That's true, but at times, it can be a necessary evil, too. The fact that you're not allowed to go out and murder random people is an infringement of your freedom, for example, but nobody in their right mind would complain about that or say that the government's evil for creating a law that prohibits random murders.
Governments are still evil, of course - governments are made of people, and people are corrupted by power (not to mention that pretty much all systems seem to favour the most ruthless sociopaths, anyway, and make it more likely for you to get elected if you're one of those). But to an extent, they're still necessary; pure anarchism doesn't work (at least not when your goal is to create a civilised society), since powerful factions with powerful leaders would simply arise naturally. And how'd you stop them? There's no overarching government anymore after all, so your only chance is to become a warlord as well and fight the other guy(s). However, more likely than not, you wouldn't be a warlord - you'd be one of the little guys who suffer and who'd suffer under either warlord.
At least the "European" (and I'm using that word solely because you did - in reality, it's used all over the world) way makes sense - year, month and day are presented in a natural order (little-endian), whereas in the "US-American" notation is just, well, weird. I understand it translates easily from natural language (so "May 1st 2007" becomes "05/01/2007"), but the same can be said about the "European" format ("1st of May 2007" becomes "01/05/2007"), so that's not really an advantage.
Personally, I prefer and exclusively use the ISO 8601 format (e.g. "2007-05-01") - it's *unambiguous*, natural (big-endian) *and* it sorts in a natural fashion when you sort alphabetically, too. There really is no downside to it at all that I can see, save for the fact that it's not as widely-used world-wide as the "European" notation (but more widely-used than the "US-American" one).
Actually, this is about as far away from a free market as it can possibly be. In a *free* market, everyone would be able/allowed to sell the songs, and the one with the lowest price and/or best service would win out; as it stands, there's ultimately pretty much just one company you can get a specific song from - the copyright holder, who thus ultimately controls the market.
I'm not saying that abandoning copyright would be a good idea, but we SHOULD keep in mind that it IS a monopoly; if I want to compete with someone who sells toasters, I can just build my own toaster that offers more features and/or sells for a cheaper price, but I cannot record my own version of a successful song and position that against the original (and if you're going to say that I could record a different song now... yes, I could, but that would be more akin to selling, say, coffee machines because someone else is already selling toasters and I'm thus not allowed to sell toasters I built myself and that are not exact copies but still based on the same principles and basic design myself as well).
Just saying - any time copyright is involved, there BY DEFINITION is no free market.
Or in Iceland, where 99.9% of electricity is generated from geothermal energy or hydro power.:P OK, so there's no iTunes Iceland, but at least your own computer would not cause any significant amount of pollution from fossil fuels (or long-term problems from radioactive waste)...
There is a difference between selecting for quality (high-quality/high-price steaks, for example) or removing something that's naturally there (boneless fish comes to mind) on one hand and ceasing to add something YOU YOURSELF added in the first place.
So, for example, it makes sense to charge more for lactose-free milk since lactose occurs naturally in milk and has to be removed in a process that costs both time and money. If, on the other hand, lactose was only added in the manufacturing process and did NOT occur naturally in milk, then there'd be no real reason why lactose-free milk should be more expensive (assuming, of course, that the lactose would be added purely for taste or similar reasons, not in order to keep other costs down for the manufacturer).
So there is a difference.
(And BTW, the example of a new and/or more expensive car lacking something because it might have less mechanical problems than a used and/or cheaper one is downright silly - using that logic, *everything* can be seen as the lack of something else, even if it's just a lack of a lack of a feature. But that's obviously not what people mean when they talk about a "lack" of something, and it's not what the GP meant, either.)
Keep in mind that this list is not (supposed to be) US-centric, though. Sure, I've never heard of Rain, either, but how important is that really? Keep in mind that 95% of the world's population do not live in the USA; there's bound to be many important people in the world that you either don't know or that aren't important to YOU.
Also keep in mind that this is not a popularity contest: people can be important even if you don't like them, and bin Laden arguably is important. Or did I miss the part where the "war on terror" was declared over and where it was determined that he's not a threat anymore?
Red Hat did not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did, and Red Hat did not pay us for it.
