While I am deeply afraid of censorship, I have to admit that as a parent it is almost impossible for me to argue against the v-chip.
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO SELF-RESTRAINT!?!?!?!
What ever happened to companies voluntarily declining to display material that was obviously offensive? Why are so many of the shows on cartoon network so vulgar? Why do we have shows like South Park that play off the corruption of children to create sick humor? What ever happened to those features that HBO would "only show after dark"????
What ever happened to the innocent commercialism of the 50's, where they tried to sell you fast food based on taste, not toys, gimmicks and "cool hip Kid's club"?!?
All of the above are unconscionable -- you can't tell me that vulgar, violent programs don't do harm to children (or adults for that matter) and yet all the available airwaves are used for them.
All the industry needed to do to avoid regulation was exercise self-restraint -- have a moral conscience. They chose not to, and now slashdot-heads are up in arms about how their "rights" (there is no natural right here) are being infringed by asking that people be WARNED before being shown content that violates all societal norms.
Look guys... I would think that most of the people reading this page would have heard by now the legal definition of monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. It is NOT the same as the common sense definition people keep arguing under.
A monopoly, in legal terms, is simply having enough market share that you can exercise a profound influence on the entire market. There have been succesful cases where the "monopoly" was only about 40% of total market share -- don't even try to tell me that Microsoft doesn't meet that definition!
Also, being a monopoly is perfectly legal! We have all kinds of monopolies, and they are completely legal! However, when you are a monopoly, there are certain things that you are not legally permitted to do. For example: you cannot use your monopoly power in one market to strong arm your way into other markets or engage in predatory pricing.
The question here is not whether Microsoft is a monopoly: it is obvious that within the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act they are (all this "we have competition" talk is just a pseudo-populist smoke screen). The question is whether they (a) used there monopoly in the OS market to get into the browser market and (b) engaged in predatory pricing in the browser market.
That's all -- did they do those things??? If they did, then they should be found at fault in this trial to the full extent of civil liability. That's the law, if you don't like it change it. But we don't have ex-post facto laws; they are still responsible for their actions prior to any change in the anti-trust laws.
FWIW, IMNSHO they are guilty as sin and should be brought to task for the above and for their deliberate attempts to subvert the american political system. I think these attempts border on sedition. But that's another question.
As I read this article, this device is basically an X-Terminal. Which just proves that X-Terminals are great devices that aren't used nearly often enough.
I used to run a 5000+ user UNIX environment, with over 500 X-terminals. Alone. By myself. With time to spare. The durn things never broke:)
The downside to X-terminals has been that they tend to have an up-front cost almost as high as a workstation. It could be that Sun Ray will fix this.
The arrogance that leads microsoft to claim that Linux is not a threat is the biggest thing that is going to kill them. Microsoft supposes that, because they have beaten one (weak) threat to their hegemony they can easily dimiss all new threats, including Linux.
Java was never really a threat to Windows -- noone who was very bright ever thought so. Furthermore, Java was (and is) a successful language! Just because we aren't all running Corell Office for Java doesn't change that.
As other's have pointed out, Linux is already enormously successful. And Microsoft can't change that. We are in a situation similar to the one Word was compared to WordPerfect in 1991. Windows is dominant, but we are hot on their tails. All it takes is for Microsoft to make ONE SLIP and we slide into dominance.
First, I don't think that this violates the first amendment. It seems to me that this is no more sinister than asking that a box containing poison be labeled with a Skull and Crossbones. If you choose to eat the poison, that's fine, it's your privilege. But I think it's absurd to talk about the labeling requirement violating freedom of speech.
To reiterate the analogy, I regard much of what comes out of our media outlets as moral poison. It teaches is to regard ourselves and our fellow women and men as no better than objects -- the plots degrade men and women with casuol sex and casual murder.
On the flip side, is there any point to this kind of law? I doubt it. Bluntly, I vote with my dollar. If a media network refuses to show some reasonable restraint in what they show, I REMOVE THAT NETWORK FROM MY HOME.
