But the article is comparing apples and oranges in one important respect: it's comparing the highest fine actually issued by the NRC last year, to the highest fine allowed for the FCC to issue under the new regulations. That's as deceptive (deliberately or not) as saying "I'm selling these PC cases at $120 each! You might think that's expensive, but just look at my competitor! Items in his store can cost up to $75,000!!" That may be completely technically true -- but it doesn't tell you what the competitor's price on PC cases is, just that there is something you could buy from the competitor which is $75,000.
Gahahahahaha! You think that someone who gets arrested as a presumed about-to-be-molester is going to get help?? What dream world are you living in? You clearly know nothing about how the system actually functions. If anything, the system will block any attempts he makes to get help for himself so that he never commits this crime for which he's already being punished -- under the logic "Well, he's a molester, or a would-be molester, or anyone someone who's thought about molesting -- and we all know what monsters those people are, so if he wants something, it must be bad, and so we're doing a good thing by blocking it. Quick -- put as many obstacles in the way of his getting treatment as you can!"
Until I actually saw the system in action, I might have done the same thing: described the system the way it should work and assume that's the way it does work. If you've ever actually seen the system at work, though, you no longer have those illusions. Your post title is incredibly ironic: "Spoken like someone that doesn't understand." If you think that someone who is arrested for a crime he hasn't committed, on the presumption that everyone who thinks about this crime commits it, by law enforcement personnel who by and large ignore the evidence and believe that molesters are never curable, and you think that that actually represents a successful bringing of help, you are the one that doesn't understand.
Beg pardon, but it sounds like what you're saying is "Oh, posh and nonsense, there's no 'thought crime' here! There's just a clear realization of the obvious laboratoryfact that certain thoughts inevitably lead to crimes! Therefore, it's okay to turn people in to the police for their thoughts!"
"Child molestation is not something that someone does, it is an indelible part of who they are. They never, ever get better, and the compulsion doesn't go away. Civil commitment after the end of the required prison term is the only way to keep children safe."
I'm sure that's what they, your students in your computer forensics class from your local state patrol child endangerment squad, believed. However, they would probably also tell you if you asked that people go crazy at the full moon. It's a well-cherished myth that still gets trotted out but the problem is that actual examination of the evidence dispels it.
And that is a myth that persists even though they (the law enforcement personnel) get no particular benefit from believing it. From having seen the way my local law enforcement handled their suspicions of child endangerment, I can tell you how they benefit from believing myths such as "no child abuser can ever be cured" and "you can always tell an abuser because they're in denial about being abusers" -- it removes a lot of the painful ambiguity from the job. They don't have to try and distinguish the guilty from the innocent -- everyone who comes under suspicion must be guilty. They don't have to preserve the rights of the innocent -- only the victim is innocent; everyone else is guilty. They don't have to try and sort out the redeemable from the scum -- everyone who's guilty is scum, and everyone is guilty.
You're telling us what you think is the whole truth, but you got it from only one source, and a source with a heavily vested interest. I think if you checked actual statistics on recidivism of child sexual abusers you'd find contradiction for your assertion that only locking up all offenders forever can make children safe.
The criteria is "was rape an end in itself, or was it employed as a means of state policy?" If evidence were to surface of a specific "rape order" at Nanjing, or even of clear instructions to the troops that, to serve Japan's ends, they should visit degradation and humiliation to those civilians that they didn't massacre, then I would view the Nanjing Massacre as an undeniable example. (I'd also point out that though I did and do disagree about Nanjing being "clearly more pertinent" in this context and "just a given", I have never removed the link, the way rd_syringe removed a link he didn't agree with and substituted one he did agree with, which started this whole thing.)
Note that nothing in the criteria states or implies "This specific means to a state policy end must be known of/approved of/ordered by the higher-ups." Like the wording about "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted" which was changed because it was being used to pointlessly limit the discussion, there doesn't seem to be a reason to exclude situations where rape and sexual torture was a means of state policy but the higher-ups didn't know that that specific means was chosen. All the Abu Ghraib defendants have testified that they believed they were pursuing the orders which they had received from higher-ups, which is to soften up the detainees for interrogation. Sexual torture was chosen as a means to a state policy end, even if it was chosen by some particular stupid rank-and-file rather than at higher levels.
