No, they are a necessity. Without them, you turn into the kind of guy who wakes up at age 55 realizing that his entire life has been a pointless waste of time.
I think it's great to have them, and I certainly have some strong beliefs of my own, but if it came down to a choice between a matter of principle and providing for my daughter, I'd toss the principle out the window without batting an eye. My responsibility to her outweighs my hatred of The Man, just as my dad's responsibility to me outweighed his desire to be an artist.
Umm, you do realize you have just stated an ideal here, don't you? Your ideal is "taking care of my family is more important than whether or not I agree with my employer". This is actually a restricted subset of a very important ideal: responsibility for one's family is more important than all but the most serious (read: life-threatening) personal concerns. This ideal, this principle, is one of the things that keeps human society stable and functional over the long term.
You haven't tossed out your principles, you've just changed the priority of them.
Before my daughter was born I would have been right there with you, but I've learned a lot since then. Self respect is a great thing to have, but next to your responsibility to your progeny it's about as important as the color of your socks. There are much bigger and better things in life than the small amount of self respect gained from sacrificing yourself and your family on the alter of idealism.
Taking responsibility for care of your family is one of the things that should earn you self-respect. However, it is often possible to balance your ideals; you have to feed your family, but there's more than one employer out there, so you might not have to work for a scuzzball. For sure Alan Cox should have no trouble getting a job whenever he wants!
Looking for a new job is a risk, depending on your resume and the level of unemployment in your sector. How much of a risk you are willing to take depends on what you are risking--when you've got a family to support, you're risking not just yourself, but them, so it is right to be more cautious. However... it's funny how the world works, but jobs that require you to seriously compromise your ethics are frequently not good jobs to have from the point-of-view of supporting a family. Think about it, and you'll see what I mean.
Last time I checked, AOL's lawyers could beat up Stallman's.
You forget that underlying the FSF is a mammoth iceberg named M.I.T. I would not want to screw with their lawyers, either--not to mention the incredibly bad press and general ill-will in the technology community such an attempt would generate.
As someone who works for a company that has one of those agreements it means:
- no non-MS OS on any computer connected to the company LAN. For development on non-MS OS (and contrary to MS-speak, Windoze sucks for embedded), I have to install the non-MS OS on a test PC that is not connected to the company LAN and sneaker-net everything.
- must use IE as your browser. No Mozilla, now that they've installed the MS proxy server that refuses to serve to non-IE browsers.
- must use MS Office as your word processor/spreadsheet/etc.
- must use Outlook as your e-mail/calendar/etc. and MS Exchange as the mail server. Too bad about all those security holes, Outlook viruses and the overall crappy performance of MS Exchange... the contract forbids putting a Unix/sendmail server on the network.
- must use WinNT for all servers. Sorry, no SAMBA file & print servers.
- Must use IIS for company intranet servers.
Need I continue?
Jon Katz really is a modern journalist!
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is something surreal about watching Katz rant hysterically and ignorantly about the major news media spreading hysteria and misinformation... True, this is about par for Jon Katz, but the synchronicity of comment and commentator is ironic, or perhaps inevitable.
Someone please send Katz on a tour of the historical archives of any library or newspaper. Read the newspapers of the 18th or 19th century; you'll see the same hysteria and rumors-as-news whenever war or disaster struck. Rumors have always spread faster than accurate news; this is nothing new.
As for the overload of cable/internet/nightly news: turn the damn things off if it bothers you! If hearing that the postman in Podunk, Nebraska is being tested for anthrax every half-hour is causing you panic everytime one of your fellow office slobs spills the dairy creamer in the coffee room, stop listening to it! You don't actually need to know the news every hour, on the hour unless there's a tornado or hurricane bearing down on you. I'd rather watch Dragonball Z than Peter Jennings any day.
As for all the stuff about our neat high-tech war machines, one might note that the Pentagon is not releasing a whole lot of information about the actual combat in Afghanistan for obvious reasons. (I'm sure certain people in the Pentagon remember when CNN and other news reports were happily broadcasting to all and sundry real-time reports of troop actions). In the absence of real information about the war, the newsies resort to interviewing talking heads and showing pictures of neat hardware--they have to show *something*, after all. I do not doubt that the Pentagon encourages the news networks to show off our high-tech stuff--it's a form of propaganda, a show of power meant to intimidate our enemies, encourage our allies and hearten our own citizens.
Doesn't anyone remember the Gulf War, where talking heads were the order of the day when there was no combat news forthcoming? It got to the point where the reporters were interviewing each other about reporting the war!
This is more on the lines of the teacher confiscating notes being passed between students in class and reading them aloud for the whole class. Or requiring two giggling students in the back of the class to share the joke that they found so funny with the rest of the class.
The point is to embarass the hell out of the students doing crap they shouldn't be doing in class by holding them up to public ridicule. Obviously, you never went to elementary or high school, or it was so long ago you've forgotten you were ever a child.
I once got thrown out of a Beginning Philosophy lecture because the professor got pissed off that I was reading a book in the back of the classroom and not paying attention to him. He later apologised, but not before I learned something important that I should have known already:
It's just plain rude to ignore people when they are talking to you!
If you don't want pay attention to the lecturer, then don't attend the class. Reading e-mail, sending IMs, surfing, reading books, etc. when someone is talking to you is rude.
There are few laws that forbid you from being rude or obnoxious, but if you are, don't complain when you get treated as if you were rude and obnoxious.
