Believe me. The return address on penis enlargement stuff is fake (just like their product claims). The web links probably work, though. Anyone selling shady stuff via email is not going to put a real return address on it. They'll spend the whole day wading through angry messages from people fed up with spam, bounce messages, and hundreds of other non-revenue-generating emails. While not all spam headers are faked, the vast majority are.
No. They won't remove you. Ever. It is far easier to simply continue sending bad email than it is to clean mailing lists.
Please don't send bouncebacks for mail you are refusing. Just forward the email to/dev/null. When you send a bounce, 99% of the time it's going to be returned to a forged email address and all you've done is make some other innocent person the victim along with yourself (and double the amount of traffic related to a single spam message).
I own a handful of domain names and have default addresses set to feed into a single mbox. I frequently have days where I get more bounce messages than actual spam. I understand it when a spammer sends email to a non-existant box and the mail server simply bounces it for that reason, but I absolutely hate getting rejection notices from some twit's mail server that say it was rejected for violating UCE mail policy or some such thing.
I will also say that the latest version of Evolution using SpamAssassin has reduced the amount of spam in my inbox to a trickle.
Thank you. Checking out Hurd is now on my to-do list.
Interesting about the mounting. Better to have the permissions on the resource itself rather than on a combination of the resource and the mount point.
Do you know if I can run any or even most of my regularly scheduled programming on Hurd? I mean: will Ruby, x.org's X11, GNOME, FireFox, apache, emacs, etc, compile and run as expected?
As to non-root users can effectively mount filesystems if they have all the permissions needed, how is that different than GNU/Linux, where I can use the/etc/fstab entries for a/dev/* devices or NFS exported filesystem to allow users to mount/unmount to predetermined mount points at will?
Yeah, so if the ad comes in the form of a 50mb MPG file, you would make sure the whole thing downloaded and that you watched the whole thing, just because it was linked in a page they already sent you? What if they said, "oh, by the way, you owe us 50 cents for reading that?" What if the page request is for a discussion on some silly news article, but all the ads are for online men's magazines? Don't you have some right to block ads that are offensive? What about pop-ups, pop-unders?
If my looking at ads is the price of the page, then in order for it to be "stealing" they have to negotiate the particulars of that transaction before the transaction happens. Not after. That's the way Salon (among others) does it. Bottom line is: it's my computer. You don't get to decide that I have to display the file in any certain way, or that I have to download other files. If you want me to pay for the site, either ask me for money or make ad viewing a precondition of sending me the article or resource.
By not viewing the ads, you're stealing the content. It's that simple.
And that is BS. If their server responds to an HTTP GET request without checking for some precondition that indicates that I've viewed the ads, then they are giving away the content. If they want to charge me for the content directly, they are perfectly capable of doing that. In the world of advertising supported media there never is and never has been any obligation (explicit or implicit) on the part of the viewer/reader/websurfer to actually watch, read, or view the ads. The WWW is a bit different than TV or print, in that the client has more control over display, but there are simple techniques that web developers can use to force the viewing of one page or page element before another is delivered.
You jest, but I had to actually explain the meaning of "BTW" in a teleconference today (and not because I'd used the acronym).:)
As to the idea that computers hurt learning: bullshit. They facilitate learning. They might not be great for some kids' grades, but grades ain't learning.
Definitely. But one does need a working business plan and the Free tools do need to be reasonably competitive if one is to actually survive as a business. I'm just waiting for a camera that runs Linux.:)
Maybe. But Free Software is more than just a "right tool for the job" decision, there could be other considerations. So there is some argument for using Free Software. Obviously it is foolish to target a profession in which all the digital tools are highly proprietary and then hope to be competitive using Free Software.
As someone who has been heavy into photography since childhood, I would no more like to see my digital darkroom owned and controlled by a handful of corporations than I'd like to see my film cameras limited to only using one brand of film, or even having to bring the camera to the shop to get the film out and prints made. From that perspective, I would cheer wildly for anyone trying to do digital imaging work on Linux.
