The CIA? That blows any sort of credibility in the report. The CIA doesnt run "hakcers", the Department of Defense does, HQ'd on an Airforce base. It was publicised back in April in this article on Wired.com
Yes there is a trehat to the free world's information infrastructure. And it is a danger. But the main article far overstates it. The referenced original article is propaganda, pure and simple. Someone must want some budget money, so they scare up a foe to be bigger than it is.
NSA require lifestyle for certain compartments, I can attest to that. Thats how I know. I am current. And the SSBI is not difficult to pass if you've lived a clean life - it just takes a damn long time to get one completed and adjudicated unless you are fresh out of college. I agree about the CI poly - just had my "bring up" last year upon changing agencies, and as long as you havent been doing the wrong things for the "bad guys" polygraphs are nothing to sweat.
The drug usage is not at all prevalent as you infer - but maybe thats outside of the compartmented community in the "general clearance" people that dont have accesses. They are busting people for it in some of the most sensitive compartments, and the drinking is not as bad a problem as it was back in the 90's. Actually 9/11 changed a lot of that when all these Three Letter Acronym agencies got blindsided.
As for people with clearances, I've known plenty with SCI, and few of them got busted - and fewer lasted long with a drug problem - almost I knew/worked-with were military "operator" types though, and they "piss test" them pretty regularly. Comes from working on-site supporting JSOC. Enough said about those years. I'm in a pretty boring place now. And I like it that way.
I've always wondered just how effective the lifestyle polys were - they seem more rigged to make you squirm than to ensure that you are trustworthy. Lots of web sites claim them to be easily eluded, essentially voodoo science - so why do they keep using them? Especially after a lot of people like the Walkers, etc.
As far as the few hundred people holding Temps where I am? Zero. They dont have their permanent adjudication, they arent getting on the compound much less in the building.
... is getting enough of the "great" hackers the proper security clearances and compartmented accesses. You must be a US citizen, pass an SSBI Single Scope Background Investigation, FBI/DIA ivestigators contact scads of people you havent talked to in years as well as your current associates and their associates and the associates of those people as well - they go 3 nodes or more out from you. Add to that a Counter Intelligence polygraph - those are sometimes the biggest hurdles. If you try for NSA credentials, you get the joy of a Lifestyle Polygraph (the worst 6+ hours of your life, trust me on that). On top of that, getting people to move to Nebraska for some duty at Stratcom in Omaha is not all that easy a sell.
Fortunately not al the duty stations are in Nebraska, and not every hacker (used in the best sense of the word) fits the stereotypes. Its not like the movies.
There is one other source they forgot:
Contractors. Look at the big DoD contract companies, and look at the IT openings they have. Northrop Grumman (includes the old TRW people), Raytheon (includes the old Hughes people), Lockheed-Martin, Ball Aerospace (Satellite/comms guys), Titan, and a pile of smaller lesser known companies. Look at what they are hiring for. These are the only relatively secure IT jobs left in the US that are not under threat of being outsourced overseas.
Plenty of work if you can qualify for the security aspects and dont mind being reinvestigated and strapped to a polygraph every few years, on top of other voluntary restrictions you put on your freedoms in exchange for the security clearance (i.e. give up the recreational/illegal drugs, give up drinking to excess, give up gambling, and give up many of the vices the fringe of hackerdom has).
Failure is not an Option By Gene Kranz -- the link goes to a google search for the book. (Choose your own bookseller - no amazon link whoring).
Gene Kranz (the guy with the serious crewcut) tells the whole story of how they got to the point to where the "geeks" could make a life and death difference in this situation, and then how they managed to pull it off. Its a great study of real engineering by real engineers under incredible time pressure, with the lives of people and the hopes of the nation in their hands.
Dammmit! I submitted the SAME story a week ago!
on
**No Title**
·
· Score: 5, Funny
One reason for the low turnout could be the same reason for the percieved lack of Debian attention to "customers" (like the accustations leveld against Gnome). If the developers aren't interested, they dont work on it. Kinda like Gnome.
