'm in the UK and have never heard of a nationwide content filter - but maybe you're thinking of the BT child-porn block which I believe was on/. a while ago - and they are only one ISP.
You've never heard of the Great Firewall of China?
What I don't understand is why this is a big deal.
It isn't a big deal. Instead of "Mars Rovers Have Incorrect Instruments Installed", a better headline would have been "Mars Rover Data Analyzed With Incorrect Calibration Data Files". But the editors would have rejected a headline like that.
It's true that the swap occurred when the instruments were installed. But it's really just a matter of semantics whether you consider the instruments to be swapped in the rovers on Mars, or their calibration files to be swapped in a computer's filesystem on Earth. Once the swap is discovered, it's over.
RTFA. NASA swapped the instruments inadvertently but since both the rovers and the detectors are manufactured identically the only consequence was that we were using the calibration data file from one instrument to analyze the data coming from the other. Swap the calibration files so they are coupled to the correct instruments again, reanalyze the raw data, and the problem is solved without having to privatize NASA.
How can i possibly advocate for a mars mission when they can't even get this shit right?
The Mars mission is stupid but not for the reason you give.
"Hi, I'm Dr. Adams, and welcome to the Planet Arium." "I thought this was the planetarium." "It is, I have a bone disease that prevents me from saying the 't' in Planet Arium."
Interesting - the whole "copy and remove space" idea is something you see all over the place as an anti-harvesting technique for email addresses (like slashdot employs). Now spammers themselves are using anti-spam measures from within their spam to combat spam filters....
This is an old technique. Haven't you ever gotten email about "V1a gra"?
I received the following chain letter recently:
> IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT! > KEEP IT GOING!!!!
> 200 8 Election Issue!! > > GET A BILL STARTED TO PLACE ALL POLITICIANS ON SOC. SEC. > This must be an issue in "200 8 ". Please! Keep it going. [remaining BS deleted. Snopes has an identical version with "2004" (no space) if you're really interested.]
So it looks like something somewhere is looking for the string "2008", because chain letters are adapting themselves to it.
There is only one government i the US that can operate at a loss - the federal one. Every other government in the country must balance their budget every year.
You're talking about something else. I was referring to specific operations, not the entire budget. City and state governments operate all kids of unprofitable things as a necessity, like health insurance programs for the poor, etc. Many of them would get shut down if they had to show a profit every year. In fact the ones that do report a profit are quickly adjusted- for example they'll either reduce the city bus fares or the budget allocated for operating bus service.
In reverse, I would occasionally be coming out of a building and someone would ask me to hold the door because they had forgotten their pass - it would really piss them off when refused to let them in and said if they waited outside I would fetch a team leader or manager for them!
I once did some work at a defense contractor site. Those guys don't need Kevin Mitnick- they have this problem nailed. I had an escort badge, which meant that my escort would walk with me down the hall to the men's room and wait outside every time I needed to take a piss.
But just remember this. the more government pulls revenue and capitol AWAY from it's citizen, the more dependent they become for said services. IE, you get a corrupt form of socialism at it's most in inefficient form.
Only if you extend this argument all the way to a ridiculous conclusion- by having a public sector in American life at all we turn into socialists. This is a good example of the Slippery Slope fallacy.
...because after all, Galileo didn't get along without government assistance! (he had to teach the wrong theory of the time that the Earth was the center of the universe, not what he found to be the truth)
Your argument seems to be that government cannot do a good job of supporting research because the midieval Church did such a bad job with Galileo. There is certainly a lesson to be learned from that episode- the government should not interfere with scientific research. Going further with that- to say that the government should not even fund it to avoid having undue influence over it- seems silly. Especially when research funded by private organizations is so heavily influenced.
law enforcement... military defense Try Blackwater Security.
Mercenaries are no substitutes for real cops. They're not held to the same legal standards as state actors.
But you agree that the real issue here isn't that the wi-fi is public, so much as it is free when someone else would like to charge for access.
Yes, it's skewed and oversimplified. I needed to set up my subtle joke about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Too subtle unfortunately.
But even if you're the guy who the cops thought could launch cruise missiles by whistling into a phone, it's hard enough to stay on top of all this crap when you're, say, not forbidden by a judge to go near a computer for several years. And he got into trouble in the first place at least partly by social engineering. Which is an area of computer security that nobody thinks about- an obvious, accessible market for someone like him. So it isn't surprising that he's taking that approach. I'd do it too if I were in his situation.
Isn't this what (ex)hackers have been telling the IT industry all along?
As old hackers while away the years (in jail) the industry moves on, which means their skills become dated and they lose all their technical expertise that got them in so much trouble in the first place. So they move on to pretending that all you need to do is act nice and con the receptionist or some fool on the other end of a phone. That route of attack is not as affected by one's weathering technical skills.
