If it were not for anonymous communication, we would never have found out about Watergate.
If you think that political corruption and invasion of rights should be allowed to proceed unfettered, then you have legitimate grounds to oppose anonymous communication. Otherwise you don't.
It would be nice if everyone could afford to reveal information about illegal activities and stand up to the vengeance that will be taken by those currently holding power. It would be foolish in the extreme to expect it. A few will, but they likely won't be in a position to know the critical information.
Just because you expect powerful people to act quickly and with few oversights to achieve their ends does not make such actions right.
If, as reported, the server quickly deleted the posted information, then they acted in good faith and reasonable compliance of the law. To gratuitously steal their business should be seen as theft performed under the cloak of authority. Also perversion of office, or whatever the appropriate term is.
Indymedia was once much more willing to comply with the extralegal requests of officials. Then those officials abused the trust. Since then, they have become less willing. This to me seems altogether proper on their part. I hope that there is a reasonable law that allows them to sue the officials for damages. Requiring them to pay personally both for their defense and for the business lost. I doubt, however, that this will be possible, because powerful people generally ensure that the laws are written to favor them and those who serve their ends.
The thing is, any leader of a major country could do this with minimal problems, provided that he could retain control for sufficient time. It would involve lots of research, expenditure, development, engineering, etc., but those wouldn't be done by the leader, and they are relatively easy to justify in terms of national prestige, economic benefits, etc. The real difficulty would be ensuring that one's plans remained in place for a century. The technical challenges aren't that hard. And it's pretty clear that it could be done. This is in contrast to "grey-goo" which may not be possible.
Another, perhaps easier, approach would be to create self-reproducing nano-machines that at one stage of their life cycle destroyed as much DNA/RNA as they could find. This, however, might not count as such nano-machines might, themselves, count as a form of life. OTOH, as I pointed out, even the giant meteor impact might leave some kinds of life. So perhaps it is too difficult.
Just killing off all mammals, however, is something so easy that we may well do it by accident. (There's lots of ways with a low probability of success...but when you add in all the probabilities of the different ways it's no longer insignificant.)
In fact, there's decent evidence that we may have started to destroy all vertebrate (chordate?) life by polluting the environment with certain chemicals that distort the sexual nature of all vertebrates. Perhaps this can be adapted to. Perhaps it will be kept at a low enough level that some will survive. But also perhaps not. (OTOH, insects have certainly adapted to most attempts to destroy them.)
You are attributing worthy, though insane, motives to him. Yes, you "hate" him. But you are accepting motives that are cleaner than those he manifestly possesses. I can't see or accept whatever those motives may be, but various of his actions rule out entire classes of motivation. And protecting America is one of the motivations that is clearly ruled out, unless he is considerably more dysfunctional that I believe.
It *has* been suggested that his actions are intended to bring on Armageddon (i.e., fulfill the necessary preconditions as laid down in Revelations), but I find it hard to believe that anyone would choose for themselves the role of the AntiChrist, which is the only role that he could fill in such a scenario.
This is RIAA related because they (or possibly the MPAA, I forget) essentially wrote the current copyright law, which is much less reasonable than the preceding copyright law (Sonny-Bono) which, in turn, was much less reasonable that it's predecessor.
I *think* that the MPAA was responsible for the Sonny-Bono law, and the RIAA was responsible for the DMCA, but I admit that I might have those confused. Or possibly the RIAA was responsible for both. (There's, of course, a difference between believing that something is true and being able to prove it. I know I couldn't prove that either organization had anything to do with copyright law. This doesn't change my belief.)
In one class the professor used to require that. Which was quite silly, because his lectures were straight reading from the class text (which he wrote).
Actually, it wouldn't be *THAT* difficult to wipe out all life on Earth, if that was your intention, and you controlled a major country (or equivalent) and you could afford to be patient. Asteroid orbits aren't *THAT* difficult to perturb. You might have to make a few orbital corrections, but I think that a solar powered mass driver on a large asteroid could probably perturb the orbit in a way that would wipe out all life on Earth within a century...though possibly some of the bacteria that live deep underground would survive.
The thing is, nobody with a lot of power has a goal of wiping out all life on Earth. If they did, who would remember their name and deeds later? It's not that nobody goes crazy that way, but it's a quite unusual craziness, and it's an unusual situation where such a person can maintain power for a long time. Besides, it's so much easier to just kill off all the people. There are probably 7 countries that could do that without any further investment, and without requiring enough patience to wait for a century (or at least decades...I haven't run the calculations).
I'm sorry. While I admit that I do not and cannot understand Bush's motives, I cannot believe any attribution that so glibly whitewashes him. I could more readily believe that he was in the pay of foreign powers intent on the destruction of the country.