You are entirely missing the point. No one is suggesting that Japanese higher officials "just didn't notice" that atrocities were happening. There is no question at all that Japanese High Command was responsible for the atrocities at Nanjing, and responsible for more atrocities besides, including rape, through the infamous "comfort woman" program.
But the very fact that Japanese High Command had in fact instituted the "comfort woman" program, creating an atmosphere where soldiers took it as normal that foreign women should be used against their will to satisfy their sexual needs, is what makes it difficult to establish whether the High Command specifically ordered rape at the Rape of Nanjing -- it is not the cut-and-dried matter you make it out to be.
To put it in terms of your analogy to the Nazi death camps, there is no question that the Final Solution was known, approved and promulgated at the highest levels. However, suppose that during World War II, there had been an incident where Nazi soldiers went to a technically neutral country and while there murdered Jewish citizens of that country. There is no question that what they did fit with the standards that had been established for them by their higher-ups, and no question that the higher-ups bore moral culpability for establishing those standards. But does the fact that the soldiers' acts fit in with those moral standards prove that those acts were ordered by the High Command? Even if the reaction of the High Command, should they be aware of it as it's happening, should be "Who cares?", that is not the same thing as "it was committed under the orders of High Command". Even if it is equally morally despicable, which we seem to be in agreement on.
Again, you are omitting the fact that the wording which you are very legalistically interpreting so as to exempt the US is no longer there.
As for the relevance of Saddam's Iraq, I asked a very very very simple question which you never answered: if we were starting the article from scratch, and we created a section on "Rape and sexual torture" with no links to begin with, would we say "Oh, gee, wait, Saddam's regime was so notable for its use of rape as a means of torture that it has to go in!"? No one denied that torture, sexual torture and rape occurred in Saddam's Iraq. What was questioned was that it was specifically notable enough in Saddam's Iraq to deserve mention above all the other torturing dictatorships -- to say nothing of notable enough to justify your use of it to replace the mention of Abu Ghraib.
there was a POV being interjected, whether intentionally or not... Yes, there sure was, and now you're interjecting it here, too.
And what about those photos at http://www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm ? Oh, of course those are just faked by organisations full of entrenched fanatics...
Uh, here's the small print from the top of that page:
(Please Note: Many of the photographs showing the rape of Iraqi women and the sodomization of Iraqi POW's at the Abu Ghraib prison are now at USA pornographic websites pointing to the possibility of collusion between the depraved US soldiers in the pictures and US based Jewish pornographers. Many of these photographs were also freely disseminated to US occupation forces, perhaps to inflame their nefarious desires and to motivate them to strike out against the Iraqi populace in these perverse ways.)
This is not exactly the page you want to cite to debunk the suspicion that inauthentic photographs are being circulated out there by fanatics.
The wording of the section was about societies in which rape and torture was an accepted policy of the military and government
was. Past tense. If you didn't even notice that the wording had changed because you were claiming that it exempted Abu Ghraib from discussion, you weren't paying enough attention to be taken seriously, and if you noticed but deliberately avoided mentioning it here then you are deliberately deceiving.
and how rape and torture of citizens in such societies are often more emotionally affected
An incorrect extrapolation from what is -- again -- a wording that has not existed in the article for nearly a month. Your insistent focus on the society, rather than the act itself of sexual torture, seems to be only so you can wave the flag and say "It doesn't apply to America! Iraq, yes! Let's point the finger at Iraq! World War II Japan, yes! Let's point the finger at them! But despite the fact that we have photographic proof of U.S. soldiers committing sexual torture, circulated by the soldiers themselves as mementos, it shouldn't even be mentioned, because it doesn't count unless the society approves it, and by gosh, the USA doesn't approve torture!" I'm not even going to get into the Congressmen who responded to the proof of torture by saying "Well, so what, if they're in those prisons to begin with they're no angels and besides, we're not as bad as Saddam Hussein so what's wrong with some electric shocks and threats of mutilation?" to question the assertion that the USA doesn't accept torture as normal.
It seems that in both cases (including the one where I wasn't the other party whose participation you are misdescribing) your problems seem to stem from a misunderstanding of what Wikipedia's standards should be. That standard seems to run like this:
If I, rd_syringe, do not personally believe that something is true, no reference to it should be made.
