I don't think he meant thin as "skinny." Rather, I'm sure he meant "not fat."
His point is still perfectly valid -- When we select mates, qualities we find physically attractive can always be attributed to some sort of positive genetic attribute.
The very fact that you find an extremely skinny girl unhealthy (thus unattractive) is a direct result of this, and illustrates his point perfectly.
If you're going to try and use some scientific principles to uphold your decidedly unscientific views, at least try to have a working understanding of said scientific principles.
IMO, the only reason evolution is not considered a "law" is because of the public (creationistic) response against it.
It's pretty clear that small things evolve, and large things evolve in small amounts, but as we haven't been around for the thousand or millions of years to observe macroevolution first-hand, some feel that we can't justify calling it a law just yet.
Though for all intents and purposes, it *is* truth. I have no problem considering it a law. Today we have no problem determining whether or not evolution occurs. The stuff we're still researching is *how* it occurred and what it did. There is no more research determining "if," because it's pretty much accepted that evolution is factual.
I do agree perfectly with you that creationism is by nature a religious/faith subject and should not be taught in the same realm as science. The whole purpose of scientific studies is to give the student a critical, experimental eye with respects to the world around him. Asking questions is not bad. Keep science here and you'll be fine.
How is this any different from static IP's assigned by DSL and cable modem services? All the FBI needs to do in the least is go to your ISP and say, "We'd like to know who this person is."
It's FAR easier to track somebody today using existing static IP addresses than it would be if some vendors took the *recommendation* that MAC addresses be used as link identifiers for ethernet-based links in IPv6 addresses.
Regarding your assertion that ISP's can be "anonymous" in this nature, this would be difficult in the US. They'd be doing so with the intent of keeping evidence from lawful organizations. It is also in any ISP's best interest to keep logs. If an attack is launched from one of your anonymous ISP's dynamic addresses and the ISP cannot show that it was, the ISP is in a bit of trouble.
Given the batch, they can link to a shipment (eg: to a specific store) and so on. The store can then link this to a credit card (or a range of credit card) sale...and on to the user(s).
Not quite. At best, the store would be able to say, "Any one of the people that bought one of these cards between dates X and Y would have a NIC with the MAC address you specify."
Yet another example of an article full of posts by people that have NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT.
The IPv6 spec SUGGESTS that the MAC address be used as an interface/link identifier (which must be unique). It's quite possible that this address would be reconfigured to something else in very short order. By setting the IPv6 address immediately with a known unique value, you have an instant (even if temporary) address with which to request a proper one.
OBVIOUSLY not every network interface has a MAC address (such as serial links and tunnels). For those types of situations, some other pseudorandom number should be just as effective, so long as it doesn't conflict with somebody else on the LOCAL subnet (the interface ID only makes up *part* of the address, remember). In the case of dialup links, the address class we're talking about here probably won't even be needed to be figured in advance -- it could be negotiated as part of the PPP process.
There is no privacy issue here. There are no evil NIC manufacturers in cahoots with the vendors to build a global database of all MAC addresses and your identity and buying habits.
Quite frankly, I am rather EMBARRASSED by the number of Slashdot posters who regularly post crap like this on threads. They make NO effort whatsoever to independently verify anything they start violently complaining about. They just assume that the BIASED take they just read was ABSOLUTE, 100% accurate and researched TRUTH.
THIS IS NEVER THE CASE.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe there's no outrage over IPv6's MAC recommendation because THERE WAS NO REASON TO BE OUTRAGED?
A bit of light reading for those that want to talk in an intelligent manner (in other words, no idiotic paranoid conspiracy theories):
RFC2373 - IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture (esp. section 2.5, 2.5.1 and Appendix A)
RFC2460 - Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification
RFC2374 - An IPv6 Aggregatable Global Unicast Address Format
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE THINK AND RESEARCH BEFORE YOU POST.
Luckily my ISP doesn't do this, I would immediately find a new provider.
