If Ron Paul is such a racist, where are Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton and all of the other civil rights leaders who love national attention? They are busy attacking Obama...
...it's also sold on newegg, tiger direct, circuit city, best buy, officemax and sam's club. in all likelihood, everex's marketing team pegged these as the outlets most likely to attract the consumers of the greenPC. newegg and tiger direct for the people who want a second box to screw around on, circuit city and best buy for the moderately technical, officemax for people like my dad who putter around looking for hardware/software compatible with their win98 machines, sam's club for people like my mom who like buying annie's organic macaroni in bulk, and wal-mart for the rest.
wal-mart still sucks, but not for selling a $200 low-power consumption Linux box.
That's not always true - school districts vary so much. I worked IT at a school running 300 - 400 OS X (Tiger) iMacs in labs and 200 - 300 G3, G4 and MacBook notebooks. All had Safari and Firefox as standard browsers. Kids would be able to use the laptops; 7th and 8th graders brought them home and pretty much did whatever they wanted with them - I know because I had to fix them.
If they did something wrong or installed unapproved software (we were very lenient - it had to be porn or something that wreaked havoc), their punishment was to be assigned an old clamshell iBook.
1) But take someone who signed up after 9/11 who is now in Iraq saying, "I signed up to get Osama and now I drive past IEDs each day in the middle of a civil war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11..."
2) Or, someone who signed up in 2000, was at the end of their contract in 2004 after serving in Iraq, who gets their deployment extended indefinitely through stop loss orders. That IS happening, and it was not what they signed...
3) Or, someone who truly believes that this war is breaking the military, and is harming the country...
4) Or, that the war is an unconstitutional war, launched without a declaration, unilaterally by the President, when the Constitution reserves that right to Congress (whether or not Congress is ignorant to that Constitutional authority or too spineless to reassert their authority). Kind of conflicts with the whole swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, or do soldiers not have to swear an oath anymore?
Lots of issues here. A stupid person may not have read before they signed, but coming to conclusions like these requires thought.
It's really sad that these soldiers have been misled by our liberal media into protesting against their brothers and sisters in arms. I know it's unpopular but somebody's got to say it. You don't protest against our troops during a war. They are soldiers so I'm going to cut them some slack and just pray that they change their minds about it.
Good lord! At least somebody will "cut them some slack" for exercising their First Amendment rights!
You think these soldiers have been misled by the liberal media just because they oppose the war? They saw the war. You didn't. My friend Jim, 25, was a medic in Falluja. He is against the war. He came back and his hair was gray, and he is 25. I think that gives him more than the right to have any opinion he wants.
Anecdotes aside, even if I disagree with someone who is pro-war, I can at least argue with them because I think they are wrong, giving them some credit for coming to their own views through experience or rationale...no matter how stupid I think the conclusions are. So "pray" they change their minds about it, wow. Sounds like you are ashamed of them for having minds in the first place.
Think about your argument: the big thing I hear from pro-war people with the "support our troops" line was that after Vietnam, troops came home and were spit on by anti-war people; now troops come back from Iraq and are given crap by pro-war people? And simultaneously told they need to "support the troops" by people who didn't even serve? Unbelievable.
...everything else this administration has ever said, like about NOT doing warrantless wiretapping.
An ACLU lawyer contacted a friend of mine last year regarding their lawsuit to stop the warrantless surveillance program, because his phone number was listed on a portion of the tapped phones lists that had been leaked to the ACLU, or that they had acquired. The only thing he could think of is that he took part in a protest on a university campus once in 2004 and had been arrested for petty disorderly conduct.
So you tell me, if his phone was being tapped, do you really think they are only tapping 100 people?
This goes for sites that deliberately block other browsers as well.
But if you are not a lawyer, or no one who will do this for free, then just work around it. It was the legal quote in the little screed by Danny Carlton I thought was ridiculous.
In a nutshell, it was ruled a copyright violation for United Video, a satellite carrier, to replace WGN's content embedded in teletext (or the use of the vertical blanking interval to transmit content to tv watchers) with its own content when relaying WGN's broadcasts to cable television.
Why? Because WGN owned the programming and paid United Video to transmit the programming in total; this included news stories and station guides embedded in the vblank.
Specifically, Judge Posner states: "The cable system selects the signals it wants to retransmit, pays the copyright owners for the right to retransmit their programs, and pays the intermediate carrier a fee for getting the signal from the broadcast station to the cable system. The intermediate carrier pays the copyright owners nothing, provided it really is passive in relation to what it transmits, like a telephone company..."
