This case shouldn't be about what MS will accept. This is a legal procedure; you don't ask a guilty defendant what sentance they think is fair.
Actually, in Colorado our judges do. It's not generally subject to bargaining. However, every defendant is given an opportunity to address the court to explain what sentence he feels is appropriate and why.
And that's a good thing, IMHO. Our judicial system is what's called an adversarial system. That means that each side pleads their own case with the judge serving mainly as a referee. Such a system is a farce if the defendant isn't given an opportunity. That's why defendants have the right to compel the appearance of witnesses-the same subpoena power as prosecutors. That's why defendants have the right to examine evidence against them and to present evidence in their favor. And that's why defendants are allowed to address the court at sentencing.
Granted, the sentencing speech is usually so much bullshit: "Your honor, I know I shouldn't have smacked the shit out of my wife. I need help with anger management and alcohol management" and that sort of bullshit that insults the intelligence of the judge, both lawyers, the arresting officers, and pretty much everyone else. However, sometimes there's actually some valid and useful information given that leads judges to go easier than they would have, had they remained ignorant.
Granted, we have a victim's rights amendment whcih gives victims (or their families' in homicide cases) the right to also address the court at sentencing, for certain (violent) crimes. In those cases, defendants who don't want to have their nuts stapled to the wall generally don't bother to give speeches.
But anyway, yes, defendants are asked. We can't be the only state that does that.
Do geeks read anything other than Science Fiction?
This one does. My favorite authors aren't all SF. Heinlein and Asimov, sure. However, I also have read a lot by Joseph Wambaugh (a lot of stories about LAPD officers, most of them fictional. There's no way I'd tolerate some of his characters' stunts in my department, but they were good for a laugh and he does a wonderful job of capturing the stress and pain of the job in a way that even non-cops can understand), Edward Abbey (whose only psuedo-SF work was _Good News_), Tony Hillerman (more mystery/cop fiction-his Navajo Tribal Police stories give very good treatment of people who are caught between two conflicting worlds and conflicting sets of obligations), and Hunter Thompson (because psychosis is timeless).<p>
I'm also willing to bet that Gabriel Garcia Marquez will live forever. _Erendira_ and _El Amor en el Tiempo de Colera_ are two of my favorites.<p>
And I hope like hell that whoever does the Chilton's auto service manuals is still around if I am.<p>
<i>And if the books and authors mentioned above are 'classics,' what the hell do we call Shakespeare, Johnson and others?</i><p>
Classics as well. However, some professor of mine once said something along the lines of "if it wasn't originally written in Latin or Greek, it's not a classic."
Tom Clancy spent the 1990's re-writing the same book many times over. So, at least one of the variants will still be around in fifty years.
However, Jerry Pournelle wrote better military fiction and Joseph Wambaugh wrote better cop fiction. Hell, even Tony Hillerman writes better cop fiction.
(Actually, I shouldn't slam Hillerman too hard. Some of his Navajo Tribal Police stories are pointless handjobs, reminiscent of the worst "In the Heat of the Night" episodes, but some of them are actually pretty powerful.)
That would be great:) Maybe I'd be able to use C-x C-s to save in word (well, it works now.... but you know what I mean) and be able to M-x ispell-buffer. GNU/EWord 2000
Yeah. They'll make emacs the default editor for Outhouse Excuse. Nobody will be able to figure it out, nobody will use it, and nobody will spread a virus through mail again!
IRC, AOL let the customer choose wether to block mail from spammers or not. This does not seem to be the case with MAPS.
Of course MAPS doesn't give that choice to the end user. All MAPS does is publish a list. It's up to each ISP to decide what they want to do with the list, whether they want to flag incoming mail from listed sites as "suspicious" or drop all spamsite packets on the floor, or use MAPS in end-user filters or at the border routers, or anything in between.
Why should innocent parties have to go hunting for new ISPs because the vigilantes who run MAPS can't be bothered to worry about collateral damage? Unless the legal tradition has vastly changed in the last ten minutes, that's negligence on their part, and yes, they can and should be sued for it.
Um, no.
A few years ago, AOL started dropping all of the mail incoming from Cyberpromo. Cyberpromo sued. The court (a Federal District courd in PA) found that AOL was entirely within their right to drop any packets they wanted, and for any reason they wanted, including Cyberpromo's spam.
A few other cases have gone through various courts in the US with similar results. No case has ever found in favor of the spammer and no spam-specific[1] case has ever been heard at the appellate level.
