And third. If you're really worried about reliability and you're someplace where there's a second (non-Covad - which Speakeasy is for SDSL) DSL provider, there are ways to hook up, say two 1.5 meg DSL lines over different providers to the same site, and then run a script from a third site that checks that each line is up every minute or two and uses dynamic DNS updates to refer your traffic one way or the other - or both. Tricky, but it can be done. Then for less than the price of a T1 you're running the equivalent of 2 T1's.
A main reason to use a remote hosting service rather than host at your own location is such redundancy. But it's much easier to maintain a machine on your own premises. Some hosting services will charge you extra for each time you even ask them to glance in the direction of the machine on their racks they renting you.
Almost by definition, a dogmatist can't be reasonable, since dogma itself, as a tenet, is not subject to reason.
That's a dogmatic definition of 'dogma.' The word has the same root as 'doctor' (whose medical meaning is quite recent - the sense of 'professor' is much older) and 'doctrine,' which originally referred to teacher and teaching. So a 'dogma' is generally a received teaching, but that does not at all mean (1) that there is no reason behind the teaching, or (2) that the student is not encouraged to reason about it. The same root is in the Greek word dokein one of whose meanings was 'think.' It also shows up as both 'orthodox' and 'paradox.' Also, 'document.'
Basically, a dogmatist is anyone who professes to have a consistent teaching. While famous examples include Philo of Larissa's elaboration on Plato's Academy 4 and the doctrines of the Councils of the Catholic Church, these do not nearly exhaust the senses of the word. Your definition of dogma as not subject to reason sounds like itself a bit of dogma - something you have been taught, but in this case by someone whose reasoning about it is based on perhaps a judgment about the Catholic Church's instances of dogma, rather than an open study of the history of the term.
This is EXACTLY about lawyers getting rich. Our broken legal system drives this stuff. That said, I think it's Very clear that this is a case of deceptive advertising. However, a class action suit is not the answer. The FTC should be the agency that goes in and fines them a couple million bucks, and forbids them from doing that crap in the future.
Given that it's fraud, given that there are two options for legally stoping it, one requiring action by a department of the federal government, the other requiring action by private lawyers (both in name representing citizens) - you'd really rather have the government get big and all-responsible rather than encouraging individual initiative to pick up the slack? Which creates the more free society? Is a rich lawyer more of a threat than a powerful bureaucrat?
When Republicans urge "legal reform" it amuses me because Republicans are supposed to be in favor of leaving things to private initiative and shrinking the role of government. Of course, what most of them really seem to favor is that citizens have no recourse to effective action either via government or via individual (or group) initiative against business which have defrauded or harmed them. This is basically a transfer of the government's power to the corporations this would shield.
Given the alternatives, I'm all in favor of encouraging as many greedy lawyers as we can get into the field. As in any ecology, if one species gets all the good stuff, the ecology as a whole is degraded. But if you get different, individually greedy species into balance you can get a highly-functioning system. Having the government come in to support one greedy group (businesses) against another greedy group (lawyers) just because they're greedy throws the whole system - in which greed can balance itself out for the larger good - out of whack.
Which neighborhood would you rather live in? One where the neighbors freely helped each other out? Or one where all appearance of friendliness depended on the passing of money?
The point is, your neighborhood's valuations are affected by the neighbors, and their neighbors. Linux admins have as neighbors a vast network of people who will help them, most often for free. Plus they also tend to be on friendlier terms with both hard- and software. So if it costs more to have them in the next cubicle, what you're paying for is a real increase in the value of the real estate your own desk is on.
Of course, some people find it romantic to live in rough, ugly places full of prostitutes and confidence men, viruses and scams, where respect's only measure is money in the pocket. But they don't usually expect to pay more for it, relative to real estate costs elsewhere in town. After all, there are broken windows.
that it will become trivial in terms of speed to compile your distribution (a la Gentoo) and so rpm- and deb-based distributions of pre-compiled (and thus not optimized to your specific CPU) programs will lose their current speed-of-installation advantage. Having really fast CPUs means that you can have an OS with major optimization to the specifics of those CPUs and associated hardware. This ease of customization might produce a situation parallel to the one in which the specialty steel business remains profitable while the old, monolithic producers require massive subsidies to survive. That is, it could hurt both Microsoft and Red Hat - while being very good for open source.
