The point is, if Americans (and I am an American), weren't so totally backward in every respect socially, to the point where we are the rednecks of the free world, then we wouldn't HAVE to protect our children from seeing violence and sex, because they would UNDERSTAND it. They would respect it.
What exactly do you mean by "respect it"? Do you mean when a relitively big busted friend of mine went to europe and the guys thought they had the automatic right to grope her on the subway (this happened to her regularly there, never in Boston us poor repressed bluebloods.)
And south africans. They respect sex so much that the insurance co. I work for started offering a "rape survivor" insurance plan there because a woman has a good enough chance of getting raped that its worth it to spend some money now to make sure she can get counseling and anti-HIV drugs later.
Or Japan where their respect for sex has caused a national hobby of subway groping.
I dunno, either you and I have very different ideas of what a "respect" for sex would lead to, or you don't know much about how some other cultures deal with the actual sexual rights of the people around them.
Hey, I've been reading as long, so don't try to out fan me.:)
And I stand by my assertion. The Revlonization of rogue was gross. She is not some long leggy bimbo with giant tits and a painted on costume. Look at her evil-mutant days. she wore a sweatsuit for crying out loud! All X-Women are beautiful, but they don't have to all be in the same way. Rogue's look always struck me as closer to Kitty Pryde's than say Rachel-phoenix's. A good looking frump, but no sexpot and no supermodel. Then everyone devolved into tall, leggy triple Ds with hair down to their asses. Yuck and double yuck.
Defender of the good-looking frump - Kahuna Burger
But what REALLY pissed me off was Rogue wasn't HOT!! They turned her into a frumpy, ugly little girl...Rogue is supposed to be GOOD Looking!!!
Er, how long have you read the X men? Before all of Marvel turned into Revlon commercials, and every single woman turned into an identical supermodel with waist-long hair, the real Rogue was:
Shorter than Wolvie (the only person on the team who was).
Dressed to not impress. (she wore loose clothes or spandex with a sweater or jacket over it.)
Fairly frumpy looking. Kinda butch really, but not in the "Storm with a mohawk and leather fetish" way.
And it all made sense. We're talking about a woman who has had maybe four satisfying physical encounters in her entire life. She isn't a sexual woman who just can't be touched, she's a very scarred woman who fears touch on many levels.
Rogue is an attractive woman in an understated way, but frumpy is just right for her, and the latter day sex pot was pure marketing crap.
After that Rogue found out that Mystique wasn't her real mom and so went off on her own. She and Logan then hooked up and thus she became an X-Person.
Heavy corrections. Rogue never thought Mystique was her biological mother. She thought of her as a surrogate mom, and Mystique in fact did act the part, in actions and thoughts. This relationship lasted at least past the entire austrailia/shadow king thing, which was where I stopped reading X Men.
Rogue left the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants because her head was getting so filled with residuals of other people's memories that she was going insane and needed a telepath. She joined the X-Men entirely on Xavier's say so, and Wolvie in fact wanted her dead at first, having been a close pre-xmen friend of Ms. Marvel. He came over to accepting her after she almost died saving his fiance's life, and after that he reacted with fierce anger to anyone who callenged her status within the team.
People (including current artists) tend to forget that when she was a bad guy, Rogue had two stripes in her very short hair. It was only after joining the X-Men that she switched to one in the center.
To go even further off topic, in college, I was on a Rogue appriciation email loop. In one Rogue trivial quiz I got the most points for the extra credit question of "how do you keep a bleached stripe in nigh-invunerable hair, anyway?" by suggesting that it was not bleached but colored over with white glaze, and her hairstyles were all kept in place with lightly fired ceramic glaze. It made sense at the time.
So her stripe can't be natural because its placement has changed. but thats only for the nit-pickers.
I mean, isn't sniffing email messages intended for a recipient the same thing as tapping a phone line? The intent is to communicate something to one person only, right?
Yes, it is. Which is why the orriginal carnivore announcement made it clear that warrents are required. The warrent is required to read the email of that person who is being intercepted.
I cannot get behind the idea that it is an invasion of anyone's privacy for a machine to "sniff" a packet and determine if they want to save it or not. If you are worried about it sniffing beyond its warrent deal with that! Lets talk third party authentification of the programming, inability of the FBI to change the programming from off site, things that matter! But if there is a warrent for the person being sniffed, I really doubt that the law will be struck down based on other people just getting their packets sniffed by a machine that then keeps no records of the examination.
Its like saying that if I listen to a police band radio, I'm also invading the privacy of cell phone users, because my equipment is theoretically recieving them, even if I'm not listening. I don't think anyone outside of the hardcore geek/privacy minority will see a legitamate invasion, and privacy advocates would be better off demanding protocols to prevent non-warrented sniffing.