How is this in ANY way remotely different from the normal non-MAC-based static IP addresses providers assign?
The benefits on the other hand (immediate identification of an abusive customer by way of the MAC address included right there in the complaint) are obvious.
I fail to see in the least why this would be considered a privacy matter (over existing static-IP address systems).
I noticed a post that stated that there is no "database" for MAC addresses. I don't know if totally believe this. Every manufacturer produces a unique address for each card produced, thus guarenteeing that no repition will occur, especially since routers and switches cache and use the info heavily. So, how do they know who is making what MAC address? Also, a MAC address maybe easy to change, but how many users know how to do that?
I am very concerned about privacy in IPv6. It seems like one big, global user tracking system to me.
The MAC address is implemented just like a serial number. E.g. Batch 1 gets MAC address 1-100. Batch 2 gets 101-200. There is no "database" that the company has somehow managed to compile that links your MAC address with anything resembling your identity. You think the stores they send these NIC's off to turn around and report back to the manufacturer with your identity and buying habits? It doesn't happen.
Don't be so paranoid. Companies tend to only spend resources on things that will earn the company a profit. An internal database of MAC addresses earns the company absolutely NOTHING. The infrastructure required to create and maintain such a database for zero profit (or even useful market research, as MAC addresses are nearly useless for doing any real tracking) just doesn't seem like a likely thing for a company to do.
In order for this to even be remotely successful, you'd have to get all of the NIC companies and the VENDORS themselves together on the conspiracy and have them all sharing their MAC addresses and databases of customers and buying preferences. This doesn't seem very likely.
In fact, if someone wanted to track your Internet activity, it would be FAR easier for them to break into your ISP, track your dynamic IP addresses as they're assigned, and monitor your traffic that way.
We just need to *discourage* the unfit from reproducing. As it is today, we give enormous benefits, discounts and payouts to people to *do* have children. We ENCOURAGE it.
It would be nice to have a society where people would be smart enough to think about the greater good in their family planning choices. If I had some horrible genetic defect that would cause all of my offspring to have a 50 IQ, I would either not reproduce or I would (via genetic engineering) fix that defect.
Unfortunately the current laws make it much more difficult for an ISP to "prove" conclusively that damage and tresspass actually occurred. ISP's have been successful in the past, but only in small numbers and with relatively large legal budgets.
This law makes spamming instantly and immediately recognized as illegal and all the ISP has to do is prove that spamming occurred.
Any DNS change takes 2-3 days to fully propogate through the 'Net. This is based on the TTL setting in your name servers, which determine how long other name servers should keep your DNS info cached (to avoid excessive/redundant lookups). Once the TTL expires, the information is refreshed from an authoritative source, and propogation is complete.
If you change your name server settings for your domain, it's just another DNS change (but at a top level) and will require 2-3 days to fully propogate.
If you know in advance you're about to make a major change, sometimes it helps to adjust the TTL values in your name server a few days beforehand so that things refresh more quickly. You then avoid the lengthy propogation period.
I've never used Register.Com, but it is a bit unfair to pin this on crappy service from them.
If their web hosting business is anything like their domain services, they suck ass.
9 months ago I asked if I could add a delegated subdomain to one of the domains I was hosting there. After 5 or 6 e-mails of clarification (they couldn't figure out what I was asking), their answer was "yep. just let us know."
3-4 months later I asked again, just to be ABSOLUTELY sure they could do this before I went out and bought hardware to act as name server for the delegated subdomain, etc. I've had experience in 2 other past instances where they've said "yep" one day and "sorry you were misinformed" the next, so I felt it crucial that I be totally certain that they understood what I was asking and could do what I needed. Again, their response (after another 5-6 clarifications) was "yep. no problem. just let us know."
So a couple of weeks ago I say "OK, I'm all set up on this end, please add this to your name servers.."
"Uhh, sorry for the past misinformation, but we can't do that."
