When the NY times covered similar pushes to regulate ride-sharing apps as taxis, they noted that the majority of stranger rapes in London were committed by unlicensed taxi drivers. Letting ride-sharing apps knock licensed taxis out of business would create a safety problem.
Re:No successful terrorist attacks since 9/11?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Dick Cheney's response to Obama's civil liberties speech in May 2009 was notable for putting forth the same claim, that the Bush administration prevented any terrorist attacks after 9/11, also failing to mention the anthrax attacks, which probably did more to frighten people than the 9/11 attacks.
Some people would like the fact that a number of people were killed and congressional mail service disrupted for months by someone who has yet to be unidentified and who the FBI concluded used biological weapons from a US government research facility to disappear down the memory hole. The house judiciary committee, which oversees the justice dept. and thus the FBI, was highly skeptical of the FBI's claim that Bruce Ivins was the sole individual responsible. Check Grassley, a Republican, was openly skeptical that Ivins was even involved. (Ivins did work at a biological weapons lab, but he didn't have access to the strain that was used in the attacks.)
Remember, facts are now judged not only by their truth and relevance, but also by their political significance.
"In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s?"
Because in the 70's, climate scientists pretty thoroughly established that if the patterns of the previous 36 ice ages still holds (and they are remarkably regular in their duration and frequency with an almost exactly 100,000 year cycle), then we have a thousand years or so to go on the current ice age. That's why there was all that speculation about sudden glaciation; they didn't know whether there could be cold surges when exiting an ice age. Their research held up, but the speculation was killed by more facts entering the debate. There was never a consensus about sudden glaciation, but our position in the ice age cycle is pretty well established by now. The consensus view is that we're too far from the peak cold to benefit from it and it will be at least a thousand years or so before natural warming starts to occur, and the current warming is human caused.
"It "works" in Sweden with a horrendous tax load on the working people of Sweden."
um, the "horrendous tax load" in Sweden includes their entire health care cost. If you add US health care costs (currently 15% of GDP) in to make a realistic comparison, the US has a higher load than Sweden.
"The US media is mostly liberal, not conservative and anyone acknowledges that if they are intellectually honest. "
bullshit. The US media is primarily corporate and the number of corporations has been shrinking fast. In the 80's, 98% of all US media was controlled by 37 corporations. Today it's 8. (For those of you with comprehension problems, that means 8 conservative billionaires control the bulk of US media.) Anti-corporate messages are simply not allowed on US media, and the "liberal" end of the US mainstream media market is only the left wing of the permissible corporate thought. Speakers or programs that attack corporatism as a concept are simply not mentioned. That's not liberal. The fact that you would treat support for Barack Obama, one of the most corporate Democrats, as a marker of liberalism shows how out of touch you are.
I'm currently teaching as my second career; I spent 15 years as a programmer/programmer-analyst/systems administrator/consultant.
Many school boards and school administrators are pushing for more use of technology in the classroom without any evaluation of whether it benefits learning. I think that's one problem.
More relevant to the article that started this discussion, I've had serious problems trying to use donated computers in one particular classroom because they were simply too different from each other to support easily. *Any* change in the software was likely to touch off a time-consuming round of fiddling with one or more machines to get it to work the same way as on the others. Teachers do not have copious amounts of time. (I work much longer hours now than I did when I was in IT.) If the poster is going to support the machines once they're in place, that's a plus, but a diverse collection of quirky older hardware might be more of a curse than a useful gift.
Having computers is nice, but if they don't come with support, they'll either draw time from the instructor or collect dust.
If the instructor does get them working and in use, there are a number of potential pitfalls that need to be dealt with. For elementary kids, basic keyboarding skills are an issue. Time spent teaching keyboarding is time not spent teaching something else. (It takes about 20 hours of teaching/practice to get upper elementary kids up to speed on keyboarding. That's a significant chunk of the language arts time for a year.) The extra effort to use an unfamiliar writing device can seriously interfere with a developing writer's progress actually writing. (If the work is simply too hard, the kids *DO* *NOT* *LEARN*. Making tasks harder can shut down progress with the kids who need practice the most.)