[1] There was Rowan v. US Postal Service, back in the 60's or so. The final result was that the USPS was not obligated to force people to receive pmail that they didn't want. As this was from the US Supreme Court, and the postage-due nature of spam creates an even stronger legal argument against a "right to spam," it's pretty solid precedent.
I want the law to be ammended such that they are required to actively support software for alternative operating systems, and also to make sure that access control mechanisms only protect their legal rights, not the rights they would liekto have.
You really want MS writing *n?x software? Let's see...one of their releases (for XP)is relatively safe and stable as MSware goes. The other one (for *n?x) runs as root, listens on seventeen different ports, is full of buffer overflows, and has the strangest dependencies.
And it's hard to make technology that can be used for one purpose but no others. Gunmakers have struggled with this, and have been sued because of this problem. Automakers could likely end up being sued over their inability to make a car that can't be driven drunk or recklessly. Explosives can be used to cut bedrock and remove stumps, and can also be used to bring down bridges and buildings. However, DuPont can't control what the end-user does.
I'm not sure that hard-drive controllers can be made smarter than that.
A better solution is to shitcan this bill. And then shitcan Senator Hollings. And then shitcan a half-dozen or so other senators just for being seen in the same room as him when he went public with this. "I didn't vote for SSSCA!" "You didn't speak against it quickly enough! Get your ass into that unemployment line!"
It'll do wonders, when we can convince the Congress that they can damn well do what we tell them to do within the Constitution, or they can go on food stamps.
After all, with the advent of XP, no producer-consumer needs words like those.Just like "privacy" and "invasion" do nothing but cloud issues and we fully expect them to be purged by 2010.
Why don't they train them for more stable jobs? Like something in healthcare or public service.
Public service my ass. Once someone is known as a gang member, his chances of being a police officer go out the window, effectively forever. We will NOT take that kind of chance. The conventional wisdom is that once they're in, odds are they'll never entirely leave. That's conventional wisdom because it's true more often than not. If a gangbanger becomes a cop, then he is a gangbanger with arrest powers, a concealed-weapons license, and training that could endanger other cops.
Their odds with fire departments aren't much better. No hosedragger wants to have the prospect of his fire crews having knife fights in the bays.
Chicago actually had a major problem with this a few years ago. Gang members would apply and somehow slip through the background investigation. After their academy graduations and training, they got caught using their official authority to protect their gangs and harass the other ones.
But some day, some self-appointed "community activist" is probably going to knowingly appoint some gangbanger into police/fire duty. I just hope like hell I don't live there.
...if i leave my back door unlocked and hanging wide open, and somebody robs me blind while i sit by and watch them do it, am i a victim of terrorism?
Probably not. Terrorism is more in the actor's motivation than anything else.
However, contributory negligence doesn't really exist in criminal law. Your bad judgement is no more a mitigating factor for the defendant than the fact that a rape victim was provocatively dressed. Bank robbers can't defend themselves in court by noting that the bank didn't have armed security. And no court would accept a virus writer defending himself by saying that Microsoft writes insecure code.
I agree. If a "circumvention device" is illegal, then "virus enabling software" should be too.:)
Excellent insight. I'm going to write my Senators and demand that C and perl compilers be subject to strict licensing requirements. The Founding Fathers clearly never intended for just anybody to have the power to write virii and copy-prevention circumvention devices and strong cryptography.
I think you are very wrong about this. It wasn't that long ago that BillyG and MS where writing off the internet as irrelivent.
Now take a look at what they are up to.
Exactly. To them, the internet is irrelevant. What's relevant is the proprietary network that they're trying to build. They're not investing in the internet. They're trying to out-AOL AOL.
Gates already has his legacy, maybe you are right and he doesn't think so, but think, he was at the top of an era.
Which still begs the questions: Does he think so, and is that enough for him?
I doubt he has enough. Part of being an egomaniac is the need to always be right. A change of course at Microsoft like the one that IBM made would amount to saying, "We're wrong about how we should have done this." That's an admission that I don't think Gates is capable of making.
I mean, yes, he was a part of making computing accessable to the masses. I'm not sure how much of that was his genius and how much was Apple's stupidity, but he's earned some place in history for that. But some people just need more, more, more...
That's one of the most common tragic flaws in literature: Some people don't know when to walk away, and that destroys them and the people around them. I think that's where Gates is headed, and I think that's where he'll likely take Microsoft if they let him.
