Amazing! Most infants of less than 24 hours in the world cannot even sit upright, much less attempt cogent sentences at a keyboard!
Because of the tone of your post, I will not continue this dialogue. If you want to communicate your thoughts to people, you'll be better received by not calling them infants. Why don't you go berate the folks at the National Review for their opposition of the FCC? Start off by calling William F. Buckley an infant and see how seriously they'll take you.
I listened to the online recording of the conversation. I've also been listening to stern for over a decade. Allow me to explain the extortion that exists because of these fines.
Viacom and other networks that carry Stern's broadcasts are unable to fight the fines in court. Fighting anything in civil court (this would NOT qualify as a criminal case) will take several years and can take over a decade if the litigants drag their feet enough. During this time, the FCC can punish Viacom by holding up any license renewals, applications, or acquisitions relating to Viacom business. Viacom is a public company that has to answer to the stock market. Investors will pull their money out of Viacom if it sees the company get into a quagmire of a legal battle with the FCC that is stunting the company's growth. Because of this, it's been cheaper to simply pay the fines and keep broadcasting.
Real conservatives believe the FCC is an abuse of government power. It's an unneccesary bureaucracy that expands government intrusion into our lives. They agree with Howard Stern that the airwaves should be ruled by the market and not a group of appointed moralists. The modding you are describing is not based on 'party lines'.
Here's an interesting commentary from the National Review on the topic of the FCC:
In a free society, different people will have different values and tolerance levels when it comes to speech, and government should not impose the will of some on all. When it comes to minding the kids, I'll take responsibility for teaching my own about the realities of this world, including the unsavory bits. You worry about yours. Let's not call in the government to do the job for us.
Consider this hypocrisy: A child can go into a public library and check out a book that contains passages using the word 'fuck' and describes sex acts. This same child may stand on a street corner and read the book aloud. The child can copy words from the book onto a t-shirt or even print posters featuring quotes from the book. But the child may not walk into a radio station and review the book over the air by reading excerpts that include those 'indecent' words.
I didn't blame the core developers directly in my posts. But yes, they do share the blame. They should have constructed the handles for modules such that no module can touch the database directly. As it is, SQL injections are rampant in the third-party stuff. It shouldn't be a matter of the module developers following guidelines. It should be a matter of what those developers are allowed to do via the code interfaces.
But I was cutting them (the phpNuke core coders) slack because they have worked their asses off building something cool that they believe in. The people who really deserve criticism are the vanity krackers who deface all the phpNuke websites.
I'm glad other posters in this discussion have differentiated post-Nuke from phpNuke. I wasn't aware that the new generation CMS is safer. Still, when I get around to migrating my site to a new CMS, I'm going for something a little lower-profile than Nuke. I'd also like to obfuscate the paths so URL searches won't help krackers find my site on google if a vulnerability is found.
There are plenty of alternatives. A quick search at freshmeat.net for CMS reveals many when sorted by popularity. I'm still using nuke because I have too much content invested in the architecture to easily switch now. But Plone looks good to me. I suppose it mostly depends on what a publisher is looking for in features. I was originally attracted to phpNuke because of all the modules and huge development community. Now I've found that it's the modules that provide most of the security vulnerabilities, so I've had to disable them all.
Running your site on a popular publishing platform is great except that there are hundreds of krackers huntng exploits in the software and when one is found, there are hundreds of attackers searching google for sites running the software with the vulnerability. Although obscurity is no reliable form of security, I would prefer it to being a high-profile target.
I'm a robotic software researcher, so this notion really affects me.
This post deserves its own slashdot article all to itself. Not only has an AI-driven robot posted on slashdot, but apparently someone has designed the robot to research software. So it would make sense that the robot would be reading slashdot. I think the editors should set up an interview with this AI drone known as SnowZero.
I've been hosting a phpnuke site for a couple years now. I do my best to keep the CMS software updated, but it has been hacked three times already. The modules and the CMS itself fall prey to exploits all the time and there are an army of Brazillian script kiddies who constantly search for susceptible websites.
