"The poll released Thursday found that 49 percent think the First Amendment goes too far, a total about 10 points higher than in 2001."
The source for the quote above is an AP story on CBS newsabout a poll by the "First Amendment Center" of Arlington VA. Don't know anything about this group, but both the AP and CBS found it worth repeating.
I can't argue the slant of the poll, not having looked any further. And as a strong civil libertarian, statistics like the number above scare me. But I fear I can't dismiss it as easily as you did.
Given that her post mentions Phillip Greenspun receiving the money along with a non-disclosure agreement, I'm not surprised he didn't mention it. I can't think of anyone who'd be willing to endanger a settlement of that size.
Far be it from me to imply that ownership affects the editorial slant of the media, but consider the first paragraph of MSNBC's coverage of the AOL exploit:
A security hole in AOL Time Warner's Instant Messenger program used by millions of people worldwide can let a hacker take full control of a victim's computer, according to security researchers and the company. An AOL spokesman said the problem will be fixed soon, and users won't have to download anything.
with the lead paragraph of their coverage (read: spin) on the recent XP fiasco:
Microsoft's new Windows XP has a host of new features designed to make a world of disparate digital devices communicate with each other. Unfortunately, some of those features make it easier for hackers to communicate with them too, the company admitted Thursday. A free fix for the flaws has been issued, and the company is urging customers to download the patch.
Of course, with the tough economic times and all, it's good to see the marketing department pitching in and writing the story leads.
It seems unlikely that @Home, Qwest, Above.net, Exodus, Sprint, or Verio is routing my traffic through sniff.sniff.bin_laden.org. I understand that most of the backbone providers have decided not to renew their peering agreements with him in light of recent events. Somebody looking for my packets is probably sitting either at my ISP or my recipient's. And I asked Max at the helpdesk to stop sniffing my packets when I saw that process running.
As far as your call for uniform encryption (which I'm not opposed to), you might want to consider how this will protect me (and you, and any "investigational focus") from overzealous Federal agents collecting header information without a warrant for 48 hours. As collecting header information was the subject of the article.
Everyone that's blaming encryption for the failure to detect the preperations for these attacks should refer to the first page of the FBI website.
"Individuals who are interested in assisting us should now apply on-line at www.fbijobs.com. Please apply if you are proficient in English and one of the following languages: Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto. Details and specific requirements can be found on www.fbijobs.com."
If we lack sufficient translators to investigate the problem after the fact, how would an easily violated ban on strong encryption products have protected us before the attack?
Your argument is that we can only learn through suffering and through failure. While I'm sure I've left some teachers and professors with this impression of myself, I'd like to think that we can learn in other ways.
Whether it's a letter to your congresscritter, a conversation with friends and family, or upgrading your bosses IE to 128-bit and explaining encryption, you can educate those around you about the importance of protecting data and privacy. You may not convince any of them. Your actions may have no impact at all. But the mirror may be a little kinder if you're thinking "I tried" instead of "We need to suffer."
According to
General Atomics Aeronautics (General Atomics), the manufacturers of the predator aircraft, they can operate for 24 hours on target at 400 NM. If the London times are to be believed, the maximum flight time is 40 hours. Through the miracle of story problems, that gives us a cruising speed of about 50 mph and a range of 1000 NM there and back or 2000 NM straight through if you just want one picture as you fly by. Of course, that assumes that the fuel consumption is the same for distance travel or loitering over the target.
Additionally they have a variety of cool little aircraft on their page, and they also appear to make really ugly European light rail trains. Dropped on Afghanistan from a great height, these are just as likely to eradicate evil-doers as our current national plan.
But even idiots are protected by copyright law. Whether or not robots.txt is a simple tool, and whether or not lawsuit happy Kelly decides to use it, his work is copyrighted. Even if he hadn't explicitly stated that his works were copyrighted, the copyright is implied.
It's arguable that ditto.com is violating Kelly's rights in a number of fashions. Cornell Law's overview of copyright points out that Kelly has the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, display or license his work or derivatives of his work.
