While there is some truth in that of course, it is only part of the truth. The much larger truth is that without the content, the publisher has nothing, ZERO, zilch. Commensurate with this, the publisher does not really deserve much credit nor profit --- he is a middleman, useful, but still just a middleman.
And commensurate with that, the truth is that without the publisher I, the audience have nothing. And without the audience, the author has nothing (or at least no paycheck). In the digital arena, I don't really need the publisher to literally "publish" the content, since that seems to be within every author's ability. But what I do need is a powerful filtering tool, adjusted to my preferences, and capable of separating valuable content from useless slashfiction involving Riker having gay sex with some bored housewife's space cat.
That's what value the digital "publisher" will add, in their absolutely vital role as a middleman between the content-producer and the content-consumer.
You are still wrapped up in the idea of physical publishing.
Okay, but I'm not wrapped up in the idea of physical publishing. May I transition your points back into the digital-network arena?
Physically producing a book is a difficult task that requires time and money...
So is digitally producing a book, but the cost is distributed differently.
...but writing a book only needs a talented author and some friends who are willing to proof read.
Writing a book only needs a monkey and a typewriter. Writing a good book needs a "talented author". Typically, it also needs a talented editor, and not simply "some friends who are willing to proofread". So right there we see two things: First, that simply authoring content doesn't guarantee the quality of that content. Second, a good editor is part of the process--a vital part currently supplied by the publisher. So it seems that publishers do provide a useful service. And since neither writing nor editing are limited to the physical realm, there doesn't seem to be any reason why the publishers shouldn't continue to add some of the same value in the digital arena as they do in the physical arena.
But what value could they add? Well, there's the aforementioned editing, which is pretty important. We can probably discard the actual "publishing" value-add, since digital networks pretty much take care of that already. But digital publishing tools and management systems will undoubtedly become more important as time goes on, so that may change.
Then there's marketing, which is the process by which publishers attempt to alert you to works you wouldn't necessarily become aware of or know how to find on your own. On the Internet, of course, we have the opposite problem: all the content is readily available and easily found. Instead of marketing, a process of pushing new content on us; we need filtering, a process of blocking the unneeded, unwanted, or otherwise valueless content. This is what Kling is talking about: filtering adds value to content, by sorting it into "valuable/not valuable" categories. I don't know about you, but I want the most efficent, most effective content filters I can get. The first company to meet that need will dominate the digital publishing world, as well it should. It will be adding quite a lot of value to the growing ocean of content, after all.
Maybe we're confusing two things. On the one hand, the cracker is already liable for whatever crimes he did commit. Evidence is collected and presented to a jury. A judge presides to ensure that the rules of law are followed in the presentation, and in the defense. The jury considers the evidence and arguments for and against, and returns the best decision they know how. If the cracker is found guilty, then he is punished according to the law. If the cracker is found innocent, he is freed.
But that's all proceeding in the criminal court system. There's also the civil court system, where the company might petition another jury on a completely different issue: that the cracker should make restitution to the company for the trouble he caused. Again, evidence is collected and arguments are made. And again, a jury considers the case. If they agree that the cracker is wholly or partly responsible for the added expense of resecuring the website, they might rule that he must pay some or all of that expense to the company. If they agree, however, that the company brought these expenses upon itself through negligence (or whatever), then they might rule that the cracker has no obligation to pay for the company's extra work. Neither decision in the civil trial has any relevance to the ruling in the criminal trial, nor should it.
I think it's pointless to make a blanket statement that the cracker is never (or always) responsible for the extra work to the company, and I withdraw the blanket statements I made earlier in the thread. Each case is different, with its own background and reasoning. Probably best to handle these things on a case-by-case basis, which is precisely why we have the courts, and the juries.
Trees are self-renewing carbon sinks, optimized for existing in a continuous symbiotic cycle with the unstable oxygen sinks in the ecosystem. Individual trees may be unstable, but forests not so much. Left to themselves, who knows what would happen? Fortunately, some of their oxygen-breathing partners have the intelligence and tools to manage the whole system for ensured stability...
