Did you live through the Cold War or just read about it? Because the big lesson was that sweeping generalizations about other systems of government and their danger to Western Civilization are complete bullshit. The Soviets were never capable of a fraction of the things we thought. Communism did not turn out to be a monolithic entity. It turned out to be organized crime running (or mostly not) countries. They weren't looking for world domination, they were looking out for #1. I don't know about you, but I promised myself when the Cold War ended to never be taken in like that again.
Characterizations of Islam as a monolithic threat to our way of life are even less tenable than the threat from Communism. Islam is a religion, not a movement or ideology. Its fractured all over the place. Iran and Saudi Arabia are moral enemies. And Saudi Arabia is by far the most aggressive state in the export of Islamist fundamentalism. The reason Islamic parties are winning elections is because they tend to be not corrupt. They are frequently the only political groups that have the first idea about taking care of citizens rather than getting rich. And I thought the whole point of American foreign policy was the furthering of democracy. Well Islamists were elected in Egypt and Algeria last year, and in Turkey a decade ago. Has one of those countries invaded Israel?
I think the biggest threat to world peace is not Islamists, its Republicans.
A friend's father commanded a company of Canadan Tanks in Italy 1943 - 44. He had a great story of Tiger hunting in small Italian hill towns.
br>
First, the rule of thumb was 5 Shermans against 1 Tiger. Any decent shot from a Tiger would turn a Sherman into a smoldering wreck.
Once they had found the tank (usually fingered by intel), they'd enter the town from different directions
The key the whole deal was figuring out where the Tiger was before they figured out they were being hunted
The tanks would then separate into one group of three and another of two.
The group of three was supposed to drive around fire the odd shot, and back the Tiger into a wall
As the Allies had no weapons that could destroy the front and side Armour of a Tigers, this was a logical move for the Germans
Over the radios, the three tanks would let the other two tanks where the tiger was. They would sneak around the back of the tiger and line up side-by side with apartment buildings between them and the Tiger. The first tank shot a hole in the wall, hopefully revealing the back of the tiger. The other tank would be ready to fire a fatal shot at the back of the tiger.
Highly skilled, highly dangerous, and very lucky if it works.
The first job of any executive is to protect the existing revenue stream. The problem with telling an existing multi-billion dollar company to come up with a new business model is like trying to take a 90 degree turn in a 747. The aircraft will not survive the maneuver.
Everyone knows the content and distribution businesses have to change. Nobody has any idea how or what the result looks like. Its not like culture will come to an end, there was culture before TV and record companies. But empires have been built and the people they employ are going to do their best to save them. That's not a conspiracy, its the nature of institutions.
In the real world, nobody can amass the hardware, software and expertise to do this kind of thing. Even the much vaunted NSA does little more than scan widely for keywords and narrowly for specific individuals or small groups of individuals. They also don't do any investigating. All such systems suffer from exactly the same limitation, false positives. The false positives overwhelm the investigative resources.
The only people to successfully implement a robust and lasting system for monitoring and control were the Soviets. They didn't use technology to do it. And they didn't care about false positives because they defined all positives as true.
TFA is nonsense. Full of generalizations, suppositions and voodoo. They make no distinction whatever between different types of depression. They don't mention physiological symptoms or account for the role of anti-depressants, ECT or other treatments in relieving symptoms. They don't deal with the obvious problem that depression can lead to suicide. The notion that encouraging rumination should have a measurable impact on the progress of the episode is laughable. Should blowing your nose more often have an impact on how quickly you recover from a cold?
In very rough terms, there are two types of depression: transitory and chronic. Transitory depression is a reaction some people have to trauma, psychic or physical. When someone says 30% of adults suffer from depression sometime in their life, this is what they are talking about. If your marriage breaks down, you get depressed for a time. You might even benefit from focusing on your problems, but to say the depression is an evolutionary adaptation that leads to the analysis leads to benefits is voodoo. Its the same thing as saying Sickle Cell Anemia confers a resistance to Malaria.
The notion that every human characteristic must have an evolutionary benefit is plain stupid. Its this kind of thinking that has turned Evolutionary Psychology into a joke. This article is a prime example.
Fermi's Paradox came up in a dream once. The explanation, according to the dream, is that Earth is in quarantine. The powers that be in the Galaxy put a communications blocking bubble around the solar system of all new technological civilizations for 10,000 or 15,000 years. The point of the exercise is that new civilizations are like teenagers, dangerous and unaware of their power to wreak havoc. This is especially true of newcomers that discover inter stellar travel while not yet having complete control over their atomics. So they just wall us off until we either 1) destroy ourselves, or 2) grow out of our galactic adolescence.
