Well, perhaps not, but today is the twentieth birthday of the emoticon!! Check out this interview (Requires Real) with the first person to ever use the ubiquitous smiley.
D'oh! yeah I did nknow this; just wasn't thinking. It still seems there should be a way to tell wihtout Referrer: since a single image requested by a user-agent that isn't requesting html files could be blocked. It's been a while since I messed with apache settings and I guess it shows; heh.
I doubt there was any particular pressure that needed to be placed on USC by the riaa and mpaa.
Not necessarily specific pressure, but the fact that the U gets a ton of entertainment industry money cannot have totally escaped the thought processes of the USC administration. They have buildings named after movie stars; there is tons of implicit pressure to defend the industry's interests whether or not such pressure is ever made explicit.
Nonetheless, from what I've seen, USC has done or at least tolerated some significant moves that deserve commendation. The current policy is a complete shift from their stance during the Napster/Metallica fallout, when they refused to shut down napster ports and spokespeople pointed out that Napster allowed for many things besides trading "illegal" files. Also don't forget that USC publishes the Online Journalism Review, who published articles on both sides of the napster and copyright battles. I would guess there is a split at USC among the administration regarding what to do about copyright infringement and that the current policy probably reflects exasperation at getting threatening letters about USC students sharing mass quantities of files.
They probably are, but the article focuses on the copyright violations, and even said (somewhat ambiguously?) that USC was asking other ISPs to shut down sites promoting "piracy" around the country. Whether or not USC cares about bandwidth (and my experience on a university technology committee was that bandwidth was not a problem, and our school has far fewer resources than USC), they clearly do express worry about copyright infringement.
That's right; porn leads to masturbation, and masturbation kills. I know because there was a string of brutal masturbatings across the west coast last week. Look at the evidence!
If you're asking me, I don't think we should be wasting our money and resources in either case. We're better off trying to encourage democratic initiatives in these places. We're never going to completely stop terrorism but the real goal should be to eliminate the conditions that make so many people sympathetic to terrorists. And I think that is true whether the terrorists threaten Jews, Spaniards, or anyone else.
Well, you've intentionally misinterpreted everything I wrote and then conveniently skipped over the parts you don't want to argue. Interesting. Anyway, read things like this if you want to learn about democratic initiatives in Iran, and recognize that I realize this place is still a tyranny; my point was there is movement in that direction. Your comment about the Ottoman empire has nothing to do with anything I said; and I gave three examples of regimes who have historically come closer to being reasonable regimes than Turkey. Regarding Iran supporting Hezbollah -- duh!! All the Arab nations in the middle east aid Hezbollah and Hamas, overtly when they can get away with it, as well as covertly. If the US wants to stop Hezbollah and Hamas (who have no designs on the US, but that's another story) as well as al Qaeda, they need to think of something more intelligent than bombing, unless they are prepared to exterminate the Arab world, since every bomb creates more sympathizers. To think American bombs whaling on Teheran will somehow reduce Arab sympathy for Hamas is laughably naive.
Regarding Iraq, I haven't seen a credible report of Iraqi involvement in 911, and if there has been such a report, the US Administration is doing an alarmingly nice job of keeping it quiet, which seems to be completely contrary to the desire to get some of our allies to support an invasion. The meetings with Atta have not been confirmed, and US officials don't even seem to believe them. About the WMD stuff, yeah, Iraq wants WMD, but the evidence of a real nuclear threat is severelylacking. But even if they were pursuing nukes -- get real. Iraq has as much right as any regime to pursue whatever policy its statecraft dictates. Why would we feel threatened by Iraqi nukes? They could never develop a capability that could seriously threaten American interests, not even indirectly; as self-aggrandizingly cruel as Saddam Hussein is, he is neither suicidal nor stupid. Keep in mind too his regime is secular - he has about as much reason to fear the al Qaeda types as we do; more in fact, since the Iraqi citizens are far more likely to take up his call to overthrow their government than American muslims, Chicago gangbangers and Marin county white kids included.
Finally, I don't know why you want to let Mr. binLaden dictate the terms of our conflict with him. Of course he says it's a "clash of civilizations" - but we don't have to buy into that; it only helps him. If we want to defeat him and his kind we need to make sure the rest of the Arab Muslim world doesn't believe it's a clash of civilizations. We won't be able to do that by bombing them to kingdom come.
Turkey is the closest thing the Islamic world has produced to a free, democratic, and open society.
