You left out the primary media bias. The primary bias is: Is this entertaining enough?
That overrules truth, honesty, and even occasionally the preference of sponsors.
P.S.: About those things you say I'll never encounter: I've encountered most of them at least once. They're just very infrequent. Outright censorship is only applied to unimportant things, like a "wardrobe malfunction". For important things they don't use censorship, but rather shaping. They reduce the frequency and move them to unimportant areas. (E.g.: "Sorry, we can't report about the president violating the constitution, it's time for an ad for the upcoming pennant race. We'll show that one after 'Bedtime with Bonzo'.")
There was a great deal of criticism of Bush...but we never had any expectations that he'd pay any attention. With Obama there's hope that he'll notice. So some of the criticism is louder.
Also some people don't like other people accepting that there might be some chance of change. Such people don't tend to be very nuanced in their thought processes, so their comments tend to be loud and abrasive.
I'll admit to being a bit of a cynic myself, but at least Obama isn't conducting an outright war on the citizenry. There might be a chance of something happening. I don't expect the government to roll back any of it's previous incursions on our rights, but it might slow down the advance, or even roll things back in a few places where people are made really unhappy.
OTOH, where Bush would have either stone-walled or fought aggressively, Obama says that he's conduct a review of policies. Now this review may take so long that it's just a sneakier form of denial...but it might not. So this is one place where we get a chance to find out what kind of change was made. Is he going to push ahead with the secret treaties, and only decide that the secrecy was unnecessary when it's too late to make reasoned comments on the treaties? We'll find out. And THEN it will be reasonable to condemn him for a traitor or praise him as an honorable man.
Remember, there's a lot of inertia in politics, and a few people at the top can only push things so hard. I may think that it would be desirable to have the A.G. go searching for a few blatant cases of misfeasance or malfeasance among the high level bureaucrats...but I'm not certain that I'm right. (And it's even possible that I'm wrong about them being there to be found.)
If the period of the copyright were reduced to 30 seconds then the GPL would effectively be the same as the BSD.
Thinking of this as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategies match, however, I map BSD onto Dove*, Proprietary onto Hawk**, and GPL onto Retaliator***. (Note that Proprietary onto Hawk isn't a good mapping, because Proprietary has numerous different shadings all the way from a Dove that hides to a patent troll...which I haven't been able to map into the scenario.) Given that this is a rather loose mapping, I expect that GPL is the winning strategy...but because it's so loose I'm not sure. In any case the only time Dove and Hawk can coexist is when Dove has a much higher rate of reproduction (for any of several possible reasons...including Hawk fighting with Hawk).
N.B.: if the copyright were reduced as suggested in the first paragraph, then the period of time for aggression by the Hawk contingent would likewise be reduces. So all of the various strategies would become more equal.
P.S.: Yes, this is a VASTLY oversimplified model of the system. It captures certain features only, and not necessarily the most salient ones. But it's a place to start and a way to think about it. If you find something else you want to add, add it to the model. But be aware that you are increasing the computational load for modeling any particular scenario.
* In the original model Dove represented an entity that never attacked. ** In the original model Hawk represented an entity that always attacked. *** In the original model Retaliator represented an entity that never attacked unless it was being attacked. N.B.: In all three cases I have oversimplified the description of the entities. If you want to read the full description, read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. I think they're described in one of the appendices, and also where he's describing what an ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) is.
The RIAA doesn't depend on being liked by people. It's purpose is to give the various record companies a bit of anonymity and plausible deniability. Most people who see RIAA don't think of this as action by, say, Sony. And the companies can always say that their agent mishandled a case if they *do* happen to get associated with it.
The RIAA *exists* to do things that the record companies wouldn't want associated with their names.
Are you talking about EMACS vs. vi? Or BSD vs. GPL? Or just more generally anything that inspired controversy? They all seem to be less common now than they were earlier. There seem to be fewer devotees to "The one true, right, and only way". Perhaps it's a sign of greater acceptance, or perhaps it's just that most of the original protagonists are growing older.
