There's no such thing as too small to attract the RIAA's attention. Ask any takeout place that ever got busted by the RIAA for playing the radio for customers.
I'm immensely amused, having wandered around some of the crop circle sites. I thought that the whole thing had been pretty well quashed by the demonstration that crop circles are easily made, but no! it's turned in to an _art form_. Gorgeous stuff, too, fractals and stars and circles within circles. People challenging themselves to make the most circles, to do it on the shortest night, to do it under the eyes of 'crop watchers'.
Some of my early technical group postings are there, but my early recreational stuff on rec.arts.comics is all missing -- that group doesn't appear to be archived before 1989.
I also sent in a correction; Cantor & Seigel were the first commerical all groups spam, but not the first all groups spam, that occurred in Jan 1994 with Clarence Thomas IV, "Global Alert for All"
I'm not an engineer, but the dam breech scenario looks pretty ludicrous to me. It appears to think that the Missouri/Mississippi system is a symmetric valley from headwaters to delta, which is where you could get the wall of water effect. Instead the floodwaters would spread out, slowing them considerably even before you reach the next dam, and what of the surge survives is then faced with a giant lake, not a narrow channel. Basic hydrology says the wider the channel, the slower the flood and the less carrying capacity, and the only way it's going to take out the next dam is by having enough debris and speed to batter it down.
Where you get the really tragic dam breaks, like the Johnstown flood, is towns in narrow mountain valleys.
Dam breeches are definitely one of the most destructive potential terrorist acts, no question, but I don't see the cascading effect happening. If you blew Aswan High Dam, you might get the scenario, ten times the water and a symmetrical river valley with with only minor dams below it.
If you want to cause max destruction on the Mississippi, there's always the Control of Nature scenario -- drift a barge up to the face of the Old River Control Structure and blowing it, and watching the waters of the Mississippi pour into the Atchafalaya basin, drowning it and leaving New Orleans dry.
It's startled me, hearing about the structure the last couple of weeks, how much SimTower was clearly based on the WTC. The skylobbies, the express/local elevator system, the shopping mall, the multi-level underground, the subway stations down at the very bottom...
Jeez, I didn't think you could *put* this much pig-ignorance in one message, is this a joke?
SOS is based in Utah, and we have different legal and cultural norms here. The first amendment (ratified by the same idiots who brought us the secon amendment) may prevail in the Federal courts, but that doesn't mean we enforce it to the same extent in the state courts.
The University of Utah is a public university, which means that the laws that apply to the state government apply to it. Utah, despite your touchingly naive belief, does not have an exemption from the 14th Amendment, which requires state governments to extend the same constitutional protections that the federal government does. Thus, the first amendment does apply here, and any Utah court which thinks it is a exception will find itself bitchslapped by the federal courts when the case moves into them.
And even if we did, it'd be irrelevant here. The first amendment exists to protect political speech, but SOS wasn't at all about political speech. It was about student life on campus, hardly the sort of important cultural discussion governments have historically suppressed and without which American democracy cannot exist..
The first amendment covers all forms of speech; the framers and the courts wisely recognized that attempts to limit to to 'important' speech would limit speech to that liked by those doing the defining.
What's more, the "speech" in question was mere anonymous insults: the lowest form of speech you can get (excluding pornography and flag burning, which aren't even speech).
This is a troll, surely? Street vs. New York (394US576, 1969), Texas vs. Johnson (491US397,1989): Flag burning is explicitly speech and protected under the 1st Amendment. "The government may not prohibit, the expression of an idea because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." Pornography is also covered by the 1st amendment; child pornography is not, and obscenity is not, but pornography != obscenity. Insults are also covered as long as they do not fall to the level of actual defamation (not covered.)
When the Founding Fathers broke away from England and enacted the bill of rights, they didn't intend for it to apply to this sort of situation. Heck, judging from their own passage of the "Alien and Sedition Act", they didn't even intend to protect actual political speech within their own time. And yet you come whining to slashdot to pretend that your own personal website, hosted with the bandwidth of a private university, is somehow more important?