But the only "rights" you can possibly have are those that are laid out by the governing body in a region. In the US, that is the Federal Government as established by the Constitution, and especially as enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and other Amendments.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Your rights are not granted by the Constitution or any government, they are inherent (granted by the Creator). The Constitution merely enumerates certain rights which the authors of the Constitution were especially concerned that the government not be permitted to legally usurp. Your rights are not limited to those enumerated in the Constitution; the Constitution even says so. Because Natural Rights are inherent, and some are inalienable, you have the same set of Natural Rights (human rights) anywhere in the world, but some local governments tyrannically usurp your rights more so than others. Remember that! Your rights are not limited to what any government deigns to grant you; however the free exercise thereof has historically been restricted by what governments are allowed to usurp. This does not mean they have any moral or ethical "right" to do so, and you have no moral or ethical obligation to support tyrannical usurpation of your rights under any government, anywhere.
Indeed, some might feel that they have a moral and ethical obligation to resist tyrannical usurpation of theirs and other's rights anywhere and everywhere.
And I say, Let JEfferson spin in his grave. Despite writing endlessly about how bad slavery was, he freed no slaves during his lifetime, and the only slaves he freed when he died were his own children.
Not so. Having recently read some information on the Monticello slaves, I can toss in a few facts. Jefferson had the patronizing but, for his time, compassionate attitude that freeing slaves who had no means to provide for themselves would be just kicking them out in the cold world to starve, and would be much crueler than keeping them fed, housed and employed on his plantation. The slaves he freed were all skilled craftsmen, whom Jefferson (correctly, as it turned out) believed would be able to make a living on their own.
Don't be so quick to judge your ancestors and their contemporaries without knowing all the facts and taking into account the world in which they lived. Perhaps 200 years from now, your descendants and their contemporaries will consider you barbaric and evil for actions now considered acceptable by most.
The other effective way to stop terrorism is to come down on the bastards that do it and encourage it so hard that no one will ever want to risk annoying the United States for a generation to come.
Or is anyone here old enough to remember when Libyan and Palestinian terrorists regularly attacked U.S. and European citizens during the '60s and '70s? Government official wrung their hands and said all they could do about it was "tighten security" (take away civil rights) and deplore the violence, and it kept on happening. Then we got a president with a backbone, Reagan, and started using military retaliation against terrorists. Libyan stopped bothering us after getting bombed and their planes and ships shot up. After the 1982 bombing of the Marines in Lebanon, a couple of shells from the USS New Jersey found their way into a Syrian command bunker, and a lot of the rest of the supposedly independent Palestinian terrorists stopped bothering us. During and for a few years after the Gulf War, no one in the Middle East except Iraq even said anything rude about us.
It doesn't matter what the root causes are, or if you dislike the U.S. for good reason--if you kill our people, we will crush you. Period. End of discussion. Find some other way to air your grievances.
That is a policy that works, and has worked in the past, and will work in the future. Half-measures, on the other hand, only spawn the cycle of endless retribution that everyone's been wailing about. No response at all simply encourages and implicitly condones terrorism. Apologizing explicitly condones and really encourages terrorism.
If you want further evidence, in 1842, a British force of 17,000 (including women and children) attempted to retreat from a position within Afghanistan. One person was left alive by the Afghan tribesman and allowed to return to tell the tale.
You're referring to Elphinstone's expedition, right? From what I've read, that was a complete clusterf**k from the get-go. Yes, the Afghans have traditionally been a difficult lot to fight--but thinking that the job is impossible because Elphinstone fubarred it is like thinking that Purina can't possibly make money selling animal feed because Pets.com went belly-up.
For those with some familiarity with military history, Elphinstone was the General Burnside of the British Army. 'Nuff said.
I (not the original poster) have no idea if it is still true, but it certainly was true during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The reformer John Hus was burned at the stake *AFTER* he had been given guarantees of safe conduct; the papal officials justified it by saying that vows or promises to heretics were not binding.
I have also travelled abroad, and spoken to people outside the U.S., as well as spoken with foriegn visitors to the U.S.
It's a matter of perception and images. America, as in our people and their values, is not morally corrupt. Our entertainment media, and the values depicted in the media, *IS* morally corrupt. Unfortunately, most of the world thinks they know America from our exported entertainment and news. What they really know is Hollywood, and Hollywood has been morally corrupt since the 1920s.
*Bleh*
So how do we convince the rest of the world that America isn't what they see on TV? About the only thing we have that gets circulated internationally that doesn't inflict the Hollywood view of American on the rest of the world is National Geographic. (It also has the merit of showing non-Hollywood views of the rest of the world to Americans, which is a very good thing. I have a certain grudging respect for Libya's Khadafi because of a NatGeoSoc article. If I had only been exposed to Hollywood and the news media view of him, I'd still think he was a lunatic terror-monger who should be taken out and shot, soonest.)
The news anchors I saw were noticeably shaken compared to the usual cool professionalism. Dan Rather in particular looked like he was about to burst into tears all day, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had been crying off camera--he looked like he had at times. All of them had the starts and shakes in their voices that told this viewer "I'd like to freak out completely, but I'm trying to stay calm and professional for this broadcast".
Personally, I think Mr. Katz thought he had a cool sounding turn of phrase about modern media and just had to use it, even if it didn't happen to fit the facts. Either that, or he's displaying his usual vague attachment to reality. After more than a year of reading/., I've learned that Jon Katz is probably a nice guy with a good heart, but his essays seem to come from some slightly twisted parallel Earth that's *almost* like ours, but not quite.