I drink a beer with a friend because its fun...its part of the recreational activity for the evening...not because I need beer to feel good.
You ever see that episode of MASH where Hawkeye decides to stop drinking and drives everyone crazy for a while, and then at the end they've just gone through a crazy mess of surgery and he orders a drink with the rest of them. When some people say he shouldn't stop his attempt, he says "guys, I need this drink." Then he stops and puts it down and says "I'l come back when I want it, not when I need it."
Before claiming that this is "untrue", I suggest looking at the petitioning laws in the State of Oregon.
I think you've found one of that wonderful brand of AC who knows everything, and even the law is wrong if it contridicts them. They're cute in the sping, but tire by summer.
For the record, similar rules apply in Massachusetts for petitioning and such. But I'm not sure if that is the crucial question here. Banning petitioners or even petitioners for one particular cause is different than banning a destructive or disruptive individual. Surely if a person consistently entered a mall to harrass customers, a mall could try for a restraining order.
Is there something inherently wrong with being old and white (and male, too)? Yeah, "they don't understand us youngsters". And they're always generalizing and stereotyping people, too!
While I don't respect Katz enough to attempt to explain his usage (he could ahve a bet on with someone on how often he can say it for all I know.) I will comment that while there is nothing inherently wrong with being any age, gender or race, there could be something wrong with an entire industry, particularly the news industry, being made up of only one demographic. After all, if every publisher and editor in chief of a major newspaper was a black pagan lesbian, would you wonder if your news was slanted? I know my news is slanted, because I occasionally go out and make the news then read how it is reported.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the "old white male" rule, and there are alternative news sources with different slants, but the point is largly valid in mainstream american news.
Saying that alcohol is a poison is ridiculous. Oh but wait, I'm from France, the wine country, you're probably American, land of puritans.
I'm from a chemistry classrrom, on this subject. All alcohols are poisons. ethel just takes a lot more to be leathal. Lots of medicines are low dose poisons too, look at chemotherapy. Don't take it so personal.
And you ignored most of my post disn't you? Even non-adicted people can do serious damage to themselves or their children by drinking. And don't hang on to that heart data so tight you lose the big picture. The last comprehensive look at the issue I saw made it clear that other long term effects are ambigous enough that the heart data should not encourage non drinkers to take it up "for their health".
There's also some fun info to be had in the psychology classroom on "alcohol myopia", the tendency even at low doses to lose track of the long term consequences of your actions. Has some fun repercussions not just on drunk driving, but drunk sex or socializing.
Oh and the fact that you are from France makes your alcohol boosting more suspect, not less. Would you believe a midwesterner to be objective on the benifits of beef consumption or Jesse Helms to talk fairly about tobbacco? think about it.
Stop the lies.
Oh the poor plight of the maligned fermented sugar! *snort* its facts, not lies, deal with them maturely.
*On top of that* drinking that much alcohol has NO bad long term effect. On the contrary, studies tend to prove that it has some positive ones! I'm not aware of any positive effects of heroin or crack.
Yeah, liver failure and fetal alcohol syndrome are good for you!
Sorry, but you may want to restate that. It all depends on the amounts. Alcohol can have highly destructive long term effects if overused, or if used in conjunction with other drugs. (have you seen the new warnings on tylenol etc? Even in the "good for your heart" zone of alcohol consumption, you are risking serious liver damage if you take it with some pain killers.) Drinking any amount at any point durring pregnancy can lower your baby's birthweight and thus increase the danger of complications. Drinking regularly can screw you child for life.
Drinking too much at once can also kill you. At my college, we had alcohol poisonings go to the hospital regularly. At MIT they had one die. Not from choking on the vomit, though thats a risk too. Just from consuming too much of a poison.
Oh, and I suspect that some diets may increase the damage too. One of my housemates is going on a modified Atkin's - no carbs, high protien, high fat. Its working to lose weight, but only because its sending his liver into overdrive to metabolize all the fat reserves. If he were to go on even a light drinking binge when his liver is that overtaxed already? Luckily he's aware of the biology behind his diet and is teetotalling while on it.
Make comparisons, but make no mistake - alcohol is a poison. Some people find it fun to take low doses of all kinds of poisons and sometimes your body will even crave them when they're gone. But don't fool yourself into ignoring the risks.
But on the flip side, I've certainly had friends be harassed and threatened online, and turning a blind eye to everything but attacks directly against the network doesn't seem right either.
What options does a network administrator have for retaining forensic evidence in case of abuse
This also ties into the carnivore question about faked emails. I've gotten some harrassing emails and considered forwarding them back to the sys admin of the jerk in question. However, realisticly, I could send anything I wanted with FWD in the title, and without digital signatures, they wouldn't know if I was forwarding a real email or not. But what kind of logs could they keep that they could confirm the authenticity of a message without invading the privacy of the user?