This is clearly the case in the "Fisher Price" incident. This is a well-known criticism of Windows XP. The "hardcore guy" you are criticizing did the correct thing by citing the references and showing that yes, this is a criticism that's out there. You did the wrong thing by declaring 'Well, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless it's the majority view!' Is that what you think Wikipedia's purpose and policy is, to report only the "majority" view and pretend those other 'minority' views don't exist?
On the issue of the "Rape" article, you fail to mention several things.
One is that when you claimed that the wording only applied to "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted as part of the normal behaviour of police or security", the wording was changed to eliminate that artificial restriction on discussion of the subject. (It wouldn't make sense to create separate sections for "Rape and sexual torture in countries that tolerate it" and "Rape and sexual torture in countries that don't officially tolerate it", since they'd say pretty much the same thing.) Funny that you mention that "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply," but fail to mention how that technicality disappeared.
Another is that you're bringing in your misconception again that the majority view (your view) is the truth and there's no need to discuss any others. First you say "there were no cases of rape involved" at Abu Ghraib. Then you mention "except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof." If you had joined Wikipedia earlier, instead of just joining around the same time that you started repeatedly removing the link to "Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse", I wouldn't have been surprised to see you editing out any reference to coercive interrogation techniques being used there because, hey, it's only one person claiming it without proof! Then it's only two people claiming it without proof, only five people claiming it with a photo of Lynndie England smirking at hooded naked prisoners simulating fellatio as proof...
Thirdly, you offer up as your proof that you were the thoughtful considerate party in the right, and that it was the other side, the "hardcore guy", who was "politically motivated", who "snuck in" his restoration of the link you removed ("snuck in"? are you suggesting I had a webcam on you and was carefully watching and waiting until you were looking the other way?) the fact that you offered The Rape of Nanjing as an alternate. Which you are claiming now is "more pertinent to that section than either of the links we had" and "just a given".
You fail to mention that it was explained to you why that was not a suitable alternative: the Rape of Nanjing was a famous military atrocity where there is no question that rapes were committed, as well as murders, as well as wholesale destruction. However, the entire reason that the Rape article has a section on Rape and Sexual Torture is to discuss rape when it occurs not as an act of self-gratification committed at another's expense (as it usually does), but as a method of torture to advance policy. No historical evidence has ever suggested that the Japanese commanders said to the soldiers who did the raping, "Hey, we're gonna want to get information out of those civilians later, so why don't you torture them by raping a bunch?" There's no suggestion that it was anything other than "They're the enemy anyways; whatever you feel like doing to them, go ahead and do it." To quote someone whose name I can't recall, "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply."
I don't know if it's me, but I can never seem to find an FTP site that lets me DL a copy of Knoppix at a speed better than 2-5 Kb/s -- this, on a cable modem! Does anyone else have this problem? The only reason I haven't already given up on FTP and switched to BitTorrent is that our home LAN is on a router that from time to time will flake out under load...
As long as I can mark that front-page article by the editors as Irresponsible And Just Plain Wrong. I won't be the only one to point this out, I know, but I think it bears repeating, especially because it's the sort of thing that could potentially lead to lawsuits.
It's bad enough to take what Gore actually said, that he took a lead role in the creation of the Internet -- which he did, by supporting the project in his political role -- and buy into the urban legend that he said he invented it. It's even worse to put quotes around it and thus falsely claim that that word came from Gore.
So in short, as Cmdr. Taco keeps reminding us, "Hey! We're News For Nerds! News doesn't have to stick to that annoying 'truth' stuff!" (No, he didn't actually say that, but hey, let's put it in quotes as if he did...)
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
on
SCO.com Defaced
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Morally, we should pat ourselves on the back when we can describe our actions as "good" or at least "acceptable". We should not be aiming for the very low target of "at least better than SCO".
Practically, this damages the reputation of everyone standing against SCO. You're acting as if everyone has already recognized that SCO is a blustering bag of hot wind trying to prop up a house of cards (and yeah, that's a mixed metaphor, but ask how well a wind keeps together a house of cards and it has a certain accuracy.) But there are those who don't know how to evaluate the evidence for themselves and are trying to determine who's in the right by trying to figure out who's acting in the most trustworthy way.