Anyway... I don't think one can expect to get high quality scans off a $200 (or even $400) scanner with a film attachment, which is what the Asker seems to want to do. I have to wonder if that same scanner is known to work much better under Windows and the issue is drivers, or if the problem is just that the scanner is just cheap. I've always gotten my film scanned (before the advent of 4 megapixel digital cameras) by pros with high-end film scanners. This means my time investment is minimal and the results are likely to be better than anything I can manage at home. This is available for about 50 cents a slide. Which would be expensive for the Asker to do his "thousands," but the time savings and quality make up for it, imho.
which is why he gets hit by rabid and disproportionate amounts of criticism by dribbling right-wing trolls much like yourself.
You fucking moron. I'm farther to the left than 99% of the population-- have been for years and years. You apparently know jackshit about the situation and are doing more than your fair share of dribbling yourself. However, if you're what passes for the "left" these days, I might consider voting for right wingers just to piss you idiots off.
better than every single other Hollywood director that you conspicuously didn't criticise.
Conspicuously didn't my ass, you loser. I've been criticizing Hollywood roundly for quite some time now. But I don't expect you to stop and gather any facts in your zeal to be a dipshit to me. Even my.sig on Slashdot is a link to an anti-intellectual-property article.
Besides, if you're going to criticise him for non 'open-source'-ness get it right. The major way he breaks that 'open source' thing is by his non-commercial restriction.
Were you dropped on your head as a baby? I wasn't criticizing Michael Moore for anything of the sort. I was criticizing your comparison. And then you've given another example of how the comparison isn't quite apt. Thank you for that.
As it is, this is the one thing I've seen Mikey Moore do that I consider even remotely admirable. Maybe if he'd keep that nobility in mind when he's thinking about taking certain lesbians to task (I bet you don't even know what I'm talking about here though), I'd find him a bit more palatable.
So you expect, as a non-paying customer, Michael Moore to go out and waste his own money and/or time to bring you a top-quality movie rip of his film, do you?
It's the only way I'll ever see one of his films. Mikey Moore is to the world of politics what crapflooding trolls are to Slashdot discussions. What's curious is that a lot of people seem to want to pay Moore for his "services" and that he's given so much credit by the so-called "left".
So Mikey Moore won't send the IP "gestapo" around to me if I do copy his film? So what? If you copy this post all over Slashdot and Usenet and IRC and post it to your Blog, I won't sue you in court myself.... does that make my message any more worthwhile?
As to the "open source way"... no. You've got it wrong. If Mikey Moore's movie were open source he would be releasing a decent copy of the film in some machine-readable format. Just like open source developers give users the source code to the software. What you describe is not "open source", it's "freeware".
The parent post I responded to seemed to indicate that installing a filter was side stepping parenting by putting the responsibility on software.
I wasn't trying to imply that so much as saying that I think the filters are ineffective tools for truly achieving the goals desired. Your approach is more of what I expect thinking parents to do. That way the children are exposed to the thinking behind the values and can actually internalize those values more readily, rather than simply obeying the rules because mommy and daddy said so. That works for toddlers, but it's not a successful long-term approach.
How can you possibly deny that providing free entertainment in the form of hundred-million-dollar blockbusters would imply a cost to the producers?
You're arguing it in a way that seems to say the copiers expect to be able to compel these movies to be made and then shared-- but that's not an argument the copiers are actually making. What's really happening is that the movies are already made (and significant revenues being earned by the producers) and then some people are also copying the movies. The argument in defense of copying is not that copiers can compel the making of movies, but that movie makers have no right to prevent copying once the movie is distributed.
Deliberate confusion... what I meant to say, and perhaps said poorly, was that you are deliberately attempting to create confusion in the minds of others, not that you seem confused yourself.
For the record, I believe that entering a movie theater to record the movie is a contract violation and that those who do this sort of thing should be subject to sanctions of some sort. The movie theater is private property and theater owners have a right to restrict your conduct while you are on their property and/or charge you a fee for access-- you are free to reject these conditions and avoid the theater, after all.
In this case, it is clear that there was a prohibition on using camcorders to record the film being shown. The theater has as much right to prohibit this as I do to tell guests in my home not to take pictures of my bedroom or my messy kitchen.
So one can make a case against the kid with the camcorder without pretending that the movie itself constitutes some sort of "intellectual property" and that therefore copyright, as it exists, is fair and appropriate.