Before any of you americans start quoting your constitution, please remember that this is Denmark and the law is different there. Why not wait and see what happens first, eh?
Took a train across Denmark the summer before last. Commented to my buddy's buddy in Koebenhavn, "Wow, so many wildflowers between farmers' fields. Totally unlike Germany. Beautiful."
He said, "Yeah. That's the law here. They have to grow 'em."
So given that I'm favoring the legal system in Denmark - from that one slim evidence (coercive though it be) - what do you, as a Dane, expect from your courts?
For bonus points, detail what you Danes intend to do to resist the imposition of what's left of the U.S. Constitution on the rest of the world.
"There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?"
Senator John Ashcroft - evidently no relation to the daemon obsessed (or is that possessed?) Attorney General of the same name.
Do his bank and other lenders know how shakey the foundations of his income are?
That software mentioned at the end of the article that he's having developed in Romania could only work by violating laws regarding computer trespass and hacking. When he's in jail and his operation shut down, how will he pay the mortgage?
If disputed behavior is covered under a contract, the criminal justice system often won't take the case, since the parties to the dispute have recourse to the civil courts. For example, a relative of mine was building a house in Florida. The contractor folded up shop and left town in the midst of the project, taking with him nearly $100,000 in advance payments, which he then transferred to his wife. The Florida criminal justice system considered this a contract dispute, so wouldn't touch it. As a civil case, lawyers didn't want it because the contractor, having given the money away, had no assets to recover.
What Buckeye Cable had with these folks is a dispute about whether they honored a clause in a contract. One could say that the real principle was the criminal system favored the business against the individual in the case of my relative, and again here. But in that case it really would be a criminal system. If it comes to that, turnabout is fair play, and there is then no ethical limitation on the individual scamming what he or she can from it. It's like stealing from the mob - hazardous to your health but not wrong. This is why it's so important that the system itself operate fairly, and not tilt towards corporations and businesses. Without fairness, the population my be terrorized, but cannot be governed.
I knew the Block twins in middle school. They would tell their classmates about how they liked to put their pet mice in toy rockets and send them up. Of course, they didn't land too well. So if they had a hand in bring the FBI in on this, it wouldn't be their first sadistic act. There was a funny article a couple years back in the New York Observer about how one of the twins (think it was Paul - who I've heard is in charge of the Internet operation while Alan runs the Tolede Blade newspaper) has spent years commuting back and forth between Toledo and New York because he believes he has a better chance of finding a woman to love him here. The angle of the article was that despite being worth northwards of $100 million, he hadn't found one as of date of publication. If he's as awkward and unlikeable as an adult as he was as a kid, that's no surprise.
in a week where we have alerts for Samba, php, kde (libs and network) and apache
The only Apache security alert I can find is for 1.2.26 - and 1.2.27 has been out for awhile (plus some distro versions of 1.2.26 are patched against it). This alert has been out for weeks too.
There are no alerts I can find against the current version of PHP.
As for the KDE alert, updating Gentoo has already fixed that here. Your mileage may vary.
The Samba alert is for something with no known exploits, and a new version of Samba was released yesterday that fixes it.
Meanwhile tens of millions of people are using MS browsing or e-mail and opening what should be secure systems and networks to intrusion. You tell me where the problem is. I don't think it's in a bias on/. As a matter of national and corporate security, MS should not be run on any system with e-mail or browser access to the public Net.
In the 14 years I've lived in West Seattle the traffic has at least tripled.