WHAT?? I just spent several hundred dollars going on information you'd explicitely given me in the past, and now you can't even offer me the courtesy of a single line in my domain's zone files? They wouldn't budge. As soon as DNS fully updates for all of my domains, I'm cancelling my accounts.
They even advised me not to post copies of the e-mail correspondence I've had with their techs on a web page. Embarrassed? I do think so. Then they started talking about slander and libel and how they take that sort of thing very seriously. Hell, all I wanted was to post verbatim copies of the e-mails. I think they speak for themselves nicely.
*Horrible* tech support in general, 2-3 day tech support runs. Their *phone* support isn't even staffed by the techs that answer your e-mails. You can't ever contact them by phone in the event you need something resolved quickly.
I should not have to be suspicious (and correct in my suspicion) that the tech that answered my e-mail thought I meant "Perl" when I said "mod_perl."
I have had nothing but bad experiences with Alabanza.
Now, of course, their domain registration services might be operated completely differently, but somehow I doubt it...
Now, tell me honestly, if his mother had had the ability to "weed" him out before birth to spare him a horrible twisted existence, wouldn't it have been a huge disservice to our understanding of the very nature of the universe.
The other side of the coin:
If we had been constantly weeding out the unfit, thereby promoting the existance of the fit, for the last several generations (or longer), who's to say our generation wouldn't have been twice as smart as it is today? We might all have been just as smart as Hawking is...
I think it's amusing that people so frequently say "well what if ___ were never born?" in response to ideas like this (including abortion).
I wonder how many geniuses and potential world leaders were never born because some girl said, "No, I changed my mind.. I think we should go get a condom first."
Today, some things like patience, empathy, mental strength and kindness are actual survival traits as we move forward from brutish physical definitions of what made a human worthy, to more abstracted and and enlightened definitions.
Additional traits being rewarded by allowing successful reproduction:
1. Ability to shamelessly rely on public hand-outs such as welfare for one's entire existence (shame and embarrassment evolved for a reason -- today it's almost being bred out of us) 2. Ability for people with debilitating genetic failures to survive (modern medicine) 3. Ability for incredibly stupid people to survive (legislation requiring a tremendous amount of labeling, ridiculous amount of safety codes, and allowing people to sue McDonalds because their coffee was hot)
The traits that make these types of people the way they are ALWAYS resulted in their death pretty early in their lives. Today, these traits are allowed to pass on to offspring, further inreasing the likelyhood that *their* offspring will be just as unfit...
Just some more food for thought. I figured I'd play Devil's Advocate.
All too often politicians work directly against the interests of all but a tiny share of their constituients, for the benefit of those that pay their re-election bills, or otherwise supply them with money or power.
So when re-election time comes around, vote them out of office. Or hell, if they're constantly doing this, get them removed from their office.
It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
I don't know about that.. you may have two or three people writing up the same feature, but doing it differently (and perhaps poorly). Without some controls in place (a "moderator"), development like this would be impossible. See if you can get stats on the number of patches accepted, rejected outright or rejected until changes can be made.
interesting thing is that the group that decides the best comments can apparently be universal, it doesn't need to be an elite, educated class.
This is why we regularly see uneducated comments that do make a valid point, but have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand, at 4+ points.
The whole IBM hardware encryption thread a while back spawned dozens of highly rated comments that basically all said "this is bad because CPU ID's are bad." This is a perfect example of the "general" public commenting on something that they have almost zero factual data about (or have made erroneous generalizations/assumptions).
Maybe just start with a "News for citizens, stuff that matters" site, with the top comments mailed to our current policy makers?
I sent a submission (unpublished) to Malda a while back about an idea I'd had for a Slashdot-like government-oriented site, with different tiers for national/state/community regions where people could get the latest unbiased scoop on pending legislation, elections and candidate info. As it would be directly relevant to politics today and comments nicely sorted by geopolitical areas, it would be a perfect thing for your own legislators to monitor (and even participate in)...
