Funniest thing about that search --- underneath the GWB link is a Jimmy Carter link. Both are accompanied by a Google directory link.
Funny thing about the links is that neither looked particularly miserable. Carter looked like he was in a toothpaste commercial.
Bush always has an idiotic smirk on his face. His abysmal failures don't seem to upset him at all. The fact that 3/11 took place because we spent all the time and resources settling old Bush family scores rather than eliminating Bin Laden does not trouble him in the least. The sad fact is that the villified French are putting more effort into catchin Bin Laden than the US.
Bush hash trashed the economy and failed to stop the terrorists, but he got a huge tax cut for corporate fat cats and settled the score with Saddam. So he thinks he is a huge success
Smoking the peyote again, are you? Engine size is not the be-all end-all of insurance premiums.. In my city, a 2004 Civic costs DOUBLE what it is to insure a 1969 Camaro. The year of the car is the main determining factor.
The cost and chance of theft are the main factors. My Jag costs several times what the wife's VW does on insurance.
Overclocking and engine tweaking are very much alike because they are both almost completely pointless and significantly reduce the lifetime of the machine.
The main reason to get a performance car is handling. It does not matter what you do to the engine, the ability to turn corners will not improve.
Of course there is a lot that can be done to improve the handling of a US built car, most have abysmal suspensions and terrible steering. My wife used to drive an Omni that her father had given her. The thing felt like it was close to tipping over when you went round an off ramp. Somehow it managed to have understeer AND oversteer at the same time. It was like there was whiplash in the steering, first the thing did not want to turn, then the back end would kick round.
This type of behavior was happening at like 30 to 40 mph. Later she was given a Horizon (same car) of the same vintage - just as bad.
I don't think the SUV craze cold have happened the same anywhere else. You have to start with a tollerance for bad suspensions to end up paying $60K for a delivery truck with leather seats.
Given the choice of speed or handling I will pick handling every time.
Yeah, maybe one day humans will be able to colonize pictures of stars.
That is not science.
The unmanned exploration program results in more knowledge than joy riding in the shuttle does.
And before we get to any stars we need to invent a space drive considerably faster than our current technology.
Hubble is telling us which stars have planets we might want to visit - kinda useful for colonization eh?
Not that I would put it past the Christian far right to try something like this, but where did you get this conspiracy theory from? It sounds like something out of science fiction comedy.
Suggest a more credible theory that is consistent with the facts.
Sure there are astronauts that would do this, and test pilots and jet jocks galore. Fortunately it's not their decision to make. An older and wiser head has looked at the risk (much larger then previously thought) consider the consequences if it went to hell
Unfortunate choice of words here. You do know that the Christian right started complaining about Hubble as soon as it started to show images that might conflict with creationism?
Its like the 9/11 thing, catastrophe happens, the immediate Bush response is 'how can we take advantage of this for our own political ends'. The economy goes into recession: 'how can we use this for tax cuts'. The Columbia disaster: 'how can we use this to kill Hubble'.
If the risk of another shuttle disaster is significant the entire fleet should be grounded completely. The space station should be de-orbited, the mission to mars cancelled. Of course this is very likely to happen after the election in any case. The next shuttle launch has already been moved to after the election.
Going to the space station only provides a marginal safety improvement. The same gain could be realized by reducing the crew by half.
The other option is to abandon Hubble I and replace it with a Hubble II designed to be serviced by machines. There are duplicates of every Hubble part. The duplicate mirror is actually better than the orbiting one, the fabrication on that one was not botched unlike the orbiting one which has spherical abberation defects.
After the Challenger disaster a replacement was quickly put together using spare parts. There is no reason this cannot be done with Hubble. There is even a spare ATLAS launch platform which could easily carry it, although one could be bought from the Russians or Chinese at a good price. I don't know if Arianne has the capacity but I would not be surprised.
Cancelling the space station program would free up plenty of cash in the NASA budget. The science return on Hubble is vastly greater than any expected from the station and a manned trip to mars combined.
Arthur C. Clarke is right, its time for the robots to take over here.
>I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards.
You do realize that that is one of the most breath-taking oxymorons I've ever seen uttered on Slashdot? If you're willing to label a culture "barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards", then you are not a relativist. You believe that there are absolute standards applicable to all cultures and that there can therefore be cultures in violation of those standards.
Its this thing called a >joke
The use of 'acceptable' here was deliberate. I did not say 'true'. There can be no absolute definition of 'acceptable', but there is certainly an intersubjective definition. The closest we get to an absolute standard would be a Rawlsian original position, although the term 'veil of ignorance' starts to take on an ironic meaning in this case.
The very worst aspect of Whahabi islam is the absolutism, the claim to absolute knowledge of what is right, everything else, the treatment of women, the lack of all basic political rights follows from that absolutism.
I think that like many right wing critics of cultural relativism you miss the point. Just because a moral code might have internal logical
consistency does not mean that it is acceptable. The point is that the absolutist moral convictions of John Ashcroft are no more acceptable than Whahabi absolutism.