Ring ring Hello, this is Bill. Bill, hi, this is "Steve". I'm stuck outside the building- this stupid thing won't let me in. Could you read me our private key real quick? OK, it's A244C7735ABBFC01... hey, how do I know you're really Steve!
Most satellite and cable TV companies operate at a loss. What makes you think the government could do any better?
What are you talking about? Governments are great at running at a loss, simply because they can do it. They don't have to report profits to stockholders. Some things in life cannot be provided by private industry (or simply are not provided) simply because they are immensely unprofitable- like basic scientific research, space exploration (not involving suborbital millionaire tourists), law enforcement, development of open protocols like TCP/IP, military defense, and providing health insurance that doesn't leave you filing for bankruptcy if you get sick.
You must be the only person on Slashdot that does not think there is enough "government" and taxes in this country as it is. I _really_ don't need the government taking even more of my money because they think they are better at spending it then I am.
You're allowing a blanket ideology to cloud your judgment of what is reasonable and what isn't. Running an access point is cheap.
that every link I make is a contribution to a campaign? Where can you honestly draw the line?
Remember, the entire story here consists of some offhand remarks being put forward by Brad Smith, the Republican chair of the FEC, to a CNET reporter. And he is well known not to be a fan of McCain-Feingold, so a Chicken-Little scenario (they'll outlaw political speech on the Internet!) is only to be expected from such a person. But the idea that links will become illegal, like in the 2600 deCSS case, hasn't been substantiated at all. The rules for the Internet could merely turn out to be that bloggers receiving regular paychecks from candidates (as several blogs did in 2004) have to disclose the existence of those paychecks in their blogs (which they didn't).
You can argue whether even this sort of restriction on political speech infringes on the First Amendment. I happen to think it comes very close- but a blog that's on a candidate's payroll is taking part in speech that is partly commercial.
I do this all the time. Before I buy anything electronic, for example, I type its model number or maker's name into Google and search site:slashdot.org to find out why it sucks.
Reminds me of a radio interview I once heard with the Google founders. The host was curious about what the "I'm feeling lucky!" button was about. She claimed she typed in "Google" into the search box and clicked "I'm feeling lucky!", and nothing happened, so it didn't work!
I must thank you for the most trivial and straightforward 5, Informative I've ever gotten. It's the hardest kind of 5 to get. This particular story really rewards people who RTFA. In fact, it seems that everyone who RTFA is getting a 5, Informative out of this thanks to you. This story is like a cornucopia of 5, Informatives available for the taking to those who've RTFA. And we can tell right away who among us posts without RTFA! At least your story wasn't a dupe. The dupe will appear any day now.
Yes, I live in Virginia and have been following the case closely. If you scroll down several posts below this one you'll see I also posted this.
Your post is currently at -1, like all your recent posts. What did you do? Capitalize too much?
THE SISTER WAS WRONGLY ACCUSED. The brother was the spammer here. He used his sisters credit card to purchase stuff over the internet to fund his spam business. Due to it being in her name she got dragged into the case by an overzealous prosecutor. The judge CORRECTLY fixed this error on the jury's part. THE SPAMMER IN THIS CASE WENT TO JAIL(the bother) I wish the friggin posters would RTFA sometimes...
A quick search using Google News makes me think you're right... the judge cited that the only case against the sister was the three credit card transactions with her name on them. And siblings are known for committing ID theft- what can you really do to your brother or sister? Other than kick his ass, but so what?
Just one more reason why you don't want people stealing your identity.
From the linked article that nobody seems to have read:
Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.
Seems to me we are not given enough information in this article to assess what the issue was in the specific conviction that was overturned. And I'm personally not familiar with the case. Does anyone know what the situation with the sister was? Did she merely live in the same house as a spammer?
Based on the article, she could have merely been in charge of canceling his magazine subscriptions. The article just indicates that the judge claimed the jury was confused in her case.
And I found an error in the story submission too:
Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Convictions - Why is this last word plural?
Even the story submitters don't RTFA!
The linked story indicates no more than one overturned conviction, that of the sister. A third guy seems to have been involved but there is no mention of his being convicted, hence no overturned conviction.
It's probably unchanged from what it was before, and would be equivalent to the sum of the rates of all the equilibrium O3 -> O2 reactions (the ones mediated by O* and NO). Except for the occasional magnetic storm, this was a steady-state system before Cl* was introduced. The Cl* reactions have a rate three orders of magnitude faster than O*, and are tempered mostly by the relative rarity of Cl* in the atmosphere despite our best efforts. The introduction of an effective catalyst for O3 -> O2 reactions will push the equilibrium [O3]/[O2] ratio down.
> That's the governing rate that determines reactant to product ratios.