It's still the "many questions" fallacy. It assumes that free entertainment implies a cost to the producers. It is really two questions.
So you admit that "steal" is a deliberate at confusion on your part? Intentional or not it works to invalidate your argument because it is an abuse of the language. You might consider alternatives, since the act of "making unauthorized duplications" is quite a bit different from the act of "stealing" copies of a film. I certainly agree that it is wrong for you to come into my house and steal my personal photo albums, but that doesn't mean I also agree that it is wrong for you to download the photos shown on my web site and make copies of them.
The problem with the punishments against distribution are also that they conflate acts done for fun and acts done for explicit monetary gain. A kid cam-copying this movie and uploading it to the world is a much different act than a group which produces look-alike DVDs and sells them as if they were the real thing, but magically cheaper. To disapprove of commercial fraud (i.e. bootlegging) is not to necessarily disapprove of low-quality copy sharing.
Only if you agree that children don't acquire some rights to control their own reading habits at some point. Seems to me the best filter is active parental involvement. What kid wants to try and sneak a peek at something when the folks are sitting right there with her?:)
Is it your god-given right to receive free entertainment, at the cost of the filmmakers?
Separate the two questions and we can have a reasonable discussion. Whether works of art should be free is a different question from whether one has a right to compel others to create and distribute those works. As it is you are committing the logical fallacy "many questions", it seems. (Those more familiar with analyzing arguments for fallacious reasoning, please correct my analysis.)
don't you think there's a good reason for this law to exist: to deter people who would steal copies of the filmmakers' films?
Another logical fallacy: vagueness of language. Here you are using the word "steal" when you really mean "make", I believe. The copies are not being stolen. No one is sneaking into the projector booth and running off with reels of film (although that does happen, that's not-- I assume-- really what you mean here). The copies are being made. And it's a very important distinction. In the case of "stolen" a single piece of real property is being taken from someone. In the case of "copied" raw materials legitimately belonging to the copier are being used to reproduce another work.
won't you recognize that every CAM-copy distributed on the internet is no better than sneaking in the back door of the theater? If these punks had been caught doing that, shouldn't they be subject to arrest under the law?
No, I won't. Further it seems to me that in the drive to eliminate copying, the punishments for copying have been made more severe than if one actually stole the money or shoplifted "legitimate" copies of the movie directly, especially when one considers how many of one's own resources one must devote to the copying process.
I know you're joking, but I see label "graffiti" all the time-- usually using "found" labels, like the ones you get at the Post Office or FedEx office. After taking a few labels from the supply, the artist (and I recognize that to some I'm using the term loosely) draws his mini-piece of graffiti on the label, which is then applied to a surface in the same manner as other graffiti and tags. These sorts of labels and stickers are usually a lot more interesting than regular tagging, and more compact than large wall pieces of graffiti-- so they can be put in places where larger graffiti wouldn't fit. It wouldn't surprise me to see some enterprising young artist adapt glabel to this use, perhaps even taking advantage of the barcoding function to encode subversive messages.:)
Nonpublic data? Since when is your name, address, previous name, previous address, and birthdate not public data? And SSN pretty much might as well be public data given how many forms and documents it seems to be requested or required on. Anyway, everything but SSN on this list is stuff I can get from companies like ussearch.com or peoplesearch.com. And in some areas, there is a lot more than this available: marriage/divorce, property ownership, certain court judgements, etc.
Are they going to analyze the other candidate's education plans? I'd say the Libertarian candidate, Michael Badnarik, and the Green candidate (whose name I don't know, but I believe has officially been nominated), deserve similar coverage at this point... especially since the Democrats haven't even officially nominated Kerry for dog-catcher, let alone President. The media, as much by what they will choose to not to cover, as much as by what they will cover, are effectively acting as PR wings for the politicians... and right now, I'm guessing that if you'd like to know about Kerry's so-called plan, one could read it on his web site or request some PR fluff pieces from the campaign.
And don't worry. I'm sure that in the fall, we'll get all the analysis of both the Kerry and Bush campaigns we can stand.
