Fair enough. My privacy is worth more than $75.00 however, and even though I still struggle to pay the rent I do not do Air Miles or any other such privacy subtracting gimmicks. Self respect is more important than money to me. I suppose it's the same reason some people refuse to buy mutual funds that have tobacco companies in its portfolio.
And for the same reason I do not view Web pages that refuse to allow its content to be viewed without JavaScript, VBScript, Flash, cookies, etc to be set to the "On" position. Yeah I know with Slashdot session cookies are on, but that is by choice and not necessity. If games were open source like SlashCode then maybe I would buy some. I am and always will be reluctant to buy games (or anything) that have DRM in them. If they (game companies, etc) can't find a legit market for their products without DRM then these people should find another line of work. I don't support them and I don't support marketing companies. But hey, if people don't mind sharing their data with people then that's their choice. I choose to be choosy. I'll be one of those people whose data isn't mined, sold, traded or stolen from carelessly placed laptops. And yes, btw, did I tell you that even banks have been found to sell data without the knowledge or consent of their customers. It may not be a big deal to some people, but I'd rather not have some unscrupulous person knowing where I live.
I'd suggest an "opt-out" system along with restrictions on *what* data was sent.
Assumptions and so on...
I remember a few years back I read an anti-spam site that did some experiments with legit companies on their opt in and opt out email policies, etc and so on. A large percentage of these companies ended up ignoring their own rules (over 40 percent at least, I really can't remember, but it was a large number). To elaborate, the anti-spam site setup unique email addresses for each company they sent an email to, and thus monitored things like unsolicited spam that came through, and whether the company in question stopped sending them email when they "unsubscribed". There are many more examples, but I will leave it at that.
The point being is that you not only have to trust these companies, but these companies have to be trustworthy. I would argue that if a company has more than 10 employees then there will be at least some amount of anomy with it's employees and with the institution in general. If it's a BIG company like Apple for example, then psychopathic people like Steve Jobs have no problems with trying to fuck over their customers in order to increase their pecking order in the Billionaires club. I'm thinking specifically of the instance when Steve said he would no longer honour the life-long tech support that he promised to his Mac purchasers. IIRC, I think he said something like "fuck them" when one of his execs told him it would be a bad idea. Of course I could bring up M$ examples, but that would be too banal.
I believe that shrink-wrap licenses have been found to be nonbinding in some jurisdictions, though I don't remember the court cases that back that up.
Perhaps, or even probably, but that's not the point. Companies offer money back guarantees and mail in rebates because they know most (or at least a statistically significant proportion of) consumers don't find it worth their while to bother. Hiring a lawyer and loosing time off work (or just plain opportunity costs) for a sixty dollar game isn't worth it. Of course you are assuming that the consumer even believes he can get his money back. In the era where laws and information campaigns are constantly reminding consumers that their rights take a back seat to that of the copy right owner, I doubt if too many (consumers) would even consider the law, much less attempt to try and enforce said law. It's not so easy to just call the police and tell them to press charges against a software company because their EULA or business practices are illegal. Believe me I've tried:)
Chances are however that if you call up the actual game company and they have some reasonable customer service rep on the line then they may refund your money if you pay to have the disks, etc sent back to them. Maybe, maybe not. It's your bet. In the end it's still a hassle. It's often easier to buy something than to return it.
It's not immediately obvious, but the link is present in the poster's URL name. I don't believe it is possible to submit an article without submitting a link. The editors should have at least made it more obvious.
The military and most organizations are NOT looking for intelligent people; they are looking for Yes-Men who appear intelligent (people who talk the talk and walk the walk of Management). This excludes Geeks, and any independent type thinker. People who make it to the managerial levels of DARPA and ANY organization will ALWAYS have their psychological preferences suited to the lowest common denominator of "intellectual".