Okay it *is* a troll, no one who knows the Alien and Sedition acts could be this dumb. For the rest of you: the Alien and Sedition acts lost the Federalists the next election, the acts were repealed under Jefferson, and the Supreme Court has smacked down any later attempts at the same thing. As above, University of Utah is *not* a private university, and thus is bound by the strictures of the Bill of Rights.
Dan, you need to learn to distinguish between personal discomfort and political outrage. The university is well within its rights (and upholding its duty to instill good moral character within its students) when they treat your site this way. And since you could get your site hosted for $30/mo at any number of non-Utah hosting companies, I have no sympathy for you.
...or possibly it's just someone with a personal axe to grind. While the usual 'freedom of the press goes to those who own them' may apply here, it also may not. Someone with a better constitutional law background than me can speculate on whether Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va. (515US819,837) would apply if the university gives similiar space to other 'publications'.
This is not about speech. This is not about freedom. This is just a student bitching about the "fascist administration". Nothing to see here; please move along.
Like other people, I have severe suspicions that there is More To This Story, but maybe the administrators are just as ignorant as this post, and this really *is* all the story.
Clear your mind and think. The "mother" could have been someone social engineering the name of a target they'd located in chat rooms. Yes, gasp, even a child. AOL doesn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts -- they do it because if they give your address to the murderous creep who has fixated on you, they'll pay through the nose. Both money and bad publicity.
This sort of knee-jerk "well, damn the rules, we must Save the Children" reaction is _exactly_ what the con-artists and sociopaths count on to get what they want.
And since the 1st ammendment doesn't apply to states (although it has been convuluted over the past 75 years or so to do so, due to the wording of the 14th ammendment), neither do it's protections in regard to public schools.
It's funny how the intents of the people who wrote the constitution, and the ammendments affect each other. The 14th ammendment (extending equal protection under the law) has effectively altered the 1st, due to the interpretations of it by the Supreme Court.
Possibly if one had any clue what the word amendment meant, or what the function of the Supreme Court is, one would be less mystified by this basic bits of governance. Surprise! Amendments are *supposed* to alter the Constitution, which includes previous amendments. Surprise! The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution and laws of the United States.
And since the 1st ammendment doesn't apply to states (although it has been convuluted over the past 75 years or so to do so, due to the wording of the 14th ammendment), neither do it's protections in regard to public schools.
It's funny how the intents of the people who wrote the constitution, and the ammendments affect each other. The 14th ammendment (extending equal protection under the law) has effectively altered the 1st, due to the interpretations of it by the Supreme Court.
Possibly if one had any clue what the word amendment meant, or what the function of the Supreme Court is, one would be less mystified by this basic bits of governance. Surprise! Amendments are *supposed* to alter the Constitution, which includes previous amendments. Surprise! The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution and laws of the United States.
Court cite? I'm assuming that you are claiming that you divorced your wife on grounds of adultery and the court accepted the adultery as true, not that you divorced your wife and the court accepted online emotional entanglements as alienation of affection or something.
Adultery is a pretty specific legal concept under US law; if you are claiming the above, I'm suspecting you aren't posting from the US; which country is it?
Re:Pressure and Oxygen
on
Space Diving
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1) Armstrong's Line - This is at an altitude of about 60,000 feet. At this level, the pressure is low enough to cause
water to boil (remember Boyle's Law in physics?). Everything in you would boil - your blood, your interstitial tissue
fluids, even the vitreous bodies (stuff inside your eyeballs). This is one reason why pressure suits are required at that
kind of altitude. If you egressed from a spacecraft above that level without a suit, you would go "Cook! Cook!
Cook!" (similar to Beavis' "Fire! Fire! Fire!"). After learning about Armstrong's Line way back, I have a different
take when I watch movies when people go into space without any pressurization.
