thank you for an intelligent response,and not just calling me ass-monkey:/
Heh, you're welcome; I guess that's the level of much of the discourse on here. After reading your post I still don't agree with your argument but at least I understand where you're coming from now.
Yeah, just look at the level of discourse in the chat; if these guys are the hackers in question, they really are sophisticated! Just look at this conversation about DNS vulnerabilities:
McCarthy, though a power mad drunk and witless individual did point out the broadening influence of Communism and help to root out some very corrupt individuals.
What bullshit. Like who? I can identify plenty of corrupt individuals at the time, starting with McCarthy himself and of course J Edgar. What McCarthy did was help the government get rid of everyone who knew anything about communism, so that by the time we actually had to fight a war against communists in Vietnam, there wasn't anybody in the government who knew a damn thing about our enemies. This is supposed to have helped America?
As for connecting al-Qaeda to the DC sniper or the DDOS, I doubt it. The DC sniper leaves tarot cards and notes that say "I am God" -- hardly sounds like the handiwork of a Muslim extremist; sounds more like another home-grown American whacko. As for the DDOS, again, I doubt it. Disrupting e-commerce may be a goal of al-Qaeda's ideology at some level, but I doubt they spend too much time thinking about it. Their M.O. has always been large scale spectacular attacks on civilians, like the WTC and Bali. A DDOS just doesn't offer the same spectacle as an attack that litters the streets with the bodies of "infidels." Al-Qaeda is a grave threat, to be sure, but it doesn't help anybody if we get so paranoid that we start seeing Islamic terrorists behind every bush. In fact, I think that's their goal.
(And no, I won't say, "then the terrorists win.") (shit, I said it!)
Exactly. I'm sure the poster you're replying to didn't actually read the decision or much of the legal analysis of that decision that followed, with most constitutional scholars (including many conservatives) being quite critical of the decision. If the decision made so much sense, why was the Court compelled to stress that the decision should not be seen as precedent?
Or rather, a question; who's to say that other intelligent life in the universe is anything like our species? The idea that they can and should colonize us, study us, or even visit us seems like the height of anthropocentric hubris. They might not be "flesh-and-blood." They might have a completely different relation to matter and energy as we understand it. They might live in water. They might have no interest in enslaving us or looting our precious natural resources.
The Fermi Paradox [ufoskeptic.org] asks: If intelligent life is common, given the billions of years since the formation of our galaxy, why have E.T.'s not yet reached (and perhaps colonized) Earth?
Because they're intelligent enough to stay away from this dump.
What they're saying is they're scouring the space beyond the mesosphere for used condoms. Those things can wreak havoc on a satellite, let me tell you.
I was interviewed on Channel One once - the topic was media coverage of war in Kosovo. The interviewer was really cool and seemed interested in my perspective, but I couldn't help thinking she was baiting me for something. When I saw the videotape of how she edited it I understood. They managed not only to take my words out of context, but to give the impression that I was saying almost exactly the opposite of what I intended. What I had said was critical of the US media; most of this was edited out, and it was made to look like my sole purpose was to bash Serbian media coverage.
Not all the 9/11 detainees are here illegally. Remember, the Justice Dept won't even tell us who they are. But whether or not it would matter (and whether you are "for" or "against" it), my point was, the current Justice Dept is no threat to the 2nd Amendment.
And why the hell was it America's job to protect the Saudis from Saddam? The Saudis are more of a long-term threat (and even short-term threat) to our interests than Saddam, as evil as he is. The Saudis had a hell of a lot more to do with 9-11. Know what the Saudis said about the American troops when we first went in to protect them from Iraq? They said we don't need to build up our forces to protect ourselves against Saddam; we'll have our white slaves take care of it. Wake up.
This is funny as shit but it is true in a way. MS can't kill Linux, because there is no "there there." It's a hydra headed beast that keeps popping out of the ground everytime it gets whacked. While they are distracted playing whack a mole with Linux, Apple quietly slurps up desktop after desktop, and then plops the next Walkman on the consumer market as a freakin' afterthought. M$'s "switch" PR fiasco just shows that competing with Apple is not high on their priority list; they don't take it seriously at all. Of course, Apple isn't in any position to undermine them on the enterprise, but as far as Joe Home User goes, the consumer who wants to connect to the internet with no hassle, write letters, chat, listen to tunes, watch DVDs, look at photos, etc., Apple is getting into a great position to win the battle without firing a shot.