Now, bearing in mind that I don't do this for a living, wouldn't it be possible to set up a logging program that ran a metric on each message that came through, based on date, to and from and message content, that could not be reversed to actually produce that data, but would have an astronomically improbable chance of being reproduced by a fake message?
That way, the logs kept, just looking at them (even by the ISP) would tell them nothing but how many messages had gone to and fro from the whole ISP. But if someone came to them with an "incriminating" or "harrassing" email they could (at their discretion or under warrent) confirm the authenticity of that message actually having been sent by their service. If each ISP used their own metrics and kept them private, it would be very difficult for anyone to fake email evidence. This would be useful for both law enforcement/people being harrassed and the innocent but framed.
So, is this kind of log possible, and would it satisfy privacy advocates, since you couldn't even tell "how aften and when used" for any given user?
However, the comment about not allowing Kevin to use any computers is grossly misleading. The limitations are against any Programmable electronic device, and even then, it's up to the probation officer about what is or is not allowable.
Thank you. I was getting pretty sick of all this over the top "so he can't were a wristwatch" silliness. You can claim that there's a slippery slope to what he can and can't do, but its really not that hard - You could take 10 people and give them a list of things to decide if they did or didn't fit the probation and as long as none of them were being deliberately dense, you'd get at least 8 or 9 agreements on every item. 10 for 10 on most.
Don't make things harder than they. It just makes you look silly.
What if a great musician picked people's pockets to the tune of millions of dollars while they were distracted by the sound of his (for instance) spellbindingly good kazoo playing. Would it be right to deny him the use of a kazoo once he's out of prison? A harmonica? Anything that makes notes?
What if a doctor raped patients when they were under anesthetic? Would it be right to deny him his medical practice when he got out of jail? well, yes. I don't really find the restriction that bizzare.
because of the christians, mostly, almost every ballot vote you see banning gambling is motivated by some grass roots church campaign to keep people from "sinning"
Hey cool, maybe we can get the Xtian Coalition on board for the anti-greyhound racing initiative in Mass. Its being mostly billed as an animal welfare fight right now, but if we remind people that it's gambling too, maybe we can get a cross party thing going.
To bring this marginally on topic, another difference between casino gambling and online gambing is that the former can be social (giving casual gamblers cooler heads around them sometimes) while the latter tends not to be. Also, depending on how the online site is set up, you never have to run out of chips until you hit your credit limit. bad.
Face it...the unwashed masses (or at least a large enough percentage of them) WANT to gamble. ALL you can do is try to reduce the harm associated with gambling by letting them do it legally, and try to educate them about gambling and its dangers. Anything else simply makes the situation worst.
I think people take these probition arguments too far sometimes. Do rape laws cause an increase in rape? Hardly.
More to the point, unlike other things, this should be easier to police on line than off. Off line gambling can be a cash economy. On line gambling isn't. Instead of bugging the ISPs they could more effectively give the list to all credit card companies and say "you cannot make payments to these accounts, they are for illegal purposes."
All of the vaunted "forbidden fruit" stories take place in a cash economy. drugs, speakeasys, prostitution... they don't take American Express. Internet gambling almost has to and thus can be regulated top down.
And I don't like lotto either, or dog tracks or Foxwoods. So what? Why do people think that the existance of one evil justifies another? It seems bizzare.
Normally when a post is at this "so there" level, I remove my plus one bonus because its not important that anyone other than the person I'm replying to see this. I realized I hadn't just as I hit submit. appologies.
In the US, clearing out the voting rolls is opposed by the Left because it means that people would have to actually keep their registrations up to date. It seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that their voters are more likely to be too lazy to register to vote than conservatives.
In cambridge, the group having trouble with inactive voters on the lists was pro-rent control, somewhat left even for cambridge. On the national level I have seen no leadership on cleaning up the rolls, so I conclude that your statement is partisan tripe until demonstrated otherwise. I would follow up with some partisan tripe of my own, but why bring down the thread? It was going so well.
Rejecting the "great man" theory tends to imply that humans are not capable of large leaps in thinking, limiting the scope of an individual. You should likely reconsider this theory, without the connotations that the words "great man" imply.
I'm not sure which connotations you mean, but you may have misunderstood my stance. I fully believe that people are capable of great leaps and momentus thoughts. I simply don't believe that many of the "great men" history credits with changing the world were actually nessaccary or sufficient to do so.
For instance, I spent one semester studying the life and writings of Martin Luther, generally credited with most of the protestant reformation. I certainly would say that he was a great thinker, and had made great intellectual/faith leaps. However, my final paper argued that he was not nessaccary or sufficient for the reformation. That is, the reformation would have happened without him (several other theologins had similar ideas in the same 50 year time period) and had he lived a few hundred years earlier, his ideas alone would not have brought about the reformation (technological, economic and political developments all made his heresey possible.)