He obviously didn't see the same President Bush I did, but I attribute that to the distorting lens of political partisanry. Apparently Peter Jennings is suffering from the same skewed perceptions. I saw a president who had something to say as soon as he got near a camera that was direct and to the point; I also see a president who isn't breaking down on national TV, and who isn't rushing off half-cocked to throw cruise missiles at someone. I see the Administration he picked acting quickly and decisively in a crisis, without going overboard (yet). In short, I see a president acting like a president should, and one who has damn good people supporting him. Did anyone notice that SecDef Rumsfield's first reaction when the plane hit was to go out and help rescue people?
Mayor Giuliani was also doing a damn good job as mayor of NYC, and deserves the plaudits. If I was a New Yorker, he'd definitely get my vote--the man has all his shit in one sock.
Former President Clinton was surprisingly classy when he got to New York and got camera time, and I'm commenting as someone who seriously loathed and despised the man for his entire eight-year abortion of a presidency. His former hanger-on Stephanopolous has been doing a bang-up job as a photo-journalist in New York during this mess; his coverage of the rescue efforts, and of the wreckage of what used to be the heart of NYC has been very interesting and powerfully moving.
I have been very impressed by the way most everyone has been pulling together and ignoring trivial crap like which political party they belong to (with the exception of Peter Jennings). There are also people in this country that I am disgusted by, but so far none of them have been decision makers or reporters (with the exception of Peter Jennings).
In my experience, most people with concealed carry permits who do indeed "carry" are very restrained and understand the gravity of using deadly force. They DON'T run around plugging people who cut them off in traffic or whatever, and I doubt they would do so in an airplane.
My experience is that of living in a U.S. state which has "shall-issue" concealed carry laws, meaning that there are a lot of concealed carry licenses issued, and an even greater number of people who just carry weapons in their car without a permit (legal in my state). We don't run around wantonly shooting each other in traffic. There have been incidents where people shot carjackers, and one "road-rage" incident where someone DEFENDED himself from some crazed guy who tried to beat him with a jackhandle after being cut off in traffic...
People who go through the process of getting a CCL (which isn't trivial) are serious about what they are doing, and generally not "carrying" just for the thrill of it. I trust my fellow citizens to behave themselves with guns, just as I trust them (in general) not to behave like homicidal madmen with cars, knives or baseball bats just because they happen to be in possession of one.
(The WTC towers were actually designed to withstand having a jet flown directly into them [chicagotribune.com]. I bet whoever signed off on that was sure it would never happen)
Actually, the WTC Towers did survive having a jet flown directly into them. They just didn't survive having two jetloads of fuel catch fire and burn inside the damaged buildings.
Also, two Towers, two planes. One Pentagon, one plane. I suspect Camp David, because of the Camp David Accords.
IF this was done by Bin Laden's guys, they showed in the 1993 WTC bombing that they are very sloppy about leaving a back trail of clues. Not every fanatical terrorist is also a genius criminal...
The really skilled (at avoiding detection and capture) terrorists were the ones trained by the Soviets in the old days. A lot of those guys are gone now, and I suspect the current crop of Middle Eastern terrorists does not have the same level of training and skill.
Harry Potter is quality reading. That's why he's so popular; the books are a damn good read, for kids, teens, and adults who aren't too stuck on themselves to read "children's books".
You, sir, appear to be suffering from the common elitist delusion "If it's popular, it can't possibly be good!" Au contraire, if it is wildly, incredibly, unexpectedly popular, there's a good chance that it is good--in a free market, advertising and hype can not counteract the realization that what one is watching or reading is utter crap beyond a certain point. Hype can get me in to see (e.g.) "Lara Croft" the first time--it won't get me to watch it twice, or buy it on video, or to tell my friends it's a good flick.
Books depend on word-of-mouth promotion and repeat buyers (of the same author) more than most other entertainment media. If Harry Potter had sucked little green toads, no one much would have heard of the first book, and there wouldn't have been others. If it had been just another so-so formula series, it wouldn't be grabbing the imaginations of kids who don't normally read!
I didn't start reading the Harry Potter novels because of the hype; in fact, like many here, I was skeptical because of the hype. My daughter liked them, and she thought they were very good, and I read the first one because she said it was very good--and I found out for myself that it was good, and read the rest of the series. Now my mother's reading them, and my dad, and they somehow got my elderly great-aunt interested in reading them, because Mom was so enthusiastic about them.
Where the hell are my moderation points when I need them? The above needs to be moderated down as a Troll, and one of the AC's had the right answer and needs to be moderated up.
To repeat the AC's point: European law and attitudes regarding alcohol consumption are different from that in the U.S. It's *legal* and normal to drink beer or wine at age 13 in many European countries, including Germany and France, and I wouldn't be surprised if England was the same. Prohibition and its legacy of restricted-drinking laws are an uniquely American perversion.
I can't believe I'm responding to such an obvious troll...
The fact is there isn't much use for stolen credit cards numbers. Now of course there is some use, but the bulk of things require the actual credit card. What are you gonna order something from ThinkGeek and have it delivered to your house? Make a couple long distance phone calls?
Wrong guess, -5. What you do with a stolen credit card number is mail-order expensive, easy-to-fence items from companies that are too clueless to notice that the credit card's billing address does not match the address of the drop site you have the stuff shipped to. Yes, such companies exist; yes, you can get a lot of valuables with very little risk if you only use the credit cards for a one day buying spree, and have the stuff shipped express to a drop address that you use once and don't go back to. After that, the credit card company's security department will notice something is wrong. Since the "victim" in credit card fraud is the merchant or credit card company, not the owner of the credit card, you are not in much danger of being charged even if someone figures out who you might be, since most merchants don't seem to pursue matters across state borders, but just eat the charge or the CC company eats the charge.