If you can "Sales" your way to the top of Management (or Human Resources Management) then you are looking for somebody like yourself (a Sales Person); and NOT an intellectual who challenges bad assumptions or procedures. People in bureaucratic structures like DARPA want TEAM PLAYERS and not thoughtful folk who will question and analyze things only to discover that systems designed and administered by a potential superior are inadequate or defective. DARPA (and all other bureaucratic organizations) want committee meetings and group hugs; intellectuals and problem solvers want results (despite the social euphoria of working in an Office with free coffee and all the other perks).
There is a distinct divide between what organizations WANT and what they get. This is because their social biases and academic lameness propelled them to the position they are in. In this respect I'm talking about eagles fly with eagles and worms wiggle with worms. People only hire who they appreciate. People who are intelligent enough to know better don't even bother wasting their time trying to apply to places like DARPA.
On the other hand, anyone committed to an ideology, whatever the flavour, is usually uneducable. I will elaborate on my previous comment. Everybody has an ideology, whether it is a formalized ideology or one developed through osmosis. In this respect I would say you are correct; anybody who (is not neurotic) believes in themselves (I'm talking ideology here and not self-esteem issues like beauty self beliefs, intelligence self beliefs, etc) and has self-confidence and pride (let's say a statistically normal individual) is generally un-educe-able and un-educate-able when it comes to skepticism.
Is it even a teachable skill, or is it just an innate part of the geek personality?"
I think it's some of each.
Yes you can teach a horse to count as well but that doesn't mean they can have an ability towards the subtleties or complexities of mathematics. In my experience it's all academic; you can teach people to memorize formula but you cannot teach people to interpret said formula outside of their natural (genetic) tendencies or (conditioned) personal experiences. Most people are only skeptical in regards to things that disagree with their own belief systems. A true skeptic questions his own beliefs. People with self-confidence will never be skeptical (take this last statement as a Trol, but it is generally true IMPE [In My Personal Experience]).
People can be taught to be skeptical like people can be taught to be cynical, depressive, sociable. Let's take as an analogy the "sociable" personality type; it has been widely agreed that the amount of extroversion/introversion a person has is largely genetic. People can be taught how to be sociable (learn what to say to girls in a singles bar for example), but this is all academic and a facade.
On the other hand, anyone committed to an ideology, whatever the flavour, is usually uneducable. un-educe-able. Interesting.
On the other hand, there was a case of an applicant being refused a job with police because his IQ was too high. That's pretty much what I was implying (and presuming) when I used the terms "average and above" and "status quo". On the surface it seems ideal; having an "ordinary" person that can deal with ordinary people. Unfortunately these Human Resources type recruiting approaches for getting the perfect candidate or the candidate with the best fit generally leads to a mono-culture within an organization. Sometimes even (or especially?) the police need to think outside of the box.
In my past I've dealt with police (on a professional and at times a semi-professional level), and yes sometimes on a personal level (I've been given verbal warnings in my youth a few times). On the semi-professional level I've noticed that the under-cover cops seem to be rather weird (they seem to be rather extreme in their off-duty lifestyles), so I am/was thinking that there may be different criteria for hiring under-cover cops. At any rate I'm sorry for being vague; at times I want to "protect" my own privacy and the privacy of those people I have encountered. The cops that I have met generally seem to be OK folk, but a few were rude and lacking in tact (I've been culturally profiled by police a few times) because of my long hair and genes, the neighbourhood I happened to be visiting, etc and so on (I can only imagine what a black person would feel like in similar circumstances). As a fairly middle-class white boy this has been disappointing.
Border patrol agents should be primarily tasked with ensuring that no illegal imports or persons physically enter the country. Digital entry not-withstanding... Even were such a warrant issued, this IS NOT their mission. Interesting point. Almost everyday I export and import information over boarders and to various parts of the world. Today and right now I am accessing the US. I'm sure the (US) government(s) would love to know who I am and what information I am transmitting across their boarders. I am very much a Digital Citizen and a world traveler through the medium of the Internet.
It seems like many governments think this analogy is justification for Internet surveillance.