I still remember how many people lost faith in Apple after M$ bought some 150K shares of Apple to save their asses after they 180-d on licensing clones. (I still have a PTP 225, one of the best of that era). My only regret is that I never got one of the ad posters for Power Computing that expressed how I felt about people deserting Apple in those dark days.... thankfully the poster is preserved here...
If you think these "freedoms" are the same, why are you whining? If the bill takes away your "freedom" to bribe a candidate by buying ads for him (and I'm not sure that's what it does, but let's stipulate), but it doesn't take away your right to spend a hundred grand on a newspaper, and you think that's the same thing, then buy a damn newspaper and quit whining (or, use your newspaper to whine to people who give a shit). Don't act like your rights are being restricted (and call it worse than the Patriot Act, which is just ludicrous) on the one hand, and then on the other hand say it's no different than something you still have the right to do.
But again the point I was making is that money is not speech. Your right to spend $100,000 is not what the first amendment protects. And your right to spend that money on a press is only partly an issue of the free press; there may be taxes and other laws that restrict you from spending as you like. Say it with me now: Money is not speech.
There's the fallacy in your thinking right there. Money is not speech. Campaign finance reform is about limiting bribes. The point is that each person in the citizenry has one vote, not that each dollar gets one vote. I realize that the legal system has accepted the tortuous logic that money can = speech, but even accepting that, it is hard to agree that that is a more significant curtailment of liberties than the Patriot Act, which directly restricts privacy and due process of law. The restriction on speech embodied by McCain-Feingold, even if I accept this ridiculous logic, is minimal -- sure it might prevent you from buying a $10,000 ad, but it doesn't prevent you from buying a cheaper ad, making a speech, writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper, organizing a political action committee, etc. Free speech does not mean the freedom of access to every possible media outlet under every circumstances, and it certainly doesn't mean the freedom to have your voice amplified by the size of your wallet.
You've got one hell of a gun lobby protecting your second amendment rights, so there's never a need for the ACLU to step in...
Not to mention, the second amendment is hardly in danger by the current Administration, or by the PATRIOT Act. Ashcroft in particular, while showing a willingness to basically scrap most of the first and fourth amendments, wouldn't even check to see if any of the 9/11 detainees in custody tried to buy guns, because such a check of gun records might offend the gun lobby.
If terrorism succeeds, it will be because democracies are unwilling to protect themselves from it
I agree. It will be because the democracies were so scared of the terrorists that we willingly handed over our liberties to the most venal group of fearmongers ever to grace public office.
Are you joking? How can you have that quote from James Madison (paraphrasing Voltaire I think) alongside your declaration of your willingness to give up your rights for some vague promise of "safety"? Specifically after you basically say, if you disagree with me, get out of my country? The idea that people can state such nonsense and cloak it as patriotism makes me want to puke. This country is great because people have been willing to stand up and insist upon the rights promised in the Constitution, not because we have cowardly surrendered them every time a power-hungry leader scares us with horror stories about terrorists poisoning our mail.
Let's get this straight once and for all: Giving up our rights will not make us any safer. Every one of the terrorists who hijacked planes last September was already under surveillance without sneak-and-peek laws. Every one of them had a valid ID without national ID card laws. Not one of them made public speeches denouncing the US, without extra restrictions on political speech. All of them got money from known terrorist sources, without crackdowns on Muslim charities. It's already illegal to commit mass murder, without having extra penalties for vaguely defined "terrorist" activities. The PATRIOT act was a wish list that Ashcroft had mostly compiled before 9/11. And they got it from Congressional leaders without debate while they were still jittery about anthrax. (Just like Bush got a blank check for unilateral preventive war from Congressional leaders with little debate while they're jittery about elections.) Make no mistake: Ashcroft and Co. are hijacking the country, in plain view of the American public, and our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop it. By painting anyone who objects as unpatriotic, they're scaring people into accepting the destruction of our most precious values.
I'm an optimist though - it may take a few years, even a decade, but America will survive this assault in the end, because liberty is stronger than its enemies. History will not smile on those orchestrating the current mess; this period will be a blotch like the Red Scare, a time when America lost its wits.
Imagine a muslim extremist demanding full access to the plans of a nuculear plant in downtown New York!
Exactly how does the M$ NDA prevent this? First, it's hard to argue that nuclear power plant plans are a "trade secret." Not that it matters; it's easy enough for such information to be classified by the government (which is where that needs to happen if it's a national security issue like this). Finally, as everyone else has pointed out, M$ agreed to publish these particular "trade secrets" and is now using the NDA to avoid living up to their end of the agreement.