How do I know this? Someone got a hold of one of my credit card numbers early this year, and went on a mail-order buying spree with it. That's where I found out that I cannot press charges myself, as I am not the victim, officially. Go figure.
The thieves tried to order high-end cameras, professional audio equipment, pre-paid cell phones, boomboxes, and camping equipment. The pro audio business, the big department store, one of the big wireless companies, and the photo shop were clueful enough to call me for confirmation when the billing and shipping address did not match. They won; they didn't get defrauded. Unfortunately, the other big wireless company and the sports equipment catalog company were too stupid to bother; they lost. The sports equipment guys were really dumb; the fraudulent mail-order got sent out, returned with "no such address", and they sent it out again!
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
Welcome to the wonderful world of online fanfiction! That's exactly the way it is in the fanfiction world... and as another poster suggested, if you don't want to wade through a lot of crap, you learn to listen to "word of mouth", and links from sites that review stories or personal picks by authors who seem to have a clue, that sort of thing. Jerry Pournelle long ago predicted something like this would happen when the Internet made self-publishing viable for anyone with the time to write. He was right.
There is an open format in the Palm world called Aportis Doc. Most Palm readers grok it, and it is actually documented. However, it is a pretty minimal plain-text format, so every Reader has also added it's own proprietary extensions to add pretty formatting... rather like happened with Word Processors on computers, since ASCII text didn't give you any formatting capabilities. Eventually we got Postscript and TeX in the Unix world, and RTF in the PC world as de facto formatted text standards, and then, finally, HTML as a standard for formatting text that any computer can display.
Since there are tools for converting HTML into almost any specialized format imaginable, and HTML is well-documented and not proprietary, I think that HTML makes a pretty good format for distributing e-texts.
As for PDF or Postscript, they are proprietary to Adobe, and I particularly dislike PDF--it is painful-to-impossible to read online since it does not flow text the way HTML does and you have to scroll around EVERY SINGLE DAMN PAGE, and Adobe keeps diddling the format, so that your shiny new PDF 5.0 document may not be readable with your Acrobat 3.0 or Xpdf or Kpdf reader. Finally, after Adobe's unethical, immoral and downright sleazy behavior in the Sklyarov affair, I strongly discourage the use or promotion of any Adobe products, especially PDF. Elcomsoft's Advanced Ebook Processor, however, sounds like a fine product to use in conjunction with any legacy encrypted PDFs you may be stuck with. But, please, let's get away from PDFs; we don't need to encourage would-be e-book publishers to give money to Adobe.
I read a LOT of books on my Palm, but I don't pay for proprietary, access-controlled expensive e-books. I convert texts from Project Gutenberg, download freely available texts and e-books from other sites, get free books from the Baen Free Library....
...and once in a great while I buy un-protected books from Baen's Webscriptions service. I refuse to buy access-controlled e-books that lock into a particular machine or limit my usage. When I buy a book, I buy a book, I don't license software.
Oddly enough, I haven't run out of books to read, nor am I likely to anytime soon; my backlog is huge. I also still buy hardbacks heavily (I have cut way back on paperbacks because they are too fragile for the long-term--I always end up replacing them in a few years.)
Don't give financial support to the publishers who come up with schemes you don't like (access-control, proprietary hardware requirements, etc)--i.e, don't buy their e-books. Support the publishers who do things the way you like (in my case, Baen Books). Publishers will pay attention to what sells and what doesn't, or they will go out of business. Remember why copy-protection on PC software, which was once ubiquitous, mostly went away? (Until recent attempts to revive it...) Because people wouldn't buy it if there was an alternative!
Publishers: if you make it a major hassle to use your product, people won't bother and will go to your competitor.
Personally.. i find it hard to believe the gun manufactures can't be sued for wrongfull deaths from a WEAPON DESIGNED TO KILL.
Why should they be? The product works as advertised, and no one legally allowed to use a gun can say he or she didn't know what a gun does. There is no question of deceptive advertising or of poor design endangering the user. Guns are weapons, they are advertised as such, weapons are designed to kill or injure living things, and guns used as designed do that quite well. Now, if a given manufacturer's firearms were in the habit of blowing up in the user's hand and crippling him, they'd have something to sue about.
BTW, the victim's relatives or whatever can still sue the user of the gun for wrongful death, and the local prosecuter can arrest the user for murder or whatever charge is appropriate. However, holding the manufacturer responsible for illegal use of their product is no more appropriate than it would be to hold CD-R writer manufacturers responsible for software piracy--and in the U.S., it's a lot less appropriate, since the whole "sue gun manufacturers for gun crimes" is a back-door attack on the 2nd Amendment by assholes who can't find the votes to get it repealed, but insist that their view should prevail over that of the majority no matter what.
If you look at it in the right light, the open-source philosophy is un-American.
The open-source movement espouses freedom of information, making commercial-quality software available without cost. Moreover, the source code for these utilities and operating systems - an unparalleled teaching tool for aspiring programmers - is distributed freely. Everyone has the same access to information.
However, it is wonderfully Christian in its ethic.... And there are those who insist that America is a Christian nation. Its laws are certainly founded on Judaeo-Christian-Roman laws and traditions.
Free software is not "un-American" (How can it be? Every American parent, school and nursery worth its salt tries to teach kids to "share", "play nice", and "help others"--are basic family values now "un-American"?). It is, however, anti-materialist. That scares the hell out of those whose only values are materialist and worldly.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideals are a luxury.