I would strongly discourage anyone from considering nuke as a CMS. It's just too much of a headache. Especially when you deal with the modules for which the patches are unweildly to apply or go unsupported.
This is an especially relevant accomplishment for the thousands of people, like myself, who have been using LI/Unix on Macintosh hardware for the last 8 or so years. Historically, there has been a huge dividing line over which few Linux distros crossed. In fact, none did. AIX (not Linux), A/UX (also not linux), NetBSD and MkLinux were the only things you could ever run on the nubus Macs. This included the early powerPC and also 68k hardware. Then the PCI powermacs came out and all the Linux distros like Yellow Dog, SuSE, and the such were ported. But MkLinux and the nubus BSD stuff never came accross this chasm to PCI, nor did the PCI Linux distros backport to nubus. Interest in the nubus distros diminished on the development front because coders wanted to apply their time and skills to working on the distros running on the faster hardware. And of course, Apple was never going to waste a penny of development on getting Mac OS X to run on hardware that didn't mean new hardware sales.
So to those of us who can remember the brick wall of owning nubus hardware and wanting to run a modern Unix on it, this is an astonishing moment.
r-blo (ryan block) is the editor of Engadget and also the submitter of this story. I would prefer he disclose this when submitting stories to slashdot in order to hype his own site. Which, by the way, are the only story submissions he makes to Slashdot and he never discloses his connection to Engadget when submitting them..
I'm posting this message from a Florida Voting machine. Browsing under IE is great! Had to download and install flash plugin for a few sites, though. I have no idea why all these posters are saying this electronic voting system is insecure. Everytime these popup windows appear telling me they need to confirm my credit card information, the numbers are displayed as asterisks (*) when I type it in. This voting machine seems plenty secure to me.
Dude. How do you think Al Qaeda is communicating with all its sleeper cells here in the US? Ever wonder why SPAM has escalated significantly since the United States attacked Afghanistan? Most of the new spam are coded messages.
Just throwing some paranoid schizo stuff into your discussion. It was otherwise a very complete posting. Let's continue to post "this story is a dupe" messages on slashdot to let our Al Qaeda leaders know we're still receiving their orders loud and clear.
There are some unique features that only hip-e offers and they might have some success because of this.
What are these features? Please identify these features. I've scoured their website and I'm not seeing them. What are the useful applications?? Hip-E is vague in describing how it is so specially tailored for teenagers. What is it that a teen wants that standard computers don't provide?
I used to work for a marketing company that specializes in reaching teenagers. When we saw the splash in the local newspaper (I live in Austin where Netpliance is headquartered) we were laughing our asses off. It's a typically clumsy adult approach to appealing to teenagers. I am so confident in the destined failure of this product that I will bet you $3,000 that they won't move more than a hundred thousand of these a year.
I'd like to point out that it might look cheap for them to pick and assemble all these third party components (windows OS, parts, etc), they are operating in such low volume that they are paying through the nose for these components. They aren't competing with Apple so much as they are competing with the other PC companies selling similar packages.
I'm not saying there's no room. My post sort of suggests it, but I meant that for a startup it's very unlikely to beat Apple in their own playing field. A company like Sony or Dell is more poised to pull this off because they've actually got all the surrounding product offerings to create a compelling digital hub for teenagers..
I've scoured the Hip-e website and all I can see is that they've bundled a baseline computer with a tv-tuner and a Windows OS. The rest is hype. Quotes from teenagers saying it's cool. Give a kid a free product and you can get whatever quote you want out of them. Granted, the new 17" iMacs don't have a built-in TV tuner, but they can edit DV footage and record DVDs, which the hip-e cannot. The DVD-writing iMac 17" costs $1500. The Hip-E costs $1700. What is compelling about this computer that makes it a better purchase than an iMac? If a kid skips the DVD-burning superdrive option, the iMac costs $1300 (cheaper if they get it via a student discount through the education online Apple Store) which yields enough saved $$ to add in the big 40gig iPod and still cost less than a Hip-E without the optional $149 mp3 player they're offering.
