``There is no need for this technology to ever be used with humans,'' said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
Utter ignorance. A ten-second news search turned up one great application here.
``it's morally wrong and reprehensible for anybody to consider the cloning of a human being,'' said House sponsor Dave Weldon, R-Fla
Regardless of any possible benefit to medical science?
And in another article about the GOP reaching out to Catholics, the real roots of the opposition become clear: Cloning is lumped in with abortion and the "homosexual agenda" as things that all good Xians should oppose. It's as if they'd never heard of the separation of the church and state...
It sounds like the ultimate way to read Slashdot at work!
Yeah, it's $10K now, but I'm betting that in 5 years or so they'll be able to put it under the brim of a baseball cap for $200. Add a wireless connection to a computer on your belt, and a pointing device, and speech-to-text, and you've got the wearable dream machine...
I seem to remember Bruce Schneier and others railing against the DMCA and its proposed variants before the U.S. Congress passed them, claiming that it would impair their ability to do legitimate research into security. At the time, they were written off as cranks (at least, by Congress), but it now appears to have come to pass - corporations have purchased (from elected officials who are supposed to be working for the citizenry, no less) the right to censor scientific and technical knowledge that threatens their outdated business models.
And how does the paper represent a "circumvention device"? DeCSS fits that definition, for sure - download the software, and you can rip DVD's. (Disclaimer: I'm not at all agreeing that that should be illegal - I'm just saying that DeCSS is a real circumvention device.) But there is no way to combine the paper and a piece of encrypted music and get unencrypted music out. One must first complete the non-trivial task of creating software or hardware that acts upon the knowledge in the paper - in short, the device has yet to be created (at least for widespread distribution).
Well, there's something that's possible in Canada but not in the U.S. - the corporations apparently haven't taken over our northern neighbor to the extent that they have here.
The whole debate kind of reminds me of drug testing (in non-safety-critical jobs, anyway). Basically, if an employer needs a worker to piss in a cup to tell if there's a problem with his work, then the issue is with management, not with the worker. If the worker's work is good, then the employer shouldn't care at all what shows up in a drug test, unless the employer has also appointed himself the employee's moral watchdog as well.
Is that really a role you want your boss to have?
It seems the same argument could apply to Internet use in the workplace as well: it ought to be obvious if there's a problem with an individual worker, even without a draconian monitoring policy. Inability to detect a problem is a failure of management, not a reason to tighten the shackles on all workers.
If an employee is circulating spam, obscene jokes, pornography, pirated software, or other such things, do you think their boss does not have the right to know about it?
And what about posting trolls to Slashdot from work?
I personally believe the dotcom crash was the direct result of productivity lost to key technical talent posting to Slashdot all day instead of propping up the economy for everyone else, like good little worker bees. Forget about management's pr0n habit - it's all Slashdot's fault.
I hope that nothing like this occurs in the USA, where at least people (for all their faults) still believe in the principle of taking responsibility for one's own actions.
Hmm. You must mean that other USA, not the one full of couch potatoes and junk food zombies who communicate primarily through brand name recognition.
They were busy auctioning off our airwaves to the wealthiest companies on the planet. But where was the FTC? Monopolies and industry-dominating cabals are their bailiwick, for the most part.
No, I didn't say that at all. Of course corporations do that. Nothing in what I wrote carried the insinuation or the logical implication that I thought otherwise - you've just made that objection up out of whole cloth.
Oops! Almost forgot the organized labor movement! There's one where conservative government elements teamed up with large corporations to deprive people of their lawful rights to assemble and to seek redress for grievances.
Your ignorance of American history runs pretty deep.
I'd suggest you look into the history of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, Indian rights issues from the inception of our goverment to the current date, the civil rights movements during the 60's, Nixon's and Kissinger's hijinks during the 60's and 70's, Bill Clinton's oddly voluminous requests for FBI files, the government's behavior during the Prohibition period, their behavior enforcing drug laws presently, et cetera, ad nauseam. Much of it is right there in the open, with plenty of ironclad documentary evidence.
Not hardly. The Fourth Amendment specifies that American citizens are, except upon issuance of a warrant based on evidence or deposition, to be secure in their "persons and papers". While I doubt the framers of the Constition envisioned billion-record databases of citizens' information up for sale, I would think that my personal data, information about my movements and habits, etc., in electronic form or otherwise, seems a natural extension of my "person and papers".
First off, fuck you. I am pissed about corporations gathering information on me, and would like to see legislation to prevent them from doing so. Just because in one post I mentioned government privacy violations without mentioning corporate ones, you seem to assume that I'm one of those laissez-faire airheads. Well, go pigeonhole someone else, dipshit.
And secondly, even if the government violates citizens' privacy less frequently or vigorously than corporations do (and I'm not at all convinced of that), the government has tools at its disposal like imprisonment and the legal ability to deal death. And if you don't think they invade the privacy of nonconformists with the intent of imprisoning them, blackmailing them, or killing them outright, I suggest you look into the stories of Sacco and Vanzetti, Martin Luther King, Jr., and anyone blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
I mean, just because you want to let the government crawl up your ass with a microscope to get a security clearance is no reason the rest of us have to like it...
Perhaps you're missing the fundamental issue: How is the government's purchase of this information from corporations any better than them simply going out and getting it themselves? You completely ignore the point.
I don't care how they get it, if they go about gathering information about people not suspected of any crime, that represents an unreasonable search and seizure.
The problem is that governments - ours (that is, the U.S. gov't) too - have a nasty habit of not going after criminals exclusively, but of going after political dissenters, subversives, agitators from racial, gender, and economic underclasses, religious minorities, and lots of other people exercising their consciences.