Once you accept the 'Open Society' position that George Sorros and Karl Popper advocate, that there is no absolute truth then there is no place for a Whahabi state or an Ashcroftian state.
What we could do is to join the two ideas. The big problem with the Rawlsian veil of ignorance argument is that it is untestable. But the situation we have in liberal society is pretty similar. The question becomes, would anyone accept an Ashcroftian or Whahabi state if they did not already live in one and if they did not know what role they would have in it?
This gets hashed out every time the proposal rears its head. From a constitutional point of view it is clueless, what does the.sex domain mean if not licensing the press?
Spreading porn is a serious part of the work the Internet does. The best way to change the societies in the middle east whose screwed up 'religious' bigottries lead to terrorism is with mountains of porn.
Yep I am 100% serious here.
I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards. Women are treated at best as second class citizens and at worst as mere property.
It takes powerful forces to break down that type of prejudice. Pornography is a very powerful force. That is why the Saudi and Iranian mullahs fear it so much.
The fundamentalist christianity that spawned David Koralishen, the anti-abortion assasisnation squads, Timothy McVeigh are not too great either. The answer is more porn.
Watching people having sex does not break down many social barriers, but the idea that religious authorities don't have to run a society does.
The United States is a Republic, or Representative Democracy, not a true Democracy. The city-states of ancient Greece were true Democracies, for the most part since women couldn't vote. Native Americans had a form of true Democracy, except voting was just done at the tribal meeting when there was an important decision to make.
The definition of democracy has changed since 1776. It is essential to understand the distinction between representative and true democracy if you are going to read the Federalist Papers. Up to that point the last time Democracy had been tried on a significant scale was Greece and the rulling classes had been brought up on the death of Socrates - ordered by the democratic mob.
Of course the fact that the number of victims of even the milder Roman emperors such as Claudius was far greater than the number of deaths under democracy did not enter the debate. The fear that served the powers that were was fear of the mob.
2004 will be known as the first election where the Internet played a major role. Dean did not win the nomination, but he had a major effect. Neither Goldwater nor McGovern won the Presidency, but those two campaigns set the agenda for their parties for the next twenty years.
So the question to ask is when the first person will emerge from one of these online pseudo-elections to be elected to a real position? It certainly can happen, for over a hundred years the Oxford Union Society was where the political elite of the country was selected. Become President of the union and you were assured a political career.
Of course this does not work as well these days and having been President is probably a liability.
I loathe Checkpoint. There VPN client is utterly absymal. Totaly and utterly crap.
Every time the VP rekeys this stupid box blocks out half my laptop's screen for five fucking minutes and does nothing. For some reason the jerk off who designed the piece of utter shit client decided to lock that area of the screen while the client does nothing.
Eventually the box asks me to select a certificate to log in to the VPN. Well guess what? Its the same one as I used last time the piec of turd asked the same question.
There is a (small) justification for asking the user if they are still at the computer from time to time. But there is no excuse for interupting the user while they are doing other work with a pop up box that is not ready to receive input.
The OSI Networking Model is a 7-layer system that can be used interchangably, layers run on top of each other... for example, HTTP specifies that it use TCP which wraps around IP over any physical protocol. It doesn't care if you're using WiFi or a hardwired connection.
Can't say that much about the OSI model except that the Internet does not use it. That's right, the Internet is actually built on a 6 layer model and there is no real connection between the two. The OSI work took place long after the Internet protocols were defined.
The OSI model has a presentation layer that the Internet does not use. I can't remember what it did and I don't think many other people do either. So DARPA saying they would throw out the OSI 7 layer model is like saying that we will throw out the idea of communism. We never tried it in the first place, and the results of those that did were not promising.
The Internet does use a layered model. But I don't think anyone would want to throw out that idea. There are also people saying that somewhat more information should be exchangeable between layers, that is an arguable position but it has nothing to do with the OSI model.
I don't know how relevant the output of this work would be to the internet. The requirements described are all taken from batlefield use cases. The idea that the military should drive IT research funding in the US is a pretty cold war concept. The military are no longer the biggest purchaser of IT.
Calling the supression of terrorisim a 'war' does nothing to change this either. What we need here is a police action to track down criminals. The military phase of the 'war on terror' should have been over with the supression of the Taleban and the elimination of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri over a year ago. The only use for the military is when you have a government that is either actively encouraging terrorism (Lybia, Iran, Pakistan) or unable to supress terrorism on its own. The situation in afghanistan was a bit of both. You had the Taleban that was created and funded by Musharaf and Pakistan in part control of the country. They were unwilling to take on Al Qaeda, but they were also incapable.
Unfortunately I don't think that the requirements of this new network are going to be driven by the people who should drive - consumer, enterprise and governmental uses of communications. I would like to think that an equal effort would go into building a response infrastructure for the FBI or Interpol, but it won't.
I think we need a manned Mars mission badly, and I Am worried the Democrats will kill it just because Bush signed off on the idea.
Hey, money is no object if the smirking chimp, W himself volunteers for the mission. He will be landing on the sun within weeks.