So, my cable service does not include networks such as Comedy Central, or even the Cartoon Network (do you really want kids to learn behaviour from cow & chicken or southpark?)
I realize that, by doing this I am sacrificing my "freedom" to watch these materials. SO WHAT?!?! I regard this whole "adult material" standard as ludicrous. If something is not healthy for my child to watch, then how on earth is it worth my time? I have better things to do (like read kernel source).
Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work for the net. Instead of 70 or 80 channels, I have millions of websites. None of the filter companies can keep up. So, I have to watch my son every second on the net. Why can't offensive web sites show some responsibility? Why will they not actively label themselves as to their content? I would settle for a standard <porn> tag. That's all I ask!
In a world where my son can legitimately find pornography while looking for the president's home page (www.whitehouse.com) -- that is, where pornography is deliberately disguised as legitimate information and resists all attempts to get them to label themselves -- how can I (even as a freedom lover) argue AGAINST mandatory labeling?
Are you an ISP? Exercise some diligence on the sites on your servers before the government has to!
Self evident because if you imply a multitude of god's then you have to ask what created them... Who was first, etc. etc. etc. Existence is the most improbable thing of all.
As for creationism: I am _not_ advocating that biblical creationism be taught in school. However, I am saying that it is idioitc to teach a bunch of dogmatic theories (namely darwinian evolution) simply to uphold a misguided view of science.
Note that in my post I specifically said that I am NOT a creationist.
One of the critical things that we must do is defend schools against such things as public prayer, religion, and especially creationism.
I sincerely hope that you are being sarcastic here. If you are, apply the remarks below to whomever moderated this post up!
First, let's look at the public prayer issue. The restriction on prayer in schools is absurd. When the government proposes to prohibit me from praying in a given place, it is establishing a religion: atheism. This is exactly the kind of thing the founding fathers were trying to prevent. Realize that prayer in public schools doesn't just prohibit teachers leading prayers: it often is interpreted to prohibit students from praying! Not from praying outloud, or leading prayers: simply from PRAYING. This is so unconstitutional that it's unbelievable. Even worse, it is a command to which Christians can respond only with civil disobedience.
As for creationism: notice that it's called the "theory of natural selection", the "THEORY of evlotuion". Do I need to explain the difference between scientific theory and scientific law to you?
You seem to be of the stripe that believes in total freedom to be anything but a Christian. That is, I am free to advocate pedophilia, but not free to advocate monogamy; free to advocate evolution but not the (self-evident) fact that God created the universe.
This is so hypocritical it is sickening. as it so happens, I personally do subscribe tyo neither natural selection nor creationism. I think that "divinely inspired evolution" is the most accurate. However, I strongly uphold the rights of those who beliefve in both creationism and natural selection to be heard in any and every forum. This is freedom.
You want freedom: great! I give it to you freely. But your freedom does not include:
Making my kids learn lies. (Your kids are your problem)
Keeping me from speaking my mind.
Restricting my freedom to indulge my religious conscience except in cases where it substantially and materially harms another human being. Note that emotional trauma caused by realizing that most people are pretty scummy doesn't count as material harm.
You Sir, appear to be a Damned Modern Liberal (no, in this context I'm not cursing -- the damned is literal). You have the freedom to initiate a witch-hunt against anyone who doesn't agree with your opinions. I am a classical Liberal. You have the freedom to say what you like. I have the freedom to call you an idiot. I am now doing so.
Normally, I avoid "woo-hoo!" kind of posts. However, I just can't help it.
Hahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahahahha ahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahha It's ahhahahahhah a SO hahahahahha a FUNNY!!! hhahahhahahaha hahahh ahha hah ha ha h
I notice here that you were involved in the creation of the nano-x project at some point. What is your opinion on the continued viability of X-Windows? Should the open source community be focusing on developing something better, or is X the best we can hope for?