The "Can Spam Act" merely allows ISP's to enforce their "no spam" policies by making it illegal for a spammer to spam to/via an ISP that expressly forbids UCE.
They're not regulating at all, they're just giving ISP's the express ability to sue.
In my opinion large mail systems like this should be heavily restricted. One should not be able to do something like this without having passed a training course (even if its just a 5-minute over-the-web thing) that shows what to do and what not to do...
These are people YOU elected into office. It is your RESPONSIBILITY to see to it that they are educated with respects to matters that affect you, the constituent.
but also TO HERSELF AT HER OWN ISP MAILBOX. This normally bright person had sent and resent numerous times, AND NEVER ONCE BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT SHE WAS DOING.
In many e-mail clients there's a setting to automatically add your own e-mail address to the list of recipients on all outgoing messages. It sounds like this is enabled in her e-mail client. She likely made no conscious effort to send this to herself (in all likelyhood the To: line in her client didn't even have her own address in it) and it's understandable that she was confused.
I do agree that if she had been better trained in the e-mail software, this probably would have been averted, but I don't think this was due as much to incompetance as you think. I know lots of educated people that would be just as confused if this setting were enabled and would also make the assumption that they were receiving e-mail via the recipient address they were using. *shrug*.
This problem could/would easily have happened regardless of the chosen platform of the recipients. This has nothing at all to do with evil Microsoft and everything to do with a lack of training.
Perhaps when you click on the "Reply To All" button and there's more than a handfull of recipients the mail client should pop up a suitable warning?
The fact that this could be used to track all of the recordings a person ever made is scary.
This is my point exactly. The conspiracy theorists always make the same conclusive leap you just made.
The only logical "surveillance" benefit that could arise from this technology would be the automation of wiretap transcriptions, which, as far as I know, are either done by hand today or with relatively crude voice recognition.
Voice recognition technology does not suddenly mean government agencies can now affect wiretaps of all the people in the United States on a whim. Your privacy will be untouched. The only way this would change the government is by saving them money on people doing transcriptions.
If anything, you should be worried about the handful of jobs that might be lost over it. Unless you have a distant relative that sits at a desk and does this, you will be totally unaffected by this technology's use in government agencies.
Do you honestly think any interest they might have has anything to do with invading your privacy and secretly spying on everyone in the country?
So they'd like to automate the wiretap transcription process. What in the world could possibly be wrong with that?
And please stop exaggarating. I have no doubt in my mind that people from various government entities are interested, but you can drop the whole "at an undisclosed location" bit of silly secrecy. He probably left a business card with a perfectly legitimate address and telephone number.
I, too, have friends that work in various private sectors that are "approached" by government agencies. These have all been very straightforward, very clear in meaning, and as normal as any other business meeting could be. The only dark, sinister, secret undertones in existence are the ones you conspiracy theorists insert while telling your stories.
It seems like every single Slashdot article nowadays has several posts that inevitably link some new piece of technology with ways the evil government can spy on us.
Go e-mail 'michael' about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to write up another Your Rights Online editorial thing where all you folks can go discuss the latest evils between yourselves, but let's keep the conspiracy theories out of "normal" articles, OK?
Using something like this would require the maintainer of that information to be trustworthy. If I didn't like the fact that my web site was being rated down, I would just be able to go in and make changes.
The "draft" being discussed calls more for an independent collection of servers holding and serving ratings information. It seems the storage requirements for such a thing would be enormous enough, but I just now started thinking about the *bandwidth* requirements. For every web page you request, for every newsgroup you download, a connection must be made and ratings retrieved for everything. Yeoww..
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think he meant thin as "skinny." Rather, I'm sure he meant "not fat."
His point is still perfectly valid -- When we select mates, qualities we find physically attractive can always be attributed to some sort of positive genetic attribute.