It would be great to keep Hubble but how long can we put off manned space exploration? We have been dragging our collective heels now since the end of the Apollo missions.
The problem is that the manned missions are not about science. The robots will quite happily accept a one way ticket without complaint. We cannot even land probes on Mars reliably at this point.
The UK rover crashed because the atmosphere was unexpectedly thinner than expected after a storm. That could have caused the second US probe to crash if the first had not sent back data allowing the lander to be recalibrated. As it is the first US probe could easily have crashed the same as the British one if the storm had hit a few days later.
At this point Hubble is the most important piece of scientific apparatus the astronomers have got. We should be looking at ways we could launch ten cheap Hubbles rather than continuing to waste money on the space station.
The moon mission had a very serious purpose. JFK did it to beat the USSR. The idea was to spend the USSR into the ground and also to prove that the West was going to win the cold war in the end. The USSR survived for twenty more years and when I was at school we would have generals show up to give us talks about how NATO would last less than five days when the Russians attacked. But it was pretty clear even before Reagan was elected that the USSR was in terminal decline, that they would never match the achievements of the West, let alone beat them.
There is no similar purpose for the Mars mission. I doubt that the endorsement of Bush Sr or Jr will have much effect on the idea because it is not going to happen anyhow. The cost of a mission would be at least 2 trillion dollars. The conservatives would want that money for a tax cut, the democrats want it to pay social security retirees the benefits they paid for.
and you know, I know you do, that it was the change in fed administration that killed the penalties that MS was going to pay.
look, even though this is the most inept and corrupt administration since 1876 I don't think the administration change had a major effect. The real win for microsoft was that the Appeals court only threw out half the case, even though admitting that the judge was unacceptably biased.
There was no way that the DoJ was going to get a breakup through the supreme court with that particular hole in the case. They knew that any decision that came from the lower courts could be challenged by Microsoft with a good chance of success.
you probably could have gotten Comedy Central back faster by staying with Dish, I wouldn't expect this to go on too long, Viacom doesn't want to lose the advertising points.
Yes, like switching your satelite provider is not exactly hassle free. I guess you might want to go get yourself a new hardware package...
I wonder how many of these 'I went and dumped...' stories are written by Viacom trolls?
My DirecTV HDVR2 has dual tuners which record at the same time. I have heard that Dish Network's DVR only has one tuner.
Dish came out with a DVR before directTV did. I got mine free, it has one tuner. There is a new model with two tuners.
The downside to DirectTV is that it will soon be owned by Rupert the liar Murdoch. So unless you want a programming lineup that is as 'fair and balanced' as faux news it is best avoided.
...in light of Microsoft being declared in violation of anti-trust law, can they funnel money to others to tie up competitors in court?
I said at the time that it was a really bad idea for the Netscape guys and Scott McNealy to start this particular type of pissing contest. In the first place the DoJ would have given Microsoftr a much tougher time if they had stuck to the original case rather than getting into the Web and Java stuff where the case was very weak.
But more importantly the motives of Sun and Netscape looked to be mostly about how to set up an alibi for their own monumental incompetence. Oh dear, company folded, must have been those evil guys in Redmond not my own incompetence...
Oh well at least this time that fool Jackson won't be involved.
This is a feature differentiation. With CDRW and DVDRW drive getting very cheap, Hp wants to make itself stand out more. If you have a basic drive for $35 and an HP with this Scribe tech for say $50 it becomes a tougher choice than before where the only apparent difference was name brand.
No, I think this is a patent license play. The DVD and CD world is full of patents. The main Philips/Sony patentson CD expired some time ago but there are still lots of patents on CD-ROM and DVD. HP want to make a small amount off each drive and each disk no matter whose name is on it. Think about it, neither HP or Sony have manufacturing plants for the drives, it is all outsourced.
Big question is whether this feature is big enough to change the supply chain. I think so, the media manufacturers have a big interest stopping HP becomming a media supply brand (they already are in print cartridges).
Most important of all is the fact that DVD-RW is still in a limited deployment stage. I have not seen the same low cost spindles of DVD-RW disks yet.
>If the GOP becomes a threat to profitabity, Rupert will try to eliminate the GOP.
Not a chance. His politics lean conservative to begin with. FCC regulation? Bah. So what if it means he can't PPV porn (fat chance, especially once courts get involved, possibly fixing original indecency decision)? The satellite network is useful for other reasons to Rup.
Oh dear Conservatives not too good at checking out their fair weather allies. The British Tories thought they could count on Rupert, not any more. Last two elections his papers have been backing Labour. It is the same pattern everywhere. Rupert will back any party that he thinks it is in his interests to back.
In China Rupert is a stalwart ally of the Communist party cadres. He cheerfully makes sure his Star TV network puts out nothing that would offend. The Communists are doubly thankful that Rupert is helpful to them in the US where Fox News has pretty much warned the GOP off the idea of replacing the USSR with China as the ideological enemy in the new cold war they have been after.
