the consesnus here seems to be that this "law" runs from the ridiculous to the unconstitutional. Well, now that we are decided, what are we going to do about it?
The Global Government (which either doesn't care or is too dumb ot realize that all of their meetings for the past 18 months have been massivly disrupted) is set to have yet another meeting soon. This one is in Quebec City, and if you are too far away to make it, I suggest you demonstrate in your local town (if you are lucky enough where such actions aren't liable to get you stuck in a basement with electrodes stuck to your testicles)
Switzerland still clings to their neutrality, and is not a member of the UN.
But, on the whole, you are correct, that compared to the UNs meddling (for better or for worse) in world affairs, ICANNs attempts to do whatever it is they are doing is relativly minor.
Am I really that ignorant of the English language? Where, when and how did the word "education" come to mean "accredited 4 year university"? What, exactly did all these accredited four year universities do to lay sole claim to the title of "education"? Unless "education" now means "bullshit, more bullshit, date rape and drunk driving" I don't think that the four year universities should be in sole possesion of the.edu
So, to put it more mildly, I don't see why four year universities should have sole rights to the.edu domain. I am happy that four year colleges and non-traditional schools may also be able to get it.
I actually modded you up for that first post for Katy a few weeks ago...as offtopic and ridiculous as it was, young love (or old love,for all I know) is so sweet+cute, I really had to reward you. I got metamodded down for it, too.
I only saw one entry that was pure html...the sad sad story of the armadillo. I didn't get the joke, but I do want to know what that guy is doing in bed with an armadillo.
This being Slashdot, I smell conspiracy! Microsoft is behind these ports. Seems unlikely...let me explain...
Deep in college campuses and cheap apartments across the country, programmers are working long into the night to get more and more advanced versions of Linux out. Undeterred by lack of support and Micro$oft FUD, nothing can stop them. Thta is until, they get a copy of Alpha Centauri...three months later, they are stil working far into the night, but this time it is to get enough artilerry together to biseige that one enemy coastal city...and hacking ther kernel is left far behind.
While I think it is great that someone is trying to think up a system for controlling ACs,don't we already have a system for doing this? Isn't this what the Moderation system already does?
I think the idea of DDOS against ACs is a good idea too, but we have to remember that some ACs have important things to say, and also that since they are anonymous, we won't be able to find out their IPs.
I think the best way to control ACs is just by setting our threshold to 1 or higher...
Read the Jim Bell article next to this...it was much more interesting, anyway.
What I don't understand is how the swine in the federal govt can find any kind of excuse at all for someone advocating the assasination of unethical government employees, as well as giving information on how to do it.
After all, Americans don't have a right to kill unethical government officers...they have a duty to do so. Anyone that doesn't have a religious objection to killing should do it, it is part of being a good citizen.
I can see why a software company like Micro$oft would vote for copyright protection, but why would companies like IBM and Iomega want copyright (copywrite?) protection?
It doesn't seem that free, fair or illicit use of harddrives or zip disks would be that bad for their business, it would actually be good. The more mp3s I can distribute fairly or not, the more 250 Meg Zip disks people will be buying, it would seem.
Are they just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts for all the poor software distributors? Or are they being pressured from somewhere? Or do they own sizable software subsidies?
In American criminal courts, Mon$anto would have to prove with a certainity of evidence that the farmer had done this purposely. In a civil case, they would have to have higher paid layers...er, they would have to prove with a preponderance evidence that this had been done purposely. I wan't a juror on this case, so I don't know all the evidence brought up. But I don't know if it qualifies as a proponderance.
I believed the same thing for a long time myself. It didn't make sense to me how an amino acid could cause any health problems, since they are obviously the stuff of life itself. I thought it was just people who hated asparatame on the basis of being artificial.
Then I did some research on the matter and found out the research and reasoning behind it...and it does have a large amount of theoretical and experimental evidence behind it.