The very fact that you find an extremely skinny girl unhealthy (thus unattractive) is a direct result of this, and illustrates his point perfectly.
If you're going to try and use some scientific principles to uphold your decidedly unscientific views, at least try to have a working understanding of said scientific principles.
IMO, the only reason evolution is not considered a "law" is because of the public (creationistic) response against it.
It's pretty clear that small things evolve, and large things evolve in small amounts, but as we haven't been around for the thousand or millions of years to observe macroevolution first-hand, some feel that we can't justify calling it a law just yet.
Though for all intents and purposes, it *is* truth. I have no problem considering it a law. Today we have no problem determining whether or not evolution occurs. The stuff we're still researching is *how* it occurred and what it did. There is no more research determining "if," because it's pretty much accepted that evolution is factual.
I do agree perfectly with you that creationism is by nature a religious/faith subject and should not be taught in the same realm as science. The whole purpose of scientific studies is to give the student a critical, experimental eye with respects to the world around him. Asking questions is not bad. Keep science here and you'll be fine.
How is this any different from static IP's assigned by DSL and cable modem services? All the FBI needs to do in the least is go to your ISP and say, "We'd like to know who this person is."
It's FAR easier to track somebody today using existing static IP addresses than it would be if some vendors took the *recommendation* that MAC addresses be used as link identifiers for ethernet-based links in IPv6 addresses.
Regarding your assertion that ISP's can be "anonymous" in this nature, this would be difficult in the US. They'd be doing so with the intent of keeping evidence from lawful organizations. It is also in any ISP's best interest to keep logs. If an attack is launched from one of your anonymous ISP's dynamic addresses and the ISP cannot show that it was, the ISP is in a bit of trouble.
Not good business.
Given the batch, they can link to a shipment (eg: to a specific store) and so on. The store can then link this to a credit card (or a range of credit card) sale...and on to the user(s).
Not quite. At best, the store would be able to say, "Any one of the people that bought one of these cards between dates X and Y would have a NIC with the MAC address you specify."
Purchases aren't tracked by serial number.
The IPv6 spec SUGGESTS that the MAC address be used as an interface/link identifier (which must be unique). It's quite possible that this address would be reconfigured to something else in very short order. By setting the IPv6 address immediately with a known unique value, you have an instant (even if temporary) address with which to request a proper one.
OBVIOUSLY not every network interface has a MAC address (such as serial links and tunnels). For those types of situations, some other pseudorandom number should be just as effective, so long as it doesn't conflict with somebody else on the LOCAL subnet (the interface ID only makes up *part* of the address, remember). In the case of dialup links, the address class we're talking about here probably won't even be needed to be figured in advance -- it could be negotiated as part of the PPP process.
There is no privacy issue here. There are no evil NIC manufacturers in cahoots with the vendors to build a global database of all MAC addresses and your identity and buying habits.
Quite frankly, I am rather EMBARRASSED by the number of Slashdot posters who regularly post crap like this on threads. They make NO effort whatsoever to independently verify anything they start violently complaining about. They just assume that the BIASED take they just read was ABSOLUTE, 100% accurate and researched TRUTH.
THIS IS NEVER THE CASE.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe there's no outrage over IPv6's MAC recommendation because THERE WAS NO REASON TO BE OUTRAGED?
A bit of light reading for those that want to talk in an intelligent manner (in other words, no idiotic paranoid conspiracy theories):
- RFC2373 - IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture (esp. section 2.5, 2.5.1 and Appendix A)
- RFC2460 - Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification
- RFC2374 - An IPv6 Aggregatable Global Unicast Address Format
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE THINK AND RESEARCH BEFORE YOU POST.Luckily my ISP doesn't do this, I would immediately find a new provider.
How is this in ANY way remotely different from the normal non-MAC-based static IP addresses providers assign?
The benefits on the other hand (immediate identification of an abusive customer by way of the MAC address included right there in the complaint) are obvious.
