I now live in rural southern Ohio. My library has a modest selection of DVDs, no PC games, and one aisle of Manga, graphic novels, science fiction, and fantasy - and most of the sf/fantasy section is Star Wars novels, fantasy series aimed at idiots, and similar dreck. Not ONE Heinlein novel. No Zelazny. No Iain M. Banks. No... but you get the picture.
I feel like I'm living in a third-world country, here - or at least a third-rate one...
For those too lazy to RTFA, Collins has tracked the "Fatal Sequence" (aka the "Tytler Sequence") to a series of speeches given in the mid-20th Century by one Henning W. Prentis, Jr., then-president of Armstrong Cork Company. The origin of "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy" and its variations remains obscure - but it is a certainty that Lord Tytler is not its author, and a virtual certainty that it, too, originated in the 20th Century, not the 16th.
Nicely researched, well-cited article. Thanks for the pointer!
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the voters discover
that they can vote themselves largess from the public
treasury. From that time on the majority always votes
for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury, with the results that a democracy
always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed
by a dictatorship.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)
Spurious quote. It first appeared during the 2000 presidential campaign. There's a long tradition of such forged quotes (see: the "beat the drums of war" quote from "Julius Caesar" as an example from the other end of the political spectrum).
More cogently, it's a partial quote of the original forgery, which was titled "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy." That fuller statement is most probably based on Plato, from whose odious "The Republic" its "Tytler" cycle (from bondage to democracy and back again) is derived. The thing is, Plato was commenting on Classic-era Greek democracies (such as that of Athens), which were direct, rather than representative, democracies. There simply is no equivalent form of government in the modern world, just as there was no equivalent form in Tytler's day. In fact, there were only three representative democracies in existence during Tytler's life: those of the U.S., France, and Iceland - whose Althing is the oldest functioning parliament in the world.
All of which is by way of observing that to have modded the parent to plus-anything "insightful" is more indicative of the modder's political leanings than any merit inherent in the post itself - which consists exclusively of a partial quote of a blatant forgery attributed to a sixteenth-century Scot most noted for his 1790 "Essay on the Principles of Translation." (Nota bene: the popular "Great nations rise and fall" quote is also frequently attributed to Tytler - although it, like "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy" passage truncated above, is nowhere to be found in his many extant writings.)
But if you are poor, God help you, because you can't afford it.
In most cases, poor people are covered under Medicaid or similar programmes. The middle class is covered by private plans. The elderly have Medicare. There are relatively few people who 1) would want to have health insurance and 2) do not qualify for Medicaid/etc. Many of the insured are either the "young invincibles" or individuals who could qualify for Medicaid but never bothered to fill in the required paperwork (or simply don't know that they qualify).
You are as full of shit as a Thanksgiving turkey.
My wife and I are living examples of how wrong you are. We were middle class with incredibly shitty health insurance, until my wife developed cancer. Now we have no health insurance (because we can't afford the premiums for even the incredibly shitty insurance we used to have), no income (because the free-market buccaneers fucked the economy in the ass), and no possible access to Medicaid or Medicare (despite having both paid Medicare taxes for decade), because we're too young for the latter, and our car is too new for us to qualify for the former.
(To qualify for Medicare, you have to have less than $2,000 in liquid assets, and your car has to be worth no more than $3,500.)
The whole point of the health care "reform" bill was to extend coverage to 30 MILLION Americans who (like us) can't afford or obtain coverage under the present, insanely-anti-consumer system. Just because the Frankenstein's monster that the House passed is full of flaws, holes, and Congressional blowjobs for the health insurance industry doesn't obviate the need for reform. We still have no insurance. We have plenty of medical debt, though - and more being added all the time.
So how does that fit into your simplistic world view, Mr. "Many of the insured... could qualify for Medicaid but never bothered to fill in the required paperwork?"
This company is owned and run by Mark "NetZero" Goldston, after all. He's made a succession of fortunes from exploiting the gullibility of people who can't do simple math (i.e. - enormously oversubscribed dial-up service == browsing at the speed of a slug on drugs + you get auto-disconnected after an hour online), or, evidently, read. He's repeatedly made it clear that he's a slimeball of Steve Case proportions, so in what world would you expect classmates.com to vary from the Goldston standard model?
His target audience is cretins, so of course they're gonna take the two bucks!