Distrust of authority? Check. Inexperience and lack of perspective? Check. Extreme feelings of alienation? Morbid fantasies of self-hatred? Check. Must be a teenager;)
Your idea of what it's like to have a job (as an engineer, or anything else), is naive to the point of being wrong. Your fear is, to a certain degree, appropriate and healthy, but it's misplaced. The future is, to an adolescent, scary because the present is scary. Everything in your life is new, and strange, and uncontrollable, and unpredictable, and you've yet to see any evidence that it will ever get better. It does get better, though. In fact, these are the worst years of your life. From here on out you'll just get stronger, smarter, and wiser. You'll learn more, and understand more, than you ever thought possible. Just wait until you're thirty. You'll "become more powerful than you can possibly imagine":D
Should you kill yourself? Of course not. But you should grow up--it's a lot easier than it looks. Just give it a few more years. People do it all the time.
Education will make you liberal. Wealth will make you conservative. Paying too much attention to Slashdot will make you paranoid and cynical. And at your age, you're already paranoid and cynical enough. Luckily, this too shall pass.
Um, they probably treat it as a break-in. Which may involve all of the precautions you mentioned. As well it should.
IF they did do all this, would it be reasonable to go and sue the thief for all the trouble he caused them?
Of course. He caused them a lot of trouble. He should make restitution.
Shouldn't walmart be responsible for not taking adequate action in the first place? Maybe the website that got hacked should have had a backup server which was completely independent and locked down from the outside world, so it was known to be good and pure, so downtime would be minimized?
You don't work on very many web-accessible ecommerce websites, do you? There's no way "walmart.com" is one server that can be mirrored to a "good and pure" backup disk every night. It's probably whole sets of servers, on a number of discrete but connected network segments, some of which are deeply buried database subnets containing customer data, some are publicly-accessible webserver subnets, some are intermediate application subnets where most of the website logic is implemented... and some are probably subnets dedicated to secure transfers of data between walmart.com and third parties who provide or receive services from Wal-Mart. All of these subnets, and all the servers on them, and the firewalls, and network hardware, and databases, and all the software, together, comprise walmart.com. The whole thing is managed by one or more sysadmins who are in a constant race against the script kiddies and crackers, to keep their systems secure in the face of constantly evolving attacks.
Most of what I've described is simply the due diligence of your security team, architecting a massive ecommerce website that is as secure as possible. Even with all these precautions, and all the latest patches, however, there's still some investigation that needs to be done when a front-end webserver gets cracked. To ignore that necessity would be fatally naive. To turn the whole thing off and switch over to a separate system would be impossible.
Ralph Nader has said that a
pound of plutonium could cause 8 billion cancers, and former
Senator Ribicoff has said that a single particle of plutonium
inhaled into the lung can cause cancer. There is no scientific
basis for any of these statements as I have shown in a paper in
the refereed scientific journal Health Physics (Vol. 32, pp.
359-379, 1977).
There's a little bit of grandstanding at the beginning, but if you read on, it becomes clear that the author has solid evidence to back it up.
Is the author of this paper a kook? Judge for yourself: he describes the procedure he used to reach his conclusions in great detail, complete with references to original data sources and to other research entities. It should be trivial to investigate the bona fides of the author and his sources, and reach your own informed conclusion. Perhaps you have an aunt, or a cousin, or a friend in the field, who would be willing to review the document with a critical eye, and give you their own expert opinion on its veracity.
Nader's own credentials notwithstanding, it seems more likely that Plutonium is a bugbear, and not the angel of death he claims it is.
As long as the refresh rate provided by plant life keeps pace with the production of carbon dioxide, there is nothing wrong at all with the stuff. Maybe the Kyoto protocol should have focused more on planting trees, or something...
A corporation is entirely and exclusively a product of the law. It has no other origin, existence, or meaning, apart from the law. The law is the corporation, and the corporation is the law.