I'd really like to see some breakdown of your contributions to the Linux kernel vs. those made by Red Hat employees (at work, not in their spare time); same thing for other important projects, like glibc, GCC and so on. I don't want to say that you haven't contributed anything - far from it! -, but to insinuate that Red Hat hasn't contributed anything (or, at the very least, not much and/or nothing of value or relevance) is misinformed at best and deliberate FUD at worst. Whether you like Red Hat or not, you can't deny that they've helped out a lot and that they're one of the companies which are actually contributing stuff and which are deeply entrenched in the F/OSS communit(y|ies) instead of just doing press releases about how "open source" they are.
I really have a whole lot of respect for you and your work, Bruce, but I'd expect better from you than blunders (intentional or unintentional) like that.
As someone who lost a significant amount of weight playing dancing games and who also hates pretty much every other kind of sport (especially competitive sports) I can only say this - great news!
I've always said (based on my own experiences) that the biggest problem with P.E. is that it fails to actually catch children's interest. Pretty much every young child I've seen loves to be physically active, but the rigid structure of school sports and the emphasis on achieving goals that takes all the fun out of being active also seems to destroy this love for activity in most children very quickly. Putting the fun back into P.E. can only be a good thing, and should also help with the USA's rampant obesity problem.
So therefore, let me say it again: great news indeed!
The real (technical) point should be: why spammers do exist? One answer could be "because SMTP has not been designed to cope with authentication and authorisation." Maybe it's important to look at problems from the correct perspective.
Indeed it would be, but your perspective isn't the correct one: what you're saying is essentially the same as "murder happens because guns don't include technology that makes it impossible to kill people with them", or "harassment exists because letters/phone calls/... aren't filtered automatically to make sure noone's being harassed".
In other words, what you're proposing is a technical solution, but you fail to realise that the underlying problem is cultural in nature, not technical. The real answer to the question "why do spammers exist" is "because people fall for them". We get spamvertised viagra etc. because there's people who will buy it, we get stock market scams because there are people who really believe that they are getting insider information, we get 419 scams for much the same reason, and so on - it all boils down to a) stupidity (or naivity, if you want to use a gentler term) and b) greed.
Viri, trojans etc. are indirectly caused by this, too, at least to some extent; unlike 15 or 20 years ago, malware isn't written anymore to cause havoc but rather to assist in criminal schemes, typically through the use of botnets. This may be anything from click fraud and blackmail to sending out more spam, which is where the stupidity and greed of those who fall for spam comes into play again.
And at the risk of making myself unpopular here by not bashing windows enough, I think that pretty much all of this is a cultural problem: obviously, people are greedy and stupid/naive, so "real" spam is easily explained, but botnets also exist because people think of computers as tools they can just use without learning anything about them. Regarding windows, for example, it's obviously a horribly insecure piece of crap, but if everyone was running Linux (or whatever) instead, people would still click on attachments they receive from random strangers by email if those attachments promised animations of cute little kittens dancing, or naked pictures of the bimbo du jour, or whatever.
So in order for technical measures to be effective, you'd have to restrict what software the user runs can and can't do. But how do you do that in a way that a) does not interfere with what the user is trying to do (e.g. websurfing etc.), b) effectively stops malware, and c) does not keep the user from installing *wanted* new programs? Limiting outgoing traffic, for example, seems like a sure way to run into trouble with regard to c); for example, what if my non-computer-savvy parents want to install Skype so they can talk to me that way? Making it impossible for them to do without my help is obviously not an option (if you think it is, think about market power and giving people what they want for a moment: it simply ain't gonna happen, no matter whether you think it's a good idea or not), and providing a "do you really want to allow program X to do Y" dialog box, for example, will just condition them to click "Yes", especially since they're not going to understand why Y means exactly, anyway.
As you can see, the only real solution is to educate people. You need to educate them about not clicking on any random attachment they get in their email (and to generally not trust everything and everyone), and you also need to educate them about spam and about buying spamvertised products and falling for spammed scams.
Until you do that, the problems we're currently seeing will continue, and saying "SMTP is broken because it allows everyone to send email" is rubbish. You don't (or at least shouldn't) blame guns for murders, or cars for car accidents, or the postal services for blackmail, or the telcos for stalking, and you shouldn't blame SMTP for spam.
Instead, blame spam on those who spam, and on those who keep those who spam in business; prosecute the former group and educate the latter group.
