I've looked over the article and some of the transcripts. It seems pretty obvious to me who gets the mantle of 'pompous and humorless.'
You mean that you have gone over the 'transcripts' of an eight year old usenet flame war and pronounced your considered opinion on them.
That is almost as pompous and idiotic as Loebner's original posts.
Perhaps you just had to be there at the time...
BTW folk had no compunction about calling great names like Minsky. I had numerous flame wars with John McCarthy concerning his reactionary McCarthy-ite politics. Very few people came to support John's side just because he invented Lisp.
Very profound statement with out any proof or attempt to back it up.
Well heck, the article being pay per view almost nobody in the thread is likely to have read it. Why bother to read the article?
There are a bunch of Win98 programs which are known not to work properly under XP. Every so often Microsoft issues a set of patches that allow these to work properly.
Yes, but if you read Loebner's reply to the thread, you would see that he didn't impose rule 17, the Prize Commiteee did (snippage mine):
This 'explanation' is one of those 'explanations' that actually reinforces the original point Marvin was making, that Loebner was being a pompous ass and so were the people working with him.
The idea that the Loebner prize would be so exaulted that concern over misrepresentation would be a serious concern is simply another self-agrandizing fantasy on Loebner's part.
Loebner said that the rule came from the committee but refused to answer very pointed questions as to who originally raised the issue with the committee in the first place.
Rule 17 was not the only example of Loebner and co. being pompous and humorless. The whole prize announcement was larded with ponderous language whose main purpose appears to be praising Loebner and his wisdom in creating the prize.
Loebner can do whatever he wants with his dough. No one is being coerced into entering his contest.
Nah, the thing that set Marvin off was the pompous set of rules for the prize.
17.The names "Loebner Prize" and "Loebner Prize Competition" may be used by
contestants in advertising only by advance written permissionof the Cambridge
Center, and their use may be subject to applicab leicensing fees. Advertising is
subject to approval by representatives of the Loebner Prize Competition. Improper or
misleading advertising may result in revocationoftheprizeand/or other actions.
Basically Loebner was using his prize for cheap self promotion.
What is amazing is that Salon can recycle an eight year old Usenet flame war I watched firsthand (and posted in some of the threads even) as news.
As usenet flamewars go it wasn't even that good of a flame war.
Incidentally if you think the Loebner and Nobel prizes are a farce, how about MIT accepting prize money from 'inventor' Lemelson who principal talent was bogus patent claims? Fortunately Lemelson is now stone cold dead so we can speak the truth about him.
I really do believe the world at large (minus 1) does understand the difference between opt-in mailings and UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail) spam.
You apparently cannot read, I said that there were legitimate classes of bulk email sender. I did not say there were legitimate classes of bulk unsolicited email senders.
The term bulk email sender is a term of art in the world of anti-spam measures. It is used by Microsoft, AOL, CNET and others to refer to themselves.
...legitiate bulk senders...
There is no such thing. It's that simple.
OK what do you call CNET, it is one of the largest bulk senders, all its newsletters are 100% opt in
What do you call Code Amber which distributes Amber alert warnings to opted in subscribers?
What do you call Amex, Ebay, and the hundreds of companies that use the web to do legitimate business with their customers?
I want my bills sent by email rather than snail mail. I want to be able to send and receive richly formatted HTML emails rather than teletype pieces of crud in monospace fonts.
I think that the blanket statements such as 'no bulk senders are legitimate' illustrate the real problem here, too many people have simplistic solutions that will eliminate spam for their proposers and people just like them but require everyone to adopt their limited uses
I think that type of attitude is giving in to the scum who send the spam.
Try dealling with K stret lobbyists, they have a habbit of persuing their own agendas rather than ther corporations real interests...
Getting a spam law written that will past first ammendment scruitiny is not that easy. The biggest problem is the requirement that any measure be as narrow as possible. The junk fax law has been found uconstitutional in one court on that basis, the judge in question is an oppinionated ass but it is quite likely that the courts will ultimately decide that banning all adverts was unnecessarily broad.
Anti spam legislation is not entirely useless but is not going to be a panacea. I believe it will significantly slow the growth of spam and increase spam sender costs. It will allow them less time to respond to the technical measures in development. But equally we must be very careful that legitiate bulk senders don't get hammered with bogus claims.
So, I'm wondering, when this comes out of beta, will it still be open source? Running diverse software on the roots is probably a Good Thing, but security through obscurity isn't, so I hope they aren't trading one kind of vulnerability for another.