A corporation exists the same way the rules of football (American or European, take your pick) exist. We don't say that the rules of football play the game. We don't say that the rules score points. We don't impose penalties for bad play on the rules. Instead, we use the rules to regulate all these other things--things that the players and referees do. In fact, the rules are the regulation of the game. But they're not the game itself, nor do they play the game.
Far from having rights, the corporation is a set of rules to preserve the rights of the "players" in the "game" of commerce. But the corporation is not those players--it's the rules.
Corporations don't have rights because they are the rights, specified, implemented, and applied.
I firmly believe that corporations should be, and were intended to be, my servants and my tools, not my peers or my rulers. You may believe differently (and it's pretty clear you do), and in the end we'll have to resolve this in the polls.
After all, the Constitution isn't like the Law of Gravity. It isn't absolute. It's just an idea, like the laws derived from it. It only applies to corporations if we say it does. And if we disagree? That's what democracy is for.
I bet if you check polls before the media was lit up with stories of weapons of mass destruction, the support would have been much less.
Assume a nation has, or is developing, an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Assume also that the nation is controlled by a dictatorial tyrant with a long history of human rights violations at home and belligerence abroad. You can assume that this hypothetical nation is the U.S., if you like.
Now, wouldn't these facts (the arsenal, the tyrant) be newsworthy? Wouldn't the media report these things? And wouldn't people naturally want something to be done about it?
Is the media biased? Maybe. But you can't just say, "the media is tricking people into supporting war by reporting newsworthy items of grave import!" Well, you can, but it's not a very compelling argument. It's like saying, "Americans overwhelmingly favored war with Germany and Japan, because they were brainwashed by a media blitz about the attack on Pearl Harbor!"
I hesitate to say we should be required to reward people based on effort and hard work, since most Americans wouldn't understand this concept.
I'm not quite sure I understand what this means. If you're saying that "most Americans" understand that rewards should be based on birth, or heritage, or race, or creed... well, I don't know about "most" Americans, but I wouldn't be surprised if many privileged Americans feel this way. But it's disingenuous to single out Americans in this way. America is worse than some, better than others, and probably about the same as most. Don't "most nations" have an imbalance of privilege? And don't the privileged of every nation justify their class system, while the destitute clamor for equality? America isn't alone, or even the worst, in this regard.
If, on the other hand, you mean that Americans understand rewards based on results, and not on effort, then that's something else entirely. Traditionally, Americans have been in favor of hard work--because it's associated with results, and it's the results that get rewarded.
If, on the gripping hand, you mean that America has developed a culture of entitlement, where every class asserts their right to the rewards, without any effort at all... that sounds about right, if quite stereotypical.
Depends on your goals, and the quality of your government.
Private companies may do research faster, but it's almost guaranteed that they will want to turn the results into profit, leverage new and existing laws to lock out the competition, and lock people into a producer-consumer relationship.
In theory, government-funded research, while possibly slower and less effective, has the advantage of administering the results as a public trust, for the free use of all (or at least all citizens).
Private companies may be fast because they're driven by a "time to market" mentality. The only problem is that I don't want to be a "market" for the results of fundamental research. What if Neils Bohr had claimed IP on Quantum Mechanics? We'd just now be getting to the transistor, assuming Bohr ever resolved his legal disputes over prior art with Heisenberg, and Schroedinger, and Born, and Einstein. Not that the transistor would do us much good, since we'd still have to license the multipurpose computing device (patent pending) from Turing...
Government research may not be the end-all, but private research is becoming less and less attractive every day, rapid "time to market" notwithstanding.
I have to admit I'm curious: On the one hand, if nobody knows about it, nobody's using it to share content. On the other hand, if everybody knows about it, the Content Industry knows about it. How does your client resolve this catch-22?
I'm not arguing that corporations have no right to free speech because they don't have discrete physical bodies the way humans do. I'm arguing that corporations have no right to free speech because they're not real.