Privacy rights exist because police agents, custom agents, administrative officials are all fallible humans that are allowed to have weird opinions, small IQ, various beliefs and can usually be bribed. That is not my understanding. When applying for a job with the police and many other agencies IQ tests are a given (so average or above should be expected). Employers (and I would presume especially for the police) often do background checks which often includes searching social networking sites for any abnormal or unusual opinions, beliefs, lifestyles, etc., and can sometimes even involve "lie detector" tests and "drug" tests. Privacy is important because there are so many people that would like to take it away from us. These people (especially the police) are not allowed to be anything but status quo. I do take it that you are probably saying this from the perspective of a moral imperative.
Well it sounds more appealing than blaming it on socialism and FDR like someone here already did. We can take the antithesis of our political ideologies and blame it on that. I suppose somebody will blame it on the Jews. It's all quite meaningless to me. The world is spiraling into a mono-culture of haves and have-nots; people who have the power to tell you what drugs to take (prescription Ritalin, but amphetamine or Meth is not), people who have the power to tell you what type of religion is right or wrong (apparently the polygamy of the traditional Mormons and the Muslims is wrong in many countries, but monogamy is perfectly fine as a religious practice), etc and so on. These laws and the new technologies to monitor people and enforce these laws are just a symptom of the Human Mind to want to have control; and those people who already have the power will get to control people. It's always been like that, but it's getting easier now. The world is turning into a Total Surveillance and Total Control society.
I'm reminded of that 60's era British Sci-Fi show the prisoner; when the protagonist says everyday during the opening credits; "I am not a number, I am a free man!" It is very much what the world is turning into.
With that in mind, suppose, today, that a criminal was sitting before you with a knife, threatening to cut off your fingers one by one if you did not give him your notebook password. Are you really willing to sit there and tell me that you would rather have your hands butchered than give up your text-based password? It's not a realistic scenario; if you were sitting beside a criminal then they could just force you to put your fingers onto the finger print reader (no amputation required). In general, a criminal would not even need your actual fingers, but just your finger prints.
I would suppose that the computer algorithm would probably just need the md5 hash of the finger prints.
This technology makes security more interesting, and not necessarily more foolproof.
I was thinking of it as being more of a general attitude and mindset than a conspiracy. People in power generally like to use that power, and so as an example we have the historical US system of checks and balances offset by the expanding executive powers of the White House. As the old saying (or observation) goes, "power corrupts". Democratic-type countries don't have a lot of history compared to the more tyrannical government types. Where democracies do exist (and have mainly evolved throughout the 20th century), there does appear to be a trend towards more "law and order" and less personal liberty. I propose that this is do to the types of people who generally trend towards power positions (business leaders and politicians). They have the marketing and oligarchical financing to put their psychological whims into reality.
Yes, as you've said, "... they panic over everything they don't understand, thinking that if it exist, it must be regulated somehow." Politicians tend to be business people and not social scientists, historians, or economists; and that being said they tend to be unqualified for their position. They are charismatic leaders, and not natural leaders of intellect or any type of utilitarian ability.
Of course it's not all just psychology; there are conspiracies; the War on Drugs is not just a US institution but is coordinated world wide. The same with WIPO, etc and so on. People in power do want to control our thoughts and behaviors. Of course if you agree with these political agenda's then you probably won't think of yourself as Orwellian or tyrannical. If you happen to be in a jail because of these conspiracies then you would think otherwise.
So what's stopping them from just putting him on trial again? I don't think anything except perhaps for bad publicity, but that could always be countered with "Think of the children!". If the spying laws haven't already been sufficiently strengthened to make a criminal case for unencumbered encryption a possibility, then now certainly appears the right time to do it. There certainly has been momentum on anti-privacy initiatives over the past few years, i.e. increased proliferation of CCTV, illegal telco wiretaps, national ID cards, DNA databases for people who are suspected of criminal activity, etc. Yes the times are changing for the worse.
I guess times aren't changing as much as you think. You can guess as to what I'm thinking if it pleases you, but I don't see the point in that exercise.
So, what happens when trade secrets leak because some gov employee got bribed to access them and pass them to a competitor?... I would assume RIM could also be held liable for loss. I'm sure that would be covered in the EULA, as just about everything and the kitchen sink seems to be. And generally governments don't need to bribe anybody to steal trade secrets, as that is (or at least before 9/11) the primary goal of government spying (economic espionage).