I've had trouble with lessons that depended on the kids having certain basic computer knowledge that I found they lacked and had to devote a great deal of effort to playing catch up. (Want to guess the percentage of 8th graders I had who tried to cite "google.com" as the source of an article in the website section of a bibliography? Would you like a long analysis of why it's amazingly difficult to teach teenagers the difference between the location bar and the search bar? (Many of them have used the search bar to input URL's for so long that the habit is thoroughly ingrained and unteaching a wrong idea is much harder than teaching something correctly from the start.)
Sorry, I started to switch topics there. Computers in the classroom can be helpful, but they're not always good and in certain cases they detract from learning. I've seen good lessons that used them, but those took a tremendous amount of preparation and required well-maintained computers. Most classroom computers are under-utilized because there aren't enough techs/admins keeping them usable. Donating admin time is probably more useful to a district or school than donating machines, but your girlfriend might appreciate the machines if you do the work to make them useful.
Unfortunately, the movie experience is what *makes* some movies. The Star Wars movies, the LOTR movies, Out of Africa, etc. give a different impression seen on the big screen than they do when seen on a small one.
I'm happy to see screeners banned because they put big screen movies at a disadvantage.
The other problem with screeners was that they allowed academy members to vote on films without actually having seen them. Cheating that way was getting more widespread and had to be cracked down on. (Under the old rules, they had little cards they had to have stamped by the theater to show that they'd actually attended the film. When the voters started receiving the whole collection on DVD, they went to the honor system. Using an honor system in Hollywood will not work.)
There's still the problem with the vast bulk of the academy voters being geezers in their 60's and 70's, (this gives any drama about alzheimer's instant academy award potential. I am not joking.) but I don't think there's a technical fix to that problem.
Over any long period, the stock market outperforms cash, which is the option you have with not investing Social Security money.
That's not true for periods significant to human lives. During the bear market of the 70's, the stock indices fell year-to-year for 10 out of 12 years. Anyone who had invested money in the stock market in proportion to the indices near the beginning of the 70's had less net worth, ignoring inflation, than they started with until the mid-to-late 80's. Inflation was extreme during the 70's and real value was lost for even longer taking inflation into account. (Interest rates were also high and bonds held until maturity did well.) This drop in investment value had a measurable effect on retirees.
Yes, if you take really, really long periods you can overcome the 1929 crash, the 70's bear market and the.com collapse, but 20 year loss cycles are long enough that age and retirement force people to eat the capital losses in order to use their money before they die and people who suffer market downturns at the wrong point in their lives are never going to recover the loss.
As for the nonsense about putting small percentages of social security into the market, the brokerage and accounting costs are crippling and simply don't work. The mainstream brokerage where I have my retirement plans charges a fee to maintain accounts under $10,000. I'm well over that amount, but I'm pretty far along in my career. My first jobs paid minimum wage and the total sum of social security taxes collected while I was working myself through college was far less than the accounting costs of maintaining those small sums in any kind of market account. My first jobs out of college didn't pay well and accounting costs for market accounts would have been excessive for those years as well. People's incomes rise as they age (in general) and the accounts would grow from accumulated contributions so market accounts are more feasible for older people, but older people are the most exposed to adverse effects from market downturns.
Social Security has incredibly low overhead (from memory 0.5%? 0.2%?) and can feasibly handle the small accounts people in their teens and twenties are going to have. Private brokerages do not want this business. Privatizing social security is poular among idealogues who don't understand the costs and the small number of people with very high incomes. It doesn't work to the benefit of young workers or low income workers or most middle income workers wouldn't benefit until later in their careers.
So what you have is business model of taking large number of high risk investments.
He greatly overstated the risks and left readers with the erroneous impression that the promotion and recording costs are the same for all new bands.
First, those recording costs are paid to studios the record company controls and are exceptionally high. (Sure, you can spend $500,000 recording an album, but with care you can spend 1/10th that amount and have better sound than a poorly planned half million.) The "break even" point quoted doesn't include the profit from the recording costs themselves.
Second, he leaves the impression that promotion costs are flat and uniform. That's bunk. The promotion budgets vary tremendously and the albums that don't hit are given tremendously lower budgets than the ones the label expects to do well. (And many an aggreived artist complains that with adequate promotion they'd be the stars.) Right there the risk is lessened considerably from the impression he leaves.