(N.B. - I'm sorry if my comment reads a bit wonky at times; I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, and since English is not my native language, well...)
Just as an idea, maybe ISPs and other organisations should include a standard "this notice was not sent due to a National Security Letter" disclaimer to every notice they sent where this is actually true; then, if you receive a notice where this line is missing, you could deduce that that particular notice was indeed sent due to them having gotten one.
Of course they couldn't actually tell you that it's true if you asked them about it, but can the feds force them to lie? It's an interesting question - can you be punished for NOT making a particular statement?
Even if you can, ISPs could still "leak" this information by putting the above disclaimer only on notices where a National Security Letter was indeed sent, but not on those which were sent for other reasons. The state might still not like that, but I find it hard to see how you could prevent "leaks" from occuring at all unless you'd also give the state the power to regulate/forbid/mandate certain speech even in situation where no National Security Letter was sent.
I guess it really is true that there is no such thing as "a little censorship" (or, equivalently, "a little bit of violation of the right to free speech"). Not that NSLs aren't already unconstitutional, anyway, of course...
This makes no sense to me at all. First you say that I must grant this compulsory license. Then you turn around and say I may decline the license. I can't find a way to read this that isn't self-contradictory. Do I have to grant the license, or can I decline (to grant) it?
That's not actually the same "you". You-the-artist must grant this compulsory license (or, more precisely, you don't have to grant it - it already exists, no matter whether you want it to or not and no matter whether you do anything); you-the-internet-radio-station can choose to accept or decline this license when you want to broadcast a song, but if you decline it, you'll - naturally - have to get another, different license in order to be legally able to broadcast the song in question.
I agree, though, the GP's comment was rather confusing, and it took me a minute to understand what he meant, too.
Huh? You really need to take a math class. Gödel's first incompleteness theorem (I suppose that's what you're referring to, since there's also others that bear his name, like the completeness theorem) has been proven true (in ZFC, at least, I assume) and thus cannot be "proven wrong in the future".
On the other hand, of course, to which extent it's actually applicable is another question, and certainly a very valid one; but the theorem, as it stands, cannot be "proven wrong", although you might question whether ZFC is itself consistent and although you might propose a different system of axioms where the theorem's false (good luck with that, though).
Not that I know all that much about mathematics or set theory myself, of course...
Good point. Should I also be cancelling my upcoming trip to the USA because you've still got Fred Phelps running around? No? Thought so - after all, you can't judge an entire country on the actions of a handful of idiots. Oh, wait...
A better analogy would be "I wasn't burgling anything, I was just using the unlocked back door to gain entrance into the building where I work because the security guard at the door was taking twenty minutes to check me every time I wanted to enter, and I was also telling a couple of others about the unlocked back door so they could do the same thing".
He shouldn't have exploited this for seven months without telling anyone (and his claim that the intended to tell Cisco about it in the future seems rather weak now), and he shouldn't have told others about it so they could do the same thing, but it's obviously not the same as cracking a random system that you do NOT have any right to access at all with the intent of doing damage or taking information from there (which is what "burgle" (or "burglarize", if you prefer that) would imply to me).
A one-year suspension is ridiculous, too. What this guy needs is a Security Research Ethics 101 course and someone who will help him develop his talents further so he'll become one of the Good Guys(tm).
Outside of the "13 year old" and the "smuggled out" part, I don't really have a problem with any of the above, actually. What's wrong with having a dozen partners? What's wrong with rolling joints? What's wrong with shooting heroin (in a criminal sense, not as a medical condition that should be treated)? What's wrong with being in a nude? What's wrong with transvestites? What's wrong with prostitution, as long as it's voluntarily and nobody's forced to do anything they don't want to do (if people *are*, that's bad, of course, but in that case, it's bad no matter whether what they're forced to do is prostitute themselves or something else). And finally, what's wrong with people from Somalia?
As long as everyone involved is an adult and as long as everything's done with the informed consent of everyone involved, I frankly don't see why you should have a right to dictate what others can or can't do. I assume, based on your nickname, that you enjoy coffee. I'm also going to guess (without any basis) that you're heterosexual and not celibate (or that you wouldn't be if you had a girlfriend in case you don't have one). How would you feel if I came along and told you that in "my society", doing depraved things like drinking coffee and having missionary-style sex with your girlfriend are (or, at the very least, should be) illegal? Wouldn't you feel that this is an intrusion into your private matters - that as long as your girlfriend wants to have sex with you, there's no reason why the two of you shouldn't, and that whether you drink coffee or not is noone's business but your own?