Good thing RIM is a Canadian company.. eh? Why? Google and Yahoo are American companies that are based in the "land of the free" and yet they comply with the Chinese government with all their unethical anti-privacy and surveillance measures. Nice companies who "do no Evil" will never win in the end. Just like corporations are legal personifications of a person; a nice company will never get the girl, the BMW or the promotion. Just ask Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
Phone companies in the US, maybe elsewhere, are legally required to facilitate eavesdropping under CALEA. End to end encrypted data services such as Skype and Hushmail have escaped this so far. So has TOR and Freenet so far. The German built JAP proxy technology was forced to put in a backdoor for the German police; all completely unannounced until a programmer looked at the (open) source code. Wikipedia has a slightly different interpretation (no back doors, but warrants issued to log IP addresses). To this day there are some very stupid people who believe that "anonymous" services should have backdoors in place to make these services un-anonymous.
I can remember when the PGP creator was put on trial in the US for his subversive software. The American government was smart in dropping the case and thus not setting a possible legal precedent (against themselves), but that was pre-9/11. As Bob Dylan once said "The times they are ah changin'"
It doesn't matter; allowing governments to spy on people does not stop terrorism, social injustice, crime, political unrest, famine or war. It's an irrational reaction to a problem. Deal with the cause not the effect. But I don't really think politicians are that stupid; I think they know this, but want the excuse to be in the best example of Orwellian arguments to tyranny, however subtly and slowly it creeps upon us.
You are half-right. Marijuana is both a sedative and a psychedelic.
Wikipedia gets it pretty much right in this statement: "While many drugs clearly fall into the category of either Stimulant, Depressant, Hallucinogen, or Antipsychotic, cannabis, containing both THC and CBD, exhibits a mix of all sections, leaning towards the Hallucinogen section due to THC being the primary constituent."
The most accurate definition of marijuana would be to call it a psychedelic (as many scientists do). The common literature (like Wikipedia) often refers to perception-enhancing drugs as hallucinogens (like Wikipedia does) even though Marijuana and other more powerful psychedelics like LSD do not cause hallucinations (at least not in a normal person who takes a normal recreational dose).
Marijuana is not a hallucinogen, it is a psychedelic (and a rather mild one at that). Psychedelics enhance perception, whereas hallucinogens cause substantial distortions of perception (visual hallucinations like pink elephants for example). Unfortunately Wikipedia is "... missing citations or needs footnotes." on these two subjects, as I suspected after giving the articles a cursory overview, because they appear to give the two words synonymous meanings.
Bad things are created by bad producers, who will only ever produce bad things. Good things are created by good producers, who will only ever produce good things. True. Slashdotters tend to be a cynical folk. In the end though banning obscene material can be very good for society; there will be no inadvertent or harmful attempts to look at or download religious materials for example and children will no longer be exposed to Fox News articles or anything said or written by Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.
Hopefully the new rules will only allow content to be viewed that has sex as the major theme, because sex brings joy to the world. Among those primates whose primary social activity is sex (for example), there is very little social aggression. Sex and marijuana should be promoted by the new FCC regulations. Religion (which causes War, aggression, hallucinations and delusional thinking) will obviously be banned.
Finally the FCC is thinking progressively and will ban all these noted obscenities from the Internet.
If Opera has so many great features so far ahead of everyone else, why is its usage still somewhere around 1% on a good day? 1. People don't know about Opera like they do about Firefox. There is (or seems to be) very little marketing towards the consumer with Opera. 2. Being open source already gives Firefox a marketing boost in the evangelical circles of the FOSS/FLOSS community. 3. Extensions really make FireFox shine. Having a choice of thousands of customizations and enhancements available via Extensions (now called Add Ons) makes FireFox really geeky keen. Though Opera does offer plug-ins (as do most browser AFAIK), none surpasses Firefox in terms of quantity and quality.
