It just seemed like the Berman/Braga team saw that George Lucas made a financial (if not artistic) success of the idea and therefore decided it was worth copying.
No, it's more like Gene Roddenberry's dying wish (that humans never argue with each other in any following series - humanity is supposed to get over that shit) makes for really bad TV. So since that only applies to sequels, it's about bloody time there was a prequel, so that there could be some semblance of emotion again.
And while Enterprise started off well enough, it started falling flat pretty quickly. Especially when you start inventing new races that never showed up in any of the series that came "afterwards."
One of the things DS9 did much better than both earlier and later ST series is flesh out other races
No, it fleshed out the Ferengi really. One of my biggest peeves with the Star Trek franchise is how one dimensional all the races are. It basicallly took single aspects of the human race and made other races utterly single-minded in that aspect.
The Klingons see glorious death in battle as their highest ideal, something they've been breeding for for thousands of years. Don't ask me how the hell they managed to become a spacefaring race, because it seems that wimpy occupations like scientists, bakers, and librarians are simply not allowed. These occupations are absolutely necessary to any civilization.
The Ferengi, I can dig the greed thing. That *almost* makes sense. But they probably exterminate their unemployed. Or worse, sell them at a markup.
The Vulcans have their logic, to the exclusion of all else. Too bad creative thinking is required for science...
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
The dominion... they seek... dominion... over everthing... Mmmkay.
But the humans? What do the humans believe in? Well, nothing it seems. And as the franchise got older, it seemed to get worse and worse that way. In TNG, everyone was perfect and boring. Or flat and featureless, take your pick. We apparently still had an emotion or two, but mostly it seems that we'd completely stopped bothering with art and music, since the most modern thing anyone listened to was jazz, the most modern drama anyone was interested in was Shakespeare, and the only pictures to be seen anywhere were drawn by an android. Noone's religious, noone drinks, and noone is unemployed. It's like we're all turning into Vulcans or something.
Remember - you too were once an annoying helpless newbie!
Helpless perhaps, but not annoying. There's this thing called reading the frickin' manual that my dear old Dad taught me, combined with the infinite amount of documentation online, combined with numerous bits of advice that were passed on to me as soon as I got online.
The most pathetic thing of all is the check-the-box form that people keep posting on Slashdot purporting to show that a particular method of ending spam won't work. It's become a substitute for intelligent discussion. People just check the boxes, and don't bother to justify which ones they checked.
Wow, it's amazing. You must not have been on the internet long, because you are utterly blind to the *reason* that people use these checklists. It's the same reason people create FAQs, and insist that people who ask questions that have been answered before, read them to find the answers. It's because everything on the list has been argued to death millions of times in thousands of forums, including this one.
You are not the first one to come up with your idea of How To Fight Spam. You won't be the last. It's been done before. But since you beg for understanding, here's why your idea won't work.
Your idea will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it. Once the massive undertaking of switching to your secure key infrastructure is completed overnight, trillions of dollars spent, and countless hours of sleep lost, you will quickly find that just like today, every server in the world will be playing catch-up trying to find and blacklist all the boneheaded servers that your scheme specifically allows for. And users will forever be trying to update their whitelists for each incoming message that arrives from an anonymous source. Either that, or they will find that every time they try to get a computer to send them e-mail, they will find that it can't because the entire point is to make automated e-mail go away.
At the same time, you argue for what amounts to a centralized database of Good People (or even a decentralized database of Good People, it doesn't matter). What will advertisers pay to get access to this database? Who will be in charge? What will be their motivation? When will they start to abuse this massive power? These questions apply to both centralized and decentralized databases. Just like DNS can be used to attack systems, so could this.
Moreover, you are attempting to create a byzantine system with allowances for certain aspects of human behaviour. You think you have all the bases covered, but you do not. In any defensive mechanism, there ways to get around the defenses. People, being the problem solvers they are, will find them and exploit them. The very best plan is the simplest plan because there are fewer things to go wrong, but at the same time they also have the largest vulnerabilities. Because your scheme is so complex, it faces the two headed monster of unreliability AND vulnerability. If spammers aren't jamming it, then human error will ensure that it doesn't work at all most of the time.