Time and time again, the schools and students have proven that what they need isn't the latest and greatest calculator or the fastest internet connection. They need skilled and motivated teachers.
At what they're willing to pay teachers? Not likely.
Actually, we pay the taxes and bitch about them nonstop, so it's really a question of what we're willing to pay the teachers. My county is one of the most populous in Colorado, and theoretically has the best school system. It's good enough that parents in neighboring Denver scramble to get their kids accepted to our public schools.
Now let's look at some numbers: $25000/year pre-tax for a primary school teacher with a B.Ed. Not much more for that for a primary school teacher with a M.Ed. And an average two-bedroom apartment rents for $750-plus a month, or $9000/year. It's not easy to live on a teacher's salary, and god help the teacher that actually wants to buy a house on that kind of money, with the average single-family home costing over $220,000 in the metro area.
Add to that the working conditions. The school day for teachers starts at around 7:30. They don't often get home until 5-6PM, and then they have to bring the work home with them. Add the work on weekends, and you're up to about 60 hours/week during the school year. Overtime pay? HA!
And the parents who make it more difficult to actually teach. Who complain about their children actually having homework, and then complain that their children (who didn't do the homework) aren't learning.
There's a culture in this country where almost everybody is an expert on some things. As a cop, I see it all the time. Some guy decides that because he got a ticket once and he watches NYPD Blue, he's perfectly competent to tell me how to do my job. The fact that I went through college , an academy and Field Training (about seven months total beyond my BA), and about fifteen hundred hours of various continuing ed beyond that doesn't tell him that I may actually know more about policing than he does.
I only mention that because teachers have it even worse. Everybody seems to think that, because they spent twelve years in school throwing spitballs and smoking pot in the restrooms, they know all about education. They know all about what the teachers should be doing. And they know that they don't need to spend the money to attract qualified and skilled people. And a ten-year teacher with a B.Ed makes half to two-thirds of what I make as a ten-year cop, or what my brother, the twelve-year firefighter makes.
Sure, they start out motivated. And after about three years of what I've described, they decide they don't need the crap that they have to eat at the hands of the self-appointed experts.
You want good schools? You need parents who actually make their children take it seriously, and who can let the teachers do their job. It's no different than calling a doctor-are you going to tell him how to remove an inflamed appendix?
There's a difference between the two, though. IBM knew when to give up trying to be the center of the universe. I don't think Gates and company are capable of suppressing their egos to the degree necessary.
Society is full of people who want to have their legacy, and want to be "men of destiny." These are people who want to be the kinds of cultural icons that live on forever. IBM thankfully didn't have too many of them at the helm. That meant that they didn't have individual egos looking for their places in the sun at the expense of the rest of the company and the world at large. In plain English, that meant that when the world changed and IBM ceased to be the alpha male, they made that transition.
Microsoft isn't in quite the same positon. They don't control any major hardware that the rest of the world needs. While they have a number of products of varying quality, they don't control anything completely indispensable. The reason for their control is their position.
Problem: The value of a position changes with time. Microsoft can learn when they've picked the wrong fight, maybe. That kind of perception means they can back away and stay alive.
Not with Gates, etc. at the helm. Even the most ardent MS/Gates-supporter would have to agree: whatever virtues Gates has, humility is not one of them. Gates really wants his legacy and his place in the history books, and Microsoft is a means to that end. Just like Bill Clinton spending his last year desperately seeking a legacy, just like RMS who wants the entire English language prefaced with GNU/, Gates wants to be a man of destiny.
That means that he sees Microsoft as being a vehicle, and not much more. I doubt that he even cares about the profits. And that means that he'll take the company into some really bad fights to support his own self-image. Even if the company's survival depended on his walking away.
(Yes, I bash MS and Gates a lot. That being said, if they released an open-source Word for KDE, I'd buy it. Possibly even at retail.)
I'm kinda surprised that the DoD would go on with their decision to make civilian GPS as accurate as it is technologically possible, even after we know that the hijackers located and flew into their targets on September 11th using civilian GPS. I'm not saying that the hijackers should spoil the treat for the rest of us. I just find it paradoxical.
Why? It's a navigation system. Of course it's going to be installed on commercial airliners.
Remember the line from "Hunt for Red October?" (The movie, not the book): "With a map and a stopwatch I can fly the Alps in a plane with no windows." It's not much more complicated. Without precise satellite equipment, the hijackers would be forced to navigate with a chart and a compass and an airspeed indicator and a clock. That buys an extra minute or ninety seconds of life in the target building. Not much help at all.