Personally, I think it's the production of a deravitive image, and republication of the full size image that's going to be their downfall. I use altavista's image search tool when I need to find a picture, but they hit the actual site to present the resized image, and when you click on the image you are taken directly to the image publisher's page.
I don't know whether or not Kelly is incompetent, but I don't see how this can be interpreted as a trick. He has an explicit terms of use statement on every page that bans reproduction, modification or storage of his images (along with about ten other possible uses).
If Kelly were complaining about misuse of a paper copy of his images, it would be clear that the copier had deliberately violated his copyright. However ditto.com is collecting, processing and republishing images without a real person looking at the bottom of the page for this copyright statement.
The real question here is responsible for preventing violations of a clearly expressed copyright. Is it Kelly, who will have to track all image cataloging spyders and manually disallow them while still allowing text indexing if he wants to promote his site? Or is it ditto.com, who would have to instruct their spyder to look for phrases like "Images copyright Bob Plaintiff 1999"?
Here at least, the district has a lab where they clean and rebuild machines for all the schools. They tear them down, vacuum them clean, wipe the drives, and build to a standard district image. While they're happier receiving large quantities of identical and non-stripped machines because they're easier to configure and they "look the same" (an important factor with tech unsavy educators), I still think they'd be interested.
At the very least, call and ask. If they can't use the parts, it's likely they deal with this question every day and can tell you if anyone else in the area that might be interested.
Your local school district would probably be happy to receive the parts. Anything older than that probably wouldn't be useful, but these sound similar to a number of systems (200+) that we donated to the San Francisco Public Schools after our last round of upgrades.
I don't know for a fact that the schools can give you receipts for tax purposes, but knowing my employer it seems a good bet.
Re:So with old machines...
on
Linux Routers
·
· Score: 2
When I was inventorying asbestos restricted spaces at the university of washington (another wacky stage in my career spiral) I stumbled across an interesting closet. I don't know what the researcher was working on, but he/she'd taken a huge stack of surplus Gateway desktops and lag-screwed them together with 2x4s for a poor man's rack mounted array. With University surplus machines practically free to internal users, I'm surprised there aren't more people doing this.
When I worked for the Forest Circus they were deep into an IBM contract. But judging from the boneyard, they'd had a Gateway fetish in years past. So the answer is.. we don't know.
It's much more reasonable to ask "what's that mystery box?" about any new hardware that appears when you're off shift. When you're on shift, it's much easier. Not all cops and feds look like the stereotype, but the cheap suit and cheap shoes ID is always a tip. It worked the morning my office was filled with armed EPA agents. But that was another story.
The company I'm contracting at just migrated from Novell Groupwise to Outlook on an Exchange server. (This decision was made by our new parent company, who's busy hoovering up any decent hardware, office furniture, and employees before they close this location.) Now I'm getting a range of user complaints about Outlook. Specifically:
Remote users have to look up dialup numbers as they move around the country rather than using the 1-800 dialup pool on the groupwise server.
Outlook opens much slower than than GroupWise. (Or any other mail app. in my experience.)
Users that need departmental or sub-departmental mailing lists now must either petition the help desk to create them or create them locally and recreate them on each machine in the group.
Outlook is not storing recently used addresses or auto-filling addresses when the user starts typing in the to: field.
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the number of machines in which the registry was compromised by the outlook install. Or the stability issues of exchange compared to a unix solution. Or the wonders of opening your network to every VB-script-kiddie that wanders by. But user concerns and complaints are time and money for both the help desk and the effected workers. It's worth asking your Exchange partisans what benefits their solution offers that will outweigh both these costs and the cost of the changeover.
On the whole, this is a proposal I support. For the same reasons that we license health care providers we should certify providers of health care information. Note that this doesn't preclude alternative practitioners or alternative theories from being promoted on the web. But it does make clear who is offering a treatment that is not widely approved. And since my slumlord was also a homeopathic doctor, I fully support dividing the MD's from the folks pushing St. John's Wort.
While technology and the availability of information are critical to any form of warfare, this is not to argue that greater access to information will lead to greater horrors. The killings in Rawanda were coordinated over AM/FM radio and carried out with machetes. And the mass killings in yugoslavia were coordinated by radio and paper orders. Neither of these represents any sort of breakthrough in the availability of information.