You obviously know little of Islamic history. Today, perhaps you have a point, though I disagree still (look at Algeria, Morocco for example - hardly democracies but not the bastions of torture and genocide that Turkey has been over the years. And while these places were hardly free, open, and democratic, Egypt, Iraq, Iran were all more progressive regimes than present-day Turkey before the US got involved mucking around with their internal affairs. The fact is the US doesn't want democracy in these countries, because democratic regimes might allow the people to decide how much to sell oil for, and, more importantly, whether to develop different ways of modernizing their societies. The fact is that tyrannical Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia are good for US economic interests. If we really wanted a "regime change" in Iraq we would have supported the Iraqi democratic opposition - which existed and was quite strong and credible - back in 1990 after we got pissed off about Kuwait. But we don't want a regime change; we just want a different dictator to deal with (in one state dept official's words of the time, we want "an iron fisted junta without Saddam Hussein."
OK if we start with the really big fish (Iraq and Iran, for example), though?
Actually, Iran is modernizing and democratizing, or at least it was before we put them in the "axis of evil." And Iraq is small potatoes. They had zero to do with 911, and they're in no position to do anything but sell us cheap oil and bitch about their sovereignty being violated by no-fly zones. It's a terrible regime, and Hussein is a miserable thug, but I could say the same of our ally Musharraf. The really big fish is Saudi Arabia, and we won't stop kissing their asses until America wakes up and begins to see past all this clash of civilizations bullshit. It's not a clash of civilizations; it's a clash between rich powerful men who cynically manipulate the populations they rule.
point is, you have to know the network is there to analyze it. The filter won't work against a determined attacker who targets your network knowing it is there. But unless they're monitoring your airspace 24/7, or you're broadcasting 24/7, this kind of filtering greatly diminishes the chance of someone randomly happening upon the network and deciding to mess with it.
But its all those guys you think we should be appeasing, by turning our back on a nation with values similar to ours? No thanks...
Yeah, no thanks. MUCH better to appease them by kowtowing to their regimes directly, like we do with Saudi Arabia, or by turning a blind eye to their gross abuses of human rights, like we do with Egypt and Pakistan among others.
If you think we're defending democracy in the Middle East you're a fool. The Israelis are not so dumb; they know that American support depends upon perceptions of American self interest as well as a well-funded and vocal lobby. And the Turkish are not so stupid as to believe their nation "free, democratic, and open." Especially not the Kurds in Turkey.
The US does not support the Israel because it is in the "holy land". The US supports Israel becuase it is a Western Liberal Democracy smacj in the middle of a geographic area surrounded by totalitarian nations. It is in the US national interest to promote Democracy (especially the Western Liberal style) throughout the world.
That's hogwash. The US supports many of the totalitarian nations that surround it. The US, like any other nation-state, makes its decisions about whom to support based on perceptions of rational self-interest (however misguided) rather than on the basis of ideology, no matter what our leaders say in their speeches.
Incidentally, recent articles in the Washington Post and on Stratfor suggesting that bin Laden has gotten cooperation again from his hidden bank accounts in Switzerland and managed to smuggle his gold out to Sudan are disturbing.
But when that happens, it is an accident. Unlike the terrorists, we are not intentionally targeting innocent civilians.
Or, better: unlike the terrorists, we are not ever going to admit to intentionally targeting innocent civilians. It's only an accident if you don't know it's going to happen, and it only happens when you make a mistake. How many times do we have to bomb the crap out of a country before we start to realize that innocent civilians are going to get killed every time we do it? If you're on the receiving end of an immensely one-sided bombing campaign, from a country your country never attacked, are you going to forgive the bombers because your family died and your neighborhood was destroyed in an accident?
The reason why we are at war with an entire country is (officially) because they are(or were, anyway) harboring these terrorists.
OK, so they're not anymore? So why are we at war with the entire country now? And where the hell are the terrorists who blew up our buildings? Why haven't we killed them yet, and instead killed thousands of others whose only crime appears to have been that they are easier to kill than the terrorists?
In my opinion, any regime that oppresses and kills its people should be destroyed, and replaced with a just government. This includes a lot of fundamentalist countries in the middle east (Pakistan, Iraq, etc.) and pretty much all the communist countries (China, Cuba, etc.) And the US is in the best position to do this.