Actually I've noticed very few Libertarians, though lots of people who are libertarian grading towards anarchist. But you're right, there are probably more Libertarians here than in the general population, but in the general population there's probably fewer than 1 in 10,000. (Being a registered Libertarian doesn't prove that you're a Libertarian. There were several years that I registered Libertarian just to give the party a bit more funding. Then I did a more systematic analysis of voting and decided that all third parties were a sham given the current voting system. You need a minimum of very close to 1/3 of the voters adhering to your party to be able to act as anything other than a spoiler in the current system.)
these people should be tried and hung for treason.
Sorry, treason is explicitly defined in the Constitution. I doubt seriously the definition can be stretched to fit this.
Yeah. You're technically correct. They should be tried for fraud and sentenced to consecutive sentences for each fraudulent vote. Also and similarly for malfeasance. And anything else that's just to tack on. (Look into accepting bribes and unjust enrichment.)
But the sentences need to be consecutive, not parallel.
It may be a true statement. Mind you, this doesn't mean I think it may be true at ground level, but I've heard assertions that if you use kite driven generators, there's always a height at which the wind is blowing sufficiently hard. The example I read about that was based around this assertion transmitted the force to earth via tension on the line. It *did* require multiple kites to avoid interrupting the generation.
I haven't seen it in person. It could be all hype. But it ain't necessarily so.
...People are also willing to forgo legislation to protect the environment to save themselves a few bucks, and then bitch about how the environment is being wrecked.
I'm afraid I don't agree with this point. People don't have very much control over how their representatives choose to represent them. Certainly not at any fine degree. You choose either Republican, Democrat, or other. It doesn't matter what other is, and often both the Democrat and the Republican candidate have the same stand on a particular issue of interest to a particular voter. Even where they differ, other differences may be controlling. One benefit of the "two party system" is that if a company is big enough, it can buy off BOTH candidates.
I'm afraid I can't believe in the sequestration proposals that I've seen. Most of them look like they would "sort of" work. Probably long enough for the people running the company doing it to get themselves retired. But I don't have any faith in it over the near-long term. Say a century. (Some of them *do* look like it would be impossible to trace a failure back to the source, though.)
E.g.: pumping CO2 into wells that used to hold oil. What proof is there that when the oil was pumped out no cracks developed in the dome due to the increased pressure (really new lack of support)? Large cracks could be detected with fancy seismographic maps...but such things are expensive to make, and they wouldn't detect small fractures anyway. And the mere fact of drilling a hole into the dome would rupture it's structural integrity. This is quite difficult to model when all you have to go on are seismographic maps made years ago (before the oil and gas were extracted).
And the real sticking point is that the people making the decision don't have any significant liability for failure. And they've got lots to gain by pushing this notion. And they've lied in the past. So why should they be trusted now?
There are solutions to the waste and fuel scarcity problems. Breeder reactors. Unfortunately, the other problems you listed are harder.
I'm not sure I trust fusion...other than solar. The current versions of fusion reactors seem to say "large, centralized, expensive". Those characteristics are each separately bad, and their bad characteristics reinforce each other when you combine them. We'll probably need to go there eventually, so research should continue, but more emphasis should be placed on alternatives and on fast-breeders. Waste, safety, and fuel scarcity can be handled. I'm not as certain about weapons proliferation.
OK. But I'm still paying for a couple of reactors that were stupidly built right on an earthquake fault. After those stupid mistakes I'm quite hesitant to trust ANY company to run a reactor.
Now it's true that the particular faults haven't moved much recently (i.e., during the last century), but this doesn't mean they won't move tomorrow. They've moved within the past 3 centuries.
A part of the problem is that it's difficult and expensive to store electricity to move a vehicle. This hasn't been solved yet, though there have been some improvements.
To me the solution that looks best is some development of the super-capacitor. It might not work, but it looks very promising. And if it does it would allow an essentially unlimited number of fast charge-discharge cycles.