No it isn't, since the limiting reagent in this case is O3, not O2! (When you put gas in your car, for example, the gasoline is the limiting reagent. You don't add up all the O2 in the atmosphere to figure out how many miles you can go.) O3 exists in trace amounts. The ozone layer would only be a few cm thick if it were 100% concentrated and as dense as sea level air. If all the O3 in the world turns to O2, the rate of the O2 -> O3 reactions won't show a measurable increase at all, since O2 is already plentiful.
Unless of course, they speed up because of the additional UV at sea level. But that will produce tropospheric O3 which we don't want, and we'd all be sunburned by then already.
As a coauthor of that paper, I must agree that the press release was dumbed down quite a bit. Unfortunately, it has to be that way in order to get any widespread attention by the media. So be it.
These press releases are always indecipherable. Which is frustrating, because we're not all scientifically dumb and some of us would like to know what's going on. You also have to be very careful when writing a press release on a topic like this. Soon we'll be hearing over and over how CFCs have been vindicated, all ozone loss was the sun's fault all this time, etc. Although I don't know how you'd really be able to prevent that in this case. There are just too many people who are eager to misinterpret what you're saying. Maybe as the authors of this paper you could put up a page somewhere debunking the misinformation that people will spread about it, so we don't go blue in the face explaining ozone chemistry to people.
The problem I have with the/. article here is that the submitter tries to tie the changes at high altitude seen last year to the current problem over northern Europe which is caused by the formation of a significant ozone hole over the Arctic. These are completely different phenomena and unrelated.
That's not the impression I got from RTFA:
Charged particles from the storms triggered chemical reactions that increased the formation of extra nitrogen in the upper stratosphere, some 20 miles up. Nitrogen levels climbed to their highest in at least two decades.
A massive low-pressure system that confines air over the Arctic then conspired to deplete ozone. Upper-atmosphere winds associated with the system, called the polar stratospheric vortex, sped up in February and March of 2004 to the fastest speeds ever recorded, the new study found. The spinning vortex allowed nitrogen gas to sink from the high stratosphere, some 20 miles up, to lower altitudes. The nitrogen gas is known to destroy ozone.
My understanding would normally be that the Arctic hole was related to the formation of ice crystals conducive to ozone breakdown via chlorine. And what changed at high altitudes was increased NO generation. But the article then implies the NO got into the stratosphere via normal weather patterns over the Arctic. (This doesn't necessarily involve the hole, although both things are happening in the same place.) Did I decipher this incorrectly?
Depending upon how old you are and how quickly methane increases over the next few decades, you will probably live to see ozone recover to very near its historical norm.
The point I wanted to make was that the solar effects from NO production will have a shorter half-life than the chlorine effects, which you might see go down "depending on how old you are". With chlorine we have to wait for a reserve of stable atmospheric CFC to decay via chlorine to HCl. I may have Googled up the wrong half life for that process.
and this is the normal "sink" reaction, which removes the ozone-producing O* radicals from circulation:
O* + O* -> O2 (Another normal "sink" is O* + O3 -> 2O2.)
Normally both the "source" and "sink" reactions are happening at once, so that the concentrations of O3 relative to O2 are at an equilibrium- as much ozone is being produced as destroyed at any given moment.
Cl* is a chlorine radical formed when CFCs break down under intense UV. The chlorine reactions happen at the surface of certain types of ice crystals that form at -80 degrees C. That's where we get the "ozone holes" from.
The overall reaction is an efficient ozone sink, with a rate of reaction 1500 times greater than the one with O*. This pushes the O3/O2 equilibrium downward. More ozone is continually being produced by sunlight hitting O2, but since the O3 is disappearing faster, the result is a much lower concentration of O3 relative to O2 than if no Cl* were present.
This article is so dumbed down as to be worthless. It blames "nitrogen gas", which is a load of crap. This story is about nitric oxide (NO) catalysis. This is a well known phenomenon. In addition to chlorine and nitric oxide, fluorine and bromine can also catalyze the breakdown of ozone. This is how nitrogen oxide breaks down ozone:
NO + O3 -> NO2 + O2 O2 + UV(180-240nm) -> O* + O* NO2 + O* -> NO + O2 (as opposed to O* + O2 -> O3 which would regenerate the ozone)
Similar reactions happen in reverse near the ground in cities, where the NO2 that emerges from tailpipes results in ground-level ozone.
Normally there's much more NO than chlorine in the stratosphere, although the chlorine reactions are more efficient. Weather patterns above the poles have always brought a steady stream of NO down from the ionosphere to the stratosphere since the beginning of time. In other words the historic, preindustrial "normal" equilibrium concentration of ozone already accounts for what the sun does in a normal solar year. The solar storms of 2003 created an abnormal surge of NO, so we saw ozone drop markedly in spring 2004 relative to 2003. But 2003 levels were already depressed, and we had normal NO levels then.
