The Democrats are playing it "safe" because Bush/Cheney's crimes make it cheaper and easier for Democrats to run against them this year. So they're bottling us up in here with them, our only way out seemingly to hand Democrats a trifecta power monopoly. Democrats mainly care about increasing their nominal Senate majority closer 60:40, with Republicans defending 23 seats to Democrats 11. In January the Congress will also probably have some thing like a 15-20 point Democratic House majority, possibly that 60+ seat filibuster-proof Senate, and a Democratic president with the first actual majority of voters since Reagan.
With which Democrats can abuse all those "Bush/Cheney" tyrannical powers without the Iraq War that gets you caught. But with the Iraq War that gets you paid.
Quite a racket. Which is why Americans should force them to impeach, or at least make it as costly as possible not to. Because Republicans will be in no position of any kind to offer the kind of "opposition party" these Democrats couldn't muster even the past 8 years with very solid minorities and blatant catastrophes.
The missing party, as usual. is the American people. And decent country would be out in the streets with pitchforks and torches by now, especially with economic collapse staring everyone in the face. Instead, we've got Slashdot and the Daily Kos. And President VP Cheney.
Why not? Cheney's crimes depend on him having the time and privacy to work them. If he had to be the spokesmodel, and his team were cut in half, the operation would b crippled.
Besides, what makes you say that Cheney's not the president right now? And who says he can't be impeached, on his own charges, or as siamese accomplice to Bush? In case you don't recall, Nixon's VP Agnew was forced to resign first under threat of impeachment (for tax fraud over bribery). Which showed that their gang was vulnerable, which forced people to talk and abandon the conspiracies. Not a bad model for today.
Anonymous Republican Coward calls a source not credible without even clicking it, where they'd see it's a simple quote of two contradictory lies by Bush's henchmen, presented with the most basic logic. No wonder facts are a stranger to this AC.
These sources are as "quaint" to Republicans as are the Geneva Conventions they've been torturing for years.
Yesterday, Bush barfed at us in his radio address:
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Saturday that Democratic leaders in the House are blocking key intelligence legislation so trial lawyers can sue phone companies that helped the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Terrorists are plotting new attacks against America "at this very moment," Bush said in renewing his call for the House to pass legislation needed to renew the intelligence law that expired last weekend.
The Bush administration said yesterday that the government "lost intelligence information" because House Democrats allowed a surveillance law to expire last week, causing some telecommunications companies to refuse to cooperate with terrorism-related wiretapping orders.
But hours later, administration officials told lawmakers that the final holdout among the companies had relented and agreed to fully participate in the surveillance program, according to an official familiar with the issue.
It's obvious that it's Bush's fault the PAA expired without extension:
But even if telecoms were refusing to cooperate, the reason for their refusal was not because they don't have retroactive immunity, but rather, it's because there is alleged uncertainty over the legality of current surveillance requests, and uncertainty over the ongoing validity of the prospective immunity provided by the PAA, because the PAA expired. If the PAA had been extended, they would be completely protected with prospective immunity for future surveillance cooperation. And, of course, the PAA would not have expired had Congressional Democrats had their way -- they wanted to extend it until they could agree to a new bill. Thus, any alleged refusal on the part of telecoms to cooperate is exclusively the fault of Bush and House Republicans for forcing expiration of the PAA. That's just true as a matter of basic logic.
The bottom line is that Bush's own Attorney General just admitted that he and Bush and the rest are repeatedly breaking the law:
But leave all of that aside for a moment. Since Mike Mukasey himself just said in this letter that spying outside of FISA is "illegal," and since it's indisputable that the Bush administration did just that for years, doesn't that compel him as Attorney General to commence a criminal investigation into this "illegal" conduct?
What does it take to get impeached in this country? Will someome please blow Bush already, so we can finally get it over with?
Oh, right, this is Slashdot, where the only way to win a lawsuit is to buy a bigger lawyer, even when you're right. Apple, that humble little company, deserves our sympathy.
You're an asshole who doesn't know shit from shinola, let alone how the law is abused, or even how to parse my clear post.
C&D letters aren't just "polite warnings". They're often bluffs that are beyond rude, into damaging abuse. When someone doesn't send one, or its equivalent, the court looks less favorably on their attempt to get the court to step in to do all the work. The court wants to see at least some "good faith" attempt to remedy the conflict, even when the person claiming damage is in the right. Failure to do so can reduce the court's willingness to interpret evidence in the plaintiff's favor, and even more often reduce punitive damages.
But when they do send one, if they're not bluffing, then what I described would never get triggered.
So all I did was put some teeth into the current system's preference for "comity" between even adversarial parties during the legal process. Teeth that are clearly needed, given the widespread abuse of sending bluff C&D letters as mere intimidation, an automatic response to any perceived threat regardless of their merits. Teeth that do no harm to legitimate C&D letter senders.
But hey, why should you bother to think about it? You just defended the unrestrained C&D letter senders. Why should your own attack be any less informed by law, comity or reason?
Maybe not this one, but there are plenty of others.
FWIW, the DMCA is unconstitutional, as it places prior restraint against all copying of a work, even though much copying is free to exercise under fair use that copyright can't prohibit. As soon as enough of those legit cases defend from DMCA attacks, the DMCA won't be usable in those illegitimate attacks anymore. But I have no doubt that some lawyers will continue to send C&D letters citing it, bluffing. Then my rule would kick in.
