The friggin top ad banner on the page I just looked at was one with the animated gif of a completely naked woman urinating that says "Pee Fantasy"
While I do not have the software that blocks banner ads automatically, I do the functional equivelent with my good old fashion brain. I did not look at the banner ads, but at the content of the page.
And what you are saying is that peacefire are the baldfaced liars, not me. They claimed that the site had been falsely listed as a pornography site. My point was that it did fit the non-porn filters that they had enabled, by the page content that I witnessed. You stating that there were also pornographic links is not an argument against me, it is a support of my conclusion that peacefire is cooking the books.
Checked out one of their individual reports, where they stated this:
We tested a Bess proxy server with the following categories enabled: "Adults Only", "Hate/Discrimination", "Illegal", "Porn Site", "Sex", "Violence", "Alcohol", "Chat", "Drugs", "Free Pages", "Gambling", "Tasteless / Gross", "Profanity", "Lingerie", "Nudity", "Personal Information", "School Cheating Info", "Suicide / Murder", "Tobacco", "Weapons", and "Personals".
So I loaded in the first "falsly blocked" site on their list (celebrity.com) and checked it out. It has a bunch of pictures of different celebrities, in a somewhat porn-site like format, but no actual nudity. Then I went back and really looked at the list of what they had enabled. "Lingerie". In other words, they had choosen a setting to test it on that pretty much says "This blocks that hide-the-nipples, victoria's secret type supersoft porn, not just nudity." And many of the pictures on this website fell exactly into that catagory - cameron diaz's upper toso wearing nothing but her hands holding her breasts, the same with a "fan dance" fan over the relevant areas, another celebrities wearing tiny black bras and panties, or panies and an open shirt just barely covering the nipples....
Now this is just one site from one of their tests, but then its the only one I checked, and they are lying about it not fitting one of the catagories they chose to block for their test. Is it still blocked if they tested the filter for porn only? I don't know. But that (very) little investigation gives me some serious doubts about the honesty and objectivity with which these "tests" of filterware are being conducted.
If I had time this afternoon I'll check a larger sample of their results, but I shouldn't even be making this post, so don't wait up. Anyone else who wants to do skeptical spot checks on them (read the "checked" items carefully) please follow up.
When we ship products over-seas we have three viable options... Finally, we could send it by land.
could you really?
Long as the sea between russia and alaska is frozen over, sure. (and weren't they talking about a bridge?)
I believe that it is theoretically possible to walk from the tip of south america to capetown. Massivly impractical, but possible. When you're on foot, a straight line is rarely the best route between two points.
You missed the point. He presented the arguments that were used against planes (which, as you now say, are acceptably safe) when they were first introduced. Now, people are making arguments against these personal devices. The naysayers, though, as he points out, aren't always right.
No, I think the other guy was right, he was just trying to be witty. There is nothing actually relevant about saying "people objected to X which is now widespread, so your objections to Y must be equally wrong." The fact that naysayers aren't always right is pretty useless for evaluating an argument against something.
Its like if someone was talking about their hopes for a presidential candidate and I started making hopeful comments about our new chancellor adolf hitler who will bring us out of this recession. There has been no useful critique of the real subject at hand.
And of course the differences between fears about the mechanical workings of a new device and the unavoidable practical implications of thousands of people zipping through a 3D area with no markings of lanes are so great as to make the comment just a silly throwaway line.
Have you ever been on the boston esplanade for the fourth of july? There's lots of boats out having fun. Most of them are rafts and canoes, but there are a few power boats zipping around. There's big signs on the bridges warning people not to leave wake, but every few minutes some moron will zip through leaving a wake that rocks smaller boats on both shores.
Now imagine that everyone was in the fast boats, and instead of a fairly straightforward trip up on down the river, you had some people going across and some suddenly dropping in from above because the fast part of your trip is through where they stop, and someone just sort of stopping and circling because they were getting their bearings, and....
You can't make these problems go away with silly "quotes" about a completely different situation. It can be funny, but "aren't we feeling clever" is the only real response, because it is not useful or relevant.
Now birds, I've had one hit my helmut before and almost knock me off my bike. I've riden over 100,000 miles and this has only happened once. Running over cats and dogs is a larger concern, which I don't think would be a problem with a personal air craft!:)
Yes but birds are just a little more common a couple of stories up than they are 6 to 7 feet off the ground. They are also bigger. You probably got hit in the helmet by a less than one pound bird. Wanna try it with a pigeon, or a hawk (common in some big cities) or a goose if you're commuting a long distance high up?
Anyway, the personal flying device is a cute idea. if they get a working model that costs less than a car, I'm sure there will be people buying them for recreational use, and I'd invest right now in a company planning on renting them in a safe location for "extreme sports" type use. Maybe ranchers will even find them useful for arial searches and reports to people on the ground managing large flocks. But thousands of people commuting into work in their private jetpacks? Never happen, sorry. Its not that the technology has been lacking, its just an unworkable idea. (kinda like video-telephones - They've had the tech to do it for years, but it hasn't happened.)