Maybe you think that that's not the same, but if you do, you couldn't be more wrong. Freedom is always the freedom of others.
he voted against the patriot act before putting it down was cool
As did 65 others, including (amazingly enough) 3 republicans. I can't comment on the rest of your comment, but I wanted to clear up any possible confusion that readers might have about this - it's not as if he was the *only* one who voted against it (or even one of just a handful of people who did).
That's an absolutely stupid comment on more than one level.
First of all, Slashdot is NOT "news for nerds"; it's "news for nerds. stuff that matters", and arguably, this stuff does matter. And second, this it the *politics* section, so unless you want to argue that Slashdot shouldn't have a politics section at all, this is an entirely fitting story.
Of course, maybe you do want to argue that Slashdot shouldn't ever cover politics; in that case, I'm looking forward to your repost of the above comment the next time the topics like DMCA, DRM, the *AAs or Jack Thompson come up. (Alternatively, why not just go to your preferences and turn off the politics section completely?)
But then, maybe you're really a closet republican who's just upset because someone dares criticise your precious administration, and because the media - of which Slashdot is arguably part - are reporting the news.
A better solution would be to make election day a national holiday. Even then, some manufacturing wouldn't shut down, but provisions could be written into the law to make sure that everyone is free to leave work to vote.
You can do that without making election days national holidays, too. On a side note, the USA do not actually have any law yet that actually guarantees people the right to vote without running the risk of getting fired when they have to leave work to do it? o.o
That's the one fact that most ID-ists and Evolutionists both miss, and it applies in nearly every argument they have. The problem is, it forces them both to STFU if they accept that fact, and when you have an agenda to push, STFU-ing is the last thing you want to do.
I fail to see how would force any actual scientist[1] to STFU, to be honest. If the "rules" were long since finalised, then it would still make sense to explore what the rules actually are, and there'd be no a priori reason at all why something as scientifically unsound, ungrounded in reality and outright whacky as creationism would suddenly be in the same league as accepted scientific theories of evolution.
Not that I'm even sure that it makes sense to talk about rules that could be fixed or finalised, of course - in fact, I fail to see why any real rules would exist that are more than just emergent behaviour of a complex dynamic system. But maybe that's just me.
1. I'm not using the word "evolutionist" on purpose, since it implies that someone "believes" in evolution the same way people believe in gods. In reality, scientists (as well as laypeople who know a bit about science) will see evolution as a theory that works exceptionally well at explaining past events and making useful predictions that match reality, but that doesn't mean that it won't be abandoned if something better comes along, just like Newtonian mechanics are not used anymore except for as an approximation at scales where the error is negligible. Of course, the key here is that evolution as a concept is too useful to be entirely abandoned, so any future theories will most likely be an evolution of evolution (no pun intended!); and in that sense, I guess you say that people believe in evolution, but it's not a fanatical belief. In other words, if new facts emerge, then scientists will adapt their theories instead of irrationally clinging to their beliefs like creationists etc. do. That's why I don't say "evolutionists".
It'd certainly be possible for him to believe that ALL of these things are to blame for (i.e., contributing to) society's (perceived or real) ills, though. I have no idea whether he really believes anything of what he says or whether he's just a greedy actor trying to pull wool over everyone's eyes to stay in the media and make some quick bucks, but the former option certainly seems possible.
Being able to file lawsuits when you're being wronged is a very fundamental pillar of democracy, though. What should happen here is that Thompson would get slapped down hard for abusing the courts, to the extent that he'll think twice about ever doing it again, and he certainly should be kicked out of the bar, but his ability to file suits in general, as a private individual, should not be touched.
Yeah, because "millions of right-wing conservatives" don't play games. Because gamers are one vast hivemind and march in lockstep to the promised socialist future. What crap -- in a story about gaming! As if Democrats are immune from the knee-jerk "bash gamers" disease.
I think it's interesting to note that it's YOU, rather than the GP, who equated "right-wingers" with "republicans" - in fact, he only talked about politics in the general conservative/progressive (right/left) sense, never in terms of republicans and democrats at all.