And yet there are innovative uses of information technology that are fighting to make the world a better place. Amnesty International's Fast Action Stops Torture(usa) or Stamp Out Torture(international) campaigns tie together pagers, cell phones, and your email to create a network of activists that can bring international pressure in a fraction of the time or cost of traditional media.
Failure to understand or engage "your enemy" will not lead to a safer world. It will lead to a world of victims who could have seen the horror coming and acted to stop it.
Looking for clarification.
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Yet, if the sw is well written, the mistakes could be corrected immediately, unlike the mess now.
I'm not sure from your post. Are you suggesting that problems could be rapidly corrected before the election? As in the case of removing dead candidates from Senate races? Or are you suggesting that the user interface of the ballot could be redesigned on the fly during the polling?
While the first would be an important improvement, the second would be disastrous. I can't think of anything that would undermine voter confidence more than ballots that changed mid-election.
Standardization will be a problem too.
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
While you immediately see open source as a solution to this one, something tells me that the election officials in places like Nye County Nevada aren't going to be nearly so receptive to such an obvious communist plot. If there is a move to e-democracy, the open source long haired *nix geek will have to sell his system town by town against hot new startups and MS Vote. People will try to make money off of this by selling package systems and promising upgrades and support. And non-tech savvy officals will buy it. The result will be a range of systems, with a corresponding range of problems and complaints.
I think you may also be underestimating the data integrity concerns. Florida is using punch card readers, a well understood and frankly antique technology to count the votes. And there was still a difference of something like 1400 votes between the tallies. If we're seeing this kind of variability on a stand alone system that we've been using for years, I worry about the rollout of a range of voting applications rushing to be the first to market.
While I believe an electronic voting system could be made to work, I think it's going to take well beyond 2004 to gain acceptance. You and I grew up with this technology, and we probably both still double check to make sure travelocity hasn't booked us a flight via Prague to Cleveland. How will your grandparents feel about voting online?
Note that I assumed that those proposing mirror sites had decided to violate the law. This is not a judgement on their morality. My understanding that mirroring copyrighted materials without permission from the author/copyright holder is illegal.
I believe that in many instances civil disobedience is the moral choice in the face of an unjust or incorrect law. Civil rights protesters, tree sitters, and the British blockades against road construction have all chosen direct actions (that often include trespass or illegal gathering, etc.) that are both moral and illegal.
As far as the morality of mirroring, I have conflicted and unresolved views on this. Distributing the DeCSS source code makes sense to me. Mirroring network security tools to avoid a european treaty that would ban port scanners and the like makes sense to me. I haven't resolved my feelings about mirroring copyrighted music/movies/microcode (to steal a line from Stephenson). But in various jurisdictions these would all still be illegal acts.
That said, thanks for the suggestions on possible locations. And I agree that local administration is key to the success of any such scheme.
If your goal is to prevent further use of the Death Penalty, you'll probably use every arguement available to you to make the case. Some people will respond to an ethical appeal. Some people will be convinced that it is being applied inequitably. Some will be shocked to learn that Governor Bush executes the borderline retarded. And some pragmatists will point out that the death penalty is significantly more expensive than life imprisonment.
Is this to say that the issue of internet censorship is as important as the death penalty? Of course not. But it is an important civil liberties issue, and it's worth pulling every last gambit out of our bag of tricks. Although it can make for a disjointed and at times inconsistent arguement, failing to appeal to any potential suporter is like tying one hand behind your back before the fight.
I agree with you that mirroring information that various political regimes would repress is important. But the difficulties faced by Chinese activists lie in getting the information to a group or group in a first world country with liberal speech laws that will permit access to the information. With Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the the like there are a large number of central locations for archiving this information in a protected manner. While this may someday become an issue for western democracies, it isn't yet.
The problem described in the original post is assuring the continued availability of information that is illegal to provide in the same liberal/western countries. If you've already decided to violate copyrite and intelectual property laws on a grand scale, where do you do it? Mirroring inside the US is ineffective for any information that isn't this week's cause celebre. DeCSS may be widely available now, but the furor will die, people will become less inclined to mirror, and indexed and accessible mirrors will eventually fold under legal pressure. For larger data sets/code bases this problem will be even greater.