The fact of the matter is that e-mail, just like regular mail, is supposed to be open to everyone. That means sending messages from any source to any recipient is supposed to be possible, and should be. The problem is not due to its open nature, but that the same automation that makes it cheap and easy also makes it cheap for abusers to exploit on a grand scale. Even if it were hard and expensive, it would still be a problem, just from different people - just look at the flyers you get in your regular mail. The only reason you don't get flyers for your local grocery store in your e-mail right now is due to how the first exploiters of this resource have made the practice a pariah among legitimate businesses. They are otherwise willing to spend millions every year to market directly to the consumer.
In conclusion, I think that your plan stinks. It's complicated, doesn't work in its intended purpose, and is horribly unreliable in concept, nevermind practice. Moreover, if you did the tiniest bit of research you will find that not only has the idea come forth before, it's been repeatedly struck down for all the reasons I've given. Your idea also demonstrates your complete lack of experience in these matters, and you should give up and find something better to do with your time.
Unless you're able to walk out of there you're a prisoner.
Yes, it's called capitalism. The only way your employer can keep you there is if he doesn't pay you enough to just fuck off for a year on a whim. And the reason he doesn't do the same is primarily because he's greedy and wants more than he's got.
Plus a couple thumbnails, because you wanted to see them *right away*.
This is the way it works: Data transmitted over a radio signal must be transmitted slower the farther away you are in order to be intelligible. As distance increases, so does interference, thus you need to place your blips farther apart and with greater amplitude or your bits will be lost in the static.
So the lander transmits all its data back to the orbiter at high speed, then the orbiter stores it for as long as it needs to before it transmits it all back to earth. At about 128 bps, if you're lucky.
So kindly be patient and STFU. It takes a while to download the pictures proper.
I mean having the uber-redundant, diesel-powered backup power in the server room fail.
Except the power didn't fail outside the server room, just inside it. There was a faulty breaker that died unexpectedly. Now, we had 100+ servers go down as a result of that, but we were pissed just the same, right along with about 20 other companies.
I'd post a link to the livejournal entry about the incident, but...
It kind of makes sense, as our brains are programmed for task switching at an early age with most kids being babysat by the TV and commercials being 30 seconds in length.
That explains why I can focus for long periods of time, and in fact it seems that unlike everyone else, I have a hard time multitasking.
Looks like I should have just gone into pre-press instead of being a systems administrator. After 5 years of experience, I'm getting paid $14.37 an hour, no benefits.
Mind you, I suspect that the printing industry is slightly more profitable than the ISP industry, which produces next to no profits for various reasons.
Alienware has some truly great cases. In fact, all the other ones I've seen mentioned here are ugly, square, or both. There's really not much on the style front here.
But because it is 'kooky', it is rejected out-of-hand.
Translation: Because crazy people practice it, it is rejected out of hand.
Homeopathy's followers are people who don't trust western doctors. They prefer "the traditional ways". These traditional ways typically involve magical properties bestowed upon intrinsically rare items, like the gizzards of snow tigers, or the tip (and only the very tip!) of a black rhino's horn. The ever-increasing rarity of these items creates ever-increasing demand, further entrenching their rarity and increasing their perceived value.
You want to know my personal experience with homeopathy? My maternal grandfather was a paranoid lunatic when he died of cancer. Because of his paranoia, he believed that Doctors were no good, and were just out to take his money (and this, in Canada). So when he found out he had colon cancer, he figured he didn't want to have anything to do with doctors and that he would cure himself at home with happy thoughts and herbal teas or some such. Of course, we know the results of his experiments.
Through my own experiments, I have discovered that the only way to cure someone of the flu is bed rest and time. With any luck, the fever will break and the patient will live. All the hand-waving in the world won't help them one way or the other.