NO and chlorine are both gradually cleared from the stratosphere by formation of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid respectively. So the supplies of these harmful catalysts have to be regenerated, either by the sun or us. But NO turns to nitric acid after only a couple days. A CFC molecule survives an average of 100 years before degrading to elemental chlorine (destroying ozone) and then HCl. Drops in ozone levels from solar activity can be expected to be transient, lasting a year or two at most. Drops in ozone levels from CFCs are essentially permanent for the rest of our lives. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking all our problems are the sun's fault.
You prove how arrogant you are by citing grammar and other nonsense when the meaning of the passage is clear.
But I have to cite your "grammar and other nonsense"! You keep posting as an AC, so there's no other way to identify you!
You would have not let Dred Scott have his day in court because "The dumb nigger wasn't educated enough to speak proper English and read."
Eh? Dred Scott? Why don't you just tell people you're talking about outlawing abortion, instead of introducing this code word stuff about slavery and Dred Scott? It's fundamentally dishonest. Hasn't Dred Scott been through enough? Can't the man rest in peace without his former slaveowners digging him up to use as a political cudgel? If you want to outlaw abortion, just be honest and say so. Leave Mr. Scott out of it.
This part is hilarious:
Your reasoning is sad. You are a failed ad-hominem based attacker with little ability to debate. You are a communist who loves bureaucracy against those who expose your fundamentally flawed thinking. Keep speaking. Your own words are a testament to your failure. You own words make it transparent as to the nature of your flawed thinking.
I might say that "you are a failed ad hominem based attacker with little ability to debate", but that would be an ad hominem attack, wouldn't it?
As a "communist" with flawed thinking who denies standing to escaped slaves who are really being used as props in a dishonest argument about abortion, I have to say, although this has been fun, you should really calm down. I've clearly gotten you mad as hell and raised your blood pressure, and stress isn't good for your health! Maybe you should sit back, relax, light a cigarette, and seek a less demanding forum than Slashdot.
1) Are you saying that punch-style ballots and machinery is superior to electronic equipment?
I would agree with this, with one caveat- by "electronic equipment" you mean Diebold's insecure crap.
But why is electronic equipment automatically considered by everyone to be superior to punch cards? Punch cards have one disadvantage- they're slow to count- which makes for bad TV on election night. Other than that, what's the real problem with them? Hanging chads? At least they hang both ways. They degrade precision, not accuracy, by introducing small, random, nonpartisan error. Everyone notices that sort of error in a tie, but ties are rare. Snafus with electronic voting machines degrade accuracy instead of precision, by introducing a systematic error that favors one candidate over another. A machine in a partisan neighborhood can do this just by crashing or otherwise losing the votes tallied that day. The election doesn't even have to be a near-tie to get screwed up by a loss of accuracy. The precision on electronic machines is obviously perfect. They give you an answer right down to a single vote. But precision is not accuracy.
2) Are you suggesting that since the machines haven't failed or malfunctioned to date, that this is no safeguard that they won't?
That would be an absolutely reasonable statement. It's one of the most reasonable things you've said today. You don't agree with it? It applies to anything before it fails the first time.
im gladbush won, then i wont have kerry taking my guns and raising taxes even more. You claim and feign poor interface when the vote doesn't go your way. All you people strive for is egalitarian fascism/communism with the exception for the "think for you" "armchair experts on everything" politicians like Kerry. As long as everyone gets fucked equally you are happy. YOU will not take my guns. YOU will not take my rights. YOU will never succeed in breaking the back of "redneck" America with your vile disparaging hypocrisy. Give me non-authoritarian centrist Libertarianism, or give me a break. You fools that shill for the Democrats and somewhat the GOP are a joke. HAHAHAHA. you insinuate the deibold machines got it wrong, when the properly reflected the will of the people and WE WON, and you communists lost. BWAHAHAHHAHA!
You're the same AC who claimed upthread that anyone who uses the term "public interest" is a Communist. Your spelling and grammar gives you away. Why don't you just post under a username, so we can tell who we're talking to without having to rely on your spelling errors? Defend your beliefs like a man.
That's some castration complex you've got going on there with the guns, by the way. I don't know what sissy sidearms you're packing but I personally couldn't care less about them.
Funny, Deibold seems to get the money I order out of the ATM rights *EVERY TIME* and I've never had a problem with my bank balance - *EVER*.
So you never had a problem with your piddly little bank balance. This is relevant how? I know a mechanic who lives up the street and fixes my car's water pump and AC all the time. He never screws up, so I'm letting him install a stint in my aorta next week.
Banks insist on proper security features from Diebold. After all, with an ATM, money is involved. If our election commissioners were as demanding as banks, Diebold's voting machines would print the same internal paper receipt that is produced internally by their ATM machines. Diebold saves some money by not including those things. Not only does the printer cost money, it means you have to be able to reconcile the paper receipt with the audit log in the Microsoft Access.mdb file! That costs real money, especially when you're relying on election workers to fix problems in the back end by directly editing the audit log.