Third, he didn't address the overall numbers for any of the labels. Sure, only 1/6 debut albums from new bands manage to get called profitable, although there are precious few which actually come in at a loss after counting the profit from the recording costs, but how many bands debut each year? The real crap for the artists is on their second and following albums which are pretty much sure things and whose profits are still divvied up according to the abusive contracts the artists have to sign to get the first album out. This article is a tad deceptive in only focussing on new bands. It's pretty rare for a band with a successful first album to completely lose it on a second.
Oh, and I liked the way he glossed over touring costs without mentioning that the artists don't have much control over those either and are often contractually required to tour whether they want to or not.
I think this guy's spinning hard for the record labels and I think he chose numbers that give an incomplete and erroneous picture of the industry.
I was a big fan of the comic up until they started interleaving the storylines into other titles. I didn't feel the need to buy every single comic they published just to follow the one I cared about. (That's what killed Marvel. They overused a tactic that increases sales up to the point where people quit buying completely.)
If it comes down to marketing vs creamy artistic integrity, marketing's going to win isn't it?
Double opt-in is marketing speak from the DMA (that's Direct Marketing Association, a group which includes a number of mainstream corporations considering spam.)
The term entered debate when Congress invited representatives of the DMA and MAPS to address a panel. It's been relentlessly pushed by the PR flacks and looks like it might be taking hold in the technical world as cybersquatting did. (Another spin term foisted into use by relentless marketing from the IP lobby.)
The spinless and more acurate term is "opt in with confirmation." It doesn't include the false and spin-driven connotation that people have to sign up twice and it accurately describes what MAPS considers ideal.
The DMA doesn't like "opt in with confirmation" because it polls much more favorably than "double opt-in" and they'd rather people used terms that favored their side of the debate.
The instrument used to generate the "oooo oooo oooo oooooo...." sound of ST:TOS was a then futuristic electronic instrument called a theremin which has an audio output which is controlled by the external capacitance. You play it by moving your hands around near it without actually touching it. There's an album of all theremin music called "Lothar and the Hand People", but I don't know how easy it would be to find or whether it's worth listening to.
I've read through the comments and the majority of posters seem to miss both the point of blocking the web site of email spammers and the essential duty for a responsible admin to do so.
First, since the early days of spam fighting, web sites advertised by spam were subject to blocking because the actual machines sending out the email were often more of a victim than the recipients, and the only way to discourage spammers from using innocent third parties as their spam hosts was to block the web site they were advertising.
Second, a good network administrator is going to block connections from other sites/networks engaged in activity that threatens the integrity of their network. Spam is a threat to the integrity of the internet as a whole. Individual administrators were closing off access to abusive sites long before the RBL and the RBL formed more as a convenience to lessen duplicated effort than as any censorious force.
Third, the decision to block Macromedia's web site is part of a content neutral policy regarding the treatment of spammers. Most network admins are supportive of free speech and react strongly to accusations of censorship. Because web site blocking is the only way to deal with porn spammers playing whack-a-mole by sending their spam from a horde of third party accounts, web site blocking is part of the RBL "experience." Macromedia lost connectivity to their web site because of past flame wars which resulted in declarations that the content of the spam would not be a consideration in the treatment of offendors. Macromedia was treated exactly the same as a sleazy porn spammer with no judgement as to the content of their wares because their actions were indistinguishable from those of sleazy porn spammers.
Finally, it's very hard to get onto the RBL. Macromedia had to blatantly ignore several warnings and be the subject of continuous complaints to be added to the RBL. (Note that it doesn't take that many complaints, only a continuous stream of them.) I suspect that macromedia had a small number of people who were getting spammed despite requests to stop and that they were unresponsive to the complaints. (This is always frustrating for the person being subjected to problems originating outside of their own network. The offending site has a duty to correct the problem and failing to do so within a reasonable amount of time is ample reason to stop passing their traffic.)
If the RBL is activity- and method-driven, why are they disrupting HTTP and other types of protocols too, even from those who haven't engaged in any of the activities and methods of spamming?
They try to cut off service to web sites advertised by spammers because the traffic to the web site is the incentive to spam. Many spammers use throwaway accounts on ISP's other than their web hosts because spamming from their web host would get their site TOS'd. Shutting off an account used to spam won't stop spam because there are an infinite number of accounts that can be created. Shutting off connection to the spammers web site does stop the spam because there's no longer any use to popping up with new accounts and spamming to get advertisement for a site that no one can reach.
The anti-trust exemption for major league baseball came from the Supreme Court, not congress.