Therefore, I think your knee-jerk reaction actually says quite a bit about you.
That's certainly true, but you can reason with those who might be swayed by the madman's claims if nobody's there to counter them and tell them the truth. In fact, I'd say you pretty much have to - it's the only way to keep the madmen from getting too much power.
Whether posting on Slashdot of all places is really going to reach anyone who's not a member of the choir already is another question, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, but at times, it can be a necessary evil, too. The fact that you're not allowed to go out and murder random people is an infringement of your freedom, for example, but nobody in their right mind would complain about that or say that the government's evil for creating a law that prohibits random murders.
Governments are still evil, of course - governments are made of people, and people are corrupted by power (not to mention that pretty much all systems seem to favour the most ruthless sociopaths, anyway, and make it more likely for you to get elected if you're one of those). But to an extent, they're still necessary; pure anarchism doesn't work (at least not when your goal is to create a civilised society), since powerful factions with powerful leaders would simply arise naturally. And how'd you stop them? There's no overarching government anymore after all, so your only chance is to become a warlord as well and fight the other guy(s). However, more likely than not, you wouldn't be a warlord - you'd be one of the little guys who suffer and who'd suffer under either warlord.
For a current example, look at Somalia.
At least the "European" (and I'm using that word solely because you did - in reality, it's used all over the world) way makes sense - year, month and day are presented in a natural order (little-endian), whereas in the "US-American" notation is just, well, weird. I understand it translates easily from natural language (so "May 1st 2007" becomes "05/01/2007"), but the same can be said about the "European" format ("1st of May 2007" becomes "01/05/2007"), so that's not really an advantage.
Personally, I prefer and exclusively use the ISO 8601 format (e.g. "2007-05-01") - it's *unambiguous*, natural (big-endian) *and* it sorts in a natural fashion when you sort alphabetically, too. There really is no downside to it at all that I can see, save for the fact that it's not as widely-used world-wide as the "European" notation (but more widely-used than the "US-American" one).
Actually, this is about as far away from a free market as it can possibly be. In a *free* market, everyone would be able/allowed to sell the songs, and the one with the lowest price and/or best service would win out; as it stands, there's ultimately pretty much just one company you can get a specific song from - the copyright holder, who thus ultimately controls the market.
I'm not saying that abandoning copyright would be a good idea, but we SHOULD keep in mind that it IS a monopoly; if I want to compete with someone who sells toasters, I can just build my own toaster that offers more features and/or sells for a cheaper price, but I cannot record my own version of a successful song and position that against the original (and if you're going to say that I could record a different song now... yes, I could, but that would be more akin to selling, say, coffee machines because someone else is already selling toasters and I'm thus not allowed to sell toasters I built myself and that are not exact copies but still based on the same principles and basic design myself as well).
Just saying - any time copyright is involved, there BY DEFINITION is no free market.
Or in Iceland, where 99.9% of electricity is generated from geothermal energy or hydro power. :P OK, so there's no iTunes Iceland, but at least your own computer would not cause any significant amount of pollution from fossil fuels (or long-term problems from radioactive waste)...
There is a difference between selecting for quality (high-quality/high-price steaks, for example) or removing something that's naturally there (boneless fish comes to mind) on one hand and ceasing to add something YOU YOURSELF added in the first place.
So, for example, it makes sense to charge more for lactose-free milk since lactose occurs naturally in milk and has to be removed in a process that costs both time and money. If, on the other hand, lactose was only added in the manufacturing process and did NOT occur naturally in milk, then there'd be no real reason why lactose-free milk should be more expensive (assuming, of course, that the lactose would be added purely for taste or similar reasons, not in order to keep other costs down for the manufacturer).
So there is a difference.
(And BTW, the example of a new and/or more expensive car lacking something because it might have less mechanical problems than a used and/or cheaper one is downright silly - using that logic, *everything* can be seen as the lack of something else, even if it's just a lack of a lack of a feature. But that's obviously not what people mean when they talk about a "lack" of something, and it's not what the GP meant, either.)
Keep in mind that this list is not (supposed to be) US-centric, though. Sure, I've never heard of Rain, either, but how important is that really? Keep in mind that 95% of the world's population do not live in the USA; there's bound to be many important people in the world that you either don't know or that aren't important to YOU.