Whose research is more valid? Neither. Neither of us have tested our theories on large enough subsets of the population to produce any meaningful results. But home remedies have a long tradition of harming patients enough that most of the things we believed a hundred years ago are no longer practiced.
oh lookit me i wrote qmail and its all uber secure
That's cute. His code may not have any bugs in it, but damn, does it ever have some huge logical flaws.
Qmail has the lovely lack of ability to reject e-mail while the SMTP connection is still active. What it does instead is it creates and sends a bounce message itself, instead of leaving that up to the sending server. What happens when you do this is you allow spammers to send e-mail to recipients in the To: line instead of the From: line, just by putting in a bogus To: line and putting the real recipient in the From: line.
There's a patch for this, but it involves setting up a list of e-mail addresses that are allowed to be accepted. Once you have several thousand e-mail addresses all over the place courtesy of Vpopmail, this becomes an impossible task.
2. Nobody did well with the homework if the entire class of 25 students only found 44 holes.
Wrong. This is an astounding success. He's taken a bunch of university students, thrown them at the most secure operating system known, given them this task, and came up with 44 security holes.
With an average of 1.76 security holes per student in 3 months time (assuming that this assignment was given at the beginning of the semesters - it probably wasn't), that's far more than the vast majority of UNIX programmers find in their entire lives, outside their own programming. How many security experts have accomplished the same feat in the past 3 months? I think that Dr. Bernstein was asking the impossible and got a miracle nonetheless.
I currently have a palmtop not unlike the HP-100LX: a Cassiopeia A-20. Its most important features are that it accepts CF cards, a limited number of PCMCIA cards (depending on the drivers mostly), and the serial port interface. Since it has a keyboard, it can be used as a dumb terminal, which for me is one of its most useful applications.
The problem is that it's too heavy to use for the most useful PDA applications: notepad, todo list, calendar, alarm clock, pocket watch. In fact, I can find full-featured laptops that are only about three times the weight that will run windows XP and thus power any PCMCIA card I want. Moreover, since the thing is obsolete, I can't find applications, or drivers for new hardware. Even to run Netbsd on it (which has support for the hardware, believe it or not), I actually need a version of Windows that it doesn't have, in order to run the bootloader.
Personally, I'm going back to a cheap PDA, just as soon as I buy a 2lb subnotebook to work as the dumb terminal I need.
I mean, sure, some of it is educational, but a lot of it is just flashy toys.
I think you missed the point here. It's more "they're more motivated into education, therefore they can understand shiny new tech toys," rather than "the shiny new tech toys are educational, therefore a culture that is more motivated into education are interested."
In other words, they're smarter and more willing to learn to use new technologies. I'd say about 80-90% of North Americans are not only computer illiterate (and they are, believe me), but they are *proud* to be computer illiterate. People make jokes about how they can't even set the time on their VCR all the time. The Japanese on the other hand, take pride in not only owning, but being able to use the latest electronic gadget.
This is the point the article is trying to make here.
10% still looks to small to some narrow minded web designers that think that people who don't use IE are idiots or a geek.
Um, it's worth noting that roughly 80%+ of the internet population knows about nothing beyond e-mail and the web. To them, the web *is* the internet. Tucows? Downloading? Browsers? If it doesn't come with the computer, it doesn't exist.
In fact, I think you would be shocked at the number of *webmasters* that have no clue whatsoever. It never ceases to amaze me to hear from people designing web pages for their business in Frontpage, and the painful process of explaining to them that no, we don't support that, it's horribly insecure and a royal pain overall, and that they have to download something called FTP. Most of them have asked questions like "download?" or "upload? I just want to publish!"
So many people have trouble with basic computer usage that getting them to try an alternative to that icon on their desktop called "The Internet" is a huge conceptual leap. 25% market share for any software that is an alternative to what comes with windows is a pipe dream.