Possible reasons that developers must be "staying away in droves" (Yogi Berra) maybe because:
A) they dont see any real impact/difference to whoever gets elected,
B) else they arent working on Debian all that much since its such a slowly developed platform and most devs want to work closer to the leading edge
Both of which mean they just dont care who gets voted in.
See if the Patent Bounty folks would be interested in this one. Seems like your prior art would torpedo this patent completely - help society and make a buck or two while you are at it.
I bet a large software company in Redmond that wants to get into the antivirus market would love to put up a bounty for this if they knew it would pay off. The bonus would be that open source and free scanners woudl not face patent persecution thanks to such work, no matter who it was that took on this patent.
" And WHAT pray tell, YOU ANONYMOUS COWARD do soldiers precisely do, other than MURDER EACH OTHER? Fucking Troll."
Aside from the obvious deterrent forces keeping people free during the Cold War (As Washinton was fond of quoting "Si vis pacem, para bellum", as true to day as it was when Vegetius allegedly originally uttered it), liberating the oppressed (Europe 1944 Afghanistan 2002, etc), eliminating slavery (US Civil War), and many other duties and accomplishments soldiers have made that you blindly overlook...
Well, lets see if anything has happened recently...
I think there are whole pile of Marines rebuilding Sri Lankan towns after the Tsumani - and lot of Navy helicopter crews deliering aid where nobody else can, and USAF and Army logistics people figuring out how to get the most aid where it is needed most, and do that more quickly than any civilian agency.
Add to that the bridges, roads, power plants, and other facilities that have been built/rebuilt in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the schools and hospitals as well. Not to mention the medics treating ALL the injured, friend and foe alike.
There is an applet called "Track Your Races -- Election Tracker" toward the bottom of the main display segement - it allows you to monitor the Presidential election and up to 10 other state/congression races and/or ballot issues, it is live updated, and based on returns, not exit polls.
Set aside your preconceptions about Fox, the app is useful for what you say you want, and numbers are numbers.
> patent which describes a way for a piece of software to "ask for help" from another application.
Isn't that the basis for Microsoft Office? You put an Excel chart in your Word doc and Word "asks for help" from Excel - and the OLE layer mediates the communication between the 2 programs?
So either Microsoft has prior art, or else Miscrosoft is under the gun for violating this patent.
For that matter, CORBA is screwed too because it does the same thing mediates between pieces of software that ask for help from another application.
The patent is so vaguely worded that its almost impossible to pin it down. The USPTO must be staffed with idiots to allow crap like this to pass.
Remember - this same patent can be used against Perl, Python and other languages. It could even be used against.Net - but Microsoft can defend that on their own.
Who speaks for Free/Open software (like Perl, Python and any other bytecode language)?
YOU DO! So speak up
Use Fuji or some other film, use other branded cameras, and refuse to use any photo development shop that has Kodak machines in it.
Write to them and let them know their abuse of the patent system is going to cost them your business.
Yes, its its probably futile, but at least its a way to let them know that using the courts to commit a robbery is not a cost-free approach.
An Initiative roll? Already made the saving throw
on
Making Tracks on Mars
·
· Score: 4, Funny
[insert D&D reference here]
I wonder what the Satellite has for initiative roll bonuses?
Yes THAT Alcee hastings. The one that got removed from the bench for conspiracy and bribery, IIRC in the 1980's.
He is a Democrat, and a political activist.
I doubt we will see any impartiality from the OCSE given whom they have chosen as the leadership here. The Republicans are probably already getting dossiers together to discredit this guy.
They should have at least come up with a couple of impartial Europeans (say, Scotland, Denmark) instead of a corruptable US politician.
SO no matter what they find out, having that guy associated with it provides any Republican an automatic "attack the attacker" bias claim defense.
[Open Source/Unix/Linux] "Developers are moving to OSX"
This tries to imply that they are leaving those environments and changing over to the OSX environment. Bad Spinmeistering by an Apple Rep. Its more like "Now that you have a BSD substrate I can add OSX to the list of ports I support for my apps".