Remember, electric car batteries are only good for around 5 years (are they saying 7 years now?). And they use expensive materials that are dangerous to extract and to re-cycle. The super-capacitors don't have that problem. They've got others, but the other problems may be easier ones.
Yes, but those "new technologies" come at increased costs. Which makes the oil less desirable. And currently shale oil is both expensive to extract and tremendously destructive to the environment.
N.B.: Not just Canada, but also the U.S. have large amounts of shale oil and tar sands. But it's not economic to extract it. (I think Canada is currently extracting in a small way...so perhaps oil prices have risen enough to make it slightly profitable.) Current technologies for extracting oil from shale or sand require lots of energy and water, and leave huge mounds of waste. It's worse than coal.
That "myth" has already come true. E.g., off-shore oil wells are tremendously more expensive than the old fashioned shallow wells on land. And the price of oil has, indeed, risen.
The claim is that the currently most accessible resources will run out within a few decades. This is probably true. It's limitations are basically political. (If you don't dare go there to drill, it's inaccessible in a temporary fashion.)
After that there will be a need to switch to a less accessible form. Who knows what that will be, or what the enabling technology will be. Oil shales at our current level of technology are massively expensive...and not just in money. This doesn't guarantee that they will be so in a decade or two. Maybe someone will come up with something, like, say, a microorganism that cracks shale oil into something that flows more readily. Or something that can eat coal and excrete something like a petroleum fraction. More likely it will be something totally else...or we'll just have to put up with the higher prices. (This might be better, as it will push us in the direction of CO2 neutral energy sources, but we won't go there if it's not cheaper for some reason [if only taxes].)
You shouldn't disbelieve in flying pink elephants. We just haven't built them yet. But they won't be very large. And they'll need to have a very high octane food.
Possibly something a bit larger than a humming-bird that lives on Old Fashions, etc. Call it Elephans Frumentii.
P.S.: With apologies to Gavagan's Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
I don't see that there's nearly as much evidence for any particular religion, or even "some religion or other", as there is for multiple universes. At least that can be shown to be consistent with quantum theory.
To be precise, what evidence that is acceptable to someone who doesn't already believe does at least one religion provide?
Actually, Buddhism can provide several pieces of evidence, but then that isn't exactly a religion in any normal sense of the word. (Any gods involved are optional extra add-ons, e.g.)
Tumbling down a canyon isn't painful unless you hit the edges. Scary, yes, but that's a different thing. And if your terminal velocity is high enough, it probably won't hurt then, either, or only for an instant.
But you'll be scared for a measurable length of time. Pain is worse, and pain + scared is yet worse. So none of those are situations that I'll go looking for. But I don't mind the kind of simulation that one gets from a roller-coaster...scared, but knowing that it's not serious. That can be fun.
According to Dante Limbo is one of the circles of Hell. Now this isn't exactly standard Catholicism of his time, but it was close enough that he could write it without being castigated by the church.
I must admit that I don't know modern christian versions of this belief. I've always interpreted it as a kind of psychological warfare against their own believers.
People accepted their self-applied label. But it was a lie. Russian under Lenin was a wierd mixture of Fascism and Communism, but under Stalin it became much more fascist...and much less communist. The various reforms since then did not increase the communist influence.
If you want to see an example of communism, look at the history of the Oneida community. This will give you a clearer idea of what communism actually is, and will show you why it doesn't scale. Even Oneida wasn't actually communist, but they came as close as was practical. Soviet Russia wasn't even close. Neither was Red China. Both were attempts at totalitarian, but that's not at all the same thing.
Communism can only work when the social controls are such that nobody can profit at the expense of another, and selfish behavior is unacceptable by ANYONE, including the leadership. There are some other requirements, but those are sufficient to prevent it from scaling. (Even then I'm not sure it's a good system, but on a really small scale, and with dedication to a common goal [usually religious] it's approximately workable.)