Don't confuse "Close to home" with "Important to me".
If these issues are all "close to home," you'd seem to imply that you're a pregnant lesbian ex-soldier who can barely survive on the $5.15 you now make at Wal Mart.
Or I care about people who fall into those catagories, or it is possible for me to be effected by those issues.
Of course if "close to home" only means "effected directly by" as you seem to imply, the orriginal statement about the candidates positions was even more ludicruis. I have never used the internet from a public terminal of any kind and don't use my parents machine, so the actual statements made in the dabate are no where near my home (or I suspect, most/.ers)
Watch out where you shoot your mouth, you might hit the wrong target.:)
Well, except for abortion, gay rights, military action, gun registration, workers rights, corportate welfare, social saftey net, and a couple dozen other things....
Niether of their positions is terribly radical and I can't think of anything either could say about the internet as a whole that would be more important to me than their positions on other core issues.
Basically, he is saying that he created the internet. [...] The internet was CREATED in the 60s.
There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe today (which I would link to if I wasn't so lazy) about the evolution of the internet. Aside from pointing out that amoung all the techies listed in various "histories" of the internet, Al Gore is the only politician given regular credit for both vision and effort, it says that while geeks often point to DARPANET (sp?) as the beginning of the internet, this is like giving Native Americans credit for the interstate highway system because some of our modern roads lie over their trails.
You have to define what you mean by the internet. Nothing in the 60s really resembled the scope, accessability and "intent" of what we now know as the internet. One might as well say that the internet was created by alexander grahm bell.
Maybe I just think in "political" rather than "inventor" but when I hear a politician talk about "taking initiative in creating" its pretty obvious to me that he's talking about pushing for funding, not claiming technological prowress.
What I find hypocritical is that the present administration made a big deal about having increased the number of Federal crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed. Now that it's expedient to do so, it's trying to make Bush out as some sort of 'Maximum George' for letting prisoners be executed for their crimes.
Hmmm... I havn't actually heard anyone in the c/g administration attack Bush on the DP issue, its mostly been collumists and other media types (no, they aren't all lapdogs of c/g)
More to the point, the problem with Bush isn't that his state executes people, or that the executions have gone up so much with him in office, or even that he has refused to grant stays in cases that on casual observation seem to cry out for review. The problem (as I mentioned in an earlier post) is that I swear the guy gets a stiffy when he thinks about people being executed. He is gleeful when talking about capital punishment, he made jokes about Carla Fae Tucker begging him for her life in an interview (which she never did, according to her supporters) and several pundits have commented on his unseeming enthusiasm for capital punishment in the latest debate. Most people I believe have mixed feelings about capital punishment. Even those who support it generally see it as an awesome responsibility that the state is given for the most serious of reasons. There aren't a lot of people who want to envision the symbolic wielder of that responsibility cavorting arround the electric chair shouting "who's your daddy?" and "I'm the MAN!" But very honestly, thats the kind of vibe that Bush has been pegged with (fairly or not, I don't know the guy personally) and I believe that it is that attitude, not number of executions, that is bringing this issue up again and again.
Wow. you're really cute in that puppy dog peeing on the rug sort of way.
Now that was an insult. The only nerve you hit was the one that leads to my bordom at technolibertarians brain center. But your incredible lack of contact with reality gave me a good sincere laugh, which I haven't had in a while (been kind of stressed) so I want to thank you.
And to respond to a tiny bit of rational thought from your post, yes, Saranden has switched firmly to Nader (she and her partner Tim Robbins were guests at his New York rally last week.) but if she, like many others, felt forced to choose between only Gore and Bush, it would not suprise me to see her choose Gore on the DP issue. While he is for capital punishment, he doesn't get a gleeful look on his face when talking about excecuting people. If you must choose between two people who aren't "with" you on the death penalty, its pretty reasonable to go with the one you don't suspect of getting a woody when he signs an order.
Anyway, next time don't mistake an honest expression of contempt for anything else. It just makes you look kinda silly.
You seem to be talking to someone other than me. A lot of people other than me, actually, including people who have attacked republicans on charecter issues, Susan Saranden (who is supporting Nader, btw) and the invisible evil people who hate you because you're smarter than them (just to fill in a data point, are you an Ayn Rand fan?)There may be more, but what I saw really didn't justify clicking the "rest of this comment" link. (Tho your post did reinforce my goal not to ever have a post that needs that little link)
And what you are saying to me,
The internet was already created, it was already privatized in most aspects, and algore was simply a member of the group that looked at that kind of stuff.
is, from all the talk I've seen, wrong. Articles from the time period that Al was talking about do in fact give him credit for pushing for what we now know as the internet.