Sure we are, until we squander our national wealth keeping the world under the barrel of our gun, and our empire simply disintegrates from within. If we went after all the regimes that "oppresses and kills its people" you'd have to include a lot of our "friends" in the world - Saudi Arabia, you mention Pakistan yourself, India, Colombia, Russia, and on and on. Replace it with a just government? Who decides what is just? John Ashcroft? No thanks; if you want to go on a crusade to convert the rest of the world to your ideology, go for it, but keep your filthy hands off my tax dollars.
these Islamic fucking whackos who dance in the streets of Gaza and Karachi when one of their ilk slams a plane full of innocents into a building
You forgot Riyadh. People danced in the streets of Saudi Arabia, as well as the streets of other Arab allies. Why did we only bomb Afghanistan, and perhaps Iraq, the latter having fuck-all to do with 9/11, and the former bombed to smithereens with no indication that we've found bin Laden or anybody worth a shit in al Qaeda except a fucking white boy from Marin County?!
Yeah there were people celebrating 911 all over the Arab world, and in parts of the non-Arab world; at least give the dancing Arabs credit for showing their feelings publicly, while the Russians and Chinese snicker behind (mostly) closed doors.
Look, the mass indoctrination of Arab Muslims with hardcore ideology that teaches them that God smiles on suicide bombers as martyrs is beyond sick -- I'm not going to argue with that. But I think it's a cynical and calculated strategy on the part of the Arab leaders this benefits -- especially the Saudis -- rather than a sign of an "evil culture" (which is a construct that has no validity from any perspective).
What have we learned from extreme Islamic fundamentalism? That greedy and tyrannical assholes in positions of power in corrupt incestuous dictatorships can use a perverse bastardization of a widespread religion in order to manipulate a large group of people (whom they openly conspire to keep poor and uneducated) to cheer on a few suicide-murderers? Are we really that surprised?
There has never in human history been an entire people who publicly revel in mass murder like the current Islamic Arab/Palestinian fuck-head idiots.
Bullshit. It happens frequently after military actions, and we have to understand that they interpret 911 as a military action. Americans danced and celebrated during the inordinately one-sided Gulf War; which in spite of our precision bombing, was probably indistinguishable from mass murder from the ground. Hell, Americans celebrated the nuclear attack on Japan, when we incinerated 100,000 people in seconds. Everyone celebrates their team's military victory. Even more so if they see their (civilian) family members die every day under Israeli gunfire. So I'm not surprised Palestinians in particular celebrated, even in New York.
that a "+5 Insightful" on slashdot will count towards tenure and promotion?
Re:The Constitution doesn't need amending
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
One day murder (such as what's going on in Israel, in the name of a cause) will be interpreted as legally protected speech (expression).
That's idiotic. Murder is conduct, regardless of whether the murderer is expressing himself. American courts are not that dumb; you can't even find that many lawyers who would be willing to make that argument with a straight face, and if you did, no court would buy it. It's arguments like this, with no basis in reality, that make people think freedom of speech "goes to far."
Slashdot Mirror
I downloaded the article off kazaa.
Well, perhaps not, but today is the twentieth birthday of the emoticon!! Check out this interview (Requires Real) with the first person to ever use the ubiquitous smiley.
Hi, Mom! How are you?
I send you this stream of obscenities in order to have your advice.
See you later
Thanks
D'oh! yeah I did nknow this; just wasn't thinking. It still seems there should be a way to tell wihtout Referrer: since a single image requested by a user-agent that isn't requesting html files could be blocked. It's been a while since I messed with apache settings and I guess it shows; heh.
It doesn't need to; it just needs to know whether the client is asking for .html or .htm .... right?
they didn't ban p2p. They just warned students not to use it illegally. Why is this distinction lost on so many people here?
Not necessarily specific pressure, but the fact that the U gets a ton of entertainment industry money cannot have totally escaped the thought processes of the USC administration. They have buildings named after movie stars; there is tons of implicit pressure to defend the industry's interests whether or not such pressure is ever made explicit.
Nonetheless, from what I've seen, USC has done or at least tolerated some significant moves that deserve commendation. The current policy is a complete shift from their stance during the Napster/Metallica fallout, when they refused to shut down napster ports and spokespeople pointed out that Napster allowed for many things besides trading "illegal" files. Also don't forget that USC publishes the Online Journalism Review, who published articles on both sides of the napster and copyright battles. I would guess there is a split at USC among the administration regarding what to do about copyright infringement and that the current policy probably reflects exasperation at getting threatening letters about USC students sharing mass quantities of files.
Without the Referer: how do they know where the links are coming from?
That's why GameFAQs.com allows linking only to HTML pages.
Exactly - a solution that doesn't involve Referrer.
