Point of Correction: Current evidence and resulting theories suggest that the bulk of biological mass on the planet is in the form of bacteria and archaea -- much of which does not rely on the photosynthesis cycle. A significant amount of microbes may dwell in the crust, out of the direct influence of the sun.
So, where does the energy that drives this biomass come from? If it grows by consuming living or dead biological matter, that's not self-sustaining.
In this spirit, the Memory Hole posted an essay by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," excerpted from their book A World Transformed and published in the March 2, 1998, edition of Time magazine. At the time of the Memory Hole posting, Sept. 21, 2002, the essay could still be found on Time's Web site. When the essay disappeared from Time's site sometime afterward, the Memory Hole noted its disappearance in a text box accompanying the essay. The essay doesn't exist in Time's Nexis archives, either.
The suggestion is that Time might cleanse its archives for political reasons. But Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly says, "There's nothing nefarious here." He explains that book publishers often insist on limiting online use of an excerpt to the period the physical magazine is on the newsstand.
Might I suggest that Time would alienate its readership less by replacing the content of the omitted article with a statement that this material was only temporarily there, rather than disappearing the article entirely?
I'm not convinced that there was a nefarious purpose here, but I'm not convinced there wasn't either. All I can say is, good thing Memory Hole is there.
Start a nazi party in Germany or France. Bzzt. Rejected.
Sorry, I don't understand. By starting a Nazi party in Germany or France, you would be causing the entire world to come out in favour of 'political speech restriction'? Why not just start a Nazi party in the U.S.?
Oh, maybe you're referring only to the Fascist parties that became really politically powerful? Maybe you could remind me then, when exactly the hell it was that the French voted in the Nazis. (And no, they didn't actually vote in Jean-Marie Le Pen.)
"Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" is Latin for "Who Watches The Watchers?".
I'd like to say I could've translated that. However, I still get some geek karma for it: I recognized it from having seen it before on the Star Trek TNG episode named, appropriately, "Who Watches The Watchers".
Ad a bit of food for thought, here is a relevant selection from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the term 'memory hole':
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.
I'm not sure I agree with the earlier post that indicated that they were trying to equate Open Source with piracy. If that was their aim, Free Software sounds a lot more sinister...
Sure, but it's much less of an industry buzzword. Anyone who's used a computer would, quite naturally, think they knew what the term "free software" meant when hearing it for the first time: software with zero cost. (Of course there's also the free-libre definition, but you won't bother to look that up if you already think you know what 'free software' means.) Because of this vagueness, it's no good as a buzzword: it's too easily confused with closed-source freeware, free downloads like IE, etc.
The term "open-source" is different. When you hear it for the first time, you won't know what it means: you might guess, but couldn't be sure of it. Thus the RIAA can kindly tell you their idea of what it means.
The truth is that anarchy serves the Internet better.
I'm inclined to agree. Someone, though, has to decide such things as what top-level domains ought to exist, and when VeriSign is abusing its authority.
What I mean is that something like ICANN has got to exist. Given that premise, to whom should it report?
What would it be like if the US could enforce its draconian and restrictive view of intellectual property on 'Net locations overseas? What if the Chinese could compel compliance with their censorship regime beyond their own borders?
Yes, I'm inclined to think that there should be no control over such things at all. And the apparent European proclivity for excessive regulation does make me uneasy about this.
The U.N. is a useless body. In its entire history, it has never accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers.
This is a ridiculous statement: it's essentially equivalent to saying the Great Powers have never jointly accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers, therefore they're powerless.
The U.N. was never intended to be a world government. Could you imagine the Great Powers willingly creating a supernational force to directly rival them?
The effectiveness of the U.N. is not measured in troops, military alliances, etc., but in its programs, in its use as a global forum for communication, etc., etc. As a formal international body it's a hell of a lot better at solving the world's problems than the random, ad hoc networks of treaties and alliances that predated it.
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
I'm not so sure. Now, I'm not sure of what the lawyer was trying to get at there, but I think that if he was just trying to suggest the accused had experience with copyright law, it would have been sufficient to say he'd taken a course in law. If he wanted to be unnecessarily specific, he might have said 'information technology law'.