That is why the Fourth Amendment exists, and why your ignorant and blithely submissive attitude about the government spying on anyone and everyone brings us that much closer to living in a place where dissent and nonconformism are punished for their own sake.
I mean WTF!?! Did someone go and abolish the Fourth Amendment while I was napping? Do Reno, Ashcroft, et al think it's not an unreasonable search and seizure if they pay someone else to do it? And why isn't there legislation about corporate abuses of privacy in this country? Why is it that if I collect lots of personal data about someone, it's stalking, but if a company does it to tens of millions of people, it's a revenue stream?
Anyone know of an unclaimed island in international waters somewhere? It's time for Sealand II...
As if MC could stop these parodies from proliferating! I had my own (but slightly dated) parody in that vein regarding Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. Picture this over a grainy black-and-white video of Mr. Barry's antics:
Crack cocaine: $10 a hit
Decent hookers: $200 an hour
Legal fees: $68737.12
Getting your old job back after getting caught on video smoking rock with working girls: Priceless.
Anyway, I'll be heeding the call to harass my elected reps with fax and mail. I'm not convinced that it will do any good, but one has to fill the empty hours somehow...
Well, OK, given. Yahoo! and other super-high-volume sites use BSD variants for serious volume/uptime/security, etc., but the usage stats I've seen still show Linux/Apache dominating overall. Though of course, if you have different information, I'd love to hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Utter ignorance. A ten-second news search turned up one great application here.
``it's morally wrong and reprehensible for anybody to consider the cloning of a human being,'' said House sponsor Dave Weldon, R-Fla
Regardless of any possible benefit to medical science?
And in another article about the GOP reaching out to Catholics, the real roots of the opposition become clear: Cloning is lumped in with abortion and the "homosexual agenda" as things that all good Xians should oppose. It's as if they'd never heard of the separation of the church and state...
Canada looks better and better...
OK,
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Yeah, it's $10K now, but I'm betting that in 5 years or so they'll be able to put it under the brim of a baseball cap for $200. Add a wireless connection to a computer on your belt, and a pointing device, and speech-to-text, and you've got the wearable dream machine...
OK,
- B
--
And how does the paper represent a "circumvention device"? DeCSS fits that definition, for sure - download the software, and you can rip DVD's. (Disclaimer: I'm not at all agreeing that that should be illegal - I'm just saying that DeCSS is a real circumvention device.) But there is no way to combine the paper and a piece of encrypted music and get unencrypted music out. One must first complete the non-trivial task of creating software or hardware that acts upon the knowledge in the paper - in short, the device has yet to be created (at least for widespread distribution).
Time to write my representatives again...
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That is odd. Unless they all started at the same time and suffer from some sort of OS-induced clock bug that crashes them every 49 days...
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The whole debate kind of reminds me of drug testing (in non-safety-critical jobs, anyway). Basically, if an employer needs a worker to piss in a cup to tell if there's a problem with his work, then the issue is with management, not with the worker. If the worker's work is good, then the employer shouldn't care at all what shows up in a drug test, unless the employer has also appointed himself the employee's moral watchdog as well.
Is that really a role you want your boss to have?
It seems the same argument could apply to Internet use in the workplace as well: it ought to be obvious if there's a problem with an individual worker, even without a draconian monitoring policy. Inability to detect a problem is a failure of management, not a reason to tighten the shackles on all workers.
OK,
- B
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And what about posting trolls to Slashdot from work?
I personally believe the dotcom crash was the direct result of productivity lost to key technical talent posting to Slashdot all day instead of propping up the economy for everyone else, like good little worker bees. Forget about management's pr0n habit - it's all Slashdot's fault.
I hope that nothing like this occurs in the USA, where at least people (for all their faults) still believe in the principle of taking responsibility for one's own actions.
Hmm. You must mean that other USA, not the one full of couch potatoes and junk food zombies who communicate primarily through brand name recognition.
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In the future, try to read what's there.
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I'd suggest you look into the history of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century, Indian rights issues from the inception of our goverment to the current date, the civil rights movements during the 60's, Nixon's and Kissinger's hijinks during the 60's and 70's, Bill Clinton's oddly voluminous requests for FBI files, the government's behavior during the Prohibition period, their behavior enforcing drug laws presently, et cetera, ad nauseam. Much of it is right there in the open, with plenty of ironclad documentary evidence.
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OK,
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And secondly, even if the government violates citizens' privacy less frequently or vigorously than corporations do (and I'm not at all convinced of that), the government has tools at its disposal like imprisonment and the legal ability to deal death. And if you don't think they invade the privacy of nonconformists with the intent of imprisoning them, blackmailing them, or killing them outright, I suggest you look into the stories of Sacco and Vanzetti, Martin Luther King, Jr., and anyone blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
I mean, just because you want to let the government crawl up your ass with a microscope to get a security clearance is no reason the rest of us have to like it...
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I don't care how they get it, if they go about gathering information about people not suspected of any crime, that represents an unreasonable search and seizure.
OK,
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That is why the Fourth Amendment exists, and why your ignorant and blithely submissive attitude about the government spying on anyone and everyone brings us that much closer to living in a place where dissent and nonconformism are punished for their own sake.
OK,
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OK,
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Anyone know of an unclaimed island in international waters somewhere? It's time for Sealand II...
OK,
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Crack cocaine: $10 a hit
Decent hookers: $200 an hour
Legal fees: $68737.12
Getting your old job back after getting caught on video smoking rock with working girls: Priceless.
Some things, money can buy, yadda yadda...
OK,
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Anyway, I'll be heeding the call to harass my elected reps with fax and mail. I'm not convinced that it will do any good, but one has to fill the empty hours somehow...
OK,
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Point taken: I probably should have been more explicit about what I meant.
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