Does anyone really think that the privacy to look up whatever info you want is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives?
Yes. I'm sorry; yes, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I cherish my freedom, as you apparently cherish your anonymity. The price of having freedom is allowing other people to have it, too. You apparently believe that freedom is really just the freedom for all of us to be exactly like you. If we don't want to do anything that you don't like, we'll do fine. Because so many people are fucking morons, that means letting them have the freedom to saturate the airwaves with the Backstreet Boys, or the freedom to learn about explosives. We have to accept these dangers as simply the cost of doing business.
Just as my right to privacy is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives, my right to due process and a fair trial is important enough to justify the fact that due process and fair trials will end up allowing dome "detainees" to go free.
The "researchers" compared the weather of the 4 days following september 11th when most (non millitary) air traffic was suspended to the 'average' temperature, for those 4 days, of the past 30 years.
The "researchers" did more than just compare weather reports:
However, instead of studying the lack of airborne jets during the FAA's three-day moratorium, Minnis considered the few aircraft that were in the skies -- military jets and transport planes.
In a usually packed air corridor around Washington, D.C., Minnis followed satellite images of a lone contrail drifting through the mid-Atlantic states on Sept. 12. The three days of grounded air travel provided him a unique opportunity to model the evolution of single contrails where normally scores or hundreds would be found.
He witnessed six contrails, each no wider than an airplane wing, evolve in a matter of hours into cloud banks that covered 20,000 square kilometers.
Yes, more research is required. Yes, it's pretty damn obvious that there is an effect. No, nobody knows if the effect is good or bad, but it is quite definitely there.
I love the "3 days isn't statistically significant" crowd. They had 3 days with no civilian air traffic. They observed military cargo flights leaving contrails that over a few hours turned into very large cloud formations.
Weather satellites observing six separate instances of these contrail to cloud formation growths is significant. There were more, but they spotted six instances where one plane flew through a clear area and made a cloud formation. Thet's pretty clear. Take 3 days without vast airplane formed cloud cover and, using all the other days with the manmade clouds as a control group, you can spot a 3 day blip with temperature variations of 3 degrees celcius more than all the days before and all the days after.
We had a 3 day window with wider variation in temperature extremes. We had a 3 day window with negligible air traffic. We have documented how well one airplane can make cloud cover. I'm not a global warming person or anything, but if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you've got an agenda of your own if you won't admit that we've got a duck.
Saying that air travel affects our weather isn't panic or tree hugging, it's observation. We're not going to stop flying. We are affecting things, for good or bad we don't even know. I don't know how we'll be able to tell- that's where this information is insignificant. The effects are obvious, but whether these effects are actually bad is not something we can determine yet, if ever. Who knows, maybe more research on jet propulsion can end up stopping this. different insulation, directed airflow, who knows? Just because we don't fully understand something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We may not have to, or even want to change anything. We just don't know enough about it yet.
A staffer for Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, who signed the letter, said that lawmakers did not want FBI ( news - web sites) agents to arrest casual users but instead go after operators of network "nodes" that handle much of the traffic.
Time to build new jails, I guess...
Yeah, now we've got the War On Piracy to fund. What I don't understand is how operators of network "nodes" that handle much of the traffic can be considered criminals. I always thought they were considered common carriers. My ISP operates the node that handles all of my traffic. I'd hate to see my ISP shut down over this. Other than forcing us back into the dark ages of dial up, how does this stop swapping?
And if you're going to give people the ability to do something illegal, you've got to at least make an effort to intervene.
The downloading music function of a computer is totally separate from the CD burning function. If I don't have a fat pipe, an internet cafe is the best place to grab the latest version of my favorite distro. The fact that the BPI (RIAUK?) bullied the cafe into taking away such an incredibly useful feature pisses me off. When you consider how small a dent this puts into music piracy, it is even more contemptible. The cafe's terms and conditions did not allow people to make illegal copies. This is just another example of the litigation and extortion business model. It's pathetic, and I hope that EasyInternetCafe manages to get out from under this.