He continues, and mentions viewers/users: "The cable system planned to run the teletext on a different channel (which the viewer would select, if we understand correctly, by pushing a button on the decoder) from the one on which it runs the nine o'clock news. But the cable system never received the teletext. United Video did not retransmit it along with the nine o'clock news but instead substituted teletext supplied by Dow Jones, containing business news. WGN and its affiliate brought this suit to enjoin, as a copyright infringement, United Video's failure to retransmit WGN's teletext along with the nine o'clock news."
The issue in question (in 1982, mind you) was never that of users circumventing embedded commercials, which they could easily do by simply a) not pressing the decoder button, b) not switching the channel to view the commercial, or c) not buying the decoder in the first place. The issue was that United Video was specifically paid a fee by the cable system to retransmit programming. It interfered instead; users/viewers were not part of the contractual loop. I.e., there is no implied consent to third parties in any contractual agreement - you pay me $.02 each time someone loads an ad. If no one loads them, that is your problem, not mine.
However, the actions of Danny Carlton, registrant of Whyfirefoxisblocked.com, aka Jack Lewis of JackLewis.net, aka Danny Carlton of Dannycarlton.com, may very well fall into the category of a Denial of Service attack, with all the liabilities that entails. In the UK, these are legal.
"For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an
intent to do the act in question and by so doing--
(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any
computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of
any such data,
whether permanently or temporarily."
Blocking a specified browser is nothing more than a Denial of Service attack in another form.
Why? Because the access holder/user (i.e. cable or Internet subscriber) pays the service provider for access to the Internet, which the service provider then, well, provides. Service providers then connect to other service providers to access data on other servers and other computers, which is transmitted over cables, phone lines, etc. Advertisers pay domain holders or website owners to display ads on their sites, or to pay by the click.
I run the latest Firefox, 2.0.0.5, on this old Compaq Armada 7800 with no problems. A little slower on newer sites with lots of video, but fine otherwise. And this is Win98SE on a Pentium II with only 64MB RAM. Saying that Firefox is "ridiculous" on this is just wrong. Add-ons include Wizz RSS newsreader and FoxyProxy. Maybe on a 486 or a 75mHz Pentium... but I'd guess there would not be a whole lot you could do on those anyway.
And the Dutch government is not exactly known for tyrannical abuse of power or corruption.
Whereas in the Anglophone countries, that is all we seem to have these days. Add that to a rich tradition of distrusting government, and the government knowing that its own people distrust it, and it is bound to create even more of an authoritarian reaction in the form of bait-and-switch surveillance and scheming.
Post-traumatic stress disorder appears to be wildly misunderstood. The hippocampus is only one part of the whole picture and while downregulating hippocampal cdk5 in PTSD sufferers might help them to integrate traumatic memory material, they would have to be on a cocktail of other drugs (the neurochemist approach) or already in therapy like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which would obviate the need for such a pathway to begin with.
Also, PTSD has been called an anxiety disorder, then a depressive disorder, then a dissociative disorder... etc., each new study saying they have pidgeon-holed it for years now, so it is no surprise to me that neurochemists with research to fund have just come back to calling it - in a glossed up, scientific way - cowardice. Thanks guys. Way to simplify cognition in an organ so complex, we don't even know what 85% of it does.
Rather, PTSD shares elements of many of these other disorders but is more complex than any single one. The "fear" caused by hippocampal activity is closely related to the amygdala, which integrates memory material, but not related causally to, say, the locus ceruleus, which is the alarm center of the brain; in someone with PTSD, imagine that the locus ceruleus is a fire alarm going off every twenty-five minutes in a firehouse, and each time it is a false alarm...but the fire fighters have slide down the pole anyway, because that is there job, their role. In other words, telling the brain it is a false alarm (treating fear) does not actually desensitize the locus ceruleus, so the brain will constantly tell the body to react as though danger is near (not necessarily fear, especially for those who are trained combat veterans and do not flinch in combat, but react to danger by entering a combat mindset, which can be problematic at the family picnic one day after someone sets off a firecracker).