It's an old ruling where the court was trying to duck getting involved in matters that woul have an impact on the game by ruling that major league baseball was not commerce and as such not covered by the anti-trust prohibitions.
Given the blatant commercialism of major league sports today, there's no chance of any other sport getting such a ruling and either congress or an aggressive attorney general could get baseball's pulled if they chose.
The mention of religion is considered prejudicial and the rules of evidence prohibit it under most circumstances. (This is old law intended to stop suits where one party's defense against a tort is that the victim is a jew.) The mention of the word Scientology was barred from evidence as the identity of the religion was ruled prejudicial (ie., the jury might acquit even if there was a real crime if they knew who the victim was.)
More troubling to me was the inclusion of a Scientologist on the jury and the use of testimony gained through a deposition of Henson in a bankruptcy proceeding. He was questioned under oath without a lawyer about material that was relevant only to the criminal case. This is an end run around the right to have a lawyer present during questioning and an abuse of the civil courts, but with no money and no lawyer, I doubt he knew to object to the whole line of questioning on 5th amendment grounds.
Anything said in court is protected from libel/slander.
No. Anything said on the floor of the House or Senate is protected from libel/slander in the US constitution, but statements to a court are not.
Seriously, do you think the penalty for executing a false complaint that person A is a child molestor in court should be treated to a lesser penalty than making the same complaint on TV? Making a false statement in court can open someone up to perjury charges as well as slander/libel.
1) modern VMS can use the / directory specifications
2) the use of device:[directory.subdirectory.etc]filename should be heavily discouraged because of the power of VMS logicals. That last form foo$bar:myfile is a wonderful thing. It's a device:[directory.etc] specification condensed into a logical, foo$bar. Get your users used to it and you can move home directorys all over the place and by redefining a few logicals, the changes really are transparent. The features I miss most from VMS that Unices lack are the layered logicals (process, job, system) and the versioning file system.
I do VMS consulting, and I see a lot of VAXen out there. Because of their dominant position when computerized control systems were first being integrated into manufacturing systems, a tremendous number of manufacturing shops had VAXen either controlling or talking to their production equipment. Because there's a major cost to upgrade and no benefit if your control software already does what you want, there are still a lot of VAXen in use. (I think Intel finally got their fabs off of them. Micron went to alphas. AMD uses both. PG&E's got some of their real-time power transfer stuff on VAXen. I see a lot of VAX or even older PDP based stuff integrated into older test equipment at every chip maker I've visited.)
Slashdot Mirror
When the NY times covered similar pushes to regulate ride-sharing apps as taxis, they noted that the majority of stranger rapes in London were committed by unlicensed taxi drivers. Letting ride-sharing apps knock licensed taxis out of business would create a safety problem.
Dick Cheney's response to Obama's civil liberties speech in May 2009 was notable for putting forth the same claim, that the Bush administration prevented any terrorist attacks after 9/11, also failing to mention the anthrax attacks, which probably did more to frighten people than the 9/11 attacks.
Some people would like the fact that a number of people were killed and congressional mail service disrupted for months by someone who has yet to be unidentified and who the FBI concluded used biological weapons from a US government research facility to disappear down the memory hole. The house judiciary committee, which oversees the justice dept. and thus the FBI, was highly skeptical of the FBI's claim that Bruce Ivins was the sole individual responsible. Check Grassley, a Republican, was openly skeptical that Ivins was even involved. (Ivins did work at a biological weapons lab, but he didn't have access to the strain that was used in the attacks.)
Remember, facts are now judged not only by their truth and relevance, but also by their political significance.
"In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s?"
Because in the 70's, climate scientists pretty thoroughly established that if the patterns of the previous 36 ice ages still holds (and they are remarkably regular in their duration and frequency with an almost exactly 100,000 year cycle), then we have a thousand years or so to go on the current ice age. That's why there was all that speculation about sudden glaciation; they didn't know whether there could be cold surges when exiting an ice age. Their research held up, but the speculation was killed by more facts entering the debate. There was never a consensus about sudden glaciation, but our position in the ice age cycle is pretty well established by now. The consensus view is that we're too far from the peak cold to benefit from it and it will be at least a thousand years or so before natural warming starts to occur, and the current warming is human caused.