The developers are no more "moving to" OSX than they are "moving to" FreeBSD when they port an app there. He should have said something more like... developers are adding OSX to their target OS's... Why do Apple types have to spin so hard all the time? They have a good OS and a decent hardware platform.
(Personal feelings: I wish they would port OSX to Athlon64 or Intel architecture and more open/non-proprietary hardware components.)
Read the later postings where this moron says SysV code "appeared" in linux and nobody knows how it got there.
He forgot about the changelogs and commit process in place so every bit of code is sourced.
Also he posted a pure flamebait troll to the Linux annoyances thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74037&cid=6645 094
here's an excerpt:
Linus blatantly stole our IP and is, in essence, trying to distribute a warezed version of our UnixWare.
By the time this book is in print, you're biggest annoyance will be the thick black cock in your asses, as we'll see your entire IP theft ring behind bars.
THERE - that enouhg of a troll for you? Mod the parent DOWN - he's LYING!
"Code was in SysV first. Now its in Linux. Noone in the linux community can prove where or who it came from, it just sort of miraculously appeared and noone took credit for it."
Bullshit.
There is a commit record and changelog - so the Linux side KNOWS how the code got there.
Trying to be factual, eh troll boy? Real Email address, and the company you work for would be credible. But what gave you away as a troll is your own words:
what about your earlier response? The one you posted in the "Linux annoyances" article?
I quote:
Linus blatantly stole our IP and is, in essence, trying to distribute a warezed version of our UnixWare.
By the time this book is in print, you're biggest annoyance will be the thick black cock in your asses, as we'll see your entire IP theft ring behind bars.
I did not say the accused rapist should be denied the ability to rebut postings about him. I'm saying he can do it in his own webspace - he has no right to demand a response in my webspace. You missed the whole point of the example.
And as for applicibility, who defines what professional media is? The courts and arbitrary bureaucrats. Hardly the people to put your ability to write freely in.
"The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty." T. Jefferson, 1787
And as for crediting Marx with the free marketplace of ideas, you are misled. The concept was championed well before Marx wrote his first polemic.
Jefferson observed in his first Inaugural Address ". . . error of opinion need not and ought not be corrected by the courts where reason is left free to combat it." Thomas Jefferson's first Inaugural Address (The Complete Jefferson 385 (S. Padover ed. 1943)).
The actual phrase "open marketplae of Ideas" was coined by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
You might want to update your knowledgebase and read up on Locke, Jefferson and a few others who predate Marx, and greatly discount anything originally attributed to Marx and Engles.
Your mention of newspapers is ludicous. They have large legal staffs to serve as a bulwark against complaints, and (at least here in the US) have constitutional guarantees that are strongly protected. That is not the case for web sites and individuals. I know of none who have legal help on retainer for free speech issues.
Forced balance is no balance at all. Thats what you do not seem to understand. Government coercion is not the answer. Plus, Free Speech is not neccesarily Fair Speech. Thats the price paid for it.
And did you not read my remarks about the free marketplace of ideas? It does not shackle me to my opponent, nor him to me. Our ideas compete on merit. If you want an opposing opinion, go look one up, don't force me to publish yours.
The government has NO RIGHT to FORCE me to use MY webspace to place a rebuttal and publicise it. Let the aggrieved party get their own and publicise it themselves.
And this law, given its use of the court system, would rapidly be turned abusive by the people with the money for lawyers and legal actions. Did you learn nothing from the USA's DMCA debacle? Do you realy want corporations running rampant over their critics?
As an example of how this kills free speech against bad corporations:
Say I criticize SCO harshly, but effectively enough to get their attention: your law would pit me defensively against SCO's lawyers in a court of law. I would either have to give-in preemptively regardless of merit, or else go to the expense of hiring an attorney myself and battle it out in court, else remove the posting that cause dthem to act.
Did you not consider that? Removal of the offending post is an alternative that would be pushed. Its a serious chill on free speech: People posting would have to consider whether posting a strongly worded opinion is worth the legal hassles it could generate, and if challenged, posters would have to calculate whether they have enough money and reources to fight, or if they are willing to be silenced and remove their post.