Basically, non-comprehensive treatments for one or the other of the symptoms invariably fail to treat PTSD effectively. It has been treated with SSRI and SNRI antidepressants which reduced hypersensitivity but inhibited memory re-integration, and i suspect this will be tried and will fail in a similar way. Describing it as a "contextualized fear response," or referring implicitly to it as such, is deeply ignorant of the complexity of the human psyche and the nature of PTSD.
You will have similar problems if you donate money to other organizations that have a history of violence: Greenpeace, any anti abortion/pro-life (ha!) groups that have killed or bombed clinics, or anyone else.
Gee willikers, since when does Greenpeace have a history of violence???
If you call writing letters to Congressmen, doing lame street theater in hazmat suits or sailing boats near global summits (and getting those boats sliced in half by bigger, military boats) then you must really be a pacifist!
I think you have them confused with the ELF/ALF, and even then, the actions of those groups amount to, well, disaffected youth spray painting and breaking things or threatening to break things, not killing people.
For some perspective, try re-reading a history of World War II, Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Darfur, ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian war, Iraq for the last 30 years or so, the 40 year-old Colombian Civil War, the war in the Congo, and then you can comment meaningfully about groups being "violent" or not. Sheesh!
How can you keep your house safe if the locks are made so that anybody knows how they are made and know the weak points and can easily pick them? People pay top money for security and they sure as hell won't go for something that is openly available, even the people they are trying to secure their items from.
This works for physical locks, but not cryptography. Read up on PGP.
Or, maybe I should explain it this way...if I can build a lock, give you the blueprints, give you the lock, give you the key that locks it (but not the one that opens it)...and you still can't open it, then that is security. That is what we are talking about.
Proprietary code is the cryptographic equivalent of someone's little sister hiding her diary and saying it's unreadable; as soon as her nosy brother finds it, he will open it (maybe brute force its cheap lock open) and read away. Or scribble in the margins, or whatever. Hiding does not make it unreadable.
Now, if she used PGP...
And if people are stupid enough to pay for something that does not protect them as well as something they could get for free, then they deserve what they get.
"If an algorithm is only secure if it remains secret, then it will only be secure until someone reverse-engineers and publishes the algorithms. A variety of secret digital cellular telephone algorithms have been "outed" and promptly broken, illustrating the futility of that argument."
Not that I disagree entirely, but when the price of fuel goes up, the price of anything transported by truck goes up as well...like food, for instance. See: Meat Poultry & Egg Prices On The Rise.
Although some of this is from feed prices going up as farmers switch corn production to ethanol, you can't say that price gouging and anti-competitive collusion at the pump - which is what we are seeing now - is anything but bad for consumers, drivers and the real economy. If costs rise to transport goods, than those cost will be reflected in prices that WE pay.
Free market...riiiight. Profits for Exxon, $4.00 a gallon (which is less dense than a gallon that is 20 degrees cooler) for me. Or, even if I junk my car and hang-glide to work, $4.00 for a loaf of bread at the supermarket. Wait, let me pinch out a tear for our corporate overlords...
More like anarchism. Capitalism has corporate bosses, communism has party bosses.
One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all--at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.
...c-e-n-s-o-r-i-n-g...
First comes blocking words like democracy from searches, then comes deleting dissident blogs,
Then comes any Chinese/Tibetan activist unfortunate enough to use Vista getting carted off to the gulags.
Hardly an adversarial relationship. Google, Yahoo and MS all roll over to the demands of the regime. It's the new 21st century open door policy, only the doors are kicked in by the PLA after receiving updates from American corporations.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/5.htm#_T oc142395826
...or is it just a coincidence that this law comes up after "SpoofCard.com Terminates Accounts of Paris Hilton and 50 Other Customers for Using its Service to Break Into Voicemail Boxes"?
I think not.
Anyway, please people, the whole reason for this law is not to make spoofing a thing of the past, but to make sure only cops and feds are allowed to spoof caller ID to harass, intimidate and spy on me by pretending to be my loved ones, creditors, ex-girlfriends who want their DVDs back, one night stands who I never called back, etc. I mean, how naive are we about them spying on me? Laws are about power and who has it. That's why they won't let me buy a tank on eBay.
Slashdot Mirror
"The most serious threat to democracy is the notion it has already been achieved."
Earliest attribution? Some protester outside the Republican Convention in Philly in 2000.