Re:Gnome libs required: won't work on Red Hat 5.1
on
Mozilla M9 Released
·
· Score: 1
Those aren't GNOME libs -- they are just modern version of GTK!!!
Basically, it is because ELF shared libraries carry a complete symbol table in what is called "position independent code". What this means (as best I understand it and I am a bear of very little brain) is that each executable on a linux system uses the same copy of the share libraries.
Windows shared libraries are not position independent. This makes them (dramatically) smaller, but also forces an instance of the library for each application that uses it.
In other words, it's not a bug, it's a FEATURE! The libraries are bigger, but only so long as one and only one application is using it.
Of course, I may have totally mangled that. Anyone who's not a bear of very little brain care to comment?
For those of you who don't know, hercules was also probably the first company to officially support linux. Around 1994-5, I bought a herc card for the sole reason that the box included "linux" in the list of supported drivers.
The key phrase is "has not been transformed into profits". That is, we are not measuring productivity by actual production, but by how much money is produced.
In fairness to our friends in Redmond, I have to say that this really isn't there fault (although they don't help).
The bottom line is that the only value any commodity has is the amount of time and energy that a PERSON put's into it, directly or indirectly.
That is, the price of Gold (for example) should really be, and in the long term is, based on how much time and effort went into mining it and how much time and effort went into stealing the land from the indians and how much time and effort the indians would have to spend on lawyers (paid by the hour) to steal it back.
My point is simply this: increased productivity results in lower prices, which results in people having more junk, which results in higher production, which results in more productivity... That simple. So, as long as we measure productivity in terms of money, we are buying into a fallacy.
Witness the rise of "service" jobs which don't actually produce anything -- most notably lawyers.
Actually, I agree with you. I think that it is legitimate to attempt to discern God's methods.
However, I think blindly and dogmatically teaching a theory which makes little or no sense (i.e. speciation etc. purely through random mutations to useful traits) is pointless. My point is that natural selection is being defended not because most scientists think it's true (they don't) but because they are afraid of stepping back from this after they fought so hard against the creationists in the monkey trials.
Whether you like it or not, the numbers on natural selection just don't work out. Especially when you consider irreducibly complex systems like the mammalian eye or blood clotting. Seriosly, read that book. It's good.
Look... The special case of evolution known as "Darwinian Natural Selection" is far from proven. In fact, there is not even much evidence for it. What is the difference between "Darwinian Natural Selection" and basic evolutionary theory? Simply put, Darwinian Evolution asserts that all this happened and could happen by chance alone. Other evolutionary theories allow for the possibility of divine intervention.
This theory is scathingly reduxed from a scientific perspective in a book called "Darwin's Black Box". It is by a well known biologist and he pretty much proves (IMNSHO) that darwinian evolution is highly improbable from a scientific perspective.
The problem is that there has been a knee jerk reaction on both sides of this debate. The religionists (notice I do not say Christians) have come up with the absurd concept of Biblical literal innerancy to defend their position and the scientists continue to defend Darwinian evolution.
In both cases there is a knee-jerk reaction that extremists capitalize on. And in both cases there is a silent conspiracy among professionals in the field to keep from confusing the laity. That is, very few Preachers, even very conservative ones, really accept scriptural literal inerrancy in the way a laymen would understand it and very few biologists really, in their heart of hearts, believe in Darwinian selection.
In any case, I think the bottom line is this: God created the world, directly or indirectly. Whether he did it by rolling the dice or waving his magic wand is irrelevant. And I follow him because he is good. (Spare me counter-arguments to God's goodness based on shallow readings of the Old Testament -- I've studied this, deeply, for years and you're wasting your time).
However, I have a real problem with anybody being forced to teach something which might or might not be true. So, I am grateful that the Kansas school board is removing this requirement. Note that these requirements often extend even to parochial and home schoolers!!!