Your vision of "fair" is an open invitation to barratry and quashing of opposing opinions on the internet by those with power and money.
On a personal level, it would result in repugnant actions: say you are an abuse victim, and you post harshly about NABMLA. Now the courts, under this law, force you under legal penalty of fine or jail (for contempt of court) to post the reply/rebuttal of the very abuser that you suffered from, or remove the posting.
Its your money, your website, your opinion, and you somehow see no harm in the government forcing you hand over part of that to someone that you disagree with strongly enough to post critical things about them?
Look to all the consequences, especially the unintended ones that you have obviously blithely ignored.
So, lets see, you have the Holocaust Deniers who can force News sites to link to them every time they are mentioned in a news post, an accused rapist demanding linkage under court order to his victim's web site, Labor Party forced to link to Conservative Party, fascists/communists court-ordered posting every time they get criticized...
Something fundamentally wrong about that. What ever happened to the Marketplace of Ideas? Thomas Jefferson championed it in the USA, but the original idea came from European philosophers (Locke, etc).
Its my web space, I pay for it, why should I be forced to give credence and publicity to someone I am opposed to, on MY dime? They can use their own site and post there.
To parphrase an old hyper-mach-military saying (Kill them all and let God sort them out):
"I still don't see how this plane is going to solve Boeing's sales problems."
Consider that 800 737s are in the air worldwide at any given time. One 737 takes off every 6 seconds on average world-wide (per the NTSB). Its become the DC-3 of the latter quarter of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st.
Also consider that the 737 is coming to the end of its design lifecycle with the -700 series. And the 757 has been partially superseded by the 767, yet nothing quite fills its old niche (737 too small, 767 too big).
Airlines are looking for cheaper to operate, more fuel efficient aircraft that will lure back the business traveler, in the 180-210 passenger size (which probably constitutes a majority of the revenues for regional and US carriers).
The 7E7 fits that description quite well. So thats why they are spending the money - theres a market for this aircraft, the same market Boeing has dominated with the 737/757, and one that will be opening up by the time this aircraft becomes operational. The biggest gain is in operating efficiency (modular electronics, easier crew servicing of aircraft, etc) and fuel efficiency.
As an example, if United could drop its operating and fuel costs both by 10% annually, it would be profitable to the tune of several hundred million dollars, instead of in bankruptcy court.
Slashdot Mirror
The CIA? That blows any sort of credibility in the report. The CIA doesnt run "hakcers", the Department of Defense does, HQ'd on an Airforce base. It was publicised back in April in this article on Wired.com Yes there is a trehat to the free world's information infrastructure. And it is a danger. But the main article far overstates it. The referenced original article is propaganda, pure and simple. Someone must want some budget money, so they scare up a foe to be bigger than it is.
NSA require lifestyle for certain compartments, I can attest to that. Thats how I know. I am current. And the SSBI is not difficult to pass if you've lived a clean life - it just takes a damn long time to get one completed and adjudicated unless you are fresh out of college. I agree about the CI poly - just had my "bring up" last year upon changing agencies, and as long as you havent been doing the wrong things for the "bad guys" polygraphs are nothing to sweat.
The drug usage is not at all prevalent as you infer - but maybe thats outside of the compartmented community in the "general clearance" people that dont have accesses. They are busting people for it in some of the most sensitive compartments, and the drinking is not as bad a problem as it was back in the 90's. Actually 9/11 changed a lot of that when all these Three Letter Acronym agencies got blindsided.
As for people with clearances, I've known plenty with SCI, and few of them got busted - and fewer lasted long with a drug problem - almost I knew/worked-with were military "operator" types though, and they "piss test" them pretty regularly. Comes from working on-site supporting JSOC. Enough said about those years. I'm in a pretty boring place now. And I like it that way.
I've always wondered just how effective the lifestyle polys were - they seem more rigged to make you squirm than to ensure that you are trustworthy. Lots of web sites claim them to be easily eluded, essentially voodoo science - so why do they keep using them? Especially after a lot of people like the Walkers, etc.