"It "works" in Sweden with a horrendous tax load on the working people of Sweden."
um, the "horrendous tax load" in Sweden includes their entire health care cost. If you add US health care costs (currently 15% of GDP) in to make a realistic comparison, the US has a higher load than Sweden.
"The US media is mostly liberal, not conservative and anyone acknowledges that if they are intellectually honest. "
bullshit. The US media is primarily corporate and the number of corporations has been shrinking fast. In the 80's, 98% of all US media was controlled by 37 corporations. Today it's 8. (For those of you with comprehension problems, that means 8 conservative billionaires control the bulk of US media.) Anti-corporate messages are simply not allowed on US media, and the "liberal" end of the US mainstream media market is only the left wing of the permissible corporate thought. Speakers or programs that attack corporatism as a concept are simply not mentioned. That's not liberal. The fact that you would treat support for Barack Obama, one of the most corporate Democrats, as a marker of liberalism shows how out of touch you are.
The US media is corporate, not liberal.
I'm currently teaching as my second career; I spent 15 years as a programmer/programmer-analyst/systems administrator/consultant.
Many school boards and school administrators are pushing for more use of technology in the classroom without any evaluation of whether it benefits learning. I think that's one problem.
More relevant to the article that started this discussion, I've had serious problems trying to use donated computers in one particular classroom because they were simply too different from each other to support easily. *Any* change in the software was likely to touch off a time-consuming round of fiddling with one or more machines to get it to work the same way as on the others. Teachers do not have copious amounts of time. (I work much longer hours now than I did when I was in IT.) If the poster is going to support the machines once they're in place, that's a plus, but a diverse collection of quirky older hardware might be more of a curse than a useful gift.
Having computers is nice, but if they don't come with support, they'll either draw time from the instructor or collect dust.
If the instructor does get them working and in use, there are a number of potential pitfalls that need to be dealt with. For elementary kids, basic keyboarding skills are an issue. Time spent teaching keyboarding is time not spent teaching something else. (It takes about 20 hours of teaching/practice to get upper elementary kids up to speed on keyboarding. That's a significant chunk of the language arts time for a year.) The extra effort to use an unfamiliar writing device can seriously interfere with a developing writer's progress actually writing. (If the work is simply too hard, the kids *DO* *NOT* *LEARN*. Making tasks harder can shut down progress with the kids who need practice the most.)
I've had trouble with lessons that depended on the kids having certain basic computer knowledge that I found they lacked and had to devote a great deal of effort to playing catch up. (Want to guess the percentage of 8th graders I had who tried to cite "google.com" as the source of an article in the website section of a bibliography? Would you like a long analysis of why it's amazingly difficult to teach teenagers the difference between the location bar and the search bar? (Many of them have used the search bar to input URL's for so long that the habit is thoroughly ingrained and unteaching a wrong idea is much harder than teaching something correctly from the start.)
Sorry, I started to switch topics there. Computers in the classroom can be helpful, but they're not always good and in certain cases they detract from learning. I've seen good lessons that used them, but those took a tremendous amount of preparation and required well-maintained computers. Most classroom computers are under-utilized because there aren't enough techs/admins keeping them usable. Donating admin time is probably more useful to a district or school than donating machines, but your girlfriend might appreciate the machines if you do the work to make them useful.
Unfortunately, the movie experience is what *makes* some movies. The Star Wars movies, the LOTR movies, Out of Africa, etc. give a different impression seen on the big screen than they do when seen on a small one.
I'm happy to see screeners banned because they put big screen movies at a disadvantage.
The other problem with screeners was that they allowed academy members to vote on films without actually having seen them. Cheating that way was getting more widespread and had to be cracked down on. (Under the old rules, they had little cards they had to have stamped by the theater to show that they'd actually attended the film. When the voters started receiving the whole collection on DVD, they went to the honor system. Using an honor system in Hollywood will not work.)
There's still the problem with the vast bulk of the academy voters being geezers in their 60's and 70's, (this gives any drama about alzheimer's instant academy award potential. I am not joking.) but I don't think there's a technical fix to that problem.
Over any long period, the stock market outperforms cash, which is the option you have with not investing Social Security money.
That's not true for periods significant to human lives. During the bear market of the 70's, the stock indices fell year-to-year for 10 out of 12 years. Anyone who had invested money in the stock market in proportion to the indices near the beginning of the 70's had less net worth, ignoring inflation, than they started with until the mid-to-late 80's. Inflation was extreme during the 70's and real value was lost for even longer taking inflation into account. (Interest rates were also high and bonds held until maturity did well.) This drop in investment value had a measurable effect on retirees.