A corporation isn't human. It isn't an animal. It isn't even a good or service. It's the implementation of a set of laws. It's an idea. Ideas don't have rights. Would we say that the First Amendment has rights? Of course not.
Since I'm in a contrary mood today, I'll point out that "a well-known fact" and "a widely-publicized-by-the-media fact" are two different things. Assuming "if American, then fat" is a stereotype. Assuming "if Muslim, then believes in Allah" isn't.
Yeah, but if we abolish ping, then the terrorists would have to use pr0n to bring down the Internet!
Not only would this directly contradict pr0n's charter of advancing telecommunications technology, but it would also inevitably lead to the banning of pr0n... and nobody wants that.
For the sake of our pr0n, let the terrorists have their ping!
I see your point. If Google decided to shaft WidgetCo., the company would be screwed. Google could conceivably be sued for libel, or something. I don't see how regulation could possibly solve this problem without making Google's search algorithm useless.
If WidgetCo. feels that Google is shafting them, they can always petition the courts to subpoena Google's source code. With suitable NDAs in place, an investigation would uncover the truth on a case-by-case basis. I feel that search engines are not a good candidate for regulation. The possibility of Google using its secret code to screw over this company or that doesn't change my view. As far as I can tell, allowing Google to compete according to the rules of the open market has more benefits than drawbacks.
However, the fact that both sides are racing to develop the next iteration in the "trace-buster-buster" series doesn't invalidate tracing and trace-busting as tactics.
I don't know if the U.S. emails really are indistinguishable from Iraqi emails. I don't even know if Saddam is using email tricks of this kind.
It does, however, seem likely that whatever information you and I have about the Iraqi regime is also available to the military experts whose job it is to know more about it than you or I. Obviously, the military makes stupid mistakes all the time, and citizen oversight is probably more important now than ever. But I maintain my initial position: Given the level of expertise Slashdot has in this area, its analysis is probably less valuable than the military's.
Corporations aren't real entities, though: they're virtual entities created through a legal fiction to regulate transactions between real entities, and to protect the interests of real entities during these transactions. In a very meaningful sense, the laws that define a "corporation"--and therefore the corporation itself--are to serve the public good.
Congress isn't making any law to abridge the speech of corporations, because corporations don't engage in speech. That they are allowed the luxury of appearing to engage in speech is a convention adopted for the sake of convenience. It's a metaphor that allows us to interact with corporations in an intuitive way.
Corporations don't "exist" in the way that humans--or animals--exist. They are, as has already been pointed out, virtual entities derived exclusively from the law. Congress can't abridge speech because speech is an inalienable, self-evident right. Individuals have rights. Corporations are just a ruleset, implemented for commercial activities. Show me how a ruleset can have "rights", and I'll reconsider your point.
As far as animals go, they may have rights, but with a few exceptions, it'd be damn hard to establish that they engage in "speech". Do animals have the right to free speech? Sure! Would we be able to tell if they used it? No. Why don't you go back home and stop abridging the rats' right to peaceful assembly in your kitchen.?
Because, of course, you're the only person with the insight to have figured this out. The Army alone has whole Groups dedicated to researching, developing, and implementing exactly these kinds of tactics. Conveniently, the Army also has a reasonably effective aptitude test which they use to guide recruits into roles for which they are inherently well-qualified. Assuming that you're just as qualified to practice psychological warfare as a Psychological Operations Specialist, all that means is that every PsyOp specialist and officer in the Army has also identified the problem you just mentioned.
Special bonus tip: I served in a PsyOp battalion for six years. I've seen the manuals. This problem is accounted for. It, and hundreds of other problems, are documented, evaluated, and proceduralized as during the initial planning stages of any PsyOp mission.
Extra special bonus tip: The real goal of missions like this is to decrease morale and undermine the enemy commander's ability to trust his troops. A secondary goal is to increase the probability that an enemy soldier will defect or desert if given a reasonable opportunity. Are these emails intended to be a reasonable opportunity? Probably not. They're simply classic FUD.