As far as the few hundred people holding Temps where I am? Zero. They dont have their permanent adjudication, they arent getting on the compound much less in the building.
... is getting enough of the "great" hackers the proper security clearances and compartmented accesses. You must be a US citizen, pass an SSBI Single Scope Background Investigation, FBI/DIA ivestigators contact scads of people you havent talked to in years as well as your current associates and their associates and the associates of those people as well - they go 3 nodes or more out from you. Add to that a Counter Intelligence polygraph - those are sometimes the biggest hurdles. If you try for NSA credentials, you get the joy of a Lifestyle Polygraph (the worst 6+ hours of your life, trust me on that). On top of that, getting people to move to Nebraska for some duty at Stratcom in Omaha is not all that easy a sell.
Fortunately not al the duty stations are in Nebraska, and not every hacker (used in the best sense of the word) fits the stereotypes. Its not like the movies.
There is one other source they forgot:
Contractors. Look at the big DoD contract companies, and look at the IT openings they have. Northrop Grumman (includes the old TRW people), Raytheon (includes the old Hughes people), Lockheed-Martin, Ball Aerospace (Satellite/comms guys), Titan, and a pile of smaller lesser known companies. Look at what they are hiring for. These are the only relatively secure IT jobs left in the US that are not under threat of being outsourced overseas.
Plenty of work if you can qualify for the security aspects and dont mind being reinvestigated and strapped to a polygraph every few years, on top of other voluntary restrictions you put on your freedoms in exchange for the security clearance (i.e. give up the recreational/illegal drugs, give up drinking to excess, give up gambling, and give up many of the vices the fringe of hackerdom has).
Failure is not an Option By Gene Kranz -- the link goes to a google search for the book. (Choose your own bookseller - no amazon link whoring).
Gene Kranz (the guy with the serious crewcut) tells the whole story of how they got to the point to where the "geeks" could make a life and death difference in this situation, and then how they managed to pull it off. Its a great study of real engineering by real engineers under incredible time pressure, with the lives of people and the hopes of the nation in their hands.
GRR!
Not the general public.
One reason for the low turnout could be the same reason for the percieved lack of Debian attention to "customers" (like the accustations leveld against Gnome). If the developers aren't interested, they dont work on it. Kinda like Gnome.
Possible reasons that developers must be "staying away in droves" (Yogi Berra) maybe because:
A) they dont see any real impact/difference to whoever gets elected,
B) else they arent working on Debian all that much since its such a slowly developed platform and most devs want to work closer to the leading edge
Both of which mean they just dont care who gets voted in.
See if the Patent Bounty folks would be interested in this one. Seems like your prior art would torpedo this patent completely - help society and make a buck or two while you are at it.
I bet a large software company in Redmond that wants to get into the antivirus market would love to put up a bounty for this if they knew it would pay off. The bonus would be that open source and free scanners woudl not face patent persecution thanks to such work, no matter who it was that took on this patent.
" And WHAT pray tell, YOU ANONYMOUS COWARD do soldiers precisely do, other than MURDER EACH OTHER? Fucking Troll."
Aside from the obvious deterrent forces keeping people free during the Cold War (As Washinton was fond of quoting "Si vis pacem, para bellum", as true to day as it was when Vegetius allegedly originally uttered it), liberating the oppressed (Europe 1944 Afghanistan 2002, etc), eliminating slavery (US Civil War), and many other duties and accomplishments soldiers have made that you blindly overlook...
Well, lets see if anything has happened recently...
I think there are whole pile of Marines rebuilding Sri Lankan towns after the Tsumani - and lot of Navy helicopter crews deliering aid where nobody else can, and USAF and Army logistics people figuring out how to get the most aid where it is needed most, and do that more quickly than any civilian agency.
Add to that the bridges, roads, power plants, and other facilities that have been built/rebuilt in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the schools and hospitals as well. Not to mention the medics treating ALL the injured, friend and foe alike.
The troll here is you.