Instead he said that he "had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on 'open source software licensing.'".
The mention of open-source licences seems too specific and too explicit to be happenstance. As I said, I'm not sure what angle the lawyer is taking here, but my guess is that this is the usual "open source advocates are pirates" angle that we've heard so often before.
Agreed, I'm not sure I trust the bureaucracy of the UN to be able to how to properly run the Internet.
But I don't understand the intense negative reaction to this idea, particularly by the submitter. The UN is not a repressive dictatorship. Sure, some of its members are, but I highly doubt that a UN-controlled Internet administrative body would have been to stupidly designed that it would impose restrictions on the 'Net just because some UN member applied pressure.
In any case, why can we trust the U.S. government to take a hands-off role towards the Internet any more than we can trust the UN?
Maybe, but in general, CEO's have invested a lot of time and money into their company, and taken a lot of risks to reap the rewards. They are generally highly educated and very savvy in the business world.
I would submit that even the most hard-working CEO doesn't deserve to make, say, 10,000 times more than the average gross annual income. And a fair number do.
Prison-rape is used as a deterrent in anti-drunk driving commercials in Ontario, Canada.
Interesting. I've never seen these commercials, and I've lived here in Ontario my entire life.
While tolerating or encouraging prison-rape would be cruel punishment in an American jail, and unconstitutional (even though obtaining justice in this case might be practically difficult), it is accepted as matter-of-fact in Canadian jails.
Can you provide evidence for this? I imagine the attitude towards prison rape is the same in Ontario as in most of the U.S.: it is illegal, something is done about it when enough of a stink is raised, but most people would admit it probably goes on anyway.
I'm not saying this is acceptable, but I've not seen any reason to believe Ontario's system is any more unacceptable than North America generally.
Americans slaughter foreigners. We slaughter our own and boast of being more civilized. Bullshit.
Who is "we"? Ontarians? Canadians? And who are we "slaughtering"? Prison rape is bad, but it's a far thing from murder or indiscriminate warfare.
Man, that hurts to think about. How about those scenes of the loving wookie family.. in their tree, making gurgling noises and pointing at stuff... That was about as demoralizing as watching an entire season of the Tele-tubbies while sober.
Do you mean "loving Ewok family"? I didn't think the Wookies lived in trees.
This is why monolithic kernals, liek the OpenBSD kernel are bettar. Since Theo dee Raddt is the only one who can edit the code, he is the only one that can add or remove back doors and exploits, so this kind of thing would not happen
Uh, a 'monolithic kernel' is a kernel that handles a lot of stuff, not a kernel developed by only one person.
In any case, this code was added after the server hosting it was hacked. And no development model will save you from insertion of malicious code if you can't rely on the security of your host machines.
The problem with that poem is that Hitler was a Socialist. Nazism was an antisemitice form of National Socialism.
There are definite similarities between Socialism and Fascism; it is no surprise that Mussolini was a Communist before he was a Fascist.
Both favoured nationalization of industry and heavy focus on industrialization and modern machinery.
But there is a difference between these ideas, one that was apparent to all the Europeans and Americans who flocked to either of the two sides in the Spanish Civil War.
This is not to say these ideological differences were well-reflected in reality. Stalin's Russia began, after a few years, to look a lot more Fascist than Socialist.
The most fundamental ideological difference between Socialism and Fascism (and National Socialism is a form of Fascism) is this: a truly Socialist future has universal equality, while a Fascist future does not.
The most telling evidence, though, is the fearful lack of coverage of foreign events by the mainstream American networks, excepting of course the Middle East. I was astounded to see the difference between regular cable CNN, and CNN International, which has reasonably decent coverage of stuff in Africa, Asia, etc. And I don't accept the argument that CNN is simply showing what its domestic audience wants to see, and has no free will in the matter.
I'm not sure if the web content fully reflects the difference in televised content, but compare CNN US with CNN International.
Yup...I see CBS, NBC, ABC...the major network news, and CNN on cable as all having from a slight to major liberal slant.
Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but I find this belief in liberal slant in mainstream U.S. media as incomprehensible to me as the arguments of the gun lobby. (I'm not equating the two, by the way.)
I read or watch CNN fairly often, and there seems to be an undertone to all the coverage that I would hardly call liberal. For instance, while Fox News might directly attack a Democrat for suggesting tax cuts are a bad idea, CNN will simply quote him, while still subtly suggesting that most Americans would want the tax cut.
The most telling evidence, though, is the fearful lack of coverage of foreign events by the mainstream American networks, excepting of course the Middle East. I was astounded to see the difference between regular cable CNN, and CNN International, which has reasonably decent coverage of stuff in Africa, Asia, etc. And I don't accept the argument that CNN is simply showing what its domestic audience wants to see, and has no free will in the matter.
And both of those statements are true, aren't they?
So far as I know, yes. I would not say that any of the White House articles in question had any quotes from authorities who (in jjn1056's words) "were making claims that Saddam was behind 9/11".
However, I would suggest that these same authorities were, in their statements, trying to make the public believe, through carefully-worded suggestions, that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Other posters have claimed it's more than one. I haven't checked, so I don't know. However, even if it is just infocus/iraq, that's still a hell of a lot.
That subdirectory seems to contain all or most of the transcripts of Ari Fleischer's and Bush's interviews and press conferences leading up to the war and after. An example is this:
Slashdot Mirror
Point of Correction: Current evidence and resulting theories suggest that the bulk of biological mass on the planet is in the form of bacteria and archaea -- much of which does not rely on the photosynthesis cycle. A significant amount of microbes may dwell in the crust, out of the direct influence of the sun.
So, where does the energy that drives this biomass come from? If it grows by consuming living or dead biological matter, that's not self-sustaining.
It all comes back to the Sun eventually.
From Declan's link:
In this spirit, the Memory Hole posted an essay by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft titled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam," excerpted from their book A World Transformed and published in the March 2, 1998, edition of Time magazine. At the time of the Memory Hole posting, Sept. 21, 2002, the essay could still be found on Time's Web site. When the essay disappeared from Time's site sometime afterward, the Memory Hole noted its disappearance in a text box accompanying the essay. The essay doesn't exist in Time's Nexis archives, either.
The suggestion is that Time might cleanse its archives for political reasons. But Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly says, "There's nothing nefarious here." He explains that book publishers often insist on limiting online use of an excerpt to the period the physical magazine is on the newsstand.
Might I suggest that Time would alienate its readership less by replacing the content of the omitted article with a statement that this material was only temporarily there, rather than disappearing the article entirely?
I'm not convinced that there was a nefarious purpose here, but I'm not convinced there wasn't either. All I can say is, good thing Memory Hole is there.
Start a nazi party in Germany or France.
Bzzt. Rejected.
Sorry, I don't understand. By starting a Nazi party in Germany or France, you would be causing the entire world to come out in favour of 'political speech restriction'? Why not just start a Nazi party in the U.S.?
Oh, maybe you're referring only to the Fascist parties that became really politically powerful? Maybe you could remind me then, when exactly the hell it was that the French voted in the Nazis. (And no, they didn't actually vote in Jean-Marie Le Pen.)
Sure wish i knew mexican :T
"Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" is Latin for "Who Watches The Watchers?".
I'd like to say I could've translated that. However, I still get some geek karma for it: I recognized it from having seen it before on the Star Trek TNG episode named, appropriately, "Who Watches The Watchers".
Ad a bit of food for thought, here is a relevant selection from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the term 'memory hole':
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.
Guess what the first link is when you google for "Mozilla Public License"?
Well, sure I could read it, but I was hoping someone who already had could offer a simple 'yes' or 'no' and save me the bother.
I'm not sure I agree with the earlier post that indicated that they were trying to equate Open Source with piracy. If that was their aim, Free Software sounds a lot more sinister...