Good god, man. Fox News isn't that bad, and CNN isn't that great (and I read CNN every day as my primary source of news). From your post it sounds like you'd be more comfortable with something like "The Nation"-- especially if you think Kerry has an education plan and that it's the news media's job to publicize his campaign for free in the form of "news".
Exactly. Mikey Moore is a first order twit. So is the president, for that matter. I want to see this movie about as much as I want my eyeballs poked with a hot iron rod. Someone needs to take this film, splice it together with "The Passion" and some cheesy 50s stag film. Then maybe overlay the audio with some death metal, punk rock, and 60s soap commericals. THEN, and only then, will I be interested in watching this mess.
By my reasoning, weather services are, and can be, provided by private businesses. The military, however, does things that are otherwise illegal-- bombing cities, killing people, taking prisoners, etc etc. Providing weather services is not illegal as far as I know.
In any case, I never said that this information should not be free (as in beer AND speech). I firmly believe that any time the taxpayers pay for information that we all have a right to that information. What I don't believe is that taxpayers should necessarily be paying for all this-- in fact, the more we pay for it, the more it appears we are subsidizing businesses, even before they might pass this proposed "partnerships" thing.
You need a single organization for severe weather coverage to ensure public safety.
Prove it. I don't think the public is going to be much or less safe just because they have a single agency doing this. A single agency represents a single point of failure, and in this case what recourse does the public even have if the NOAA screws up? If there are multiple agencies, there is nothing to prevent the government from contracting the weather services it does need out to one of them.
As to conflicting warnings, I assume that most of the warnings would be the same type of stuff and that the public could make decisions based on a consensus model or majority of warnings thing. If all the major weather services are predicting dangerous weather, that seems like a better bet than if it's one small service being operated by boy scouts working on their weather merit badge.
More likely I would think that if I have health or homeowners insurance or other policies that weather is likely to affect, that the insurance company would have a preferred weather service that they would require me to use when it comes to things like whether or not to board up my windows and vacate the area.
Since we are paying for this service, why should access to the data be limited?
Good question-- but one which argues against a point I never made and have no intention of attempting defend.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me. The return address on penis enlargement stuff is fake (just like their product claims). The web links probably work, though. Anyone selling shady stuff via email is not going to put a real return address on it. They'll spend the whole day wading through angry messages from people fed up with spam, bounce messages, and hundreds of other non-revenue-generating emails. While not all spam headers are faked, the vast majority are.
No. They won't remove you. Ever. It is far easier to simply continue sending bad email than it is to clean mailing lists.
/dev/null. When you send a bounce, 99% of the time it's going to be returned to a forged email address and all you've done is make some other innocent person the victim along with yourself (and double the amount of traffic related to a single spam message).
Please don't send bouncebacks for mail you are refusing. Just forward the email to
I own a handful of domain names and have default addresses set to feed into a single mbox. I frequently have days where I get more bounce messages than actual spam. I understand it when a spammer sends email to a non-existant box and the mail server simply bounces it for that reason, but I absolutely hate getting rejection notices from some twit's mail server that say it was rejected for violating UCE mail policy or some such thing.
I will also say that the latest version of Evolution using SpamAssassin has reduced the amount of spam in my inbox to a trickle.
Thank you. Checking out Hurd is now on my to-do list.
Interesting about the mounting. Better to have the permissions on the resource itself rather than on a combination of the resource and the mount point.
Do you know if I can run any or even most of my regularly scheduled programming on Hurd? I mean: will Ruby, x.org's X11, GNOME, FireFox, apache, emacs, etc, compile and run as expected?
/etc/fstab entries for a /dev/* devices or NFS exported filesystem to allow users to mount/unmount to predetermined mount points at will?
As to non-root users can effectively mount filesystems if they have all the permissions needed, how is that different than GNU/Linux, where I can use the
Yeah, so if the ad comes in the form of a 50mb MPG file, you would make sure the whole thing downloaded and that you watched the whole thing, just because it was linked in a page they already sent you? What if they said, "oh, by the way, you owe us 50 cents for reading that?" What if the page request is for a discussion on some silly news article, but all the ads are for online men's magazines? Don't you have some right to block ads that are offensive? What about pop-ups, pop-unders?