Do they grasp the economic impact of these botnets? There may not be any physical violence, but the spam hassels, system cleanup, and DDOS attacks create hundreads of millions of dollars in economic damages. Sure, that's distributed over millions of people, but this sort of macroscopic vandalism is, in fact, a major crime. Throw the book at 'em.
Which part of
"Spain is one of nearly three dozen countries that is a signatory to the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty, but Spanish legislators have not yet ratified the treaty by passing anti-cybercrime laws that would bring its judicial system in line with the treaty's goals,"
was unclear to you?
They can't "throw the book at 'em", because there is no "book". What they've done is not a crime under Spanish law.
What needs to happen is that some country that has an extradition treaty with Spain (and that has laws against computer intrusion, etc.) needs to bring charges against them and request their extradition for prosecution under those laws.
Disclaimer: IANAL. And, most likely, neither are you.
Most of them are false positives. I think it's mostly because keygens and malware often use similar executable packers. But there are conspiracy theories that the AV vendors get paid for flagging keygens.
Horse hockey, warez boi.
Keygens are one of the biggest single vectors of virus/worm infection, period. Even when you delete the keygen after you run it, chances are your antivirus will find some root kit or another has been installed on your system, merrily downloading malware left and right.
Don't believe it? Try running almost any keygen presently being offered, delete the keygen, don't run any other piece of software, then go look at the activity lights on your router or cable modem.
Surprise!
Oh, and those conspiracy theories? They're spread by the botnet operators who depend on keygens to add the machines of warez doodz like you to their networks.
Ok, then. More rain and snow prove global warming. And drought proves global warming. So..... given that any changes in the weather prove global warming, what would disprove global warming?
Look, vastly to oversimplify things, weather (as opposed to climate) is a product of three factors:
1. An imbalance of hot and cold, caused by differential solar heating between tropical and polar latitudes (and by the effect of ice caps and glaciers providing "reservoirs" of cold air during the Summer), which causes the denser, cold, polar air to flow toward the relative vacuum of the less-dense, rising, warmer air of the tropical regions
2. The Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation dragging against the bottom of the atmosphere, which creates cyclonic rotation in the moving air masses, and
3. The heat energy of the total system, which determines the amplitude of the various weather phenomena (which is to say, "How violent the storms, droughts, and so on are.").
So, if the heat energy of the total system increases (i.e. - if the globe warms up), what results is more extreme weather of all kinds until the ice caps and glaciers disappear. Thus, you get more blizzards (and more intense blizzards) in Winter, more thunderstorms (and more intense thunderstorms - think F-class tornadoes, Class 5 hurricanes and typhoons, etc.) in Summer, more droughts (and more prolonged droughts) in areas that are drought-prone (like California and the American Southwest in general), and a whole lot more "unseasonable" weather in general (think tornadoes in January, blizzards in June, etc.).
Obviously, there are a lot of other factors that bear on local weather patterns: the proximity of significantly-sized bodies of either shallow or deep water, the size and position of mountain ranges, the presence or absence of forests, swamps, and the like (as opposed to mile after square mile of asphault roofs and roadways, which absorb, rather than reflect heat), and the latitude of the area, to name a few of the more important contributors.
So, yes, more rain and snow - and more drought - are symptoms (not "proof") of global warming. As to what would disprove global warming, see cmdr tofu's summary, below.
Stick your head in the sand long enough, and it's "Heads nobody wins, tails everybody loses."
If SCOTUS follows precedent - and it might - this particular piece of stupidity will be overturned, just as the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was. And for the same reason - because both are obvious violations of the 5th Amendment.
I ask you to make a part of the United States' position the following:
1. ACTA negotiations must be open and transparent and conducted in such a way as to permit the American public ongoing input into the negotiation process as it occurs, rather than conducted behind closed doors, with only the end result visible, after an agreement has been concluded.
2. The preservation of fair use must be a critical and integral part of the United States' position in the negotiations, and the fair use rights of its citizens must not be compromised in the final agreement.
3. Copyright terms must not be extended any further than U.S. law currently provides, and should, if anything, be reduced in order to provide the artistic compost necessary for the creative process to thrive. The U.S. must take the position that excessive copyright term lengths stifle innovation in the arts, rather than preserve it, and that its citizens and humanity as a whole are ill-served by the progressive march towards infinite copyright extension.