Shutting down GPS will really hurt civil aviation, but with no benefit. Better to just keep the terrs off the flight deck.
In the end it all costs roughly the same. The reason why internet tax was thought up is because tons of people can wait for what they want
As of yet, there is no special "internet tax." The tax you get assessed on online sales is your SALES tax, at the exact same rate as if you bought the goods in question at the retailer down the street.
If the balance between internet and retail store is broken, it would screw over everything.
Yeah. One of them has to actually charge and account for sales taxes. The other one does it on the honor system with no enforcement effort. Really balanced.
If buying over the internet costed more money AND time than retail stores, it would screw over the world.
Makes you wonder just how the world got along for so long without the internet.
In fact, no taxation without representation!
You've got representation. It's in your city council and state assembly where they actually pass sales tax laws. (Except in Colorado, where a lot of the sales taxes are for special districts and are actually passed by referendum. Direct democracy, which explains why the Broncos are fucking us over again. How's that for representation?)
Is there a way of tracking people who say this and getting some estimates on how many actually follow through with it?
Yeah. If you see it, just automatically assume the speaker is full of shit. Last year, the US was full of people who said "If George Bush gets elected, I'm leaving the US." Those people included Barbra Streisand, one of the Baldwins, and about a half-dozen of the yuppies who have been ruining my neighborhood for the last decade.
Not one of them has kept the promise. It's really too bad, because IMHO a nation without Baldwins, Streisands, or idiot yuppies who move to Colorado and bitch about the cold is a happy nation.
1st Amendment. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press.
Um, no. Read the Amendment again. "Congress shall make no law..." That means that the Amendment is a restriction on GOVERNMENT action.
Your argument has already been tried, though. Scamfraud Wallace's Cyberpromo sued Compuserve for routing Cyberpromo spam to/dev/null. The court hearing the case (a Fed district court in PA) held that the First Amendment did not confer a right to spam and did not stop Compuserve from filtering.
Of course I would prefer to palce email spam under jurisdiction of the junk fax law!
..which was also attacked on First Amendment grounds, in the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The junk fax law was upheld.
The whole point of fighting for freedom is that it is even the freedoms of those we don't like that we are preserving, or those we wished would have no freedom. Freedom is only as great as its lowest common denominator.
Whose freedom are we talking about here? Mine. Specifically, MY freedom to decide who is allowed to use MY SMTP server. I paid for the server. I decide who is allowed to send through it and who is allowed to receive through it. If somebody thinks I need to let him use it without my permission, then I trust that he'll understand when I spraypaint _my_ business's advertisements on his car's windshield.
So yes, I think that this is reasonable and a laudable position to take. Censorship is especially a lowest common denominator freedom-- who decides the standards on which things are censored? How are false accusations handled? Can that censorship be turned on you or I?
Censorship has nothing to do with this discussion. MAPS is publishing a list of IP addresses and representing that "These IP's have been implicated in spamming. We have tried to contact the owners of these IP's. Some of the owners could not be reached. Others have refused to take measures to prevent spamming from their services."
That's all they do: publish the list. I used to use it as a true blocklist. Other people I know have used it to insert an X-Spam header into incoming email. It's up to each individual admin to implement it and decide how it's to be used.
You might also take a look at the US Constitution. Show me the _EXACT_ wording that gives a right to send or receive email. It ain't there. Nobody has a right to send me email and have it received. No sensible ISP will make any guarantee that email will go through.
And if someone doesn't like a spamblocked ISP, then he has to remember that he doesn't own the ISP. He's a customer. Customers are worth listening to, but they don't own the machines. If they want to be in charge of a mail server, then they should buy their own. Sendmail is free and early Pentiums are damned cheap. And considering what volume of my incoming mail is spam, I doubt they want the increase in rates that I'd have to charge to pay for the larger pipes and larger hard drives.
I floated the question about two years ago, back when MAPS was the Great White Hope of the pro-property-rights people, and got better than 75% saying to go ahead and filter.
And when someone doesn't like MAPS, thinks they're unreliable or has false info, they can get rid of them easily enough, stop using the MAPS RBL in the filters. Contrary to a popular delusion among spammers, nobody holds a gun to anybody's head and forces them to use MAPS, SPEWS, ORBZ, or any of the other lists.