This is the short version: in addition to being a protein building block, aspartic acid, along with glutamate, is also a nuerotransmitter, which means it makes a class of receptor (called the Glutamate receptors, not surprisingly) fire. If they fire a little bit, thats okay. A professor at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis (Dr. Olney, the same Dr. Olney who in related work would show that PCP literally eats holes in peoples brains) discovered that if you give monkeys too much glutamate and\or aspartic acid, those neurons keep on firing, which A) Causes behavioral changes and B) eventually, after using all its energy to continuously polarize itself, dies of ischemia and\or overheats, damaging its organelles, after which the cell is chewed apart by macrophages.
Now, the question isn't whether this happens...it does. Dr. Olney was able to find at least enough proof that it does to convince congress to ban Glutamate from baby foods. The issue is whether a normal person can regulate the aspartic acid\glutamate levels enough so that it doesn't cause nervous overexcitation. And the answer to that is, that, yes, a normal person can probably balance out the effects of a little bit of MSG or Nutrasweet. There are 7 or 8 different sites on the Aspartic Acid recpetor site, so it isn't as simple as Aspartic Acid=Cell Death. However, there is a lot of evidence that under certain conditions, the regulating mechanisms lose their effectiveness, and the neuron will continuosly fire, causing weird behaviors and\or cell death.
So is it rather unusual that an amino acid can be poisonous? Yes, it is. But is it impossible? No. After all, amino acids can cross the blood\brain barrier unimpeded, something other chemicals can't do. And for that matter, amphetamine, ephedrine etc. are also chemicals that are almost identical to amino acids, and they are obviously dangerous.
But my point is not that aspartic acid is neccasarily poisonous...it is that Monsanto has continuosly denied any evidence whatsoever that it might be, and that they scientific evidence is not neccarsarily what they have in mind when insisting that it is safe.
Right you are! O I posted on here a few days ago, (on an article about computer security) that Americans seem to have an obsession with eliminating risks. I wouldn't want to make asparatame illegal. (Just like it is ridiculous that marijuana is illegal), but I do want people to be educated about the risks or possible risks of such substances.
I don't blame Monsanto for the American publics taste for crack snacks. (I once ate two boxes of Lil Debbie Nutty Bars at a sitting myself!) But I do blame them, and their spineless, consciousless (or maybe just rather clueless) scientists for lying to the press, bribing congressmen, telling their lies to medical students, etc. All the while harmless drugs like marijuana are causing the constitution to be trodden over...
As for philosophical issue, yes, you are right, everyone is always free to do what they think best. That is one side of the coin. The other side is that their is an external reality that we create for ourselves, but that once created, is hard to control and hard to change, and that we are not always able to change it.
Monsato is about number one on everyones list of companies that don't care about anyone or anything. Right next to Nestle, which in addition to their baby-killing, also makes tea that tastes like shit.
In regards to Asparatame, their toxic sweetner, Monsata has this to say:
"Nutrasweet breaks down into such common dietary products as phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methanol.
Shit, I don't know about you, but I don't get all that much methanol in my diet. I suspect taht the fine "scientists" at Monsato might, though.
A lot of people think that gnutella isn't scalabl enough. But from what I have seen of it, gnutella is less efficient then Napster because it takes up about 500 bytes-1 K a second to link hosts and pass requests.
On a analog modem, that is an annoying loss of bandwidth, but on DSL or Cable or a ethernet dorm room, that owuld be a trivial amnount of bandwith. As broadband starts to spread, I am sure gnutella will be more and more practical.
You are right, but for cultural reasons, Americans will never listen to your logic. I don't know about people in other parts of the world.
In America, everytime a plane crashes, or someone overdoses on OTC medications, or someone shoots themselves in the foot or head with a hand gun, the media, activist groups and politicians swarm all over it. Sure these things are bad, but to a certain extant, they are unavoidable. American culture seems to be averse to the fact that things don't work or work in unforeseen ways, and that sometimes people get hurt or killed from these things.
Computer security is no exception to this, people are not going to accept the fact that running a computer implies the risk of having it broken into, and that there is not much to be done about it and that no one is to blame when a security hole in your chosen OS causes loss of thousands of dollars worth of sensitive data. Many people will continue to view security holes as the result of near criminal negligence.
The previous Slashdot article mentioned that psychologists were working on the project. Is it just me, or would being a spychologist trying to put together a psychological profile of 5cr1p7 k1dd13z be a very amusing job? I can imagine a psychologist sitting around, trying to guess what fonts and color schemes would be the most amusing to cr4ck3rz.