So rejecting the "great man" view of history doesn't mean that I don't believe in great men (or women) it just means that in most cases where history gives one man or woman credit for a major change, I find that a careful examination shows that without that great person, another equally as great would have emerged, and had that great person been born 100 years earlier or later, they would not have had the impact they did.
-Kahuna Burger
Re:Compulsory voting is horrible social engineerin
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The Perils Of E-Voting
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Society would be better off if the people who have not researched their vote didn't get the opportunity to enter a ballot.
while I agree in theory, I don't think the "Rainbow Coalition" voters are any less informed that a person who got a Xtain Coalition "voter information guide" at their local church. Or the people who come out to the polls and vote straight party line. Its not that I think partyline voting is always evil - I just worry when they can do it just by looking at the ballot. My solution to uninformed voting would be to remove party affiliation from the ballot. If you want to vote party line, you should at least have to go to the trouble of finding out who your candidate is before you enter the voting booth.
Here in France we have a big problem: the mayor of Paris has been elected partly thanks to the vote of more than 3k dead people.
And the question no one asks in these cases, is "Why were those people still on the voting lists?" I know there's talk in some cities (in the USA) of people going into graveyards and writing down names to register, but here in Cambridge, we have a huge "inactive" voting list of dead or moved people who just are never removed. If you're good at reading upside down, you can look at the voting list as they're finding your name and notice three or four other people still registered at your address who are just not going to be removed, ever.
Ballot stuffing is not assumed to be a big problem in this down, but the bloated rolls still are. In the last municipal election, a citizens action group wanted to get a challenged question on the ballot. They were told they had to have signatures from X percent of Cambridge voters. But because the percentage came out of all registered voters, not just the active list (those who voted in the last election) some folks estimated that they were asking for more signatures than there were real cambridge voters!
So when people talk about the dead voting, they're not just talking about a lack of control at the polls or on line or whathaveyou. They're also really talking about a lazy election commission not keeping the rolls in shape.
To pick nits, they have not yet restored the manuscript. They have restored 5 pages out of 170, in order to win the right to handle the rest.
What I found far more fascinating is the assertion that the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus." Now I had been taught that Calculus grew out of a problem solving grudge between two famous mathmeticians. Not being a proponent of the "great man" theory, I tended to assume that this breakthrough built on advancements in theorums up to that point.
However, if this text actually shows that Archimedes had the beginnings so many years before, I might be forced to conceed at least a "great man of math" theory. Though considering the dark ages in between, perhaps an examination of the history will show an evolution and reevolution rather than two poles of brilliance.
My ONLY objection, in the context of this discussion, is that this system can be abused by the FBI, with, essentially, no oversight. Using the ISP system to divert mail would require complicity between ISP and FBI to be abused...and that at least marginally raises the bar.
Again...what I am suggesting is truely trivial difference, if they are truely only doing what they claim to be doing. However it protects the people at large, if their intions are other than their claims. Seems like a win all around (unless of course your an FBI agent who wants to abuse your carnivorous machine)
Actaully, I wonder about that. I have not had a lot of expereince with the rules of evidence, but would having a third party route all the data really result in as high a "quality" of evidence as the FBI harvesting it themselves? The advantage I see of the Carnivore method is that the data is filtered directly from the "feed". In your suggestion, could the ISP really guarenty the completeness of the info they were providing? Would their credibility become another route by which the data could be attacked (so, you claim to have provided these forwards to the FBI of the defendant's email. But as the provider, you are certainly capable of making a indistinguishable forgery of such a mesasage, right? Did you have any billing problems with the defendant?)
On a slightly more serious note, your method would require the FBI to tell the ISP exactly who the target was, risking a civilly disobedient ISP doing the forwards, but tipping off the subject of the surveillance. Of course with Carnivore, if the ISP couldn't tell what it was scanning for, they wouldn't know that it wasn't pulling an "echelon".
So, the best case senerio (given the existance of wiretapping laws, etc) would be: FBI shows up with a machine and two peices of paper. One is a authorized warrent, the other is a third party affidavate (I dunno, someone backed by the ACLU) stating that the filtering is programed only to pick out the email address of one individual, the one covered under warrent. You could even have the third party program and install the Carnivores, and then provide the kit and kaboodle to the FBI at the end, giving them the data and the chance to confirm that said 3rd party programmed it corectly.
Of course a system like that would take a lot of work to get in place and people with the energy to do that much work on this topic generally wouldn't like it because its compromise. So they will probably just keep doing it the way that makes some people nervous, and those people will keep making noise. Real life is too bad that way.
As for the other part of your closing line, I don't know what you could mean. I can't see how you could possibly claim money, without ignorance, to be a reason to vote to support a huge, corrupt government that can't steal enough money from the people to support its rampant spending.