Slashdot Mirror
'm in the UK and have never heard of a nationwide content filter - but maybe you're thinking of the BT child-porn block which I believe was on /. a while ago - and they are only one ISP.
You've never heard of the Great Firewall of China?
Actually the fault also lies with Slashcode. Accurate headlines take too many characters when the form only allows 50.
What I don't understand is why this is a big deal.
It isn't a big deal. Instead of "Mars Rovers Have Incorrect Instruments Installed", a better headline would have been "Mars Rover Data Analyzed With Incorrect Calibration Data Files". But the editors would have rejected a headline like that.
It's true that the swap occurred when the instruments were installed. But it's really just a matter of semantics whether you consider the instruments to be swapped in the rovers on Mars, or their calibration files to be swapped in a computer's filesystem on Earth. Once the swap is discovered, it's over.
RTFA. NASA swapped the instruments inadvertently but since both the rovers and the detectors are manufactured identically the only consequence was that we were using the calibration data file from one instrument to analyze the data coming from the other. Swap the calibration files so they are coupled to the correct instruments again, reanalyze the raw data, and the problem is solved without having to privatize NASA.
How can i possibly advocate for a mars mission when they can't even get this shit right?
The Mars mission is stupid but not for the reason you give.
"Hi, I'm Dr. Adams, and welcome to the Planet Arium."
"I thought this was the planetarium."
"It is, I have a bone disease that prevents me from saying the 't' in Planet Arium."
Interesting - the whole "copy and remove space" idea is something you see all over the place as an anti-harvesting technique for email addresses (like slashdot employs). Now spammers themselves are using anti-spam measures from within their spam to combat spam filters....
This is an old technique. Haven't you ever gotten email about "V1a gra"?
I received the following chain letter recently:
> IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT!
> KEEP IT GOING!!!!
> 200 8 Election Issue!!
>
> GET A BILL STARTED TO PLACE ALL POLITICIANS ON SOC. SEC.
> This must be an issue in "200 8 ". Please! Keep it going.
[remaining BS deleted. Snopes has an identical version with "2004" (no space) if you're really interested.]
So it looks like something somewhere is looking for the string "2008", because chain letters are adapting themselves to it.
There is only one government i the US that can operate at a loss - the federal one. Every other government in the country must balance their budget every year.
You're talking about something else. I was referring to specific operations, not the entire budget. City and state governments operate all kids of unprofitable things as a necessity, like health insurance programs for the poor, etc. Many of them would get shut down if they had to show a profit every year. In fact the ones that do report a profit are quickly adjusted- for example they'll either reduce the city bus fares or the budget allocated for operating bus service.
In reverse, I would occasionally be coming out of a building and someone would ask me to hold the door because they had forgotten their pass - it would really piss them off when refused to let them in and said if they waited outside I would fetch a team leader or manager for them!
I once did some work at a defense contractor site. Those guys don't need Kevin Mitnick- they have this problem nailed. I had an escort badge, which meant that my escort would walk with me down the hall to the men's room and wait outside every time I needed to take a piss.
But just remember this. the more government pulls revenue and capitol AWAY from it's citizen, the more dependent they become for said services. IE, you get a corrupt form of socialism at it's most in inefficient form.
Only if you extend this argument all the way to a ridiculous conclusion- by having a public sector in American life at all we turn into socialists.
This is a good example of the Slippery Slope fallacy.
...because after all, Galileo didn't get along without government assistance! (he had to teach the wrong theory of the time that the Earth was the center of the universe, not what he found to be the truth)
Your argument seems to be that government cannot do a good job of supporting research because the midieval Church did such a bad job with Galileo. There is certainly a lesson to be learned from that episode- the government should not interfere with scientific research. Going further with that- to say that the government should not even fund it to avoid having undue influence over it- seems silly. Especially when research funded by private organizations is so heavily influenced.
law enforcement... military defense
Try Blackwater Security.
Mercenaries are no substitutes for real cops. They're not held to the same legal standards as state actors.
But you agree that the real issue here isn't that the wi-fi is public, so much as it is free when someone else would like to charge for access.
Yes, it's skewed and oversimplified. I needed to set up my subtle joke about Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Too subtle unfortunately.
But even if you're the guy who the cops thought could launch cruise missiles by whistling into a phone, it's hard enough to stay on top of all this crap when you're, say, not forbidden by a judge to go near a computer for several years. And he got into trouble in the first place at least partly by social engineering. Which is an area of computer security that nobody thinks about- an obvious, accessible market for someone like him. So it isn't surprising that he's taking that approach. I'd do it too if I were in his situation.
Isn't this what (ex)hackers have been telling the IT industry all along?