If my looking at ads is the price of the page, then in order for it to be "stealing" they have to negotiate the particulars of that transaction before the transaction happens. Not after. That's the way Salon (among others) does it. Bottom line is: it's my computer. You don't get to decide that I have to display the file in any certain way, or that I have to download other files. If you want me to pay for the site, either ask me for money or make ad viewing a precondition of sending me the article or resource.
Also may need to change the endianness of your I/O stream.
By not viewing the ads, you're stealing the content. It's that simple.
And that is BS. If their server responds to an HTTP GET request without checking for some precondition that indicates that I've viewed the ads, then they are giving away the content. If they want to charge me for the content directly, they are perfectly capable of doing that. In the world of advertising supported media there never is and never has been any obligation (explicit or implicit) on the part of the viewer/reader/websurfer to actually watch, read, or view the ads. The WWW is a bit different than TV or print, in that the client has more control over display, but there are simple techniques that web developers can use to force the viewing of one page or page element before another is delivered.
You jest, but I had to actually explain the meaning of "BTW" in a teleconference today (and not because I'd used the acronym). :)
As to the idea that computers hurt learning: bullshit. They facilitate learning. They might not be great for some kids' grades, but grades ain't learning.
Definitely. But one does need a working business plan and the Free tools do need to be reasonably competitive if one is to actually survive as a business. I'm just waiting for a camera that runs Linux. :)
Maybe. But Free Software is more than just a "right tool for the job" decision, there could be other considerations. So there is some argument for using Free Software. Obviously it is foolish to target a profession in which all the digital tools are highly proprietary and then hope to be competitive using Free Software.
As someone who has been heavy into photography since childhood, I would no more like to see my digital darkroom owned and controlled by a handful of corporations than I'd like to see my film cameras limited to only using one brand of film, or even having to bring the camera to the shop to get the film out and prints made. From that perspective, I would cheer wildly for anyone trying to do digital imaging work on Linux.
Anyway... I don't think one can expect to get high quality scans off a $200 (or even $400) scanner with a film attachment, which is what the Asker seems to want to do. I have to wonder if that same scanner is known to work much better under Windows and the issue is drivers, or if the problem is just that the scanner is just cheap. I've always gotten my film scanned (before the advent of 4 megapixel digital cameras) by pros with high-end film scanners. This means my time investment is minimal and the results are likely to be better than anything I can manage at home. This is available for about 50 cents a slide. Which would be expensive for the Asker to do his "thousands," but the time savings and quality make up for it, imho.
which is why he gets hit by rabid and disproportionate amounts of criticism by dribbling right-wing trolls much like yourself.
.sig on Slashdot is a link to an anti-intellectual-property article.
You fucking moron. I'm farther to the left than 99% of the population-- have been for years and years. You apparently know jackshit about the situation and are doing more than your fair share of dribbling yourself. However, if you're what passes for the "left" these days, I might consider voting for right wingers just to piss you idiots off.
better than every single other Hollywood director that you conspicuously didn't criticise.
Conspicuously didn't my ass, you loser. I've been criticizing Hollywood roundly for quite some time now. But I don't expect you to stop and gather any facts in your zeal to be a dipshit to me. Even my
Besides, if you're going to criticise him for non 'open-source'-ness get it right. The major way he breaks that 'open source' thing is by his non-commercial restriction.
Were you dropped on your head as a baby? I wasn't criticizing Michael Moore for anything of the sort. I was criticizing your comparison. And then you've given another example of how the comparison isn't quite apt. Thank you for that.
As it is, this is the one thing I've seen Mikey Moore do that I consider even remotely admirable. Maybe if he'd keep that nobility in mind when he's thinking about taking certain lesbians to task (I bet you don't even know what I'm talking about here though), I'd find him a bit more palatable.
I saw "Columbine". That was enough for me. If "9/11" is even close, I'm glad to give it a miss.
But thanks for the patronizing bullshit. Let me guess, you're Kerry voter?
So you expect, as a non-paying customer, Michael Moore to go out and waste his own money and/or time to bring you a top-quality movie rip of his film, do you?
It's the only way I'll ever see one of his films. Mikey Moore is to the world of politics what crapflooding trolls are to Slashdot discussions. What's curious is that a lot of people seem to want to pay Moore for his "services" and that he's given so much credit by the so-called "left".