It was actual a reference to a private momento to my past that I keep in my wallet to remind me that people can emerge from the suckiest of situations when they are not abandoned. I have yet to meet a libertarian who really cared how his politics would have effected my real life had they been in place. One accused me of "bringing emotions into it" for even bringing the reality of my life up (this in the same conversation where he "proved" that property rights were the most important of all rights because people didn't like it when he grabbed their hat's right off of their heads. Dork.) The comment was intentionally ambiguous. Meanwhile...
Your assertion that a warrant that allows the government blanket access to the private email of every customer of a "suspected criminal's" ISP does not constitute "unreasonable" is laughable.
Honey, when they work with the phone company, they have theoretical access to "every customer". Access by their machine is irrelevant if it only gives them access to the filtered data.
And no, you don't have to think that every person on earth is out to get you to be paranoid. And why would a libertarian need to think that clinton et al had our best interests at heart? These are the people who believe we can turn education over to corporations whose only interst is in the bottom line, and the "hidden hand of the free market" will make them all as lambs. I happen to believe in the not so hidden hand on the ballot that holds politicains in line.
It would be TRIVIAL for an ISP to setup their mail server to blindly send copies of all messages and ONLY messages to and from the person being monitored to the FBI system...instead they insist on having THEIR box process EVERYONES messages.
Funny isn't it? Everyone gets their panties in a wad about the government getting warrents to check your email, but you flat out say that IPS's could redirect and read your email without anyone knowing, and no one cares? You know, you can bash my veiw of history all you want, but I trust my government more than any business on the planet.
Oh and yeah, I know history and I still think you're paranoid. We don't live in a police state, no matter how much you'd like to believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly do you mean by "respect it"? Do you mean when a relitively big busted friend of mine went to europe and the guys thought they had the automatic right to grope her on the subway (this happened to her regularly there, never in Boston us poor repressed bluebloods.)
And south africans. They respect sex so much that the insurance co. I work for started offering a "rape survivor" insurance plan there because a woman has a good enough chance of getting raped that its worth it to spend some money now to make sure she can get counseling and anti-HIV drugs later.
Or Japan where their respect for sex has caused a national hobby of subway groping.
I dunno, either you and I have very different ideas of what a "respect" for sex would lead to, or you don't know much about how some other cultures deal with the actual sexual rights of the people around them.
-Kahuna Burger
And I stand by my assertion. The Revlonization of rogue was gross. She is not some long leggy bimbo with giant tits and a painted on costume. Look at her evil-mutant days. she wore a sweatsuit for crying out loud! All X-Women are beautiful, but they don't have to all be in the same way. Rogue's look always struck me as closer to Kitty Pryde's than say Rachel-phoenix's. A good looking frump, but no sexpot and no supermodel. Then everyone devolved into tall, leggy triple Ds with hair down to their asses. Yuck and double yuck.
Defender of the good-looking frump - Kahuna Burger
Er, how long have you read the X men? Before all of Marvel turned into Revlon commercials, and every single woman turned into an identical supermodel with waist-long hair, the real Rogue was :
Shorter than Wolvie (the only person on the team who was).
Dressed to not impress. (she wore loose clothes or spandex with a sweater or jacket over it.)
Fairly frumpy looking. Kinda butch really, but not in the "Storm with a mohawk and leather fetish" way.
And it all made sense. We're talking about a woman who has had maybe four satisfying physical encounters in her entire life. She isn't a sexual woman who just can't be touched, she's a very scarred woman who fears touch on many levels.
Rogue is an attractive woman in an understated way, but frumpy is just right for her, and the latter day sex pot was pure marketing crap.
-Kahuna Burger
Heavy corrections. Rogue never thought Mystique was her biological mother. She thought of her as a surrogate mom, and Mystique in fact did act the part, in actions and thoughts. This relationship lasted at least past the entire austrailia/shadow king thing, which was where I stopped reading X Men.
Rogue left the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants because her head was getting so filled with residuals of other people's memories that she was going insane and needed a telepath. She joined the X-Men entirely on Xavier's say so, and Wolvie in fact wanted her dead at first, having been a close pre-xmen friend of Ms. Marvel. He came over to accepting her after she almost died saving his fiance's life, and after that he reacted with fierce anger to anyone who callenged her status within the team.
-Kahuna Burger
To go even further off topic, in college, I was on a Rogue appriciation email loop. In one Rogue trivial quiz I got the most points for the extra credit question of "how do you keep a bleached stripe in nigh-invunerable hair, anyway?" by suggesting that it was not bleached but colored over with white glaze, and her hairstyles were all kept in place with lightly fired ceramic glaze. It made sense at the time.
So her stripe can't be natural because its placement has changed. but thats only for the nit-pickers.