Of course, all this is even more irrelevant in the face of Christ, dead and resurrected to save me from the power that sin has held over my life. But that's another comment:)
The problem with the ACLU is that they don't limit themselves to Civil Liberties. The past 20 years or so, they have been far more interested in preserving "rights" which have no moral or legal basis (e.g. trying to keep student-initiated prayer out of public schools) than they have been in resisting the genuine enchroachments on Civil rights that are constantly going on (e.g. confiscation without due process, especially in hacker and drug cases, or the second ammendment).
Bottom line is that, rather than trying to hold the government accountable to the law as it stands, they are trying to push a genuinely pernicious social agenda. It's enough to make me sick.
The real solution is for the Internet community to wrest control from the territorial governments. The problem with both NSI and ICANN is that they are getting their power comes from an organization that simply does not understand the Internet.
I think we need an Internet government, elected by people "in the know" (maybe a vote based on % of inet traffic that goes through your network), with power to enforce standards on an internet wide basis. Enforcement could be done easily by blocking traffic from sites if they chose to be intransigent.
This government could easily setup new root servers and TLD's NOT under the control of NSI.
This is the only way we are going to deal with issues like spam, domain name shortage, etc. The US government will not do it for us.
The biggest problem I see is that any rational allication of votes is going te result in a lot of people I don't necessarily like having a lot of power... On the other hand, if we make it a real democracy then all the Windroids would dominate.
Lead is a serious poison, especially to anyone under the age of twelve.
And it doesn't require the children to lick it to pick up a bad dose. Basically, the big danger of lead is that it let's off lead dust constantly. This dust is then inhaled directly into your blood stream.
I speak as a father whose son has had high lead levels... It's not worth it, don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am deeply afraid of censorship, I have to admit that as a parent it is almost impossible for me to argue against the v-chip.
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO SELF-RESTRAINT!?!?!?!
What ever happened to companies voluntarily declining to display material that was obviously offensive? Why are so many of the shows on cartoon network so vulgar? Why do we have shows like South Park that play off the corruption of children to create sick humor? What ever happened to those features that HBO would "only show after dark"????
What ever happened to the innocent commercialism of the 50's, where they tried to sell you fast food based on taste, not toys, gimmicks and "cool hip Kid's club"?!?
All of the above are unconscionable -- you can't tell me that vulgar, violent programs don't do harm to children (or adults for that matter) and yet all the available airwaves are used for them.
All the industry needed to do to avoid regulation was exercise self-restraint -- have a moral conscience. They chose not to, and now slashdot-heads are up in arms about how their "rights" (there is no natural right here) are being infringed by asking that people be WARNED before being shown content that violates all societal norms.
I have no sympathy.
Look guys... I would think that most of the people reading this page would have heard by now the legal definition of monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. It is NOT the same as the common sense definition people keep arguing under.
A monopoly, in legal terms, is simply having enough market share that you can exercise a profound influence on the entire market. There have been succesful cases where the "monopoly" was only about 40% of total market share -- don't even try to tell me that Microsoft doesn't meet that definition!
Also, being a monopoly is perfectly legal! We have all kinds of monopolies, and they are completely legal! However, when you are a monopoly, there are certain things that you are not legally permitted to do. For example: you cannot use your monopoly power in one market to strong arm your way into other markets or engage in predatory pricing.
The question here is not whether Microsoft is a monopoly: it is obvious that within the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act they are (all this "we have competition" talk is just a pseudo-populist smoke screen). The question is whether they (a) used there monopoly in the OS market to get into the browser market and (b) engaged in predatory pricing in the browser market.
That's all -- did they do those things??? If they did, then they should be found at fault in this trial to the full extent of civil liability. That's the law, if you don't like it change it. But we don't have ex-post facto laws; they are still responsible for their actions prior to any change in the anti-trust laws.
FWIW, IMNSHO they are guilty as sin and should be brought to task for the above and for their deliberate attempts to subvert the american political system. I think these attempts border on sedition. But that's another question.