In this light, is there a non-US/EU country with adequate connectivity, a stable government, and a track record for lax copyrite enforcement? People can shout HavenCo until they're blue in the face, but until Sealand has been hosting content without interference for at least a couple of years we need a stable fall back plan. I'm open to suggestions.
There seem to be more than a few posts sympathizing with the "don't piss on somebody else's parade" and "don't participate if you don't support it" crowd. This is wrong. Patrick may have been able to sit out homecoming. But high school is a four year popularity contest that he can't avoid. By playing the game, winning, and rejecting it, he made a much stronger statement about the system than any of us losers who whined about fairness and popularity from the sidelines.
What's more, thousands of people are being forced to think about and discuss the value of an official popularity contest in our public schools. Somehow, this seems much more effective than my "I didn't go to prom/homecoming because..."
And finally, for the sticklers, did it say anywhere in the "rules" that it was forbidden to decline the "honor"?
While I was working for the UW, my boss and I would head over to University surplus and pick up a stack of 486's and early pentiums. He was an authorized buyer for his kid's elementary school, and we could pick up a stack of 5 pcs for about US$ 100. Out of the five, we could generally build three or four working systems. Together with the odd scanner or die hard HP LaserJet, we could ensure adequate computers in his kids classrooms.
Granted, I wasn't providing training or support, and beyond the occasional semi-defective hub I wasn't providing any networking either. But that's still a far cry from US$3,000/school/month. What level of advertising revenue were they expecting to pull to cover that kind of expenditure?
Frankly, providing adequate computing resources to schools is almost never as expensive as it's made out to be. Some courses, maybe CAD or programing in high school might require faster systems or high end monitors. But word processing, spread sheets, typing courses, or searching the web for useful content and the like don't require a screaming fast system or connection.
Does anybody know which 10 states they're concentrating on? I'm certain my letter will have a greater effect if California is actually considering this legislation. I'd hate to look silly by writing about a bill not under consideration.
When the census guy finally got around to us, we had to sit him down and pour him a drink. The short form isn't all that short if you've got 12 people living in your house, only two of them are home, and you've got to guess at peoples birth dates, full names, etc.
Maybe they'll connect my census records with my asbestos testing results, housing inspections, fire inspections, police records, and strong sugestions to the IRS criminal investigation about my slumlord. At that point Carole's abuse of the SkunkHouse residents will probably fall under RICO.
Slashdot Mirror
"The poll released Thursday found that 49 percent think the First Amendment goes too far, a total about 10 points higher than in 2001."
The source for the quote above is an AP story on CBS newsabout a poll by the "First Amendment Center" of Arlington VA. Don't know anything about this group, but both the AP and CBS found it worth repeating.
I can't argue the slant of the poll, not having looked any further. And as a strong civil libertarian, statistics like the number above scare me. But I fear I can't dismiss it as easily as you did.
Given that her post mentions Phillip Greenspun receiving the money along with a non-disclosure agreement, I'm not surprised he didn't mention it. I can't think of anyone who'd be willing to endanger a settlement of that size.
Far be it from me to imply that ownership affects the editorial slant of the media, but consider the first paragraph of MSNBC's coverage of the AOL exploit:
with the lead paragraph of their coverage (read: spin) on the recent XP fiasco:
Of course, with the tough economic times and all, it's good to see the marketing department pitching in and writing the story leads.
It seems unlikely that @Home, Qwest, Above.net, Exodus, Sprint, or Verio is routing my traffic through sniff.sniff.bin_laden.org. I understand that most of the backbone providers have decided not to renew their peering agreements with him in light of recent events. Somebody looking for my packets is probably sitting either at my ISP or my recipient's. And I asked Max at the helpdesk to stop sniffing my packets when I saw that process running.
As far as your call for uniform encryption (which I'm not opposed to), you might want to consider how this will protect me (and you, and any "investigational focus") from overzealous Federal agents collecting header information without a warrant for 48 hours. As collecting header information was the subject of the article.