-Kahuna Burger
Yes, it is. Which is why the orriginal carnivore announcement made it clear that warrents are required. The warrent is required to read the email of that person who is being intercepted.
I cannot get behind the idea that it is an invasion of anyone's privacy for a machine to "sniff" a packet and determine if they want to save it or not. If you are worried about it sniffing beyond its warrent deal with that! Lets talk third party authentification of the programming, inability of the FBI to change the programming from off site, things that matter! But if there is a warrent for the person being sniffed, I really doubt that the law will be struck down based on other people just getting their packets sniffed by a machine that then keeps no records of the examination.
Its like saying that if I listen to a police band radio, I'm also invading the privacy of cell phone users, because my equipment is theoretically recieving them, even if I'm not listening. I don't think anyone outside of the hardcore geek/privacy minority will see a legitamate invasion, and privacy advocates would be better off demanding protocols to prevent non-warrented sniffing.
-Kahuna Burger
You ever see that episode of MASH where Hawkeye decides to stop drinking and drives everyone crazy for a while, and then at the end they've just gone through a crazy mess of surgery and he orders a drink with the rest of them. When some people say he shouldn't stop his attempt, he says "guys, I need this drink." Then he stops and puts it down and says "I'l come back when I want it, not when I need it."
Totally off topic, but had to comment.
-Kahuna Burger
I think you've found one of that wonderful brand of AC who knows everything, and even the law is wrong if it contridicts them. They're cute in the sping, but tire by summer.
For the record, similar rules apply in Massachusetts for petitioning and such. But I'm not sure if that is the crucial question here. Banning petitioners or even petitioners for one particular cause is different than banning a destructive or disruptive individual. Surely if a person consistently entered a mall to harrass customers, a mall could try for a restraining order.
-Kahuna Burger
While I don't respect Katz enough to attempt to explain his usage (he could ahve a bet on with someone on how often he can say it for all I know.) I will comment that while there is nothing inherently wrong with being any age, gender or race, there could be something wrong with an entire industry, particularly the news industry, being made up of only one demographic. After all, if every publisher and editor in chief of a major newspaper was a black pagan lesbian, would you wonder if your news was slanted? I know my news is slanted, because I occasionally go out and make the news then read how it is reported.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the "old white male" rule, and there are alternative news sources with different slants, but the point is largly valid in mainstream american news.
-Kahuna Burger
I'm from a chemistry classrrom, on this subject. All alcohols are poisons. ethel just takes a lot more to be leathal. Lots of medicines are low dose poisons too, look at chemotherapy. Don't take it so personal.
And you ignored most of my post disn't you? Even non-adicted people can do serious damage to themselves or their children by drinking. And don't hang on to that heart data so tight you lose the big picture. The last comprehensive look at the issue I saw made it clear that other long term effects are ambigous enough that the heart data should not encourage non drinkers to take it up "for their health".
There's also some fun info to be had in the psychology classroom on "alcohol myopia", the tendency even at low doses to lose track of the long term consequences of your actions. Has some fun repercussions not just on drunk driving, but drunk sex or socializing.
Oh and the fact that you are from France makes your alcohol boosting more suspect, not less. Would you believe a midwesterner to be objective on the benifits of beef consumption or Jesse Helms to talk fairly about tobbacco? think about it.
Stop the lies.
Oh the poor plight of the maligned fermented sugar! *snort* its facts, not lies, deal with them maturely.
-Kahuna Burger
Yeah, liver failure and fetal alcohol syndrome are good for you!
Sorry, but you may want to restate that. It all depends on the amounts. Alcohol can have highly destructive long term effects if overused, or if used in conjunction with other drugs. (have you seen the new warnings on tylenol etc? Even in the "good for your heart" zone of alcohol consumption, you are risking serious liver damage if you take it with some pain killers.) Drinking any amount at any point durring pregnancy can lower your baby's birthweight and thus increase the danger of complications. Drinking regularly can screw you child for life.
Drinking too much at once can also kill you. At my college, we had alcohol poisonings go to the hospital regularly. At MIT they had one die. Not from choking on the vomit, though thats a risk too. Just from consuming too much of a poison.
Oh, and I suspect that some diets may increase the damage too. One of my housemates is going on a modified Atkin's - no carbs, high protien, high fat. Its working to lose weight, but only because its sending his liver into overdrive to metabolize all the fat reserves. If he were to go on even a light drinking binge when his liver is that overtaxed already? Luckily he's aware of the biology behind his diet and is teetotalling while on it.
Make comparisons, but make no mistake - alcohol is a poison. Some people find it fun to take low doses of all kinds of poisons and sometimes your body will even crave them when they're gone. But don't fool yourself into ignoring the risks.