If the GOP ends up with a road crash in November Rupert is quite capable of jumping sides. HANITY and (colmes) would become COLMES and (hanity).
I suspect he's been reading ESR's website and taken his views about the right to bear arms to heart.
That damn typo again. How many times? It was the right to arm bears. The idea being that the British or whoever might invade would be scared off by the heavily armed bears in the woods.
This strategy was used by great effect by the Spanish in the peninsular war. The regular spanish troops were poorly trained and led worse. On one occasion they ran away from the sound of their own gun fire (stopping only to loot the allied supply train). It was the gorilla (guerilla) war of the Spanish people that wore the French down to the point where they bolted (and suffering the misfortune to have their baggage train full of plunder intercepted and looted by the British at Salamancer.
Since actual gorillas are none too common in the iberian penisular they did very little of the fighting, but they would have if they had got the chance.
Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products.
I used to take my car to their garage (honestly) in fact once I get the MGB back in shape I will probably be taking that round as well.
As someone who works with payments a lot I am pretty surprised that Real can sustain this mode of business. The checked unseen options thing sounds pretty close to the edge at best. I am surprised that their chargeback rate is not way up high. Of course there is a chance the processor on the back end cannot afford to turn away such a large account - must be several hundred million a year. Rather harder to say no to that than it would be to a small scale porno site no matter what their chargebacks are.
I block real networks at the firewall. First use I have found for the parental safety feature on my low end box.
Not true in general. If the buyer bought the goods "in good faith" then they cannot be required to return them.
Unless Florida has decided to pass a different statute (unlikely) the position in English Common law is that the goods bellong to the original owner (except in four peculiar exceptions that certainly would not apply here).
Once EB became aware that the goods were stolen and then sold them EB were arguably guilty of receiving stolen goods. There could also be a claim for conversion.
This is the sort of thing that any HQ with a clue would tell the franchise to pay up on. It is a really risky proposition that could easily end up with a nasty legal situation.
And Joe Poweruser? He should peek at the iptables-log, laugh, drink a cup of coffe and get back to his code.
The point of DDoS is that it hits everyone. Sure we get huge numbers of DDoS attacks at work, sure none has ever taken us down. But the check that we have to write to ensure that is huge, millions a month.
OK so a second bite at the same article, lets take a look at those DDoS schemes.
According to the article the ISPs are unresponsive to take down requests, the FBI do not take notice. I know that people keep making this complaint but there are high tech crimes units in the major cities and they are looking to takedown these guys. And at the moment the demand is such that DDoS is being treated as if it was a littering offense.
I think we need a better primer on how to prepare a case for law enforcement. I guess it is possible if you read the article carefully that the desk guy thought this particular person had been getting evidence by hacking.
We can't expect to do this with law enforcement in the loop every time. Lets change the model, law enforcement only get involved if the ISPs fail to act, and instead of just going after the hacker there is a liability for the ISP.
This is consistent with fire department model of government security regulations. You can do pretty much anything to your house decoration wise. Government only gets involved when safety is the issue. In particular the fire dept won't let you build a house that is a fire-trap, in part because it might set fire to buildings arround it.
Here we have ISPs that are forwarding bogons. It seems to me that this should not be that difficulty to prevent. A $500 box performing passive listening at the cable head end could sound an alert when there is a bogon attack. You don't have to look at every packet, all you need to do is to look at a sample. If you see an ethernet MAC spewing bogons you shut it down.
Another approach would be to push the bogon prevention right to the cable modem. Why on earth would these let bogon injection take place in the first place? Sure there will be some hacked modems, but DDoS is comming from hijacked machines.
Cable modems, NAT boxes and the like should have limiters built in to prevent the creation of ridiculous numbers of SYN packets or outgoing UDP packets to reserved system ports like DNS. It is pretty easy to think of numbers that should be no inconvenience to any legitimate use, and there could be an option to turn them off in any case. But why give every home user the equivalent of a loaded machine gun when they don't need or want one?
Reduce the value of your machine to a hacker, reduce the probability of attack?
...That Xerox tries to sue this guy to take down the information?
Apart from the obvious jurisdiction issue (Xerox could still file suit in the US, might be tricky enforcing judgement, it is not clear that this is illegal even under DMCA. The DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for discovery of interface functions.
Sure the courts bent over backwards on the DVD/CSS thing to outlaw a program sold as a DVD copier. It is far from clear that a pure DVD player would be illegal. When the patents expire in 2015 it will be 100% legal to sell players without the zone encoding of playback restrictions.
What is going on here with Xerox and HP is a 'razor and blades' business model. Some management guru wrote a book about them thirty years ago and ever since then people have tried to copy the model - even in areas where it simply does not fit.
With a razor there is a major advantage to having a new, sharp blade. If someone could make an electric razor that good there would be no competition. Actually you can make an electric that good - if you keep replacing the blades...
If you look at the Canon printers they make a whole series where you can fill up the ink from stock. They also make refil cartridges at a fair price and the basic cost of the printer is the same as an HP.
The big problem with canon printers is finding a place that stocks them. The computer stores would much rather sell a printer that gives them a refil cartridge sale.