One time, I was, like, writing this paper, it was a really important paper, and the stupid paper clip came up, and he was like, BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEP It looks like you're writing a letter, can I help you? And I was like, what the fuck is that? So I, like clicked the clip and he went away, until I did something else, and he was back with a vengeance, like, BEEPBEEPBEEP and it was like, Word has shortcuts for this action, so I, like, picked up the keyboard and smashed it into my monitor while screaming obscenities. I had to write the rest of my paper on a manual typewriter. It was a good paper but it looked like crap because the keys didn't stay on the same line. So I got Wordperfect instead, and a new monitor. But I got kicked out of college for smoking too much pot, so I don't have to write papers anymore.
It's true, Word is an awful file format as far as I can tell. I've had the same kinds of problems opening Word documents created with different versions, or even opening files in other formats (even HTML!) And don't even get me started on the program's HTML output, which some people feel compelled to use even when they are hiring web designers to do it right for them. Nothing worse than spending an hour cleaning up a Word-generated web page only to have the client send you another copy of the same output because they wanted to change a sentence of content.....
So, yeah, Word sucks, but the point is that everyone uses it in certain arenas. So you're forced to use it if you deal with OPD a lot (Other People's Documents). Also, in Word's defense, it is profoundly easy and intuitive for people to use. And once people get used to it they are loathe to switch to something new to figure out.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, you're welcome; I guess that's the level of much of the discourse on here. After reading your post I still don't agree with your argument but at least I understand where you're coming from now.
And that's just a little fragment of it. I'm really worried about these guys taking over the internet!!
What bullshit. Like who? I can identify plenty of corrupt individuals at the time, starting with McCarthy himself and of course J Edgar. What McCarthy did was help the government get rid of everyone who knew anything about communism, so that by the time we actually had to fight a war against communists in Vietnam, there wasn't anybody in the government who knew a damn thing about our enemies. This is supposed to have helped America?
As for connecting al-Qaeda to the DC sniper or the DDOS, I doubt it. The DC sniper leaves tarot cards and notes that say "I am God" -- hardly sounds like the handiwork of a Muslim extremist; sounds more like another home-grown American whacko. As for the DDOS, again, I doubt it. Disrupting e-commerce may be a goal of al-Qaeda's ideology at some level, but I doubt they spend too much time thinking about it. Their M.O. has always been large scale spectacular attacks on civilians, like the WTC and Bali. A DDOS just doesn't offer the same spectacle as an attack that litters the streets with the bodies of "infidels." Al-Qaeda is a grave threat, to be sure, but it doesn't help anybody if we get so paranoid that we start seeing Islamic terrorists behind every bush. In fact, I think that's their goal.
(And no, I won't say, "then the terrorists win.") (shit, I said it!)
Exactly. I'm sure the poster you're replying to didn't actually read the decision or much of the legal analysis of that decision that followed, with most constitutional scholars (including many conservatives) being quite critical of the decision. If the decision made so much sense, why was the Court compelled to stress that the decision should not be seen as precedent?
Or rather, a question; who's to say that other intelligent life in the universe is anything like our species? The idea that they can and should colonize us, study us, or even visit us seems like the height of anthropocentric hubris. They might not be "flesh-and-blood." They might have a completely different relation to matter and energy as we understand it. They might live in water. They might have no interest in enslaving us or looting our precious natural resources.
Because they're intelligent enough to stay away from this dump.
What they're saying is they're scouring the space beyond the mesosphere for used condoms. Those things can wreak havoc on a satellite, let me tell you.
the miniature X10 cameras in the miniature SUVs...
listen to this
that slogan manages to be even more grammatically incorrect than the original!
I was interviewed on Channel One once - the topic was media coverage of war in Kosovo. The interviewer was really cool and seemed interested in my perspective, but I couldn't help thinking she was baiting me for something. When I saw the videotape of how she edited it I understood. They managed not only to take my words out of context, but to give the impression that I was saying almost exactly the opposite of what I intended. What I had said was critical of the US media; most of this was edited out, and it was made to look like my sole purpose was to bash Serbian media coverage.
Not all the 9/11 detainees are here illegally. Remember, the Justice Dept won't even tell us who they are. But whether or not it would matter (and whether you are "for" or "against" it), my point was, the current Justice Dept is no threat to the 2nd Amendment.
that's about as funny as Barbara Bush in a bobsled.
And why the hell was it America's job to protect the Saudis from Saddam? The Saudis are more of a long-term threat (and even short-term threat) to our interests than Saddam, as evil as he is. The Saudis had a hell of a lot more to do with 9-11. Know what the Saudis said about the American troops when we first went in to protect them from Iraq? They said we don't need to build up our forces to protect ourselves against Saddam; we'll have our white slaves take care of it. Wake up.