-Kahuna Burger
What options does a network administrator have for retaining forensic evidence in case of abuse
This also ties into the carnivore question about faked emails. I've gotten some harrassing emails and considered forwarding them back to the sys admin of the jerk in question. However, realisticly, I could send anything I wanted with FWD in the title, and without digital signatures, they wouldn't know if I was forwarding a real email or not. But what kind of logs could they keep that they could confirm the authenticity of a message without invading the privacy of the user?
Now, bearing in mind that I don't do this for a living, wouldn't it be possible to set up a logging program that ran a metric on each message that came through, based on date, to and from and message content, that could not be reversed to actually produce that data, but would have an astronomically improbable chance of being reproduced by a fake message?
That way, the logs kept, just looking at them (even by the ISP) would tell them nothing but how many messages had gone to and fro from the whole ISP. But if someone came to them with an "incriminating" or "harrassing" email they could (at their discretion or under warrent) confirm the authenticity of that message actually having been sent by their service. If each ISP used their own metrics and kept them private, it would be very difficult for anyone to fake email evidence. This would be useful for both law enforcement/people being harrassed and the innocent but framed.
So, is this kind of log possible, and would it satisfy privacy advocates, since you couldn't even tell "how aften and when used" for any given user?
-Kahuna Burger
Thank you. I was getting pretty sick of all this over the top "so he can't were a wristwatch" silliness. You can claim that there's a slippery slope to what he can and can't do, but its really not that hard - You could take 10 people and give them a list of things to decide if they did or didn't fit the probation and as long as none of them were being deliberately dense, you'd get at least 8 or 9 agreements on every item. 10 for 10 on most.
Don't make things harder than they. It just makes you look silly.
-Kahuna Burger
What if a doctor raped patients when they were under anesthetic? Would it be right to deny him his medical practice when he got out of jail? well, yes. I don't really find the restriction that bizzare.
-Kahuna Burger
Hey cool, maybe we can get the Xtian Coalition on board for the anti-greyhound racing initiative in Mass. Its being mostly billed as an animal welfare fight right now, but if we remind people that it's gambling too, maybe we can get a cross party thing going.
To bring this marginally on topic, another difference between casino gambling and online gambing is that the former can be social (giving casual gamblers cooler heads around them sometimes) while the latter tends not to be. Also, depending on how the online site is set up, you never have to run out of chips until you hit your credit limit. bad.
-Kahuna Burger
I think people take these probition arguments too far sometimes. Do rape laws cause an increase in rape? Hardly.
More to the point, unlike other things, this should be easier to police on line than off. Off line gambling can be a cash economy. On line gambling isn't. Instead of bugging the ISPs they could more effectively give the list to all credit card companies and say "you cannot make payments to these accounts, they are for illegal purposes."
All of the vaunted "forbidden fruit" stories take place in a cash economy. drugs, speakeasys, prostitution... they don't take American Express. Internet gambling almost has to and thus can be regulated top down.
And I don't like lotto either, or dog tracks or Foxwoods. So what? Why do people think that the existance of one evil justifies another? It seems bizzare.
-Kahuna Burger
-Kahuna Burger
In cambridge, the group having trouble with inactive voters on the lists was pro-rent control, somewhat left even for cambridge. On the national level I have seen no leadership on cleaning up the rolls, so I conclude that your statement is partisan tripe until demonstrated otherwise. I would follow up with some partisan tripe of my own, but why bring down the thread? It was going so well.
-Kahuna Burger
I'm not sure which connotations you mean, but you may have misunderstood my stance. I fully believe that people are capable of great leaps and momentus thoughts. I simply don't believe that many of the "great men" history credits with changing the world were actually nessaccary or sufficient to do so.
For instance, I spent one semester studying the life and writings of Martin Luther, generally credited with most of the protestant reformation. I certainly would say that he was a great thinker, and had made great intellectual/faith leaps. However, my final paper argued that he was not nessaccary or sufficient for the reformation. That is, the reformation would have happened without him (several other theologins had similar ideas in the same 50 year time period) and had he lived a few hundred years earlier, his ideas alone would not have brought about the reformation (technological, economic and political developments all made his heresey possible.)
So rejecting the "great man" view of history doesn't mean that I don't believe in great men (or women) it just means that in most cases where history gives one man or woman credit for a major change, I find that a careful examination shows that without that great person, another equally as great would have emerged, and had that great person been born 100 years earlier or later, they would not have had the impact they did.
-Kahuna Burger
while I agree in theory, I don't think the "Rainbow Coalition" voters are any less informed that a person who got a Xtain Coalition "voter information guide" at their local church. Or the people who come out to the polls and vote straight party line. Its not that I think partyline voting is always evil - I just worry when they can do it just by looking at the ballot. My solution to uninformed voting would be to remove party affiliation from the ballot. If you want to vote party line, you should at least have to go to the trouble of finding out who your candidate is before you enter the voting booth.