So you're willing to let a target know when they get wiretapped or traced, right?
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. It's already legal to tap or trap-and-trace someone without telling him. Changing the venue of the court that signs the court order wouldn't change that. All it would do, is make it harder for a defendant to see the evidence against him when it actually goes to trial.
Surely such a person would of course ignore the summons to the court, and simply carry on business as usual.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's not hard for anybody to ignore a summons-someone blows off one of mine at least once every other week. All that happens is the court puts out a bench warrant for them.
Give me a break. Yes, you need something like this. You sometimes need the ability to get a secret court order.
Um, no we don't. Taps/traps-and-traces are already secret until they get introduced into court. Having a Star Chamber only means that the defendant wouldn't be able to see the probable cause used to justify the invasion when the case goes to trial. Never mind the legal requirements of discovery in the US...
But then, I'm just a dumb-shit cop. You obviously know more than me about what we need.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in Colorado our judges do. It's not generally subject to bargaining. However, every defendant is given an opportunity to address the court to explain what sentence he feels is appropriate and why.
And that's a good thing, IMHO. Our judicial system is what's called an adversarial system. That means that each side pleads their own case with the judge serving mainly as a referee. Such a system is a farce if the defendant isn't given an opportunity. That's why defendants have the right to compel the appearance of witnesses-the same subpoena power as prosecutors. That's why defendants have the right to examine evidence against them and to present evidence in their favor. And that's why defendants are allowed to address the court at sentencing.
Granted, the sentencing speech is usually so much bullshit: "Your honor, I know I shouldn't have smacked the shit out of my wife. I need help with anger management and alcohol management" and that sort of bullshit that insults the intelligence of the judge, both lawyers, the arresting officers, and pretty much everyone else. However, sometimes there's actually some valid and useful information given that leads judges to go easier than they would have, had they remained ignorant.
Granted, we have a victim's rights amendment whcih gives victims (or their families' in homicide cases) the right to also address the court at sentencing, for certain (violent) crimes. In those cases, defendants who don't want to have their nuts stapled to the wall generally don't bother to give speeches.
But anyway, yes, defendants are asked. We can't be the only state that does that.
This one does. My favorite authors aren't all SF. Heinlein and Asimov, sure. However, I also have read a lot by Joseph Wambaugh (a lot of stories about LAPD officers, most of them fictional. There's no way I'd tolerate some of his characters' stunts in my department, but they were good for a laugh and he does a wonderful job of capturing the stress and pain of the job in a way that even non-cops can understand), Edward Abbey (whose only psuedo-SF work was _Good News_), Tony Hillerman (more mystery/cop fiction-his Navajo Tribal Police stories give very good treatment of people who are caught between two conflicting worlds and conflicting sets of obligations), and Hunter Thompson (because psychosis is timeless).<p>
I'm also willing to bet that Gabriel Garcia Marquez will live forever. _Erendira_ and _El Amor en el Tiempo de Colera_ are two of my favorites.<p>
And I hope like hell that whoever does the Chilton's auto service manuals is still around if I am.<p>
<i>And if the books and authors mentioned above are 'classics,' what the hell do we call Shakespeare, Johnson and others?</i><p>
Classics as well. However, some professor of mine once said something along the lines of "if it wasn't originally written in Latin or Greek, it's not a classic."
Tom Clancy spent the 1990's re-writing the same book many times over. So, at least one of the variants will still be around in fifty years.
However, Jerry Pournelle wrote better military fiction and Joseph Wambaugh wrote better cop fiction. Hell, even Tony Hillerman writes better cop fiction.
(Actually, I shouldn't slam Hillerman too hard. Some of his Navajo Tribal Police stories are pointless handjobs, reminiscent of the worst "In the Heat of the Night" episodes, but some of them are actually pretty powerful.)
On a recent Redhat, I believe that you just browse through rpmfind to locate the openssh rpms, then click install.
In theory, Mandrake Update does that. In practice, not always. And the KDE front-end doesn't give any helpful error messages.
In practical terms, sometimes you just have to go through the command line. At least with all *n?xes, that's still an option.
Yeah. They'll make emacs the default editor for Outhouse Excuse. Nobody will be able to figure it out, nobody will use it, and nobody will spread a virus through mail again!
Of course MAPS doesn't give that choice to the end user. All MAPS does is publish a list. It's up to each ISP to decide what they want to do with the list, whether they want to flag incoming mail from listed sites as "suspicious" or drop all spamsite packets on the floor, or use MAPS in end-user filters or at the border routers, or anything in between.