As I read this article, this device is basically an X-Terminal. Which just proves that X-Terminals are great devices that aren't used nearly often enough.
:)
I used to run a 5000+ user UNIX environment, with over 500 X-terminals. Alone. By myself. With time to spare. The durn things never broke
The downside to X-terminals has been that they tend to have an up-front cost almost as high as a workstation. It could be that Sun Ray will fix this.
The arrogance that leads microsoft to claim that Linux is not a threat is the biggest thing that is going to kill them. Microsoft supposes that, because they have beaten one (weak) threat to their hegemony they can easily dimiss all new threats, including Linux.
Java was never really a threat to Windows -- noone who was very bright ever thought so. Furthermore, Java was (and is) a successful language! Just because we aren't all running Corell Office for Java doesn't change that.
As other's have pointed out, Linux is already enormously successful. And Microsoft can't change that. We are in a situation similar to the one Word was compared to WordPerfect in 1991. Windows is dominant, but we are hot on their tails. All it takes is for Microsoft to make ONE SLIP and we slide into dominance.
To reiterate the analogy, I regard much of what comes out of our media outlets as moral poison. It teaches is to regard ourselves and our fellow women and men as no better than objects -- the plots degrade men and women with casuol sex and casual murder.
On the flip side, is there any point to this kind of law? I doubt it. Bluntly, I vote with my dollar. If a media network refuses to show some reasonable restraint in what they show, I REMOVE THAT NETWORK FROM MY HOME.
So, my cable service does not include networks such as Comedy Central, or even the Cartoon Network (do you really want kids to learn behaviour from cow & chicken or southpark?)
I realize that, by doing this I am sacrificing my "freedom" to watch these materials. SO WHAT?!?! I regard this whole "adult material" standard as ludicrous. If something is not healthy for my child to watch, then how on earth is it worth my time? I have better things to do (like read kernel source).
Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work for the net. Instead of 70 or 80 channels, I have millions of websites. None of the filter companies can keep up. So, I have to watch my son every second on the net. Why can't offensive web sites show some responsibility? Why will they not actively label themselves as to their content? I would settle for a standard <porn> tag. That's all I ask!
In a world where my son can legitimately find pornography while looking for the president's home page (www.whitehouse.com) -- that is, where pornography is deliberately disguised as legitimate information and resists all attempts to get them to label themselves -- how can I (even as a freedom lover) argue AGAINST mandatory labeling?
Are you an ISP? Exercise some diligence on the sites on your servers before the government has to!
Self evident because if you imply a multitude of god's then you have to ask what created them... Who was first, etc. etc. etc. Existence is the most improbable thing of all.
As for creationism: I am _not_ advocating that biblical creationism be taught in school. However, I am saying that it is idioitc to teach a bunch of dogmatic theories (namely darwinian evolution) simply to uphold a misguided view of science.
Note that in my post I specifically said that I am NOT a creationist.
Why are darwinists always so ignorant of science?
I sincerely hope that you are being sarcastic here. If you are, apply the remarks below to whomever moderated this post up!
First, let's look at the public prayer issue. The restriction on prayer in schools is absurd. When the government proposes to prohibit me from praying in a given place, it is establishing a religion: atheism. This is exactly the kind of thing the founding fathers were trying to prevent. Realize that prayer in public schools doesn't just prohibit teachers leading prayers: it often is interpreted to prohibit students from praying! Not from praying outloud, or leading prayers: simply from PRAYING. This is so unconstitutional that it's unbelievable. Even worse, it is a command to which Christians can respond only with civil disobedience.
As for creationism: notice that it's called the "theory of natural selection", the "THEORY of evlotuion". Do I need to explain the difference between scientific theory and scientific law to you?
You seem to be of the stripe that believes in total freedom to be anything but a Christian. That is, I am free to advocate pedophilia, but not free to advocate monogamy; free to advocate evolution but not the (self-evident) fact that God created the universe.