I think it's time that someone tested that DMCA clause by suing someone with it, and not resorting to any dirty tricks - just suing under the bare terms of the DMCA itself - and watching it get defeated, setting a clear precedent. That sounds like a job for the EFF.
The multiples of the wavelengths have to be harmonic, 2^n, not just simple multiples. That's how harmonics work. They will be unique: a given femtoscopic distance will have only a single frequency harmonic in the visible spectrum, because the visible spectrum fits within a single "octave", eg from f to (f*2).
I am saying that the false color should indeed represent the electronic structure of the atom being colored. I did make a mistake substituting the atomic weight for atomic number (and therefore nuclear particle count for electron count). But what I mean is that carbon's 6 electrons fall into 2 shells (at ground state). The inner shell is filled with 2 electrons and has a diameter. That shell's diameter would be divided by the count of two electrons in it, to account for the equivalence to "texture" that a larger feature distance on a larger object's surface would create if the distances between many points were reflecting visible light. That tiny distance corresponds to a single wavelength that's 2^n times larger in the visible band. So that shell would be colored that corresponding color. The next shell would have its larger diameter divided by its 6 electrons and scaled harmonically to chose its color. Then the two colors would be mixed additively (as the electrons are so small compared to the shells that they would rarely block incoming photons, if photons were actually incident (which is what we're simulating). So, (to make up easily added colors), a red inner shell and a green outer shell would make the atom look yellow. This procedure would make the atom look like it would if it were actually scaled up by successive doubling to a size that reflects visible light.
There are other variations on that coloring scheme that could show electronic properties. For example, instead of just dividing the shell diameter by its filled electron count to set its subharmonic color, the shell's fraction of filling electrons to its electron capacity (eg, carbon's 2/8 in its second shell) could divide the shell's diameter before scaling harmonically to set its color. Or that fraction could be used to set the brightness (or other linear property, like value or intensity, depending on the color model used) of that shell's color to emphasize how full it is. The nucleus might be colored the atom's ground state color, appearing in the center of the hues of the surrounding shells (perhaps with a simulated cleared cylindrical "peephole" so its "default" color isn't mixed with the overlapping shells) as electrons migrate when the atom is excited. Bonds likewise would recolor the atoms as electrons are distributed between atoms and shells.
All of these techniques would illustrate intuitively the quantities and distributions they represent. So people could bring to bear our other learned experience with color to understand the properties and dynamics even at this tiny scale. Interactions with photons could be especially obvious to even untrained viewers, as harmonically colored photons interact (or don't) with identically (or not) colored atomic shells, shuffling the resulting electron counts.
And the technique I describe is easy to compute, and easy for current 3D HW and SW to render. So elaborate animations should be straightforward to produce. Beautiful and educational.
If someone gets a Cease & Desist letter threatening them with harm if they don't c&d, then fights it in court and shows the C&D was invalid, the court should treat the sender of the C&D letter like any other bully making threats. Fine them, count a strike against the attorney who wrote it (and start disciplining/disbarring them after some number of strikes in some period of time). And find damages to cover the time the recipient had to spend to straighten this out when they weren't wrong.
And when the C&D sender loses such a case, every other recipient of such a letter should be able to file to get the same results applied to their own case, if they can prove it was the same circumstances (which should be cheap, easy and quick if they were indeed the same). That should load up the fines and strikes on the sender and their lawyers.
Which in turn will deter lots of these C&D letters, especially when they're just bluffing (and they know it). Why should a law license and a retainer let these bullies litter the land with their C&D letters that get enforced with just the threat of intimidation, but which don't have a legal leg to stand on (or ever have to demonstrate they do)? They should have to face some consequences for abuse themselves.
No, I'm a programmer with a PS3 running Linux who's stopped by Sony's artificial limits.
Do you think you're doing programmers any favors by limiting us to only x86, and keeping us from screaming fast, cheap, and fascinating new parallel HW?
If it proliferates (and there are already several million PS3s out there, while IBM, Toshiba and others are marketing Cell machines - if only a few, at the high end) it will hardly be "unique".
Oh, please let Toshiba return the favor by selling a PC with Cell and RSX to compete with Sony's Playstation, without the Sony Hypervisor lockout (and with RAM expandible beyond 512MB).
If it's got both Blu-Ray and Firewire, then the revenge will be complete. And I will support it in every way.
Actually, we do agree on nearly everything - certainly practically everything you just said.
Except "why do Republicans win elections". The reason is not their political actions, but their ads. Or rather, their PR strategy to mask their political actions that directly conflict with both their image and what their voters expect from them.
People vote for Republicans because they think Republicans are "fiscal conservatives" and "moral people". "Limited government" and "fair interpersonal dealings". They're "good Christians" who "trust the people and private business", not "government welfare". They "put American first" and "the rest of the world can go to hell". They "lower taxes" and the "cut pork and waste".