Nope, this doesn't happen because you are actually wearing a quite remarkable pressure suit: your skin. What *will* happen if you try to hold your breath is that your lungs will blow out. But if you keep your mouth open and exhale, experiments in depressurization on animals (and on one human -- accident during NASA suit testing) you can expect to last thirty seconds to a minute, though you'll be unconscious quicker than that.
Um, I'm afraid you don't understand Vinge very much. Ever heard the phrase "Vingean Singularity"? Vinge doesn't believe in limitations for computers -- he develops artificial limits for his fiction *because* he doesn't believe there are limits. He thinks that in a relatively short period of time, that the acceleration curve of technology will go asymptotic, rising so steeply, in such extreme change that we will be unable to understand the world on the other side. In particular, he thinks that when computers begin to be able to design their own improvements is when this is most likely to happen.
Because the post-Singularity world is impossible to write about, he writes either the people who for some reason or another are isolated from the Singularity (his Bobble future) or a universe where there has been artificial limits imposed on computing power in areas of the galaxy (the Zones of the Deepness/Fire universe.) He sees the Singularity arriving as soon as 30 years from now, so it's not surprising that in the Zones universe computers are not that much advanced beyond today's.
I'm not sure how much I agree with Vinge on the Singularity concept, but saying 'he has not kept up with computer science and technology' is foolish, nto the least because he's a professor of computer science (distributed and embedded computer systems.)
Yeaaargh, it terrifies me that people are commenting on this thread with the complete lack of knowlege they are. First the repeating of oil company propaganda, now this. Pinatubo erupted Jun 1991.
I'm not sure which one you are referring to, since you seem to be pulling things out of the air instead of doing research on the web that is at your fingertips, but the largest historical explosion was Tambora in 1815. It's been blamed for an exceptionally cool year in the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, but those who argue that that year was more of a matter of perception -- the people keeping the most records were having a cool year and other regions were normal.
Oh well, I better get back to the flamage over my first person account. I wanted to avoid the usual "RMS came here and said what he always says article", but I guess it didn't come off well.
Nah, it came off fine and I liked it. Some people just seem to have their insecurities tweaked by RMS or anything in praise of him.
For those of you that don't know the water on the moon turned out to be astronaut urine from the Apollo missions urine dumps that had found its way to the surface of the moon.
I think most of us would like our slashdot without katz and were happier when we didn't have to see anything related to him.
Speak for yourself, not me. I have this strange ability to look at the front page, read the intro to a story by Katz or anyone else, and go on to the next summary if it fails to interest me. Sadly, some of the more braindamaged among the Slashdot readership cannot grasp this concept and are forced to click on the link and waste time posting empty rants.
The problem, though, is that most people don't want interactivity. They don't want Tim Berners-Lee's web, where ideas can be exchanged at the speed of light. They just want to go to joecartoon.com and get the latest Gerbil cartoon. Or they want to go to msnbc.com and get the latest news. Or go to ZDNet so they can feel "techno-hip". They don't want to come to Slashdot (please, flamers, refrain from comments regarding free-thinking and Slashdot, I've heard enough). They don't want to try new things, hear new ideas, or contribute their ideas. Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they're afraid. Maybe they're stupid. But to these people, the Intenet is TV over the phone-lines-- they don't care if the connection is two-way.
You know, this is the usual contempt that folks who think they are elite pour down on mundanes, but it's not true. AOLers and others love interactivity just as much as you. They may post to message boards to talk about their cats instead of code, they may join chat rooms to talk about their kids or look for virtual sex, but the ability to communicate with other people enchants them just as much as it does you. Climb down off the high horse.
There's nothing special here...