I wonder if the geek venom on this issue comes from a unwillingness to accept the government role in the internet. Your rage against government programs combined with the insistence on the long term privatized nature of the internet certainly would make it hard for you to swallow the idea that a big government carreer politician had anything to do with something you value so much. I wouldn't be suprized if in a decade or so, the origens of the internet had been mythologized to eliminate any but the most cursory (and maybe unitentional) government involvement, to sit more easily within the techno-libertarian worldview. It certainly would fit the trend of mythologized histories, esp in the US.
I can't have any real respect for a "news source" that states a lie as truth twice in one short article.
OK, guys, one more time - Al Gore NEVER said that he invented the internet. He said that he "took initiative in creating" it, in a context of talking about legislative proccess. Some conservative wack job took a slightly over-reaching comment that was clearly about funding and regulation and distorted it into a claim of technological might. Then everyone one the planet decided that the fake interpretation was actually the orriginal quote.
The fact that I support gore more than bush only accounts for a small part of my annoyance at this entire thing (I'm voting for Nader anyway). I just hate it when an irresponsible media allows retoric to trump fact, then eventually to become fact. "A little boy was charged with sexual harrassment for kissing a little girl who wanted him too!" nope, never happened, but that doesn't matter, does it? "One of the colimbine victims proudly declared her belief in God at gunpoint before being killed!" Totally false, but who cares, the book sold well. "Al Gore says he invented the internet!" Significantly different from his actual comments, but its just FUNNIER, doncha know?
OK, enough ranting for now. On a slightly different note, is there anyone for whom the computer/privacy credentials of the canidates will be a deciding factor in voting?
In science, the burden of proof is upon the one making the claim.
A scientist would reject the claim as being unsupported by the evidence. Until your side of the debate can come up with the evidence, your claim is invalid.
One could make the argument that by marketing cell phones, the manufacturers are making an implicit claim that they ARE safe, and thus they have the burden of proof.
I worry at the way this "scientific" argument is being applied. "Are cell phones safe?" is not a theoretical scientific question to be examined objectively for as long as we want and hold the answer agnosticly positive till proof otherwise. It's a public safety issue and should (IMHO) be approaced like a new pharmacutical or food additive - riggorous testing before release, provisional acceptance and monitoring after release.
No, i don't think thats reasonable at all. Basically you're saying kids don't have any (or very little) rights. Rights are supposed to be something that cannot be taken away, no matter what. If you start saying you can take away rights from groups of people b/c of certain requirements, you get into a very scary mindset.
Sounds like a pretty normal mindset to me. I honestly think you have a unrealistic (but common young american) view of rights. Almost all "rights" can and are taken away for various reasons. The right to move as we please is taken away for any number of crimes, the right to free speech is circumscribed in many ways and always has been. (when free speechers are reminded of one of those that they accept, they generally claim that it is "not a speech issue"). Freedom of religion protects only certain kinds of religion conduct, but all reasons for those kinds of conduct. The right of free association does not currently protect discrimination (in the US).
And of course, people who are under the legal gaurdianship of others have more limitations on their rights. It takes a good sense of paranioa to see anything sinister or discriminatory in that. (and a good amount of hysteria to in anyway comapare it to racial discrimination).
Finally we reach the particularly bizzare assumption that buying a particular video game at an age where someone else has gaurdianship over you is actually classifiable as a Right. Its an action, and in a free society, one can make arguments about the correctness of regulating non-harmful actions. But equating any non-harmful action with rights is IMHO demeaning to real human rights issues.
Its really just for a laugh, and a lot of the prize winners are great ideas. Ever try to plan a marriage? Quite the headache, Moon and the city of Las Vegas has done us a great social service. I know Pawsense has sold more than a few copies, how much software have you sold?
I had a similar reaction to the bit about being in love and being O/C disordered. For someone who has studied neuropsych, that is just plain fascinating! It should and hopefully will be repeated and expanded on if consistant.
The awards would make a lot more sense if they didn't include ridiculous psuedoscience and just stuck to well-meaning research that just turns out to be hilarious. I'm sure its just easier to pick on Breatharians than to use your brain and sense of humor to find something that isn't painfully and obviously weird.
So now every time I joke to a friend on how I'm going to rule the world or smoke some crack, that in and of itself could consititute an act? How did law enforcement catch law breakers proir to email and newsgroups? If I am doing something illegal, (like stockpiling nuculear weapons or dealing drugs) then there are many real-world things I have to do. These real-world ACTIONS (buying plutonium, crack, whatever) are the proof they need to look for, not some email talking about stuff I've never did. Speech does not equal action.
Don't be naive. Just because you can't charge someone based only on their words doesn't mean their words are irrelevant. What you say or write can be either proof for the jury after you have been caught, or a pointer towards where to find evidence.