Every single one of those statements is a lie. A Big Lie. Republicans have multiplied the debt every chance they've gotten, even ruinously, creating dependencies on foreign enemies. They've multiplied the government size while reducing its effectiveness for most Americans, at the expense of giveaways for corporations and favorite states (which vote Republican - but only to the rich/corporate Republicans there). Their "supply side / trickle down" economics subsidizes private business, largely with war profiteering (even in times of relative peace), centrally planning industry with handouts and tax cuts for selected businesses. All of which has to be paid back in taxes later, or the country defaults. They leave America rotting, sick without insurance, its infrastructures left tied up by parasitic monopolies, while shipping $trillions to foreigners as pretext for even more corporate giveaways and government power plays. They're liars, cheats, thieves on the grandest scales: S&L heist; Iran/Contra Operation (smuggling guns and drugs, resupplying Iran and positioning Sauds); Iraq. And on the personal scales they routinely molest children, cheat on their wives, embezzle and take bribes, in every combination, while covering it all up. They're evil, even if mere greed for power and money and lust for killing, rape and lies are the corruption we'd call "evil".
And everyone knows it. How do they get elected on exactly the opposite promises, for generations? Their PR. Which of course revolves around ads. It also rests on strategic token political actions, like antiabortion rules and homophobic legislation, even rising to promises of "amending" the Constitution to make blastocysts into "persons" and persons into "heterosexals only". For Republicans, political action is merely necessary for holding power, but totally insufficient without ads. Of course, the ads are coordinated with the actions for maximum effect, maximum cover beneath which they betray every promise and principle. But without the ads, good ones and just many of them, at the right time, they wouldn't succeed.
What's missing from that equation is the Americans who believe the ads, despite the mountain of contrary evidence. America is a big, complex place, with people quite complex ourselves, and a complex history (from genocide to civil rights, from liberty to the Terror War, and all points between). But America's tremendous success has come from its enthusiasm and organization of its people. Which has selected for a country that is easily led, can ignore contradictions, that lives in a mediasphere that can say anything at any time, directing vastly consistent popular behavior on a common ideal once it's established. Americans are at root immigrants, so we are enthusiastic about cutting with any past, including here at home, when there's even the possibility of getting some new dream come true, even if we've been promised it before, even if it's at odds with the rest of what we want. That's what the media and dreams are like: they don't have the constraints of reality, even when they create real actions that drive us further from the dreams.
Republicans know all of this. One reason is that their people come from the corporate tier, which is expert in creating fake realities for profit, while delivering eno
These mainframes use the z6 CPU, which is closely related to the POWER6, which is closely related to the PowerPC.
Is it at all possible to automatically port any nontrivial z6 software to PPC, if it doesn't require the actually different HW of the z6 (or its much higher performance)? Any possibility to run PPC SW on a z6, with some automatic porting for the higher performance?
I'd like to see these atoms rendered in necessarily false color (they're smaller than visible light wavelengths) that is at least the color corresponding to their size. They're smaller than visible wavelengths, but their actual size is a specific fraction of a visible wavelength. Let's see the atoms colored with the color that's a harmonic multiple.
Or maybe the color should be derived from the "texture" of the atom, just like the actual color of macroscopic materials. If a carbon atom has 12 electrons evenly distributed around a sphere in shells (2, 8 and another 2 in valence), let's see it get colored accordingly. Maybe the inner shell's diameter harmonic color in the visible range, divided by 2 and scaled back into the visible, overlapped with the same algorithm for the outer 8 in the second shell, then again for the 2 in the outermost shell.
The point is that these colors can mean something. And since the number and combination of electrons is so important to the characteristics of the electron, as well as offering the femtoscopic equivalent to macroscopic colored surfaces, I'd like to finally see what I've been imagining since high school chemistry class.
Pointing out a fallacy by name ("false choice") isn't "impolite".
Your "irrelevant value comparison that no one is disputing about whether political opposition is more important than ads" is that you are comparing political opposition to ads by value, when I didn't say one or the other was more valuable. That value comparison is irrelevant, no one is disputing it but you. That makes it not just a false choice fallacy, but also a strawman.
I was polite about it. Some people are rude when pointing them out, since fallacies are unfair arguments, and go further away from legitimate disagreement. I did not. In fact, it gets harder to stay polite when you're both trying fallacies (and sticking to them once they're pointed out), and implying that I'm rude for pointing them out. But I will stay polite, because I'm secure in my argument.
Political action is necessary but not sufficient. Advertising that delivers the message about political action is what frames the debate. It's how nearly all political action is translated into alliance by the public, or at least the critical mass even in the "word of mouth" Internet Era. The ads drive home all those stories.
Of course the DNC ran ads. They didn't actually run enough, or good enough, but yes more actual political action would have made even what they had go much further. You're asking the wrong question to test your argument. The question is what if Democrats had performed plenty of political action in 2002-2006, but didn't run any ads. Republicans would have wiped the floor with them. Just as Republicans wiped the floor with them with their superior advertising (and underlying messaging, carefully crafted lies), despite the terrible damage done by Republicans with their greater volume of worse quality political action.
So now I'm trying for at least the third time to debate you on the same subject. Not the choice between political action or ads that you're sticking to, but rather the value of more or less ads given an at least adequate amount of political action. If you want to talk about that, I'm ready. If not, I'm not interested.
As long as they keep making new peripheral buses and networks that are the fastest in the world to keep up with the supercomputing speeds, that we can then buy to use with our PCs, then it's a great investment.
But since the American people will have bought the new tech for the world, it should be released into the public domain, after maybe 5 years patent licensed to only American corporations (who cannot sublicense it abroad). That's what investments in American tech should be like. Not just subsidies to private corporations, however Chinese they might be.