Sure, but it's much less of an industry buzzword. Anyone who's used a computer would, quite naturally, think they knew what the term "free software" meant when hearing it for the first time: software with zero cost. (Of course there's also the free-libre definition, but you won't bother to look that up if you already think you know what 'free software' means.) Because of this vagueness, it's no good as a buzzword: it's too easily confused with closed-source freeware, free downloads like IE, etc.
The term "open-source" is different. When you hear it for the first time, you won't know what it means: you might guess, but couldn't be sure of it. Thus the RIAA can kindly tell you their idea of what it means.
The truth is that anarchy serves the Internet better.
I'm inclined to agree. Someone, though, has to decide such things as what top-level domains ought to exist, and when VeriSign is abusing its authority.
What I mean is that something like ICANN has got to exist. Given that premise, to whom should it report?
What would it be like if the US could enforce its draconian and restrictive view of intellectual property on 'Net locations overseas? What if the Chinese could compel compliance with their censorship regime beyond their own borders?
Yes, I'm inclined to think that there should be no control over such things at all. And the apparent European proclivity for excessive regulation does make me uneasy about this.
The U.N. is a useless body. In its entire history, it has never accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers.
This is a ridiculous statement: it's essentially equivalent to saying the Great Powers have never jointly accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers, therefore they're powerless.
The U.N. was never intended to be a world government. Could you imagine the Great Powers willingly creating a supernational force to directly rival them?
The effectiveness of the U.N. is not measured in troops, military alliances, etc., but in its programs, in its use as a global forum for communication, etc., etc. As a formal international body it's a hell of a lot better at solving the world's problems than the random, ad hoc networks of treaties and alliances that predated it.
No, but it is not a representative democracy.
Remember, this is the Internet: we're talking about the whole world here.
Whether or not the U.N. is a representative democracy, the United States certainly isn't, simply because it only represents Americans.
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
I'm not so sure. Now, I'm not sure of what the lawyer was trying to get at there, but I think that if he was just trying to suggest the accused had experience with copyright law, it would have been sufficient to say he'd taken a course in law. If he wanted to be unnecessarily specific, he might have said 'information technology law'.
Instead he said that he "had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on 'open source software licensing.'".
The mention of open-source licences seems too specific and too explicit to be happenstance. As I said, I'm not sure what angle the lawyer is taking here, but my guess is that this is the usual "open source advocates are pirates" angle that we've heard so often before.
No, it's apparently still in business.
Hell, Firebird's open-source, so they can just copy and paste the pop-up blocking code...
Is the Mozilla Public License anything like the GPL, in the sense of requiring you to open the source of any code that's derived from MPL'ed code?
In the other, we have the rest of the world: protector of political speech restriction...
Perhaps you could be so good as to remind me when exactly we of the rest of the world came out in favour of 'political speech restriction'?
Wasn't it Ari Fleischer who suggested that "Americans should watch what they say"?
Agreed, I'm not sure I trust the bureaucracy of the UN to be able to how to properly run the Internet.
But I don't understand the intense negative reaction to this idea, particularly by the submitter. The UN is not a repressive dictatorship. Sure, some of its members are, but I highly doubt that a UN-controlled Internet administrative body would have been to stupidly designed that it would impose restrictions on the 'Net just because some UN member applied pressure.
In any case, why can we trust the U.S. government to take a hands-off role towards the Internet any more than we can trust the UN?
Maybe, but in general, CEO's have invested a lot of time and money into their company, and taken a lot of risks to reap the rewards. They are generally highly educated and very savvy in the business world.
I would submit that even the most hard-working CEO doesn't deserve to make, say, 10,000 times more than the average gross annual income. And a fair number do.
Prison-rape is used as a deterrent in anti-drunk driving commercials in Ontario, Canada.
Interesting. I've never seen these commercials, and I've lived here in Ontario my entire life.
While tolerating or encouraging prison-rape would be cruel punishment in an American jail, and unconstitutional (even though obtaining justice in this case might be practically difficult), it is accepted as matter-of-fact in Canadian jails.
Can you provide evidence for this? I imagine the attitude towards prison rape is the same in Ontario as in most of the U.S.: it is illegal, something is done about it when enough of a stink is raised, but most people would admit it probably goes on anyway.