I also find it a little telling of their small stature when you do a search on Google with the phrase "hip-e digital lifestyles" and their own site isn't on the first page.
Basically, they aren't a big enough company to compete with Apple because they're dealing in too small a volume to get all these third-party components at a cheap enough price to make the Hip-e a reasoble deal.
these are the folks who created the iOpener
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· Score: 4, Informative
That's exactly what I first thought when I read that line.
Just to clarify for everyone, Kent Savage is the same guy behind the Netpliance iOpener. He's one of those dot-com bubble masters who doesn't really 'get-it' but can spins some concept up that looks great on paper and board rooms. Other people who also don't 'get-it' in these meetings sucker into his pitches and invest in stupid ideas like this without recognizing the fatal flaws.
The fatal flaw with the Hip-E??? They're trying to out-mac Apple. That's like trying to out-weird Michael Jackson. No slight against Apple in this comparison. They've done a tremendous job building brand awareness, applying inspired industrial design, and conceptualizing cool products. While the Apple store is located in a shopping mall here in Austin, the Hip-e folks have one of those ridiculous kiosks in the mall like those ones selling t-shirts with your picture ironed-on that says "worlds's greatest grandpa."
I read the Yahoo article linked to above and I think it's poor journalism for the writer to have not mentioned that Digital Lifestyles is the new name of Netpliance.
Yes, I agree with you. Perhaps the National Science Foundation can dedicate next years grant to solving Slashdot's dupe problem instead of hacking into an internet chess club.
I'm not sure what part of this architecture you're describing as not being 'very secure.' If data was served via SSL from the website, it would be less available to packet sniffers and would thereby be pretty secure end-to-end. Also, even though the server is at a hosting company, they could have been running it as a dedicated server, which would give IndyMedia 100% control over reboots, etc. Worst case scenario, it's a shared host. Indymedia could have kept their sensitive data on an encrypted partition that they would have to ssh into the box to mount themselves.
Of course, these are all hypotheticals as the specific details of this case haven't been revealed.
Hey, I think you are 100% correct. Critical Mass doesn't serve the stated purpose. It does damage to the bicycle movement. The raising awareness claim is a rationalization for people who feel powerless and want to act out against drivers. Jamming up traffic isn't going to get more people out of cars and walking or riding bikes. Emphasizing the benefits of bicycling might get a few out of their cars:
1. Best parking spots at even the most popular destinations.
2. Helps you keep fit. Way more fun than a treadmill indoors.
3. Gas is $2.00 a gallon. Bikes use no gas.
4. Bikes don't require insurance, a license, or a loan.
Please have patience with the Critical Mass folks. They're just venting their frustration. I think the phenomena is diminishing, as well.
Your citing of the abortion doctor case is relevant, but doesn't prove your point. In the abortion doctor address case, doctors were ACTUALLY MURDERED. The people publishing the information were being held liable for the deaths of doctors killed and injured. A jury awarded Planned Parenthood $107 million in the case. It still is being battled out in the courts. Here's a great legal discussion of the case.
Note the difference here. That's a civil case where a victim of violence is suing a 'publisher'. This Indymedia situation would appear to be a criminal case in that the FBI doesn't confiscate stuff unless they are looking to put people in jail for something. Hopefully nothing has happened to anyone listed on the Indymedia site.
No one has said a website can't publish the names and addresses of abortion doctors. A jury has said that someone who did is responsible for the deaths and injuries committed against people on said list. It also didn't help the Nuremburg Files website defendents that they were marking off pictures of doctors as they were killed or greying them out if they were only injured. It functioned as a sort of scorecard for psychopaths.
In terms of free speech, prior restraint is a serious defense that has been upheld in countless cases. The Supreme Court describes prior restraint as "the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights." In the IndyMedia and the Nuremburg Files case, the government is going to wait and see what the result is of speech rather than intercede with assumptions on what could happen. Probably what has happened with the IndyMedia situation is that the govt. is harrassing them by claiming that something posted was stolen from a comprimised server and they are confiscating the hard drives to investigate the theft of the data.