Those actions come from popular support, which largely depends on ads. Ads are how our huge, complex, busy society communicates with itself. You're either setting up a false choice between political opposition and ads, or you're making an irrelevant value comparison that no one is disputing about whether political opposition is more important than ads.
They're both important. And one depends on the other.
The people who assassinate presidents are not the Americans who are fired up for change.
You can believe whatever you want about America. Are you even an American? But the objective reality is that Democrats are turning out twice as much as are Republicans, in record amounts. And they're not voting for another Clinton, they're voting for a new guy. A new Black guy. After getting rid of the other white guys, and now the old woman in favor of the young guy. If that's not change, then nothing is.
Hope doesn't guarantee change, nor does energy. But what guarantees nothing will change is that people have no hope. Like you. So your advice on how America can change isn't coming from anyplace convincing.
No they're not split. As I said, they're ignorant, apathetic, and distracted by the war, the economy, and their personal lives.
You are creating a false duality between "with or against NSA spying". The real duality is whether or not people notice. Since people mostly don't notice, and then are beaten back with distractions and end-runs, the corporate deals with the politicians who prey on the people go through.
Bush most certainly should be in jail, or worse, but he's not. He's also cruising down below 20% approval, which is like only the grade F students thinking you're the right quarterback for the football team. That shows that Americans are disconnected from the system that's supposed to protect us, including the media that should be ringing air raid sirens every day over these crimes. But they're not.
That's why ads are important. I never said that EFF should run ads instead of suing. I said that I think their running ads is more important than giving awards. I didn't even say EFF shouldn't give awards. In fact, I said that a good ad would feature Klein with his award, which would show Americans that there are real people out there putting their lives on the line to protect us all from these real tyrannies that they don't otherwise see exposed on their TV.
That's why the Republicans are running ads. If they didn't matter, they wouldn't waste their money, while they don't have enough to campaign to hold the seats they're using to put through these abuses. It's all important. But that also means that ads to convince Americans it's important, especially in the face of ads convincing them that it's not, are important. Because those people are going to the polls every few weeks already, warming up for November. At which time, if NSA spying is an issue fixed in the public imagination (not just Slashdotters'), it will mean votes. If not in the Senate, which has small turnover and other issues despite the centrality of the Senate in allowing the spying, then at least in the House, which has to stand for election every 2 years. The ads are the way to drive home the "emotional" images that drive people to demand protection. Either the Republican way of fake protection, that we'll see in those ads, or a different way, an EFF way preferably, of protecting ourselves from the telcos as well as the few "terrorists" who have to reach a lot further than the telcos to hurt us.
The populace isn't "split" on NSA spying. Sure, a few percent of the populace says "whatever the president wants" when asked "is it OK for the president to listen to terrorists' phonecalls if it happens to innocently also overhear some other people's calls - who might just be terrorists we wouldn't otherwise notice, or drug dealers, or something?" But that's a fraction of Republicans, who are losing power left and right: they'll have something like 40 Senate seats in 2009, and perhaps something like 30-35 in 2011, and probably the House will be 60:40 in 2011, while their presidential candidate will probably get whipped something like 60:40. Already Republicans don't even show up to vote except maybe half that of Democrats, and that's while they still have a Clinton to fear.
It's not like Democrats are even aware of this issue except when asked, and then only vaguely for the most part. And independents aren't much more on the ball. So there's maybe 20-30% of adults who even have NSA spying on their radar, except when asked or actually seeing it on TV. The other 70% is up for grabs.
Which is why the Republicans and their telco masters are launching a TV ad. And why someone, if not the Democrats, should launch a counterad. On issues like this, the courts are sensitive to how the public reacts - if it reacts at all. Since Republicans are so under siege in general, this ad is a desperate ploy that would further distract them if it were met with the strong challenge that the truth actually offers: NSA spying should matter to everyone, because everyone's privacy - and therefore safety and liberty - is at risk. But if Republicans scare America again with this ad, and win telco amnesty, then that's momentum for them, and more telco bribes to keep them in line and in office.
So I want to see the debate get the facts for a change. If the ad is good, it will change the debate. Americans are fired up for change right now, and will be through November when we elect the first Black president. Let's see the rising tide also carry our most basic liberty: the line where the government and other private interests end, and where our private life begins as sacrosanct.
Those awards are nice honors to their deserving recipients. But they don't help any activism except preaching to the choir: people who already tune in to EFF. The mass media (which is EFF's natural enemy most of the time) doesn't even notice these nerd/wonk awards.
What the EFF should do to get itself press, more members, and actually push hard back for freedom would be making some ads to counter the telco propaganda that their award winners are persecuted by. I bet Mark Klein would be a good cameo in an ad, waving his EFF award or not.
If I had the world's engineering budget, I'd make one of those top engineering challenges the building of a global rail circuit interconnecting each of the 6 inhabited continents (really 4, because Eurasia and the Americas are already done).
Rail tubes across all the seas, maybe 4 tracks wide (2 in each direction) in at least 2 or 3 separate bundles for capacity and redundancy. Running from Newfoundland to Iceland/Ireland/Scotland/Netherlands, across the Bering strait, Malaysia to Australia and New Zealand, and across the Mediterranean (the Mideast is too volatile to depend on its land linkage among Europe/Asia/Africa). Maybe even China/Korea to Japan and the Philippines
That's real engineering. It wouldn't require lots of new science, just engineering, and lots of it - truly grand. And the benefits would improve energy consumption, trade, tourism, and break down some boundaries among rival peoples that create lots more conflict than necessary, which we should leave behind now that we're more interdependent than independent.