I would suspect "software downloads" would imply an independent application and not a patch or a service pack. I'm sure they have their servers prepared to get Slashdotted and Digged, etc for the marketing event. Though I wonder why Microsoft with it's money couldn't hire a marketing firm to think up something savvy like that for Internet Explorer.
It would also be a great opportunity to promote bittorent as a mass downloading medium. Too bad it doesn't seem to be in the plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. My privacy is worth more than $75.00 however, and even though I still struggle to pay the rent I do not do Air Miles or any other such privacy subtracting gimmicks. Self respect is more important than money to me. I suppose it's the same reason some people refuse to buy mutual funds that have tobacco companies in its portfolio.
And for the same reason I do not view Web pages that refuse to allow its content to be viewed without JavaScript, VBScript, Flash, cookies, etc to be set to the "On" position. Yeah I know with Slashdot session cookies are on, but that is by choice and not necessity. If games were open source like SlashCode then maybe I would buy some. I am and always will be reluctant to buy games (or anything) that have DRM in them. If they (game companies, etc) can't find a legit market for their products without DRM then these people should find another line of work. I don't support them and I don't support marketing companies. But hey, if people don't mind sharing their data with people then that's their choice. I choose to be choosy. I'll be one of those people whose data isn't mined, sold, traded or stolen from carelessly placed laptops. And yes, btw, did I tell you that even banks have been found to sell data without the knowledge or consent of their customers. It may not be a big deal to some people, but I'd rather not have some unscrupulous person knowing where I live.
I'd suggest an "opt-out" system along with restrictions on *what* data was sent.
Assumptions and so on...
I remember a few years back I read an anti-spam site that did some experiments with legit companies on their opt in and opt out email policies, etc and so on. A large percentage of these companies ended up ignoring their own rules (over 40 percent at least, I really can't remember, but it was a large number). To elaborate, the anti-spam site setup unique email addresses for each company they sent an email to, and thus monitored things like unsolicited spam that came through, and whether the company in question stopped sending them email when they "unsubscribed". There are many more examples, but I will leave it at that.
The point being is that you not only have to trust these companies, but these companies have to be trustworthy. I would argue that if a company has more than 10 employees then there will be at least some amount of anomy with it's employees and with the institution in general. If it's a BIG company like Apple for example, then psychopathic people like Steve Jobs have no problems with trying to fuck over their customers in order to increase their pecking order in the Billionaires club. I'm thinking specifically of the instance when Steve said he would no longer honour the life-long tech support that he promised to his Mac purchasers. IIRC, I think he said something like "fuck them" when one of his execs told him it would be a bad idea. Of course I could bring up M$ examples, but that would be too banal.
I believe that shrink-wrap licenses have been found to be nonbinding in some jurisdictions, though I don't remember the court cases that back that up.
Perhaps, or even probably, but that's not the point. Companies offer money back guarantees and mail in rebates because they know most (or at least a statistically significant proportion of) consumers don't find it worth their while to bother. Hiring a lawyer and loosing time off work (or just plain opportunity costs) for a sixty dollar game isn't worth it. Of course you are assuming that the consumer even believes he can get his money back. In the era where laws and information campaigns are constantly reminding consumers that their rights take a back seat to that of the copy right owner, I doubt if too many (consumers) would even consider the law, much less attempt to try and enforce said law. It's not so easy to just call the police and tell them to press charges against a software company because their EULA or business practices are illegal. Believe me I've tried :)
Chances are however that if you call up the actual game company and they have some reasonable customer service rep on the line then they may refund your money if you pay to have the disks, etc sent back to them. Maybe, maybe not. It's your bet. In the end it's still a hassle. It's often easier to buy something than to return it.
It's not immediately obvious, but the link is present in the poster's URL name. I don't believe it is possible to submit an article without submitting a link. The editors should have at least made it more obvious.
On the other hand, if your cable and DSL are down, maybe it's time to do something else.
Whenever my Internet connection is down I find it best to take a Prozac.