This has nothing to do with security through obscurity. More harm is being done by people inanely prattling 'security through obscurity' these days than by people actually practicing it.
A case in point here, when I started arguing for shaddow passwords in UNIX more than ten years ago people objected because it was 'security through obscurity', took three years of argument and soe folks writing crack to hammer the idea into some very thick skulls that the Morris architecture was vulnerable to a dictionary attack.
In this case the iea of forcing people to stop using alpha code is a pretty good one. I recomend it because it simplifies mainenance greatly.
Remember the early days of the Web when Netscape would release a fresh alpha release on a monthly basis? That was a nightmare, features appeared, dissappeared, reappeared depending on who got their act together. After a while they got a clue and would put drop dead dates in the non production releases.
Microsoft eleased a version of Source Safe that was designed to work a s an integrated versioning syste for Web sites in 1997. It is aazingly well documented.
However it is my belief that the first Web interface to a version control system was the one I wrote in 1994. I doubt that anyone wrote an earlier one since in the process of writing the system I discovered that the specification of POST was messed up completely, you closed the TCP/IP socket to indicate end of message... making it a little difficult to retrieve the result code... [Especially if you were working on the TCP/IP stacks of that day which simply did not support onesided teardown reliably or in some cases at all].
My 1994 code used the VMS Code Management System as the back end. We looked into using CVS but at the time it was a pile of not very well integrated (or for that matter debugged) scripts, there was not a robust API. I can dig out the dates etc if people really want to fight this but I can't see any cotinuations so the Microsoft prior art is going to be entirely sufficient.
BTW I did an email interface as well, slapping Web interface in front of a VMS API was hardly a challenging thing to do. The problem was trying to duplicate the work on UNIX boxes where the O/S support for resource locks was vestigial making race conditions impossible to avoid and the applications tended not to provide a clean API, everything had to be done through scripting instead.
I don't agree with Limbaugh's judgement, I think it shows him to be an opinionated ass. He seems to have forgotten the bit about the judiciarry only overturning legislative decisions with great reluctance. This is an example of exercising jusidical perogative rather than defending the constitution.
AFAIR, California unsolicited fax lawsuits are fruitless because California "opted-out" of the federal law.
I was not aware that states could opt out of federal laws...
I suspect that what you are refering to is the fact that the Junk Fax law was struck down in the Nixon decision. The judgement is written by a complete ass and is full of pretty opinionated twaddle that hopefully the appeals court will strike down.
Unfortunately Limbaugh has one point that is quite likely to stand on appeal, namely that a blanket ban on junk fax is not the least restrictive measure that would serve the state's purpose since an opt-out list would be less intrusive. I don't agree but the argument may well survive.
I'm wondering if I should start forwarding all my "Buy Norton SystemWorks 2003" spam to abuse@symantec.com
I talked to a symantec guy about that at a Spam conference.
Turns out that the folk who 'sell' you Norton etc. via spam tend not to bother buying the actual product from symantec. In the rare cases when they deliver anything it is almost always a pirated copy.
Experts, schmeckperts. Law is decided by judges, not lawyers. And if you read the history of practically any Internet related lawsuit you will see that the plaintif can usually get a suit brought in the court of their choice.
Ralsky tried very hard to get the cyberpromotions suit taken away from Virginia's rocket docket to his own state where it takes three years to get a first hearing. And he failled.
This makes sense. Otherwise it would be incredibly unfair to defendents, who would have to travel to the location of the plaintiff on the plaintiff's whim.
In Internet cases the courts have generally considered that companies are doing business anywhere that they solicit it. The solicitation happens anywhere the defendant could reasonably expect that the message would be read.
Nah, magazines of that type never make any money. Look at all the right wing rags with their alleged circulations, none of them would be in business without massive subsidy from kook outfits. Don't worry though, in the UK the New Statesman is known as the staggers precisely because it is always on the verge of collapse and keeps being rescued by yet another owner.
Salon committed suicide by alienating its core readership of liberals, when they brought on hyperconservatives like Sullivan and Horowitz.
The problem with Sulivan and Horowitz is not their conservative views it is their dishonesty and in the case of Horowitz outright bigotry. I don't think that people like that are exactly persuasive in their views. They strike me as having been choosen for the same reason that Fox hired a token leftie, to make people feel good about hearing both sides of the argument.