On a serious note, I wonder if any psychological research has been done that debates the notion of kiddies\crackers as being teenage males with bad social skills. It would be interesting to see if more cracker types wern't (for example) socialy outgoing and healthy college students who like the thrill of cracking. Or maybe their is a substantial amount of middle aged computer programmers that have access to high tech computers, and use them for breaking into other systems out of boredom.
despite what the previous Slashdot post said, the documents available don't seem to have any kind of abstract of the psychological characeteistics of the people that broke into the system.
Are you accusing me of seXX0ring sheep?!?! I will have you know that my Viagra induced escapades only involve Goats. Come on, you don't think that Senor Goat got that prolapsed with someone (me) plugging him with undrugged genitalia, did you?
I wouldn't say that the web browser was the latest innovation in science and technology. I don't even know if I would even say that the web browser was so much an innovation in technology as it was a stylistic leap forward for computers. (I would probably say the same about the GUI).
I would say, that, just off the top of my head, that cloning a sheep was a pretty innovative use of science\technology. I am sure that there is plenty of other things we can think up. Take pharmacology, Viagra to the side, I am sure that their has been dozens of new medications devised in the past decade. Gabapentin comes to mind. In other areas of technology, the research on hybrid cars comes to mind. I am sure that people out there can think of dozens of innovations.
And of course, I can't forget to mention "Ginger"...
I am so glad that I live in a world where a persons intelligence can so adequatly be judged by an AC reading one comment that I wrote in an off hand moment of boredom.
Damn, Mr. Coward (are you any relation to Noel?), maybe you should get a job at a psychiatric facility diagnosing peoples sanity by their ability to play ping-pong. A person with your talents has many routes open to them in life.
Slashdot Mirror
the consesnus here seems to be that this "law" runs from the ridiculous to the unconstitutional. Well, now that we are decided, what are we going to do about it?
The Global Government (which either doesn't care or is too dumb ot realize that all of their meetings for the past 18 months have been massivly disrupted) is set to have yet another meeting soon. This one is in Quebec City, and if you are too far away to make it, I suggest you demonstrate in your local town (if you are lucky enough where such actions aren't liable to get you stuck in a basement with electrodes stuck to your testicles)
Switzerland still clings to their neutrality, and is not a member of the UN.
But, on the whole, you are correct, that compared to the UNs meddling (for better or for worse) in world affairs, ICANNs attempts to do whatever it is they are doing is relativly minor.
Am I really that ignorant of the English language? Where, when and how did the word "education" come to mean "accredited 4 year university"? What, exactly did all these accredited four year universities do to lay sole claim to the title of "education"? Unless "education" now means "bullshit, more bullshit, date rape and drunk driving" I don't think that the four year universities should be in sole possesion of the .edu
So, to put it more mildly, I don't see why four year universities should have sole rights to the .edu domain. I am happy that four year colleges and non-traditional schools may also be able to get it.
I actually modded you up for that first post for Katy a few weeks ago...as offtopic and ridiculous as it was, young love (or old love,for all I know) is so sweet+cute, I really had to reward you. I got metamodded down for it, too.
I only saw one entry that was pure html...the sad sad story of the armadillo. I didn't get the joke, but I do want to know what that guy is doing in bed with an armadillo.
This being Slashdot, I smell conspiracy! Microsoft is behind these ports. Seems unlikely...let me explain...
Deep in college campuses and cheap apartments across the country, programmers are working long into the night to get more and more advanced versions of Linux out. Undeterred by lack of support and Micro$oft FUD, nothing can stop them. Thta is until, they get a copy of Alpha Centauri...three months later, they are stil working far into the night, but this time it is to get enough artilerry together to biseige that one enemy coastal city...and hacking ther kernel is left far behind.
just to be fair, I must present the other side of the coin...
blah blah blah broken homes blah drugs blah alcohol blah academic pressure blach blah commericialism blah blah lack of traditional values blach blach blah blah too many choices blah blah DOOM blah blah global capitalism blah geek profiling blah blah
In other news, ain't nothing change, ain't nothing strange.