My rebuttal is based on the stupidity of such remarks.
You got me. I ws not as clear as I should have been. I agree with you (except that I think lying was pretty well established in Washington long before Clinton was born). I wasn't referring to the Bush administration per se, but the federal government. The Republicans don't control Congress, and they're more in corporations' pockets than the administration. Party is irrelevant- the system itself is screwed up. We need campaign finance reform just as much as we need boardroom reform.
If the "incentive" is detrimental to the company, the justification for these actions is ethically questionable.
Exactly. All any shareholder needs to ask is "is SonicBlue a bank? When did we get into the loan business, and why are we handing out loans that don't have to be repaid?" It looks like outright theft from the rest of the shareholders, with the "non-recourse" part thrown in.
The officers and boardmembers of a company are still liable for crimes committed by a company.
Oh, would that it were true. Especially at Arthur Andersen. With a government less beholden to corporate interests, This problem never would have gotten started. Theft is theft, and fraud is fraud. People trying this sort of thing would have gone to jail long before they got to the level of billions. The big corps. would have known better than to try.
With Congress doing the same thing to keep their jobs- the money dance with the budget and the money dance selling votes, it was only to be expected that the crooked businessmen would entrench themselves in the White House. We need to clean up accounting and reporting of companies, then we need to tackle Washington to clean up its accounting and reporting.
Make them refund every penny that they embezzeled/whatever, and THEN fine them on top of that.
In any legal system except one bought and paid for by big business, that would be a given. If I steal a car, it isn't waiting for me when I get out of jail; I lose what I stole. A car isn't worth 7 billion dollars. Prison sounds great, though. They'll be living with hardened criminals who have done far less damage to society.
No actual people were responsible for committing actual crimes.
The justice department needs to stop being a bunch of whores and realize that "limited liability" has to do with financial, not criminal liability. Fraud is fraud, theft is theft. Put them in the same cell with a guy doing 5 years for forging a check. It makes me sick.
Kunze says the new changes stop short of exempting Open Source software a customer has purchased from carrying a warranty. And software distributed for free would still be required under UCITA to carry a warranty if there's a charge for installation services or an accompanying maintenance contract.
When you buy most open source software, what you're actually paying for is the packaging, documentation and distribution of same. You can guarantee this: If the shrink wrap is not broken, the CDs inside are guaranteed to be unbroken and free from scratches. The books inside are guaranteed to not be dog eared.
Other, custom open source software already has a kind of warranty- the contractor is writing it for you. If it doesn't work, he isn't finished yet.
It's easy to guarantee installation. It's installed properly, right? The maintainance contract is in itself a form of warranty.
None of these are ways of weaseling out of ethical obligations. They reflect the realistic expectations of just about everybody involved in computers and open source. Free software isn't a product to be sold, so it in and of itself can not have a real warranty. The things actually sold can realistically be guaranteed. If the stupid politicians want to force geeks to expose themselves to financial liability, then the geeks just have to expose themselves to the same liability that MS has always done: none. Including the source code can be its own insurance. A lot of "liability" can be shifted if the customer has it.
Basically this is a layer of overhead that proprietary guys already have (without adding to their responsibilities) and now they want to saddle open source folks with the expense and distraction while adding to their FUD. Easy to get around, easy to overcome.
I assume he's making enough money to cover his costs and then some, else he wouldn't continue.
Yes, but you understand that businesses have a fundamental right to high profits. If we don't buy the pills or videos these guys will band together with other content providers (RIAA/MPAA) and buy legislation forcing us to prop up their failing business models. I see a convergence with MS and Intel, where your upgrades of Windows will read your spam and send money from your credit card to the spammers if you don't buy enough penis pumps. I for one don't want to see this happen, which is why I buy at least one degree from a prestigious non- accredited university a week.
Re:is it Legal to Stalk Spammers?
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Just wondering is it legal to stalk spammers?
I don't see a problem with it. They're in the business of unsolicited harassment too. Tell you what: if they want to opt-out of being stalked, I've got a fake email address that they can write to, and I guarantee that I'll take them off my stalking list.