Those people are math-challenged, or those who are trying to spin. The US would have, for the forseeable future, been a buyer on the carbon market. So yes, we'll be out of the carbon market, in the sense that we won't be paying other countries for the privelege of doing what we're doing now.
Actually, you're already out of the market, you just don't see it.
Like how European steel is cheaper than American steel. Why? More efficient, more productive plants. Now couldn't American steel producers benefit from this same increased efficiency? Why aren't they now? Largely because they've just been pissing and moaning for the government to save them, rather than doing it the Mom-and-apple-pie, All-American way and just innovating their way into the competition. You know, free-market style?
I don't get why the hell you guys don't just shut up and stop whining about finding ways to do things more efficiently. What possible ill effects could come about from using less coal and oil? Cleaner air? You feel that it means the terrorists win? What possible ill effects from using more and more, the way you are now? Poorer health, a possible global catastrophe, and the end of the way of life we've all enjoyed, which will bring about its own catastrophe.
So, who's with me in the fight against banning porn? Who will stand up and publicly announce that There Is Nothing Wrong With That? Who will demonstrate that porn consumers are normal, mentally healthy, god-fearing, middle class men and women, and not the filthy worms the Christian right makes us out to be?
Anyone?
The only way evil survives in the world is when good people stand by and do nothing.
saying that porn is ubiquitous now but compared to when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.'
Oh yeah. Porn's ubiquitousness now is leading us into the darkness of...
of...
Politics?
I think his point is that porn led him into politics. I bet he read in some Playboy article that the Kennedies get all the hot chicks. And he got that Playboy from some guy in a dark alley. So now that he's a sentator, he's going to do his best to keep that secret, and that way *he'll* get all the hot chicks.
Slashdot Mirror
It just seemed like the Berman/Braga team saw that George Lucas made a financial (if not artistic) success of the idea and therefore decided it was worth copying.
No, it's more like Gene Roddenberry's dying wish (that humans never argue with each other in any following series - humanity is supposed to get over that shit) makes for really bad TV. So since that only applies to sequels, it's about bloody time there was a prequel, so that there could be some semblance of emotion again.
And while Enterprise started off well enough, it started falling flat pretty quickly. Especially when you start inventing new races that never showed up in any of the series that came "afterwards."
One of the things DS9 did much better than both earlier and later ST series is flesh out other races
No, it fleshed out the Ferengi really. One of my biggest peeves with the Star Trek franchise is how one dimensional all the races are. It basicallly took single aspects of the human race and made other races utterly single-minded in that aspect.
The Klingons see glorious death in battle as their highest ideal, something they've been breeding for for thousands of years. Don't ask me how the hell they managed to become a spacefaring race, because it seems that wimpy occupations like scientists, bakers, and librarians are simply not allowed. These occupations are absolutely necessary to any civilization.
The Ferengi, I can dig the greed thing. That *almost* makes sense. But they probably exterminate their unemployed. Or worse, sell them at a markup.
The Vulcans have their logic, to the exclusion of all else. Too bad creative thinking is required for science...
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
The dominion... they seek... dominion... over everthing... Mmmkay.
But the humans? What do the humans believe in? Well, nothing it seems. And as the franchise got older, it seemed to get worse and worse that way. In TNG, everyone was perfect and boring. Or flat and featureless, take your pick. We apparently still had an emotion or two, but mostly it seems that we'd completely stopped bothering with art and music, since the most modern thing anyone listened to was jazz, the most modern drama anyone was interested in was Shakespeare, and the only pictures to be seen anywhere were drawn by an android. Noone's religious, noone drinks, and noone is unemployed. It's like we're all turning into Vulcans or something.
Remember - you too were once an annoying helpless newbie!
Helpless perhaps, but not annoying. There's this thing called reading the frickin' manual that my dear old Dad taught me, combined with the infinite amount of documentation online, combined with numerous bits of advice that were passed on to me as soon as I got online.
Smart people do it this way.