I moved from Seattle 14 years ago among other things because traffic was getting so bad... to New York, but hey if I'm going to suffer the pains of a major city, may as well have the rewards of one. Folks who don't know Seattle don't realize that rail will succeed there for the exact same reason the current most successful use of it is Portland, OR: folks in that corner of the country are very environmentally correct (especially the loggers who improve the forests by removing the large combustable objects!). Not to mention the retro-techno-wiz factor in monorail - lots of fans of that out there too.
But what's just plain wrong about the plan is that they're putting the first line not where the population density of transit riders is, but where the rich are (or where the real estate speculators believe more rich can be lured), nearer the water. It will be useless for instance to the U of W with 40,000 mostly-transit-riding students who lean strongly green, and is closer to downtown than Ballard. The line should go there first. "But they're already on transit, why give them more service?" Right, ignore your best customers.
Conclusion: decent tools are the answer, not bug-eyed rants about the death of email.
Quite right. I have an e-mail address that's nine years old, so it's in plenty of spammers' lists by now. But it's useful to keep it for both business and personal reasons. Running Vipul's Razor limits me to a few spams a day (out of dozens trying to reach me), which I then report back (a quick Mutt macro) so other folks using Razor will be spared them. Also, if I sign up for anything new I do so with a user id unique to it, like nytimes@mydomain.com (okay, it helps to have a domain). Then if any spam starts coming to that id, I/dev/null it after a Procmail rule that reports it all to Razor.
You can easily have your servers report no more than:
Server: Apache/1.3.26
Set ServerTokens to "min" in httpd.conf. Why tell anybody anything you have no use in their knowing? Sure, there are other ways they can test your vulnerability. But some of them will look here first, and just go elsewhere if you're not baiting them with what they're looking for.
There is no one else in the world with my full name - and probably only one person (a first cousin) with the same first-last combo. It's really not that hard to give all children unique names, and will help the government track us unambiguously. Name duplication is a needless infringement on the uniqueness of the individual. Let's outlaw it. No more "George Bush"es!
Just curious, what security flaws do Lotus 2.4 or WordPerfect 5.1 bring into your operation? Sure, you'd like to support less stuff. But in places I've worked the Lotus and WP users support each other - nobody expects IT to be more expert at Lotus macros than the accountants, and nobody expects IT to know half as much about using WP well as a good executive assistant.
Are WP or Lotus files as attachments now doing the serious viral stuff that Word and Excel files are famous for? For security's sake, an "anything but Word or Excel" policy could serve you very well. Of course, it's a bit harder to find new staff that knows the older programs well - but the staff you will find generally knows them better than the typical new hire trained on Messysoft stuff knows how to use that. And Word in particular is designed for unskilled labor, not expert users.
Thanks for correction about RAID-1. But wouldn't the extra cost only be for the extra drive, presuming the CPU is lightly enough loaded that Linux kernel RAID shouldn't much affect the responsiveness of the system, as is the case with most home office systems? 60-gig 7200 rpm drives are around 80 bucks - or 100 if you don't shop around. So with two of 'em you're at 160-200, less than a single 10 gig drive cost not too long ago. And at costs this cheap, how could they not be intended to be disposable?
The ex-girlfriend (still friend) had her hard drive failing. "Okay, order a WD, I'll come by and replace it." So she did, and the WD was DOA, and we end up out at Staples paying too much for a smaller Maxtor. But even too much is so cheap these days. Given that drive manufacturers are barely holding on in this market, and are all scrimping on quality control, does it even make sense not to install drives in pairs with RAID/0 mirroring? The cost of the second drive is far less than the time involved in even doing regular backups (although these are still a good idea for when to tornado strikes), let alone restoring a system.
"Welcome, enemy, to the battlefield of our choosing. While you try to subvert our music-sharing computer net with your puny scab programmers, we will be infiltrating the medical-information-sharing net used by your doctors. Our downloads my temporarily become less reliable as countermeasures are required to circumvent your aggressions. Your medical equipment and diagnoses may become temporarily less reliable and - considering the sloppiness of most medical record-keeping - by the time anyone notices, you may not be around to regret starting this war."