Current military PsyOp doctrine begins with Sun Tzu's premise that victory is best achieved in the mind of the enemy before the fighting even begins. It also proposes that demoralized troops fight less and surrender more. This reduces the death toll on your own army and the enemy army. It also shortens the duration and cost of the conflict. It's a classic tactic, dating back at least as far as Alexander the Great. Sadly, its value is too little understood these days (obviously).
You have confused "axis" (singular) with "axes" (plural).
A single axis doesn't need an origin, only some points to define it. Conveniently, nations can function as points in this context.
Also, two axes can be parallel, or even perpendicular but on two discrete and parallel planes. In fact, you can have multiple infinities of axes without ever requiring a single origin!
Slashdot Mirror
And commensurate with that, the truth is that without the publisher I, the audience have nothing. And without the audience, the author has nothing (or at least no paycheck). In the digital arena, I don't really need the publisher to literally "publish" the content, since that seems to be within every author's ability. But what I do need is a powerful filtering tool, adjusted to my preferences, and capable of separating valuable content from useless slashfiction involving Riker having gay sex with some bored housewife's space cat.
That's what value the digital "publisher" will add, in their absolutely vital role as a middleman between the content-producer and the content-consumer.
Okay, but I'm not wrapped up in the idea of physical publishing. May I transition your points back into the digital-network arena?
Physically producing a book is a difficult task that requires time and money...
So is digitally producing a book, but the cost is distributed differently.
Writing a book only needs a monkey and a typewriter. Writing a good book needs a "talented author". Typically, it also needs a talented editor, and not simply "some friends who are willing to proofread". So right there we see two things: First, that simply authoring content doesn't guarantee the quality of that content. Second, a good editor is part of the process--a vital part currently supplied by the publisher. So it seems that publishers do provide a useful service. And since neither writing nor editing are limited to the physical realm, there doesn't seem to be any reason why the publishers shouldn't continue to add some of the same value in the digital arena as they do in the physical arena.
But what value could they add? Well, there's the aforementioned editing, which is pretty important. We can probably discard the actual "publishing" value-add, since digital networks pretty much take care of that already. But digital publishing tools and management systems will undoubtedly become more important as time goes on, so that may change.
Then there's marketing, which is the process by which publishers attempt to alert you to works you wouldn't necessarily become aware of or know how to find on your own. On the Internet, of course, we have the opposite problem: all the content is readily available and easily found. Instead of marketing, a process of pushing new content on us; we need filtering, a process of blocking the unneeded, unwanted, or otherwise valueless content. This is what Kling is talking about: filtering adds value to content, by sorting it into "valuable/not valuable" categories. I don't know about you, but I want the most efficent, most effective content filters I can get. The first company to meet that need will dominate the digital publishing world, as well it should. It will be adding quite a lot of value to the growing ocean of content, after all.
Maybe we're confusing two things. On the one hand, the cracker is already liable for whatever crimes he did commit. Evidence is collected and presented to a jury. A judge presides to ensure that the rules of law are followed in the presentation, and in the defense. The jury considers the evidence and arguments for and against, and returns the best decision they know how. If the cracker is found guilty, then he is punished according to the law. If the cracker is found innocent, he is freed.
But that's all proceeding in the criminal court system. There's also the civil court system, where the company might petition another jury on a completely different issue: that the cracker should make restitution to the company for the trouble he caused. Again, evidence is collected and arguments are made. And again, a jury considers the case. If they agree that the cracker is wholly or partly responsible for the added expense of resecuring the website, they might rule that he must pay some or all of that expense to the company. If they agree, however, that the company brought these expenses upon itself through negligence (or whatever), then they might rule that the cracker has no obligation to pay for the company's extra work. Neither decision in the civil trial has any relevance to the ruling in the criminal trial, nor should it.
I think it's pointless to make a blanket statement that the cracker is never (or always) responsible for the extra work to the company, and I withdraw the blanket statements I made earlier in the thread. Each case is different, with its own background and reasoning. Probably best to handle these things on a case-by-case basis, which is precisely why we have the courts, and the juries.