So lets say you are arrested and charged with buying crack, but you claim that you were just standing near the crack dealer and the cop lied when arresting you. Your email stating "I'm gonna go buy some crack tonight" is of course relevant in trying you for that night's arrest.
Or you are being investigated for a kidnapping, and the police find an email saying "I'm going to X to buy crack, that'll make a good lure." The police will go to X and try to get further information about your actions and plans.
They need to look for all evidence, and that includes speech. Your argument is as silly as saying "its the murder thats a crime and not touching the doorknob to get in, so why would police ever waste their time dusting a doorknob for prints at a crime scene?" Its a good thing you aren't actually involved in investigation or law enforcement.
But the media created the hacker craze that we see all the time on the news. As long as they keep up the heat and Some people keep doing illeagle and just so many things in bad taste the "EVIL" connotation will never go away.
Just out of curiosity, when are you asserting that these evil media types started this "misdefinition"? AFAIK, the general public has been using "hacker" in the breaking a system's security sense at least since the mid eighties. I could be mis-remembering, but my take of the word history has always been 1) computer geeks refer to themselves as hackers, 2) self identified hackers break into systems, 3) media and public accepts their self definition, 4) other who self defined that way don't want to be thought of in the same group and 5) instead of renaming themselves, try to take away the name of those they don't aprove of. Since few are willing to accept the blame shifting, and the systems breakers largely decline to begin self identifying differently, 6) this redefinition fails except amoung those who want to protect their own self image.
Overall, it makes me want to go put on a kilt and refuse molasass with my porriage.
Jesus Christ, when is you fools gonna stop moderating the "language evolves" posts that come with every damn "hacker" story?
Around the same time they stop moderating up the stupid "next they will get rid of X" or "what about libraries" posts that come with every Napster story I suppose...
And if people are going to keep trying to impose a silly word distinction on those who don't need it, other will keep reminding that general usage defines language.
It is in fact, 1% who like them, 50% who fucking hate them, and 49% who couldn't give a fuck.
What about the ones who started out not giving a fuck utill they were exposed to geek paranioa and arogance and moved to a sort of vauge irritation and weird pity while still not caring enough to hate and certainly not fearing?
I think this is not acceptable in a service that is funded out of (partly) taxpayers pockets is so over-regulated as to be utterly useless.
Utterly useless, huh? Well, did you get your timetable?
I'm not (just) being snotty here. You went into the library with an almost archetypical legitamate purpose : to gather some useful information in a short timeframe. Yor goal did not need porn, or virii, or IRC or email. People using the computers for any of those purposes could have seriously increased the time you had to wait. So, were you able to get what you legitamatly needed or not?
If so, how can you then call the system utterly useless? If not, do you think the failure had anything to do with the blocking software, or just the railways not keeping their info accessable on line?
Just trying to keep some perspective arround here.
Of course the FBI is saying that they'll use the system for monitoring of current investigations, but they have also stated that they would use it for crime prevention. I repeat, prevention. They are willing to sacrifice our privacy in the name of "preventing" future crimes which have yet to happen.
1) solving crimes and crime prevention are linked. Finding a serial rapist is preventing future rapes, etc.
2) Working to prevent a crime is perfectly legitamate for law enforcement. Why the quotes around preventing? This doesn't have to mean scanning the email of every citizen, it more likely means using email taps along with other metods when they have reasonable evidence of a consiracy to commit a crime.
I think maybe you should look at what was actually sent first. Might change your opinions a bit. Tasteless and irritating, but hardly threatening.
Frankly I don't think thats your decision to make. Or this company's. You have no idea what the context of the message was, what the context of this case is, or anything else. If the sender of the message was identified, he/she/it would have had the opertunity to be confronted with all evidence of the case and present a defense. You have no more right to try him/her/it and find innocence than anyone would have to find guilt without that proceeding.
I'm really not seeing the point of all of this. The university says "we have a problem can you help us?" the company said "no". Fine, their ethical decision. Then it becomes an actual case where the government says "Help them" and they still say "no". No longer their ethical choice to make, no longer OK. They get some sort of contempt charge and a gag order so that publicity about this discovery won't contaminate the larger case or lead to further annonymous harrassment. These obstructionists turn it into a big case and take so long that the person claiming harrassment just gives up and gets on with his her its life and they think thats a victory.
I don't see anything to get our panties in a wad over, except maybe a group that thinks they can take over for the court system.
Ah, the embarrassment argument. It hinges on the premise that kids wouldn't be embarrassed to ask some random authority-figure adult for permission to legitimate topics. However legitimate topic include information about birth control, abortion, or sexually transmitted disease.
The problem is that the people who want to keep kids from certain information also want to keep certain information from kids. It's not just that they don't want kids to accidentally see naked ladies. It's that they don't want their kids to know about sex, drugs, and differing religions/moralities/etc.