Let me put this another way. There is no merit to SCO's case. There is barely any consistency to SCO's case. The nature of what exactly was supposedly done wrong to them, and the identity of who exactly done the wrong, has changed. The only thing that has remained constant throughout, and thus what we can be pretty sure they've been after all along, has been the mud hurled at Linux, Linux supporters, and Linux users, trying to brand us as lawless renegades. Whoever hacked their website made an invaluable contribution to that cause.
Actually, what it sounds like you're saying is that the bootleggers are operating in a market where the established music industry is not.
Think about it. You're arguing that the traditional music industry cannot possibly lower its prices enough to make any sales to this market segment. If a bootlegger sells 10,000 illegal CDs to people who could never have afforded to buy legal copies of the CDs, guess how many lost sales of the legal copies that equates to? That's right, none.
84. Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment.
He's also going back to the original portrayal of the case as being about "stolen" code, rather than about contract disputes. Unless he's taking SCO's interpretation of the contract disputes to such an extreme that he would indeed agree and assert that IBM "stole" code from SCO by the act of writing it themselves.
Well, it's good to see you to take that stance. I don't think you can blame people for thinking that you really were pressing for an absurd level of absolute, fair-use-need-not-apply control over all your content -- since many publishers have taken exactly that absurd of a stance.
You know, one thing hasn't been mentioned that I find extremely significant:
Given the subject matter, "katie.com" is the frigging stupidest name possible for the book.
The book is about Katie Tarbox being exploited by an "Internet predator" (really, a predator who chose to use the Internet -- it's necessary to make this distinction because there are feebs like Parry Aftab out there). The last impression that Katie T. and Penguin and self-proclaimed protector of children Parry Aftab should want to give is that Katie T. in any way, shape or form encouraged or prompted the exploitation.
Yet, what is the meaning, the implication, of adding the ".com" extension (I mean, besides when it's being used for actual accuracy, which apparently Aftab and Penguin don't give two craps about)? Thanks to the whole dot-com hysteria, "dot-com" has come to mean in the public mind "something's for sale." pencils.com? Pencils for sale! hubcaps.com? Hubcaps for sale! girl.com? Girls for sale!
So basically Penguin and Parry Aftab are fighting hard, and fighting dirty, for the right to use a title that implies Katie Tarbox put herself up for sale on the Internet. Great going, guys!
... you know, the kind where one day it turns out the bank president and his secretary and all the bank's assets abruptly left in a hurry, forwarding address unknown....
Is it so surprising that a company like Microsoft would steal technology? They generally license it when they can't get away with it, but if they could steal with no repercussions (as this agreement would technically allow) you can bet that they would steal technology to stay "competitive".
A bug would be if Mozilla was supposed to load web pages securely and instead of doing so, loaded them in an insecure fashion.
What Mozilla is doing in this case, or in any case, does without the patch, is to say "Yes, okay" when the user chooses an insecure action and says "there, do this for me."
What are you going to call a bug next? "Mozilla loads the goatse.cx page even though no one would ever really want to see that! Goatse.cx has been around at least since 2002, and yet Mozilla has failed to fix this bug that lets you go there!"
I find it to be based on the fact that they're using terms completely differently than actual technical people do. They're claiming they don't install "vaporware" and I wonder what the hell they think that means, since by the definition everyone else uses, if it actually exists and can be installed, it isn't vaporware. In one sentence they say the CD puts the audio player into RAM. We here in the industry call that "loading" the software, cousin. They apparently don't, however, because by the end of the paragraph they claim they "load no software".
I find your claims that the claims of whoever wrote this being a confused technical ignoramus trying to say what pacifies people whether or not it's true being unfounded are unfounded, since there certainly is foundation for the assertion.
My personal feeling on this, BTW? When I buy a music CD, I am buying data. I would be extremely pissed-off if, when I got it home, I discovered that what they put inside the package instead was their code to access the data that I bought, because why exactly am I going to trust their code?
Slashdot Mirror
But the article is comparing apples and oranges in one important respect: it's comparing the highest fine actually issued by the NRC last year, to the highest fine allowed for the FCC to issue under the new regulations. That's as deceptive (deliberately or not) as saying "I'm selling these PC cases at $120 each! You might think that's expensive, but just look at my competitor! Items in his store can cost up to $75,000!!" That may be completely technically true -- but it doesn't tell you what the competitor's price on PC cases is, just that there is something you could buy from the competitor which is $75,000.