As old hackers while away the years (in jail) the industry moves on, which means their skills become dated and they lose all their technical expertise that got them in so much trouble in the first place. So they move on to pretending that all you need to do is act nice and con the receptionist or some fool on the other end of a phone. That route of attack is not as affected by one's weathering technical skills.
Ring ring
Hello, this is Bill.
Bill, hi, this is "Steve". I'm stuck outside the building- this stupid thing won't let me in. Could you read me our private key real quick?
OK, it's A244C7735ABBFC01... hey, how do I know you're really Steve!
Most satellite and cable TV companies operate at a loss. What makes you think the government could do any better?
What are you talking about? Governments are great at running at a loss, simply because they can do it. They don't have to report profits to stockholders. Some things in life cannot be provided by private industry (or simply are not provided) simply because they are immensely unprofitable- like basic scientific research, space exploration (not involving suborbital millionaire tourists), law enforcement, development of open protocols like TCP/IP, military defense, and providing health insurance that doesn't leave you filing for bankruptcy if you get sick.
You must be the only person on Slashdot that does not think there is enough "government" and taxes in this country as it is. I _really_ don't need the government taking even more of my money because they think they are better at spending it then I am.
You're allowing a blanket ideology to cloud your judgment of what is reasonable and what isn't. Running an access point is cheap.
that every link I make is a contribution to a campaign? Where can you honestly draw the line?
Remember, the entire story here consists of some offhand remarks being put forward by Brad Smith, the Republican chair of the FEC, to a CNET reporter. And he is well known not to be a fan of McCain-Feingold, so a Chicken-Little scenario (they'll outlaw political speech on the Internet!) is only to be expected from such a person. But the idea that links will become illegal, like in the 2600 deCSS case, hasn't been substantiated at all. The rules for the Internet could merely turn out to be that bloggers receiving regular paychecks from candidates (as several blogs did in 2004) have to disclose the existence of those paychecks in their blogs (which they didn't).
You can argue whether even this sort of restriction on political speech infringes on the First Amendment. I happen to think it comes very close- but a blog that's on a candidate's payroll is taking part in speech that is partly commercial.
I do this all the time. Before I buy anything electronic, for example, I type its model number or maker's name into Google and search site:slashdot.org to find out why it sucks.
I don't see what's astounding about this.
Reminds me of a radio interview I once heard with the Google founders. The host was curious about what the "I'm feeling lucky!" button was about. She claimed she typed in "Google" into the search box and clicked "I'm feeling lucky!", and nothing happened, so it didn't work!
I must thank you for the most trivial and straightforward 5, Informative I've ever gotten. It's the hardest kind of 5 to get. This particular story really rewards people who RTFA. In fact, it seems that everyone who RTFA is getting a 5, Informative out of this thanks to you. This story is like a cornucopia of 5, Informatives available for the taking to those who've RTFA. And we can tell right away who among us posts without RTFA!
At least your story wasn't a dupe. The dupe will appear any day now.
Yes, I live in Virginia and have been following the case closely. If you scroll down several posts below this one you'll see I also posted this.
Your post is currently at -1, like all your recent posts. What did you do? Capitalize too much?
THE SISTER WAS WRONGLY ACCUSED. The brother was the spammer here. He used his sisters credit card to purchase stuff over the internet to fund his spam business. Due to it being in her name she got dragged into the case by an overzealous prosecutor. The judge CORRECTLY fixed this error on the jury's part. THE SPAMMER IN THIS CASE WENT TO JAIL(the bother) I wish the friggin posters would RTFA sometimes...
A quick search using Google News makes me think you're right... the judge cited that the only case against the sister was the three credit card transactions with her name on them. And siblings are known for committing ID theft- what can you really do to your brother or sister? Other than kick his ass, but so what?
Just one more reason why you don't want people stealing your identity.
From the linked article that nobody seems to have read:
Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.
Seems to me we are not given enough information in this article to assess what the issue was in the specific conviction that was overturned. And I'm personally not familiar with the case. Does anyone know what the situation with the sister was? Did she merely live in the same house as a spammer?
Based on the article, she could have merely been in charge of canceling his magazine subscriptions. The article just indicates that the judge claimed the jury was confused in her case.
And I found an error in the story submission too:
Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Conviction s - Why is this last word plural?
Even the story submitters don't RTFA!
The linked story indicates no more than one overturned conviction, that of the sister. A third guy seems to have been involved but there is no mention of his being convicted, hence no overturned conviction.
> What's the rate of reaction of O2 -> O3?
It's probably unchanged from what it was before, and would be equivalent to the sum of the rates of all the equilibrium O3 -> O2 reactions (the ones mediated by O* and NO). Except for the occasional magnetic storm, this was a steady-state system before Cl* was introduced. The Cl* reactions have a rate three orders of magnitude faster than O*, and are tempered mostly by the relative rarity of Cl* in the atmosphere despite our best efforts. The introduction of an effective catalyst for O3 -> O2 reactions will push the equilibrium [O3]/[O2] ratio down.