No, they are a necessity. Without them, you turn into the kind of guy who wakes up at age 55 realizing that his entire life has been a pointless waste of time.
I think it's great to have them, and I certainly have some strong beliefs of my own, but if it came down to a choice between a matter of principle and providing for my daughter, I'd toss the principle out the window without batting an eye. My responsibility to her outweighs my hatred of The Man, just as my dad's responsibility to me outweighed his desire to be an artist.
Umm, you do realize you have just stated an ideal here, don't you? Your ideal is "taking care of my family is more important than whether or not I agree with my employer". This is actually a restricted subset of a very important ideal: responsibility for one's family is more important than all but the most serious (read: life-threatening) personal concerns. This ideal, this principle, is one of the things that keeps human society stable and functional over the long term.
You haven't tossed out your principles, you've just changed the priority of them.
Before my daughter was born I would have been right there with you, but I've learned a lot since then. Self respect is a great thing to have, but next to your responsibility to your progeny it's about as important as the color of your socks. There are much bigger and better things in life than the small amount of self respect gained from sacrificing yourself and your family on the alter of idealism.
Taking responsibility for care of your family is one of the things that should earn you self-respect. However, it is often possible to balance your ideals; you have to feed your family, but there's more than one employer out there, so you might not have to work for a scuzzball. For sure Alan Cox should have no trouble getting a job whenever he wants!
Looking for a new job is a risk, depending on your resume and the level of unemployment in your sector. How much of a risk you are willing to take depends on what you are risking--when you've got a family to support, you're risking not just yourself, but them, so it is right to be more cautious. However... it's funny how the world works, but jobs that require you to seriously compromise your ethics are frequently not good jobs to have from the point-of-view of supporting a family. Think about it, and you'll see what I mean.
Last time I checked, AOL's lawyers could beat up Stallman's.
You forget that underlying the FSF is a mammoth iceberg named M.I.T. I would not want to screw with their lawyers, either--not to mention the incredibly bad press and general ill-will in the technology community such an attempt would generate.
As someone who works for a company that has one of those agreements it means:
- no non-MS OS on any computer connected to the company LAN. For development on non-MS OS (and contrary to MS-speak, Windoze sucks for embedded), I have to install the non-MS OS on a test PC that is not connected to the company LAN and sneaker-net everything.
- must use IE as your browser. No Mozilla, now that they've installed the MS proxy server that refuses to serve to non-IE browsers.
- must use MS Office as your word processor/spreadsheet/etc.
- must use Outlook as your e-mail/calendar/etc. and MS Exchange as the mail server. Too bad about all those security holes, Outlook viruses and the overall crappy performance of MS Exchange... the contract forbids putting a Unix/sendmail server on the network.
- must use WinNT for all servers. Sorry, no SAMBA file & print servers.
- Must use IIS for company intranet servers.
Need I continue?
There is something surreal about watching Katz rant hysterically and ignorantly about the major news media spreading hysteria and misinformation... True, this is about par for Jon Katz, but the synchronicity of comment and commentator is ironic, or perhaps inevitable.
Someone please send Katz on a tour of the historical archives of any library or newspaper. Read the newspapers of the 18th or 19th century; you'll see the same hysteria and rumors-as-news whenever war or disaster struck. Rumors have always spread faster than accurate news; this is nothing new.
As for the overload of cable/internet/nightly news: turn the damn things off if it bothers you! If hearing that the postman in Podunk, Nebraska is being tested for anthrax every half-hour is causing you panic everytime one of your fellow office slobs spills the dairy creamer in the coffee room, stop listening to it! You don't actually need to know the news every hour, on the hour unless there's a tornado or hurricane bearing down on you. I'd rather watch Dragonball Z than Peter Jennings any day.
As for all the stuff about our neat high-tech war machines, one might note that the Pentagon is not releasing a whole lot of information about the actual combat in Afghanistan for obvious reasons. (I'm sure certain people in the Pentagon remember when CNN and other news reports were happily broadcasting to all and sundry real-time reports of troop actions). In the absence of real information about the war, the newsies resort to interviewing talking heads and showing pictures of neat hardware--they have to show *something*, after all. I do not doubt that the Pentagon encourages the news networks to show off our high-tech stuff--it's a form of propaganda, a show of power meant to intimidate our enemies, encourage our allies and hearten our own citizens.
Doesn't anyone remember the Gulf War, where talking heads were the order of the day when there was no combat news forthcoming? It got to the point where the reporters were interviewing each other about reporting the war!
Well, no.
This is more on the lines of the teacher confiscating notes being passed between students in class and reading them aloud for the whole class. Or requiring two giggling students in the back of the class to share the joke that they found so funny with the rest of the class.
The point is to embarass the hell out of the students doing crap they shouldn't be doing in class by holding them up to public ridicule. Obviously, you never went to elementary or high school, or it was so long ago you've forgotten you were ever a child.
I once got thrown out of a Beginning Philosophy lecture because the professor got pissed off that I was reading a book in the back of the classroom and not paying attention to him. He later apologised, but not before I learned something important that I should have known already:
It's just plain rude to ignore people when they are talking to you!
If you don't want pay attention to the lecturer, then don't attend the class. Reading e-mail, sending IMs, surfing, reading books, etc. when someone is talking to you is rude.
There are few laws that forbid you from being rude or obnoxious, but if you are, don't complain when you get treated as if you were rude and obnoxious.
Sheet music? Have you tried The Mutopia Project?