Trees are self-renewing carbon sinks, optimized for existing in a continuous symbiotic cycle with the unstable oxygen sinks in the ecosystem. Individual trees may be unstable, but forests not so much. Left to themselves, who knows what would happen? Fortunately, some of their oxygen-breathing partners have the intelligence and tools to manage the whole system for ensured stability...
New here, aren't you? ;)
Heh. Children...
;)
:D
Distrust of authority? Check. Inexperience and lack of perspective? Check. Extreme feelings of alienation? Morbid fantasies of self-hatred? Check. Must be a teenager
Your idea of what it's like to have a job (as an engineer, or anything else), is naive to the point of being wrong. Your fear is, to a certain degree, appropriate and healthy, but it's misplaced. The future is, to an adolescent, scary because the present is scary. Everything in your life is new, and strange, and uncontrollable, and unpredictable, and you've yet to see any evidence that it will ever get better. It does get better, though. In fact, these are the worst years of your life. From here on out you'll just get stronger, smarter, and wiser. You'll learn more, and understand more, than you ever thought possible. Just wait until you're thirty. You'll "become more powerful than you can possibly imagine"
Should you kill yourself? Of course not. But you should grow up--it's a lot easier than it looks. Just give it a few more years. People do it all the time.
Education will make you liberal. Wealth will make you conservative. Paying too much attention to Slashdot will make you paranoid and cynical. And at your age, you're already paranoid and cynical enough. Luckily, this too shall pass.
HTH. HAND!
Um, they probably treat it as a break-in. Which may involve all of the precautions you mentioned. As well it should.
IF they did do all this, would it be reasonable to go and sue the thief for all the trouble he caused them?
Of course. He caused them a lot of trouble. He should make restitution.
Shouldn't walmart be responsible for not taking adequate action in the first place? Maybe the website that got hacked should have had a backup server which was completely independent and locked down from the outside world, so it was known to be good and pure, so downtime would be minimized?
You don't work on very many web-accessible ecommerce websites, do you? There's no way "walmart.com" is one server that can be mirrored to a "good and pure" backup disk every night. It's probably whole sets of servers, on a number of discrete but connected network segments, some of which are deeply buried database subnets containing customer data, some are publicly-accessible webserver subnets, some are intermediate application subnets where most of the website logic is implemented... and some are probably subnets dedicated to secure transfers of data between walmart.com and third parties who provide or receive services from Wal-Mart. All of these subnets, and all the servers on them, and the firewalls, and network hardware, and databases, and all the software, together, comprise walmart.com. The whole thing is managed by one or more sysadmins who are in a constant race against the script kiddies and crackers, to keep their systems secure in the face of constantly evolving attacks.
Most of what I've described is simply the due diligence of your security team, architecting a massive ecommerce website that is as secure as possible. Even with all these precautions, and all the latest patches, however, there's still some investigation that needs to be done when a front-end webserver gets cracked. To ignore that necessity would be fatally naive. To turn the whole thing off and switch over to a separate system would be impossible.
You're wrong.
Highlights:
Ralph Nader has said that a pound of plutonium could cause 8 billion cancers, and former Senator Ribicoff has said that a single particle of plutonium inhaled into the lung can cause cancer. There is no scientific basis for any of these statements as I have shown in a paper in the refereed scientific journal Health Physics (Vol. 32, pp. 359-379, 1977).
There's a little bit of grandstanding at the beginning, but if you read on, it becomes clear that the author has solid evidence to back it up.
Is the author of this paper a kook? Judge for yourself: he describes the procedure he used to reach his conclusions in great detail, complete with references to original data sources and to other research entities. It should be trivial to investigate the bona fides of the author and his sources, and reach your own informed conclusion. Perhaps you have an aunt, or a cousin, or a friend in the field, who would be willing to review the document with a critical eye, and give you their own expert opinion on its veracity.
Nader's own credentials notwithstanding, it seems more likely that Plutonium is a bugbear, and not the angel of death he claims it is.