Everyone that's blaming encryption for the failure to detect the preperations for these attacks should refer to the first page of the FBI website.
"Individuals who are interested in assisting us should now apply on-line at www.fbijobs.com. Please apply if you are proficient in English and one of the following languages: Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto. Details and specific requirements can be found on www.fbijobs.com."
If we lack sufficient translators to investigate the problem after the fact, how would an easily violated ban on strong encryption products have protected us before the attack?
Your argument is that we can only learn through suffering and through failure. While I'm sure I've left some teachers and professors with this impression of myself, I'd like to think that we can learn in other ways.
Whether it's a letter to your congresscritter, a conversation with friends and family, or upgrading your bosses IE to 128-bit and explaining encryption, you can educate those around you about the importance of protecting data and privacy. You may not convince any of them. Your actions may have no impact at all. But the mirror may be a little kinder if you're thinking "I tried" instead of "We need to suffer."
According to General Atomics Aeronautics (General Atomics), the manufacturers of the predator aircraft, they can operate for 24 hours on target at 400 NM. If the London times are to be believed, the maximum flight time is 40 hours. Through the miracle of story problems, that gives us a cruising speed of about 50 mph and a range of 1000 NM there and back or 2000 NM straight through if you just want one picture as you fly by. Of course, that assumes that the fuel consumption is the same for distance travel or loitering over the target.
Additionally they have a variety of cool little aircraft on their page, and they also appear to make really ugly European light rail trains. Dropped on Afghanistan from a great height, these are just as likely to eradicate evil-doers as our current national plan.
But even idiots are protected by copyright law. Whether or not robots.txt is a simple tool, and whether or not lawsuit happy Kelly decides to use it, his work is copyrighted. Even if he hadn't explicitly stated that his works were copyrighted, the copyright is implied.
It's arguable that ditto.com is violating Kelly's rights in a number of fashions. Cornell Law's overview of copyright points out that Kelly has the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, display or license his work or derivatives of his work.
Personally, I think it's the production of a deravitive image, and republication of the full size image that's going to be their downfall. I use altavista's image search tool when I need to find a picture, but they hit the actual site to present the resized image, and when you click on the image you are taken directly to the image publisher's page.
I don't know whether or not Kelly is incompetent, but I don't see how this can be interpreted as a trick. He has an explicit terms of use statement on every page that bans reproduction, modification or storage of his images (along with about ten other possible uses).
If Kelly were complaining about misuse of a paper copy of his images, it would be clear that the copier had deliberately violated his copyright. However ditto.com is collecting, processing and republishing images without a real person looking at the bottom of the page for this copyright statement.
The real question here is responsible for preventing violations of a clearly expressed copyright. Is it Kelly, who will have to track all image cataloging spyders and manually disallow them while still allowing text indexing if he wants to promote his site? Or is it ditto.com, who would have to instruct their spyder to look for phrases like "Images copyright Bob Plaintiff 1999"?
Here at least, the district has a lab where they clean and rebuild machines for all the schools. They tear them down, vacuum them clean, wipe the drives, and build to a standard district image. While they're happier receiving large quantities of identical and non-stripped machines because they're easier to configure and they "look the same" (an important factor with tech unsavy educators), I still think they'd be interested.
At the very least, call and ask. If they can't use the parts, it's likely they deal with this question every day and can tell you if anyone else in the area that might be interested.
Your local school district would probably be happy to receive the parts. Anything older than that probably wouldn't be useful, but these sound similar to a number of systems (200+) that we donated to the San Francisco Public Schools after our last round of upgrades.
I don't know for a fact that the schools can give you receipts for tax purposes, but knowing my employer it seems a good bet.
When I was inventorying asbestos restricted spaces at the university of washington (another wacky stage in my career spiral) I stumbled across an interesting closet. I don't know what the researcher was working on, but he/she'd taken a huge stack of surplus Gateway desktops and lag-screwed them together with 2x4s for a poor man's rack mounted array. With University surplus machines practically free to internal users, I'm surprised there aren't more people doing this.
When I worked for the Forest Circus they were deep into an IBM contract. But judging from the boneyard, they'd had a Gateway fetish in years past. So the answer is.. we don't know.