This end-time vision is pure dark science-fiction, told of an unlikely world where the controlling powers were stupid enough to sanction hacking into others' computer systems as a legitimate means of pursuing social and economic agendas. Such civilizations, if they have ever existed, have not long survived.
I'm sorry, but racists, sexists, and homophobes are outright scum!
People who don't realize that there are real differences between peoples - say between the English and the French, or between Buddhists and Hindus - haven't seen much of the world. People who have no preferences among peoples - say for the Danish over the Austrians, or the athiests over the born-agains - no more really care about people than does someone who claims to care about music but can't give you any preference between Bach and Nsync, or Beatles and Bacharach really care about music - or someone who claims to care about food but can't give you any preference between Wonder Bread and German Rye really care about food - or someone who claims to care about painting but can't give you any preference between da Vinci and a road sign really care about art.
"Hate" laws are intended to enforce an attitude of "I just don't notice; I have no taste, I don't care, and I'm just going to accept the world the way it's packaged for me - Wonder World!" It's not that there's some "right" preference everyone should have - but if you've no preference at all you just aren't paying attention.
And not paying attention, among human beings, is often worse than hatred. Many a child or lover would rather be hated than ignored. So peoples who are ignored make of themselves objects of hate. The "no hate crimes" mentality leads directly to the Palestinian uprising and the attack on New York. We must pay enough attention to peoples to notice the differences; discussion of these differences must not be taboo. In making it so, "good" people enact evil.
The McCarthyism link is to a Wired story about a law now likely to pass the Senate allowing the FBI to gain ISP e-mail records without warrant. All the more reason to get your own fixed IP and run your own mailserver. If I'm my ISP for mail, can they demand I turn over the records of my e-mail from my own computer in my home without a warrant? For those whose cable services block outgoing port 25... tough.
Of course, having read this, Ashcroft's Ashellians will require licenses on mail servers....
If the VCR is being replaced by DVD as ABC said on the news last night, then a "Tivo" becomes the obvious thing to have once there's no more VCR in cluttering your space. Half the point of a VCR - playing rentals - has gone away now that half the households have DVD. The other half is better filled by Tivo than VCR, especially since the DVD has us spoiled for digital "quality."
... or something damn close to it. For an old HP LJIIIp that looks a lot better than an LJII, even though both are 300 dpi. It's because the IIIp uses smaller dots where appropriate at the edges. Many ink jet printers do the same thing. Not sure if anything at 1200 dpi bothers with this trick, but the trick's good enough that the quality difference between the IIIp at 300 dpi and a 600 dpi printer is very hard to see.
E-bay isn't just providing a neutral marketplace, but one in which they (1) take a cut of each sale and (2) have ways for buyers to inform them of fraud. Aren't they exposing themselves to potential federal racketeering charges if they are made aware of frauds as clear as those written up by MSNBC and continue to participate in profiting from those frauds? Knowing participation in fraud is not the same thing as, say, being a landlord for a shop that turns out to accept stolen goods (like on 47th St. in Manhattan, where a bunch of diamond merchants were just busted for that - this being the center of the diamond trade in America). It's more like if the landlord took a cut of each sale, helped steer the customers to the store, while knowing the shopkeepers were fencing. And that would result in a racketeering bust. If the feds won't touch it, can the California AG use RICO? E-bay should be cleaned up or closed down. It's not like no-one else will fill the space.
Slashdot Mirror
And third. If you're really worried about reliability and you're someplace where there's a second (non-Covad - which Speakeasy is for SDSL) DSL provider, there are ways to hook up, say two 1.5 meg DSL lines over different providers to the same site, and then run a script from a third site that checks that each line is up every minute or two and uses dynamic DNS updates to refer your traffic one way or the other - or both. Tricky, but it can be done. Then for less than the price of a T1 you're running the equivalent of 2 T1's.
A main reason to use a remote hosting service rather than host at your own location is such redundancy. But it's much easier to maintain a machine on your own premises. Some hosting services will charge you extra for each time you even ask them to glance in the direction of the machine on their racks they renting you.