If the trains average 50 miles per hour, and the path winds up 4x longer than the equator as it curves around continents to get around terrain to leaving/landing points, Johannesburg to Tasmania could be a 96,000 mile total circuit. That's around the world in 80 days, 21st Century style.
The research debunks the conventional wisdom about not visiting questionable sites, because even trusted Web sites such as those belonging to Fortune 500 companies, schools, and government organizations can serve forth malware."
Yes, you're not in any greater risk hanging out in crackhouses, because even the banks you visit sometimes have dangerous bank robbers in them.
That statement is one of the stupidest analyses of relative risk that I've ever heard.
Slashdot Mirror
The Democrats are playing it "safe" because Bush/Cheney's crimes make it cheaper and easier for Democrats to run against them this year. So they're bottling us up in here with them, our only way out seemingly to hand Democrats a trifecta power monopoly. Democrats mainly care about increasing their nominal Senate majority closer 60:40, with Republicans defending 23 seats to Democrats 11. In January the Congress will also probably have some thing like a 15-20 point Democratic House majority, possibly that 60+ seat filibuster-proof Senate, and a Democratic president with the first actual majority of voters since Reagan.
With which Democrats can abuse all those "Bush/Cheney" tyrannical powers without the Iraq War that gets you caught. But with the Iraq War that gets you paid.
Quite a racket. Which is why Americans should force them to impeach, or at least make it as costly as possible not to. Because Republicans will be in no position of any kind to offer the kind of "opposition party" these Democrats couldn't muster even the past 8 years with very solid minorities and blatant catastrophes.
The missing party, as usual. is the American people. And decent country would be out in the streets with pitchforks and torches by now, especially with economic collapse staring everyone in the face. Instead, we've got Slashdot and the Daily Kos. And President VP Cheney.
Why not? Cheney's crimes depend on him having the time and privacy to work them. If he had to be the spokesmodel, and his team were cut in half, the operation would b crippled.
Besides, what makes you say that Cheney's not the president right now? And who says he can't be impeached, on his own charges, or as siamese accomplice to Bush? In case you don't recall, Nixon's VP Agnew was forced to resign first under threat of impeachment (for tax fraud over bribery). Which showed that their gang was vulnerable, which forced people to talk and abandon the conspiracies. Not a bad model for today.
Anonymous Republican Coward calls a source not credible without even clicking it, where they'd see it's a simple quote of two contradictory lies by Bush's henchmen, presented with the most basic logic. No wonder facts are a stranger to this AC.
These sources are as "quaint" to Republicans as are the Geneva Conventions they've been torturing for years.
Bush has his new Attorney General lying to back him up, but they can't even keep their stories straight:
It's obvious that it's Bush's fault the PAA expired without extension:
The bottom line is that Bush's own Attorney General just admitted that he and Bush and the rest are repeatedly breaking the law:
What does it take to get impeached in this country? Will someome please blow Bush already, so we can finally get it over with?
Oh, right, this is Slashdot, where the only way to win a lawsuit is to buy a bigger lawyer, even when you're right. Apple, that humble little company, deserves our sympathy.
You're an asshole who doesn't know shit from shinola, let alone how the law is abused, or even how to parse my clear post.
C&D letters aren't just "polite warnings". They're often bluffs that are beyond rude, into damaging abuse. When someone doesn't send one, or its equivalent, the court looks less favorably on their attempt to get the court to step in to do all the work. The court wants to see at least some "good faith" attempt to remedy the conflict, even when the person claiming damage is in the right. Failure to do so can reduce the court's willingness to interpret evidence in the plaintiff's favor, and even more often reduce punitive damages.
But when they do send one, if they're not bluffing, then what I described would never get triggered.
So all I did was put some teeth into the current system's preference for "comity" between even adversarial parties during the legal process. Teeth that are clearly needed, given the widespread abuse of sending bluff C&D letters as mere intimidation, an automatic response to any perceived threat regardless of their merits. Teeth that do no harm to legitimate C&D letter senders.
But hey, why should you bother to think about it? You just defended the unrestrained C&D letter senders. Why should your own attack be any less informed by law, comity or reason?
Maybe not this one, but there are plenty of others.
FWIW, the DMCA is unconstitutional, as it places prior restraint against all copying of a work, even though much copying is free to exercise under fair use that copyright can't prohibit. As soon as enough of those legit cases defend from DMCA attacks, the DMCA won't be usable in those illegitimate attacks anymore. But I have no doubt that some lawyers will continue to send C&D letters citing it, bluffing. Then my rule would kick in.
I think it's time that someone tested that DMCA clause by suing someone with it, and not resorting to any dirty tricks - just suing under the bare terms of the DMCA itself - and watching it get defeated, setting a clear precedent. That sounds like a job for the EFF.
The multiples of the wavelengths have to be harmonic, 2^n, not just simple multiples. That's how harmonics work. They will be unique: a given femtoscopic distance will have only a single frequency harmonic in the visible spectrum, because the visible spectrum fits within a single "octave", eg from f to (f*2).