If the company itself, i.e. the patent holder, donates the code, then it is probably safe. I'm not in a position to judge how useful it might be. But MS has long taken the position that it supports the BSD license, and other similar licenses that allow it to take code contributed by others, close it, modify it, and sell the closed & modified version under a new name.
I can't say that I know that they actually support such projects, but that's been their official position for over a decade.
??? I feel like you are re-writing history a bit. MS was, indeed, involved in those standards. That's quite a bit different from saying it supported them. And the MS.NET is about the opposite of supporting standards in ANY area. It's more about breaking standard ways of operating that already exist and are working.
It's interesting. At this rate in 20 or 30 years I may take them seriously. If they don't do something else sinister in the mean time.
One think that might cause me to think less favorably if it happens in the meanwhile is another EULA trap. (I *did* say another. I've counted every EULA since and including the MSWindows2000 as a trap. To be fair that should just be every one that I've read, which is only a small percentage of them.)
O. I've mentioned that bit about declarations of war requiring the approval of 2/3 of the Senate a few times. But you're right. Nobody declares war anymore, they just start fighting.
You might look into Cincinnatus. During the early Roman Republic there was a military crisis and he became essentially the dictator of Rome. After the war was over he resigned his position and then refused to even enter into the city of Rome again lest the government be corrupted by his presence.
Of course, it's also worth noticing that Cincinnatus was opposed to equal justice for all social classes...
Gore didn't make that statement. He made a closely similar statement which was perverted via oversimplification int the comment about his inventing the internet.
As far as I know, however, Gates actually did make that "640KB is enough for anyone" comment, just as the chairman of IBM famously underestimated the number of computer that would be needed by the country. (I can't remember the exact number, but I think it was on the order of, and probably on the close order of, 100 computers. This was, I think, somewhere after 1945 and before 1958.)
I can't remember whether the statement of Gates was published in Datamation or InformationWeek (or possibly in something else that I read less regularly). Of course, it's always possible the the reporter misquoted him... When it comes down to trusting the word of W. Gates or an anonymous reporter I find myself in a quandary. Neither is at all reliable.
As to why the government is more into contracting these days... I think it's primarily ideological rather than practical. I haven't noticed that either the costs have gone down OR the quality has improved. In several cases the precise opposite has happened.
Some companies are efficient, but generally not those that deal with government paperwork. And yet there are reasons for much of that paperwork. Q/C is increasingly difficult as organizations get larger and the implementers are further removed from the decision makers. (Do note, however, that I said much of the paperwork, not most of it. I'd wager that more than half is excess and unwarranted for one reason or another. Large organizations in general have a huge problem dealing with "selfish-memes" or "transposmemes" or whatever you wish to call the thing: Processes that have been hallowed by tradition, but serve no purpose other than to perpetuate themselves. Like particular forms that no one ever reads anymore [though once they may have]. Or particular offices and jobs that no longer have a useful function due to some restructuring...possible decades ago.) Government is, here, just another example of "large organization".
If you think that private companies are necessarily better, recall the last time you had to deal with the billing department of your HMO. Or consider how long it took GM to respond to Toyota during the 1970's. (Hint: the 1970's were over before GM had started to respond. They still haven't responded adequately. And the problem lays directly at the foot of management. Unions are only tangentially involved.)
I'm glad that it's surgically treatable. What I'm hoping for, and suggesting, however, is a treatment for youngsters that will prevent the disease from developing. Clearly for adults it's too late for treatments that only take effect while you are growing up, i.e., while the organs are still building themselves and naturally increasing in size.
Now that they've identified the problem, there's a reasonable chance that it can be treated. It might well require a weekly pill or some such, or even a shot, as RNA is too delicate to trust to the gut. But many such things are treatable already.
India has a flourishing medical community, including many pharmaceutical companies. I would expect them to jump on this quickly.
FWIW, there are a lot of Spanish speaking doctors, because a lot of them ARE Spanish, and speak English as a second language (often extremely fluently).
OTOH, a school here has 17 languages that it must deal with. Try Vietnamese, Laotian, Tagalog. (Lots of Philippine nurses, but I haven't met many doctors. Perhaps they stay home.) Portuguese might be a good second string, esp. if you're on the east coast. French if you're near the Canadian border. Etc. (I didn't suggest either Chinese or Japanese, as I've met too many doctors with that as their native tongue, or as the language spoken at home.)
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If it were not for anonymous communication, we would never have found out about Watergate.
If you think that political corruption and invasion of rights should be allowed to proceed unfettered, then you have legitimate grounds to oppose anonymous communication. Otherwise you don't.
It would be nice if everyone could afford to reveal information about illegal activities and stand up to the vengeance that will be taken by those currently holding power. It would be foolish in the extreme to expect it. A few will, but they likely won't be in a position to know the critical information.
Expect? Quite possibly. Think justifiable? Nope.