The most pathetic thing of all is the check-the-box form that people keep posting on Slashdot purporting to show that a particular method of ending spam won't work. It's become a substitute for intelligent discussion. People just check the boxes, and don't bother to justify which ones they checked.
Wow, it's amazing. You must not have been on the internet long, because you are utterly blind to the *reason* that people use these checklists. It's the same reason people create FAQs, and insist that people who ask questions that have been answered before, read them to find the answers. It's because everything on the list has been argued to death millions of times in thousands of forums, including this one.
You are not the first one to come up with your idea of How To Fight Spam. You won't be the last. It's been done before. But since you beg for understanding, here's why your idea won't work.
Your idea will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it. Once the massive undertaking of switching to your secure key infrastructure is completed overnight, trillions of dollars spent, and countless hours of sleep lost, you will quickly find that just like today, every server in the world will be playing catch-up trying to find and blacklist all the boneheaded servers that your scheme specifically allows for. And users will forever be trying to update their whitelists for each incoming message that arrives from an anonymous source. Either that, or they will find that every time they try to get a computer to send them e-mail, they will find that it can't because the entire point is to make automated e-mail go away.
At the same time, you argue for what amounts to a centralized database of Good People (or even a decentralized database of Good People, it doesn't matter). What will advertisers pay to get access to this database? Who will be in charge? What will be their motivation? When will they start to abuse this massive power? These questions apply to both centralized and decentralized databases. Just like DNS can be used to attack systems, so could this.
Moreover, you are attempting to create a byzantine system with allowances for certain aspects of human behaviour. You think you have all the bases covered, but you do not. In any defensive mechanism, there ways to get around the defenses. People, being the problem solvers they are, will find them and exploit them. The very best plan is the simplest plan because there are fewer things to go wrong, but at the same time they also have the largest vulnerabilities. Because your scheme is so complex, it faces the two headed monster of unreliability AND vulnerability. If spammers aren't jamming it, then human error will ensure that it doesn't work at all most of the time.
The fact of the matter is that e-mail, just like regular mail, is supposed to be open to everyone. That means sending messages from any source to any recipient is supposed to be possible, and should be. The problem is not due to its open nature, but that the same automation that makes it cheap and easy also makes it cheap for abusers to exploit on a grand scale. Even if it were hard and expensive, it would still be a problem, just from different people - just look at the flyers you get in your regular mail. The only reason you don't get flyers for your local grocery store in your e-mail right now is due to how the first exploiters of this resource have made the practice a pariah among legitimate businesses. They are otherwise willing to spend millions every year to market directly to the consumer.
In conclusion, I think that your plan stinks. It's complicated, doesn't work in its intended purpose, and is horribly unreliable in concept, nevermind practice. Moreover, if you did the tiniest bit of research you will find that not only has the idea come forth before, it's been repeatedly struck down for all the reasons I've given. Your idea also demonstrates your complete lack of experience in these matters, and you should give up and find something better to do with your time.
That 28.6% of adults don't use the internet, they use the eentarweb.
Before it takes root in society!
Ooops, too late!
Whoa! Dude! There are *bubbles* floating out of that thing in the picture!
What will they think of next?
Unless you're able to walk out of there you're a prisoner.
Yes, it's called capitalism. The only way your employer can keep you there is if he doesn't pay you enough to just fuck off for a year on a whim. And the reason he doesn't do the same is primarily because he's greedy and wants more than he's got.
Here's what they have at the ESA:
$ ls |wc
302 302 7628
Plus a couple thumbnails, because you wanted to see them *right away*.
This is the way it works: Data transmitted over a radio signal must be transmitted slower the farther away you are in order to be intelligible. As distance increases, so does interference, thus you need to place your blips farther apart and with greater amplitude or your bits will be lost in the static.
So the lander transmits all its data back to the orbiter at high speed, then the orbiter stores it for as long as it needs to before it transmits it all back to earth. At about 128 bps, if you're lucky.
So kindly be patient and STFU. It takes a while to download the pictures proper.