I fail to see in the least why this would be considered a privacy matter (over existing static-IP address systems).
Please explain.
I noticed a post that stated that there is no "database" for MAC addresses. I don't know if totally believe this. Every manufacturer produces a unique address for each card produced, thus guarenteeing that no repition will occur, especially since routers and switches cache and use the info heavily. So, how do they know who is making what MAC address? Also, a MAC address maybe easy to change, but how many users know how to do that?
I am very concerned about privacy in IPv6. It seems like one big, global user tracking system to me.
The MAC address is implemented just like a serial number. E.g. Batch 1 gets MAC address 1-100. Batch 2 gets 101-200. There is no "database" that the company has somehow managed to compile that links your MAC address with anything resembling your identity. You think the stores they send these NIC's off to turn around and report back to the manufacturer with your identity and buying habits? It doesn't happen.
Don't be so paranoid. Companies tend to only spend resources on things that will earn the company a profit. An internal database of MAC addresses earns the company absolutely NOTHING. The infrastructure required to create and maintain such a database for zero profit (or even useful market research, as MAC addresses are nearly useless for doing any real tracking) just doesn't seem like a likely thing for a company to do.
In order for this to even be remotely successful, you'd have to get all of the NIC companies and the VENDORS themselves together on the conspiracy and have them all sharing their MAC addresses and databases of customers and buying preferences. This doesn't seem very likely.
In fact, if someone wanted to track your Internet activity, it would be FAR easier for them to break into your ISP, track your dynamic IP addresses as they're assigned, and monitor your traffic that way.
We just need to *discourage* the unfit from reproducing. As it is today, we give enormous benefits, discounts and payouts to people to *do* have children. We ENCOURAGE it.
It would be nice to have a society where people would be smart enough to think about the greater good in their family planning choices. If I had some horrible genetic defect that would cause all of my offspring to have a 50 IQ, I would either not reproduce or I would (via genetic engineering) fix that defect.
Unfortunately the current laws make it much more difficult for an ISP to "prove" conclusively that damage and tresspass actually occurred. ISP's have been successful in the past, but only in small numbers and with relatively large legal budgets.
This law makes spamming instantly and immediately recognized as illegal and all the ISP has to do is prove that spamming occurred.
Right-o. Cheaper is better.
If you're worried that "cheaper" also means "easier to convince a judge of the need", then perhaps you need to oust your current judges.
This should in now way affect the requirements to obtain a court order/wiretap order from a judge.
Any DNS change takes 2-3 days to fully propogate through the 'Net. This is based on the TTL setting in your name servers, which determine how long other name servers should keep your DNS info cached (to avoid excessive/redundant lookups). Once the TTL expires, the information is refreshed from an authoritative source, and propogation is complete.
If you change your name server settings for your domain, it's just another DNS change (but at a top level) and will require 2-3 days to fully propogate.
If you know in advance you're about to make a major change, sometimes it helps to adjust the TTL values in your name server a few days beforehand so that things refresh more quickly. You then avoid the lengthy propogation period.
I've never used Register.Com, but it is a bit unfair to pin this on crappy service from them.
If their web hosting business is anything like their domain services, they suck ass.
9 months ago I asked if I could add a delegated subdomain to one of the domains I was hosting there. After 5 or 6 e-mails of clarification (they couldn't figure out what I was asking), their answer was "yep. just let us know."
3-4 months later I asked again, just to be ABSOLUTELY sure they could do this before I went out and bought hardware to act as name server for the delegated subdomain, etc. I've had experience in 2 other past instances where they've said "yep" one day and "sorry you were misinformed" the next, so I felt it crucial that I be totally certain that they understood what I was asking and could do what I needed. Again, their response (after another 5-6 clarifications) was "yep. no problem. just let us know."
So a couple of weeks ago I say "OK, I'm all set up on this end, please add this to your name servers.."
"Uhh, sorry for the past misinformation, but we can't do that."