But the only "rights" you can possibly have are those that are laid out by the governing body in a region. In the US, that is the Federal Government as established by the Constitution, and especially as enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and other Amendments.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Your rights are not granted by the Constitution or any government, they are inherent (granted by the Creator). The Constitution merely enumerates certain rights which the authors of the Constitution were especially concerned that the government not be permitted to legally usurp. Your rights are not limited to those enumerated in the Constitution; the Constitution even says so. Because Natural Rights are inherent, and some are inalienable, you have the same set of Natural Rights (human rights) anywhere in the world, but some local governments tyrannically usurp your rights more so than others. Remember that! Your rights are not limited to what any government deigns to grant you; however the free exercise thereof has historically been restricted by what governments are allowed to usurp. This does not mean they have any moral or ethical "right" to do so, and you have no moral or ethical obligation to support tyrannical usurpation of your rights under any government, anywhere.
Indeed, some might feel that they have a moral and ethical obligation to resist tyrannical usurpation of theirs and other's rights anywhere and everywhere.
And I say, Let JEfferson spin in his grave. Despite writing endlessly about how bad slavery was, he freed no slaves during his lifetime, and the only slaves he freed when he died were his own children.
Not so. Having recently read some information on the Monticello slaves, I can toss in a few facts. Jefferson had the patronizing but, for his time, compassionate attitude that freeing slaves who had no means to provide for themselves would be just kicking them out in the cold world to starve, and would be much crueler than keeping them fed, housed and employed on his plantation. The slaves he freed were all skilled craftsmen, whom Jefferson (correctly, as it turned out) believed would be able to make a living on their own.
Don't be so quick to judge your ancestors and their contemporaries without knowing all the facts and taking into account the world in which they lived. Perhaps 200 years from now, your descendants and their contemporaries will consider you barbaric and evil for actions now considered acceptable by most.
The other effective way to stop terrorism is to come down on the bastards that do it and encourage it so hard that no one will ever want to risk annoying the United States for a generation to come.
Or is anyone here old enough to remember when Libyan and Palestinian terrorists regularly attacked U.S. and European citizens during the '60s and '70s? Government official wrung their hands and said all they could do about it was "tighten security" (take away civil rights) and deplore the violence, and it kept on happening. Then we got a president with a backbone, Reagan, and started using military retaliation against terrorists. Libyan stopped bothering us after getting bombed and their planes and ships shot up. After the 1982 bombing of the Marines in Lebanon, a couple of shells from the USS New Jersey found their way into a Syrian command bunker, and a lot of the rest of the supposedly independent Palestinian terrorists stopped bothering us. During and for a few years after the Gulf War, no one in the Middle East except Iraq even said anything rude about us.
It doesn't matter what the root causes are, or if you dislike the U.S. for good reason--if you kill our people, we will crush you. Period. End of discussion. Find some other way to air your grievances.
That is a policy that works, and has worked in the past, and will work in the future. Half-measures, on the other hand, only spawn the cycle of endless retribution that everyone's been wailing about. No response at all simply encourages and implicitly condones terrorism. Apologizing explicitly condones and really encourages terrorism.
If you want further evidence, in 1842, a British force of 17,000 (including women and children) attempted to retreat from a position within Afghanistan. One person was left alive by the Afghan tribesman and allowed to return to tell the tale.
You're referring to Elphinstone's expedition, right? From what I've read, that was a complete clusterf**k from the get-go. Yes, the Afghans have traditionally been a difficult lot to fight--but thinking that the job is impossible because Elphinstone fubarred it is like thinking that Purina can't possibly make money selling animal feed because Pets.com went belly-up.
For those with some familiarity with military history, Elphinstone was the General Burnside of the British Army. 'Nuff said.
I (not the original poster) have no idea if it is still true, but it certainly was true during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The reformer John Hus was burned at the stake *AFTER* he had been given guarantees of safe conduct; the papal officials justified it by saying that vows or promises to heretics were not binding.
*Sigh*
I have also travelled abroad, and spoken to people outside the U.S., as well as spoken with foriegn visitors to the U.S.
It's a matter of perception and images. America, as in our people and their values, is not morally corrupt. Our entertainment media, and the values depicted in the media, *IS* morally corrupt. Unfortunately, most of the world thinks they know America from our exported entertainment and news. What they really know is Hollywood, and Hollywood has been morally corrupt since the 1920s.
*Bleh*
So how do we convince the rest of the world that America isn't what they see on TV? About the only thing we have that gets circulated internationally that doesn't inflict the Hollywood view of American on the rest of the world is National Geographic. (It also has the merit of showing non-Hollywood views of the rest of the world to Americans, which is a very good thing. I have a certain grudging respect for Libya's Khadafi because of a NatGeoSoc article. If I had only been exposed to Hollywood and the news media view of him, I'd still think he was a lunatic terror-monger who should be taken out and shot, soonest.)
The news anchors I saw were noticeably shaken compared to the usual cool professionalism. Dan Rather in particular looked like he was about to burst into tears all day, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had been crying off camera--he looked like he had at times. All of them had the starts and shakes in their voices that told this viewer "I'd like to freak out completely, but I'm trying to stay calm and professional for this broadcast".
/., I've learned that Jon Katz is probably a nice guy with a good heart, but his essays seem to come from some slightly twisted parallel Earth that's *almost* like ours, but not quite.