The dream went on to explain why we see UFOs that don't communicate with us. They are outlaws breaking the quarantine. Humans, said the dream, have unique language abilities unknown elsewhere in the galaxy. A single human could write more and better code than teams of hundreds in the next-best software civilization. So the UFOs are from some of the shadier civilizations out there and they come to kidnap code slaves. They have to stay stealthy or they will get caught.
This was a real dream I had about 10 years ago. And yes, I was asleep at the time. The story is obviously full of holes, it was only a dream after all, but intriguing.
They can't prosecute you if you aren't consuming their content.
Well the point of the article is that even if they can't prosecute you for not using their content, they've found a way to charge you for not using their content.
The IOC spokesperson said one of the blocked sites belonged to Faulun Gong. "I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil, fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government."
So its OK, then. I'm just surprised that the IOC has an official position on Faulun Gong. What other religions does it characterize officially? What does the IOC think about Scientology? Islam? Would they agree that Luther was holier than St. Augustine? Who would do better at the 100m freestyle, Jesus or Mohammad? Could the Hindu pantheon stand a chance against the Greek pantheon at water polo?
Since the IOC brought it up, they should at least provide reporters with the IOC's own official list of religions its OK to block. This should be no problem as the IOC is really thorough when it comes to official lists.
Old and busted: Witch hunting New hotness: child porn hunting
There is a creeping consensus in the English speaking countries that ALL adults are capable of sexually exploiting children. And that the state has a responsibility to deny them the opportunity to do so.
What the fuck does Viacom think they're going to do with a 12 TB database? They can't exactly load up MS Access on a spare computer at the law firm. Who, besides Google, has the capacity to actually manipulate that much data in any meaningful way?
Go ahead. Give them the 12 TB. Better yet, give them 24 TB. I can't wait to see Sumner Redstone at the next stockholder's meeting try to explain the millions it will cost to analyze this data.
I really don't understand why the Dems are giving in on this. Spare us the "they're all corrupt" explanation. Sure they are all corrupt, but that doesn't explain what's going on here. There is potential political pain for the Dems by giving in, and potential political profit from defeating the bill. It doesn't make political sense to cave at this point. Anyone got a good explanation?
First amendment rights trump other laws. Just yesterday I was exercising my rights by posting a torrent of Spiderman 3.
Today, I will exercise my rights by making my music collection accessible via Kazaa. Who could object? Verizon's got my back.
Its beautiful. I've always thought that the corporate war on their customers over intellectual property would turn when someone went too far. All of a sudden the main stream media would wake up and finally get it. Well, now its happened. The media is all over the story and Sony, bless their hollow little heads, just keep digging. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was shocked but not suprised at the news Sony or Level 4 have broken the LGPL. They are staggering around like a pummled prizefighter, bleeding on everything. There's going to be more blood before this is over. Besides the $billion or so it will cost Sony to clean up the mess, others will have some 'splainin to do. Like the anti-virus companies, like Microsoft, like the other music companies.
All this stuff about broadband and Google is chump change. Why aren't the shareholders of SBC demanding a stop to the free ride for Domino's and Dell and all the other businesses using SBC's phone lines to support their business models? SBC has made a considerable investment in those lines and they have to have a return on it. Do these freeloaders think phone service comes free?
Thank George Bush. His regime has pissed off the rest of the world so much that mortal enemies are enthusiastically agreeing on this. As long as the US was willing to run the root servers as a global public trust, nobody had a problem. But all kinds of countries are furious with the US politicization of AIDS, population control, public health, etc. Even US allies shudder at the thought that Dubya might do to the Internet what he's done to Iraq. Because they now depend upon it so much, they cannot allow such a threat.
Think of it this way, the entire world has decided to revolt against the Bush administration. Those saying they can't, remember what Sam Goldwyn said, "if the people want to stay away, there's nothing you can do to stop them"
We need an army of greedy, stupid, crooked IP shysters like this man. The end of corporate IP hijacking will come not from 10 million file traders, or 10,000 pundits, or 1,000 crusaders, but from 100 Leo Stollers. Sanity will return to the debate at the moment people perceive things have gone too far. At this point, Mr. Stoller is leading the charge. But I'm sure someone out there can be more offensive, more greedy, more stupid, more agressive! This is America, after all. The sooner we find them, (and 98 more like them) the sooner this insanity will pass.
Like Bittorrent, but only legal files. Hmmm... I've heard this before. Its like the Korean movie theatre owner who was unhappy with "The Sound of Music". It was too long, and he couldn't get enough showings each evening. So he cut out all the songs.