They probably are, but the article focuses on the copyright violations, and even said (somewhat ambiguously?) that USC was asking other ISPs to shut down sites promoting "piracy" around the country. Whether or not USC cares about bandwidth (and my experience on a university technology committee was that bandwidth was not a problem, and our school has far fewer resources than USC), they clearly do express worry about copyright infringement.
yeah man, nothing worse than virus-infected fake automata monkeys. It takes a shit on your hardwood floor and then says:
This is a excite game
This game is my first work.
You're the first player.
I wish you would like it.
I know it's ultraportable, but I definitely think that in this situation Monkey Linux would be a wiser choice.
That's right; porn leads to masturbation, and masturbation kills. I know because there was a string of brutal masturbatings across the west coast last week. Look at the evidence!
If you're asking me, I don't think we should be wasting our money and resources in either case. We're better off trying to encourage democratic initiatives in these places. We're never going to completely stop terrorism but the real goal should be to eliminate the conditions that make so many people sympathetic to terrorists. And I think that is true whether the terrorists threaten Jews, Spaniards, or anyone else.
Can you delete me now? Good!
Regarding Iraq, I haven't seen a credible report of Iraqi involvement in 911, and if there has been such a report, the US Administration is doing an alarmingly nice job of keeping it quiet, which seems to be completely contrary to the desire to get some of our allies to support an invasion. The meetings with Atta have not been confirmed, and US officials don't even seem to believe them. About the WMD stuff, yeah, Iraq wants WMD, but the evidence of a real nuclear threat is severely lacking. But even if they were pursuing nukes -- get real. Iraq has as much right as any regime to pursue whatever policy its statecraft dictates. Why would we feel threatened by Iraqi nukes? They could never develop a capability that could seriously threaten American interests, not even indirectly; as self-aggrandizingly cruel as Saddam Hussein is, he is neither suicidal nor stupid. Keep in mind too his regime is secular - he has about as much reason to fear the al Qaeda types as we do; more in fact, since the Iraqi citizens are far more likely to take up his call to overthrow their government than American muslims, Chicago gangbangers and Marin county white kids included.
Finally, I don't know why you want to let Mr. binLaden dictate the terms of our conflict with him. Of course he says it's a "clash of civilizations" - but we don't have to buy into that; it only helps him. If we want to defeat him and his kind we need to make sure the rest of the Arab Muslim world doesn't believe it's a clash of civilizations. We won't be able to do that by bombing them to kingdom come.
You obviously know little of Islamic history. Today, perhaps you have a point, though I disagree still (look at Algeria, Morocco for example - hardly democracies but not the bastions of torture and genocide that Turkey has been over the years. And while these places were hardly free, open, and democratic, Egypt, Iraq, Iran were all more progressive regimes than present-day Turkey before the US got involved mucking around with their internal affairs. The fact is the US doesn't want democracy in these countries, because democratic regimes might allow the people to decide how much to sell oil for, and, more importantly, whether to develop different ways of modernizing their societies. The fact is that tyrannical Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia are good for US economic interests. If we really wanted a "regime change" in Iraq we would have supported the Iraqi democratic opposition - which existed and was quite strong and credible - back in 1990 after we got pissed off about Kuwait. But we don't want a regime change; we just want a different dictator to deal with (in one state dept official's words of the time, we want "an iron fisted junta without Saddam Hussein."
OK if we start with the really big fish (Iraq and Iran, for example), though?
Actually, Iran is modernizing and democratizing, or at least it was before we put them in the "axis of evil." And Iraq is small potatoes. They had zero to do with 911, and they're in no position to do anything but sell us cheap oil and bitch about their sovereignty being violated by no-fly zones. It's a terrible regime, and Hussein is a miserable thug, but I could say the same of our ally Musharraf. The really big fish is Saudi Arabia, and we won't stop kissing their asses until America wakes up and begins to see past all this clash of civilizations bullshit. It's not a clash of civilizations; it's a clash between rich powerful men who cynically manipulate the populations they rule.
point is, you have to know the network is there to analyze it. The filter won't work against a determined attacker who targets your network knowing it is there. But unless they're monitoring your airspace 24/7, or you're broadcasting 24/7, this kind of filtering greatly diminishes the chance of someone randomly happening upon the network and deciding to mess with it.
Yeah, no thanks. MUCH better to appease them by kowtowing to their regimes directly, like we do with Saudi Arabia, or by turning a blind eye to their gross abuses of human rights, like we do with Egypt and Pakistan among others.