Until I actually saw the system in action, I might have done the same thing: described the system the way it should work and assume that's the way it does work. If you've ever actually seen the system at work, though, you no longer have those illusions. Your post title is incredibly ironic: "Spoken like someone that doesn't understand." If you think that someone who is arrested for a crime he hasn't committed, on the presumption that everyone who thinks about this crime commits it, by law enforcement personnel who by and large ignore the evidence and believe that molesters are never curable, and you think that that actually represents a successful bringing of help, you are the one that doesn't understand.
Beg pardon, but it sounds like what you're saying is "Oh, posh and nonsense, there's no 'thought crime' here! There's just a clear realization of the obvious laboratoryfact that certain thoughts inevitably lead to crimes! Therefore, it's okay to turn people in to the police for their thoughts!"
I'm sure that's what they, your students in your computer forensics class from your local state patrol child endangerment squad, believed. However, they would probably also tell you if you asked that people go crazy at the full moon. It's a well-cherished myth that still gets trotted out but the problem is that actual examination of the evidence dispels it.
And that is a myth that persists even though they (the law enforcement personnel) get no particular benefit from believing it. From having seen the way my local law enforcement handled their suspicions of child endangerment, I can tell you how they benefit from believing myths such as "no child abuser can ever be cured" and "you can always tell an abuser because they're in denial about being abusers" -- it removes a lot of the painful ambiguity from the job. They don't have to try and distinguish the guilty from the innocent -- everyone who comes under suspicion must be guilty. They don't have to preserve the rights of the innocent -- only the victim is innocent; everyone else is guilty. They don't have to try and sort out the redeemable from the scum -- everyone who's guilty is scum, and everyone is guilty.
You're telling us what you think is the whole truth, but you got it from only one source, and a source with a heavily vested interest. I think if you checked actual statistics on recidivism of child sexual abusers you'd find contradiction for your assertion that only locking up all offenders forever can make children safe.
Note that nothing in the criteria states or implies "This specific means to a state policy end must be known of/approved of/ordered by the higher-ups." Like the wording about "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted" which was changed because it was being used to pointlessly limit the discussion, there doesn't seem to be a reason to exclude situations where rape and sexual torture was a means of state policy but the higher-ups didn't know that that specific means was chosen. All the Abu Ghraib defendants have testified that they believed they were pursuing the orders which they had received from higher-ups, which is to soften up the detainees for interrogation. Sexual torture was chosen as a means to a state policy end, even if it was chosen by some particular stupid rank-and-file rather than at higher levels.
But the very fact that Japanese High Command had in fact instituted the "comfort woman" program, creating an atmosphere where soldiers took it as normal that foreign women should be used against their will to satisfy their sexual needs, is what makes it difficult to establish whether the High Command specifically ordered rape at the Rape of Nanjing -- it is not the cut-and-dried matter you make it out to be.
To put it in terms of your analogy to the Nazi death camps, there is no question that the Final Solution was known, approved and promulgated at the highest levels. However, suppose that during World War II, there had been an incident where Nazi soldiers went to a technically neutral country and while there murdered Jewish citizens of that country. There is no question that what they did fit with the standards that had been established for them by their higher-ups, and no question that the higher-ups bore moral culpability for establishing those standards. But does the fact that the soldiers' acts fit in with those moral standards prove that those acts were ordered by the High Command? Even if the reaction of the High Command, should they be aware of it as it's happening, should be "Who cares?", that is not the same thing as "it was committed under the orders of High Command". Even if it is equally morally despicable, which we seem to be in agreement on.
As for the relevance of Saddam's Iraq, I asked a very very very simple question which you never answered: if we were starting the article from scratch, and we created a section on "Rape and sexual torture" with no links to begin with, would we say "Oh, gee, wait, Saddam's regime was so notable for its use of rape as a means of torture that it has to go in!"? No one denied that torture, sexual torture and rape occurred in Saddam's Iraq. What was questioned was that it was specifically notable enough in Saddam's Iraq to deserve mention above all the other torturing dictatorships -- to say nothing of notable enough to justify your use of it to replace the mention of Abu Ghraib.
there was a POV being interjected, whether intentionally or not ... Yes, there sure was, and now you're interjecting it here, too.