...it's also sold on newegg, tiger direct, circuit city, best buy, officemax and sam's club. in all likelihood, everex's marketing team pegged these as the outlets most likely to attract the consumers of the greenPC. newegg and tiger direct for the people who want a second box to screw around on, circuit city and best buy for the moderately technical, officemax for people like my dad who putter around looking for hardware/software compatible with their win98 machines, sam's club for people like my mom who like buying annie's organic macaroni in bulk, and wal-mart for the rest.
wal-mart still sucks, but not for selling a $200 low-power consumption Linux box.
That's not always true - school districts vary so much. I worked IT at a school running 300 - 400 OS X (Tiger) iMacs in labs and 200 - 300 G3, G4 and MacBook notebooks. All had Safari and Firefox as standard browsers. Kids would be able to use the laptops; 7th and 8th graders brought them home and pretty much did whatever they wanted with them - I know because I had to fix them.
If they did something wrong or installed unapproved software (we were very lenient - it had to be porn or something that wreaked havoc), their punishment was to be assigned an old clamshell iBook.
Now that's incentive to behave!
Right, I agree mostly. Read before you sign.
1) But take someone who signed up after 9/11 who is now in Iraq saying, "I signed up to get Osama and now I drive past IEDs each day in the middle of a civil war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11..."
2) Or, someone who signed up in 2000, was at the end of their contract in 2004 after serving in Iraq, who gets their deployment extended indefinitely through stop loss orders. That IS happening, and it was not what they signed...
3) Or, someone who truly believes that this war is breaking the military, and is harming the country...
4) Or, that the war is an unconstitutional war, launched without a declaration, unilaterally by the President, when the Constitution reserves that right to Congress (whether or not Congress is ignorant to that Constitutional authority or too spineless to reassert their authority). Kind of conflicts with the whole swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, or do soldiers not have to swear an oath anymore?
Lots of issues here. A stupid person may not have read before they signed, but coming to conclusions like these requires thought.
Good lord! At least somebody will "cut them some slack" for exercising their First Amendment rights!
You think these soldiers have been misled by the liberal media just because they oppose the war? They saw the war. You didn't. My friend Jim, 25, was a medic in Falluja. He is against the war. He came back and his hair was gray, and he is 25. I think that gives him more than the right to have any opinion he wants.
Anecdotes aside, even if I disagree with someone who is pro-war, I can at least argue with them because I think they are wrong, giving them some credit for coming to their own views through experience or rationale...no matter how stupid I think the conclusions are. So "pray" they change their minds about it, wow. Sounds like you are ashamed of them for having minds in the first place.
Think about your argument: the big thing I hear from pro-war people with the "support our troops" line was that after Vietnam, troops came home and were spit on by anti-war people; now troops come back from Iraq and are given crap by pro-war people? And simultaneously told they need to "support the troops" by people who didn't even serve? Unbelievable.
...eunuchs?
...everything else this administration has ever said, like about NOT doing warrantless wiretapping.
An ACLU lawyer contacted a friend of mine last year regarding their lawsuit to stop the warrantless surveillance program, because his phone number was listed on a portion of the tapped phones lists that had been leaked to the ACLU, or that they had acquired. The only thing he could think of is that he took part in a protest on a university campus once in 2004 and had been arrested for petty disorderly conduct.
So you tell me, if his phone was being tapped, do you really think they are only tapping 100 people?
This goes for sites that deliberately block other browsers as well.
But if you are not a lawyer, or no one who will do this for free, then just work around it. It was the legal quote in the little screed by Danny Carlton I thought was ridiculous.
...then start a "collective" and buy guns. seems like a no-brainer to me.
Read the F'ing Legal Opinion...
IANAL, but the lead opinion by Judge Posner on WGN v. United Video can be found here: http://www.projectposner.org/case/1982/693F2d622
In a nutshell, it was ruled a copyright violation for United Video, a satellite carrier, to replace WGN's content embedded in teletext (or the use of the vertical blanking interval to transmit content to tv watchers) with its own content when relaying WGN's broadcasts to cable television.
Why? Because WGN owned the programming and paid United Video to transmit the programming in total; this included news stories and station guides embedded in the vblank.
Specifically, Judge Posner states: "The cable system selects the signals it wants to retransmit, pays the copyright owners for the right to retransmit their programs, and pays the intermediate carrier a fee for getting the signal from the broadcast station to the cable system. The intermediate carrier pays the copyright owners nothing, provided it really is passive in relation to what it transmits, like a telephone company..."