So Mikey Moore won't send the IP "gestapo" around to me if I do copy his film? So what? If you copy this post all over Slashdot and Usenet and IRC and post it to your Blog, I won't sue you in court myself.... does that make my message any more worthwhile?
As to the "open source way"... no. You've got it wrong. If Mikey Moore's movie were open source he would be releasing a decent copy of the film in some machine-readable format. Just like open source developers give users the source code to the software. What you describe is not "open source", it's "freeware".
The parent post I responded to seemed to indicate that installing a filter was side stepping parenting by putting the responsibility on software.
I wasn't trying to imply that so much as saying that I think the filters are ineffective tools for truly achieving the goals desired. Your approach is more of what I expect thinking parents to do. That way the children are exposed to the thinking behind the values and can actually internalize those values more readily, rather than simply obeying the rules because mommy and daddy said so. That works for toddlers, but it's not a successful long-term approach.
How can you possibly deny that providing free entertainment in the form of hundred-million-dollar blockbusters would imply a cost to the producers?
You're arguing it in a way that seems to say the copiers expect to be able to compel these movies to be made and then shared-- but that's not an argument the copiers are actually making. What's really happening is that the movies are already made (and significant revenues being earned by the producers) and then some people are also copying the movies. The argument in defense of copying is not that copiers can compel the making of movies, but that movie makers have no right to prevent copying once the movie is distributed.
Deliberate confusion... what I meant to say, and perhaps said poorly, was that you are deliberately attempting to create confusion in the minds of others, not that you seem confused yourself.
For the record, I believe that entering a movie theater to record the movie is a contract violation and that those who do this sort of thing should be subject to sanctions of some sort. The movie theater is private property and theater owners have a right to restrict your conduct while you are on their property and/or charge you a fee for access-- you are free to reject these conditions and avoid the theater, after all.
In this case, it is clear that there was a prohibition on using camcorders to record the film being shown. The theater has as much right to prohibit this as I do to tell guests in my home not to take pictures of my bedroom or my messy kitchen.
So one can make a case against the kid with the camcorder without pretending that the movie itself constitutes some sort of "intellectual property" and that therefore copyright, as it exists, is fair and appropriate.
It's still the "many questions" fallacy. It assumes that free entertainment implies a cost to the producers. It is really two questions.
So you admit that "steal" is a deliberate at confusion on your part? Intentional or not it works to invalidate your argument because it is an abuse of the language. You might consider alternatives, since the act of "making unauthorized duplications" is quite a bit different from the act of "stealing" copies of a film. I certainly agree that it is wrong for you to come into my house and steal my personal photo albums, but that doesn't mean I also agree that it is wrong for you to download the photos shown on my web site and make copies of them.
The problem with the punishments against distribution are also that they conflate acts done for fun and acts done for explicit monetary gain. A kid cam-copying this movie and uploading it to the world is a much different act than a group which produces look-alike DVDs and sells them as if they were the real thing, but magically cheaper. To disapprove of commercial fraud (i.e. bootlegging) is not to necessarily disapprove of low-quality copy sharing.
Only if you agree that children don't acquire some rights to control their own reading habits at some point. Seems to me the best filter is active parental involvement. What kid wants to try and sneak a peek at something when the folks are sitting right there with her? :)
Is it your god-given right to receive free entertainment, at the cost of the filmmakers?
Separate the two questions and we can have a reasonable discussion. Whether works of art should be free is a different question from whether one has a right to compel others to create and distribute those works. As it is you are committing the logical fallacy "many questions", it seems. (Those more familiar with analyzing arguments for fallacious reasoning, please correct my analysis.)
don't you think there's a good reason for this law to exist: to deter people who would steal copies of the filmmakers' films?
Another logical fallacy: vagueness of language. Here you are using the word "steal" when you really mean "make", I believe. The copies are not being stolen. No one is sneaking into the projector booth and running off with reels of film (although that does happen, that's not-- I assume-- really what you mean here). The copies are being made. And it's a very important distinction. In the case of "stolen" a single piece of real property is being taken from someone. In the case of "copied" raw materials legitimately belonging to the copier are being used to reproduce another work.
won't you recognize that every CAM-copy distributed on the internet is no better than sneaking in the back door of the theater? If these punks had been caught doing that, shouldn't they be subject to arrest under the law?