As long as the refresh rate provided by plant life keeps pace with the production of carbon dioxide, there is nothing wrong at all with the stuff. Maybe the Kyoto protocol should have focused more on planting trees, or something...
A corporation exists the same way the rules of football (American or European, take your pick) exist. We don't say that the rules of football play the game. We don't say that the rules score points. We don't impose penalties for bad play on the rules. Instead, we use the rules to regulate all these other things--things that the players and referees do. In fact, the rules are the regulation of the game. But they're not the game itself, nor do they play the game.
Far from having rights, the corporation is a set of rules to preserve the rights of the "players" in the "game" of commerce. But the corporation is not those players--it's the rules.
Corporations don't have rights because they are the rights, specified, implemented, and applied.
I firmly believe that corporations should be, and were intended to be, my servants and my tools, not my peers or my rulers. You may believe differently (and it's pretty clear you do), and in the end we'll have to resolve this in the polls.
After all, the Constitution isn't like the Law of Gravity. It isn't absolute. It's just an idea, like the laws derived from it. It only applies to corporations if we say it does. And if we disagree? That's what democracy is for.
Assume a nation has, or is developing, an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Assume also that the nation is controlled by a dictatorial tyrant with a long history of human rights violations at home and belligerence abroad. You can assume that this hypothetical nation is the U.S., if you like.
Now, wouldn't these facts (the arsenal, the tyrant) be newsworthy? Wouldn't the media report these things? And wouldn't people naturally want something to be done about it?
Is the media biased? Maybe. But you can't just say, "the media is tricking people into supporting war by reporting newsworthy items of grave import!" Well, you can, but it's not a very compelling argument. It's like saying, "Americans overwhelmingly favored war with Germany and Japan, because they were brainwashed by a media blitz about the attack on Pearl Harbor!"
I'm not quite sure I understand what this means. If you're saying that "most Americans" understand that rewards should be based on birth, or heritage, or race, or creed... well, I don't know about "most" Americans, but I wouldn't be surprised if many privileged Americans feel this way. But it's disingenuous to single out Americans in this way. America is worse than some, better than others, and probably about the same as most. Don't "most nations" have an imbalance of privilege? And don't the privileged of every nation justify their class system, while the destitute clamor for equality? America isn't alone, or even the worst, in this regard.
If, on the other hand, you mean that Americans understand rewards based on results, and not on effort, then that's something else entirely. Traditionally, Americans have been in favor of hard work--because it's associated with results, and it's the results that get rewarded.
If, on the gripping hand, you mean that America has developed a culture of entitlement, where every class asserts their right to the rewards, without any effort at all... that sounds about right, if quite stereotypical.
Anyway, I'm done nitpicking. Carry on :)
Translation: "In REPUBLICAN AMERICA, Government give mandate to YOU!"
Depends on your goals, and the quality of your government.
Private companies may do research faster, but it's almost guaranteed that they will want to turn the results into profit, leverage new and existing laws to lock out the competition, and lock people into a producer-consumer relationship.
In theory, government-funded research, while possibly slower and less effective, has the advantage of administering the results as a public trust, for the free use of all (or at least all citizens).
Private companies may be fast because they're driven by a "time to market" mentality. The only problem is that I don't want to be a "market" for the results of fundamental research. What if Neils Bohr had claimed IP on Quantum Mechanics? We'd just now be getting to the transistor, assuming Bohr ever resolved his legal disputes over prior art with Heisenberg, and Schroedinger, and Born, and Einstein. Not that the transistor would do us much good, since we'd still have to license the multipurpose computing device (patent pending) from Turing...
Government research may not be the end-all, but private research is becoming less and less attractive every day, rapid "time to market" notwithstanding.
Unless, of course, Newswire is hosting content I'm interested in accessing. Then there's a very good point to using their bandwidth.
I have to admit I'm curious: On the one hand, if nobody knows about it, nobody's using it to share content. On the other hand, if everybody knows about it, the Content Industry knows about it. How does your client resolve this catch-22?