USPS actually does pretty well. A couple/three years ago they profited a billion dollars. Of course, that's with creative accounting- they had a big round of financing that they're still paying off, and email is really hurting them.
Where their real cost comes in is that they're a public service. A letter across town costs you just as much as a letter to the far tip of the Aleutians. They're not about to shut off the routes that cost too much to service.
If they streamlined, or recieved federal funds, we could probably still pay 20 cents an ounce- for local mail. So mail on high volume routes subsidises the sparse ones. 37 cents an ounce seems cheap, but my point was that USPS isn't government funded, so its prices are realistically high rather than artificially low.
The Post Office Amtrak Nuclear power Remodeled houses in the inner city Tobacco
The USPS is financially independent; that's why it costs so damn much. Amtrak is being pushed in that direction, but it just costs too much to survive. These aren't industries that wouldn't survive without legislation, however. There are a lot of shipping companies that do quite well- you listed UPS and FedEx. The government doesn't keep them afloat. There are several rail lines that are doing well, too. Washington just wants to make sure that niche services like first class mail and passenger rail are universally available.
All the nuclear plants I can think of are owned by power companies. The government regulates the hell out of them but doesn't own them.
The remodeling industry does not survive because people are forced to get new kitchens every few years. Many cities that suck, however, are understandably interested in urban renewal.
Tobacco survives because they sell something people really want. Their lawyers are just there because of morons who whine when they get cancer, as if they didn't do it to themselves.
All of these industries are full of companies with good business models. Amtrak and the USPS would lose money without the support and/or protection they get, but they get it because Washington wants to make sure those services are provided.
None of these industries have failing business models and so need legislative protection. Washington doesn't want to insure that we continue to get crappy top 40, they just want to continue to get campaign contributions.
...dvd's are pretty resistant to superficial damage anyways, and can usually be fixed with a 2-dollar kit. Have you ever rented a DVD that's more than a month or so old? It's not pretty.
...if your car should somehow melt or be snapped in half, you don't get a free replacement. Part of owning something is taking care of it. Part of taking care of data is backing it up. Nobody's asking for each DVD to come with 5 free "backup" copies of the disc here, just to keep the right to back up data.
...assuming that that FBI warning makes an exception for personal copying (Newsflash: It Doesn't) people will still be using this far away for illicit purposes. What does the FBI warning have to do with my legal rights? What does someone else's violation of the law have to do with my legal rights?
The solution to rampant lawlessness is to capture and punish the lawbreakers, not to extend the law to make everything illegal. Even John Ashcroft can't arrest everybody. Especially if they're breaking the law by exercising their legal rights. This is going to take a long time, but the courts are going to throw out a lot these laws. Until then, I guess a lot of us will just have to be "criminals."
yeah, like the chief of staff needs a vote in congress (a law) anymore to go to war.
The best part is that the JCS have been totally cut out of planning for this Iraq thing. It's less of a true national policy than a nostalgia thing among some administration members. It's also getting quite
tiring.
Australia's safe until Paul Hogan starts attending NSC meetings.
Actually grammer isn't even a word so it naturally has no spelling.
Grammer is indeed a word; it's a town in Indiana, and the spelling of the word shall be Grammer. That seemed out of context and was not capitalized, however, so I took the liberty of assuming that you had actually meant grammar.
There's no way out of this, is there?
I think when we both run out of karma it'll be finished.
...i can see that most of you don't. you don't see the point. he ddi this for his own enjoyment.
And he sells them. Enough people think he's on to something that it's a paying proposition. He sells enough that in April he dropped the prices. I'm surprised the trolls haven't been complaining about/. using the front page for advertising, even though that's not at all what the story's about. It's impressive as hell, and the fact that it's totally useless doesn't really matter.
So, instead of putting out one version now, then adding a few things on and putting out a special version, then putting everything in and calling it a Collector's Edition, he's waiting until the Collector's Edition is the only one.