Horowitz has being playing the 'I am not a racist but I'll walk and talk like a duck then call you an anti-semite for calling me a duck' game.
Sullivan is the type of sneering rightwinger who never treats opposing views with respect and so gains none himself.
I don't think that Salon is likely to go under completely. There are plenty of right left wing plutocrats who would like to run a mag on the side. And Arianna H. has them all in her rolodex...
The big mistake that Salon made was charging for access to table talk. As a result Salon is not very interactive. Consider how successfull Slashdot has been on the basis of rehashed stories researched elsewhere.
I think that slashdot could be made profitable in a very short time by simply setting up a server with the slashcode and allowing anyone to comment for free. Make the money on the adverts and on subscriptions to the premium part of the site.
You know, this cheap digital camera I bought takes rather high-quality screen shots of monitors.
Yeah, but you might have a teensy problem doing that sort of thing on a regular basis without being observed by co-workers.
DRM restrictions on content propagation are useful mainly to address the knuckle-head factor. The people who are not actually malicious but won't obey security policies. Folk like Wen Ho Lee and the head of the CIA.
Until Palladium it will be fairly easy to subvert the DRM by modifying the code. But the people using the scheme are going to be doctors and lawyers and executive suite types whose main interest is what happens if their laptop gets stolen.
Yeah you can try to use file encryption, only the problem there is that none of the systems so far deployed have a decent user interface for use by groups of users. The DRM stuff looks much better there.
Put the crack down, eh? Where do you get this stuff from? Do you think peer review is the same as editing?
Well I have done peer review and I have edited conference proceedings and not been paid for either. In fact one conference I chaired recently charged me to attend the damn thing!
Yep some journals do some 'editing'. This typically means they fuss over the format of references and have someone retypeset the paper (oh you thought they read the LaTeX???). This is done by someone paid a wage at the low end of secretarial rates.
Robert Maxwell made his orignal fortune with Pergammon Press.
There are extremists on both sides of this topic. Extremists suck though.
There are always extreemists on both sides of an issue. Sometimes they suck, sometimes they don't.
Martin Luther King when he was alive was generally regarded by the media as a dangerous radical, much more Al Sharpton than Jessie Jackson. Nelson Mandela was an extreemist too.
Sometimes the right position is pretty damn extreeme, there is no middle ground. There is no middle ground on slavery for example.
The answer lies in the middle, but nobody wants to discuss that. They just want to criticise the other extremists.
The answer is to not attempt to enforce limits, that is only going to be counterproductive in the current environment. The problem is that the administration appears to consider trust to be a right. I would be much more inclined to believe the establishment's requests for being circumspect if they did not then turn round and take advantage of them.
I agree that full disclosure is frequently not the best plan and I have in the past been pretty critical of people who use full disclosure as an excuse for being blatantly irresponsible. However I don't see that type of behaviour being a systemic problem in the academic litterature.
The Bush Administration didn't ask for this, and this has nothing to do with whether or not the administration likes the information... Washington isn't involved in this story at all!
What is the basis for that assertion?
CNN has for the past week been full of stories concerning a request by Turkey for munitions etc. to be moved into Turkey in case of attack by Iraq. Only the thing is that if you listen to the BBC you would have heard the Turkish minister responsible stating that Turkey was not behind the request, it was the US that made the request.
Another example of this is the constant claim that the UK supports the position of the Bush Administration on Iraq. According to the BBC a million people marched in the UK to tell the world that they do not support the Bush administration. Getting a million people to mobilize in a country of 55 million is a non trivial event, particularly when the party in power is left wing, the people marching ar Blairs base.
Rand McNalley should censor their maps of cities, omitting key terrorist targets.
They do.
Try finding army bases on UK ordanance survey maps. Quite often they are missing and in other cases they are shown quite a way from their actual location.
This tactic worked quite well in WWII, less well when satelite reconasaince became possible and not at all well in the days of GPS.
That is why you are likely to find yourself in big trouble if you go near an army base with a GPS receiver in many countries, including many NATO allies.
Now the ordinance survey is a military outfit and always has been so it is self censorship, however that is not the only issue here. The problem is that this administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it will tell any lie to get its policy through, take for example the tax cut which was passed on the promise it would not cause a deficit - even though non-partisan estimates already showed the economy headed for deficit before 9/11.
As Ari Fleicher put it 'people need to be carefull about what they say'. This is an administration that will use any means to stop publication of undesired news.