90% fewer electrons? Does this mean less resiliency/redundancy in the chip - how vulnerable is this to quantum effects - or simple radiation?
http://www.foxnews.com/
There is an applet called "Track Your Races -- Election Tracker" toward the bottom of the main display segement - it allows you to monitor the Presidential election and up to 10 other state/congression races and/or ballot issues, it is live updated, and based on returns, not exit polls.
Set aside your preconceptions about Fox, the app is useful for what you say you want, and numbers are numbers.
> patent which describes a way for a piece of software to "ask for help" from another application.
Isn't that the basis for Microsoft Office? You put an Excel chart in your Word doc and Word "asks for help" from Excel - and the OLE layer mediates the communication between the 2 programs?
So either Microsoft has prior art, or else Miscrosoft is under the gun for violating this patent.
For that matter, CORBA is screwed too because it does the same thing mediates between pieces of software that ask for help from another application.
The patent is so vaguely worded that its almost impossible to pin it down. The USPTO must be staffed with idiots to allow crap like this to pass.
Remember - this same patent can be used against Perl, Python and other languages. It could even be used against .Net - but Microsoft can defend that on their own.
Who speaks for Free/Open software (like Perl, Python and any other bytecode language)?
YOU DO! So speak up
Use Fuji or some other film, use other branded cameras, and refuse to use any photo development shop that has Kodak machines in it.
Write to them and let them know their abuse of the patent system is going to cost them your business.
Yes, its its probably futile, but at least its a way to let them know that using the courts to commit a robbery is not a cost-free approach.
[insert D&D reference here]
I wonder what the Satellite has for initiative roll bonuses?
Alcee Hastings.
Yes THAT Alcee hastings. The one that got removed from the bench for conspiracy and bribery, IIRC in the 1980's.
He is a Democrat, and a political activist.
I doubt we will see any impartiality from the OCSE given whom they have chosen as the leadership here. The Republicans are probably already getting dossiers together to discredit this guy.
They should have at least come up with a couple of impartial Europeans (say, Scotland, Denmark) instead of a corruptable US politician.
SO no matter what they find out, having that guy associated with it provides any Republican an automatic "attack the attacker" bias claim defense.
Sorry, but this set of buildings at MIT look like somethign out of Tim Burton's "A nightmare before Christmas".
Hardly architectural masterpieces for generations to come.
This tries to imply that they are leaving those environments and changing over to the OSX environment. Bad Spinmeistering by an Apple Rep. Its more like "Now that you have a BSD substrate I can add OSX to the list of ports I support for my apps".
The developers are no more "moving to" OSX than they are "moving to" FreeBSD when they port an app there. He should have said something more like
(Personal feelings: I wish they would port OSX to Athlon64 or Intel architecture and more open/non-proprietary hardware components.)
Nice of you to dig that up.
Sophisticated troll he is.
sure, post it or a link. I could use it at work. And at home now that these changes seem to have poisoned COMCAST's DNS.
Read the later postings where this moron says SysV code "appeared" in linux and nobody knows how it got there.
5 094
He forgot about the changelogs and commit process in place so every bit of code is sourced.
Also he posted a pure flamebait troll to the Linux annoyances thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74037&cid=664
here's an excerpt:
Linus blatantly stole our IP and is, in essence, trying to distribute a warezed version of our UnixWare.
By the time this book is in print, you're biggest annoyance will be the thick black cock in your asses, as we'll see your entire IP theft ring behind bars.
THERE - that enouhg of a troll for you? Mod the parent DOWN - he's LYING!
"Code was in SysV first. Now its in Linux. Noone in the linux community can prove where or who it came from, it just sort of miraculously appeared and noone took credit for it."
Bullshit.
There is a commit record and changelog - so the Linux side KNOWS how the code got there.
You forgot that, didnt you, you troll.
Nice try.
Trying to be factual, eh troll boy? Real Email address, and the company you work for would be credible. But what gave you away as a troll is your own words:
what about your earlier response? The one you posted in the "Linux annoyances" article?
I quote:
Linus blatantly stole our IP and is, in essence, trying to distribute a warezed version of our UnixWare.