No, Lucas is too smart a businessman to not want that. By your math, he'd be able to sell 3 DVD copies of each of 4-6. Me, I don't see anything special about "special." Just put the damn movie on a disc. I don't want trailers, interviews or games.
A good General thinks of the long term, even if the war is for a short-term objective.
Amen. Except for the deranged and Harry Truman, nobody fights a war for the sake of fighting a war. Fighting is a constructive act, intended to achieve a goal. Whatever terms get used, the goal is invariably for the peace after the war to be better than the peace before the war. No peace can exist, much less be improved by wholesale gratuitous maiming.
The reality of this weapon is that it is more precise than current ones. While the collateral damage is unsettling, it is less. Warfare is being refined continually- we don't bomb cities any more, we bomb targets. Soon the efficiency of laser targeting will be brought to the effects delivery. If the laser is painting the target, there's no bomb to go off course- the target's already hit. I think it's a good move.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I'm sorry; yes, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I cherish my freedom, as you apparently cherish your anonymity. The price of having freedom is allowing other people to have it, too. You apparently believe that freedom is really just the freedom for all of us to be exactly like you. If we don't want to do anything that you don't like, we'll do fine. Because so many people are fucking morons, that means letting them have the freedom to saturate the airwaves with the Backstreet Boys, or the freedom to learn about explosives. We have to accept these dangers as simply the cost of doing business.
Just as my right to privacy is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives, my right to due process and a fair trial is important enough to justify the fact that due process and fair trials will end up allowing dome "detainees" to go free.
The "researchers" did more than just compare weather reports:
However, instead of studying the lack of airborne jets during the FAA's three-day moratorium, Minnis considered the few aircraft that were in the skies -- military jets and transport planes.
In a usually packed air corridor around Washington, D.C., Minnis followed satellite images of a lone contrail drifting through the mid-Atlantic states on Sept. 12. The three days of grounded air travel provided him a unique opportunity to model the evolution of single contrails where normally scores or hundreds would be found.
He witnessed six contrails, each no wider than an airplane wing, evolve in a matter of hours into cloud banks that covered 20,000 square kilometers.
Yes, more research is required. Yes, it's pretty damn obvious that there is an effect. No, nobody knows if the effect is good or bad, but it is quite definitely there.
I love the "3 days isn't statistically significant" crowd. They had 3 days with no civilian air traffic. They observed military cargo flights leaving contrails that over a few hours turned into very large cloud formations.
Weather satellites observing six separate instances of these contrail to cloud formation growths is significant. There were more, but they spotted six instances where one plane flew through a clear area and made a cloud formation. Thet's pretty clear. Take 3 days without vast airplane formed cloud cover and, using all the other days with the manmade clouds as a control group, you can spot a 3 day blip with temperature variations of 3 degrees celcius more than all the days before and all the days after.
We had a 3 day window with wider variation in temperature extremes. We had a 3 day window with negligible air traffic. We have documented how well one airplane can make cloud cover. I'm not a global warming person or anything, but if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you've got an agenda of your own if you won't admit that we've got a duck.
Saying that air travel affects our weather isn't panic or tree hugging, it's observation. We're not going to stop flying. We are affecting things, for good or bad we don't even know. I don't know how we'll be able to tell- that's where this information is insignificant. The effects are obvious, but whether these effects are actually bad is not something we can determine yet, if ever. Who knows, maybe more research on jet propulsion can end up stopping this. different insulation, directed airflow, who knows? Just because we don't fully understand something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We may not have to, or even want to change anything. We just don't know enough about it yet.
Time to build new jails, I guess...
Yeah, now we've got the War On Piracy to fund. What I don't understand is how operators of network "nodes" that handle much of the traffic can be considered criminals. I always thought they were considered common carriers. My ISP operates the node that handles all of my traffic. I'd hate to see my ISP shut down over this. Other than forcing us back into the dark ages of dial up, how does this stop swapping?