No, the journals have a joint interest with the government here. Both would like to avoid the transfer of academic discourse from the channels that can be controlled to the Internet.
The government is concerned about every publication that prints dissident views. They have tried repeatedly to stop Ted Postol at MIT from telling people that missile defense is based on junk science and blatant lies.
The science journals are worried that their readership is starting to realise that the journal system is a racket. The authors pay to get published, they edit the journals for free and then their universities pay a fortune to get highly restricted access to the information.
Case in point, see the last paragraph from the BBC
Everyone involved acknowledges the publication restraint is only part of the answer - there is nothing to stop scientists simply posting their research on the internet, for example.
First they didn't count the votes in Florida but I didn't protest because I didn't live in Florida.
Then they established military tribunals to try inconvenient cases without juries or appeal and I didn't protest because I wasn't foreign looking.
Then they declared prisoners of war illegal combatants but I didn't protest because I wasn't a prisoner of war.
Then they suspended habeas corpus, transfered prisoners to military jails without the right to see a lawyer, I didn't protest because they told me the prisoner was obviously guilty.
Then Ari Fleicher announced that 'people should take care of what they say', being a good citizen I decided to take care not to criticize the regime.
Then they told us that we should build shelters against biological attack using duct tape and plastic, yes really they did, I didn't protest because I have plenty of duct tape.
Then they told us that anyone protesting against a war against Iraq was allied with Saddam and Bin Laden, I did not protest.
Then they told us that publishing scientific information that contradicted the administration could not be published and I did not protest.
Then they armed their supporters claiming that the country needed a well regulated militia in case of internal dissent and I did not protest because I was affraid.
Then they cancelled the elections because they could only give comfort to the opponents of the administration and thus the opponents of American greatness and American power, I did not protest because they didn't count my vote last time.
No, we are not quite there yet, but haven't people noticed that we are getting close?
There are completely legitimate reasons for blocking UUNet. It's the spam. You may be confusing SPEWS with some small-time renegade blocklist.
Since the SPEWS maintainers refuse to answer any correspondence whatsoever there is no way you can possibly know what criteria they are applying. They state that their criteria for listing UUNET is content hosted by a UUNET customer. Of course SPEWS could be lying.
The realtime blacklists are simply not transparent.
Comparing UUNET to vigilantes is simple sophistry.
If you want to speak about voting out the incumbent president,
How can we vote him out? Thy wouldn't let the votes be counted when it came to voting a president in.
The US First Amendment only applies to restrictions imposed by the government.
And in any case will be suspended in the next few weeks, after all they have already suspended due process and habeas corpus so it is only a matter of time before the first ammendment goes as well.
One of the problems with the death penalty is that its popularity with the voters means that opponents are considered unelectable. So you end up with politicians like Clinton who know that it does not work but will pay lip service to it to get elected, or you get psychopaths like Bush.
The Risks digest reported in 1991 that the email newsletter from the International Association for Cryptographic Research was being blocked by spam filters.
I somehow doubt it, Canter and Segal didn't send out their mass mailling till 1993.
One of the IACR board members was a crypto expert with the unfortunate name of Don Beaver. And there were some references to "hardcore bits" and LaTex. It was all too much for the filters.
I think you are describing a censorship filter rather than a spam filter there.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean that you have gone over the 'transcripts' of an eight year old usenet flame war and pronounced your considered opinion on them.
That is almost as pompous and idiotic as Loebner's original posts.
Perhaps you just had to be there at the time...
BTW folk had no compunction about calling great names like Minsky. I had numerous flame wars with John McCarthy concerning his reactionary McCarthy-ite politics. Very few people came to support John's side just because he invented Lisp.
Well heck, the article being pay per view almost nobody in the thread is likely to have read it. Why bother to read the article?
There are a bunch of Win98 programs which are known not to work properly under XP. Every so often Microsoft issues a set of patches that allow these to work properly.
This 'explanation' is one of those 'explanations' that actually reinforces the original point Marvin was making, that Loebner was being a pompous ass and so were the people working with him.
The idea that the Loebner prize would be so exaulted that concern over misrepresentation would be a serious concern is simply another self-agrandizing fantasy on Loebner's part.
Loebner said that the rule came from the committee but refused to answer very pointed questions as to who originally raised the issue with the committee in the first place.
Rule 17 was not the only example of Loebner and co. being pompous and humorless. The whole prize announcement was larded with ponderous language whose main purpose appears to be praising Loebner and his wisdom in creating the prize.