Uh, here's the small print from the top of that page:
This is not exactly the page you want to cite to debunk the suspicion that inauthentic photographs are being circulated out there by fanatics.
was. Past tense. If you didn't even notice that the wording had changed because you were claiming that it exempted Abu Ghraib from discussion, you weren't paying enough attention to be taken seriously, and if you noticed but deliberately avoided mentioning it here then you are deliberately deceiving.
and how rape and torture of citizens in such societies are often more emotionally affected
An incorrect extrapolation from what is -- again -- a wording that has not existed in the article for nearly a month. Your insistent focus on the society, rather than the act itself of sexual torture, seems to be only so you can wave the flag and say "It doesn't apply to America! Iraq, yes! Let's point the finger at Iraq! World War II Japan, yes! Let's point the finger at them! But despite the fact that we have photographic proof of U.S. soldiers committing sexual torture, circulated by the soldiers themselves as mementos, it shouldn't even be mentioned, because it doesn't count unless the society approves it, and by gosh, the USA doesn't approve torture!" I'm not even going to get into the Congressmen who responded to the proof of torture by saying "Well, so what, if they're in those prisons to begin with they're no angels and besides, we're not as bad as Saddam Hussein so what's wrong with some electric shocks and threats of mutilation?" to question the assertion that the USA doesn't accept torture as normal.
If I, rd_syringe, do not personally believe that something is true, no reference to it should be made.
This is clearly the case in the "Fisher Price" incident. This is a well-known criticism of Windows XP. The "hardcore guy" you are criticizing did the correct thing by citing the references and showing that yes, this is a criticism that's out there. You did the wrong thing by declaring 'Well, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless it's the majority view!' Is that what you think Wikipedia's purpose and policy is, to report only the "majority" view and pretend those other 'minority' views don't exist?
On the issue of the "Rape" article, you fail to mention several things.
One is that when you claimed that the wording only applied to "countries where torture is tolerated or accepted as part of the normal behaviour of police or security", the wording was changed to eliminate that artificial restriction on discussion of the subject. (It wouldn't make sense to create separate sections for "Rape and sexual torture in countries that tolerate it" and "Rape and sexual torture in countries that don't officially tolerate it", since they'd say pretty much the same thing.) Funny that you mention that "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply," but fail to mention how that technicality disappeared.
Another is that you're bringing in your misconception again that the majority view (your view) is the truth and there's no need to discuss any others. First you say "there were no cases of rape involved" at Abu Ghraib. Then you mention "except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof." If you had joined Wikipedia earlier, instead of just joining around the same time that you started repeatedly removing the link to "Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse", I wouldn't have been surprised to see you editing out any reference to coercive interrogation techniques being used there because, hey, it's only one person claiming it without proof! Then it's only two people claiming it without proof, only five people claiming it with a photo of Lynndie England smirking at hooded naked prisoners simulating fellatio as proof...
Thirdly, you offer up as your proof that you were the thoughtful considerate party in the right, and that it was the other side, the "hardcore guy", who was "politically motivated", who "snuck in" his restoration of the link you removed ("snuck in"? are you suggesting I had a webcam on you and was carefully watching and waiting until you were looking the other way?) the fact that you offered The Rape of Nanjing as an alternate. Which you are claiming now is "more pertinent to that section than either of the links we had" and "just a given".
You fail to mention that it was explained to you why that was not a suitable alternative: the Rape of Nanjing was a famous military atrocity where there is no question that rapes were committed, as well as murders, as well as wholesale destruction. However, the entire reason that the Rape article has a section on Rape and Sexual Torture is to discuss rape when it occurs not as an act of self-gratification committed at another's expense (as it usually does), but as a method of torture to advance policy. No historical evidence has ever suggested that the Japanese commanders said to the soldiers who did the raping, "Hey, we're gonna want to get information out of those civilians later, so why don't you torture them by raping a bunch?" There's no suggestion that it was anything other than "They're the enemy anyways; whatever you feel like doing to them, go ahead and do it." To quote someone whose name I can't recall, "based strictly on the wording of the section, the link didn't apply."