> That's the governing rate that determines reactant to product ratios.
No it isn't, since the limiting reagent in this case is O3, not O2! (When you put gas in your car, for example, the gasoline is the limiting reagent. You don't add up all the O2 in the atmosphere to figure out how many miles you can go.) O3 exists in trace amounts. The ozone layer would only be a few cm thick if it were 100% concentrated and as dense as sea level air. If all the O3 in the world turns to O2, the rate of the O2 -> O3 reactions won't show a measurable increase at all, since O2 is already plentiful.
Unless of course, they speed up because of the additional UV at sea level. But that will produce tropospheric O3 which we don't want, and we'd all be sunburned by then already.
These press releases are always indecipherable. Which is frustrating, because we're not all scientifically dumb and some of us would like to know what's going on. You also have to be very careful when writing a press release on a topic like this. Soon we'll be hearing over and over how CFCs have been vindicated, all ozone loss was the sun's fault all this time, etc. Although I don't know how you'd really be able to prevent that in this case. There are just too many people who are eager to misinterpret what you're saying. Maybe as the authors of this paper you could put up a page somewhere debunking the misinformation that people will spread about it, so we don't go blue in the face explaining ozone chemistry to people.
The problem I have with the
That's not the impression I got from RTFA:My understanding would normally be that the Arctic hole was related to the formation of ice crystals conducive to ozone breakdown via chlorine. And what changed at high altitudes was increased NO generation. But the article then implies the NO got into the stratosphere via normal weather patterns over the Arctic. (This doesn't necessarily involve the hole, although both things are happening in the same place.) Did I decipher this incorrectly?
Depending upon how old you are and how quickly methane increases over the next few decades, you will probably live to see ozone recover to very near its historical norm.
The point I wanted to make was that the solar effects from NO production will have a shorter half-life than the chlorine effects, which you might see go down "depending on how old you are". With chlorine we have to wait for a reserve of stable atmospheric CFC to decay via chlorine to HCl. I may have Googled up the wrong half life for that process.
This is how ozone is made (the "source" reaction):
O2 + UV(180-240nm) -> O* + O*
O* + O2 -> O3
Its famed ability to absorb UV happens this way:
O3 + UV(200-320nm) -> O* + O2
O* + O2 -> O3 (again)
and this is the normal "sink" reaction, which removes the ozone-producing O* radicals from circulation:
O* + O* -> O2
(Another normal "sink" is O* + O3 -> 2O2.)
Normally both the "source" and "sink" reactions are happening at once, so that the concentrations of O3 relative to O2 are at an equilibrium- as much ozone is being produced as destroyed at any given moment.
This is the chlorine breakdown path:
Cl* + O3 -> ClO* + O2
ClO* + ClO* -> Cl2O2
Cl2O2 + UV -> 2Cl* + O2
overall: 2O3 -> 3O2
Cl* is a chlorine radical formed when CFCs break down under intense UV. The chlorine reactions happen at the surface of certain types of ice crystals that form at -80 degrees C. That's where we get the "ozone holes" from.
The overall reaction is an efficient ozone sink, with a rate of reaction 1500 times greater than the one with O*. This pushes the O3/O2 equilibrium downward. More ozone is continually being produced by sunlight hitting O2, but since the O3 is disappearing faster, the result is a much lower concentration of O3 relative to O2 than if no Cl* were present.
This article is so dumbed down as to be worthless. It blames "nitrogen gas", which is a load of crap. This story is about nitric oxide (NO) catalysis. This is a well known phenomenon. In addition to chlorine and nitric oxide, fluorine and bromine can also catalyze the breakdown of ozone. This is how nitrogen oxide breaks down ozone:
NO + O3 -> NO2 + O2
O2 + UV(180-240nm) -> O* + O*
NO2 + O* -> NO + O2 (as opposed to O* + O2 -> O3 which would regenerate the ozone)
Similar reactions happen in reverse near the ground in cities, where the NO2 that emerges from tailpipes results in ground-level ozone.
Normally there's much more NO than chlorine in the stratosphere, although the chlorine reactions are more efficient. Weather patterns above the poles have always brought a steady stream of NO down from the ionosphere to the stratosphere since the beginning of time. In other words the historic, preindustrial "normal" equilibrium concentration of ozone already accounts for what the sun does in a normal solar year. The solar storms of 2003 created an abnormal surge of NO, so we saw ozone drop markedly in spring 2004 relative to 2003. But 2003 levels were already depressed, and we had normal NO levels then.