Is this sarcasm? if so, please indicate for morons like myself. Because if you were being serious, you couldn't be serious.
You "don't believe in automatically banning things that have legitimate uses..." Fortunately, that legal point does not rest on your beliefs, but on the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling. Beyond that, your post is 100% troll. Some people can't be trusted? Get the fuck outtahere. You mean in a free and open society, people can do whatever they want? Someone call in the cavalry, that can't be what the founding fathers meant. That's not democracy, that's chaos, Anarchy, Communism even.
You want to know how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, frausters, copyright violators, organized criminals, paedophiles and terrorists I'm willing to let get away with it? All of them. Because even in toto, they don't add up to the danger of one fascist.
In case you hadn't noticed, there are plenty of laws already to deal with crimes. What you want is not to deal with crimes, but with criminals. And you're willing to sacrifice other people's rights to do it. That's not even fascism, its chickenshit fascism. Fascism lite. You'll only take away rights from the people that don't deserve them. They're easy to spot, because the only ones that want to be anonymous have something to hide.
You know, great countries are never toppled. Instead, the values that made them great are abandoned. The sad, empty hulk of greatness gets toppled. America used to be a great country.
Really, he's the CEO of the world's most successful two hit wonder (Windows & Office). That's just about it in terms of Revenue and Profit at Microsoft. Sitting on two hits, he can look down his nose at those one hit bozos.
AFAIK, the RIAA has yet to actually obtain a judgement in any end-user lawsuit. That they can successfully sue at all is far from clear at this point. Indeed, with the exception of the Napster suit, the RIAA has yet to prevail in a single hearing, much less a trial. So far, people have settled, or the suit has yet to reach trial. To date, the RIAA is batting.000 in court on end-user lawsuits.
Cuban may well be right about the proper amount for damages, but that assumes judgement. At the start, anyone can sue anybody for any sum. For example, SCO's multi-billion dollar suit against IBM. I think we can all agree SCO won't get billions. Likewise, the RIAA would probably get less than they are asking IF they won at trial, and IF a judge agreed to impose damages. Both of those eventualities are speculative at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you live through the Cold War or just read about it? Because the big lesson was that sweeping generalizations about other systems of government and their danger to Western Civilization are complete bullshit. The Soviets were never capable of a fraction of the things we thought. Communism did not turn out to be a monolithic entity. It turned out to be organized crime running (or mostly not) countries. They weren't looking for world domination, they were looking out for #1. I don't know about you, but I promised myself when the Cold War ended to never be taken in like that again.
Characterizations of Islam as a monolithic threat to our way of life are even less tenable than the threat from Communism. Islam is a religion, not a movement or ideology. Its fractured all over the place. Iran and Saudi Arabia are moral enemies. And Saudi Arabia is by far the most aggressive state in the export of Islamist fundamentalism. The reason Islamic parties are winning elections is because they tend to be not corrupt. They are frequently the only political groups that have the first idea about taking care of citizens rather than getting rich. And I thought the whole point of American foreign policy was the furthering of democracy. Well Islamists were elected in Egypt and Algeria last year, and in Turkey a decade ago. Has one of those countries invaded Israel?
I think the biggest threat to world peace is not Islamists, its Republicans.
Pity they don't try it with the War on Drugs. Enforcement seems to rule there.
A friend's father commanded a company of Canadan Tanks in Italy 1943 - 44. He had a great story of Tiger hunting in small Italian hill towns. br> First, the rule of thumb was 5 Shermans against 1 Tiger. Any decent shot from a Tiger would turn a Sherman into a smoldering wreck.
Once they had found the tank (usually fingered by intel), they'd enter the town from different directions
The key the whole deal was figuring out where the Tiger was before they figured out they were being hunted
The tanks would then separate into one group of three and another of two.
The group of three was supposed to drive around fire the odd shot, and back the Tiger into a wall
As the Allies had no weapons that could destroy the front and side Armour of a Tigers, this was a logical move for the Germans
Over the radios, the three tanks would let the other two tanks where the tiger was. They would sneak around the back of the tiger and line up side-by side with apartment buildings between them and the Tiger. The first tank shot a hole in the wall, hopefully revealing the back of the tiger. The other tank would be ready to fire a fatal shot at the back of the tiger.
Highly skilled, highly dangerous, and very lucky if it works.
The first job of any executive is to protect the existing revenue stream. The problem with telling an existing multi-billion dollar company to come up with a new business model is like trying to take a 90 degree turn in a 747. The aircraft will not survive the maneuver.