I don't know if it's me, but I can never seem to find an FTP site that lets me DL a copy of Knoppix at a speed better than 2-5 Kb/s -- this, on a cable modem! Does anyone else have this problem? The only reason I haven't already given up on FTP and switched to BitTorrent is that our home LAN is on a router that from time to time will flake out under load...
It's bad enough to take what Gore actually said, that he took a lead role in the creation of the Internet -- which he did, by supporting the project in his political role -- and buy into the urban legend that he said he invented it. It's even worse to put quotes around it and thus falsely claim that that word came from Gore.
So in short, as Cmdr. Taco keeps reminding us, "Hey! We're News For Nerds! News doesn't have to stick to that annoying 'truth' stuff!" (No, he didn't actually say that, but hey, let's put it in quotes as if he did...)
Practically, this damages the reputation of everyone standing against SCO. You're acting as if everyone has already recognized that SCO is a blustering bag of hot wind trying to prop up a house of cards (and yeah, that's a mixed metaphor, but ask how well a wind keeps together a house of cards and it has a certain accuracy.) But there are those who don't know how to evaluate the evidence for themselves and are trying to determine who's in the right by trying to figure out who's acting in the most trustworthy way.
Let me put this another way. There is no merit to SCO's case. There is barely any consistency to SCO's case. The nature of what exactly was supposedly done wrong to them, and the identity of who exactly done the wrong, has changed. The only thing that has remained constant throughout, and thus what we can be pretty sure they've been after all along, has been the mud hurled at Linux, Linux supporters, and Linux users, trying to brand us as lawless renegades. Whoever hacked their website made an invaluable contribution to that cause.
Think about it. You're arguing that the traditional music industry cannot possibly lower its prices enough to make any sales to this market segment. If a bootlegger sells 10,000 illegal CDs to people who could never have afforded to buy legal copies of the CDs, guess how many lost sales of the legal copies that equates to? That's right, none.
Well, come to think of it, if it came down to Lich Nixon or Dubya Bush....
Or, as my sig puts it....
It must be the same amount as it costs to run an advertisement masquerading as a story in the New York Times. (hint, hint, paranoia not your friend)
Well, it's good to see you to take that stance. I don't think you can blame people for thinking that you really were pressing for an absurd level of absolute, fair-use-need-not-apply control over all your content -- since many publishers have taken exactly that absurd of a stance.
Given the subject matter, "katie.com" is the frigging stupidest name possible for the book.
The book is about Katie Tarbox being exploited by an "Internet predator" (really, a predator who chose to use the Internet -- it's necessary to make this distinction because there are feebs like Parry Aftab out there). The last impression that Katie T. and Penguin and self-proclaimed protector of children Parry Aftab should want to give is that Katie T. in any way, shape or form encouraged or prompted the exploitation.
Yet, what is the meaning, the implication, of adding the ".com" extension (I mean, besides when it's being used for actual accuracy, which apparently Aftab and Penguin don't give two craps about)? Thanks to the whole dot-com hysteria, "dot-com" has come to mean in the public mind "something's for sale." pencils.com? Pencils for sale! hubcaps.com? Hubcaps for sale! girl.com? Girls for sale!
So basically Penguin and Parry Aftab are fighting hard, and fighting dirty, for the right to use a title that implies Katie Tarbox put herself up for sale on the Internet. Great going, guys!
You do know that plagiarism is not in itself a crime, correct?
A bug would be if Mozilla was supposed to load web pages securely and instead of doing so, loaded them in an insecure fashion.
What Mozilla is doing in this case, or in any case, does without the patch, is to say "Yes, okay" when the user chooses an insecure action and says "there, do this for me."
What are you going to call a bug next? "Mozilla loads the goatse.cx page even though no one would ever really want to see that! Goatse.cx has been around at least since 2002, and yet Mozilla has failed to fix this bug that lets you go there!"
I find your claims that the claims of whoever wrote this being a confused technical ignoramus trying to say what pacifies people whether or not it's true being unfounded are unfounded, since there certainly is foundation for the assertion.
My personal feeling on this, BTW? When I buy a music CD, I am buying data. I would be extremely pissed-off if, when I got it home, I discovered that what they put inside the package instead was their code to access the data that I bought, because why exactly am I going to trust their code?