After my brief email dialogue with Phillip, I believe that Engadget does not have a commercial relationship with Slashdot. Mr. Torrone is simply busting his ass creating content over at Engadget and Slashdot seems to respect that by featuring links to his work. I look forward to seeing more interesting articles by Phillip Torrone and hope that in the future he discloses his authorship in his submissions to Slashdot.
Re:another engadget paid placement
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Phillip,
I appreciate your response to the charges I've made. I'll email you to start a not-so-public discussion on this topic. If you and Engadget are legit, I'll respond here indicating my endorsement.
I would request that anyone submitting a story to Slashdot that links to their own site, or some article they've written on a site disclose their relationship. Check out how the editor of Wired did this in his submission that was also posted on slashdot today. It's easy to do and builds credibility for everyone involved.
another engadget paid placement
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For Christ's sake, will slashdot come clean on how much money they charge Engadget (WEBLOGS, INC. NETWORK) for these story placements? The submitter, Ptorrone, is the author of the article (Phillip Torrone), yet this is not disclosed in the slashdot post.
Engadget is an infomercial site. It's not a blog. If you doubt the commercial relationship between slashdot and Engadget, check out how many submissions have been accepted from Ptorrone in the last 60 days. Also note that each of the accepted submissions are Engadget articles written by PhillipTorrone.
By switching to IE, then you are jumping through the hoop the website developers have set in front of you. I recommend you just ignore the site and move on. There's plenty of other content on the web that's not obfuscated from visitors with browser requirements. Maybe over time, the developers of said sites will realize they can increase their page hits if they open up their site to W3 standards.
I hope you will also accept that there is a mountain of scientific evidence that a breast is an organ that is part of human sexual response and arousal.
I'm not personally aware of the scientific evidence that you're referencing here, but if it does exist, would this research demonstrate that a man's nipples are different in sexual arousal than a woman's nipples? Is there a strong argument for sexualizing a woman's nipples more so than a man's nipples?
I understand your church group is unaccustomed to seeing bare breasts in public unadvertised. It is likely that members of your congregation have not experienced other cultures in countries such as Japan, Argentina, Brazil, or any number of European countries. Within those cultures, people are not ashamed by womens' breasts being displayed in public while women nurse or on posters in subway trains.
My previous example of the Taliban is, of course, a radical example of fundamentalist religion. But it is an accurate exaggeration of the same feelings your church group experiences when it sees a part of the human anatomy in public that they're not used to seeing. I'm not suggesting at all that you and your church are similar to the Taliban. But what I am saying is that it's easy for us to see how uptight they were (are)about female anatomy and how it was used to subjugate women. In other countries, people look at America in the same way over this Jane Jackson morality witch hunt.
Breaking taboos and boundaries is difficult. I can empathize with you and the members of your church. But for the health and maturity of our society, I think it's something that needs to happen. It's just something we're "not used to"-- it's not something that will harm us. Discomforting, but good in the long run.
Guns that I owned at the time could no longer be legally manufactured or imported.
Yes, and those guns were still lawfully posessed by you throughout the existence of the Assault Rifle Ban. But you and the NRA are happy to exaggerate the bill as if it took guns out of the hands of Americans.
The NRA profits off of manipulating people into an "It's us vs. them" mentality. Look, I'm trying to get through this fog to tell you that us liberal wackos don't give a shit about your guns. There's plenty of political support for private gun ownership on both sides of the aisle. Hence, the Assault Rifle Ban did not get renewed. And as you have clarified for me, the lawmakers who originally voted for it paid a political price for doing so.
Don't write people off assuming you disagree with them. If you do, then you will suffer from a closed mind for the rest of your life.
As for the nazi skinhead shooting, it was in Dallas in the late eighties. Some skinheads were beating up another skinhead girl. A liberal wacko guy I knew who owned a punk rock club where the attack took place shot at the crowd of skinheads. He ended up shooting a skinhead girl through her back and the bullet came out of her nipple. She survived and the shooter pretty much didn't get into any legal trouble over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing! Most infants of less than 24 hours in the world cannot even sit upright, much less attempt cogent sentences at a keyboard!