Um, no.
A few years ago, AOL started dropping all of the mail incoming from Cyberpromo. Cyberpromo sued. The court (a Federal District courd in PA) found that AOL was entirely within their right to drop any packets they wanted, and for any reason they wanted, including Cyberpromo's spam.
A few other cases have gone through various courts in the US with similar results. No case has ever found in favor of the spammer and no spam-specific[1] case has ever been heard at the appellate level.
[1] There was Rowan v. US Postal Service, back in the 60's or so. The final result was that the USPS was not obligated to force people to receive pmail that they didn't want. As this was from the US Supreme Court, and the postage-due nature of spam creates an even stronger legal argument against a "right to spam," it's pretty solid precedent.
I'd like to kill Bill Gates.
Now highlight & right click... theasourus.
Tried it. No shit, I BSOD'ed the machine when I did. PIV, 512M RAM, etc., crashed because I tried to open the thesaurus.
You really want MS writing *n?x software? Let's see...one of their releases (for XP)is relatively safe and stable as MSware goes. The other one (for *n?x) runs as root, listens on seventeen different ports, is full of buffer overflows, and has the strangest dependencies.
And it's hard to make technology that can be used for one purpose but no others. Gunmakers have struggled with this, and have been sued because of this problem. Automakers could likely end up being sued over their inability to make a car that can't be driven drunk or recklessly. Explosives can be used to cut bedrock and remove stumps, and can also be used to bring down bridges and buildings. However, DuPont can't control what the end-user does.
I'm not sure that hard-drive controllers can be made smarter than that.
A better solution is to shitcan this bill. And then shitcan Senator Hollings. And then shitcan a half-dozen or so other senators just for being seen in the same room as him when he went public with this. "I didn't vote for SSSCA!" "You didn't speak against it quickly enough! Get your ass into that unemployment line!"
It'll do wonders, when we can convince the Congress that they can damn well do what we tell them to do within the Constitution, or they can go on food stamps.
After all, with the advent of XP, no producer-consumer needs words like those.Just like "privacy" and "invasion" do nothing but cloud issues and we fully expect them to be purged by 2010.
Public service my ass. Once someone is known as a gang member, his chances of being a police officer go out the window, effectively forever. We will NOT take that kind of chance. The conventional wisdom is that once they're in, odds are they'll never entirely leave. That's conventional wisdom because it's true more often than not. If a gangbanger becomes a cop, then he is a gangbanger with arrest powers, a concealed-weapons license, and training that could endanger other cops.
Their odds with fire departments aren't much better. No hosedragger wants to have the prospect of his fire crews having knife fights in the bays.
Chicago actually had a major problem with this a few years ago. Gang members would apply and somehow slip through the background investigation. After their academy graduations and training, they got caught using their official authority to protect their gangs and harass the other ones.
But some day, some self-appointed "community activist" is probably going to knowingly appoint some gangbanger into police/fire duty. I just hope like hell I don't live there.
Probably not. Terrorism is more in the actor's motivation than anything else.
However, contributory negligence doesn't really exist in criminal law. Your bad judgement is no more a mitigating factor for the defendant than the fact that a rape victim was provocatively dressed. Bank robbers can't defend themselves in court by noting that the bank didn't have armed security. And no court would accept a virus writer defending himself by saying that Microsoft writes insecure code.
Excellent insight. I'm going to write my Senators and demand that C and perl compilers be subject to strict licensing requirements. The Founding Fathers clearly never intended for just anybody to have the power to write virii and copy-prevention circumvention devices and strong cryptography.
Now take a look at what they are up to.
Exactly. To them, the internet is irrelevant. What's relevant is the proprietary network that they're trying to build. They're not investing in the internet. They're trying to out-AOL AOL.
Which still begs the questions: Does he think so, and is that enough for him?
I doubt he has enough. Part of being an egomaniac is the need to always be right. A change of course at Microsoft like the one that IBM made would amount to saying, "We're wrong about how we should have done this." That's an admission that I don't think Gates is capable of making.
I mean, yes, he was a part of making computing accessable to the masses. I'm not sure how much of that was his genius and how much was Apple's stupidity, but he's earned some place in history for that. But some people just need more, more, more...
That's one of the most common tragic flaws in literature: Some people don't know when to walk away, and that destroys them and the people around them. I think that's where Gates is headed, and I think that's where he'll likely take Microsoft if they let him.