This is so hypocritical it is sickening. as it so happens, I personally do subscribe tyo neither natural selection nor creationism. I think that "divinely inspired evolution" is the most accurate. However, I strongly uphold the rights of those who beliefve in both creationism and natural selection to be heard in any and every forum. This is freedom.
You want freedom: great! I give it to you freely. But your freedom does not include:
- Making my kids learn lies. (Your kids are your problem)
- Keeping me from speaking my mind.
- Restricting my freedom to indulge my religious conscience except in cases where it substantially and materially harms another human being. Note that emotional trauma caused by realizing that most people are pretty scummy doesn't count as material harm.
You Sir, appear to be a Damned Modern Liberal (no, in this context I'm not cursing -- the damned is literal). You have the freedom to initiate a witch-hunt against anyone who doesn't agree with your opinions. I am a classical Liberal. You have the freedom to say what you like. I have the freedom to call you an idiot. I am now doing so.According to linux.com, Redhat has repudiated this story.
Sigh.
Normally, I avoid "woo-hoo!" kind of posts. However, I just can't help it.
a a
Hahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahahahh
ahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahh
It's ahhahahahhah a SO hahahahahha a FUNNY!!! hhahahhahahaha
hahahh
ahha
hah
ha
ha
h
I notice here that you were involved in the creation of the nano-x project at some point. What is your opinion on the continued viability of X-Windows? Should the open source community be focusing on developing something better, or is X the best we can hope for?
Those aren't GNOME libs -- they are just modern version of GTK!!!
Upgrade -- Redhat 5.1 is what: 18 months old now?
Basically, it is because ELF shared libraries carry a complete symbol table in what is called "position independent code". What this means (as best I understand it and I am a bear of very little brain) is that each executable on a linux system uses the same copy of the share libraries.
Windows shared libraries are not position independent. This makes them (dramatically) smaller, but also forces an instance of the library for each application that uses it.
In other words, it's not a bug, it's a FEATURE! The libraries are bigger, but only so long as one and only one application is using it.
Of course, I may have totally mangled that. Anyone who's not a bear of very little brain care to comment?
Amphigory
--
Cease striving and know the I [jehovah] am God.
-- Psalm 45:6
Now there is positive proof: too many dot-heads post without reading!
For those of you who don't know, hercules was also probably the first company to officially support linux. Around 1994-5, I bought a herc card for the sole reason that the box included "linux" in the list of supported drivers.
Good-bye hercules... You'll be missed.
Octo = 8 greek
Pus = corrupted pod = 1 greek
Correct plurals:
Octopoda
Octopuses
The key phrase is "has not been transformed into profits". That is, we are not measuring productivity by actual production, but by how much money is produced.
In fairness to our friends in Redmond, I have to say that this really isn't there fault (although they don't help).
The bottom line is that the only value any commodity has is the amount of time and energy that a PERSON put's into it, directly or indirectly.
That is, the price of Gold (for example) should really be, and in the long term is, based on how much time and effort went into mining it and how much time and effort went into stealing the land from the indians and how much time and effort the indians would have to spend on lawyers (paid by the hour) to steal it back.
My point is simply this: increased productivity results in lower prices, which results in people having more junk, which results in higher production, which results in more productivity... That simple. So, as long as we measure productivity in terms of money, we are buying into a fallacy.
Witness the rise of "service" jobs which don't actually produce anything -- most notably lawyers.
I think I'm rambling now, but you get my point.
Actually, I agree with you. I think that it is legitimate to attempt to discern God's methods.
However, I think blindly and dogmatically teaching a theory which makes little or no sense (i.e. speciation etc. purely through random mutations to useful traits) is pointless. My point is that natural selection is being defended not because most scientists think it's true (they don't) but because they are afraid of stepping back from this after they fought so hard against the creationists in the monkey trials.
Whether you like it or not, the numbers on natural selection just don't work out. Especially when you consider irreducibly complex systems like the mammalian eye or blood clotting. Seriosly, read that book. It's good.