-Kahuna Burger
And the question no one asks in these cases, is "Why were those people still on the voting lists?" I know there's talk in some cities (in the USA) of people going into graveyards and writing down names to register, but here in Cambridge, we have a huge "inactive" voting list of dead or moved people who just are never removed. If you're good at reading upside down, you can look at the voting list as they're finding your name and notice three or four other people still registered at your address who are just not going to be removed, ever.
Ballot stuffing is not assumed to be a big problem in this down, but the bloated rolls still are. In the last municipal election, a citizens action group wanted to get a challenged question on the ballot. They were told they had to have signatures from X percent of Cambridge voters. But because the percentage came out of all registered voters, not just the active list (those who voted in the last election) some folks estimated that they were asking for more signatures than there were real cambridge voters!
So when people talk about the dead voting, they're not just talking about a lack of control at the polls or on line or whathaveyou. They're also really talking about a lazy election commission not keeping the rolls in shape.
-Kahuna Burger
What I found far more fascinating is the assertion that the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus." Now I had been taught that Calculus grew out of a problem solving grudge between two famous mathmeticians. Not being a proponent of the "great man" theory, I tended to assume that this breakthrough built on advancements in theorums up to that point.
However, if this text actually shows that Archimedes had the beginnings so many years before, I might be forced to conceed at least a "great man of math" theory. Though considering the dark ages in between, perhaps an examination of the history will show an evolution and reevolution rather than two poles of brilliance.
-Kahuna Burger
Again...what I am suggesting is truely trivial difference, if they are truely only doing what they claim to be doing. However it protects the people at large, if their intions are other than their claims. Seems like a win all around (unless of course your an FBI agent who wants to abuse your carnivorous machine)
Actaully, I wonder about that. I have not had a lot of expereince with the rules of evidence, but would having a third party route all the data really result in as high a "quality" of evidence as the FBI harvesting it themselves? The advantage I see of the Carnivore method is that the data is filtered directly from the "feed". In your suggestion, could the ISP really guarenty the completeness of the info they were providing? Would their credibility become another route by which the data could be attacked (so, you claim to have provided these forwards to the FBI of the defendant's email. But as the provider, you are certainly capable of making a indistinguishable forgery of such a mesasage, right? Did you have any billing problems with the defendant?)
On a slightly more serious note, your method would require the FBI to tell the ISP exactly who the target was, risking a civilly disobedient ISP doing the forwards, but tipping off the subject of the surveillance. Of course with Carnivore, if the ISP couldn't tell what it was scanning for, they wouldn't know that it wasn't pulling an "echelon".
So, the best case senerio (given the existance of wiretapping laws, etc) would be: FBI shows up with a machine and two peices of paper. One is a authorized warrent, the other is a third party affidavate (I dunno, someone backed by the ACLU) stating that the filtering is programed only to pick out the email address of one individual, the one covered under warrent. You could even have the third party program and install the Carnivores, and then provide the kit and kaboodle to the FBI at the end, giving them the data and the chance to confirm that said 3rd party programmed it corectly.
Of course a system like that would take a lot of work to get in place and people with the energy to do that much work on this topic generally wouldn't like it because its compromise. So they will probably just keep doing it the way that makes some people nervous, and those people will keep making noise. Real life is too bad that way.
-Kahuna Burger
It was actual a reference to a private momento to my past that I keep in my wallet to remind me that people can emerge from the suckiest of situations when they are not abandoned. I have yet to meet a libertarian who really cared how his politics would have effected my real life had they been in place. One accused me of "bringing emotions into it" for even bringing the reality of my life up (this in the same conversation where he "proved" that property rights were the most important of all rights because people didn't like it when he grabbed their hat's right off of their heads. Dork.) The comment was intentionally ambiguous. Meanwhile...
Your assertion that a warrant that allows the government blanket access to the private email of every customer of a "suspected criminal's" ISP does not constitute "unreasonable" is laughable.
Honey, when they work with the phone company, they have theoretical access to "every customer". Access by their machine is irrelevant if it only gives them access to the filtered data.
And no, you don't have to think that every person on earth is out to get you to be paranoid. And why would a libertarian need to think that clinton et al had our best interests at heart? These are the people who believe we can turn education over to corporations whose only interst is in the bottom line, and the "hidden hand of the free market" will make them all as lambs. I happen to believe in the not so hidden hand on the ballot that holds politicains in line.
-Kahuna Burger
Funny isn't it? Everyone gets their panties in a wad about the government getting warrents to check your email, but you flat out say that IPS's could redirect and read your email without anyone knowing, and no one cares? You know, you can bash my veiw of history all you want, but I trust my government more than any business on the planet.
Oh and yeah, I know history and I still think you're paranoid. We don't live in a police state, no matter how much you'd like to believe it.
-kahuna Burger