At what they're willing to pay teachers? Not likely.
Actually, we pay the taxes and bitch about them nonstop, so it's really a question of what we're willing to pay the teachers. My county is one of the most populous in Colorado, and theoretically has the best school system. It's good enough that parents in neighboring Denver scramble to get their kids accepted to our public schools.
Now let's look at some numbers: $25000/year pre-tax for a primary school teacher with a B.Ed. Not much more for that for a primary school teacher with a M.Ed. And an average two-bedroom apartment rents for $750-plus a month, or $9000/year. It's not easy to live on a teacher's salary, and god help the teacher that actually wants to buy a house on that kind of money, with the average single-family home costing over $220,000 in the metro area.
Add to that the working conditions. The school day for teachers starts at around 7:30. They don't often get home until 5-6PM, and then they have to bring the work home with them. Add the work on weekends, and you're up to about 60 hours/week during the school year. Overtime pay? HA!
And the parents who make it more difficult to actually teach. Who complain about their children actually having homework, and then complain that their children (who didn't do the homework) aren't learning.
There's a culture in this country where almost everybody is an expert on some things. As a cop, I see it all the time. Some guy decides that because he got a ticket once and he watches NYPD Blue, he's perfectly competent to tell me how to do my job. The fact that I went through college , an academy and Field Training (about seven months total beyond my BA), and about fifteen hundred hours of various continuing ed beyond that doesn't tell him that I may actually know more about policing than he does.
I only mention that because teachers have it even worse. Everybody seems to think that, because they spent twelve years in school throwing spitballs and smoking pot in the restrooms, they know all about education. They know all about what the teachers should be doing. And they know that they don't need to spend the money to attract qualified and skilled people. And a ten-year teacher with a B.Ed makes half to two-thirds of what I make as a ten-year cop, or what my brother, the twelve-year firefighter makes.
Sure, they start out motivated. And after about three years of what I've described, they decide they don't need the crap that they have to eat at the hands of the self-appointed experts.
You want good schools? You need parents who actually make their children take it seriously, and who can let the teachers do their job. It's no different than calling a doctor-are you going to tell him how to remove an inflamed appendix?
There's a difference between the two, though. IBM knew when to give up trying to be the center of the universe. I don't think Gates and company are capable of suppressing their egos to the degree necessary.
Society is full of people who want to have their legacy, and want to be "men of destiny." These are people who want to be the kinds of cultural icons that live on forever. IBM thankfully didn't have too many of them at the helm. That meant that they didn't have individual egos looking for their places in the sun at the expense of the rest of the company and the world at large. In plain English, that meant that when the world changed and IBM ceased to be the alpha male, they made that transition.
Microsoft isn't in quite the same positon. They don't control any major hardware that the rest of the world needs. While they have a number of products of varying quality, they don't control anything completely indispensable. The reason for their control is their position.
Problem: The value of a position changes with time. Microsoft can learn when they've picked the wrong fight, maybe. That kind of perception means they can back away and stay alive.
Not with Gates, etc. at the helm. Even the most ardent MS/Gates-supporter would have to agree: whatever virtues Gates has, humility is not one of them. Gates really wants his legacy and his place in the history books, and Microsoft is a means to that end. Just like Bill Clinton spending his last year desperately seeking a legacy, just like RMS who wants the entire English language prefaced with GNU/, Gates wants to be a man of destiny.
That means that he sees Microsoft as being a vehicle, and not much more. I doubt that he even cares about the profits. And that means that he'll take the company into some really bad fights to support his own self-image. Even if the company's survival depended on his walking away.
(Yes, I bash MS and Gates a lot. That being said, if they released an open-source Word for KDE, I'd buy it. Possibly even at retail.)
Why? It's a navigation system. Of course it's going to be installed on commercial airliners.
Remember the line from "Hunt for Red October?" (The movie, not the book): "With a map and a stopwatch I can fly the Alps in a plane with no windows." It's not much more complicated. Without precise satellite equipment, the hijackers would be forced to navigate with a chart and a compass and an airspeed indicator and a clock. That buys an extra minute or ninety seconds of life in the target building. Not much help at all.
Shutting down GPS will really hurt civil aviation, but with no benefit. Better to just keep the terrs off the flight deck.
As of yet, there is no special "internet tax." The tax you get assessed on online sales is your SALES tax, at the exact same rate as if you bought the goods in question at the retailer down the street.