It's much more reasonable to ask "what's that mystery box?" about any new hardware that appears when you're off shift. When you're on shift, it's much easier. Not all cops and feds look like the stereotype, but the cheap suit and cheap shoes ID is always a tip. It worked the morning my office was filled with armed EPA agents. But that was another story.
The company I'm contracting at just migrated from Novell Groupwise to Outlook on an Exchange server. (This decision was made by our new parent company, who's busy hoovering up any decent hardware, office furniture, and employees before they close this location.) Now I'm getting a range of user complaints about Outlook. Specifically:
Of course, this doesn't even touch on the number of machines in which the registry was compromised by the outlook install. Or the stability issues of exchange compared to a unix solution. Or the wonders of opening your network to every VB-script-kiddie that wanders by. But user concerns and complaints are time and money for both the help desk and the effected workers. It's worth asking your Exchange partisans what benefits their solution offers that will outweigh both these costs and the cost of the changeover.
National Public Radio reported on this on Monday. You can hear the story here in real audio format.
On the whole, this is a proposal I support. For the same reasons that we license health care providers we should certify providers of health care information. Note that this doesn't preclude alternative practitioners or alternative theories from being promoted on the web. But it does make clear who is offering a treatment that is not widely approved. And since my slumlord was also a homeopathic doctor, I fully support dividing the MD's from the folks pushing St. John's Wort.
While technology and the availability of information are critical to any form of warfare, this is not to argue that greater access to information will lead to greater horrors. The killings in Rawanda were coordinated over AM/FM radio and carried out with machetes. And the mass killings in yugoslavia were coordinated by radio and paper orders. Neither of these represents any sort of breakthrough in the availability of information.
And yet there are innovative uses of information technology that are fighting to make the world a better place. Amnesty International's Fast Action Stops Torture(usa) or Stamp Out Torture(international) campaigns tie together pagers, cell phones, and your email to create a network of activists that can bring international pressure in a fraction of the time or cost of traditional media.
Failure to understand or engage "your enemy" will not lead to a safer world. It will lead to a world of victims who could have seen the horror coming and acted to stop it.
Yet, if the sw is well written, the mistakes could be corrected immediately, unlike the mess now.
I'm not sure from your post. Are you suggesting that problems could be rapidly corrected before the election? As in the case of removing dead candidates from Senate races? Or are you suggesting that the user interface of the ballot could be redesigned on the fly during the polling?
While the first would be an important improvement, the second would be disastrous. I can't think of anything that would undermine voter confidence more than ballots that changed mid-election.
While you immediately see open source as a solution to this one, something tells me that the election officials in places like Nye County Nevada aren't going to be nearly so receptive to such an obvious communist plot. If there is a move to e-democracy, the open source long haired *nix geek will have to sell his system town by town against hot new startups and MS Vote. People will try to make money off of this by selling package systems and promising upgrades and support. And non-tech savvy officals will buy it. The result will be a range of systems, with a corresponding range of problems and complaints.
I think you may also be underestimating the data integrity concerns. Florida is using punch card readers, a well understood and frankly antique technology to count the votes. And there was still a difference of something like 1400 votes between the tallies. If we're seeing this kind of variability on a stand alone system that we've been using for years, I worry about the rollout of a range of voting applications rushing to be the first to market.
While I believe an electronic voting system could be made to work, I think it's going to take well beyond 2004 to gain acceptance. You and I grew up with this technology, and we probably both still double check to make sure travelocity hasn't booked us a flight via Prague to Cleveland. How will your grandparents feel about voting online?
Note that I assumed that those proposing mirror sites had decided to violate the law. This is not a judgement on their morality. My understanding that mirroring copyrighted materials without permission from the author/copyright holder is illegal.
I believe that in many instances civil disobedience is the moral choice in the face of an unjust or incorrect law. Civil rights protesters, tree sitters, and the British blockades against road construction have all chosen direct actions (that often include trespass or illegal gathering, etc.) that are both moral and illegal.