Harlan is notoriously acerbic in person. I think he's a decent writer, though I usually don't like his style. (That's a matter of taste, not expertise.) And sometimes he's excellent.
So even though he's a good writer, it's easy to understand why someone might heckle him in person.
OTOH, I follow neither Harlan's writing nor Star Trek. I'm just answering your question based on general knowledge of the field.
To me it hinders my use of the Kindle, Therefore I didn't buy it.
I honestly don't know if I would have bought it if it weren't DRM encumbered, but once I noticed that it was I stopped even considering it.
To me, DRM encumbered is the correct terminology. If it isn't for you, then YOU shouldn't use the phrase. That doesn't say anything about whether *I* should use the phrase.
OK, but now that most of Java is GPL I'm not convinced that's a serious threat. I just can't take that one seriously. (I suppose, though, that it's possible that the people making the decisions don't understand the GPL.)
No. The facets of the situation that are being discussed are either irrelevant or opposed to communism. (I'd assert that communism scales so poorly that there's never been a communist society on larger than the village level. Doesn't mean there weren't groups that *called* themselves communists. But they had less to do with communism than the Democrats have to do with democracy.)
In primus: There's probably no legal way to deal with this, unless you want to fight it out in court. Good luck with that. They won't prosecute unless they figure they'll win.
Given that: If you're operating a botnet, why not just edit the official government pages to include forbidden links. Then you don't even need to know very many of them.
Actually, it doesn't even need to be government pages. Any large company would work as well. And in either case you'd need to be using a botnet for this, because: a) you don't want it traced back to you, and b) you need to do it repeatedly (every time they fix the page).
I'm not at all sure how practical it is to try to get a complete list in the manner described. It's probably continually being altered. The only practical way would seem to be to read their server and copy off the secret file at least once a week. And for that you'd better not be traceable, because eventually they'll notice what you are doing. (Another interesting trick would be to include, say, clothing links into the list. [When I was in my early teens I used to trace the Sears catalog women's underwear pictures, and then edit them.])
Slashdot Mirror
You left out the primary media bias. The primary bias is: Is this entertaining enough?
That overrules truth, honesty, and even occasionally the preference of sponsors.
P.S.: About those things you say I'll never encounter: I've encountered most of them at least once. They're just very infrequent. Outright censorship is only applied to unimportant things, like a "wardrobe malfunction". For important things they don't use censorship, but rather shaping. They reduce the frequency and move them to unimportant areas. (E.g.: "Sorry, we can't report about the president violating the constitution, it's time for an ad for the upcoming pennant race. We'll show that one after 'Bedtime with Bonzo'.")
There was a great deal of criticism of Bush...but we never had any expectations that he'd pay any attention. With Obama there's hope that he'll notice. So some of the criticism is louder.
Also some people don't like other people accepting that there might be some chance of change. Such people don't tend to be very nuanced in their thought processes, so their comments tend to be loud and abrasive.
I'll admit to being a bit of a cynic myself, but at least Obama isn't conducting an outright war on the citizenry. There might be a chance of something happening. I don't expect the government to roll back any of it's previous incursions on our rights, but it might slow down the advance, or even roll things back in a few places where people are made really unhappy.
OTOH, where Bush would have either stone-walled or fought aggressively, Obama says that he's conduct a review of policies. Now this review may take so long that it's just a sneakier form of denial...but it might not. So this is one place where we get a chance to find out what kind of change was made. Is he going to push ahead with the secret treaties, and only decide that the secrecy was unnecessary when it's too late to make reasoned comments on the treaties? We'll find out. And THEN it will be reasonable to condemn him for a traitor or praise him as an honorable man.
Remember, there's a lot of inertia in politics, and a few people at the top can only push things so hard. I may think that it would be desirable to have the A.G. go searching for a few blatant cases of misfeasance or malfeasance among the high level bureaucrats...but I'm not certain that I'm right. (And it's even possible that I'm wrong about them being there to be found.)
If the period of the copyright were reduced to 30 seconds then the GPL would effectively be the same as the BSD.