No, I won't. Further it seems to me that in the drive to eliminate copying, the punishments for copying have been made more severe than if one actually stole the money or shoplifted "legitimate" copies of the movie directly, especially when one considers how many of one's own resources one must devote to the copying process.
I know you're joking, but I see label "graffiti" all the time-- usually using "found" labels, like the ones you get at the Post Office or FedEx office. After taking a few labels from the supply, the artist (and I recognize that to some I'm using the term loosely) draws his mini-piece of graffiti on the label, which is then applied to a surface in the same manner as other graffiti and tags. These sorts of labels and stickers are usually a lot more interesting than regular tagging, and more compact than large wall pieces of graffiti-- so they can be put in places where larger graffiti wouldn't fit. It wouldn't surprise me to see some enterprising young artist adapt glabel to this use, perhaps even taking advantage of the barcoding function to encode subversive messages. :)
Nonpublic data? Since when is your name, address, previous name, previous address, and birthdate not public data? And SSN pretty much might as well be public data given how many forms and documents it seems to be requested or required on. Anyway, everything but SSN on this list is stuff I can get from companies like ussearch.com or peoplesearch.com. And in some areas, there is a lot more than this available: marriage/divorce, property ownership, certain court judgements, etc.
Are they going to analyze the other candidate's education plans? I'd say the Libertarian candidate, Michael Badnarik, and the Green candidate (whose name I don't know, but I believe has officially been nominated), deserve similar coverage at this point... especially since the Democrats haven't even officially nominated Kerry for dog-catcher, let alone President. The media, as much by what they will choose to not to cover, as much as by what they will cover, are effectively acting as PR wings for the politicians... and right now, I'm guessing that if you'd like to know about Kerry's so-called plan, one could read it on his web site or request some PR fluff pieces from the campaign.
And don't worry. I'm sure that in the fall, we'll get all the analysis of both the Kerry and Bush campaigns we can stand.
Good god, man. Fox News isn't that bad, and CNN isn't that great (and I read CNN every day as my primary source of news). From your post it sounds like you'd be more comfortable with something like "The Nation"-- especially if you think Kerry has an education plan and that it's the news media's job to publicize his campaign for free in the form of "news".
Exactly. Mikey Moore is a first order twit. So is the president, for that matter. I want to see this movie about as much as I want my eyeballs poked with a hot iron rod. Someone needs to take this film, splice it together with "The Passion" and some cheesy 50s stag film. Then maybe overlay the audio with some death metal, punk rock, and 60s soap commericals. THEN, and only then, will I be interested in watching this mess.
By my reasoning, weather services are, and can be, provided by private businesses. The military, however, does things that are otherwise illegal-- bombing cities, killing people, taking prisoners, etc etc. Providing weather services is not illegal as far as I know.
In any case, I never said that this information should not be free (as in beer AND speech). I firmly believe that any time the taxpayers pay for information that we all have a right to that information. What I don't believe is that taxpayers should necessarily be paying for all this-- in fact, the more we pay for it, the more it appears we are subsidizing businesses, even before they might pass this proposed "partnerships" thing.
You need a single organization for severe weather coverage to ensure public safety.
Prove it. I don't think the public is going to be much or less safe just because they have a single agency doing this. A single agency represents a single point of failure, and in this case what recourse does the public even have if the NOAA screws up? If there are multiple agencies, there is nothing to prevent the government from contracting the weather services it does need out to one of them.
As to conflicting warnings, I assume that most of the warnings would be the same type of stuff and that the public could make decisions based on a consensus model or majority of warnings thing. If all the major weather services are predicting dangerous weather, that seems like a better bet than if it's one small service being operated by boy scouts working on their weather merit badge.
More likely I would think that if I have health or homeowners insurance or other policies that weather is likely to affect, that the insurance company would have a preferred weather service that they would require me to use when it comes to things like whether or not to board up my windows and vacate the area.
Since we are paying for this service, why should access to the data be limited?
Good question-- but one which argues against a point I never made and have no intention of attempting defend.