Look... The special case of evolution known as "Darwinian Natural Selection" is far from proven. In fact, there is not even much evidence for it. What is the difference between "Darwinian Natural Selection" and basic evolutionary theory? Simply put, Darwinian Evolution asserts that all this happened and could happen by chance alone. Other evolutionary theories allow for the possibility of divine intervention.
:)
This theory is scathingly reduxed from a scientific perspective in a book called "Darwin's Black Box". It is by a well known biologist and he pretty much proves (IMNSHO) that darwinian evolution is highly improbable from a scientific perspective.
The problem is that there has been a knee jerk reaction on both sides of this debate. The religionists (notice I do not say Christians) have come up with the absurd concept of Biblical literal innerancy to defend their position and the scientists continue to defend Darwinian evolution.
In both cases there is a knee-jerk reaction that extremists capitalize on. And in both cases there is a silent conspiracy among professionals in the field to keep from confusing the laity. That is, very few Preachers, even very conservative ones, really accept scriptural literal inerrancy in the way a laymen would understand it and very few biologists really, in their heart of hearts, believe in Darwinian selection.
In any case, I think the bottom line is this: God created the world, directly or indirectly. Whether he did it by rolling the dice or waving his magic wand is irrelevant. And I follow him because he is good. (Spare me counter-arguments to God's goodness based on shallow readings of the Old Testament -- I've studied this, deeply, for years and you're wasting your time).
However, I have a real problem with anybody being forced to teach something which might or might not be true. So, I am grateful that the Kansas school board is removing this requirement. Note that these requirements often extend even to parochial and home schoolers!!!
Of course, all this is even more irrelevant in the face of Christ, dead and resurrected to save me from the power that sin has held over my life. But that's another comment
The problem with the ACLU is that they don't limit themselves to Civil Liberties. The past 20 years or so, they have been far more interested in preserving "rights" which have no moral or legal basis (e.g. trying to keep student-initiated prayer out of public schools) than they have been in resisting the genuine enchroachments on Civil rights that are constantly going on (e.g. confiscation without due process, especially in hacker and drug cases, or the second ammendment).
Bottom line is that, rather than trying to hold the government accountable to the law as it stands, they are trying to push a genuinely pernicious social agenda. It's enough to make me sick.
On the VB type app... Take a look at VDK Builder. This packoge has gotten ridiculous[ly little attention - it's really quite good.
They've been on the net since BEFORE the web. I first ordered from them using a telnet client!
They have everything, and they don't give me a bunch of grief like crapazon.
Look... /Nobody/ looks like a fashion model anymore anyway -- not even the fashion models. See one in real life sometime; you're in for a shock.
I don't see that there's any difference between a human faked up and a tatal fake.
Just give him some Prozac. Get rid of all those anti-social tendencies and make your little geek-boy into a little girl!
The government will even pay for it! What more do you want?
The real solution is for the Internet community to wrest control from the territorial governments. The problem with both NSI and ICANN is that they are getting their power comes from an organization that simply does not understand the Internet.
I think we need an Internet government, elected by people "in the know" (maybe a vote based on % of inet traffic that goes through your network), with power to enforce standards on an internet wide basis. Enforcement could be done easily by blocking traffic from sites if they chose to be intransigent.
This government could easily setup new root servers and TLD's NOT under the control of NSI.
This is the only way we are going to deal with issues like spam, domain name shortage, etc. The US government will not do it for us.
The biggest problem I see is that any rational allication of votes is going te result in a lot of people I don't necessarily like having a lot of power... On the other hand, if we make it a real democracy then all the Windroids would dominate.
My opinion...
Patrick
Lead is a serious poison, especially to anyone under the age of twelve.
And it doesn't require the children to lick it to pick up a bad dose. Basically, the big danger of lead is that it let's off lead dust constantly. This dust is then inhaled directly into your blood stream.
I speak as a father whose son has had high lead levels... It's not worth it, don't use it.