4. Penalties for copyright violation should and must fit the actual economic damage incurred by copyright holders, with Draconian punishment reserved exclusively for those who profit financially from infringement. The U.S. position should and must be that damages for infringement by individuals who do not seek to profit financially from their actions must neither be excessive nor unduly harsh.
5. Artists should be given the right to sue copyright infringers for monetary damages, regardless of when or whether those artists have formally registered their works, if and only if the infringing use was for the financial gain of the infringer.
I think we need to work for a constitutional amendment, to basically say a corporation is NOT a person with 'speech rights'.
Good luck with that.
I think we need a number of other constitutional amendments, too, including one specifically guaranteeing a right to individual privacy - but I'm not holding my breath, because, according to Article 5, there are two and only two mechanisms in the U.S. constitution for amending same:
1. Congress (both houses) must pass a proposed amendment by a 2/3 majority, and that amendment must then be ratified by 3/4 of the individual state legislatures or state constitutional conventions, or
2. On petition by 2/3 of the states' legislatures, a national constitutional convention can be convened for the purpose of proposing amendments, which then must be ratified as above.
Note that Congress - which is the body the amendment you're proposing to regulate thereby - is unlikely in extremis to pass such an amendment even by majority vote, much less by a supermajority, and that a constitutional convention isn't going to happen, either.
Thomas Jefferson opined, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." I'd say that nowadays the blood of lobbyists and machine politicians would make a good substitute "natural manure."
Slashdot Mirror
I now live in rural southern Ohio. My library has a modest selection of DVDs, no PC games, and one aisle of Manga, graphic novels, science fiction, and fantasy - and most of the sf/fantasy section is Star Wars novels, fantasy series aimed at idiots, and similar dreck. Not ONE Heinlein novel. No Zelazny. No Iain M. Banks. No ... but you get the picture.
I feel like I'm living in a third-world country, here - or at least a third-rate one ...
Murdoch can take away our Times, but he can never take our FREEDOM!
so what's the fucking point of saying he's CUBAN-american?
It's not racism - it's an allusion to his cigar-rolling skills!
Interesting citation re democracy: http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html
Interesting, indeed.
For those too lazy to RTFA, Collins has tracked the "Fatal Sequence" (aka the "Tytler Sequence") to a series of speeches given in the mid-20th Century by one Henning W. Prentis, Jr., then-president of Armstrong Cork Company. The origin of "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy" and its variations remains obscure - but it is a certainty that Lord Tytler is not its author, and a virtual certainty that it, too, originated in the 20th Century, not the 16th.
Nicely researched, well-cited article. Thanks for the pointer!
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)
Spurious quote. It first appeared during the 2000 presidential campaign. There's a long tradition of such forged quotes (see: the "beat the drums of war" quote from "Julius Caesar" as an example from the other end of the political spectrum).
More cogently, it's a partial quote of the original forgery, which was titled "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy." That fuller statement is most probably based on Plato, from whose odious "The Republic" its "Tytler" cycle (from bondage to democracy and back again) is derived. The thing is, Plato was commenting on Classic-era Greek democracies (such as that of Athens), which were direct, rather than representative, democracies. There simply is no equivalent form of government in the modern world, just as there was no equivalent form in Tytler's day. In fact, there were only three representative democracies in existence during Tytler's life: those of the U.S., France, and Iceland - whose Althing is the oldest functioning parliament in the world.
All of which is by way of observing that to have modded the parent to plus-anything "insightful" is more indicative of the modder's political leanings than any merit inherent in the post itself - which consists exclusively of a partial quote of a blatant forgery attributed to a sixteenth-century Scot most noted for his 1790 "Essay on the Principles of Translation." (Nota bene: the popular "Great nations rise and fall" quote is also frequently attributed to Tytler - although it, like "The Fall of the Athenian Democracy" passage truncated above, is nowhere to be found in his many extant writings.)
But if you are poor, God help you, because you can't afford it.
In most cases, poor people are covered under Medicaid or similar programmes. The middle class is covered by private plans. The elderly have Medicare. There are relatively few people who 1) would want to have health insurance and 2) do not qualify for Medicaid/etc. Many of the insured are either the "young invincibles" or individuals who could qualify for Medicaid but never bothered to fill in the required paperwork (or simply don't know that they qualify).
You are as full of shit as a Thanksgiving turkey.