Nah, the thing that set Marvin off was the pompous set of rules for the prize.
17.The names "Loebner Prize" and "Loebner Prize Competition" may be used by contestants in advertising only by advance written permissionof the Cambridge Center, and their use may be subject to applicab leicensing fees. Advertising is subject to approval by representatives of the Loebner Prize Competition. Improper or misleading advertising may result in revocationoftheprizeand/or other actions.
Basically Loebner was using his prize for cheap self promotion.What is amazing is that Salon can recycle an eight year old Usenet flame war I watched firsthand (and posted in some of the threads even) as news.
As usenet flamewars go it wasn't even that good of a flame war.
Incidentally if you think the Loebner and Nobel prizes are a farce, how about MIT accepting prize money from 'inventor' Lemelson who principal talent was bogus patent claims? Fortunately Lemelson is now stone cold dead so we can speak the truth about him.
You apparently cannot read, I said that there were legitimate classes of bulk email sender. I did not say there were legitimate classes of bulk unsolicited email senders.
The term bulk email sender is a term of art in the world of anti-spam measures. It is used by Microsoft, AOL, CNET and others to refer to themselves.
OK what do you call CNET, it is one of the largest bulk senders, all its newsletters are 100% opt in
What do you call Code Amber which distributes Amber alert warnings to opted in subscribers?
What do you call Amex, Ebay, and the hundreds of companies that use the web to do legitimate business with their customers?
I want my bills sent by email rather than snail mail. I want to be able to send and receive richly formatted HTML emails rather than teletype pieces of crud in monospace fonts.
I think that the blanket statements such as 'no bulk senders are legitimate' illustrate the real problem here, too many people have simplistic solutions that will eliminate spam for their proposers and people just like them but require everyone to adopt their limited uses
I think that type of attitude is giving in to the scum who send the spam.
Getting a spam law written that will past first ammendment scruitiny is not that easy. The biggest problem is the requirement that any measure be as narrow as possible. The junk fax law has been found uconstitutional in one court on that basis, the judge in question is an oppinionated ass but it is quite likely that the courts will ultimately decide that banning all adverts was unnecessarily broad.
Anti spam legislation is not entirely useless but is not going to be a panacea. I believe it will significantly slow the growth of spam and increase spam sender costs. It will allow them less time to respond to the technical measures in development. But equally we must be very careful that legitiate bulk senders don't get hammered with bogus claims.
This has nothing to do with security through obscurity. More harm is being done by people inanely prattling 'security through obscurity' these days than by people actually practicing it.
A case in point here, when I started arguing for shaddow passwords in UNIX more than ten years ago people objected because it was 'security through obscurity', took three years of argument and soe folks writing crack to hammer the idea into some very thick skulls that the Morris architecture was vulnerable to a dictionary attack.
In this case the iea of forcing people to stop using alpha code is a pretty good one. I recomend it because it simplifies mainenance greatly.
Remember the early days of the Web when Netscape would release a fresh alpha release on a monthly basis? That was a nightmare, features appeared, dissappeared, reappeared depending on who got their act together. After a while they got a clue and would put drop dead dates in the non production releases.
Microsoft eleased a version of Source Safe that was designed to work a s an integrated versioning syste for Web sites in 1997. It is aazingly well documented.
However it is my belief that the first Web interface to a version control system was the one I wrote in 1994. I doubt that anyone wrote an earlier one since in the process of writing the system I discovered that the specification of POST was messed up completely, you closed the TCP/IP socket to indicate end of message... making it a little difficult to retrieve the result code... [Especially if you were working on the TCP/IP stacks of that day which simply did not support onesided teardown reliably or in some cases at all].
My 1994 code used the VMS Code Management System as the back end. We looked into using CVS but at the time it was a pile of not very well integrated (or for that matter debugged) scripts, there was not a robust API. I can dig out the dates etc if people really want to fight this but I can't see any cotinuations so the Microsoft prior art is going to be entirely sufficient.
BTW I did an email interface as well, slapping Web interface in front of a VMS API was hardly a challenging thing to do. The problem was trying to duplicate the work on UNIX boxes where the O/S support for resource locks was vestigial making race conditions impossible to avoid and the applications tended not to provide a clean API, everything had to be done through scripting instead.
I don't agree with Limbaugh's judgement, I think it shows him to be an opinionated ass. He seems to have forgotten the bit about the judiciarry only overturning legislative decisions with great reluctance. This is an example of exercising jusidical perogative rather than defending the constitution.