You might want to put some qualifiers on that last part. As is being discussed other places, there are a lot of reasons parents might want to use filtering software. And cut out the "naked ladies" strawman, a casual few minutes of browsing should demonstrate that we aren't just talking about some tasteful nudes out there. There is a legitamate issue even in most parent's minds pitting mature exploration against the wish to protect emotional health.
So lets think about viable options. One good one would be to say "we don't want anything on our computers that would be harmful to minors" then, instead of asking every parent what they think would harm their minors, try to get a professional consensus. Talk to teachers, child psychologists, librarians and parents about what they actually mean when they say "harmful". The professional viewpoint would probably overrule the few wacky fundy parents and in most communities you would end up with a mandate to block pornography (with a priority for eliminating violent and child centered types) and non-professional drug information.
Now, is it possible to implement such a filter? At what success rate? Are we focusing on preventing people from finding information they are looking for or from getting rape fantasy porn when looking for info on preventing date rape? Is this a one size fits all minors, or legal minor vs pre-teen minor?
If the free speechers, the techies and the concerned (some of which may overlap) sat down and had this conversation, instead of both sides assuming that its either unfiltered or christian coalition aproved, we might accomplish something.
Slashdot Mirror
While I do not have the software that blocks banner ads automatically, I do the functional equivelent with my good old fashion brain. I did not look at the banner ads, but at the content of the page.
And what you are saying is that peacefire are the baldfaced liars, not me. They claimed that the site had been falsely listed as a pornography site. My point was that it did fit the non-porn filters that they had enabled, by the page content that I witnessed. You stating that there were also pornographic links is not an argument against me, it is a support of my conclusion that peacefire is cooking the books.
-Kahuna Burger
We tested a Bess proxy server with the following categories enabled: "Adults Only", "Hate/Discrimination", "Illegal", "Porn Site", "Sex", "Violence", "Alcohol", "Chat", "Drugs", "Free Pages", "Gambling", "Tasteless / Gross", "Profanity", "Lingerie", "Nudity", "Personal Information", "School Cheating Info", "Suicide / Murder", "Tobacco", "Weapons", and "Personals".
So I loaded in the first "falsly blocked" site on their list (celebrity.com) and checked it out. It has a bunch of pictures of different celebrities, in a somewhat porn-site like format, but no actual nudity. Then I went back and really looked at the list of what they had enabled. "Lingerie". In other words, they had choosen a setting to test it on that pretty much says "This blocks that hide-the-nipples, victoria's secret type supersoft porn, not just nudity." And many of the pictures on this website fell exactly into that catagory - cameron diaz's upper toso wearing nothing but her hands holding her breasts, the same with a "fan dance" fan over the relevant areas, another celebrities wearing tiny black bras and panties, or panies and an open shirt just barely covering the nipples....
Now this is just one site from one of their tests, but then its the only one I checked, and they are lying about it not fitting one of the catagories they chose to block for their test. Is it still blocked if they tested the filter for porn only? I don't know. But that (very) little investigation gives me some serious doubts about the honesty and objectivity with which these "tests" of filterware are being conducted.
If I had time this afternoon I'll check a larger sample of their results, but I shouldn't even be making this post, so don't wait up. Anyone else who wants to do skeptical spot checks on them (read the "checked" items carefully) please follow up.
-Kahuna Burger
could you really?
Long as the sea between russia and alaska is frozen over, sure. (and weren't they talking about a bridge?)
I believe that it is theoretically possible to walk from the tip of south america to capetown. Massivly impractical, but possible. When you're on foot, a straight line is rarely the best route between two points.
-Kahuna Burger
No, I think the other guy was right, he was just trying to be witty. There is nothing actually relevant about saying "people objected to X which is now widespread, so your objections to Y must be equally wrong." The fact that naysayers aren't always right is pretty useless for evaluating an argument against something.
Its like if someone was talking about their hopes for a presidential candidate and I started making hopeful comments about our new chancellor adolf hitler who will bring us out of this recession. There has been no useful critique of the real subject at hand.
And of course the differences between fears about the mechanical workings of a new device and the unavoidable practical implications of thousands of people zipping through a 3D area with no markings of lanes are so great as to make the comment just a silly throwaway line.
Have you ever been on the boston esplanade for the fourth of july? There's lots of boats out having fun. Most of them are rafts and canoes, but there are a few power boats zipping around. There's big signs on the bridges warning people not to leave wake, but every few minutes some moron will zip through leaving a wake that rocks smaller boats on both shores.
Now imagine that everyone was in the fast boats, and instead of a fairly straightforward trip up on down the river, you had some people going across and some suddenly dropping in from above because the fast part of your trip is through where they stop, and someone just sort of stopping and circling because they were getting their bearings, and....
You can't make these problems go away with silly "quotes" about a completely different situation. It can be funny, but "aren't we feeling clever" is the only real response, because it is not useful or relevant.