He continues, and mentions viewers/users: "The cable system planned to run the teletext on a different channel (which the viewer would select, if we understand correctly, by pushing a button on the decoder) from the one on which it runs the nine o'clock news. But the cable system never received the teletext. United Video did not retransmit it along with the nine o'clock news but instead substituted teletext supplied by Dow Jones, containing business news. WGN and its affiliate brought this suit to enjoin, as a copyright infringement, United Video's failure to retransmit WGN's teletext along with the nine o'clock news."
The issue in question (in 1982, mind you) was never that of users circumventing embedded commercials, which they could easily do by simply a) not pressing the decoder button, b) not switching the channel to view the commercial, or c) not buying the decoder in the first place. The issue was that United Video was specifically paid a fee by the cable system to retransmit programming. It interfered instead; users/viewers were not part of the contractual loop. I.e., there is no implied consent to third parties in any contractual agreement - you pay me $.02 each time someone loads an ad. If no one loads them, that is your problem, not mine.
However, the actions of Danny Carlton, registrant of Whyfirefoxisblocked.com, aka Jack Lewis of JackLewis.net, aka Danny Carlton of Dannycarlton.com, may very well fall into the category of a Denial of Service attack, with all the liabilities that entails. In the UK, these are legal.
According to the UK Computer Misuse Act of 1990, Section 3.(2), and as amended in the Police and Justice Bill of 2006, Part 5, Section 34 & 35:
"For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an intent to do the act in question and by so doing--
(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data, whether permanently or temporarily."
Blocking a specified browser is nothing more than a Denial of Service attack in another form.
Why? Because the access holder/user (i.e. cable or Internet subscriber) pays the service provider for access to the Internet, which the service provider then, well, provides. Service providers then connect to other service providers to access data on other servers and other computers, which is transmitted over cables, phone lines, etc. Advertisers pay domain holders or website owners to display ads on their sites, or to pay by the click.
The doma
I run the latest Firefox, 2.0.0.5, on this old Compaq Armada 7800 with no problems. A little slower on newer sites with lots of video, but fine otherwise. And this is Win98SE on a Pentium II with only 64MB RAM. Saying that Firefox is "ridiculous" on this is just wrong. Add-ons include Wizz RSS newsreader and FoxyProxy. Maybe on a 486 or a 75mHz Pentium... but I'd guess there would not be a whole lot you could do on those anyway.
And the Dutch government is not exactly known for tyrannical abuse of power or corruption.
Whereas in the Anglophone countries, that is all we seem to have these days. Add that to a rich tradition of distrusting government, and the government knowing that its own people distrust it, and it is bound to create even more of an authoritarian reaction in the form of bait-and-switch surveillance and scheming.
Post-traumatic stress disorder appears to be wildly misunderstood. The hippocampus is only one part of the whole picture and while downregulating hippocampal cdk5 in PTSD sufferers might help them to integrate traumatic memory material, they would have to be on a cocktail of other drugs (the neurochemist approach) or already in therapy like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which would obviate the need for such a pathway to begin with.
Also, PTSD has been called an anxiety disorder, then a depressive disorder, then a dissociative disorder... etc., each new study saying they have pidgeon-holed it for years now, so it is no surprise to me that neurochemists with research to fund have just come back to calling it - in a glossed up, scientific way - cowardice. Thanks guys. Way to simplify cognition in an organ so complex, we don't even know what 85% of it does.
Rather, PTSD shares elements of many of these other disorders but is more complex than any single one. The "fear" caused by hippocampal activity is closely related to the amygdala, which integrates memory material, but not related causally to, say, the locus ceruleus, which is the alarm center of the brain; in someone with PTSD, imagine that the locus ceruleus is a fire alarm going off every twenty-five minutes in a firehouse, and each time it is a false alarm ...but the fire fighters have slide down the pole anyway, because that is there job, their role. In other words, telling the brain it is a false alarm (treating fear) does not actually desensitize the locus ceruleus, so the brain will constantly tell the body to react as though danger is near (not necessarily fear, especially for those who are trained combat veterans and do not flinch in combat, but react to danger by entering a combat mindset, which can be problematic at the family picnic one day after someone sets off a firecracker).
Basically, non-comprehensive treatments for one or the other of the symptoms invariably fail to treat PTSD effectively. It has been treated with SSRI and SNRI antidepressants which reduced hypersensitivity but inhibited memory re-integration, and i suspect this will be tried and will fail in a similar way. Describing it as a "contextualized fear response," or referring implicitly to it as such, is deeply ignorant of the complexity of the human psyche and the nature of PTSD.