While I think it is great that someone is trying to think up a system for controlling ACs,don't we already have a system for doing this? Isn't this what the Moderation system already does?
I think the idea of DDOS against ACs is a good idea too, but we have to remember that some ACs have important things to say, and also that since they are anonymous, we won't be able to find out their IPs.
I think the best way to control ACs is just by setting our threshold to 1 or higher...
Read the Jim Bell article next to this...it was much more interesting, anyway.
What I don't understand is how the swine in the federal govt can find any kind of excuse at all for someone advocating the assasination of unethical government employees, as well as giving information on how to do it.
After all, Americans don't have a right to kill unethical government officers...they have a duty to do so. Anyone that doesn't have a religious objection to killing should do it, it is part of being a good citizen.
Or maybe he just wanted to contribute to open standards by letting us view his html...
I can see why a software company like Micro$oft would vote for copyright protection, but why would companies like IBM and Iomega want copyright (copywrite?) protection?
It doesn't seem that free, fair or illicit use of harddrives or zip disks would be that bad for their business, it would actually be good. The more mp3s I can distribute fairly or not, the more 250 Meg Zip disks people will be buying, it would seem.
Are they just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts for all the poor software distributors? Or are they being pressured from somewhere? Or do they own sizable software subsidies?
In American criminal courts, Mon$anto would have to prove with a certainity of evidence that the farmer had done this purposely. In a civil case, they would have to have higher paid layers...er, they would have to prove with a preponderance evidence that this had been done purposely. I wan't a juror on this case, so I don't know all the evidence brought up. But I don't know if it qualifies as a proponderance.
I believed the same thing for a long time myself. It didn't make sense to me how an amino acid could cause any health problems, since they are obviously the stuff of life itself. I thought it was just people who hated asparatame on the basis of being artificial.
Then I did some research on the matter and found out the research and reasoning behind it...and it does have a large amount of theoretical and experimental evidence behind it.
This is the short version: in addition to being a protein building block, aspartic acid, along with glutamate, is also a nuerotransmitter, which means it makes a class of receptor (called the Glutamate receptors, not surprisingly) fire. If they fire a little bit, thats okay. A professor at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis (Dr. Olney, the same Dr. Olney who in related work would show that PCP literally eats holes in peoples brains) discovered that if you give monkeys too much glutamate and\or aspartic acid, those neurons keep on firing, which A) Causes behavioral changes and B) eventually, after using all its energy to continuously polarize itself, dies of ischemia and\or overheats, damaging its organelles, after which the cell is chewed apart by macrophages.
Now, the question isn't whether this happens...it does. Dr. Olney was able to find at least enough proof that it does to convince congress to ban Glutamate from baby foods. The issue is whether a normal person can regulate the aspartic acid\glutamate levels enough so that it doesn't cause nervous overexcitation. And the answer to that is, that, yes, a normal person can probably balance out the effects of a little bit of MSG or Nutrasweet. There are 7 or 8 different sites on the Aspartic Acid recpetor site, so it isn't as simple as Aspartic Acid=Cell Death. However, there is a lot of evidence that under certain conditions, the regulating mechanisms lose their effectiveness, and the neuron will continuosly fire, causing weird behaviors and\or cell death.
So is it rather unusual that an amino acid can be poisonous? Yes, it is. But is it impossible? No. After all, amino acids can cross the blood\brain barrier unimpeded, something other chemicals can't do. And for that matter, amphetamine, ephedrine etc. are also chemicals that are almost identical to amino acids, and they are obviously dangerous.
But my point is not that aspartic acid is neccasarily poisonous...it is that Monsanto has continuosly denied any evidence whatsoever that it might be, and that they scientific evidence is not neccarsarily what they have in mind when insisting that it is safe.
Right you are! O I posted on here a few days ago, (on an article about computer security) that Americans seem to have an obsession with eliminating risks. I wouldn't want to make asparatame illegal. (Just like it is ridiculous that marijuana is illegal), but I do want people to be educated about the risks or possible risks of such substances.
I don't blame Monsanto for the American publics taste for crack snacks. (I once ate two boxes of Lil Debbie Nutty Bars at a sitting myself!) But I do blame them, and their spineless, consciousless (or maybe just rather clueless) scientists for lying to the press, bribing congressmen, telling their lies to medical students, etc. All the while harmless drugs like marijuana are causing the constitution to be trodden over...