The downloading music function of a computer is totally separate from the CD burning function. If I don't have a fat pipe, an internet cafe is the best place to grab the latest version of my favorite distro. The fact that the BPI (RIAUK?) bullied the cafe into taking away such an incredibly useful feature pisses me off. When you consider how small a dent this puts into music piracy, it is even more contemptible. The cafe's terms and conditions did not allow people to make illegal copies. This is just another example of the litigation and extortion business model. It's pathetic, and I hope that EasyInternetCafe manages to get out from under this.
You got me. I ws not as clear as I should have been. I agree with you (except that I think lying was pretty well established in Washington long before Clinton was born). I wasn't referring to the Bush administration per se, but the federal government. The Republicans don't control Congress, and they're more in corporations' pockets than the administration. Party is irrelevant- the system itself is screwed up. We need campaign finance reform just as much as we need boardroom reform.
Exactly. All any shareholder needs to ask is "is SonicBlue a bank? When did we get into the loan business, and why are we handing out loans that don't have to be repaid?" It looks like outright theft from the rest of the shareholders, with the "non-recourse" part thrown in.
Oh, would that it were true. Especially at Arthur Andersen. With a government less beholden to corporate interests, This problem never would have gotten started. Theft is theft, and fraud is fraud. People trying this sort of thing would have gone to jail long before they got to the level of billions. The big corps. would have known better than to try.
With Congress doing the same thing to keep their jobs- the money dance with the budget and the money dance selling votes, it was only to be expected that the crooked businessmen would entrench themselves in the White House. We need to clean up accounting and reporting of companies, then we need to tackle Washington to clean up its accounting and reporting.
In any legal system except one bought and paid for by big business, that would be a given. If I steal a car, it isn't waiting for me when I get out of jail; I lose what I stole. A car isn't worth 7 billion dollars. Prison sounds great, though. They'll be living with hardened criminals who have done far less damage to society.
The justice department needs to stop being a bunch of whores and realize that "limited liability" has to do with financial, not criminal liability. Fraud is fraud, theft is theft. Put them in the same cell with a guy doing 5 years for forging a check. It makes me sick.
So, do you want your money back? How do you want someone to accept financial liability for software that you never paid them for?
When you buy most open source software, what you're actually paying for is the packaging, documentation and distribution of same. You can guarantee this: If the shrink wrap is not broken, the CDs inside are guaranteed to be unbroken and free from scratches. The books inside are guaranteed to not be dog eared.
Other, custom open source software already has a kind of warranty- the contractor is writing it for you. If it doesn't work, he isn't finished yet.
It's easy to guarantee installation. It's installed properly, right? The maintainance contract is in itself a form of warranty.
None of these are ways of weaseling out of ethical obligations. They reflect the realistic expectations of just about everybody involved in computers and open source. Free software isn't a product to be sold, so it in and of itself can not have a real warranty. The things actually sold can realistically be guaranteed. If the stupid politicians want to force geeks to expose themselves to financial liability, then the geeks just have to expose themselves to the same liability that MS has always done: none. Including the source code can be its own insurance. A lot of "liability" can be shifted if the customer has it.
Basically this is a layer of overhead that proprietary guys already have (without adding to their responsibilities) and now they want to saddle open source folks with the expense and distraction while adding to their FUD. Easy to get around, easy to overcome.
Um, if they opted in and you make it easy to opt out, it's not spam.
Yes, but you understand that businesses have a fundamental right to high profits. If we don't buy the pills or videos these guys will band together with other content providers (RIAA/MPAA) and buy legislation forcing us to prop up their failing business models. I see a convergence with MS and Intel, where your upgrades of Windows will read your spam and send money from your credit card to the spammers if you don't buy enough penis pumps. I for one don't want to see this happen, which is why I buy at least one degree from a prestigious non- accredited university a week.
I don't see a problem with it. They're in the business of unsolicited harassment too. Tell you what: if they want to opt-out of being stalked, I've got a fake email address that they can write to, and I guarantee that I'll take them off my stalking list.