My wife and I are living examples of how wrong you are. We were middle class with incredibly shitty health insurance, until my wife developed cancer. Now we have no health insurance (because we can't afford the premiums for even the incredibly shitty insurance we used to have), no income (because the free-market buccaneers fucked the economy in the ass), and no possible access to Medicaid or Medicare (despite having both paid Medicare taxes for decade), because we're too young for the latter, and our car is too new for us to qualify for the former.
(To qualify for Medicare, you have to have less than $2,000 in liquid assets, and your car has to be worth no more than $3,500.)
The whole point of the health care "reform" bill was to extend coverage to 30 MILLION Americans who (like us) can't afford or obtain coverage under the present, insanely-anti-consumer system. Just because the Frankenstein's monster that the House passed is full of flaws, holes, and Congressional blowjobs for the health insurance industry doesn't obviate the need for reform. We still have no insurance. We have plenty of medical debt, though - and more being added all the time.
So how does that fit into your simplistic world view, Mr. "Many of the insured ... could qualify for Medicaid but never bothered to fill in the required paperwork?"
Er .. because they're stupid?
This company is owned and run by Mark "NetZero" Goldston, after all. He's made a succession of fortunes from exploiting the gullibility of people who can't do simple math (i.e. - enormously oversubscribed dial-up service == browsing at the speed of a slug on drugs + you get auto-disconnected after an hour online), or, evidently, read. He's repeatedly made it clear that he's a slimeball of Steve Case proportions, so in what world would you expect classmates.com to vary from the Goldston standard model?
His target audience is cretins, so of course they're gonna take the two bucks!
Method: MakeGoogleSpreadsheetUseful
Error: unknown Method!
you can deposit diamonds at a bank, but how do you fit a crater in a vault?
Use really, really good compression.
the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
How tragic - another case of Mad Penguin Disease.
Will nobody think of the children?
You'll say, "Why, this is nothing but a bag of shit!"
Do they grasp the economic impact of these botnets? There may not be any physical violence, but the spam hassels, system cleanup, and DDOS attacks create hundreads of millions of dollars in economic damages. Sure, that's distributed over millions of people, but this sort of macroscopic vandalism is, in fact, a major crime. Throw the book at 'em.
Which part of
"Spain is one of nearly three dozen countries that is a signatory to the Council of Europe's cybercrime treaty, but Spanish legislators have not yet ratified the treaty by passing anti-cybercrime laws that would bring its judicial system in line with the treaty's goals,"
was unclear to you?
They can't "throw the book at 'em", because there is no "book". What they've done is not a crime under Spanish law.
What needs to happen is that some country that has an extradition treaty with Spain (and that has laws against computer intrusion, etc.) needs to bring charges against them and request their extradition for prosecution under those laws.
Disclaimer: IANAL. And, most likely, neither are you.
...block all ads with Privoxy and shut off Javacrap.
And then browse with blazing speed ... the 3 web sites that remain partially functional without Javastuff, that is.
The "new black" is gamma.
"And a bird, you cannot change". -- Yoda Skynard
"And this bird, change you cannot". -- Yoda Skynnard
Fixed that for you!
Most of them are false positives. I think it's mostly because keygens and malware often use similar executable packers. But there are conspiracy theories that the AV vendors get paid for flagging keygens.
Horse hockey, warez boi.
Keygens are one of the biggest single vectors of virus/worm infection, period. Even when you delete the keygen after you run it, chances are your antivirus will find some root kit or another has been installed on your system, merrily downloading malware left and right.
Don't believe it? Try running almost any keygen presently being offered, delete the keygen, don't run any other piece of software, then go look at the activity lights on your router or cable modem.
Surprise!
Oh, and those conspiracy theories? They're spread by the botnet operators who depend on keygens to add the machines of warez doodz like you to their networks.
I have never yet found a torrent on any torrent site that had a virus or trojan.
Then you haven't been looking hard enough.
(waves butane lighter)
Actually, it hasn't.
I submitted this story
on February 17, but no /. editor seemed to think it worthy of publication.
Frankly, I think they're all do-do heads ...
Proposed by the physicist Robert W Bussard (hence "Bussard Ramjet"), popularised by Larry Niven
ITIYM "Proposed by the physicist Robert W Bussard (hence "Bussard Ramjet"), popularised by Poul Anderson in his novel Tau Zero."
Kids these days ...
Ok, then. More rain and snow prove global warming. And drought proves global warming. So..... given that any changes in the weather prove global warming, what would disprove global warming?