I am saying that the false color should indeed represent the electronic structure of the atom being colored. I did make a mistake substituting the atomic weight for atomic number (and therefore nuclear particle count for electron count). But what I mean is that carbon's 6 electrons fall into 2 shells (at ground state). The inner shell is filled with 2 electrons and has a diameter. That shell's diameter would be divided by the count of two electrons in it, to account for the equivalence to "texture" that a larger feature distance on a larger object's surface would create if the distances between many points were reflecting visible light. That tiny distance corresponds to a single wavelength that's 2^n times larger in the visible band. So that shell would be colored that corresponding color. The next shell would have its larger diameter divided by its 6 electrons and scaled harmonically to chose its color. Then the two colors would be mixed additively (as the electrons are so small compared to the shells that they would rarely block incoming photons, if photons were actually incident (which is what we're simulating). So, (to make up easily added colors), a red inner shell and a green outer shell would make the atom look yellow. This procedure would make the atom look like it would if it were actually scaled up by successive doubling to a size that reflects visible light.
There are other variations on that coloring scheme that could show electronic properties. For example, instead of just dividing the shell diameter by its filled electron count to set its subharmonic color, the shell's fraction of filling electrons to its electron capacity (eg, carbon's 2/8 in its second shell) could divide the shell's diameter before scaling harmonically to set its color. Or that fraction could be used to set the brightness (or other linear property, like value or intensity, depending on the color model used) of that shell's color to emphasize how full it is. The nucleus might be colored the atom's ground state color, appearing in the center of the hues of the surrounding shells (perhaps with a simulated cleared cylindrical "peephole" so its "default" color isn't mixed with the overlapping shells) as electrons migrate when the atom is excited. Bonds likewise would recolor the atoms as electrons are distributed between atoms and shells.
All of these techniques would illustrate intuitively the quantities and distributions they represent. So people could bring to bear our other learned experience with color to understand the properties and dynamics even at this tiny scale. Interactions with photons could be especially obvious to even untrained viewers, as harmonically colored photons interact (or don't) with identically (or not) colored atomic shells, shuffling the resulting electron counts.
And the technique I describe is easy to compute, and easy for current 3D HW and SW to render. So elaborate animations should be straightforward to produce. Beautiful and educational.
If someone gets a Cease & Desist letter threatening them with harm if they don't c&d, then fights it in court and shows the C&D was invalid, the court should treat the sender of the C&D letter like any other bully making threats. Fine them, count a strike against the attorney who wrote it (and start disciplining/disbarring them after some number of strikes in some period of time). And find damages to cover the time the recipient had to spend to straighten this out when they weren't wrong.
And when the C&D sender loses such a case, every other recipient of such a letter should be able to file to get the same results applied to their own case, if they can prove it was the same circumstances (which should be cheap, easy and quick if they were indeed the same). That should load up the fines and strikes on the sender and their lawyers.
Which in turn will deter lots of these C&D letters, especially when they're just bluffing (and they know it). Why should a law license and a retainer let these bullies litter the land with their C&D letters that get enforced with just the threat of intimidation, but which don't have a legal leg to stand on (or ever have to demonstrate they do)? They should have to face some consequences for abuse themselves.
No, I'm a programmer with a PS3 running Linux who's stopped by Sony's artificial limits.
Do you think you're doing programmers any favors by limiting us to only x86, and keeping us from screaming fast, cheap, and fascinating new parallel HW?
If it proliferates (and there are already several million PS3s out there, while IBM, Toshiba and others are marketing Cell machines - if only a few, at the high end) it will hardly be "unique".
Oh, please let Toshiba return the favor by selling a PC with Cell and RSX to compete with Sony's Playstation, without the Sony Hypervisor lockout (and with RAM expandible beyond 512MB).
If it's got both Blu-Ray and Firewire, then the revenge will be complete. And I will support it in every way.
Ad's like this one remixing the heinous Republican terrorist ad.
Now there's an ad that shoves telco Republicans' nose in the crap they laid with their ad. An even more powerful remix of their terrorist's dream ad.
Actually, we do agree on nearly everything - certainly practically everything you just said.
Except "why do Republicans win elections". The reason is not their political actions, but their ads. Or rather, their PR strategy to mask their political actions that directly conflict with both their image and what their voters expect from them.
People vote for Republicans because they think Republicans are "fiscal conservatives" and "moral people". "Limited government" and "fair interpersonal dealings". They're "good Christians" who "trust the people and private business", not "government welfare". They "put American first" and "the rest of the world can go to hell". They "lower taxes" and the "cut pork and waste".
Every single one of those statements is a lie. A Big Lie. Republicans have multiplied the debt every chance they've gotten, even ruinously, creating dependencies on foreign enemies. They've multiplied the government size while reducing its effectiveness for most Americans, at the expense of giveaways for corporations and favorite states (which vote Republican - but only to the rich/corporate Republicans there). Their "supply side / trickle down" economics subsidizes private business, largely with war profiteering (even in times of relative peace), centrally planning industry with handouts and tax cuts for selected businesses. All of which has to be paid back in taxes later, or the country defaults. They leave America rotting, sick without insurance, its infrastructures left tied up by parasitic monopolies, while shipping $trillions to foreigners as pretext for even more corporate giveaways and government power plays. They're liars, cheats, thieves on the grandest scales: S&L heist; Iran/Contra Operation (smuggling guns and drugs, resupplying Iran and positioning Sauds); Iraq. And on the personal scales they routinely molest children, cheat on their wives, embezzle and take bribes, in every combination, while covering it all up. They're evil, even if mere greed for power and money and lust for killing, rape and lies are the corruption we'd call "evil".