Just because you expect powerful people to act quickly and with few oversights to achieve their ends does not make such actions right.
If, as reported, the server quickly deleted the posted information, then they acted in good faith and reasonable compliance of the law. To gratuitously steal their business should be seen as theft performed under the cloak of authority. Also perversion of office, or whatever the appropriate term is.
Indymedia was once much more willing to comply with the extralegal requests of officials. Then those officials abused the trust. Since then, they have become less willing. This to me seems altogether proper on their part. I hope that there is a reasonable law that allows them to sue the officials for damages. Requiring them to pay personally both for their defense and for the business lost. I doubt, however, that this will be possible, because powerful people generally ensure that the laws are written to favor them and those who serve their ends.
The thing is, any leader of a major country could do this with minimal problems, provided that he could retain control for sufficient time. It would involve lots of research, expenditure, development, engineering, etc., but those wouldn't be done by the leader, and they are relatively easy to justify in terms of national prestige, economic benefits, etc. The real difficulty would be ensuring that one's plans remained in place for a century. The technical challenges aren't that hard. And it's pretty clear that it could be done. This is in contrast to "grey-goo" which may not be possible.
Another, perhaps easier, approach would be to create self-reproducing nano-machines that at one stage of their life cycle destroyed as much DNA/RNA as they could find. This, however, might not count as such nano-machines might, themselves, count as a form of life. OTOH, as I pointed out, even the giant meteor impact might leave some kinds of life. So perhaps it is too difficult.
Just killing off all mammals, however, is something so easy that we may well do it by accident. (There's lots of ways with a low probability of success...but when you add in all the probabilities of the different ways it's no longer insignificant.)
In fact, there's decent evidence that we may have started to destroy all vertebrate (chordate?) life by polluting the environment with certain chemicals that distort the sexual nature of all vertebrates. Perhaps this can be adapted to. Perhaps it will be kept at a low enough level that some will survive. But also perhaps not. (OTOH, insects have certainly adapted to most attempts to destroy them.)
You are attributing worthy, though insane, motives to him. Yes, you "hate" him. But you are accepting motives that are cleaner than those he manifestly possesses. I can't see or accept whatever those motives may be, but various of his actions rule out entire classes of motivation. And protecting America is one of the motivations that is clearly ruled out, unless he is considerably more dysfunctional that I believe.
It *has* been suggested that his actions are intended to bring on Armageddon (i.e., fulfill the necessary preconditions as laid down in Revelations), but I find it hard to believe that anyone would choose for themselves the role of the AntiChrist, which is the only role that he could fill in such a scenario.
This is RIAA related because they (or possibly the MPAA, I forget) essentially wrote the current copyright law, which is much less reasonable than the preceding copyright law (Sonny-Bono) which, in turn, was much less reasonable that it's predecessor.
I *think* that the MPAA was responsible for the Sonny-Bono law, and the RIAA was responsible for the DMCA, but I admit that I might have those confused. Or possibly the RIAA was responsible for both. (There's, of course, a difference between believing that something is true and being able to prove it. I know I couldn't prove that either organization had anything to do with copyright law. This doesn't change my belief.)
In one class the professor used to require that. Which was quite silly, because his lectures were straight reading from the class text (which he wrote).
Actually, it wouldn't be *THAT* difficult to wipe out all life on Earth, if that was your intention, and you controlled a major country (or equivalent) and you could afford to be patient. Asteroid orbits aren't *THAT* difficult to perturb. You might have to make a few orbital corrections, but I think that a solar powered mass driver on a large asteroid could probably perturb the orbit in a way that would wipe out all life on Earth within a century...though possibly some of the bacteria that live deep underground would survive.
The thing is, nobody with a lot of power has a goal of wiping out all life on Earth. If they did, who would remember their name and deeds later? It's not that nobody goes crazy that way, but it's a quite unusual craziness, and it's an unusual situation where such a person can maintain power for a long time. Besides, it's so much easier to just kill off all the people. There are probably 7 countries that could do that without any further investment, and without requiring enough patience to wait for a century (or at least decades...I haven't run the calculations).
I understand your point, but...
I'm sorry. While I admit that I do not and cannot understand Bush's motives, I cannot believe any attribution that so glibly whitewashes him. I could more readily believe that he was in the pay of foreign powers intent on the destruction of the country.
If the company itself, i.e. the patent holder, donates the code, then it is probably safe. I'm not in a position to judge how useful it might be. But MS has long taken the position that it supports the BSD license, and other similar licenses that allow it to take code contributed by others, close it, modify it, and sell the closed & modified version under a new name.
I can't say that I know that they actually support such projects, but that's been their official position for over a decade.
??? .NET is about the opposite of supporting standards in ANY area. It's more about breaking standard ways of operating that already exist and are working.