Well, we were in contact with them for a bit before we filled the suit.
I don't know what kind of stunt you are pulling here, but I don't really give a whole heap of credibility to someone who files a lawsuit and then goes talking about it on slashdot.
When the CANSPAM act was being debated at the FTC the big issue everyone was worried about was that the law would be used by gold-diggers against the folk with the deepest pockets. This is apparently what had happened in Utah were the act quickly became a full employment act for lawyers. That is why the act is a lot weaker than some anti-spam campaigners would like.
This debate quickly ends up like the abortion debate. Both sides start to look pretty ugly. Instead of all this he-said she-said stuff we should design some protocols where you can tell whether someone consented to send the mail or not.
>If George Bush is complaining the sex in his marriage is always the same, the answer is not changing the constitution.
Are you gay or something?
No, but the couple who live across the road are and their two kids would probably like their parents to be able to marry.
If "w" finds sex same and boring he should maybe have a talk with Laura, buy her something nice, or if he really can't stand 'same sex' with her seduce an intern. I don't see why we have to change the constitution just because Laura is no good in the sack.
And quite why we have to have him bringing up his inadequacies like this is beyond me. It was bad enough when Bob Dole was hawking viagra.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing about the links is that neither looked particularly miserable. Carter looked like he was in a toothpaste commercial.
Bush always has an idiotic smirk on his face. His abysmal failures don't seem to upset him at all. The fact that 3/11 took place because we spent all the time and resources settling old Bush family scores rather than eliminating Bin Laden does not trouble him in the least. The sad fact is that the villified French are putting more effort into catchin Bin Laden than the US.
Bush hash trashed the economy and failed to stop the terrorists, but he got a huge tax cut for corporate fat cats and settled the score with Saddam. So he thinks he is a huge success
The cost and chance of theft are the main factors. My Jag costs several times what the wife's VW does on insurance.
Overclocking and engine tweaking are very much alike because they are both almost completely pointless and significantly reduce the lifetime of the machine.
The main reason to get a performance car is handling. It does not matter what you do to the engine, the ability to turn corners will not improve.
Of course there is a lot that can be done to improve the handling of a US built car, most have abysmal suspensions and terrible steering. My wife used to drive an Omni that her father had given her. The thing felt like it was close to tipping over when you went round an off ramp. Somehow it managed to have understeer AND oversteer at the same time. It was like there was whiplash in the steering, first the thing did not want to turn, then the back end would kick round. This type of behavior was happening at like 30 to 40 mph. Later she was given a Horizon (same car) of the same vintage - just as bad.
I don't think the SUV craze cold have happened the same anywhere else. You have to start with a tollerance for bad suspensions to end up paying $60K for a delivery truck with leather seats.
Given the choice of speed or handling I will pick handling every time.
That is not science.
The unmanned exploration program results in more knowledge than joy riding in the shuttle does.
And before we get to any stars we need to invent a space drive considerably faster than our current technology.
Hubble is telling us which stars have planets we might want to visit - kinda useful for colonization eh?
Not that I would put it past the Christian far right to try something like this, but where did you get this conspiracy theory from? It sounds like something out of science fiction comedy.
Suggest a more credible theory that is consistent with the facts.
Unfortunate choice of words here. You do know that the Christian right started complaining about Hubble as soon as it started to show images that might conflict with creationism?
Its like the 9/11 thing, catastrophe happens, the immediate Bush response is 'how can we take advantage of this for our own political ends'. The economy goes into recession: 'how can we use this for tax cuts'. The Columbia disaster: 'how can we use this to kill Hubble'.
If the risk of another shuttle disaster is significant the entire fleet should be grounded completely. The space station should be de-orbited, the mission to mars cancelled. Of course this is very likely to happen after the election in any case. The next shuttle launch has already been moved to after the election.
Going to the space station only provides a marginal safety improvement. The same gain could be realized by reducing the crew by half.
The other option is to abandon Hubble I and replace it with a Hubble II designed to be serviced by machines. There are duplicates of every Hubble part. The duplicate mirror is actually better than the orbiting one, the fabrication on that one was not botched unlike the orbiting one which has spherical abberation defects.
After the Challenger disaster a replacement was quickly put together using spare parts. There is no reason this cannot be done with Hubble. There is even a spare ATLAS launch platform which could easily carry it, although one could be bought from the Russians or Chinese at a good price. I don't know if Arianne has the capacity but I would not be surprised.
Cancelling the space station program would free up plenty of cash in the NASA budget. The science return on Hubble is vastly greater than any expected from the station and a manned trip to mars combined.
Arthur C. Clarke is right, its time for the robots to take over here.
You do realize that that is one of the most breath-taking oxymorons I've ever seen uttered on Slashdot? If you're willing to label a culture "barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards", then you are not a relativist. You believe that there are absolute standards applicable to all cultures and that there can therefore be cultures in violation of those standards.