I still remember how many people lost faith in Apple after M$ bought some 150K shares of Apple to save their asses after they 180-d on licensing clones. (I still have a PTP 225, one of the best of that era). My only regret is that I never got one of the ad posters for Power Computing that expressed how I felt about people deserting Apple in those dark days.... thankfully the poster is preserved here...
But again the point I was making is that money is not speech. Your right to spend $100,000 is not what the first amendment protects. And your right to spend that money on a press is only partly an issue of the free press; there may be taxes and other laws that restrict you from spending as you like. Say it with me now: Money is not speech.
There's the fallacy in your thinking right there. Money is not speech. Campaign finance reform is about limiting bribes. The point is that each person in the citizenry has one vote, not that each dollar gets one vote. I realize that the legal system has accepted the tortuous logic that money can = speech, but even accepting that, it is hard to agree that that is a more significant curtailment of liberties than the Patriot Act, which directly restricts privacy and due process of law. The restriction on speech embodied by McCain-Feingold, even if I accept this ridiculous logic, is minimal -- sure it might prevent you from buying a $10,000 ad, but it doesn't prevent you from buying a cheaper ad, making a speech, writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper, organizing a political action committee, etc. Free speech does not mean the freedom of access to every possible media outlet under every circumstances, and it certainly doesn't mean the freedom to have your voice amplified by the size of your wallet.
Not to mention, the second amendment is hardly in danger by the current Administration, or by the PATRIOT Act. Ashcroft in particular, while showing a willingness to basically scrap most of the first and fourth amendments, wouldn't even check to see if any of the 9/11 detainees in custody tried to buy guns, because such a check of gun records might offend the gun lobby.
Give us a minute, it will be.
I agree. It will be because the democracies were so scared of the terrorists that we willingly handed over our liberties to the most venal group of fearmongers ever to grace public office.
Let's get this straight once and for all: Giving up our rights will not make us any safer. Every one of the terrorists who hijacked planes last September was already under surveillance without sneak-and-peek laws. Every one of them had a valid ID without national ID card laws. Not one of them made public speeches denouncing the US, without extra restrictions on political speech. All of them got money from known terrorist sources, without crackdowns on Muslim charities. It's already illegal to commit mass murder, without having extra penalties for vaguely defined "terrorist" activities. The PATRIOT act was a wish list that Ashcroft had mostly compiled before 9/11. And they got it from Congressional leaders without debate while they were still jittery about anthrax. (Just like Bush got a blank check for unilateral preventive war from Congressional leaders with little debate while they're jittery about elections.) Make no mistake: Ashcroft and Co. are hijacking the country, in plain view of the American public, and our elected representatives are doing nothing to stop it. By painting anyone who objects as unpatriotic, they're scaring people into accepting the destruction of our most precious values.
I'm an optimist though - it may take a few years, even a decade, but America will survive this assault in the end, because liberty is stronger than its enemies. History will not smile on those orchestrating the current mess; this period will be a blotch like the Red Scare, a time when America lost its wits.
Exactly how does the M$ NDA prevent this? First, it's hard to argue that nuclear power plant plans are a "trade secret." Not that it matters; it's easy enough for such information to be classified by the government (which is where that needs to happen if it's a national security issue like this). Finally, as everyone else has pointed out, M$ agreed to publish these particular "trade secrets" and is now using the NDA to avoid living up to their end of the agreement.
Has anyone programmed a usable interface to LaTeX that is intuitive for a non-programmer?
One time, I was, like, writing this paper, it was a really important paper, and the stupid paper clip came up, and he was like, BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEP It looks like you're writing a letter, can I help you? And I was like, what the fuck is that? So I, like clicked the clip and he went away, until I did something else, and he was back with a vengeance, like, BEEPBEEPBEEP and it was like, Word has shortcuts for this action, so I, like, picked up the keyboard and smashed it into my monitor while screaming obscenities. I had to write the rest of my paper on a manual typewriter. It was a good paper but it looked like crap because the keys didn't stay on the same line. So I got Wordperfect instead, and a new monitor. But I got kicked out of college for smoking too much pot, so I don't have to write papers anymore.
So, yeah, Word sucks, but the point is that everyone uses it in certain arenas. So you're forced to use it if you deal with OPD a lot (Other People's Documents). Also, in Word's defense, it is profoundly easy and intuitive for people to use. And once people get used to it they are loathe to switch to something new to figure out.