Because of the tone of your post, I will not continue this dialogue. If you want to communicate your thoughts to people, you'll be better received by not calling them infants. Why don't you go berate the folks at the National Review for their opposition of the FCC? Start off by calling William F. Buckley an infant and see how seriously they'll take you.
I listened to the online recording of the conversation. I've also been listening to stern for over a decade. Allow me to explain the extortion that exists because of these fines.
Viacom and other networks that carry Stern's broadcasts are unable to fight the fines in court. Fighting anything in civil court (this would NOT qualify as a criminal case) will take several years and can take over a decade if the litigants drag their feet enough. During this time, the FCC can punish Viacom by holding up any license renewals, applications, or acquisitions relating to Viacom business. Viacom is a public company that has to answer to the stock market. Investors will pull their money out of Viacom if it sees the company get into a quagmire of a legal battle with the FCC that is stunting the company's growth. Because of this, it's been cheaper to simply pay the fines and keep broadcasting.
Real conservatives believe the FCC is an abuse of government power. It's an unneccesary bureaucracy that expands government intrusion into our lives. They agree with Howard Stern that the airwaves should be ruled by the market and not a group of appointed moralists. The modding you are describing is not based on 'party lines'. Here's an interesting commentary from the National Review on the topic of the FCC:
Consider this hypocrisy: A child can go into a public library and check out a book that contains passages using the word 'fuck' and describes sex acts. This same child may stand on a street corner and read the book aloud. The child can copy words from the book onto a t-shirt or even print posters featuring quotes from the book. But the child may not walk into a radio station and review the book over the air by reading excerpts that include those 'indecent' words.
I didn't blame the core developers directly in my posts. But yes, they do share the blame. They should have constructed the handles for modules such that no module can touch the database directly. As it is, SQL injections are rampant in the third-party stuff. It shouldn't be a matter of the module developers following guidelines. It should be a matter of what those developers are allowed to do via the code interfaces.
But I was cutting them (the phpNuke core coders) slack because they have worked their asses off building something cool that they believe in. The people who really deserve criticism are the vanity krackers who deface all the phpNuke websites.
I'm glad other posters in this discussion have differentiated post-Nuke from phpNuke. I wasn't aware that the new generation CMS is safer. Still, when I get around to migrating my site to a new CMS, I'm going for something a little lower-profile than Nuke. I'd also like to obfuscate the paths so URL searches won't help krackers find my site on google if a vulnerability is found.
There are plenty of alternatives. A quick search at freshmeat.net for CMS reveals many when sorted by popularity. I'm still using nuke because I have too much content invested in the architecture to easily switch now. But Plone looks good to me. I suppose it mostly depends on what a publisher is looking for in features. I was originally attracted to phpNuke because of all the modules and huge development community. Now I've found that it's the modules that provide most of the security vulnerabilities, so I've had to disable them all.
Running your site on a popular publishing platform is great except that there are hundreds of krackers huntng exploits in the software and when one is found, there are hundreds of attackers searching google for sites running the software with the vulnerability. Although obscurity is no reliable form of security, I would prefer it to being a high-profile target.
I'm a robotic software researcher, so this notion really affects me.
This post deserves its own slashdot article all to itself. Not only has an AI-driven robot posted on slashdot, but apparently someone has designed the robot to research software. So it would make sense that the robot would be reading slashdot. I think the editors should set up an interview with this AI drone known as SnowZero.
I've been hosting a phpnuke site for a couple years now. I do my best to keep the CMS software updated, but it has been hacked three times already. The modules and the CMS itself fall prey to exploits all the time and there are an army of Brazillian script kiddies who constantly search for susceptible websites.
I would strongly discourage anyone from considering nuke as a CMS. It's just too much of a headache. Especially when you deal with the modules for which the patches are unweildly to apply or go unsupported.