That's a dogmatic definition of 'dogma.' The word has the same root as 'doctor' (whose medical meaning is quite recent - the sense of 'professor' is much older) and 'doctrine,' which originally referred to teacher and teaching. So a 'dogma' is generally a received teaching, but that does not at all mean (1) that there is no reason behind the teaching, or (2) that the student is not encouraged to reason about it. The same root is in the Greek word dokein one of whose meanings was 'think.' It also shows up as both 'orthodox' and 'paradox.' Also, 'document.'
Basically, a dogmatist is anyone who professes to have a consistent teaching. While famous examples include Philo of Larissa's elaboration on Plato's Academy 4 and the doctrines of the Councils of the Catholic Church, these do not nearly exhaust the senses of the word. Your definition of dogma as not subject to reason sounds like itself a bit of dogma - something you have been taught, but in this case by someone whose reasoning about it is based on perhaps a judgment about the Catholic Church's instances of dogma, rather than an open study of the history of the term.
Given that it's fraud, given that there are two options for legally stoping it, one requiring action by a department of the federal government, the other requiring action by private lawyers (both in name representing citizens) - you'd really rather have the government get big and all-responsible rather than encouraging individual initiative to pick up the slack? Which creates the more free society? Is a rich lawyer more of a threat than a powerful bureaucrat?
When Republicans urge "legal reform" it amuses me because Republicans are supposed to be in favor of leaving things to private initiative and shrinking the role of government. Of course, what most of them really seem to favor is that citizens have no recourse to effective action either via government or via individual (or group) initiative against business which have defrauded or harmed them. This is basically a transfer of the government's power to the corporations this would shield.
Given the alternatives, I'm all in favor of encouraging as many greedy lawyers as we can get into the field. As in any ecology, if one species gets all the good stuff, the ecology as a whole is degraded. But if you get different, individually greedy species into balance you can get a highly-functioning system. Having the government come in to support one greedy group (businesses) against another greedy group (lawyers) just because they're greedy throws the whole system - in which greed can balance itself out for the larger good - out of whack.
Which neighborhood would you rather live in? One where the neighbors freely helped each other out? Or one where all appearance of friendliness depended on the passing of money?
The point is, your neighborhood's valuations are affected by the neighbors, and their neighbors. Linux admins have as neighbors a vast network of people who will help them, most often for free. Plus they also tend to be on friendlier terms with both hard- and software. So if it costs more to have them in the next cubicle, what you're paying for is a real increase in the value of the real estate your own desk is on.
Of course, some people find it romantic to live in rough, ugly places full of prostitutes and confidence men, viruses and scams, where respect's only measure is money in the pocket. But they don't usually expect to pay more for it, relative to real estate costs elsewhere in town. After all, there are broken windows.
that it will become trivial in terms of speed to compile your distribution (a la Gentoo) and so rpm- and deb-based distributions of pre-compiled (and thus not optimized to your specific CPU) programs will lose their current speed-of-installation advantage. Having really fast CPUs means that you can have an OS with major optimization to the specifics of those CPUs and associated hardware. This ease of customization might produce a situation parallel to the one in which the specialty steel business remains profitable while the old, monolithic producers require massive subsidies to survive. That is, it could hurt both Microsoft and Red Hat - while being very good for open source.
Took a train across Denmark the summer before last. Commented to my buddy's buddy in Koebenhavn, "Wow, so many wildflowers between farmers' fields. Totally unlike Germany. Beautiful."
He said, "Yeah. That's the law here. They have to grow 'em."
So given that I'm favoring the legal system in Denmark - from that one slim evidence (coercive though it be) - what do you, as a Dane, expect from your courts?
For bonus points, detail what you Danes intend to do to resist the imposition of what's left of the U.S. Constitution on the rest of the world.
Senator John Ashcroft - evidently no relation to the daemon obsessed (or is that possessed?) Attorney General of the same name.
That software mentioned at the end of the article that he's having developed in Romania could only work by violating laws regarding computer trespass and hacking. When he's in jail and his operation shut down, how will he pay the mortgage?