I mean having the uber-redundant, diesel-powered backup power in the server room fail.
Except the power didn't fail outside the server room, just inside it. There was a faulty breaker that died unexpectedly. Now, we had 100+ servers go down as a result of that, but we were pissed just the same, right along with about 20 other companies.
I'd post a link to the livejournal entry about the incident, but...
It kind of makes sense, as our brains are programmed for task switching at an early age with most kids being babysat by the TV and commercials being 30 seconds in length.
:)
That explains why I can focus for long periods of time, and in fact it seems that unlike everyone else, I have a hard time multitasking.
I preferred public television as a child.
Looks like I should have just gone into pre-press instead of being a systems administrator. After 5 years of experience, I'm getting paid $14.37 an hour, no benefits.
Mind you, I suspect that the printing industry is slightly more profitable than the ISP industry, which produces next to no profits for various reasons.
Alienware has some truly great cases. In fact, all the other ones I've seen mentioned here are ugly, square, or both. There's really not much on the style front here.
Noone mentioned them because their cases are ugly. At least, the ones they currently have on their website.
But because it is 'kooky', it is rejected out-of-hand.
Translation: Because crazy people practice it, it is rejected out of hand.
Homeopathy's followers are people who don't trust western doctors. They prefer "the traditional ways". These traditional ways typically involve magical properties bestowed upon intrinsically rare items, like the gizzards of snow tigers, or the tip (and only the very tip!) of a black rhino's horn. The ever-increasing rarity of these items creates ever-increasing demand, further entrenching their rarity and increasing their perceived value.
You want to know my personal experience with homeopathy? My maternal grandfather was a paranoid lunatic when he died of cancer. Because of his paranoia, he believed that Doctors were no good, and were just out to take his money (and this, in Canada). So when he found out he had colon cancer, he figured he didn't want to have anything to do with doctors and that he would cure himself at home with happy thoughts and herbal teas or some such. Of course, we know the results of his experiments.
Through my own experiments, I have discovered that the only way to cure someone of the flu is bed rest and time. With any luck, the fever will break and the patient will live. All the hand-waving in the world won't help them one way or the other.
Whose research is more valid? Neither. Neither of us have tested our theories on large enough subsets of the population to produce any meaningful results. But home remedies have a long tradition of harming patients enough that most of the things we believed a hundred years ago are no longer practiced.
And just *what* do you plan on doing with those monkeys, young man!?
oh lookit me i wrote qmail and its all uber secure
That's cute. His code may not have any bugs in it, but damn, does it ever have some huge logical flaws.
Qmail has the lovely lack of ability to reject e-mail while the SMTP connection is still active. What it does instead is it creates and sends a bounce message itself, instead of leaving that up to the sending server. What happens when you do this is you allow spammers to send e-mail to recipients in the To: line instead of the From: line, just by putting in a bogus To: line and putting the real recipient in the From: line.
There's a patch for this, but it involves setting up a list of e-mail addresses that are allowed to be accepted. Once you have several thousand e-mail addresses all over the place courtesy of Vpopmail, this becomes an impossible task.
So no, this man isn't a perfect programmer.
2. Nobody did well with the homework if the entire class of 25 students only found 44 holes.
Wrong. This is an astounding success. He's taken a bunch of university students, thrown them at the most secure operating system known, given them this task, and came up with 44 security holes.
With an average of 1.76 security holes per student in 3 months time (assuming that this assignment was given at the beginning of the semesters - it probably wasn't), that's far more than the vast majority of UNIX programmers find in their entire lives, outside their own programming. How many security experts have accomplished the same feat in the past 3 months? I think that Dr. Bernstein was asking the impossible and got a miracle nonetheless.
I currently have a palmtop not unlike the HP-100LX: a Cassiopeia A-20. Its most important features are that it accepts CF cards, a limited number of PCMCIA cards (depending on the drivers mostly), and the serial port interface. Since it has a keyboard, it can be used as a dumb terminal, which for me is one of its most useful applications.