Its this thing called a >joke The use of 'acceptable' here was deliberate. I did not say 'true'. There can be no absolute definition of 'acceptable', but there is certainly an intersubjective definition. The closest we get to an absolute standard would be a Rawlsian original position, although the term 'veil of ignorance' starts to take on an ironic meaning in this case.
The very worst aspect of Whahabi islam is the absolutism, the claim to absolute knowledge of what is right, everything else, the treatment of women, the lack of all basic political rights follows from that absolutism.
I think that like many right wing critics of cultural relativism you miss the point. Just because a moral code might have internal logical consistency does not mean that it is acceptable. The point is that the absolutist moral convictions of John Ashcroft are no more acceptable than Whahabi absolutism.
Once you accept the 'Open Society' position that George Sorros and Karl Popper advocate, that there is no absolute truth then there is no place for a Whahabi state or an Ashcroftian state.
What we could do is to join the two ideas. The big problem with the Rawlsian veil of ignorance argument is that it is untestable. But the situation we have in liberal society is pretty similar. The question becomes, would anyone accept an Ashcroftian or Whahabi state if they did not already live in one and if they did not know what role they would have in it?
Ad #1 Ad #2 Ad #3
Spreading porn is a serious part of the work the Internet does. The best way to change the societies in the middle east whose screwed up 'religious' bigottries lead to terrorism is with mountains of porn.
Yep I am 100% serious here.
I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards. Women are treated at best as second class citizens and at worst as mere property.
It takes powerful forces to break down that type of prejudice. Pornography is a very powerful force. That is why the Saudi and Iranian mullahs fear it so much.
The fundamentalist christianity that spawned David Koralishen, the anti-abortion assasisnation squads, Timothy McVeigh are not too great either. The answer is more porn.
Watching people having sex does not break down many social barriers, but the idea that religious authorities don't have to run a society does.
The definition of democracy has changed since 1776. It is essential to understand the distinction between representative and true democracy if you are going to read the Federalist Papers. Up to that point the last time Democracy had been tried on a significant scale was Greece and the rulling classes had been brought up on the death of Socrates - ordered by the democratic mob.
Of course the fact that the number of victims of even the milder Roman emperors such as Claudius was far greater than the number of deaths under democracy did not enter the debate. The fear that served the powers that were was fear of the mob.
2004 will be known as the first election where the Internet played a major role. Dean did not win the nomination, but he had a major effect. Neither Goldwater nor McGovern won the Presidency, but those two campaigns set the agenda for their parties for the next twenty years.
So the question to ask is when the first person will emerge from one of these online pseudo-elections to be elected to a real position? It certainly can happen, for over a hundred years the Oxford Union Society was where the political elite of the country was selected. Become President of the union and you were assured a political career. Of course this does not work as well these days and having been President is probably a liability.
Every time the VP rekeys this stupid box blocks out half my laptop's screen for five fucking minutes and does nothing. For some reason the jerk off who designed the piece of utter shit client decided to lock that area of the screen while the client does nothing.
Eventually the box asks me to select a certificate to log in to the VPN. Well guess what? Its the same one as I used last time the piec of turd asked the same question.
There is a (small) justification for asking the user if they are still at the computer from time to time. But there is no excuse for interupting the user while they are doing other work with a pop up box that is not ready to receive input.
The sooner Checkpoint goes under the better.
Can't say that much about the OSI model except that the Internet does not use it. That's right, the Internet is actually built on a 6 layer model and there is no real connection between the two. The OSI work took place long after the Internet protocols were defined.
The OSI model has a presentation layer that the Internet does not use. I can't remember what it did and I don't think many other people do either. So DARPA saying they would throw out the OSI 7 layer model is like saying that we will throw out the idea of communism. We never tried it in the first place, and the results of those that did were not promising.
The Internet does use a layered model. But I don't think anyone would want to throw out that idea. There are also people saying that somewhat more information should be exchangeable between layers, that is an arguable position but it has nothing to do with the OSI model.
I don't know how relevant the output of this work would be to the internet. The requirements described are all taken from batlefield use cases. The idea that the military should drive IT research funding in the US is a pretty cold war concept. The military are no longer the biggest purchaser of IT.
Calling the supression of terrorisim a 'war' does nothing to change this either. What we need here is a police action to track down criminals. The military phase of the 'war on terror' should have been over with the supression of the Taleban and the elimination of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri over a year ago. The only use for the military is when you have a government that is either actively encouraging terrorism (Lybia, Iran, Pakistan) or unable to supress terrorism on its own. The situation in afghanistan was a bit of both. You had the Taleban that was created and funded by Musharaf and Pakistan in part control of the country. They were unwilling to take on Al Qaeda, but they were also incapable.
Unfortunately I don't think that the requirements of this new network are going to be driven by the people who should drive - consumer, enterprise and governmental uses of communications. I would like to think that an equal effort would go into building a response infrastructure for the FBI or Interpol, but it won't.
Hey, money is no object if the smirking chimp, W himself volunteers for the mission. He will be landing on the sun within weeks.