Personally, I think Mr. Katz thought he had a cool sounding turn of phrase about modern media and just had to use it, even if it didn't happen to fit the facts. Either that, or he's displaying his usual vague attachment to reality. After more than a year of reading
He obviously didn't see the same President Bush I did, but I attribute that to the distorting lens of political partisanry. Apparently Peter Jennings is suffering from the same skewed perceptions. I saw a president who had something to say as soon as he got near a camera that was direct and to the point; I also see a president who isn't breaking down on national TV, and who isn't rushing off half-cocked to throw cruise missiles at someone. I see the Administration he picked acting quickly and decisively in a crisis, without going overboard (yet). In short, I see a president acting like a president should, and one who has damn good people supporting him. Did anyone notice that SecDef Rumsfield's first reaction when the plane hit was to go out and help rescue people?
Mayor Giuliani was also doing a damn good job as mayor of NYC, and deserves the plaudits. If I was a New Yorker, he'd definitely get my vote--the man has all his shit in one sock.
Former President Clinton was surprisingly classy when he got to New York and got camera time, and I'm commenting as someone who seriously loathed and despised the man for his entire eight-year abortion of a presidency. His former hanger-on Stephanopolous has been doing a bang-up job as a photo-journalist in New York during this mess; his coverage of the rescue efforts, and of the wreckage of what used to be the heart of NYC has been very interesting and powerfully moving.
I have been very impressed by the way most everyone has been pulling together and ignoring trivial crap like which political party they belong to (with the exception of Peter Jennings). There are also people in this country that I am disgusted by, but so far none of them have been decision makers or reporters (with the exception of Peter Jennings).
In my experience, most people with concealed carry permits who do indeed "carry" are very restrained and understand the gravity of using deadly force. They DON'T run around plugging people who cut them off in traffic or whatever, and I doubt they would do so in an airplane.
My experience is that of living in a U.S. state which has "shall-issue" concealed carry laws, meaning that there are a lot of concealed carry licenses issued, and an even greater number of people who just carry weapons in their car without a permit (legal in my state). We don't run around wantonly shooting each other in traffic. There have been incidents where people shot carjackers, and one "road-rage" incident where someone DEFENDED himself from some crazed guy who tried to beat him with a jackhandle after being cut off in traffic...
People who go through the process of getting a CCL (which isn't trivial) are serious about what they are doing, and generally not "carrying" just for the thrill of it. I trust my fellow citizens to behave themselves with guns, just as I trust them (in general) not to behave like homicidal madmen with cars, knives or baseball bats just because they happen to be in possession of one.
(The WTC towers were actually designed to withstand having a jet flown directly into them [chicagotribune.com]. I bet whoever signed off on that was sure it would never happen)
Actually, the WTC Towers did survive having a jet flown directly into them. They just didn't survive having two jetloads of fuel catch fire and burn inside the damaged buildings.
Also, two Towers, two planes. One Pentagon, one plane. I suspect Camp David, because of the Camp David Accords.
IF this was done by Bin Laden's guys, they showed in the 1993 WTC bombing that they are very sloppy about leaving a back trail of clues. Not every fanatical terrorist is also a genius criminal...
The really skilled (at avoiding detection and capture) terrorists were the ones trained by the Soviets in the old days. A lot of those guys are gone now, and I suspect the current crop of Middle Eastern terrorists does not have the same level of training and skill.
Of course, there's one little flaw in your rant:
Harry Potter is quality reading. That's why he's so popular; the books are a damn good read, for kids, teens, and adults who aren't too stuck on themselves to read "children's books".
You, sir, appear to be suffering from the common elitist delusion "If it's popular, it can't possibly be good!" Au contraire, if it is wildly, incredibly, unexpectedly popular, there's a good chance that it is good--in a free market, advertising and hype can not counteract the realization that what one is watching or reading is utter crap beyond a certain point. Hype can get me in to see (e.g.) "Lara Croft" the first time--it won't get me to watch it twice, or buy it on video, or to tell my friends it's a good flick.
Books depend on word-of-mouth promotion and repeat buyers (of the same author) more than most other entertainment media. If Harry Potter had sucked little green toads, no one much would have heard of the first book, and there wouldn't have been others. If it had been just another so-so formula series, it wouldn't be grabbing the imaginations of kids who don't normally read!
I didn't start reading the Harry Potter novels because of the hype; in fact, like many here, I was skeptical because of the hype. My daughter liked them, and she thought they were very good, and I read the first one because she said it was very good--and I found out for myself that it was good, and read the rest of the series. Now my mother's reading them, and my dad, and they somehow got my elderly great-aunt interested in reading them, because Mom was so enthusiastic about them.
You can't buy that kind of hype. It's earned.
Where the hell are my moderation points when I need them? The above needs to be moderated down as a Troll, and one of the AC's had the right answer and needs to be moderated up.
To repeat the AC's point: European law and attitudes regarding alcohol consumption are different from that in the U.S. It's *legal* and normal to drink beer or wine at age 13 in many European countries, including Germany and France, and I wouldn't be surprised if England was the same. Prohibition and its legacy of restricted-drinking laws are an uniquely American perversion.
I can't believe I'm responding to such an obvious troll...
The fact is there isn't much use for stolen credit cards numbers. Now of course there is some use, but the bulk of things require the actual credit card. What are you gonna order something from ThinkGeek and have it delivered to your house? Make a couple long distance phone calls?
Wrong guess, -5. What you do with a stolen credit card number is mail-order expensive, easy-to-fence items from companies that are too clueless to notice that the credit card's billing address does not match the address of the drop site you have the stuff shipped to. Yes, such companies exist; yes, you can get a lot of valuables with very little risk if you only use the credit cards for a one day buying spree, and have the stuff shipped express to a drop address that you use once and don't go back to. After that, the credit card company's security department will notice something is wrong. Since the "victim" in credit card fraud is the merchant or credit card company, not the owner of the credit card, you are not in much danger of being charged even if someone figures out who you might be, since most merchants don't seem to pursue matters across state borders, but just eat the charge or the CC company eats the charge.