And everyone knows it. How do they get elected on exactly the opposite promises, for generations? Their PR. Which of course revolves around ads. It also rests on strategic token political actions, like antiabortion rules and homophobic legislation, even rising to promises of "amending" the Constitution to make blastocysts into "persons" and persons into "heterosexals only". For Republicans, political action is merely necessary for holding power, but totally insufficient without ads. Of course, the ads are coordinated with the actions for maximum effect, maximum cover beneath which they betray every promise and principle. But without the ads, good ones and just many of them, at the right time, they wouldn't succeed.
What's missing from that equation is the Americans who believe the ads, despite the mountain of contrary evidence. America is a big, complex place, with people quite complex ourselves, and a complex history (from genocide to civil rights, from liberty to the Terror War, and all points between). But America's tremendous success has come from its enthusiasm and organization of its people. Which has selected for a country that is easily led, can ignore contradictions, that lives in a mediasphere that can say anything at any time, directing vastly consistent popular behavior on a common ideal once it's established. Americans are at root immigrants, so we are enthusiastic about cutting with any past, including here at home, when there's even the possibility of getting some new dream come true, even if we've been promised it before, even if it's at odds with the rest of what we want. That's what the media and dreams are like: they don't have the constraints of reality, even when they create real actions that drive us further from the dreams.
Republicans know all of this. One reason is that their people come from the corporate tier, which is expert in creating fake realities for profit, while delivering eno
These mainframes use the z6 CPU, which is closely related to the POWER6, which is closely related to the PowerPC.
Is it at all possible to automatically port any nontrivial z6 software to PPC, if it doesn't require the actually different HW of the z6 (or its much higher performance)? Any possibility to run PPC SW on a z6, with some automatic porting for the higher performance?
I'd like to see these atoms rendered in necessarily false color (they're smaller than visible light wavelengths) that is at least the color corresponding to their size. They're smaller than visible wavelengths, but their actual size is a specific fraction of a visible wavelength. Let's see the atoms colored with the color that's a harmonic multiple.
Or maybe the color should be derived from the "texture" of the atom, just like the actual color of macroscopic materials. If a carbon atom has 12 electrons evenly distributed around a sphere in shells (2, 8 and another 2 in valence), let's see it get colored accordingly. Maybe the inner shell's diameter harmonic color in the visible range, divided by 2 and scaled back into the visible, overlapped with the same algorithm for the outer 8 in the second shell, then again for the 2 in the outermost shell.
The point is that these colors can mean something. And since the number and combination of electrons is so important to the characteristics of the electron, as well as offering the femtoscopic equivalent to macroscopic colored surfaces, I'd like to finally see what I've been imagining since high school chemistry class.
Pointing out a fallacy by name ("false choice") isn't "impolite".
Your "irrelevant value comparison that no one is disputing about whether political opposition is more important than ads" is that you are comparing political opposition to ads by value, when I didn't say one or the other was more valuable. That value comparison is irrelevant, no one is disputing it but you. That makes it not just a false choice fallacy, but also a strawman.
I was polite about it. Some people are rude when pointing them out, since fallacies are unfair arguments, and go further away from legitimate disagreement. I did not. In fact, it gets harder to stay polite when you're both trying fallacies (and sticking to them once they're pointed out), and implying that I'm rude for pointing them out. But I will stay polite, because I'm secure in my argument.
Political action is necessary but not sufficient. Advertising that delivers the message about political action is what frames the debate. It's how nearly all political action is translated into alliance by the public, or at least the critical mass even in the "word of mouth" Internet Era. The ads drive home all those stories.
Of course the DNC ran ads. They didn't actually run enough, or good enough, but yes more actual political action would have made even what they had go much further. You're asking the wrong question to test your argument. The question is what if Democrats had performed plenty of political action in 2002-2006, but didn't run any ads. Republicans would have wiped the floor with them. Just as Republicans wiped the floor with them with their superior advertising (and underlying messaging, carefully crafted lies), despite the terrible damage done by Republicans with their greater volume of worse quality political action.
So now I'm trying for at least the third time to debate you on the same subject. Not the choice between political action or ads that you're sticking to, but rather the value of more or less ads given an at least adequate amount of political action. If you want to talk about that, I'm ready. If not, I'm not interested.
As long as they keep making new peripheral buses and networks that are the fastest in the world to keep up with the supercomputing speeds, that we can then buy to use with our PCs, then it's a great investment.
But since the American people will have bought the new tech for the world, it should be released into the public domain, after maybe 5 years patent licensed to only American corporations (who cannot sublicense it abroad). That's what investments in American tech should be like. Not just subsidies to private corporations, however Chinese they might be.
Those actions come from popular support, which largely depends on ads. Ads are how our huge, complex, busy society communicates with itself. You're either setting up a false choice between political opposition and ads, or you're making an irrelevant value comparison that no one is disputing about whether political opposition is more important than ads.
They're both important. And one depends on the other.
The people who assassinate presidents are not the Americans who are fired up for change.
You can believe whatever you want about America. Are you even an American? But the objective reality is that Democrats are turning out twice as much as are Republicans, in record amounts. And they're not voting for another Clinton, they're voting for a new guy. A new Black guy. After getting rid of the other white guys, and now the old woman in favor of the young guy. If that's not change, then nothing is.