This is an especially relevant accomplishment for the thousands of people, like myself, who have been using LI/Unix on Macintosh hardware for the last 8 or so years. Historically, there has been a huge dividing line over which few Linux distros crossed. In fact, none did. AIX (not Linux), A/UX (also not linux), NetBSD and MkLinux were the only things you could ever run on the nubus Macs. This included the early powerPC and also 68k hardware. Then the PCI powermacs came out and all the Linux distros like Yellow Dog, SuSE, and the such were ported. But MkLinux and the nubus BSD stuff never came accross this chasm to PCI, nor did the PCI Linux distros backport to nubus. Interest in the nubus distros diminished on the development front because coders wanted to apply their time and skills to working on the distros running on the faster hardware. And of course, Apple was never going to waste a penny of development on getting Mac OS X to run on hardware that didn't mean new hardware sales.
So to those of us who can remember the brick wall of owning nubus hardware and wanting to run a modern Unix on it, this is an astonishing moment.
r-blo (ryan block) is the editor of Engadget and also the submitter of this story. I would prefer he disclose this when submitting stories to slashdot in order to hype his own site. Which, by the way, are the only story submissions he makes to Slashdot and he never discloses his connection to Engadget when submitting them..
I'm posting this message from a Florida Voting machine. Browsing under IE is great! Had to download and install flash plugin for a few sites, though. I have no idea why all these posters are saying this electronic voting system is insecure. Everytime these popup windows appear telling me they need to confirm my credit card information, the numbers are displayed as asterisks (*) when I type it in. This voting machine seems plenty secure to me.
Dude. How do you think Al Qaeda is communicating with all its sleeper cells here in the US? Ever wonder why SPAM has escalated significantly since the United States attacked Afghanistan? Most of the new spam are coded messages.
Just throwing some paranoid schizo stuff into your discussion. It was otherwise a very complete posting. Let's continue to post "this story is a dupe" messages on slashdot to let our Al Qaeda leaders know we're still receiving their orders loud and clear.
I find your assertion interesting.
There are some unique features that only hip-e offers and they might have some success because of this.
What are these features? Please identify these features. I've scoured their website and I'm not seeing them. What are the useful applications?? Hip-E is vague in describing how it is so specially tailored for teenagers. What is it that a teen wants that standard computers don't provide?
I used to work for a marketing company that specializes in reaching teenagers. When we saw the splash in the local newspaper (I live in Austin where Netpliance is headquartered) we were laughing our asses off. It's a typically clumsy adult approach to appealing to teenagers. I am so confident in the destined failure of this product that I will bet you $3,000 that they won't move more than a hundred thousand of these a year.
I'd like to point out that it might look cheap for them to pick and assemble all these third party components (windows OS, parts, etc), they are operating in such low volume that they are paying through the nose for these components. They aren't competing with Apple so much as they are competing with the other PC companies selling similar packages.
I'm not saying there's no room. My post sort of suggests it, but I meant that for a startup it's very unlikely to beat Apple in their own playing field. A company like Sony or Dell is more poised to pull this off because they've actually got all the surrounding product offerings to create a compelling digital hub for teenagers..
I've scoured the Hip-e website and all I can see is that they've bundled a baseline computer with a tv-tuner and a Windows OS. The rest is hype. Quotes from teenagers saying it's cool. Give a kid a free product and you can get whatever quote you want out of them. Granted, the new 17" iMacs don't have a built-in TV tuner, but they can edit DV footage and record DVDs, which the hip-e cannot. The DVD-writing iMac 17" costs $1500. The Hip-E costs $1700. What is compelling about this computer that makes it a better purchase than an iMac? If a kid skips the DVD-burning superdrive option, the iMac costs $1300 (cheaper if they get it via a student discount through the education online Apple Store) which yields enough saved $$ to add in the big 40gig iPod and still cost less than a Hip-E without the optional $149 mp3 player they're offering.
I also find it a little telling of their small stature when you do a search on Google with the phrase "hip-e digital lifestyles" and their own site isn't on the first page.