Where their real cost comes in is that they're a public service. A letter across town costs you just as much as a letter to the far tip of the Aleutians. They're not about to shut off the routes that cost too much to service.
If they streamlined, or recieved federal funds, we could probably still pay 20 cents an ounce- for local mail. So mail on high volume routes subsidises the sparse ones. 37 cents an ounce seems cheap, but my point was that USPS isn't government funded, so its prices are realistically high rather than artificially low.
Amtrak
Nuclear power
Remodeled houses in the inner city
Tobacco
The USPS is financially independent; that's why it costs so damn much. Amtrak is being pushed in that direction, but it just costs too much to survive. These aren't industries that wouldn't survive without legislation, however. There are a lot of shipping companies that do quite well- you listed UPS and FedEx. The government doesn't keep them afloat. There are several rail lines that are doing well, too. Washington just wants to make sure that niche services like first class mail and passenger rail are universally available.
All the nuclear plants I can think of are owned by power companies. The government regulates the hell out of them but doesn't own them.
The remodeling industry does not survive because people are forced to get new kitchens every few years. Many cities that suck, however, are understandably interested in urban renewal.
Tobacco survives because they sell something people really want. Their lawyers are just there because of morons who whine when they get cancer, as if they didn't do it to themselves.
All of these industries are full of companies with good business models. Amtrak and the USPS would lose money without the support and/or protection they get, but they get it because Washington wants to make sure those services are provided.
None of these industries have failing business models and so need legislative protection. Washington doesn't want to insure that we continue to get crappy top 40, they just want to continue to get campaign contributions.
Have you ever rented a DVD that's more than a month or so old? It's not pretty.
Part of taking care of data is backing it up. Nobody's asking for each DVD to come with 5 free "backup" copies of the disc here, just to keep the right to back up data.
What does the FBI warning have to do with my legal rights? What does someone else's violation of the law have to do with my legal rights?
The solution to rampant lawlessness is to capture and punish the lawbreakers, not to extend the law to make everything illegal. Even John Ashcroft can't arrest everybody. Especially if they're breaking the law by exercising their legal rights. This is going to take a long time, but the courts are going to throw out a lot these laws. Until then, I guess a lot of us will just have to be "criminals."
The best part is that the JCS have been totally cut out of planning for this Iraq thing. It's less of a true national policy than a nostalgia thing among some administration members. It's also getting quite tiring.
Australia's safe until Paul Hogan starts attending NSC meetings.
Grammer is indeed a word; it's a town in Indiana, and the spelling of the word shall be Grammer. That seemed out of context and was not capitalized, however, so I took the liberty of assuming that you had actually meant grammar.
There's no way out of this, is there?
I think when we both run out of karma it'll be finished.
It's spelled grammar. At least get that right.
And he sells them. Enough people think he's on to something that it's a paying proposition. He sells enough that in April he dropped the prices. I'm surprised the trolls haven't been complaining about /. using the front page for advertising, even though that's not at all what the story's about. It's impressive as hell, and the fact that it's totally useless doesn't really matter.
No, Lucas is too smart a businessman to not want that. By your math, he'd be able to sell 3 DVD copies of each of 4-6. Me, I don't see anything special about "special." Just put the damn movie on a disc. I don't want trailers, interviews or games.
The RIAA just bought a bill to legalize DOSs as part of a political disagreement.
These DOS attacks are not justice,
Which is the point that this weekend's perps were trying to illustrate.
Amen. Except for the deranged and Harry Truman, nobody fights a war for the sake of fighting a war. Fighting is a constructive act, intended to achieve a goal. Whatever terms get used, the goal is invariably for the peace after the war to be better than the peace before the war. No peace can exist, much less be improved by wholesale gratuitous maiming.
The reality of this weapon is that it is more precise than current ones. While the collateral damage is unsettling, it is less. Warfare is being refined continually- we don't bomb cities any more, we bomb targets. Soon the efficiency of laser targeting will be brought to the effects delivery. If the laser is painting the target, there's no bomb to go off course- the target's already hit. I think it's a good move.