"I'm octosquid, and you're squidopus. You're squidy little eight shoes!"
"Squid, octopus... I'm the one with the spear-gun."
Gee willikers, since when does Greenpeace have a history of violence???
If you call writing letters to Congressmen, doing lame street theater in hazmat suits or sailing boats near global summits (and getting those boats sliced in half by bigger, military boats) then you must really be a pacifist!
I think you have them confused with the ELF/ALF, and even then, the actions of those groups amount to, well, disaffected youth spray painting and breaking things or threatening to break things, not killing people.
For some perspective, try re-reading a history of World War II, Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Darfur, ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian war, Iraq for the last 30 years or so, the 40 year-old Colombian Civil War, the war in the Congo, and then you can comment meaningfully about groups being "violent" or not. Sheesh!
This works for physical locks, but not cryptography. Read up on PGP.
Or, maybe I should explain it this way...if I can build a lock, give you the blueprints, give you the lock, give you the key that locks it (but not the one that opens it)...and you still can't open it, then that is security. That is what we are talking about.
Proprietary code is the cryptographic equivalent of someone's little sister hiding her diary and saying it's unreadable; as soon as her nosy brother finds it, he will open it (maybe brute force its cheap lock open) and read away. Or scribble in the margins, or whatever. Hiding does not make it unreadable.
Now, if she used PGP...
And if people are stupid enough to pay for something that does not protect them as well as something they could get for free, then they deserve what they get.
...like Bruce Schneier:
"If an algorithm is only secure if it remains secret, then it will only be secure until someone reverse-engineers and publishes the algorithms. A variety of secret digital cellular telephone algorithms have been "outed" and promptly broken, illustrating the futility of that argument."from Crypto-Gram: September 15, 1999
But what could we expect from an FCC headed by a lawyer, a businessman, a professional Senate staffer, a DRM-supporter who received coaching from Clear Channel to oppose a satellite radio merger, and a professional telecom corporate lobbyist.
Not that I disagree entirely, but when the price of fuel goes up, the price of anything transported by truck goes up as well...like food, for instance. See: Meat Poultry & Egg Prices On The Rise.
Although some of this is from feed prices going up as farmers switch corn production to ethanol, you can't say that price gouging and anti-competitive collusion at the pump - which is what we are seeing now - is anything but bad for consumers, drivers and the real economy. If costs rise to transport goods, than those cost will be reflected in prices that WE pay.
Free market...riiiight. Profits for Exxon, $4.00 a gallon (which is less dense than a gallon that is 20 degrees cooler) for me. Or, even if I junk my car and hang-glide to work, $4.00 for a loaf of bread at the supermarket. Wait, let me pinch out a tear for our corporate overlords...
Obligatory quoting of Bakunin/Kropotkin/Chomsky, refuting of Marx, refuting of Milton Friedman...
Now that that is out of the way, I'd just like to say that I, for one, welcome our new anarcho-communist ant overlords.
More like anarchism. Capitalism has corporate bosses, communism has party bosses.
One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all--at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.
First comes blocking words like democracy from searches, then comes deleting dissident blogs,
Then comes any Chinese/Tibetan activist unfortunate enough to use Vista getting carted off to the gulags.
Hardly an adversarial relationship. Google, Yahoo and MS all roll over to the demands of the regime. It's the new 21st century open door policy, only the doors are kicked in by the PLA after receiving updates from American corporations.T oc142395826
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/5.htm#_
...or is it just a coincidence that this law comes up after "SpoofCard.com Terminates Accounts of Paris Hilton and 50 Other Customers for Using its Service to Break Into Voicemail Boxes"?
I think not.
Anyway, please people, the whole reason for this law is not to make spoofing a thing of the past, but to make sure only cops and feds are allowed to spoof caller ID to harass, intimidate and spy on me by pretending to be my loved ones, creditors, ex-girlfriends who want their DVDs back, one night stands who I never called back, etc. I mean, how naive are we about them spying on me? Laws are about power and who has it. That's why they won't let me buy a tank on eBay.
Damn government.
Actually, Microsoft *is* treating them like journalists!
Just an example of envelope or ATM journalism that you mostly still see in the Phillipines.
Slightly dated by US standards, sure, where you get hired as press secretary for good coverage, but hey, I mean they're only bloggers.