Also keep in mind that this is not a popularity contest: people can be important even if you don't like them, and bin Laden arguably is important. Or did I miss the part where the "war on terror" was declared over and where it was determined that he's not a threat anymore?
I'd really like to see some breakdown of your contributions to the Linux kernel vs. those made by Red Hat employees (at work, not in their spare time); same thing for other important projects, like glibc, GCC and so on. I don't want to say that you haven't contributed anything - far from it! -, but to insinuate that Red Hat hasn't contributed anything (or, at the very least, not much and/or nothing of value or relevance) is misinformed at best and deliberate FUD at worst. Whether you like Red Hat or not, you can't deny that they've helped out a lot and that they're one of the companies which are actually contributing stuff and which are deeply entrenched in the F/OSS communit(y|ies) instead of just doing press releases about how "open source" they are.
I really have a whole lot of respect for you and your work, Bruce, but I'd expect better from you than blunders (intentional or unintentional) like that.
As someone who lost a significant amount of weight playing dancing games and who also hates pretty much every other kind of sport (especially competitive sports) I can only say this - great news!
I've always said (based on my own experiences) that the biggest problem with P.E. is that it fails to actually catch children's interest. Pretty much every young child I've seen loves to be physically active, but the rigid structure of school sports and the emphasis on achieving goals that takes all the fun out of being active also seems to destroy this love for activity in most children very quickly. Putting the fun back into P.E. can only be a good thing, and should also help with the USA's rampant obesity problem.
So therefore, let me say it again: great news indeed!
Indeed it would be, but your perspective isn't the correct one: what you're saying is essentially the same as "murder happens because guns don't include technology that makes it impossible to kill people with them", or "harassment exists because letters/phone calls/... aren't filtered automatically to make sure noone's being harassed".
In other words, what you're proposing is a technical solution, but you fail to realise that the underlying problem is cultural in nature, not technical. The real answer to the question "why do spammers exist" is "because people fall for them". We get spamvertised viagra etc. because there's people who will buy it, we get stock market scams because there are people who really believe that they are getting insider information, we get 419 scams for much the same reason, and so on - it all boils down to a) stupidity (or naivity, if you want to use a gentler term) and b) greed.
Viri, trojans etc. are indirectly caused by this, too, at least to some extent; unlike 15 or 20 years ago, malware isn't written anymore to cause havoc but rather to assist in criminal schemes, typically through the use of botnets. This may be anything from click fraud and blackmail to sending out more spam, which is where the stupidity and greed of those who fall for spam comes into play again.
And at the risk of making myself unpopular here by not bashing windows enough, I think that pretty much all of this is a cultural problem: obviously, people are greedy and stupid/naive, so "real" spam is easily explained, but botnets also exist because people think of computers as tools they can just use without learning anything about them. Regarding windows, for example, it's obviously a horribly insecure piece of crap, but if everyone was running Linux (or whatever) instead, people would still click on attachments they receive from random strangers by email if those attachments promised animations of cute little kittens dancing, or naked pictures of the bimbo du jour, or whatever.
So in order for technical measures to be effective, you'd have to restrict what software the user runs can and can't do. But how do you do that in a way that a) does not interfere with what the user is trying to do (e.g. websurfing etc.), b) effectively stops malware, and c) does not keep the user from installing *wanted* new programs? Limiting outgoing traffic, for example, seems like a sure way to run into trouble with regard to c); for example, what if my non-computer-savvy parents want to install Skype so they can talk to me that way? Making it impossible for them to do without my help is obviously not an option (if you think it is, think about market power and giving people what they want for a moment: it simply ain't gonna happen, no matter whether you think it's a good idea or not), and providing a "do you really want to allow program X to do Y" dialog box, for example, will just condition them to click "Yes", especially since they're not going to understand why Y means exactly, anyway.
As you can see, the only real solution is to educate people. You need to educate them about not clicking on any random attachment they get in their email (and to generally not trust everything and everyone), and you also need to educate them about spam and about buying spamvertised products and falling for spammed scams.