The problem is that it's too heavy to use for the most useful PDA applications: notepad, todo list, calendar, alarm clock, pocket watch. In fact, I can find full-featured laptops that are only about three times the weight that will run windows XP and thus power any PCMCIA card I want. Moreover, since the thing is obsolete, I can't find applications, or drivers for new hardware. Even to run Netbsd on it (which has support for the hardware, believe it or not), I actually need a version of Windows that it doesn't have, in order to run the bootloader.
Personally, I'm going back to a cheap PDA, just as soon as I buy a 2lb subnotebook to work as the dumb terminal I need.
I mean, sure, some of it is educational, but a lot of it is just flashy toys.
I think you missed the point here. It's more "they're more motivated into education, therefore they can understand shiny new tech toys," rather than "the shiny new tech toys are educational, therefore a culture that is more motivated into education are interested."
In other words, they're smarter and more willing to learn to use new technologies. I'd say about 80-90% of North Americans are not only computer illiterate (and they are, believe me), but they are *proud* to be computer illiterate. People make jokes about how they can't even set the time on their VCR all the time. The Japanese on the other hand, take pride in not only owning, but being able to use the latest electronic gadget.
This is the point the article is trying to make here.
10% still looks to small to some narrow minded web designers that think that people who don't use IE are idiots or a geek.
Um, it's worth noting that roughly 80%+ of the internet population knows about nothing beyond e-mail and the web. To them, the web *is* the internet. Tucows? Downloading? Browsers? If it doesn't come with the computer, it doesn't exist.
In fact, I think you would be shocked at the number of *webmasters* that have no clue whatsoever. It never ceases to amaze me to hear from people designing web pages for their business in Frontpage, and the painful process of explaining to them that no, we don't support that, it's horribly insecure and a royal pain overall, and that they have to download something called FTP. Most of them have asked questions like "download?" or "upload? I just want to publish!"
So many people have trouble with basic computer usage that getting them to try an alternative to that icon on their desktop called "The Internet" is a huge conceptual leap. 25% market share for any software that is an alternative to what comes with windows is a pipe dream.
Those people are math-challenged, or those who are trying to spin. The US would have, for the forseeable future, been a buyer on the carbon market. So yes, we'll be out of the carbon market, in the sense that we won't be paying other countries for the privelege of doing what we're doing now.
Actually, you're already out of the market, you just don't see it.
Like how European steel is cheaper than American steel. Why? More efficient, more productive plants. Now couldn't American steel producers benefit from this same increased efficiency? Why aren't they now? Largely because they've just been pissing and moaning for the government to save them, rather than doing it the Mom-and-apple-pie, All-American way and just innovating their way into the competition. You know, free-market style?
I don't get why the hell you guys don't just shut up and stop whining about finding ways to do things more efficiently. What possible ill effects could come about from using less coal and oil? Cleaner air? You feel that it means the terrorists win? What possible ill effects from using more and more, the way you are now? Poorer health, a possible global catastrophe, and the end of the way of life we've all enjoyed, which will bring about its own catastrophe.
So, who's with me in the fight against banning porn? Who will stand up and publicly announce that There Is Nothing Wrong With That? Who will demonstrate that porn consumers are normal, mentally healthy, god-fearing, middle class men and women, and not the filthy worms the Christian right makes us out to be?
Anyone?
The only way evil survives in the world is when good people stand by and do nothing.
saying that porn is ubiquitous now but compared to when he was growing up and 'some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time.'
Oh yeah. Porn's ubiquitousness now is leading us into the darkness of...
of...
Politics?
I think his point is that porn led him into politics. I bet he read in some Playboy article that the Kennedies get all the hot chicks. And he got that Playboy from some guy in a dark alley. So now that he's a sentator, he's going to do his best to keep that secret, and that way *he'll* get all the hot chicks.
What a devious bastard.
I didn't see this coming. No way. Not me. It's a complete surprise. I'm shocked. *Shocked* I tell you!