Thinking of this as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategies match, however, I map BSD onto Dove*, Proprietary onto Hawk**, and GPL onto Retaliator***. (Note that Proprietary onto Hawk isn't a good mapping, because Proprietary has numerous different shadings all the way from a Dove that hides to a patent troll...which I haven't been able to map into the scenario.) Given that this is a rather loose mapping, I expect that GPL is the winning strategy...but because it's so loose I'm not sure. In any case the only time Dove and Hawk can coexist is when Dove has a much higher rate of reproduction (for any of several possible reasons...including Hawk fighting with Hawk).
N.B.: if the copyright were reduced as suggested in the first paragraph, then the period of time for aggression by the Hawk contingent would likewise be reduces. So all of the various strategies would become more equal.
P.S.: Yes, this is a VASTLY oversimplified model of the system. It captures certain features only, and not necessarily the most salient ones. But it's a place to start and a way to think about it. If you find something else you want to add, add it to the model. But be aware that you are increasing the computational load for modeling any particular scenario.
* In the original model Dove represented an entity that never attacked.
** In the original model Hawk represented an entity that always attacked.
*** In the original model Retaliator represented an entity that never attacked unless it was being attacked.
N.B.: In all three cases I have oversimplified the description of the entities. If you want to read the full description, read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. I think they're described in one of the appendices, and also where he's describing what an ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) is.
The RIAA doesn't depend on being liked by people. It's purpose is to give the various record companies a bit of anonymity and plausible deniability. Most people who see RIAA don't think of this as action by, say, Sony. And the companies can always say that their agent mishandled a case if they *do* happen to get associated with it.
The RIAA *exists* to do things that the record companies wouldn't want associated with their names.
Are you talking about EMACS vs. vi? Or BSD vs. GPL? Or just more generally anything that inspired controversy? They all seem to be less common now than they were earlier. There seem to be fewer devotees to "The one true, right, and only way". Perhaps it's a sign of greater acceptance, or perhaps it's just that most of the original protagonists are growing older.
Actually I've noticed very few Libertarians, though lots of people who are libertarian grading towards anarchist. But you're right, there are probably more Libertarians here than in the general population, but in the general population there's probably fewer than 1 in 10,000. (Being a registered Libertarian doesn't prove that you're a Libertarian. There were several years that I registered Libertarian just to give the party a bit more funding. Then I did a more systematic analysis of voting and decided that all third parties were a sham given the current voting system. You need a minimum of very close to 1/3 of the voters adhering to your party to be able to act as anything other than a spoiler in the current system.)
these people should be tried and hung for treason.
Sorry, treason is explicitly defined in the Constitution. I doubt seriously the definition can be stretched to fit this.
Yeah. You're technically correct. They should be tried for fraud and sentenced to consecutive sentences for each fraudulent vote. Also and similarly for malfeasance. And anything else that's just to tack on. (Look into accepting bribes and unjust enrichment.)
But the sentences need to be consecutive, not parallel.
It may be a true statement. Mind you, this doesn't mean I think it may be true at ground level, but I've heard assertions that if you use kite driven generators, there's always a height at which the wind is blowing sufficiently hard. The example I read about that was based around this assertion transmitted the force to earth via tension on the line. It *did* require multiple kites to avoid interrupting the generation.
I haven't seen it in person. It could be all hype. But it ain't necessarily so.
...People are also willing to forgo legislation to protect the environment to save themselves a few bucks, and then bitch about how the environment is being wrecked.
I'm afraid I don't agree with this point. People don't have very much control over how their representatives choose to represent them. Certainly not at any fine degree. You choose either Republican, Democrat, or other. It doesn't matter what other is, and often both the Democrat and the Republican candidate have the same stand on a particular issue of interest to a particular voter. Even where they differ, other differences may be controlling. One benefit of the "two party system" is that if a company is big enough, it can buy off BOTH candidates.