Until you do that, the problems we're currently seeing will continue, and saying "SMTP is broken because it allows everyone to send email" is rubbish. You don't (or at least shouldn't) blame guns for murders, or cars for car accidents, or the postal services for blackmail, or the telcos for stalking, and you shouldn't blame SMTP for spam.
Instead, blame spam on those who spam, and on those who keep those who spam in business; prosecute the former group and educate the latter group.
(N.B. - I'm sorry if my comment reads a bit wonky at times; I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, and since English is not my native language, well...)
Just as an idea, maybe ISPs and other organisations should include a standard "this notice was not sent due to a National Security Letter" disclaimer to every notice they sent where this is actually true; then, if you receive a notice where this line is missing, you could deduce that that particular notice was indeed sent due to them having gotten one.
Of course they couldn't actually tell you that it's true if you asked them about it, but can the feds force them to lie? It's an interesting question - can you be punished for NOT making a particular statement?
Even if you can, ISPs could still "leak" this information by putting the above disclaimer only on notices where a National Security Letter was indeed sent, but not on those which were sent for other reasons. The state might still not like that, but I find it hard to see how you could prevent "leaks" from occuring at all unless you'd also give the state the power to regulate/forbid/mandate certain speech even in situation where no National Security Letter was sent.
I guess it really is true that there is no such thing as "a little censorship" (or, equivalently, "a little bit of violation of the right to free speech"). Not that NSLs aren't already unconstitutional, anyway, of course...
That's not actually the same "you". You-the-artist must grant this compulsory license (or, more precisely, you don't have to grant it - it already exists, no matter whether you want it to or not and no matter whether you do anything); you-the-internet-radio-station can choose to accept or decline this license when you want to broadcast a song, but if you decline it, you'll - naturally - have to get another, different license in order to be legally able to broadcast the song in question.
I agree, though, the GP's comment was rather confusing, and it took me a minute to understand what he meant, too.
Huh? You really need to take a math class. Gödel's first incompleteness theorem (I suppose that's what you're referring to, since there's also others that bear his name, like the completeness theorem) has been proven true (in ZFC, at least, I assume) and thus cannot be "proven wrong in the future".
On the other hand, of course, to which extent it's actually applicable is another question, and certainly a very valid one; but the theorem, as it stands, cannot be "proven wrong", although you might question whether ZFC is itself consistent and although you might propose a different system of axioms where the theorem's false (good luck with that, though).
Not that I know all that much about mathematics or set theory myself, of course...
Good point. Should I also be cancelling my upcoming trip to the USA because you've still got Fred Phelps running around? No? Thought so - after all, you can't judge an entire country on the actions of a handful of idiots. Oh, wait...
A better analogy would be "I wasn't burgling anything, I was just using the unlocked back door to gain entrance into the building where I work because the security guard at the door was taking twenty minutes to check me every time I wanted to enter, and I was also telling a couple of others about the unlocked back door so they could do the same thing".
He shouldn't have exploited this for seven months without telling anyone (and his claim that the intended to tell Cisco about it in the future seems rather weak now), and he shouldn't have told others about it so they could do the same thing, but it's obviously not the same as cracking a random system that you do NOT have any right to access at all with the intent of doing damage or taking information from there (which is what "burgle" (or "burglarize", if you prefer that) would imply to me).
A one-year suspension is ridiculous, too. What this guy needs is a Security Research Ethics 101 course and someone who will help him develop his talents further so he'll become one of the Good Guys(tm).
Outside of the "13 year old" and the "smuggled out" part, I don't really have a problem with any of the above, actually. What's wrong with having a dozen partners? What's wrong with rolling joints? What's wrong with shooting heroin (in a criminal sense, not as a medical condition that should be treated)? What's wrong with being in a nude? What's wrong with transvestites? What's wrong with prostitution, as long as it's voluntarily and nobody's forced to do anything they don't want to do (if people *are*, that's bad, of course, but in that case, it's bad no matter whether what they're forced to do is prostitute themselves or something else). And finally, what's wrong with people from Somalia?
As long as everyone involved is an adult and as long as everything's done with the informed consent of everyone involved, I frankly don't see why you should have a right to dictate what others can or can't do. I assume, based on your nickname, that you enjoy coffee. I'm also going to guess (without any basis) that you're heterosexual and not celibate (or that you wouldn't be if you had a girlfriend in case you don't have one). How would you feel if I came along and told you that in "my society", doing depraved things like drinking coffee and having missionary-style sex with your girlfriend are (or, at the very least, should be) illegal? Wouldn't you feel that this is an intrusion into your private matters - that as long as your girlfriend wants to have sex with you, there's no reason why the two of you shouldn't, and that whether you drink coffee or not is noone's business but your own?