Basically, they aren't a big enough company to compete with Apple because they're dealing in too small a volume to get all these third-party components at a cheap enough price to make the Hip-e a reasoble deal.
That's exactly what I first thought when I read that line.
Just to clarify for everyone, Kent Savage is the same guy behind the Netpliance iOpener. He's one of those dot-com bubble masters who doesn't really 'get-it' but can spins some concept up that looks great on paper and board rooms. Other people who also don't 'get-it' in these meetings sucker into his pitches and invest in stupid ideas like this without recognizing the fatal flaws.
The fatal flaw with the Hip-E??? They're trying to out-mac Apple. That's like trying to out-weird Michael Jackson. No slight against Apple in this comparison. They've done a tremendous job building brand awareness, applying inspired industrial design, and conceptualizing cool products. While the Apple store is located in a shopping mall here in Austin, the Hip-e folks have one of those ridiculous kiosks in the mall like those ones selling t-shirts with your picture ironed-on that says "worlds's greatest grandpa."
I read the Yahoo article linked to above and I think it's poor journalism for the writer to have not mentioned that Digital Lifestyles is the new name of Netpliance.
Here's a little blurb about them on Engadget.
I mean come on, this is a solvable problem.
Yes, I agree with you. Perhaps the National Science Foundation can dedicate next years grant to solving Slashdot's dupe problem instead of hacking into an internet chess club.
I'm not sure what part of this architecture you're describing as not being 'very secure.' If data was served via SSL from the website, it would be less available to packet sniffers and would thereby be pretty secure end-to-end. Also, even though the server is at a hosting company, they could have been running it as a dedicated server, which would give IndyMedia 100% control over reboots, etc. Worst case scenario, it's a shared host. Indymedia could have kept their sensitive data on an encrypted partition that they would have to ssh into the box to mount themselves.
Of course, these are all hypotheticals as the specific details of this case haven't been revealed.
Hey, I think you are 100% correct. Critical Mass doesn't serve the stated purpose. It does damage to the bicycle movement. The raising awareness claim is a rationalization for people who feel powerless and want to act out against drivers. Jamming up traffic isn't going to get more people out of cars and walking or riding bikes. Emphasizing the benefits of bicycling might get a few out of their cars:
1. Best parking spots at even the most popular destinations.
2. Helps you keep fit. Way more fun than a treadmill indoors.
3. Gas is $2.00 a gallon. Bikes use no gas.
4. Bikes don't require insurance, a license, or a loan.
Please have patience with the Critical Mass folks. They're just venting their frustration. I think the phenomena is diminishing, as well.
Your citing of the abortion doctor case is relevant, but doesn't prove your point. In the abortion doctor address case, doctors were ACTUALLY MURDERED. The people publishing the information were being held liable for the deaths of doctors killed and injured. A jury awarded Planned Parenthood $107 million in the case. It still is being battled out in the courts. Here's a great legal discussion of the case.
Note the difference here. That's a civil case where a victim of violence is suing a 'publisher'. This Indymedia situation would appear to be a criminal case in that the FBI doesn't confiscate stuff unless they are looking to put people in jail for something. Hopefully nothing has happened to anyone listed on the Indymedia site.
No one has said a website can't publish the names and addresses of abortion doctors. A jury has said that someone who did is responsible for the deaths and injuries committed against people on said list. It also didn't help the Nuremburg Files website defendents that they were marking off pictures of doctors as they were killed or greying them out if they were only injured. It functioned as a sort of scorecard for psychopaths.
In terms of free speech, prior restraint is a serious defense that has been upheld in countless cases. The Supreme Court describes prior restraint as "the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights." In the IndyMedia and the Nuremburg Files case, the government is going to wait and see what the result is of speech rather than intercede with assumptions on what could happen. Probably what has happened with the IndyMedia situation is that the govt. is harrassing them by claiming that something posted was stolen from a comprimised server and they are confiscating the hard drives to investigate the theft of the data.