As for philosophical issue, yes, you are right, everyone is always free to do what they think best. That is one side of the coin. The other side is that their is an external reality that we create for ourselves, but that once created, is hard to control and hard to change, and that we are not always able to change it.
In regards to Asparatame, their toxic sweetner, Monsata has this to say: "Nutrasweet breaks down into such common dietary products as phenylalanine, aspartic acid and methanol.
Shit, I don't know about you, but I don't get all that much methanol in my diet. I suspect taht the fine "scientists" at Monsato might, though.
Don't believe this guy! My real e-Mail it thegiver@goatse.cx !
Damn, too bad you can't figure out a simple spam decoding!
No, because in space, no one can hear your cell phone calls.
A lot of people think that gnutella isn't scalabl enough. But from what I have seen of it, gnutella is less efficient then Napster because it takes up about 500 bytes-1 K a second to link hosts and pass requests.
On a analog modem, that is an annoying loss of bandwidth, but on DSL or Cable or a ethernet dorm room, that owuld be a trivial amnount of bandwith. As broadband starts to spread, I am sure gnutella will be more and more practical.
You are right, but for cultural reasons, Americans will never listen to your logic. I don't know about people in other parts of the world.
In America, everytime a plane crashes, or someone overdoses on OTC medications, or someone shoots themselves in the foot or head with a hand gun, the media, activist groups and politicians swarm all over it. Sure these things are bad, but to a certain extant, they are unavoidable. American culture seems to be averse to the fact that things don't work or work in unforeseen ways, and that sometimes people get hurt or killed from these things.
Computer security is no exception to this, people are not going to accept the fact that running a computer implies the risk of having it broken into, and that there is not much to be done about it and that no one is to blame when a security hole in your chosen OS causes loss of thousands of dollars worth of sensitive data. Many people will continue to view security holes as the result of near criminal negligence.
The previous Slashdot article mentioned that psychologists were working on the project. Is it just me, or would being a spychologist trying to put together a psychological profile of 5cr1p7 k1dd13z be a very amusing job? I can imagine a psychologist sitting around, trying to guess what fonts and color schemes would be the most amusing to cr4ck3rz.
On a serious note, I wonder if any psychological research has been done that debates the notion of kiddies\crackers as being teenage males with bad social skills. It would be interesting to see if more cracker types wern't (for example) socialy outgoing and healthy college students who like the thrill of cracking. Or maybe their is a substantial amount of middle aged computer programmers that have access to high tech computers, and use them for breaking into other systems out of boredom.
despite what the previous Slashdot post said, the documents available don't seem to have any kind of abstract of the psychological characeteistics of the people that broke into the system.
If it were French, the custom agents would have had to make sure there was no Swastikas inscribed on the rocks.
Are you accusing me of seXX0ring sheep?!?! I will have you know that my Viagra induced escapades only involve Goats. Come on, you don't think that Senor Goat got that prolapsed with someone (me) plugging him with undrugged genitalia, did you?
I wouldn't say that the web browser was the latest innovation in science and technology. I don't even know if I would even say that the web browser was so much an innovation in technology as it was a stylistic leap forward for computers. (I would probably say the same about the GUI).
I would say, that, just off the top of my head, that cloning a sheep was a pretty innovative use of science\technology. I am sure that there is plenty of other things we can think up. Take pharmacology, Viagra to the side, I am sure that their has been dozens of new medications devised in the past decade. Gabapentin comes to mind. In other areas of technology, the research on hybrid cars comes to mind. I am sure that people out there can think of dozens of innovations.
And of course, I can't forget to mention "Ginger"...
I am not going to miss it either, since they never bothered to put Kittylicious Pryde in any of the X-Men games.
I am so glad that I live in a world where a persons intelligence can so adequatly be judged by an AC reading one comment that I wrote in an off hand moment of boredom.
Damn, Mr. Coward (are you any relation to Noel?), maybe you should get a job at a psychiatric facility diagnosing peoples sanity by their ability to play ping-pong. A person with your talents has many routes open to them in life.