If you think we're defending democracy in the Middle East you're a fool. The Israelis are not so dumb; they know that American support depends upon perceptions of American self interest as well as a well-funded and vocal lobby. And the Turkish are not so stupid as to believe their nation "free, democratic, and open." Especially not the Kurds in Turkey.
That's hogwash. The US supports many of the totalitarian nations that surround it. The US, like any other nation-state, makes its decisions about whom to support based on perceptions of rational self-interest (however misguided) rather than on the basis of ideology, no matter what our leaders say in their speeches.
Can you post a link? I missed this story.
Or, better: unlike the terrorists, we are not ever going to admit to intentionally targeting innocent civilians. It's only an accident if you don't know it's going to happen, and it only happens when you make a mistake. How many times do we have to bomb the crap out of a country before we start to realize that innocent civilians are going to get killed every time we do it? If you're on the receiving end of an immensely one-sided bombing campaign, from a country your country never attacked, are you going to forgive the bombers because your family died and your neighborhood was destroyed in an accident?
The reason why we are at war with an entire country is (officially) because they are(or were, anyway) harboring these terrorists.
OK, so they're not anymore? So why are we at war with the entire country now? And where the hell are the terrorists who blew up our buildings? Why haven't we killed them yet, and instead killed thousands of others whose only crime appears to have been that they are easier to kill than the terrorists?
In my opinion, any regime that oppresses and kills its people should be destroyed, and replaced with a just government. This includes a lot of fundamentalist countries in the middle east (Pakistan, Iraq, etc.) and pretty much all the communist countries (China, Cuba, etc.) And the US is in the best position to do this.
Sure we are, until we squander our national wealth keeping the world under the barrel of our gun, and our empire simply disintegrates from within. If we went after all the regimes that "oppresses and kills its people" you'd have to include a lot of our "friends" in the world - Saudi Arabia, you mention Pakistan yourself, India, Colombia, Russia, and on and on. Replace it with a just government? Who decides what is just? John Ashcroft? No thanks; if you want to go on a crusade to convert the rest of the world to your ideology, go for it, but keep your filthy hands off my tax dollars.
You forgot Riyadh. People danced in the streets of Saudi Arabia, as well as the streets of other Arab allies. Why did we only bomb Afghanistan, and perhaps Iraq, the latter having fuck-all to do with 9/11, and the former bombed to smithereens with no indication that we've found bin Laden or anybody worth a shit in al Qaeda except a fucking white boy from Marin County?!
Yeah there were people celebrating 911 all over the Arab world, and in parts of the non-Arab world; at least give the dancing Arabs credit for showing their feelings publicly, while the Russians and Chinese snicker behind (mostly) closed doors.
Look, the mass indoctrination of Arab Muslims with hardcore ideology that teaches them that God smiles on suicide bombers as martyrs is beyond sick -- I'm not going to argue with that. But I think it's a cynical and calculated strategy on the part of the Arab leaders this benefits -- especially the Saudis -- rather than a sign of an "evil culture" (which is a construct that has no validity from any perspective).
What have we learned from extreme Islamic fundamentalism? That greedy and tyrannical assholes in positions of power in corrupt incestuous dictatorships can use a perverse bastardization of a widespread religion in order to manipulate a large group of people (whom they openly conspire to keep poor and uneducated) to cheer on a few suicide-murderers? Are we really that surprised?
There has never in human history been an entire people who publicly revel in mass murder like the current Islamic Arab/Palestinian fuck-head idiots.
Bullshit. It happens frequently after military actions, and we have to understand that they interpret 911 as a military action. Americans danced and celebrated during the inordinately one-sided Gulf War; which in spite of our precision bombing, was probably indistinguishable from mass murder from the ground. Hell, Americans celebrated the nuclear attack on Japan, when we incinerated 100,000 people in seconds. Everyone celebrates their team's military victory. Even more so if they see their (civilian) family members die every day under Israeli gunfire. So I'm not surprised Palestinians in particular celebrated, even in New York.
It's discriminatory, dammit. I don't think being metaphysically challenged should present a barrier to employment.
that a "+5 Insightful" on slashdot will count towards tenure and promotion?
That's idiotic. Murder is conduct, regardless of whether the murderer is expressing himself. American courts are not that dumb; you can't even find that many lawyers who would be willing to make that argument with a straight face, and if you did, no court would buy it. It's arguments like this, with no basis in reality, that make people think freedom of speech "goes to far."