-Kahuna Burger
Yes but birds are just a little more common a couple of stories up than they are 6 to 7 feet off the ground. They are also bigger. You probably got hit in the helmet by a less than one pound bird. Wanna try it with a pigeon, or a hawk (common in some big cities) or a goose if you're commuting a long distance high up?
Anyway, the personal flying device is a cute idea. if they get a working model that costs less than a car, I'm sure there will be people buying them for recreational use, and I'd invest right now in a company planning on renting them in a safe location for "extreme sports" type use. Maybe ranchers will even find them useful for arial searches and reports to people on the ground managing large flocks. But thousands of people commuting into work in their private jetpacks? Never happen, sorry. Its not that the technology has been lacking, its just an unworkable idea. (kinda like video-telephones - They've had the tech to do it for years, but it hasn't happened.)
-Kahuna Burger
If these issues are all "close to home," you'd seem to imply that you're a pregnant lesbian ex-soldier who can barely survive on the $5.15 you now make at Wal Mart.
Or I care about people who fall into those catagories, or it is possible for me to be effected by those issues.
Of course if "close to home" only means "effected directly by" as you seem to imply, the orriginal statement about the candidates positions was even more ludicruis. I have never used the internet from a public terminal of any kind and don't use my parents machine, so the actual statements made in the dabate are no where near my home (or I suspect, most /.ers)
Watch out where you shoot your mouth, you might hit the wrong target. :)
kahuna Burger
Well, except for abortion, gay rights, military action, gun registration, workers rights, corportate welfare, social saftey net, and a couple dozen other things....
Niether of their positions is terribly radical and I can't think of anything either could say about the internet as a whole that would be more important to me than their positions on other core issues.
Kahuna Burger
There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe today (which I would link to if I wasn't so lazy) about the evolution of the internet. Aside from pointing out that amoung all the techies listed in various "histories" of the internet, Al Gore is the only politician given regular credit for both vision and effort, it says that while geeks often point to DARPANET (sp?) as the beginning of the internet, this is like giving Native Americans credit for the interstate highway system because some of our modern roads lie over their trails.
You have to define what you mean by the internet. Nothing in the 60s really resembled the scope, accessability and "intent" of what we now know as the internet. One might as well say that the internet was created by alexander grahm bell.
Maybe I just think in "political" rather than "inventor" but when I hear a politician talk about "taking initiative in creating" its pretty obvious to me that he's talking about pushing for funding, not claiming technological prowress.
Kahuna Burger
Hmmm... I havn't actually heard anyone in the c/g administration attack Bush on the DP issue, its mostly been collumists and other media types (no, they aren't all lapdogs of c/g)
More to the point, the problem with Bush isn't that his state executes people, or that the executions have gone up so much with him in office, or even that he has refused to grant stays in cases that on casual observation seem to cry out for review. The problem (as I mentioned in an earlier post) is that I swear the guy gets a stiffy when he thinks about people being executed. He is gleeful when talking about capital punishment, he made jokes about Carla Fae Tucker begging him for her life in an interview (which she never did, according to her supporters) and several pundits have commented on his unseeming enthusiasm for capital punishment in the latest debate. Most people I believe have mixed feelings about capital punishment. Even those who support it generally see it as an awesome responsibility that the state is given for the most serious of reasons. There aren't a lot of people who want to envision the symbolic wielder of that responsibility cavorting arround the electric chair shouting "who's your daddy?" and "I'm the MAN!" But very honestly, thats the kind of vibe that Bush has been pegged with (fairly or not, I don't know the guy personally) and I believe that it is that attitude, not number of executions, that is bringing this issue up again and again.
Kahuna Burger
Wow. you're really cute in that puppy dog peeing on the rug sort of way.
Now that was an insult. The only nerve you hit was the one that leads to my bordom at technolibertarians brain center. But your incredible lack of contact with reality gave me a good sincere laugh, which I haven't had in a while (been kind of stressed) so I want to thank you.
And to respond to a tiny bit of rational thought from your post, yes, Saranden has switched firmly to Nader (she and her partner Tim Robbins were guests at his New York rally last week.) but if she, like many others, felt forced to choose between only Gore and Bush, it would not suprise me to see her choose Gore on the DP issue. While he is for capital punishment, he doesn't get a gleeful look on his face when talking about excecuting people. If you must choose between two people who aren't "with" you on the death penalty, its pretty reasonable to go with the one you don't suspect of getting a woody when he signs an order.
Anyway, next time don't mistake an honest expression of contempt for anything else. It just makes you look kinda silly.