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Usenet Gag Order
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People seem to be getting terribly excited about HOW do they have JURISDICTION and all that. He has jurisdiction because the individual in question lives in his district. Under all the noise and slanted presentation (this appears to be put up by 'Two Boots' himself), it looks like a fairly standard restraining order with the twist that one of the areas he is restrained from is a newsgroup. It's just like if you threatened your ex-spouse and he/she got a restraining order. You might be banned from approaching their workplace, calling them -- many other forms of normally legal, constitutional behavior.
If 'Two Boots' wanted to move somewhere that didn't do reciprocal enforcement of restraint orders, he could start posting again. But he better not go back to Seattle, or the judge will throw his ass in jail. Just like if he was calling up his ex from afar.
And if the newsgroup war was spilling into meatspace stalking, as alleged, then the judge was quite right to do what he did.
When your in the lake of fire screaming for mercy, your going to wish you hadn't tossed around the name of the Almighty in such a nonchalant manner.
Ah, yes, this is why fundies amuse me so much. Whenever it comes down to it, it's always 'you'll regret not bowing down, because GOD WILL TORTURE YOU FOREVER! BWAHAHAHA!' Indeed, I'm sure that I could be made to crawl by pain; but so could I by any human torturer. I know my limits. But why would I worship someone because of their power to give pain? Why would I worship Pinochet's crew of torturers, or Charles Ng, or all the other mad and cruel ones? Power does not equal right; power does not equal good.
It's why I've never feared not believing; if the God that tortures for non-belief is true, he is not worthy of worship, and the only right path is not bow your head to madness, no matter the pain. And I've never understood why people who shout so loudly about the need for virtue worship darkness so fervently.
a) A better theater scene. Half a dozen repertory troupes, plus a pile of others. We have our own french theater, our own Shakespeare theater, etc etc etc.
That's *three* Shakespeare theaters. The Shakespeare Theater, Washington Shakespeare Company, and the Folger.
I'm thinking of taking a turn out on the West Coast for a couple of years, and that's definitely going to be the thing I miss, the sheer depth of culture. Yeah, SF has a great opera and there's some fine museums here and there, but nothing like the range you get in places like DC and New York.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as too small to attract the RIAA's attention. Ask any takeout place that ever got busted by the RIAA for playing the radio for customers.
I love the human race, truly I do.
The link above is just a brief summation, you can get the full story at:
r .h tml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_p
Since all our communication is verbal, there's nothing that can stand up in a courtroom.
Incorrect. You can, in fact, be bound to verbal contracts. It's just harder to prove.
Some of my early technical group postings are there, but my early recreational stuff on rec.arts.comics is all missing -- that group doesn't appear to be archived before 1989.
I also sent in a correction; Cantor & Seigel were the first commerical all groups spam, but not the first all groups spam, that occurred in Jan 1994 with Clarence Thomas IV, "Global Alert for All"
I can telnet out and ping, but no web. Which wouldn't be a problem except that lynx doesn't support https urls, so I can't log in to Yahoo. Grumble.
I'm not an engineer, but the dam breech scenario looks pretty ludicrous to me. It appears to think that the Missouri/Mississippi system is a symmetric valley from headwaters to delta, which is where you could get the wall of water effect. Instead the floodwaters would spread out, slowing them considerably even before you reach the next dam, and what of the surge survives is then faced with a giant lake, not a narrow channel. Basic hydrology says the wider the channel, the slower the flood and the less carrying capacity, and the only way it's going to take out the next dam is by having enough debris and speed to batter it down.
Where you get the really tragic dam breaks, like the Johnstown flood, is towns in narrow mountain valleys.
Dam breeches are definitely one of the most destructive potential terrorist acts, no question, but I don't see the cascading effect happening. If you blew Aswan High Dam, you might get the scenario, ten times the water and a symmetrical river valley with with only minor dams below it.
If you want to cause max destruction on the Mississippi, there's always the Control of Nature scenario -- drift a barge up to the face of the Old River Control Structure and blowing it, and watching the waters of the Mississippi pour into the Atchafalaya basin, drowning it and leaving New Orleans dry.