Everyone knows the content and distribution businesses have to change. Nobody has any idea how or what the result looks like. Its not like culture will come to an end, there was culture before TV and record companies. But empires have been built and the people they employ are going to do their best to save them. That's not a conspiracy, its the nature of institutions.
In the real world, nobody can amass the hardware, software and expertise to do this kind of thing. Even the much vaunted NSA does little more than scan widely for keywords and narrowly for specific individuals or small groups of individuals. They also don't do any investigating. All such systems suffer from exactly the same limitation, false positives. The false positives overwhelm the investigative resources.
The only people to successfully implement a robust and lasting system for monitoring and control were the Soviets. They didn't use technology to do it. And they didn't care about false positives because they defined all positives as true.
TFA is nonsense. Full of generalizations, suppositions and voodoo. They make no distinction whatever between different types of depression. They don't mention physiological symptoms or account for the role of anti-depressants, ECT or other treatments in relieving symptoms. They don't deal with the obvious problem that depression can lead to suicide. The notion that encouraging rumination should have a measurable impact on the progress of the episode is laughable. Should blowing your nose more often have an impact on how quickly you recover from a cold?
In very rough terms, there are two types of depression: transitory and chronic. Transitory depression is a reaction some people have to trauma, psychic or physical. When someone says 30% of adults suffer from depression sometime in their life, this is what they are talking about. If your marriage breaks down, you get depressed for a time. You might even benefit from focusing on your problems, but to say the depression is an evolutionary adaptation that leads to the analysis leads to benefits is voodoo. Its the same thing as saying Sickle Cell Anemia confers a resistance to Malaria.
The notion that every human characteristic must have an evolutionary benefit is plain stupid. Its this kind of thinking that has turned Evolutionary Psychology into a joke. This article is a prime example.
Fermi's Paradox came up in a dream once. The explanation, according to the dream, is that Earth is in quarantine. The powers that be in the Galaxy put a communications blocking bubble around the solar system of all new technological civilizations for 10,000 or 15,000 years. The point of the exercise is that new civilizations are like teenagers, dangerous and unaware of their power to wreak havoc. This is especially true of newcomers that discover inter stellar travel while not yet having complete control over their atomics. So they just wall us off until we either 1) destroy ourselves, or 2) grow out of our galactic adolescence.
The dream went on to explain why we see UFOs that don't communicate with us. They are outlaws breaking the quarantine. Humans, said the dream, have unique language abilities unknown elsewhere in the galaxy. A single human could write more and better code than teams of hundreds in the next-best software civilization. So the UFOs are from some of the shadier civilizations out there and they come to kidnap code slaves. They have to stay stealthy or they will get caught.
This was a real dream I had about 10 years ago. And yes, I was asleep at the time. The story is obviously full of holes, it was only a dream after all, but intriguing.
They can't prosecute you if you aren't consuming their content.
Well the point of the article is that even if they can't prosecute you for not using their content, they've found a way to charge you for not using their content.
OK, its a bit extreme. But let's at least waterboard them.
The IOC spokesperson said one of the blocked sites belonged to Faulun Gong. "I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil, fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government."
So its OK, then. I'm just surprised that the IOC has an official position on Faulun Gong. What other religions does it characterize officially? What does the IOC think about Scientology? Islam? Would they agree that Luther was holier than St. Augustine? Who would do better at the 100m freestyle, Jesus or Mohammad? Could the Hindu pantheon stand a chance against the Greek pantheon at water polo?
Since the IOC brought it up, they should at least provide reporters with the IOC's own official list of religions its OK to block. This should be no problem as the IOC is really thorough when it comes to official lists.
Old and busted: Witch hunting
New hotness: child porn hunting
There is a creeping consensus in the English speaking countries that ALL adults are capable of sexually exploiting children. And that the state has a responsibility to deny them the opportunity to do so.
What the fuck does Viacom think they're going to do with a 12 TB database? They can't exactly load up MS Access on a spare computer at the law firm. Who, besides Google, has the capacity to actually manipulate that much data in any meaningful way? Go ahead. Give them the 12 TB. Better yet, give them 24 TB. I can't wait to see Sumner Redstone at the next stockholder's meeting try to explain the millions it will cost to analyze this data.
I really don't understand why the Dems are giving in on this. Spare us the "they're all corrupt" explanation. Sure they are all corrupt, but that doesn't explain what's going on here. There is potential political pain for the Dems by giving in, and potential political profit from defeating the bill. It doesn't make political sense to cave at this point. Anyone got a good explanation?