Kahuna Burger
You seem to be talking to someone other than me. A lot of people other than me, actually, including people who have attacked republicans on charecter issues, Susan Saranden (who is supporting Nader, btw) and the invisible evil people who hate you because you're smarter than them (just to fill in a data point, are you an Ayn Rand fan?)There may be more, but what I saw really didn't justify clicking the "rest of this comment" link. (Tho your post did reinforce my goal not to ever have a post that needs that little link)
And what you are saying to me,
The internet was already created, it was already privatized in most aspects, and algore was simply a member of the group that looked at that kind of stuff.
is, from all the talk I've seen, wrong. Articles from the time period that Al was talking about do in fact give him credit for pushing for what we now know as the internet.
I wonder if the geek venom on this issue comes from a unwillingness to accept the government role in the internet. Your rage against government programs combined with the insistence on the long term privatized nature of the internet certainly would make it hard for you to swallow the idea that a big government carreer politician had anything to do with something you value so much. I wouldn't be suprized if in a decade or so, the origens of the internet had been mythologized to eliminate any but the most cursory (and maybe unitentional) government involvement, to sit more easily within the techno-libertarian worldview. It certainly would fit the trend of mythologized histories, esp in the US.
Kahuna Burger
OK, guys, one more time - Al Gore NEVER said that he invented the internet. He said that he "took initiative in creating" it, in a context of talking about legislative proccess. Some conservative wack job took a slightly over-reaching comment that was clearly about funding and regulation and distorted it into a claim of technological might. Then everyone one the planet decided that the fake interpretation was actually the orriginal quote.
The fact that I support gore more than bush only accounts for a small part of my annoyance at this entire thing (I'm voting for Nader anyway). I just hate it when an irresponsible media allows retoric to trump fact, then eventually to become fact. "A little boy was charged with sexual harrassment for kissing a little girl who wanted him too!" nope, never happened, but that doesn't matter, does it? "One of the colimbine victims proudly declared her belief in God at gunpoint before being killed!" Totally false, but who cares, the book sold well. "Al Gore says he invented the internet!" Significantly different from his actual comments, but its just FUNNIER, doncha know?
OK, enough ranting for now. On a slightly different note, is there anyone for whom the computer/privacy credentials of the canidates will be a deciding factor in voting?
-Kahuna Burger
A scientist would reject the claim as being unsupported by the evidence. Until your side of the debate can come up with the evidence, your claim is invalid.
One could make the argument that by marketing cell phones, the manufacturers are making an implicit claim that they ARE safe, and thus they have the burden of proof.
I worry at the way this "scientific" argument is being applied. "Are cell phones safe?" is not a theoretical scientific question to be examined objectively for as long as we want and hold the answer agnosticly positive till proof otherwise. It's a public safety issue and should (IMHO) be approaced like a new pharmacutical or food additive - riggorous testing before release, provisional acceptance and monitoring after release.
Kahuna Burger
Sounds like a pretty normal mindset to me. I honestly think you have a unrealistic (but common young american) view of rights. Almost all "rights" can and are taken away for various reasons. The right to move as we please is taken away for any number of crimes, the right to free speech is circumscribed in many ways and always has been. (when free speechers are reminded of one of those that they accept, they generally claim that it is "not a speech issue"). Freedom of religion protects only certain kinds of religion conduct, but all reasons for those kinds of conduct. The right of free association does not currently protect discrimination (in the US).
And of course, people who are under the legal gaurdianship of others have more limitations on their rights. It takes a good sense of paranioa to see anything sinister or discriminatory in that. (and a good amount of hysteria to in anyway comapare it to racial discrimination).
Finally we reach the particularly bizzare assumption that buying a particular video game at an age where someone else has gaurdianship over you is actually classifiable as a Right. Its an action, and in a free society, one can make arguments about the correctness of regulating non-harmful actions. But equating any non-harmful action with rights is IMHO demeaning to real human rights issues.
-Kahuna Burger
I had a similar reaction to the bit about being in love and being O/C disordered. For someone who has studied neuropsych, that is just plain fascinating! It should and hopefully will be repeated and expanded on if consistant.
The awards would make a lot more sense if they didn't include ridiculous psuedoscience and just stuck to well-meaning research that just turns out to be hilarious. I'm sure its just easier to pick on Breatharians than to use your brain and sense of humor to find something that isn't painfully and obviously weird.
Agreed.
-Kahuna Burger
Don't be naive. Just because you can't charge someone based only on their words doesn't mean their words are irrelevant. What you say or write can be either proof for the jury after you have been caught, or a pointer towards where to find evidence.
So lets say you are arrested and charged with buying crack, but you claim that you were just standing near the crack dealer and the cop lied when arresting you. Your email stating "I'm gonna go buy some crack tonight" is of course relevant in trying you for that night's arrest.
Or you are being investigated for a kidnapping, and the police find an email saying "I'm going to X to buy crack, that'll make a good lure." The police will go to X and try to get further information about your actions and plans.
They need to look for all evidence, and that includes speech. Your argument is as silly as saying "its the murder thats a crime and not touching the doorknob to get in, so why would police ever waste their time dusting a doorknob for prints at a crime scene?" Its a good thing you aren't actually involved in investigation or law enforcement.