It's startled me, hearing about the structure the last couple of weeks, how much SimTower was clearly based on the WTC. The skylobbies, the express/local elevator system, the shopping mall, the multi-level underground, the subway stations down at the very bottom...
Laura
SOS is based in Utah, and we have different legal and cultural norms here. The first amendment (ratified by the same idiots who brought us the secon amendment) may prevail in the Federal courts, but that doesn't mean we enforce it to the same extent in the state courts.
The University of Utah is a public university, which means that the laws that apply to the state government apply to it. Utah, despite your touchingly naive belief, does not have an exemption from the 14th Amendment, which requires state governments to extend the same constitutional protections that the federal government does. Thus, the first amendment does apply here, and any Utah court which thinks it is a exception will find itself bitchslapped by the federal courts when the case moves into them.
And even if we did, it'd be irrelevant here. The first amendment exists to protect political speech, but SOS wasn't at all about political speech. It was about student life on campus, hardly the sort of important cultural discussion governments have historically suppressed and without which American democracy cannot exist..
The first amendment covers all forms of speech; the framers and the courts wisely recognized that attempts to limit to to 'important' speech would limit speech to that liked by those doing the defining.
What's more, the "speech" in question was mere anonymous insults: the lowest form of speech you can get (excluding pornography and flag burning, which aren't even speech).
This is a troll, surely? Street vs. New York (394US576, 1969), Texas vs. Johnson (491US397,1989): Flag burning is explicitly speech and protected under the 1st Amendment. "The government may not prohibit, the expression of an idea because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." Pornography is also covered by the 1st amendment; child pornography is not, and obscenity is not, but pornography != obscenity. Insults are also covered as long as they do not fall to the level of actual defamation (not covered.)
When the Founding Fathers broke away from England and enacted the bill of rights, they didn't intend for it to apply to this sort of situation. Heck, judging from their own passage of the "Alien and Sedition Act", they didn't even intend to protect actual political speech within their own time. And yet you come whining to slashdot to pretend that your own personal website, hosted with the bandwidth of a private university, is somehow more important?
Okay it *is* a troll, no one who knows the Alien and Sedition acts could be this dumb. For the rest of you: the Alien and Sedition acts lost the Federalists the next election, the acts were repealed under Jefferson, and the Supreme Court has smacked down any later attempts at the same thing. As above, University of Utah is *not* a private university, and thus is bound by the strictures of the Bill of Rights.
Dan, you need to learn to distinguish between personal discomfort and political outrage. The university is well within its rights (and upholding its duty to instill good moral character within its students) when they treat your site this way. And since you could get your site hosted for $30/mo at any number of non-Utah hosting companies, I have no sympathy for you.
...or possibly it's just someone with a personal axe to grind. While the usual 'freedom of the press goes to those who own them' may apply here, it also may not. Someone with a better constitutional law background than me can speculate on whether Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va. (515US819,837) would apply if the university gives similiar space to other 'publications'.
This is not about speech. This is not about freedom. This is just a student bitching about the "fascist administration". Nothing to see here; please move along.
Like other people, I have severe suspicions that there is More To This Story, but maybe the administrators are just as ignorant as this post, and this really *is* all the story.
Clear your mind and think. The "mother" could have been someone social engineering the name of a target they'd located in chat rooms. Yes, gasp, even a child. AOL doesn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts -- they do it because if they give your address to the murderous creep who has fixated on you, they'll pay through the nose. Both money and bad publicity.
This sort of knee-jerk "well, damn the rules, we must Save the Children" reaction is _exactly_ what the con-artists and sociopaths count on to get what they want.
And since the 1st ammendment doesn't apply to states (although it has been convuluted over the past 75 years or so to do so, due to the wording of the 14th ammendment), neither do it's protections in regard to public schools.