What Buckeye Cable had with these folks is a dispute about whether they honored a clause in a contract. One could say that the real principle was the criminal system favored the business against the individual in the case of my relative, and again here. But in that case it really would be a criminal system. If it comes to that, turnabout is fair play, and there is then no ethical limitation on the individual scamming what he or she can from it. It's like stealing from the mob - hazardous to your health but not wrong. This is why it's so important that the system itself operate fairly, and not tilt towards corporations and businesses. Without fairness, the population my be terrorized, but cannot be governed.
I knew the Block twins in middle school. They would tell their classmates about how they liked to put their pet mice in toy rockets and send them up. Of course, they didn't land too well. So if they had a hand in bring the FBI in on this, it wouldn't be their first sadistic act. There was a funny article a couple years back in the New York Observer about how one of the twins (think it was Paul - who I've heard is in charge of the Internet operation while Alan runs the Tolede Blade newspaper) has spent years commuting back and forth between Toledo and New York because he believes he has a better chance of finding a woman to love him here. The angle of the article was that despite being worth northwards of $100 million, he hadn't found one as of date of publication. If he's as awkward and unlikeable as an adult as he was as a kid, that's no surprise.
The only Apache security alert I can find is for 1.2.26 - and 1.2.27 has been out for awhile (plus some distro versions of 1.2.26 are patched against it). This alert has been out for weeks too.
There are no alerts I can find against the current version of PHP.
As for the KDE alert, updating Gentoo has already fixed that here. Your mileage may vary.
The Samba alert is for something with no known exploits, and a new version of Samba was released yesterday that fixes it.
Meanwhile tens of millions of people are using MS browsing or e-mail and opening what should be secure systems and networks to intrusion. You tell me where the problem is. I don't think it's in a bias on /. As a matter of national and corporate security, MS should not be run on any system with e-mail or browser access to the public Net.
I moved from Seattle 14 years ago among other things because traffic was getting so bad ... to New York, but hey if I'm going to suffer the pains of a major city, may as well have the rewards of one. Folks who don't know Seattle don't realize that rail will succeed there for the exact same reason the current most successful use of it is Portland, OR: folks in that corner of the country are very environmentally correct (especially the loggers who improve the forests by removing the large combustable objects!). Not to mention the retro-techno-wiz factor in monorail - lots of fans of that out there too.
But what's just plain wrong about the plan is that they're putting the first line not where the population density of transit riders is, but where the rich are (or where the real estate speculators believe more rich can be lured), nearer the water. It will be useless for instance to the U of W with 40,000 mostly-transit-riding students who lean strongly green, and is closer to downtown than Ballard. The line should go there first. "But they're already on transit, why give them more service?" Right, ignore your best customers.
Quite right. I have an e-mail address that's nine years old, so it's in plenty of spammers' lists by now. But it's useful to keep it for both business and personal reasons. Running Vipul's Razor limits me to a few spams a day (out of dozens trying to reach me), which I then report back (a quick Mutt macro) so other folks using Razor will be spared them. Also, if I sign up for anything new I do so with a user id unique to it, like nytimes@mydomain.com (okay, it helps to have a domain). Then if any spam starts coming to that id, I /dev/null it after a Procmail rule that reports it all to Razor.
Server: Apache/1.3.26
Set ServerTokens to "min" in httpd.conf. Why tell anybody anything you have no use in their knowing? Sure, there are other ways they can test your vulnerability. But some of them will look here first, and just go elsewhere if you're not baiting them with what they're looking for.
There is no one else in the world with my full name - and probably only one person (a first cousin) with the same first-last combo. It's really not that hard to give all children unique names, and will help the government track us unambiguously. Name duplication is a needless infringement on the uniqueness of the individual. Let's outlaw it. No more "George Bush"es!