-Kahuna Burger
Just out of curiosity, when are you asserting that these evil media types started this "misdefinition"? AFAIK, the general public has been using "hacker" in the breaking a system's security sense at least since the mid eighties. I could be mis-remembering, but my take of the word history has always been 1) computer geeks refer to themselves as hackers, 2) self identified hackers break into systems, 3) media and public accepts their self definition, 4) other who self defined that way don't want to be thought of in the same group and 5) instead of renaming themselves, try to take away the name of those they don't aprove of. Since few are willing to accept the blame shifting, and the systems breakers largely decline to begin self identifying differently, 6) this redefinition fails except amoung those who want to protect their own self image.
Overall, it makes me want to go put on a kilt and refuse molasass with my porriage.
-Kahuna Burger
Around the same time they stop moderating up the stupid "next they will get rid of X" or "what about libraries" posts that come with every Napster story I suppose...
And if people are going to keep trying to impose a silly word distinction on those who don't need it, other will keep reminding that general usage defines language.
-Kahuna Burger
What about the ones who started out not giving a fuck utill they were exposed to geek paranioa and arogance and moved to a sort of vauge irritation and weird pity while still not caring enough to hate and certainly not fearing?
Sigh, never enough options on these quizes. :)
-Kahuna Burger
Utterly useless, huh? Well, did you get your timetable?
I'm not (just) being snotty here. You went into the library with an almost archetypical legitamate purpose : to gather some useful information in a short timeframe. Yor goal did not need porn, or virii, or IRC or email. People using the computers for any of those purposes could have seriously increased the time you had to wait. So, were you able to get what you legitamatly needed or not?
If so, how can you then call the system utterly useless? If not, do you think the failure had anything to do with the blocking software, or just the railways not keeping their info accessable on line?
Just trying to keep some perspective arround here.
-Kahuna Burger
Emo Philips. ;)
1) solving crimes and crime prevention are linked. Finding a serial rapist is preventing future rapes, etc.
2) Working to prevent a crime is perfectly legitamate for law enforcement. Why the quotes around preventing? This doesn't have to mean scanning the email of every citizen, it more likely means using email taps along with other metods when they have reasonable evidence of a consiracy to commit a crime.
-Kahuna Burger
What point would that be? "I can write silly future fiction that makes 1984 look realisitic"?
Its not a worst case scenerio, its a no case scenerio. At best it could pass as a satire of geek fears.
In a word, ugh.
-Kahuna Burger
Frankly I don't think thats your decision to make. Or this company's. You have no idea what the context of the message was, what the context of this case is, or anything else. If the sender of the message was identified, he/she/it would have had the opertunity to be confronted with all evidence of the case and present a defense. You have no more right to try him/her/it and find innocence than anyone would have to find guilt without that proceeding.
I'm really not seeing the point of all of this. The university says "we have a problem can you help us?" the company said "no". Fine, their ethical decision. Then it becomes an actual case where the government says "Help them" and they still say "no". No longer their ethical choice to make, no longer OK. They get some sort of contempt charge and a gag order so that publicity about this discovery won't contaminate the larger case or lead to further annonymous harrassment. These obstructionists turn it into a big case and take so long that the person claiming harrassment just gives up and gets on with his her its life and they think thats a victory.
I don't see anything to get our panties in a wad over, except maybe a group that thinks they can take over for the court system.
-Kahuna Burger
The problem is that the people who want to keep kids from certain information also want to keep certain information from kids. It's not just that they don't want kids to accidentally see naked ladies. It's that they don't want their kids to know about sex, drugs, and differing religions/moralities/etc.
You might want to put some qualifiers on that last part. As is being discussed other places, there are a lot of reasons parents might want to use filtering software. And cut out the "naked ladies" strawman, a casual few minutes of browsing should demonstrate that we aren't just talking about some tasteful nudes out there. There is a legitamate issue even in most parent's minds pitting mature exploration against the wish to protect emotional health.
So lets think about viable options. One good one would be to say "we don't want anything on our computers that would be harmful to minors" then, instead of asking every parent what they think would harm their minors, try to get a professional consensus. Talk to teachers, child psychologists, librarians and parents about what they actually mean when they say "harmful". The professional viewpoint would probably overrule the few wacky fundy parents and in most communities you would end up with a mandate to block pornography (with a priority for eliminating violent and child centered types) and non-professional drug information.
Now, is it possible to implement such a filter? At what success rate? Are we focusing on preventing people from finding information they are looking for or from getting rape fantasy porn when looking for info on preventing date rape? Is this a one size fits all minors, or legal minor vs pre-teen minor?
If the free speechers, the techies and the concerned (some of which may overlap) sat down and had this conversation, instead of both sides assuming that its either unfiltered or christian coalition aproved, we might accomplish something.
-Kahuna Burger