"Edonkey: sounds like ass, works like ass."
A corporation isn't human. It isn't an animal. It isn't even a good or service. It's the implementation of a set of laws. It's an idea. Ideas don't have rights. Would we say that the First Amendment has rights? Of course not.
Since I'm in a contrary mood today, I'll point out that "a well-known fact" and "a widely-publicized-by-the-media fact" are two different things. Assuming "if American, then fat" is a stereotype. Assuming "if Muslim, then believes in Allah" isn't.
Not only would this directly contradict pr0n's charter of advancing telecommunications technology, but it would also inevitably lead to the banning of pr0n... and nobody wants that.
For the sake of our pr0n, let the terrorists have their ping!
I see your point. If Google decided to shaft WidgetCo., the company would be screwed. Google could conceivably be sued for libel, or something. I don't see how regulation could possibly solve this problem without making Google's search algorithm useless.
If WidgetCo. feels that Google is shafting them, they can always petition the courts to subpoena Google's source code. With suitable NDAs in place, an investigation would uncover the truth on a case-by-case basis. I feel that search engines are not a good candidate for regulation. The possibility of Google using its secret code to screw over this company or that doesn't change my view. As far as I can tell, allowing Google to compete according to the rules of the open market has more benefits than drawbacks.
Fair enough :)
However, the fact that both sides are racing to develop the next iteration in the "trace-buster-buster" series doesn't invalidate tracing and trace-busting as tactics.
I don't know if the U.S. emails really are indistinguishable from Iraqi emails. I don't even know if Saddam is using email tricks of this kind.
It does, however, seem likely that whatever information you and I have about the Iraqi regime is also available to the military experts whose job it is to know more about it than you or I. Obviously, the military makes stupid mistakes all the time, and citizen oversight is probably more important now than ever. But I maintain my initial position: Given the level of expertise Slashdot has in this area, its analysis is probably less valuable than the military's.
Congress isn't making any law to abridge the speech of corporations, because corporations don't engage in speech. That they are allowed the luxury of appearing to engage in speech is a convention adopted for the sake of convenience. It's a metaphor that allows us to interact with corporations in an intuitive way.
Corporations don't "exist" in the way that humans--or animals--exist. They are, as has already been pointed out, virtual entities derived exclusively from the law. Congress can't abridge speech because speech is an inalienable, self-evident right. Individuals have rights. Corporations are just a ruleset, implemented for commercial activities. Show me how a ruleset can have "rights", and I'll reconsider your point.
As far as animals go, they may have rights, but with a few exceptions, it'd be damn hard to establish that they engage in "speech". Do animals have the right to free speech? Sure! Would we be able to tell if they used it? No. Why don't you go back home and stop abridging the rats' right to peaceful assembly in your kitchen.?
Special bonus tip: I served in a PsyOp battalion for six years. I've seen the manuals. This problem is accounted for. It, and hundreds of other problems, are documented, evaluated, and proceduralized as during the initial planning stages of any PsyOp mission.
Extra special bonus tip: The real goal of missions like this is to decrease morale and undermine the enemy commander's ability to trust his troops. A secondary goal is to increase the probability that an enemy soldier will defect or desert if given a reasonable opportunity. Are these emails intended to be a reasonable opportunity? Probably not. They're simply classic FUD.
Current military PsyOp doctrine begins with Sun Tzu's premise that victory is best achieved in the mind of the enemy before the fighting even begins. It also proposes that demoralized troops fight less and surrender more. This reduces the death toll on your own army and the enemy army. It also shortens the duration and cost of the conflict. It's a classic tactic, dating back at least as far as Alexander the Great. Sadly, its value is too little understood these days (obviously).
A single axis doesn't need an origin, only some points to define it. Conveniently, nations can function as points in this context.
Also, two axes can be parallel, or even perpendicular but on two discrete and parallel planes. In fact, you can have multiple infinities of axes without ever requiring a single origin!
Next, please.