NO and chlorine are both gradually cleared from the stratosphere by formation of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid respectively. So the supplies of these harmful catalysts have to be regenerated, either by the sun or us. But NO turns to nitric acid after only a couple days. A CFC molecule survives an average of 100 years before degrading to elemental chlorine (destroying ozone) and then HCl. Drops in ozone levels from solar activity can be expected to be transient, lasting a year or two at most. Drops in ozone levels from CFCs are essentially permanent for the rest of our lives. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking all our problems are the sun's fault.
You prove how arrogant you are by citing grammar and other nonsense when the meaning of the passage is clear.
But I have to cite your "grammar and other nonsense"! You keep posting as an AC, so there's no other way to identify you!
You would have not let Dred Scott have his day in court because "The dumb nigger wasn't educated enough to speak proper English and read."
Eh? Dred Scott? Why don't you just tell people you're talking about outlawing abortion, instead of introducing this code word stuff about slavery and Dred Scott? It's fundamentally dishonest. Hasn't Dred Scott been through enough? Can't the man rest in peace without his former slaveowners digging him up to use as a political cudgel? If you want to outlaw abortion, just be honest and say so. Leave Mr. Scott out of it.
This part is hilarious:
Your reasoning is sad. You are a failed ad-hominem based attacker with little ability to debate. You are a communist who loves bureaucracy against those who expose your fundamentally flawed thinking. Keep speaking. Your own words are a testament to your failure. You own words make it transparent as to the nature of your flawed thinking.
I might say that "you are a failed ad hominem based attacker with little ability to debate", but that would be an ad hominem attack, wouldn't it?
As a "communist" with flawed thinking who denies standing to escaped slaves who are really being used as props in a dishonest argument about abortion, I have to say, although this has been fun, you should really calm down. I've clearly gotten you mad as hell and raised your blood pressure, and stress isn't good for your health! Maybe you should sit back, relax, light a cigarette, and seek a less demanding forum than Slashdot.
1) Are you saying that punch-style ballots and machinery is superior to electronic equipment?
I would agree with this, with one caveat- by "electronic equipment" you mean Diebold's insecure crap.
But why is electronic equipment automatically considered by everyone to be superior to punch cards? Punch cards have one disadvantage- they're slow to count- which makes for bad TV on election night. Other than that, what's the real problem with them? Hanging chads? At least they hang both ways. They degrade precision, not accuracy, by introducing small, random, nonpartisan error. Everyone notices that sort of error in a tie, but ties are rare.
Snafus with electronic voting machines degrade accuracy instead of precision, by introducing a systematic error that favors one candidate over another. A machine in a partisan neighborhood can do this just by crashing or otherwise losing the votes tallied that day. The election doesn't even have to be a near-tie to get screwed up by a loss of accuracy.
The precision on electronic machines is obviously perfect. They give you an answer right down to a single vote. But precision is not accuracy.
2) Are you suggesting that since the machines haven't failed or malfunctioned to date, that this is no safeguard that they won't?
That would be an absolutely reasonable statement. It's one of the most reasonable things you've said today. You don't agree with it? It applies to anything before it fails the first time.
Except for one thing- the machines have already failed and malfunctioned.
im gladbush won, then i wont have kerry taking my guns and raising taxes even more. You claim and feign poor interface when the vote doesn't go your way. All you people strive for is egalitarian fascism/communism with the exception for the "think for you" "armchair experts on everything" politicians like Kerry. As long as everyone gets fucked equally you are happy. YOU will not take my guns. YOU will not take my rights. YOU will never succeed in breaking the back of "redneck" America with your vile disparaging hypocrisy. Give me non-authoritarian centrist Libertarianism, or give me a break. You fools that shill for the Democrats and somewhat the GOP are a joke. HAHAHAHA. you insinuate the deibold machines got it wrong, when the properly reflected the will of the people and WE WON, and you communists lost. BWAHAHAHHAHA!
You're the same AC who claimed upthread that anyone who uses the term "public interest" is a Communist. Your spelling and grammar gives you away. Why don't you just post under a username, so we can tell who we're talking to without having to rely on your spelling errors? Defend your beliefs like a man.
That's some castration complex you've got going on there with the guns, by the way. I don't know what sissy sidearms you're packing but I personally couldn't care less about them.
Funny, Deibold seems to get the money I order out of the ATM rights *EVERY TIME* and I've never had a problem with my bank balance - *EVER*.
.mdb file! That costs real money, especially when you're relying on election workers to fix problems in the back end by directly editing the audit log.
So you never had a problem with your piddly little bank balance. This is relevant how? I know a mechanic who lives up the street and fixes my car's water pump and AC all the time. He never screws up, so I'm letting him install a stint in my aorta next week.
Banks insist on proper security features from Diebold. After all, with an ATM, money is involved. If our election commissioners were as demanding as banks, Diebold's voting machines would print the same internal paper receipt that is produced internally by their ATM machines. Diebold saves some money by not including those things. Not only does the printer cost money, it means you have to be able to reconcile the paper receipt with the audit log in the Microsoft Access