Are WP or Lotus files as attachments now doing the serious viral stuff that Word and Excel files are famous for? For security's sake, an "anything but Word or Excel" policy could serve you very well. Of course, it's a bit harder to find new staff that knows the older programs well - but the staff you will find generally knows them better than the typical new hire trained on Messysoft stuff knows how to use that. And Word in particular is designed for unskilled labor, not expert users.
Thanks for correction about RAID-1. But wouldn't the extra cost only be for the extra drive, presuming the CPU is lightly enough loaded that Linux kernel RAID shouldn't much affect the responsiveness of the system, as is the case with most home office systems? 60-gig 7200 rpm drives are around 80 bucks - or 100 if you don't shop around. So with two of 'em you're at 160-200, less than a single 10 gig drive cost not too long ago. And at costs this cheap, how could they not be intended to be disposable?
The ex-girlfriend (still friend) had her hard drive failing. "Okay, order a WD, I'll come by and replace it." So she did, and the WD was DOA, and we end up out at Staples paying too much for a smaller Maxtor. But even too much is so cheap these days. Given that drive manufacturers are barely holding on in this market, and are all scrimping on quality control, does it even make sense not to install drives in pairs with RAID/0 mirroring? The cost of the second drive is far less than the time involved in even doing regular backups (although these are still a good idea for when to tornado strikes), let alone restoring a system.
Any site that has a tab called MySonic or MyAnythingelse sure won't get MyTime or MyBusiness.
People who don't realize that there are real differences between peoples - say between the English and the French, or between Buddhists and Hindus - haven't seen much of the world. People who have no preferences among peoples - say for the Danish over the Austrians, or the athiests over the born-agains - no more really care about people than does someone who claims to care about music but can't give you any preference between Bach and Nsync, or Beatles and Bacharach really care about music - or someone who claims to care about food but can't give you any preference between Wonder Bread and German Rye really care about food - or someone who claims to care about painting but can't give you any preference between da Vinci and a road sign really care about art.
"Hate" laws are intended to enforce an attitude of "I just don't notice; I have no taste, I don't care, and I'm just going to accept the world the way it's packaged for me - Wonder World!" It's not that there's some "right" preference everyone should have - but if you've no preference at all you just aren't paying attention.
And not paying attention, among human beings, is often worse than hatred. Many a child or lover would rather be hated than ignored. So peoples who are ignored make of themselves objects of hate. The "no hate crimes" mentality leads directly to the Palestinian uprising and the attack on New York. We must pay enough attention to peoples to notice the differences; discussion of these differences must not be taboo. In making it so, "good" people enact evil.
Of course, having read this, Ashcroft's Ashellians will require licenses on mail servers....
If the VCR is being replaced by DVD as ABC said on the news last night, then a "Tivo" becomes the obvious thing to have once there's no more VCR in cluttering your space. Half the point of a VCR - playing rentals - has gone away now that half the households have DVD. The other half is better filled by Tivo than VCR, especially since the DVD has us spoiled for digital "quality."
... or something damn close to it. For an old HP LJIIIp that looks a lot better than an LJII, even though both are 300 dpi. It's because the IIIp uses smaller dots where appropriate at the edges. Many ink jet printers do the same thing. Not sure if anything at 1200 dpi bothers with this trick, but the trick's good enough that the quality difference between the IIIp at 300 dpi and a 600 dpi printer is very hard to see.
E-bay isn't just providing a neutral marketplace, but one in which they (1) take a cut of each sale and (2) have ways for buyers to inform them of fraud. Aren't they exposing themselves to potential federal racketeering charges if they are made aware of frauds as clear as those written up by MSNBC and continue to participate in profiting from those frauds? Knowing participation in fraud is not the same thing as, say, being a landlord for a shop that turns out to accept stolen goods (like on 47th St. in Manhattan, where a bunch of diamond merchants were just busted for that - this being the center of the diamond trade in America). It's more like if the landlord took a cut of each sale, helped steer the customers to the store, while knowing the shopkeepers were fencing. And that would result in a racketeering bust. If the feds won't touch it, can the California AG use RICO? E-bay should be cleaned up or closed down. It's not like no-one else will fill the space.