I'm afraid I can't believe in the sequestration proposals that I've seen. Most of them look like they would "sort of" work. Probably long enough for the people running the company doing it to get themselves retired. But I don't have any faith in it over the near-long term. Say a century. (Some of them *do* look like it would be impossible to trace a failure back to the source, though.)
E.g.: pumping CO2 into wells that used to hold oil. What proof is there that when the oil was pumped out no cracks developed in the dome due to the increased pressure (really new lack of support)? Large cracks could be detected with fancy seismographic maps...but such things are expensive to make, and they wouldn't detect small fractures anyway. And the mere fact of drilling a hole into the dome would rupture it's structural integrity. This is quite difficult to model when all you have to go on are seismographic maps made years ago (before the oil and gas were extracted).
And the real sticking point is that the people making the decision don't have any significant liability for failure. And they've got lots to gain by pushing this notion. And they've lied in the past. So why should they be trusted now?
There are solutions to the waste and fuel scarcity problems. Breeder reactors. Unfortunately, the other problems you listed are harder.
I'm not sure I trust fusion...other than solar. The current versions of fusion reactors seem to say "large, centralized, expensive". Those characteristics are each separately bad, and their bad characteristics reinforce each other when you combine them. We'll probably need to go there eventually, so research should continue, but more emphasis should be placed on alternatives and on fast-breeders. Waste, safety, and fuel scarcity can be handled. I'm not as certain about weapons proliferation.
OK. But I'm still paying for a couple of reactors that were stupidly built right on an earthquake fault. After those stupid mistakes I'm quite hesitant to trust ANY company to run a reactor.
Now it's true that the particular faults haven't moved much recently (i.e., during the last century), but this doesn't mean they won't move tomorrow. They've moved within the past 3 centuries.
A part of the problem is that it's difficult and expensive to store electricity to move a vehicle. This hasn't been solved yet, though there have been some improvements.
To me the solution that looks best is some development of the super-capacitor. It might not work, but it looks very promising. And if it does it would allow an essentially unlimited number of fast charge-discharge cycles.
Remember, electric car batteries are only good for around 5 years (are they saying 7 years now?). And they use expensive materials that are dangerous to extract and to re-cycle. The super-capacitors don't have that problem. They've got others, but the other problems may be easier ones.
Yes, but those "new technologies" come at increased costs. Which makes the oil less desirable. And currently shale oil is both expensive to extract and tremendously destructive to the environment.
N.B.: Not just Canada, but also the U.S. have large amounts of shale oil and tar sands. But it's not economic to extract it. (I think Canada is currently extracting in a small way...so perhaps oil prices have risen enough to make it slightly profitable.) Current technologies for extracting oil from shale or sand require lots of energy and water, and leave huge mounds of waste. It's worse than coal.
That "myth" has already come true. E.g., off-shore oil wells are tremendously more expensive than the old fashioned shallow wells on land. And the price of oil has, indeed, risen.
The claim is that the currently most accessible resources will run out within a few decades. This is probably true. It's limitations are basically political. (If you don't dare go there to drill, it's inaccessible in a temporary fashion.)
After that there will be a need to switch to a less accessible form. Who knows what that will be, or what the enabling technology will be. Oil shales at our current level of technology are massively expensive...and not just in money. This doesn't guarantee that they will be so in a decade or two. Maybe someone will come up with something, like, say, a microorganism that cracks shale oil into something that flows more readily. Or something that can eat coal and excrete something like a petroleum fraction. More likely it will be something totally else...or we'll just have to put up with the higher prices. (This might be better, as it will push us in the direction of CO2 neutral energy sources, but we won't go there if it's not cheaper for some reason [if only taxes].)
You shouldn't disbelieve in flying pink elephants. We just haven't built them yet. But they won't be very large. And they'll need to have a very high octane food.
Possibly something a bit larger than a humming-bird that lives on Old Fashions, etc. Call it Elephans Frumentii.