WHAT?? I just spent several hundred dollars going on information you'd explicitely given me in the past, and now you can't even offer me the courtesy of a single line in my domain's zone files? They wouldn't budge. As soon as DNS fully updates for all of my domains, I'm cancelling my accounts.
They even advised me not to post copies of the e-mail correspondence I've had with their techs on a web page. Embarrassed? I do think so. Then they started talking about slander and libel and how they take that sort of thing very seriously. Hell, all I wanted was to post verbatim copies of the e-mails. I think they speak for themselves nicely.
*Horrible* tech support in general, 2-3 day tech support runs. Their *phone* support isn't even staffed by the techs that answer your e-mails. You can't ever contact them by phone in the event you need something resolved quickly.
I should not have to be suspicious (and correct in my suspicion) that the tech that answered my e-mail thought I meant "Perl" when I said "mod_perl."
I have had nothing but bad experiences with Alabanza.
Now, of course, their domain registration services might be operated completely differently, but somehow I doubt it...
Now, tell me honestly, if his mother had had the ability to "weed" him out before birth to spare him a horrible twisted existence, wouldn't it have been a huge disservice to our understanding of the very nature of the universe.
The other side of the coin:
If we had been constantly weeding out the unfit, thereby promoting the existance of the fit, for the last several generations (or longer), who's to say our generation wouldn't have been twice as smart as it is today? We might all have been just as smart as Hawking is...
I think it's amusing that people so frequently say "well what if ___ were never born?" in response to ideas like this (including abortion).
I wonder how many geniuses and potential world leaders were never born because some girl said, "No, I changed my mind.. I think we should go get a condom first."
Today, some things like patience, empathy, mental strength and kindness are actual survival traits as we move forward from brutish physical definitions of what made a human worthy, to more abstracted and and enlightened definitions.
Additional traits being rewarded by allowing successful reproduction:
1. Ability to shamelessly rely on public hand-outs such as welfare for one's entire existence (shame and embarrassment evolved for a reason -- today it's almost being bred out of us)
2. Ability for people with debilitating genetic failures to survive (modern medicine)
3. Ability for incredibly stupid people to survive (legislation requiring a tremendous amount of labeling, ridiculous amount of safety codes, and allowing people to sue McDonalds because their coffee was hot)
The traits that make these types of people the way they are ALWAYS resulted in their death pretty early in their lives. Today, these traits are allowed to pass on to offspring, further inreasing the likelyhood that *their* offspring will be just as unfit...
Just some more food for thought. I figured I'd play Devil's Advocate.
All too often politicians work directly against the interests of all but a tiny share of their constituients, for the benefit of those that pay their re-election bills, or otherwise supply them with money or power.
So when re-election time comes around, vote them out of office. Or hell, if they're constantly doing this, get them removed from their office.
It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
I don't know about that.. you may have two or three people writing up the same feature, but doing it differently (and perhaps poorly). Without some controls in place (a "moderator"), development like this would be impossible. See if you can get stats on the number of patches accepted, rejected outright or rejected until changes can be made.
interesting thing is that the group that decides the best comments can apparently be universal, it doesn't need to be an elite, educated class.
This is why we regularly see uneducated comments that do make a valid point, but have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand, at 4+ points.
The whole IBM hardware encryption thread a while back spawned dozens of highly rated comments that basically all said "this is bad because CPU ID's are bad." This is a perfect example of the "general" public commenting on something that they have almost zero factual data about (or have made erroneous generalizations/assumptions).
Maybe just start with a "News for citizens, stuff that matters" site, with the top comments mailed to our current policy makers?
I sent a submission (unpublished) to Malda a while back about an idea I'd had for a Slashdot-like government-oriented site, with different tiers for national/state/community regions where people could get the latest unbiased scoop on pending legislation, elections and candidate info. As it would be directly relevant to politics today and comments nicely sorted by geopolitical areas, it would be a perfect thing for your own legislators to monitor (and even participate in)...