If the balance between internet and retail store is broken, it would screw over everything.
Yeah. One of them has to actually charge and account for sales taxes. The other one does it on the honor system with no enforcement effort. Really balanced.
If buying over the internet costed more money AND time than retail stores, it would screw over the world.
Makes you wonder just how the world got along for so long without the internet.
In fact, no taxation without representation!
You've got representation. It's in your city council and state assembly where they actually pass sales tax laws. (Except in Colorado, where a lot of the sales taxes are for special districts and are actually passed by referendum. Direct democracy, which explains why the Broncos are fucking us over again. How's that for representation?)
Yeah. If you see it, just automatically assume the speaker is full of shit. Last year, the US was full of people who said "If George Bush gets elected, I'm leaving the US." Those people included Barbra Streisand, one of the Baldwins, and about a half-dozen of the yuppies who have been ruining my neighborhood for the last decade.
Not one of them has kept the promise. It's really too bad, because IMHO a nation without Baldwins, Streisands, or idiot yuppies who move to Colorado and bitch about the cold is a happy nation.
Um, no. Read the Amendment again. "Congress shall make no law..." That means that the Amendment is a restriction on GOVERNMENT action.
Your argument has already been tried, though. Scamfraud Wallace's Cyberpromo sued Compuserve for routing Cyberpromo spam to
Of course I would prefer to palce email spam under jurisdiction of the junk fax law!
..which was also attacked on First Amendment grounds, in the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The junk fax law was upheld.
Whose freedom are we talking about here? Mine. Specifically, MY freedom to decide who is allowed to use MY SMTP server. I paid for the server. I decide who is allowed to send through it and who is allowed to receive through it. If somebody thinks I need to let him use it without my permission, then I trust that he'll understand when I spraypaint _my_ business's advertisements on his car's windshield.
So yes, I think that this is reasonable and a laudable position to take. Censorship is especially a lowest common denominator freedom-- who decides the standards on which things are censored? How are false accusations handled? Can that censorship be turned on you or I?
Censorship has nothing to do with this discussion. MAPS is publishing a list of IP addresses and representing that "These IP's have been implicated in spamming. We have tried to contact the owners of these IP's. Some of the owners could not be reached. Others have refused to take measures to prevent spamming from their services."
That's all they do: publish the list. I used to use it as a true blocklist. Other people I know have used it to insert an X-Spam header into incoming email. It's up to each individual admin to implement it and decide how it's to be used.
You might also take a look at the US Constitution. Show me the _EXACT_ wording that gives a right to send or receive email. It ain't there. Nobody has a right to send me email and have it received. No sensible ISP will make any guarantee that email will go through.
And if someone doesn't like a spamblocked ISP, then he has to remember that he doesn't own the ISP. He's a customer. Customers are worth listening to, but they don't own the machines. If they want to be in charge of a mail server, then they should buy their own. Sendmail is free and early Pentiums are damned cheap. And considering what volume of my incoming mail is spam, I doubt they want the increase in rates that I'd have to charge to pay for the larger pipes and larger hard drives.
I floated the question about two years ago, back when MAPS was the Great White Hope of the pro-property-rights people, and got better than 75% saying to go ahead and filter.
And when someone doesn't like MAPS, thinks they're unreliable or has false info, they can get rid of them easily enough, stop using the MAPS RBL in the filters. Contrary to a popular delusion among spammers, nobody holds a gun to anybody's head and forces them to use MAPS, SPEWS, ORBZ, or any of the other lists.
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. It's already legal to tap or trap-and-trace someone without telling him. Changing the venue of the court that signs the court order wouldn't change that. All it would do, is make it harder for a defendant to see the evidence against him when it actually goes to trial.
Surely such a person would of course ignore the summons to the court, and simply carry on business as usual.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. It's not hard for anybody to ignore a summons-someone blows off one of mine at least once every other week. All that happens is the court puts out a bench warrant for them.
Give me a break. Yes, you need something like this. You sometimes need the ability to get a secret court order.
Um, no we don't. Taps/traps-and-traces are already secret until they get introduced into court. Having a Star Chamber only means that the defendant wouldn't be able to see the probable cause used to justify the invasion when the case goes to trial. Never mind the legal requirements of discovery in the US...
But then, I'm just a dumb-shit cop. You obviously know more than me about what we need.
If that means that I don't have six million port-80 connect attempts per hour, I'll take it at a black market price right now.