After my brief email dialogue with Phillip, I believe that Engadget does not have a commercial relationship with Slashdot. Mr. Torrone is simply busting his ass creating content over at Engadget and Slashdot seems to respect that by featuring links to his work. I look forward to seeing more interesting articles by Phillip Torrone and hope that in the future he discloses his authorship in his submissions to Slashdot.
Phillip,
I appreciate your response to the charges I've made. I'll email you to start a not-so-public discussion on this topic. If you and Engadget are legit, I'll respond here indicating my endorsement.
I would request that anyone submitting a story to Slashdot that links to their own site, or some article they've written on a site disclose their relationship. Check out how the editor of Wired did this in his submission that was also posted on slashdot today. It's easy to do and builds credibility for everyone involved.
For Christ's sake, will slashdot come clean on how much money they charge Engadget (WEBLOGS, INC. NETWORK) for these story placements? The submitter, Ptorrone, is the author of the article (Phillip Torrone), yet this is not disclosed in the slashdot post.
Engadget is an infomercial site. It's not a blog. If you doubt the commercial relationship between slashdot and Engadget, check out how many submissions have been accepted from Ptorrone in the last 60 days. Also note that each of the accepted submissions are Engadget articles written by PhillipTorrone.
All so true.
By switching to IE, then you are jumping through the hoop the website developers have set in front of you. I recommend you just ignore the site and move on. There's plenty of other content on the web that's not obfuscated from visitors with browser requirements. Maybe over time, the developers of said sites will realize they can increase their page hits if they open up their site to W3 standards.
I hope you will also accept that there is a mountain of scientific evidence that a breast is an organ that is part of human sexual response and arousal.
I'm not personally aware of the scientific evidence that you're referencing here, but if it does exist, would this research demonstrate that a man's nipples are different in sexual arousal than a woman's nipples? Is there a strong argument for sexualizing a woman's nipples more so than a man's nipples?
I understand your church group is unaccustomed to seeing bare breasts in public unadvertised. It is likely that members of your congregation have not experienced other cultures in countries such as Japan, Argentina, Brazil, or any number of European countries. Within those cultures, people are not ashamed by womens' breasts being displayed in public while women nurse or on posters in subway trains.
My previous example of the Taliban is, of course, a radical example of fundamentalist religion. But it is an accurate exaggeration of the same feelings your church group experiences when it sees a part of the human anatomy in public that they're not used to seeing. I'm not suggesting at all that you and your church are similar to the Taliban. But what I am saying is that it's easy for us to see how uptight they were (are)about female anatomy and how it was used to subjugate women. In other countries, people look at America in the same way over this Jane Jackson morality witch hunt.
Breaking taboos and boundaries is difficult. I can empathize with you and the members of your church. But for the health and maturity of our society, I think it's something that needs to happen. It's just something we're "not used to"-- it's not something that will harm us. Discomforting, but good in the long run.
My thoughts exactly, but said better than me!
Guns that I owned at the time could no longer be legally manufactured or imported.
Yes, and those guns were still lawfully posessed by you throughout the existence of the Assault Rifle Ban. But you and the NRA are happy to exaggerate the bill as if it took guns out of the hands of Americans.
The NRA profits off of manipulating people into an "It's us vs. them" mentality. Look, I'm trying to get through this fog to tell you that us liberal wackos don't give a shit about your guns. There's plenty of political support for private gun ownership on both sides of the aisle. Hence, the Assault Rifle Ban did not get renewed. And as you have clarified for me, the lawmakers who originally voted for it paid a political price for doing so.
Don't write people off assuming you disagree with them. If you do, then you will suffer from a closed mind for the rest of your life.
As for the nazi skinhead shooting, it was in Dallas in the late eighties. Some skinheads were beating up another skinhead girl. A liberal wacko guy I knew who owned a punk rock club where the attack took place shot at the crowd of skinheads. He ended up shooting a skinhead girl through her back and the bullet came out of her nipple. She survived and the shooter pretty much didn't get into any legal trouble over it.