The "Can Spam Act" merely allows ISP's to enforce their "no spam" policies by making it illegal for a spammer to spam to/via an ISP that expressly forbids UCE.
They're not regulating at all, they're just giving ISP's the express ability to sue.
*My* elected representatives *do* listen. If your congressmen are ignoring your letters, perhaps you should vote for somebody else next time...
In my opinion large mail systems like this should be heavily restricted. One should not be able to do something like this without having passed a training course (even if its just a 5-minute over-the-web thing) that shows what to do and what not to do...
These are people YOU elected into office. It is your RESPONSIBILITY to see to it that they are educated with respects to matters that affect you, the constituent.
Write a letter. Make the world better.
And these are elected leaders.
No, they're the fresh-faced aids.
but also TO HERSELF AT HER OWN ISP MAILBOX. This normally bright person had sent and resent numerous times, AND NEVER ONCE BOTHERED TO LOOK AT WHAT SHE WAS DOING.
In many e-mail clients there's a setting to automatically add your own e-mail address to the list of recipients on all outgoing messages. It sounds like this is enabled in her e-mail client. She likely made no conscious effort to send this to herself (in all likelyhood the To: line in her client didn't even have her own address in it) and it's understandable that she was confused.
I do agree that if she had been better trained in the e-mail software, this probably would have been averted, but I don't think this was due as much to incompetance as you think. I know lots of educated people that would be just as confused if this setting were enabled and would also make the assumption that they were receiving e-mail via the recipient address they were using. *shrug*.
Agreed.
This problem could/would easily have happened regardless of the chosen platform of the recipients. This has nothing at all to do with evil Microsoft and everything to do with a lack of training.
Perhaps when you click on the "Reply To All" button and there's more than a handfull of recipients the mail client should pop up a suitable warning?
The fact that this could be used to track all of the recordings a person ever made is scary.
This is my point exactly. The conspiracy theorists always make the same conclusive leap you just made.
The only logical "surveillance" benefit that could arise from this technology would be the automation of wiretap transcriptions, which, as far as I know, are either done by hand today or with relatively crude voice recognition.
Voice recognition technology does not suddenly mean government agencies can now affect wiretaps of all the people in the United States on a whim. Your privacy will be untouched. The only way this would change the government is by saving them money on people doing transcriptions.
If anything, you should be worried about the handful of jobs that might be lost over it. Unless you have a distant relative that sits at a desk and does this, you will be totally unaffected by this technology's use in government agencies.
Do you honestly think any interest they might have has anything to do with invading your privacy and secretly spying on everyone in the country?
So they'd like to automate the wiretap transcription process. What in the world could possibly be wrong with that?
And please stop exaggarating. I have no doubt in my mind that people from various government entities are interested, but you can drop the whole "at an undisclosed location" bit of silly secrecy. He probably left a business card with a perfectly legitimate address and telephone number.
I, too, have friends that work in various private sectors that are "approached" by government agencies. These have all been very straightforward, very clear in meaning, and as normal as any other business meeting could be. The only dark, sinister, secret undertones in existence are the ones you conspiracy theorists insert while telling your stories.
It seems like every single Slashdot article nowadays has several posts that inevitably link some new piece of technology with ways the evil government can spy on us.
Go e-mail 'michael' about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to write up another Your Rights Online editorial thing where all you folks can go discuss the latest evils between yourselves, but let's keep the conspiracy theories out of "normal" articles, OK?
Using something like this would require the maintainer of that information to be trustworthy. If I didn't like the fact that my web site was being rated down, I would just be able to go in and make changes.
The "draft" being discussed calls more for an independent collection of servers holding and serving ratings information. It seems the storage requirements for such a thing would be enormous enough, but I just now started thinking about the *bandwidth* requirements. For every web page you request, for every newsgroup you download, a connection must be made and ratings retrieved for everything. Yeoww..