It's funny how the intents of the people who wrote the constitution, and the ammendments affect each other. The 14th ammendment (extending equal protection under the law) has effectively altered the 1st, due to the interpretations of it by the Supreme Court.
Possibly if one had any clue what the word amendment meant, or what the function of the Supreme Court is, one would be less mystified by this basic bits of governance. Surprise! Amendments are *supposed* to alter the Constitution, which includes previous amendments. Surprise! The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution and laws of the United States.
'Informative'? Sheeyah, right.
And since the 1st ammendment doesn't apply to states (although it has been convuluted over the past 75 years or so to do so, due to the wording of the 14th ammendment), neither do it's protections in regard to public schools.
It's funny how the intents of the people who wrote the constitution, and the ammendments affect each other. The 14th ammendment (extending equal protection under the law) has effectively altered the 1st, due to the interpretations of it by the Supreme Court.
Possibly if one had any clue what the word amendment meant, or what the function of the Supreme Court is, one would be less mystified by this basic bits of governance. Surprise! Amendments are *supposed* to alter the Constitution, which includes previous amendments. Surprise! The function of the Supreme Court is to interpret the constitution and laws of the United States.
Court cite? I'm assuming that you are claiming that you divorced your wife on grounds of adultery and the court accepted the adultery as true, not that you divorced your wife and the court accepted online emotional entanglements as alienation of affection or something.
Adultery is a pretty specific legal concept under US law; if you are claiming the above, I'm suspecting you aren't posting from the US; which country is it?
1) Armstrong's Line - This is at an altitude of about 60,000 feet. At this level, the pressure is low enough to cause water to boil (remember Boyle's Law in physics?). Everything in you would boil - your blood, your interstitial tissue fluids, even the vitreous bodies (stuff inside your eyeballs). This is one reason why pressure suits are required at that kind of altitude. If you egressed from a spacecraft above that level without a suit, you would go "Cook! Cook! Cook!" (similar to Beavis' "Fire! Fire! Fire!"). After learning about Armstrong's Line way back, I have a different take when I watch movies when people go into space without any pressurization.
r s/970603.html has a good summation of the situation.
Nope, this doesn't happen because you are actually wearing a quite remarkable pressure suit: your skin. What *will* happen if you try to hold your breath is that your lungs will blow out. But if you keep your mouth open and exhale, experiments in depressurization on animals (and on one human -- accident during NASA suit testing) you can expect to last thirty seconds to a minute, though you'll be unconscious quicker than that.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answe
Um, I'm afraid you don't understand Vinge very much. Ever heard the phrase "Vingean Singularity"? Vinge doesn't believe in limitations for computers -- he develops artificial limits for his fiction *because* he doesn't believe there are limits. He thinks that in a relatively short period of time, that the acceleration curve of technology will go asymptotic, rising so steeply, in such extreme change that we will be unable to understand the world on the other side. In particular, he thinks that when computers begin to be able to design their own improvements is when this is most likely to happen.
Because the post-Singularity world is impossible to write about, he writes either the people who for some reason or another are isolated from the Singularity (his Bobble future) or a universe where there has been artificial limits imposed on computing power in areas of the galaxy (the Zones of the Deepness/Fire universe.) He sees the Singularity arriving as soon as 30 years from now, so it's not surprising that in the Zones universe computers are not that much advanced beyond today's.
I'm not sure how much I agree with Vinge on the Singularity concept, but saying 'he has not kept up with computer science and technology' is foolish, nto the least because he's a professor of computer science (distributed and embedded computer systems.)
Yeaaargh, it terrifies me that people are commenting on this thread with the complete lack of knowlege they are. First the repeating of oil company propaganda, now this. Pinatubo erupted Jun 1991.
I'm not sure which one you are referring to, since you seem to be pulling things out of the air instead of doing research on the web that is at your fingertips, but the largest historical explosion was Tambora in 1815. It's been blamed for an exceptionally cool year in the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, but those who argue that that year was more of a matter of perception -- the people keeping the most records were having a cool year and other regions were normal.