It would be great to keep Hubble but how long can we put off manned space exploration? We have been dragging our collective heels now since the end of the Apollo missions.
The problem is that the manned missions are not about science. The robots will quite happily accept a one way ticket without complaint. We cannot even land probes on Mars reliably at this point.
The UK rover crashed because the atmosphere was unexpectedly thinner than expected after a storm. That could have caused the second US probe to crash if the first had not sent back data allowing the lander to be recalibrated. As it is the first US probe could easily have crashed the same as the British one if the storm had hit a few days later.
At this point Hubble is the most important piece of scientific apparatus the astronomers have got. We should be looking at ways we could launch ten cheap Hubbles rather than continuing to waste money on the space station.
The moon mission had a very serious purpose. JFK did it to beat the USSR. The idea was to spend the USSR into the ground and also to prove that the West was going to win the cold war in the end. The USSR survived for twenty more years and when I was at school we would have generals show up to give us talks about how NATO would last less than five days when the Russians attacked. But it was pretty clear even before Reagan was elected that the USSR was in terminal decline, that they would never match the achievements of the West, let alone beat them.
There is no similar purpose for the Mars mission. I doubt that the endorsement of Bush Sr or Jr will have much effect on the idea because it is not going to happen anyhow. The cost of a mission would be at least 2 trillion dollars. The conservatives would want that money for a tax cut, the democrats want it to pay social security retirees the benefits they paid for.
look, even though this is the most inept and corrupt administration since 1876 I don't think the administration change had a major effect. The real win for microsoft was that the Appeals court only threw out half the case, even though admitting that the judge was unacceptably biased.
There was no way that the DoJ was going to get a breakup through the supreme court with that particular hole in the case. They knew that any decision that came from the lower courts could be challenged by Microsoft with a good chance of success.
Sroll down the page. The instructions for how to do cold fusion follow.
Yes, like switching your satelite provider is not exactly hassle free. I guess you might want to go get yourself a new hardware package...
I wonder how many of these 'I went and dumped...' stories are written by Viacom trolls?
Dish came out with a DVR before directTV did. I got mine free, it has one tuner. There is a new model with two tuners.
The downside to DirectTV is that it will soon be owned by Rupert the liar Murdoch. So unless you want a programming lineup that is as 'fair and balanced' as faux news it is best avoided.
I said at the time that it was a really bad idea for the Netscape guys and Scott McNealy to start this particular type of pissing contest. In the first place the DoJ would have given Microsoftr a much tougher time if they had stuck to the original case rather than getting into the Web and Java stuff where the case was very weak.
But more importantly the motives of Sun and Netscape looked to be mostly about how to set up an alibi for their own monumental incompetence. Oh dear, company folded, must have been those evil guys in Redmond not my own incompetence...
Oh well at least this time that fool Jackson won't be involved.
No, I think this is a patent license play. The DVD and CD world is full of patents. The main Philips/Sony patentson CD expired some time ago but there are still lots of patents on CD-ROM and DVD. HP want to make a small amount off each drive and each disk no matter whose name is on it. Think about it, neither HP or Sony have manufacturing plants for the drives, it is all outsourced.
Big question is whether this feature is big enough to change the supply chain. I think so, the media manufacturers have a big interest stopping HP becomming a media supply brand (they already are in print cartridges).
Most important of all is the fact that DVD-RW is still in a limited deployment stage. I have not seen the same low cost spindles of DVD-RW disks yet.
Not a chance. His politics lean conservative to begin with. FCC regulation? Bah. So what if it means he can't PPV porn (fat chance, especially once courts get involved, possibly fixing original indecency decision)? The satellite network is useful for other reasons to Rup.
Oh dear Conservatives not too good at checking out their fair weather allies. The British Tories thought they could count on Rupert, not any more. Last two elections his papers have been backing Labour. It is the same pattern everywhere. Rupert will back any party that he thinks it is in his interests to back.
In China Rupert is a stalwart ally of the Communist party cadres. He cheerfully makes sure his Star TV network puts out nothing that would offend. The Communists are doubly thankful that Rupert is helpful to them in the US where Fox News has pretty much warned the GOP off the idea of replacing the USSR with China as the ideological enemy in the new cold war they have been after.
If the GOP ends up with a road crash in November Rupert is quite capable of jumping sides. HANITY and (colmes) would become COLMES and (hanity).
That damn typo again. How many times? It was the right to arm bears. The idea being that the British or whoever might invade would be scared off by the heavily armed bears in the woods.
This strategy was used by great effect by the Spanish in the peninsular war. The regular spanish troops were poorly trained and led worse. On one occasion they ran away from the sound of their own gun fire (stopping only to loot the allied supply train). It was the gorilla (guerilla) war of the Spanish people that wore the French down to the point where they bolted (and suffering the misfortune to have their baggage train full of plunder intercepted and looted by the British at Salamancer.
Since actual gorillas are none too common in the iberian penisular they did very little of the fighting, but they would have if they had got the chance.
I used to take my car to their garage (honestly) in fact once I get the MGB back in shape I will probably be taking that round as well.