First amendment rights trump other laws. Just yesterday I was exercising my rights by posting a torrent of Spiderman 3. Today, I will exercise my rights by making my music collection accessible via Kazaa. Who could object? Verizon's got my back.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity"
Wise words indeed.
Its beautiful. I've always thought that the corporate war on their customers over intellectual property would turn when someone went too far. All of a sudden the main stream media would wake up and finally get it. Well, now its happened. The media is all over the story and Sony, bless their hollow little heads, just keep digging. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was shocked but not suprised at the news Sony or Level 4 have broken the LGPL. They are staggering around like a pummled prizefighter, bleeding on everything. There's going to be more blood before this is over. Besides the $billion or so it will cost Sony to clean up the mess, others will have some 'splainin to do. Like the anti-virus companies, like Microsoft, like the other music companies.
All this stuff about broadband and Google is chump change. Why aren't the shareholders of SBC demanding a stop to the free ride for Domino's and Dell and all the other businesses using SBC's phone lines to support their business models? SBC has made a considerable investment in those lines and they have to have a return on it. Do these freeloaders think phone service comes free?
Thank George Bush. His regime has pissed off the rest of the world so much that mortal enemies are enthusiastically agreeing on this. As long as the US was willing to run the root servers as a global public trust, nobody had a problem. But all kinds of countries are furious with the US politicization of AIDS, population control, public health, etc. Even US allies shudder at the thought that Dubya might do to the Internet what he's done to Iraq. Because they now depend upon it so much, they cannot allow such a threat.
Think of it this way, the entire world has decided to revolt against the Bush administration. Those saying they can't, remember what Sam Goldwyn said, "if the people want to stay away, there's nothing you can do to stop them"
But a grunt?
We need an army of greedy, stupid, crooked IP shysters like this man.
The end of corporate IP hijacking will come not from 10 million file traders, or 10,000 pundits, or 1,000 crusaders, but from 100 Leo Stollers. Sanity will return to the debate at the moment people perceive things have gone too far. At this point, Mr. Stoller is leading the charge. But I'm sure someone out there can be more offensive, more greedy, more stupid, more agressive! This is America, after all. The sooner we find them, (and 98 more like them) the sooner this insanity will pass.
Like Bittorrent, but only legal files. Hmmm... I've heard this before. Its like the Korean movie theatre owner who was unhappy with "The Sound of Music". It was too long, and he couldn't get enough showings each evening.
So he cut out all the songs.
Is this sarcasm? if so, please indicate for morons like myself. Because if you were being serious, you couldn't be serious.
You "don't believe in automatically banning things that have legitimate uses..." Fortunately, that legal point does not rest on your beliefs, but on the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling. Beyond that, your post is 100% troll. Some people can't be trusted? Get the fuck outtahere. You mean in a free and open society, people can do whatever they want? Someone call in the cavalry, that can't be what the founding fathers meant. That's not democracy, that's chaos, Anarchy, Communism even.
You want to know how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, frausters, copyright violators, organized criminals, paedophiles and terrorists I'm willing to let get away with it? All of them. Because even in toto, they don't add up to the danger of one fascist.
In case you hadn't noticed, there are plenty of laws already to deal with crimes. What you want is not to deal with crimes, but with criminals. And you're willing to sacrifice other people's rights to do it. That's not even fascism, its chickenshit fascism. Fascism lite. You'll only take away rights from the people that don't deserve them. They're easy to spot, because the only ones that want to be anonymous have something to hide.
You know, great countries are never toppled. Instead, the values that made them great are abandoned. The sad, empty hulk of greatness gets toppled. America used to be a great country.
Because there's no chance it will actually work.
Really, he's the CEO of the world's most successful two hit wonder (Windows & Office). That's just about it in terms of Revenue and Profit at Microsoft. Sitting on two hits, he can look down his nose at those one hit bozos.
AFAIK, the RIAA has yet to actually obtain a judgement in any end-user lawsuit. That they can successfully sue at all is far from clear at this point. Indeed, with the exception of the Napster suit, the RIAA has yet to prevail in a single hearing, much less a trial. So far, people have settled, or the suit has yet to reach trial. To date, the RIAA is batting .000 in court on end-user lawsuits.
Cuban may well be right about the proper amount for damages, but that assumes judgement. At the start, anyone can sue anybody for any sum. For example, SCO's multi-billion dollar suit against IBM. I think we can all agree SCO won't get billions. Likewise, the RIAA would probably get less than they are asking IF they won at trial, and IF a judge agreed to impose damages. Both of those eventualities are speculative at this point.