I'm not saying this is acceptable, but I've not seen any reason to believe Ontario's system is any more unacceptable than North America generally.
Americans slaughter foreigners. We slaughter our own and boast of being more civilized. Bullshit.
Who is "we"? Ontarians? Canadians? And who are we "slaughtering"? Prison rape is bad, but it's a far thing from murder or indiscriminate warfare.
Man, that hurts to think about. How about those scenes of the loving wookie family.. in their tree, making gurgling noises and pointing at stuff... That was about as demoralizing as watching an entire season of the Tele-tubbies while sober.
Do you mean "loving Ewok family"? I didn't think the Wookies lived in trees.
This is why monolithic kernals, liek the OpenBSD kernel are bettar. Since Theo dee Raddt is the only one who can edit the code, he is the only one that can add or remove back doors and exploits, so this kind of thing would not happen
Uh, a 'monolithic kernel' is a kernel that handles a lot of stuff, not a kernel developed by only one person.
In any case, this code was added after the server hosting it was hacked. And no development model will save you from insertion of malicious code if you can't rely on the security of your host machines.
The problem with that poem is that Hitler was a Socialist. Nazism was an antisemitice form of National Socialism.
There are definite similarities between Socialism and Fascism; it is no surprise that Mussolini was a Communist before he was a Fascist.
Both favoured nationalization of industry and heavy focus on industrialization and modern machinery.
But there is a difference between these ideas, one that was apparent to all the Europeans and Americans who flocked to either of the two sides in the Spanish Civil War.
This is not to say these ideological differences were well-reflected in reality. Stalin's Russia began, after a few years, to look a lot more Fascist than Socialist.
The most fundamental ideological difference between Socialism and Fascism (and National Socialism is a form of Fascism) is this: a truly Socialist future has universal equality, while a Fascist future does not.
The most telling evidence, though, is the fearful lack of coverage of foreign events by the mainstream American networks, excepting of course the Middle East. I was astounded to see the difference between regular cable CNN, and CNN International, which has reasonably decent coverage of stuff in Africa, Asia, etc. And I don't accept the argument that CNN is simply showing what its domestic audience wants to see, and has no free will in the matter.
I'm not sure if the web content fully reflects the difference in televised content, but compare CNN US with CNN International.
By and large, the heads of our news organizations are very definitely liberal.
I guess you're not including Rupert Murdoch, eh?
Can you give an example of a CEO who is definitely liberal? Like Richard Parsons or Steve Case?
Yup...I see CBS, NBC, ABC...the major network news, and CNN on cable as all having from a slight to major liberal slant.
Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but I find this belief in liberal slant in mainstream U.S. media as incomprehensible to me as the arguments of the gun lobby. (I'm not equating the two, by the way.)
I read or watch CNN fairly often, and there seems to be an undertone to all the coverage that I would hardly call liberal. For instance, while Fox News might directly attack a Democrat for suggesting tax cuts are a bad idea, CNN will simply quote him, while still subtly suggesting that most Americans would want the tax cut.
The most telling evidence, though, is the fearful lack of coverage of foreign events by the mainstream American networks, excepting of course the Middle East. I was astounded to see the difference between regular cable CNN, and CNN International, which has reasonably decent coverage of stuff in Africa, Asia, etc. And I don't accept the argument that CNN is simply showing what its domestic audience wants to see, and has no free will in the matter.
And both of those statements are true, aren't they?
So far as I know, yes. I would not say that any of the White House articles in question had any quotes from authorities who (in jjn1056's words) "were making claims that Saddam was behind 9/11".
However, I would suggest that these same authorities were, in their statements, trying to make the public believe, through carefully-worded suggestions, that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Other posters have claimed it's more than one. I haven't checked, so I don't know. However, even if it is just infocus/iraq, that's still a hell of a lot.
e pt26.html
That subdirectory seems to contain all or most of the transcripts of Ari Fleischer's and Bush's interviews and press conferences leading up to the war and after. An example is this:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/excerpts_s