I feel like you are re-writing history a bit. MS was, indeed, involved in those standards. That's quite a bit different from saying it supported them. And the MS
It's interesting. At this rate in 20 or 30 years I may take them seriously. If they don't do something else sinister in the mean time.
One think that might cause me to think less favorably if it happens in the meanwhile is another EULA trap. (I *did* say another. I've counted every EULA since and including the MSWindows2000 as a trap. To be fair that should just be every one that I've read, which is only a small percentage of them.)
How many Datamations have *you* kept from the 1990's? Why would you expect anyone to be able to cite a specific reference?
(I think it's *got* to have been sometime in the 1990's. This is inferential, though, not memory.)
I think the Bar Association is a lobbying group on behalf of the lawyers. It clearly doesn't exercise any quality control over them.
If you want to support the artists, send them the money as a gift. Don't pay one of the RIAA companies. The artists will be lucky to see a dime of it.
I don't know if that's true or not. I didn't see the pictures.
O. I've mentioned that bit about declarations of war requiring the approval of 2/3 of the Senate a few times. But you're right. Nobody declares war anymore, they just start fighting.
Ah. So this time you had the choice of a candidate that even approximately claimed to represent your views.
You might look into Cincinnatus. During the early Roman Republic there was a military crisis and he became essentially the dictator of Rome. After the war was over he resigned his position and then refused to even enter into the city of Rome again lest the government be corrupted by his presence.
Of course, it's also worth noticing that Cincinnatus was opposed to equal justice for all social classes...
Gore didn't make that statement. He made a closely similar statement which was perverted via oversimplification int the comment about his inventing the internet.
As far as I know, however, Gates actually did make that "640KB is enough for anyone" comment, just as the chairman of IBM famously underestimated the number of computer that would be needed by the country. (I can't remember the exact number, but I think it was on the order of, and probably on the close order of, 100 computers. This was, I think, somewhere after 1945 and before 1958.)
I can't remember whether the statement of Gates was published in Datamation or InformationWeek (or possibly in something else that I read less regularly). Of course, it's always possible the the reporter misquoted him... When it comes down to trusting the word of W. Gates or an anonymous reporter I find myself in a quandary. Neither is at all reliable.
As to why the government is more into contracting these days ... I think it's primarily ideological rather than practical. I haven't noticed that either the costs have gone down OR the quality has improved. In several cases the precise opposite has happened.
Some companies are efficient, but generally not those that deal with government paperwork. And yet there are reasons for much of that paperwork. Q/C is increasingly difficult as organizations get larger and the implementers are further removed from the decision makers. (Do note, however, that I said much of the paperwork, not most of it. I'd wager that more than half is excess and unwarranted for one reason or another. Large organizations in general have a huge problem dealing with "selfish-memes" or "transposmemes" or whatever you wish to call the thing: Processes that have been hallowed by tradition, but serve no purpose other than to perpetuate themselves. Like particular forms that no one ever reads anymore [though once they may have]. Or particular offices and jobs that no longer have a useful function due to some restructuring...possible decades ago.) Government is, here, just another example of "large organization".
If you think that private companies are necessarily better, recall the last time you had to deal with the billing department of your HMO. Or consider how long it took GM to respond to Toyota during the 1970's. (Hint: the 1970's were over before GM had started to respond. They still haven't responded adequately. And the problem lays directly at the foot of management. Unions are only tangentially involved.)
I'm glad that it's surgically treatable. What I'm hoping for, and suggesting, however, is a treatment for youngsters that will prevent the disease from developing. Clearly for adults it's too late for treatments that only take effect while you are growing up, i.e., while the organs are still building themselves and naturally increasing in size.
Now that they've identified the problem, there's a reasonable chance that it can be treated. It might well require a weekly pill or some such, or even a shot, as RNA is too delicate to trust to the gut. But many such things are treatable already.
India has a flourishing medical community, including many pharmaceutical companies. I would expect them to jump on this quickly.
Even the Howards know better than to do that, and they *don't* live forever. ... Except, perhaps, one of them.
FWIW, there are a lot of Spanish speaking doctors, because a lot of them ARE Spanish, and speak English as a second language (often extremely fluently).
OTOH, a school here has 17 languages that it must deal with. Try Vietnamese, Laotian, Tagalog. (Lots of Philippine nurses, but I haven't met many doctors. Perhaps they stay home.) Portuguese might be a good second string, esp. if you're on the east coast. French if you're near the Canadian border. Etc. (I didn't suggest either Chinese or Japanese, as I've met too many doctors with that as their native tongue, or as the language spoken at home.)
Well, yes... but if you think you know your genetic history, and don't have a printed gene sequence test in front of you, the odds are you're wrong.
Talk to genetic paleontologists. Genes are a lot more mobile among populations than people admit.