Look, vastly to oversimplify things, weather (as opposed to climate) is a product of three factors:
1. An imbalance of hot and cold, caused by differential solar heating between tropical and polar latitudes (and by the effect of ice caps and glaciers providing "reservoirs" of cold air during the Summer), which causes the denser, cold, polar air to flow toward the relative vacuum of the less-dense, rising, warmer air of the tropical regions
2. The Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation dragging against the bottom of the atmosphere, which creates cyclonic rotation in the moving air masses, and
3. The heat energy of the total system, which determines the amplitude of the various weather phenomena (which is to say, "How violent the storms, droughts, and so on are.").
So, if the heat energy of the total system increases (i.e. - if the globe warms up), what results is more extreme weather of all kinds until the ice caps and glaciers disappear. Thus, you get more blizzards (and more intense blizzards) in Winter, more thunderstorms (and more intense thunderstorms - think F-class tornadoes, Class 5 hurricanes and typhoons, etc.) in Summer, more droughts (and more prolonged droughts) in areas that are drought-prone (like California and the American Southwest in general), and a whole lot more "unseasonable" weather in general (think tornadoes in January, blizzards in June, etc.).
Obviously, there are a lot of other factors that bear on local weather patterns: the proximity of significantly-sized bodies of either shallow or deep water, the size and position of mountain ranges, the presence or absence of forests, swamps, and the like (as opposed to mile after square mile of asphault roofs and roadways, which absorb, rather than reflect heat), and the latitude of the area, to name a few of the more important contributors.
So, yes, more rain and snow - and more drought - are symptoms (not "proof") of global warming. As to what would disprove global warming, see cmdr tofu's summary, below.
Stick your head in the sand long enough, and it's "Heads nobody wins, tails everybody loses."
Why can't the american news world stop using the world technology for everything that isn't actual, real, new technology?
In other news: Blacksmith uses hammer and anvil technology to produce horseshoes. Film at eleven.
If SCOTUS follows precedent - and it might - this particular piece of stupidity will be overturned, just as the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was. And for the same reason - because both are obvious violations of the 5th Amendment.
I ask you to make a part of the United States' position the following:
1. ACTA negotiations must be open and transparent and conducted in such a way as to permit the American public ongoing input into the negotiation process as it occurs, rather than conducted behind closed doors, with only the end result visible, after an agreement has been concluded.
2. The preservation of fair use must be a critical and integral part of the United States' position in the negotiations, and the fair use rights of its citizens must not be compromised in the final agreement.
3. Copyright terms must not be extended any further than U.S. law currently provides, and should, if anything, be reduced in order to provide the artistic compost necessary for the creative process to thrive. The U.S. must take the position that excessive copyright term lengths stifle innovation in the arts, rather than preserve it, and that its citizens and humanity as a whole are ill-served by the progressive march towards infinite copyright extension.
4. Penalties for copyright violation should and must fit the actual economic damage incurred by copyright holders, with Draconian punishment reserved exclusively for those who profit financially from infringement. The U.S. position should and must be that damages for infringement by individuals who do not seek to profit financially from their actions must neither be excessive nor unduly harsh.
5. Artists should be given the right to sue copyright infringers for monetary damages, regardless of when or whether those artists have formally registered their works, if and only if the infringing use was for the financial gain of the infringer.
I think we need to work for a constitutional amendment, to basically say a corporation is NOT a person with 'speech rights'.
Good luck with that.
I think we need a number of other constitutional amendments, too, including one specifically guaranteeing a right to individual privacy - but I'm not holding my breath, because, according to Article 5, there are two and only two mechanisms in the U.S. constitution for amending same:
1. Congress (both houses) must pass a proposed amendment by a 2/3 majority, and that amendment must then be ratified by 3/4 of the individual state legislatures or state constitutional conventions, or
2. On petition by 2/3 of the states' legislatures, a national constitutional convention can be convened for the purpose of proposing amendments, which then must be ratified as above.
Note that Congress - which is the body the amendment you're proposing to regulate thereby - is unlikely in extremis to pass such an amendment even by majority vote, much less by a supermajority, and that a constitutional convention isn't going to happen, either.
Thomas Jefferson opined, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." I'd say that nowadays the blood of lobbyists and machine politicians would make a good substitute "natural manure."
Trust me, your mileage won't vary.