It has to do with my (rejected) Slashdot submission:
http://it.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=718461
The military and most organizations are NOT looking for intelligent people; they are looking for Yes-Men who appear intelligent (people who talk the talk and walk the walk of Management). This excludes Geeks, and any independent type thinker. People who make it to the managerial levels of DARPA and ANY organization will ALWAYS have their psychological preferences suited to the lowest common denominator of "intellectual".
If you can "Sales" your way to the top of Management (or Human Resources Management) then you are looking for somebody like yourself (a Sales Person); and NOT an intellectual who challenges bad assumptions or procedures. People in bureaucratic structures like DARPA want TEAM PLAYERS and not thoughtful folk who will question and analyze things only to discover that systems designed and administered by a potential superior are inadequate or defective. DARPA (and all other bureaucratic organizations) want committee meetings and group hugs; intellectuals and problem solvers want results (despite the social euphoria of working in an Office with free coffee and all the other perks).
There is a distinct divide between what organizations WANT and what they get. This is because their social biases and academic lameness propelled them to the position they are in. In this respect I'm talking about eagles fly with eagles and worms wiggle with worms. People only hire who they appreciate. People who are intelligent enough to know better don't even bother wasting their time trying to apply to places like DARPA.
Yes you can teach a horse to count as well but that doesn't mean they can have an ability towards the subtleties or complexities of mathematics. In my experience it's all academic; you can teach people to memorize formula but you cannot teach people to interpret said formula outside of their natural (genetic) tendencies or (conditioned) personal experiences. Most people are only skeptical in regards to things that disagree with their own belief systems. A true skeptic questions his own beliefs. People with self-confidence will never be skeptical (take this last statement as a Trol, but it is generally true IMPE [In My Personal Experience]).
People can be taught to be skeptical like people can be taught to be cynical, depressive, sociable. Let's take as an analogy the "sociable" personality type; it has been widely agreed that the amount of extroversion/introversion a person has is largely genetic. People can be taught how to be sociable (learn what to say to girls in a singles bar for example), but this is all academic and a facade. On the other hand, anyone committed to an ideology, whatever the flavour, is usually uneducable. un-educe-able. Interesting.
In my past I've dealt with police (on a professional and at times a semi-professional level), and yes sometimes on a personal level (I've been given verbal warnings in my youth a few times). On the semi-professional level I've noticed that the under-cover cops seem to be rather weird (they seem to be rather extreme in their off-duty lifestyles), so I am/was thinking that there may be different criteria for hiring under-cover cops. At any rate I'm sorry for being vague; at times I want to "protect" my own privacy and the privacy of those people I have encountered. The cops that I have met generally seem to be OK folk, but a few were rude and lacking in tact (I've been culturally profiled by police a few times) because of my long hair and genes, the neighbourhood I happened to be visiting, etc and so on (I can only imagine what a black person would feel like in similar circumstances). As a fairly middle-class white boy this has been disappointing.
It seems like many governments think this analogy is justification for Internet surveillance.
Best regards,
UTW
Well it sounds more appealing than blaming it on socialism and FDR like someone here already did. We can take the antithesis of our political ideologies and blame it on that. I suppose somebody will blame it on the Jews. It's all quite meaningless to me. The world is spiraling into a mono-culture of haves and have-nots; people who have the power to tell you what drugs to take (prescription Ritalin, but amphetamine or Meth is not), people who have the power to tell you what type of religion is right or wrong (apparently the polygamy of the traditional Mormons and the Muslims is wrong in many countries, but monogamy is perfectly fine as a religious practice), etc and so on. These laws and the new technologies to monitor people and enforce these laws are just a symptom of the Human Mind to want to have control; and those people who already have the power will get to control people. It's always been like that, but it's getting easier now. The world is turning into a Total Surveillance and Total Control society.
I'm reminded of that 60's era British Sci-Fi show the prisoner; when the protagonist says everyday during the opening credits; "I am not a number, I am a free man!" It is very much what the world is turning into.
I would suppose that the computer algorithm would probably just need the md5 hash of the finger prints.
This technology makes security more interesting, and not necessarily more foolproof.