I was not aware that states could opt out of federal laws...
I suspect that what you are refering to is the fact that the Junk Fax law was struck down in the Nixon decision. The judgement is written by a complete ass and is full of pretty opinionated twaddle that hopefully the appeals court will strike down.
Unfortunately Limbaugh has one point that is quite likely to stand on appeal, namely that a blanket ban on junk fax is not the least restrictive measure that would serve the state's purpose since an opt-out list would be less intrusive. I don't agree but the argument may well survive.
I talked to a symantec guy about that at a Spam conference.
Turns out that the folk who 'sell' you Norton etc. via spam tend not to bother buying the actual product from symantec. In the rare cases when they deliver anything it is almost always a pirated copy.
Experts, schmeckperts. Law is decided by judges, not lawyers. And if you read the history of practically any Internet related lawsuit you will see that the plaintif can usually get a suit brought in the court of their choice.
Ralsky tried very hard to get the cyberpromotions suit taken away from Virginia's rocket docket to his own state where it takes three years to get a first hearing. And he failled.
This makes sense. Otherwise it would be incredibly unfair to defendents, who would have to travel to the location of the plaintiff on the plaintiff's whim.
In Internet cases the courts have generally considered that companies are doing business anywhere that they solicit it. The solicitation happens anywhere the defendant could reasonably expect that the message would be read.
Salon committed suicide by alienating its core readership of liberals, when they brought on hyperconservatives like Sullivan and Horowitz.
The problem with Sulivan and Horowitz is not their conservative views it is their dishonesty and in the case of Horowitz outright bigotry. I don't think that people like that are exactly persuasive in their views. They strike me as having been choosen for the same reason that Fox hired a token leftie, to make people feel good about hearing both sides of the argument.
Horowitz has being playing the 'I am not a racist but I'll walk and talk like a duck then call you an anti-semite for calling me a duck' game.
Sullivan is the type of sneering rightwinger who never treats opposing views with respect and so gains none himself.
I don't think that Salon is likely to go under completely. There are plenty of right left wing plutocrats who would like to run a mag on the side. And Arianna H. has them all in her rolodex...
The big mistake that Salon made was charging for access to table talk. As a result Salon is not very interactive. Consider how successfull Slashdot has been on the basis of rehashed stories researched elsewhere.
I think that slashdot could be made profitable in a very short time by simply setting up a server with the slashcode and allowing anyone to comment for free. Make the money on the adverts and on subscriptions to the premium part of the site.
Yeah, but you might have a teensy problem doing that sort of thing on a regular basis without being observed by co-workers.
DRM restrictions on content propagation are useful mainly to address the knuckle-head factor. The people who are not actually malicious but won't obey security policies. Folk like Wen Ho Lee and the head of the CIA.
Until Palladium it will be fairly easy to subvert the DRM by modifying the code. But the people using the scheme are going to be doctors and lawyers and executive suite types whose main interest is what happens if their laptop gets stolen.
Yeah you can try to use file encryption, only the problem there is that none of the systems so far deployed have a decent user interface for use by groups of users. The DRM stuff looks much better there.
Well I have done peer review and I have edited conference proceedings and not been paid for either. In fact one conference I chaired recently charged me to attend the damn thing!
Yep some journals do some 'editing'. This typically means they fuss over the format of references and have someone retypeset the paper (oh you thought they read the LaTeX???). This is done by someone paid a wage at the low end of secretarial rates.
Robert Maxwell made his orignal fortune with Pergammon Press.
There are always extreemists on both sides of an issue. Sometimes they suck, sometimes they don't.
Martin Luther King when he was alive was generally regarded by the media as a dangerous radical, much more Al Sharpton than Jessie Jackson. Nelson Mandela was an extreemist too.
Sometimes the right position is pretty damn extreeme, there is no middle ground. There is no middle ground on slavery for example.
The answer lies in the middle, but nobody wants to discuss that. They just want to criticise the other extremists.
The answer is to not attempt to enforce limits, that is only going to be counterproductive in the current environment. The problem is that the administration appears to consider trust to be a right. I would be much more inclined to believe the establishment's requests for being circumspect if they did not then turn round and take advantage of them.
I agree that full disclosure is frequently not the best plan and I have in the past been pretty critical of people who use full disclosure as an excuse for being blatantly irresponsible. However I don't see that type of behaviour being a systemic problem in the academic litterature.