Oh well, I better get back to the flamage over my first person account. I wanted to avoid the usual "RMS came here and said what he always says article", but I guess it didn't come off well.
Nah, it came off fine and I liked it. Some people just seem to have their insecurities tweaked by RMS or anything in praise of him.
Anyone have the text to repost? It's fallen off the page and the site has no archives from June or July.
Except it's not particularly clear that it *was* stolen, as opposed to sold out the back door.
Cite?
I think most of us would like our slashdot without katz and were happier when we didn't have to see anything related to him.
Speak for yourself, not me. I have this strange ability to look at the front page, read the intro to a story by Katz or anyone else, and go on to the next summary if it fails to interest me. Sadly, some of the more braindamaged among the Slashdot readership cannot grasp this concept and are forced to click on the link and waste time posting empty rants.
I recommend therapy.
The problem, though, is that most people don't want interactivity. They don't want Tim Berners-Lee's web, where ideas can be exchanged at the speed of light. They just want to go to joecartoon.com and get the latest Gerbil cartoon. Or they want to go to msnbc.com and get the latest news. Or go to ZDNet so they can feel "techno-hip". They don't want to come to Slashdot (please, flamers, refrain from comments regarding free-thinking and Slashdot, I've heard enough). They don't want to try new things, hear new ideas, or contribute their ideas. Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they're afraid. Maybe they're stupid. But to these people, the Intenet is TV over the phone-lines-- they don't care if the connection is two-way.
You know, this is the usual contempt that folks who think they are elite pour down on mundanes, but it's not true. AOLers and others love interactivity just as much as you. They may post to message boards to talk about their cats instead of code, they may join chat rooms to talk about their kids or look for virtual sex, but the ability to communicate with other people enchants them just as much as it does you. Climb down off the high horse.
People seem to be getting terribly excited about HOW do they have JURISDICTION and all that. He has jurisdiction because the individual in question lives in his district. Under all the noise and slanted presentation (this appears to be put up by 'Two Boots' himself), it looks like a fairly standard restraining order with the twist that one of the areas he is restrained from is a newsgroup. It's just like if you threatened your ex-spouse and he/she got a restraining order. You might be banned from approaching their workplace, calling them -- many other forms of normally legal, constitutional behavior.
If 'Two Boots' wanted to move somewhere that didn't do reciprocal enforcement of restraint orders, he could start posting again. But he better not go back to Seattle, or the judge will throw his ass in jail. Just like if he was calling up his ex from afar.
And if the newsgroup war was spilling into meatspace stalking, as alleged, then the judge was quite right to do what he did.
Laura
When your in the lake of fire screaming for mercy, your going to wish you hadn't tossed around the name of the Almighty in such a nonchalant manner.
Ah, yes, this is why fundies amuse me so much. Whenever it comes down to it, it's always 'you'll regret not bowing down, because GOD WILL TORTURE YOU FOREVER! BWAHAHAHA!' Indeed, I'm sure that I could be made to crawl by pain; but so could I by any human torturer. I know my limits. But why would I worship someone because of their power to give pain? Why would I worship Pinochet's crew of torturers, or Charles Ng, or all the other mad and cruel ones? Power does not equal right; power does not equal good.
It's why I've never feared not believing; if the God that tortures for non-belief is true, he is not worthy of worship, and the only right path is not bow your head to madness, no matter the pain. And I've never understood why people who shout so loudly about the need for virtue worship darkness so fervently.
Laura
That's *three* Shakespeare theaters. The Shakespeare Theater, Washington Shakespeare Company, and the Folger.
I'm thinking of taking a turn out on the West Coast for a couple of years, and that's definitely going to be the thing I miss, the sheer depth of culture. Yeah, SF has a great opera and there's some fine museums here and there, but nothing like the range you get in places like DC and New York.