I was thinking of it as being more of a general attitude and mindset than a conspiracy. People in power generally like to use that power, and so as an example we have the historical US system of checks and balances offset by the expanding executive powers of the White House. As the old saying (or observation) goes, "power corrupts". Democratic-type countries don't have a lot of history compared to the more tyrannical government types. Where democracies do exist (and have mainly evolved throughout the 20th century), there does appear to be a trend towards more "law and order" and less personal liberty. I propose that this is do to the types of people who generally trend towards power positions (business leaders and politicians). They have the marketing and oligarchical financing to put their psychological whims into reality.
Yes, as you've said, "... they panic over everything they don't understand, thinking that if it exist, it must be regulated somehow." Politicians tend to be business people and not social scientists, historians, or economists; and that being said they tend to be unqualified for their position. They are charismatic leaders, and not natural leaders of intellect or any type of utilitarian ability.
Of course it's not all just psychology; there are conspiracies; the War on Drugs is not just a US institution but is coordinated world wide. The same with WIPO, etc and so on. People in power do want to control our thoughts and behaviors. Of course if you agree with these political agenda's then you probably won't think of yourself as Orwellian or tyrannical. If you happen to be in a jail because of these conspiracies then you would think otherwise.
Best regards,
UTW
I can remember when the PGP creator was put on trial in the US for his subversive software. The American government was smart in dropping the case and thus not setting a possible legal precedent (against themselves), but that was pre-9/11. As Bob Dylan once said "The times they are ah changin'"
It doesn't matter; allowing governments to spy on people does not stop terrorism, social injustice, crime, political unrest, famine or war. It's an irrational reaction to a problem. Deal with the cause not the effect. But I don't really think politicians are that stupid; I think they know this, but want the excuse to be in the best example of Orwellian arguments to tyranny, however subtly and slowly it creeps upon us.
You are half-right. Marijuana is both a sedative and a psychedelic.
Wikipedia gets it pretty much right in this statement:
"While many drugs clearly fall into the category of either Stimulant, Depressant, Hallucinogen, or Antipsychotic, cannabis, containing both THC and CBD, exhibits a mix of all sections, leaning towards the Hallucinogen section due to THC being the primary constituent."
The most accurate definition of marijuana would be to call it a psychedelic (as many scientists do). The common literature (like Wikipedia) often refers to perception-enhancing drugs as hallucinogens (like Wikipedia does) even though Marijuana and other more powerful psychedelics like LSD do not cause hallucinations (at least not in a normal person who takes a normal recreational dose).
Marijuana is not a hallucinogen, it is a psychedelic (and a rather mild one at that). Psychedelics enhance perception, whereas hallucinogens cause substantial distortions of perception (visual hallucinations like pink elephants for example). Unfortunately Wikipedia is "... missing citations or needs footnotes." on these two subjects, as I suspected after giving the articles a cursory overview, because they appear to give the two words synonymous meanings.
Hopefully the new rules will only allow content to be viewed that has sex as the major theme, because sex brings joy to the world. Among those primates whose primary social activity is sex (for example), there is very little social aggression. Sex and marijuana should be promoted by the new FCC regulations. Religion (which causes War, aggression, hallucinations and delusional thinking) will obviously be banned.
Finally the FCC is thinking progressively and will ban all these noted obscenities from the Internet.
2. Being open source already gives Firefox a marketing boost in the evangelical circles of the FOSS/FLOSS community.
3. Extensions really make FireFox shine. Having a choice of thousands of customizations and enhancements available via Extensions (now called Add Ons) makes FireFox really geeky keen. Though Opera does offer plug-ins (as do most browser AFAIK), none surpasses Firefox in terms of quantity and quality.
I would suspect "software downloads" would imply an independent application and not a patch or a service pack. I'm sure they have their servers prepared to get Slashdotted and Digged, etc for the marketing event. Though I wonder why Microsoft with it's money couldn't hire a marketing firm to think up something savvy like that for Internet Explorer.
It would also be a great opportunity to promote bittorent as a mass downloading medium. Too bad it doesn't seem to be in the plan.