Yes, if you take really, really long periods you can overcome the 1929 crash, the 70's bear market and the .com collapse, but 20 year loss cycles are long enough that age and retirement force people to eat the capital losses in order to use their money before they die and people who suffer market downturns at the wrong point in their lives are never going to recover the loss.
As for the nonsense about putting small percentages of social security into the market, the brokerage and accounting costs are crippling and simply don't work. The mainstream brokerage where I have my retirement plans charges a fee to maintain accounts under $10,000. I'm well over that amount, but I'm pretty far along in my career. My first jobs paid minimum wage and the total sum of social security taxes collected while I was working myself through college was far less than the accounting costs of maintaining those small sums in any kind of market account. My first jobs out of college didn't pay well and accounting costs for market accounts would have been excessive for those years as well. People's incomes rise as they age (in general) and the accounts would grow from accumulated contributions so market accounts are more feasible for older people, but older people are the most exposed to adverse effects from market downturns.
Social Security has incredibly low overhead (from memory 0.5%? 0.2%?) and can feasibly handle the small accounts people in their teens and twenties are going to have. Private brokerages do not want this business. Privatizing social security is poular among idealogues who don't understand the costs and the small number of people with very high incomes. It doesn't work to the benefit of young workers or low income workers or most middle income workers wouldn't benefit until later in their careers.
He greatly overstated the risks and left readers with the erroneous impression that the promotion and recording costs are the same for all new bands.
First, those recording costs are paid to studios the record company controls and are exceptionally high. (Sure, you can spend $500,000 recording an album, but with care you can spend 1/10th that amount and have better sound than a poorly planned half million.) The "break even" point quoted doesn't include the profit from the recording costs themselves.
Second, he leaves the impression that promotion costs are flat and uniform. That's bunk. The promotion budgets vary tremendously and the albums that don't hit are given tremendously lower budgets than the ones the label expects to do well. (And many an aggreived artist complains that with adequate promotion they'd be the stars.) Right there the risk is lessened considerably from the impression he leaves.
Third, he didn't address the overall numbers for any of the labels. Sure, only 1/6 debut albums from new bands manage to get called profitable, although there are precious few which actually come in at a loss after counting the profit from the recording costs, but how many bands debut each year? The real crap for the artists is on their second and following albums which are pretty much sure things and whose profits are still divvied up according to the abusive contracts the artists have to sign to get the first album out. This article is a tad deceptive in only focussing on new bands. It's pretty rare for a band with a successful first album to completely lose it on a second.
Oh, and I liked the way he glossed over touring costs without mentioning that the artists don't have much control over those either and are often contractually required to tour whether they want to or not.
I think this guy's spinning hard for the record labels and I think he chose numbers that give an incomplete and erroneous picture of the industry.
I was a big fan of the comic up until they started interleaving the storylines into other titles. I didn't feel the need to buy every single comic they published just to follow the one I cared about. (That's what killed Marvel. They overused a tactic that increases sales up to the point where people quit buying completely.)
If it comes down to marketing vs creamy artistic integrity, marketing's going to win isn't it?
The term entered debate when Congress invited representatives of the DMA and MAPS to address a panel. It's been relentlessly pushed by the PR flacks and looks like it might be taking hold in the technical world as cybersquatting did. (Another spin term foisted into use by relentless marketing from the IP lobby.)
The spinless and more acurate term is "opt in with confirmation." It doesn't include the false and spin-driven connotation that people have to sign up twice and it accurately describes what MAPS considers ideal.
The DMA doesn't like "opt in with confirmation" because it polls much more favorably than "double opt-in" and they'd rather people used terms that favored their side of the debate.
The instrument used to generate the "oooo oooo oooo oooooo...." sound of ST:TOS was a then futuristic electronic instrument called a theremin which has an audio output which is controlled by the external capacitance. You play it by moving your hands around near it without actually touching it. There's an album of all theremin music called "Lothar and the Hand People", but I don't know how easy it would be to find or whether it's worth listening to.
First, since the early days of spam fighting, web sites advertised by spam were subject to blocking because the actual machines sending out the email were often more of a victim than the recipients, and the only way to discourage spammers from using innocent third parties as their spam hosts was to block the web site they were advertising.