As far as the morality of mirroring, I have conflicted and unresolved views on this. Distributing the DeCSS source code makes sense to me. Mirroring network security tools to avoid a european treaty that would ban port scanners and the like makes sense to me. I haven't resolved my feelings about mirroring copyrighted music/movies/microcode (to steal a line from Stephenson). But in various jurisdictions these would all still be illegal acts.
That said, thanks for the suggestions on possible locations. And I agree that local administration is key to the success of any such scheme.
If your goal is to prevent further use of the Death Penalty, you'll probably use every arguement available to you to make the case. Some people will respond to an ethical appeal. Some people will be convinced that it is being applied inequitably. Some will be shocked to learn that Governor Bush executes the borderline retarded. And some pragmatists will point out that the death penalty is significantly more expensive than life imprisonment.
Is this to say that the issue of internet censorship is as important as the death penalty? Of course not. But it is an important civil liberties issue, and it's worth pulling every last gambit out of our bag of tricks. Although it can make for a disjointed and at times inconsistent arguement, failing to appeal to any potential suporter is like tying one hand behind your back before the fight.
I agree with you that mirroring information that various political regimes would repress is important. But the difficulties faced by Chinese activists lie in getting the information to a group or group in a first world country with liberal speech laws that will permit access to the information. With Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the the like there are a large number of central locations for archiving this information in a protected manner. While this may someday become an issue for western democracies, it isn't yet.
The problem described in the original post is assuring the continued availability of information that is illegal to provide in the same liberal/western countries. If you've already decided to violate copyrite and intelectual property laws on a grand scale, where do you do it? Mirroring inside the US is ineffective for any information that isn't this week's cause celebre. DeCSS may be widely available now, but the furor will die, people will become less inclined to mirror, and indexed and accessible mirrors will eventually fold under legal pressure. For larger data sets/code bases this problem will be even greater.
In this light, is there a non-US/EU country with adequate connectivity, a stable government, and a track record for lax copyrite enforcement? People can shout HavenCo until they're blue in the face, but until Sealand has been hosting content without interference for at least a couple of years we need a stable fall back plan. I'm open to suggestions.
There seem to be more than a few posts sympathizing with the "don't piss on somebody else's parade" and "don't participate if you don't support it" crowd. This is wrong. Patrick may have been able to sit out homecoming. But high school is a four year popularity contest that he can't avoid. By playing the game, winning, and rejecting it, he made a much stronger statement about the system than any of us losers who whined about fairness and popularity from the sidelines.
What's more, thousands of people are being forced to think about and discuss the value of an official popularity contest in our public schools. Somehow, this seems much more effective than my "I didn't go to prom/homecoming because..."
And finally, for the sticklers, did it say anywhere in the "rules" that it was forbidden to decline the "honor"?
While I was working for the UW, my boss and I would head over to University surplus and pick up a stack of 486's and early pentiums. He was an authorized buyer for his kid's elementary school, and we could pick up a stack of 5 pcs for about US$ 100. Out of the five, we could generally build three or four working systems. Together with the odd scanner or die hard HP LaserJet, we could ensure adequate computers in his kids classrooms.
Granted, I wasn't providing training or support, and beyond the occasional semi-defective hub I wasn't providing any networking either. But that's still a far cry from US$3,000/school/month. What level of advertising revenue were they expecting to pull to cover that kind of expenditure?
Frankly, providing adequate computing resources to schools is almost never as expensive as it's made out to be. Some courses, maybe CAD or programing in high school might require faster systems or high end monitors. But word processing, spread sheets, typing courses, or searching the web for useful content and the like don't require a screaming fast system or connection.
Does anybody know which 10 states they're concentrating on? I'm certain my letter will have a greater effect if California is actually considering this legislation. I'd hate to look silly by writing about a bill not under consideration.
When the census guy finally got around to us, we had to sit him down and pour him a drink. The short form isn't all that short if you've got 12 people living in your house, only two of them are home, and you've got to guess at peoples birth dates, full names, etc.
Maybe they'll connect my census records with my asbestos testing results, housing inspections, fire inspections, police records, and strong sugestions to the IRS criminal investigation about my slumlord. At that point Carole's abuse of the SkunkHouse residents will probably fall under RICO.