Maybe you think that that's not the same, but if you do, you couldn't be more wrong. Freedom is always the freedom of others.
As did 65 others, including (amazingly enough) 3 republicans. I can't comment on the rest of your comment, but I wanted to clear up any possible confusion that readers might have about this - it's not as if he was the *only* one who voted against it (or even one of just a handful of people who did).
That's an absolutely stupid comment on more than one level.
First of all, Slashdot is NOT "news for nerds"; it's "news for nerds. stuff that matters", and arguably, this stuff does matter. And second, this it the *politics* section, so unless you want to argue that Slashdot shouldn't have a politics section at all, this is an entirely fitting story.
Of course, maybe you do want to argue that Slashdot shouldn't ever cover politics; in that case, I'm looking forward to your repost of the above comment the next time the topics like DMCA, DRM, the *AAs or Jack Thompson come up. (Alternatively, why not just go to your preferences and turn off the politics section completely?)
But then, maybe you're really a closet republican who's just upset because someone dares criticise your precious administration, and because the media - of which Slashdot is arguably part - are reporting the news.
You can do that without making election days national holidays, too. On a side note, the USA do not actually have any law yet that actually guarantees people the right to vote without running the risk of getting fired when they have to leave work to do it? o.o
Why not, pray tell? And FWIW, what does "cannot be counted upon" even *mean*?
I fail to see how would force any actual scientist[1] to STFU, to be honest. If the "rules" were long since finalised, then it would still make sense to explore what the rules actually are, and there'd be no a priori reason at all why something as scientifically unsound, ungrounded in reality and outright whacky as creationism would suddenly be in the same league as accepted scientific theories of evolution.
Not that I'm even sure that it makes sense to talk about rules that could be fixed or finalised, of course - in fact, I fail to see why any real rules would exist that are more than just emergent behaviour of a complex dynamic system. But maybe that's just me.
1. I'm not using the word "evolutionist" on purpose, since it implies that someone "believes" in evolution the same way people believe in gods. In reality, scientists (as well as laypeople who know a bit about science) will see evolution as a theory that works exceptionally well at explaining past events and making useful predictions that match reality, but that doesn't mean that it won't be abandoned if something better comes along, just like Newtonian mechanics are not used anymore except for as an approximation at scales where the error is negligible. Of course, the key here is that evolution as a concept is too useful to be entirely abandoned, so any future theories will most likely be an evolution of evolution (no pun intended!); and in that sense, I guess you say that people believe in evolution, but it's not a fanatical belief. In other words, if new facts emerge, then scientists will adapt their theories instead of irrationally clinging to their beliefs like creationists etc. do. That's why I don't say "evolutionists".It'd certainly be possible for him to believe that ALL of these things are to blame for (i.e., contributing to) society's (perceived or real) ills, though. I have no idea whether he really believes anything of what he says or whether he's just a greedy actor trying to pull wool over everyone's eyes to stay in the media and make some quick bucks, but the former option certainly seems possible.
Being able to file lawsuits when you're being wronged is a very fundamental pillar of democracy, though. What should happen here is that Thompson would get slapped down hard for abusing the courts, to the extent that he'll think twice about ever doing it again, and he certainly should be kicked out of the bar, but his ability to file suits in general, as a private individual, should not be touched.
I think it's interesting to note that it's YOU, rather than the GP, who equated "right-wingers" with "republicans" - in fact, he only talked about politics in the general conservative/progressive (right/left) sense, never in terms of republicans and democrats at all.
Therefore, I think your knee-jerk reaction actually says quite a bit about you.
That's certainly true, but you can reason with those who might be swayed by the madman's claims if nobody's there to counter them and tell them the truth. In fact, I'd say you pretty much have to - it's the only way to keep the madmen from getting too much power.
Whether posting on Slashdot of all places is really going to reach anyone who's not a member of the choir already is another question, of course.
Ding dong, the witch is dead. Good riddance, Jack.