As someone who works with payments a lot I am pretty surprised that Real can sustain this mode of business. The checked unseen options thing sounds pretty close to the edge at best. I am surprised that their chargeback rate is not way up high. Of course there is a chance the processor on the back end cannot afford to turn away such a large account - must be several hundred million a year. Rather harder to say no to that than it would be to a small scale porno site no matter what their chargebacks are.
I block real networks at the firewall. First use I have found for the parental safety feature on my low end box.
Unless Florida has decided to pass a different statute (unlikely) the position in English Common law is that the goods bellong to the original owner (except in four peculiar exceptions that certainly would not apply here).
Once EB became aware that the goods were stolen and then sold them EB were arguably guilty of receiving stolen goods. There could also be a claim for conversion.
This is the sort of thing that any HQ with a clue would tell the franchise to pay up on. It is a really risky proposition that could easily end up with a nasty legal situation.
The point of DDoS is that it hits everyone. Sure we get huge numbers of DDoS attacks at work, sure none has ever taken us down. But the check that we have to write to ensure that is huge, millions a month.
Here is a take on this issue from Phill Hallam-Baker:
OK so a second bite at the same article, lets take a look at those DDoS schemes.
According to the article the ISPs are unresponsive to take down requests, the FBI do not take notice. I know that people keep making this complaint but there are high tech crimes units in the major cities and they are looking to takedown these guys. And at the moment the demand is such that DDoS is being treated as if it was a littering offense.
I think we need a better primer on how to prepare a case for law enforcement. I guess it is possible if you read the article carefully that the desk guy thought this particular person had been getting evidence by hacking.
We can't expect to do this with law enforcement in the loop every time. Lets change the model, law enforcement only get involved if the ISPs fail to act, and instead of just going after the hacker there is a liability for the ISP.
This is consistent with fire department model of government security regulations. You can do pretty much anything to your house decoration wise. Government only gets involved when safety is the issue. In particular the fire dept won't let you build a house that is a fire-trap, in part because it might set fire to buildings arround it.
Here we have ISPs that are forwarding bogons. It seems to me that this should not be that difficulty to prevent. A $500 box performing passive listening at the cable head end could sound an alert when there is a bogon attack. You don't have to look at every packet, all you need to do is to look at a sample. If you see an ethernet MAC spewing bogons you shut it down.
Another approach would be to push the bogon prevention right to the cable modem. Why on earth would these let bogon injection take place in the first place? Sure there will be some hacked modems, but DDoS is comming from hijacked machines.
Cable modems, NAT boxes and the like should have limiters built in to prevent the creation of ridiculous numbers of SYN packets or outgoing UDP packets to reserved system ports like DNS. It is pretty easy to think of numbers that should be no inconvenience to any legitimate use, and there could be an option to turn them off in any case. But why give every home user the equivalent of a loaded machine gun when they don't need or want one?
Reduce the value of your machine to a hacker, reduce the probability of attack?
Apart from the obvious jurisdiction issue (Xerox could still file suit in the US, might be tricky enforcing judgement, it is not clear that this is illegal even under DMCA. The DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for discovery of interface functions.
Sure the courts bent over backwards on the DVD/CSS thing to outlaw a program sold as a DVD copier. It is far from clear that a pure DVD player would be illegal. When the patents expire in 2015 it will be 100% legal to sell players without the zone encoding of playback restrictions.
What is going on here with Xerox and HP is a 'razor and blades' business model. Some management guru wrote a book about them thirty years ago and ever since then people have tried to copy the model - even in areas where it simply does not fit.
With a razor there is a major advantage to having a new, sharp blade. If someone could make an electric razor that good there would be no competition. Actually you can make an electric that good - if you keep replacing the blades...
If you look at the Canon printers they make a whole series where you can fill up the ink from stock. They also make refil cartridges at a fair price and the basic cost of the printer is the same as an HP.
The big problem with canon printers is finding a place that stocks them. The computer stores would much rather sell a printer that gives them a refil cartridge sale.
I don't know what kind of stunt you are pulling here, but I don't really give a whole heap of credibility to someone who files a lawsuit and then goes talking about it on slashdot.
When the CANSPAM act was being debated at the FTC the big issue everyone was worried about was that the law would be used by gold-diggers against the folk with the deepest pockets. This is apparently what had happened in Utah were the act quickly became a full employment act for lawyers. That is why the act is a lot weaker than some anti-spam campaigners would like.
This debate quickly ends up like the abortion debate. Both sides start to look pretty ugly. Instead of all this he-said she-said stuff we should design some protocols where you can tell whether someone consented to send the mail or not.
Are you gay or something?
No, but the couple who live across the road are and their two kids would probably like their parents to be able to marry.
If "w" finds sex same and boring he should maybe have a talk with Laura, buy her something nice, or if he really can't stand 'same sex' with her seduce an intern. I don't see why we have to change the constitution just because Laura is no good in the sack.
And quite why we have to have him bringing up his inadequacies like this is beyond me. It was bad enough when Bob Dole was hawking viagra.