P.S.: With apologies to Gavagan's Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
I don't see that there's nearly as much evidence for any particular religion, or even "some religion or other", as there is for multiple universes. At least that can be shown to be consistent with quantum theory.
To be precise, what evidence that is acceptable to someone who doesn't already believe does at least one religion provide?
Actually, Buddhism can provide several pieces of evidence, but then that isn't exactly a religion in any normal sense of the word. (Any gods involved are optional extra add-ons, e.g.)
Tumbling down a canyon isn't painful unless you hit the edges. Scary, yes, but that's a different thing. And if your terminal velocity is high enough, it probably won't hurt then, either, or only for an instant.
But you'll be scared for a measurable length of time. Pain is worse, and pain + scared is yet worse. So none of those are situations that I'll go looking for. But I don't mind the kind of simulation that one gets from a roller-coaster...scared, but knowing that it's not serious. That can be fun.
According to Dante Limbo is one of the circles of Hell. Now this isn't exactly standard Catholicism of his time, but it was close enough that he could write it without being castigated by the church.
I must admit that I don't know modern christian versions of this belief. I've always interpreted it as a kind of psychological warfare against their own believers.
People accepted their self-applied label. But it was a lie. Russian under Lenin was a wierd mixture of Fascism and Communism, but under Stalin it became much more fascist...and much less communist. The various reforms since then did not increase the communist influence.
If you want to see an example of communism, look at the history of the Oneida community. This will give you a clearer idea of what communism actually is, and will show you why it doesn't scale. Even Oneida wasn't actually communist, but they came as close as was practical. Soviet Russia wasn't even close. Neither was Red China. Both were attempts at totalitarian, but that's not at all the same thing.
Communism can only work when the social controls are such that nobody can profit at the expense of another, and selfish behavior is unacceptable by ANYONE, including the leadership. There are some other requirements, but those are sufficient to prevent it from scaling. (Even then I'm not sure it's a good system, but on a really small scale, and with dedication to a common goal [usually religious] it's approximately workable.)
Harlan is notoriously acerbic in person. I think he's a decent writer, though I usually don't like his style. (That's a matter of taste, not expertise.) And sometimes he's excellent.
So even though he's a good writer, it's easy to understand why someone might heckle him in person.
OTOH, I follow neither Harlan's writing nor Star Trek. I'm just answering your question based on general knowledge of the field.
To me it hinders my use of the Kindle,
Therefore I didn't buy it.
I honestly don't know if I would have bought it if it weren't DRM encumbered, but once I noticed that it was I stopped even considering it.
To me, DRM encumbered is the correct terminology. If it isn't for you, then YOU shouldn't use the phrase. That doesn't say anything about whether *I* should use the phrase.
OK, but now that most of Java is GPL I'm not convinced that's a serious threat. I just can't take that one seriously. (I suppose, though, that it's possible that the people making the decisions don't understand the GPL.)
No. The facets of the situation that are being discussed are either irrelevant or opposed to communism. (I'd assert that communism scales so poorly that there's never been a communist society on larger than the village level. Doesn't mean there weren't groups that *called* themselves communists. But they had less to do with communism than the Democrats have to do with democracy.)
In primus:
There's probably no legal way to deal with this, unless you want to fight it out in court. Good luck with that. They won't prosecute unless they figure they'll win.
Given that:
If you're operating a botnet, why not just edit the official government pages to include forbidden links. Then you don't even need to know very many of them.
Actually, it doesn't even need to be government pages. Any large company would work as well. And in either case you'd need to be using a botnet for this, because:
a) you don't want it traced back to you, and
b) you need to do it repeatedly (every time they fix the page).
I'm not at all sure how practical it is to try to get a complete list in the manner described. It's probably continually being altered. The only practical way would seem to be to read their server and copy off the secret file at least once a week. And for that you'd better not be traceable, because eventually they'll notice what you are doing. (Another interesting trick would be to include, say, clothing links into the list. [When I was in my early teens I used to trace the Sears catalog women's underwear pictures, and then edit them.])