What is the basis for that assertion?
CNN has for the past week been full of stories concerning a request by Turkey for munitions etc. to be moved into Turkey in case of attack by Iraq. Only the thing is that if you listen to the BBC you would have heard the Turkish minister responsible stating that Turkey was not behind the request, it was the US that made the request.
Another example of this is the constant claim that the UK supports the position of the Bush Administration on Iraq. According to the BBC a million people marched in the UK to tell the world that they do not support the Bush administration. Getting a million people to mobilize in a country of 55 million is a non trivial event, particularly when the party in power is left wing, the people marching ar Blairs base.
They do.
Try finding army bases on UK ordanance survey maps. Quite often they are missing and in other cases they are shown quite a way from their actual location.
This tactic worked quite well in WWII, less well when satelite reconasaince became possible and not at all well in the days of GPS.
That is why you are likely to find yourself in big trouble if you go near an army base with a GPS receiver in many countries, including many NATO allies.
Now the ordinance survey is a military outfit and always has been so it is self censorship, however that is not the only issue here. The problem is that this administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it will tell any lie to get its policy through, take for example the tax cut which was passed on the promise it would not cause a deficit - even though non-partisan estimates already showed the economy headed for deficit before 9/11.
As Ari Fleicher put it 'people need to be carefull about what they say'. This is an administration that will use any means to stop publication of undesired news.
No, the journals have a joint interest with the government here. Both would like to avoid the transfer of academic discourse from the channels that can be controlled to the Internet.
The government is concerned about every publication that prints dissident views. They have tried repeatedly to stop Ted Postol at MIT from telling people that missile defense is based on junk science and blatant lies.
The science journals are worried that their readership is starting to realise that the journal system is a racket. The authors pay to get published, they edit the journals for free and then their universities pay a fortune to get highly restricted access to the information.
Everyone involved acknowledges the publication restraint is only part of the answer - there is nothing to stop scientists simply posting their research on the internet, for example.
First they didn't count the votes in Florida but I didn't protest because I didn't live in Florida.
Then they established military tribunals to try inconvenient cases without juries or appeal and I didn't protest because I wasn't foreign looking.
Then they declared prisoners of war illegal combatants but I didn't protest because I wasn't a prisoner of war.
Then they suspended habeas corpus, transfered prisoners to military jails without the right to see a lawyer, I didn't protest because they told me the prisoner was obviously guilty.
Then Ari Fleicher announced that 'people should take care of what they say', being a good citizen I decided to take care not to criticize the regime.
Then they told us that we should build shelters against biological attack using duct tape and plastic, yes really they did, I didn't protest because I have plenty of duct tape.
Then they told us that anyone protesting against a war against Iraq was allied with Saddam and Bin Laden, I did not protest.
Then they told us that publishing scientific information that contradicted the administration could not be published and I did not protest.
Then they armed their supporters claiming that the country needed a well regulated militia in case of internal dissent and I did not protest because I was affraid.
Then they cancelled the elections because they could only give comfort to the opponents of the administration and thus the opponents of American greatness and American power, I did not protest because they didn't count my vote last time.
No, we are not quite there yet, but haven't people noticed that we are getting close?
Make sure that the responsible science journals handle the floow of information to the public in an orderly manner you know.
Since the SPEWS maintainers refuse to answer any correspondence whatsoever there is no way you can possibly know what criteria they are applying. They state that their criteria for listing UUNET is content hosted by a UUNET customer. Of course SPEWS could be lying.
The realtime blacklists are simply not transparent.
Comparing UUNET to vigilantes is simple sophistry.
How can we vote him out? Thy wouldn't let the votes be counted when it came to voting a president in.
The US First Amendment only applies to restrictions imposed by the government.
And in any case will be suspended in the next few weeks, after all they have already suspended due process and habeas corpus so it is only a matter of time before the first ammendment goes as well.
One of the problems with the death penalty is that its popularity with the voters means that opponents are considered unelectable. So you end up with politicians like Clinton who know that it does not work but will pay lip service to it to get elected, or you get psychopaths like Bush.
I somehow doubt it, Canter and Segal didn't send out their mass mailling till 1993.
One of the IACR board members was a crypto expert with the unfortunate name of Don Beaver. And there were some references to "hardcore bits" and LaTex. It was all too much for the filters.
I think you are describing a censorship filter rather than a spam filter there.