How do I know this? Someone got a hold of one of my credit card numbers early this year, and went on a mail-order buying spree with it. That's where I found out that I cannot press charges myself, as I am not the victim, officially. Go figure.
The thieves tried to order high-end cameras, professional audio equipment, pre-paid cell phones, boomboxes, and camping equipment. The pro audio business, the big department store, one of the big wireless companies, and the photo shop were clueful enough to call me for confirmation when the billing and shipping address did not match. They won; they didn't get defrauded. Unfortunately, the other big wireless company and the sports equipment catalog company were too stupid to bother; they lost. The sports equipment guys were really dumb; the fraudulent mail-order got sent out, returned with "no such address", and they sent it out again!
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
Welcome to the wonderful world of online fanfiction! That's exactly the way it is in the fanfiction world... and as another poster suggested, if you don't want to wade through a lot of crap, you learn to listen to "word of mouth", and links from sites that review stories or personal picks by authors who seem to have a clue, that sort of thing. Jerry Pournelle long ago predicted something like this would happen when the Internet made self-publishing viable for anyone with the time to write. He was right.
There is an open format in the Palm world called Aportis Doc. Most Palm readers grok it, and it is actually documented. However, it is a pretty minimal plain-text format, so every Reader has also added it's own proprietary extensions to add pretty formatting... rather like happened with Word Processors on computers, since ASCII text didn't give you any formatting capabilities. Eventually we got Postscript and TeX in the Unix world, and RTF in the PC world as de facto formatted text standards, and then, finally, HTML as a standard for formatting text that any computer can display.
Since there are tools for converting HTML into almost any specialized format imaginable, and HTML is well-documented and not proprietary, I think that HTML makes a pretty good format for distributing e-texts.
As for PDF or Postscript, they are proprietary to Adobe, and I particularly dislike PDF--it is painful-to-impossible to read online since it does not flow text the way HTML does and you have to scroll around EVERY SINGLE DAMN PAGE, and Adobe keeps diddling the format, so that your shiny new PDF 5.0 document may not be readable with your Acrobat 3.0 or Xpdf or Kpdf reader. Finally, after Adobe's unethical, immoral and downright sleazy behavior in the Sklyarov affair, I strongly discourage the use or promotion of any Adobe products, especially PDF. Elcomsoft's Advanced Ebook Processor, however, sounds like a fine product to use in conjunction with any legacy encrypted PDFs you may be stuck with. But, please, let's get away from PDFs; we don't need to encourage would-be e-book publishers to give money to Adobe.
I read a LOT of books on my Palm, but I don't pay for proprietary, access-controlled expensive e-books. I convert texts from Project Gutenberg, download freely available texts and e-books from other sites, get free books from the Baen Free Library....
...and once in a great while I buy un-protected books from Baen's Webscriptions service. I refuse to buy access-controlled e-books that lock into a particular machine or limit my usage. When I buy a book, I buy a book, I don't license software.
Oddly enough, I haven't run out of books to read, nor am I likely to anytime soon; my backlog is huge. I also still buy hardbacks heavily (I have cut way back on paperbacks because they are too fragile for the long-term--I always end up replacing them in a few years.)
Don't give financial support to the publishers who come up with schemes you don't like (access-control, proprietary hardware requirements, etc)--i.e, don't buy their e-books. Support the publishers who do things the way you like (in my case, Baen Books). Publishers will pay attention to what sells and what doesn't, or they will go out of business. Remember why copy-protection on PC software, which was once ubiquitous, mostly went away? (Until recent attempts to revive it...) Because people wouldn't buy it if there was an alternative!
Publishers: if you make it a major hassle to use your product, people won't bother and will go to your competitor.
what?
Personally.. i find it hard to believe the gun manufactures can't be sued for wrongfull deaths from a WEAPON DESIGNED TO KILL.
Why should they be? The product works as advertised, and no one legally allowed to use a gun can say he or she didn't know what a gun does. There is no question of deceptive advertising or of poor design endangering the user. Guns are weapons, they are advertised as such, weapons are designed to kill or injure living things, and guns used as designed do that quite well. Now, if a given manufacturer's firearms were in the habit of blowing up in the user's hand and crippling him, they'd have something to sue about.
BTW, the victim's relatives or whatever can still sue the user of the gun for wrongful death, and the local prosecuter can arrest the user for murder or whatever charge is appropriate. However, holding the manufacturer responsible for illegal use of their product is no more appropriate than it would be to hold CD-R writer manufacturers responsible for software piracy--and in the U.S., it's a lot less appropriate, since the whole "sue gun manufacturers for gun crimes" is a back-door attack on the 2nd Amendment by assholes who can't find the votes to get it repealed, but insist that their view should prevail over that of the majority no matter what.
If you look at it in the right light, the open-source philosophy is un-American.
The open-source movement espouses freedom of information, making commercial-quality software available without cost. Moreover, the source code for these utilities and operating systems - an unparalleled teaching tool for aspiring programmers - is distributed freely. Everyone has the same access to information.
However, it is wonderfully Christian in its ethic.... And there are those who insist that America is a Christian nation. Its laws are certainly founded on Judaeo-Christian-Roman laws and traditions.
Free software is not "un-American" (How can it be? Every American parent, school and nursery worth its salt tries to teach kids to "share", "play nice", and "help others"--are basic family values now "un-American"?). It is, however, anti-materialist. That scares the hell out of those whose only values are materialist and worldly.