Hope doesn't guarantee change, nor does energy. But what guarantees nothing will change is that people have no hope. Like you. So your advice on how America can change isn't coming from anyplace convincing.
No they're not split. As I said, they're ignorant, apathetic, and distracted by the war, the economy, and their personal lives.
You are creating a false duality between "with or against NSA spying". The real duality is whether or not people notice. Since people mostly don't notice, and then are beaten back with distractions and end-runs, the corporate deals with the politicians who prey on the people go through.
Bush most certainly should be in jail, or worse, but he's not. He's also cruising down below 20% approval, which is like only the grade F students thinking you're the right quarterback for the football team. That shows that Americans are disconnected from the system that's supposed to protect us, including the media that should be ringing air raid sirens every day over these crimes. But they're not.
That's why ads are important. I never said that EFF should run ads instead of suing. I said that I think their running ads is more important than giving awards. I didn't even say EFF shouldn't give awards. In fact, I said that a good ad would feature Klein with his award, which would show Americans that there are real people out there putting their lives on the line to protect us all from these real tyrannies that they don't otherwise see exposed on their TV.
That's why the Republicans are running ads. If they didn't matter, they wouldn't waste their money, while they don't have enough to campaign to hold the seats they're using to put through these abuses. It's all important. But that also means that ads to convince Americans it's important, especially in the face of ads convincing them that it's not, are important. Because those people are going to the polls every few weeks already, warming up for November. At which time, if NSA spying is an issue fixed in the public imagination (not just Slashdotters'), it will mean votes. If not in the Senate, which has small turnover and other issues despite the centrality of the Senate in allowing the spying, then at least in the House, which has to stand for election every 2 years. The ads are the way to drive home the "emotional" images that drive people to demand protection. Either the Republican way of fake protection, that we'll see in those ads, or a different way, an EFF way preferably, of protecting ourselves from the telcos as well as the few "terrorists" who have to reach a lot further than the telcos to hurt us.
The populace isn't "split" on NSA spying. Sure, a few percent of the populace says "whatever the president wants" when asked "is it OK for the president to listen to terrorists' phonecalls if it happens to innocently also overhear some other people's calls - who might just be terrorists we wouldn't otherwise notice, or drug dealers, or something?" But that's a fraction of Republicans, who are losing power left and right: they'll have something like 40 Senate seats in 2009, and perhaps something like 30-35 in 2011, and probably the House will be 60:40 in 2011, while their presidential candidate will probably get whipped something like 60:40. Already Republicans don't even show up to vote except maybe half that of Democrats, and that's while they still have a Clinton to fear.
It's not like Democrats are even aware of this issue except when asked, and then only vaguely for the most part. And independents aren't much more on the ball. So there's maybe 20-30% of adults who even have NSA spying on their radar, except when asked or actually seeing it on TV. The other 70% is up for grabs.
Which is why the Republicans and their telco masters are launching a TV ad. And why someone, if not the Democrats, should launch a counterad. On issues like this, the courts are sensitive to how the public reacts - if it reacts at all. Since Republicans are so under siege in general, this ad is a desperate ploy that would further distract them if it were met with the strong challenge that the truth actually offers: NSA spying should matter to everyone, because everyone's privacy - and therefore safety and liberty - is at risk. But if Republicans scare America again with this ad, and win telco amnesty, then that's momentum for them, and more telco bribes to keep them in line and in office.
So I want to see the debate get the facts for a change. If the ad is good, it will change the debate. Americans are fired up for change right now, and will be through November when we elect the first Black president. Let's see the rising tide also carry our most basic liberty: the line where the government and other private interests end, and where our private life begins as sacrosanct.
Those awards are nice honors to their deserving recipients. But they don't help any activism except preaching to the choir: people who already tune in to EFF. The mass media (which is EFF's natural enemy most of the time) doesn't even notice these nerd/wonk awards.
What the EFF should do to get itself press, more members, and actually push hard back for freedom would be making some ads to counter the telco propaganda that their award winners are persecuted by. I bet Mark Klein would be a good cameo in an ad, waving his EFF award or not.
If I had the world's engineering budget, I'd make one of those top engineering challenges the building of a global rail circuit interconnecting each of the 6 inhabited continents (really 4, because Eurasia and the Americas are already done).
Rail tubes across all the seas, maybe 4 tracks wide (2 in each direction) in at least 2 or 3 separate bundles for capacity and redundancy. Running from Newfoundland to Iceland/Ireland/Scotland/Netherlands, across the Bering strait, Malaysia to Australia and New Zealand, and across the Mediterranean (the Mideast is too volatile to depend on its land linkage among Europe/Asia/Africa). Maybe even China/Korea to Japan and the Philippines
That's real engineering. It wouldn't require lots of new science, just engineering, and lots of it - truly grand. And the benefits would improve energy consumption, trade, tourism, and break down some boundaries among rival peoples that create lots more conflict than necessary, which we should leave behind now that we're more interdependent than independent.
If the trains average 50 miles per hour, and the path winds up 4x longer than the equator as it curves around continents to get around terrain to leaving/landing points, Johannesburg to Tasmania could be a 96,000 mile total circuit. That's around the world in 80 days, 21st Century style.
Yes, you're not in any greater risk hanging out in crackhouses, because even the banks you visit sometimes have dangerous bank robbers in them.
That statement is one of the stupidest analyses of relative risk that I've ever heard.