Second, a good network administrator is going to block connections from other sites/networks engaged in activity that threatens the integrity of their network. Spam is a threat to the integrity of the internet as a whole. Individual administrators were closing off access to abusive sites long before the RBL and the RBL formed more as a convenience to lessen duplicated effort than as any censorious force.
Third, the decision to block Macromedia's web site is part of a content neutral policy regarding the treatment of spammers. Most network admins are supportive of free speech and react strongly to accusations of censorship. Because web site blocking is the only way to deal with porn spammers playing whack-a-mole by sending their spam from a horde of third party accounts, web site blocking is part of the RBL "experience." Macromedia lost connectivity to their web site because of past flame wars which resulted in declarations that the content of the spam would not be a consideration in the treatment of offendors. Macromedia was treated exactly the same as a sleazy porn spammer with no judgement as to the content of their wares because their actions were indistinguishable from those of sleazy porn spammers.
Finally, it's very hard to get onto the RBL. Macromedia had to blatantly ignore several warnings and be the subject of continuous complaints to be added to the RBL. (Note that it doesn't take that many complaints, only a continuous stream of them.) I suspect that macromedia had a small number of people who were getting spammed despite requests to stop and that they were unresponsive to the complaints. (This is always frustrating for the person being subjected to problems originating outside of their own network. The offending site has a duty to correct the problem and failing to do so within a reasonable amount of time is ample reason to stop passing their traffic.)
They try to cut off service to web sites advertised by spammers because the traffic to the web site is the incentive to spam. Many spammers use throwaway accounts on ISP's other than their web hosts because spamming from their web host would get their site TOS'd. Shutting off an account used to spam won't stop spam because there are an infinite number of accounts that can be created. Shutting off connection to the spammers web site does stop the spam because there's no longer any use to popping up with new accounts and spamming to get advertisement for a site that no one can reach.
It's an old ruling where the court was trying to duck getting involved in matters that woul have an impact on the game by ruling that major league baseball was not commerce and as such not covered by the anti-trust prohibitions.
Given the blatant commercialism of major league sports today, there's no chance of any other sport getting such a ruling and either congress or an aggressive attorney general could get baseball's pulled if they chose.
The mention of religion is considered prejudicial and the rules of evidence prohibit it under most circumstances. (This is old law intended to stop suits where one party's defense against a tort is that the victim is a jew.) The mention of the word Scientology was barred from evidence as the identity of the religion was ruled prejudicial (ie., the jury might acquit even if there was a real crime if they knew who the victim was.)
More troubling to me was the inclusion of a Scientologist on the jury and the use of testimony gained through a deposition of Henson in a bankruptcy proceeding. He was questioned under oath without a lawyer about material that was relevant only to the criminal case. This is an end run around the right to have a lawyer present during questioning and an abuse of the civil courts, but with no money and no lawyer, I doubt he knew to object to the whole line of questioning on 5th amendment grounds.
No. Anything said on the floor of the House or Senate is protected from libel/slander in the US constitution, but statements to a court are not.
Seriously, do you think the penalty for executing a false complaint that person A is a child molestor in court should be treated to a lesser penalty than making the same complaint on TV? Making a false statement in court can open someone up to perjury charges as well as slander/libel.
2) the use of device:[directory.subdirectory.etc]filename should be heavily discouraged because of the power of VMS logicals. That last form foo$bar:myfile is a wonderful thing. It's a device:[directory.etc] specification condensed into a logical, foo$bar. Get your users used to it and you can move home directorys all over the place and by redefining a few logicals, the changes really are transparent. The features I miss most from VMS that Unices lack are the layered logicals (process, job, system) and the versioning file system.
I do VMS consulting, and I see a lot of VAXen out there. Because of their dominant position when computerized control systems were first being integrated into manufacturing systems, a tremendous number of manufacturing shops had VAXen either controlling or talking to their production equipment. Because there's a major cost to upgrade and no benefit if your control software already does what you want, there are still a lot of VAXen in use. (I think Intel finally got their fabs off of them. Micron went to alphas. AMD uses both. PG&E's got some of their real-time power transfer stuff on VAXen. I see a lot of VAX or even older PDP based stuff integrated into older test equipment at every chip maker I've visited.)