By the time this book is in print, you're biggest annoyance will be the thick black cock in your asses, as we'll see your entire IP theft ring behind bars.
I did not say the accused rapist should be denied the ability to rebut postings about him. I'm saying he can do it in his own webspace - he has no right to demand a response in my webspace. You missed the whole point of the example.
And as for applicibility, who defines what professional media is? The courts and arbitrary bureaucrats. Hardly the people to put your ability to write freely in.
"The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty." T. Jefferson, 1787
And as for crediting Marx with the free marketplace of ideas, you are misled. The concept was championed well before Marx wrote his first polemic.
Jefferson observed in his first Inaugural Address ". . . error of opinion need not and ought not be corrected by the courts where reason is left free to combat it." Thomas Jefferson's first Inaugural Address (The Complete Jefferson 385 (S. Padover ed. 1943)).
The actual phrase "open marketplae of Ideas" was coined by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
You might want to update your knowledgebase and read up on Locke, Jefferson and a few others who predate Marx, and greatly discount anything originally attributed to Marx and Engles.
Your mention of newspapers is ludicous. They have large legal staffs to serve as a bulwark against complaints, and (at least here in the US) have constitutional guarantees that are strongly protected. That is not the case for web sites and individuals. I know of none who have legal help on retainer for free speech issues.
Forced balance is no balance at all. Thats what you do not seem to understand. Government coercion is not the answer. Plus, Free Speech is not neccesarily Fair Speech. Thats the price paid for it.
And did you not read my remarks about the free marketplace of ideas? It does not shackle me to my opponent, nor him to me. Our ideas compete on merit. If you want an opposing opinion, go look one up, don't force me to publish yours.
The government has NO RIGHT to FORCE me to use MY webspace to place a rebuttal and publicise it. Let the aggrieved party get their own and publicise it themselves.
And this law, given its use of the court system, would rapidly be turned abusive by the people with the money for lawyers and legal actions. Did you learn nothing from the USA's DMCA debacle? Do you realy want corporations running rampant over their critics?
As an example of how this kills free speech against bad corporations:
Say I criticize SCO harshly, but effectively enough to get their attention: your law would pit me defensively against SCO's lawyers in a court of law. I would either have to give-in preemptively regardless of merit, or else go to the expense of hiring an attorney myself and battle it out in court, else remove the posting that cause dthem to act.
Did you not consider that? Removal of the offending post is an alternative that would be pushed. Its a serious chill on free speech: People posting would have to consider whether posting a strongly worded opinion is worth the legal hassles it could generate, and if challenged, posters would have to calculate whether they have enough money and reources to fight, or if they are willing to be silenced and remove their post.
Your vision of "fair" is an open invitation to barratry and quashing of opposing opinions on the internet by those with power and money.
On a personal level, it would result in repugnant actions: say you are an abuse victim, and you post harshly about NABMLA. Now the courts, under this law, force you under legal penalty of fine or jail (for contempt of court) to post the reply/rebuttal of the very abuser that you suffered from, or remove the posting.
Its your money, your website, your opinion, and you somehow see no harm in the government forcing you hand over part of that to someone that you disagree with strongly enough to post critical things about them?
Look to all the consequences, especially the unintended ones that you have obviously blithely ignored.
So, lets see, you have the Holocaust Deniers who can force News sites to link to them every time they are mentioned in a news post, an accused rapist demanding linkage under court order to his victim's web site, Labor Party forced to link to Conservative Party, fascists/communists court-ordered posting every time they get criticized...
Something fundamentally wrong about that. What ever happened to the Marketplace of Ideas? Thomas Jefferson championed it in the USA, but the original idea came from European philosophers (Locke, etc).
Its my web space, I pay for it, why should I be forced to give credence and publicity to someone I am opposed to, on MY dime? They can use their own site and post there.
To parphrase an old hyper-mach-military saying (Kill them all and let God sort them out):
Post them all, and let Google sort them out.
Vox populi, and all that jazz...
"I still don't see how this plane is going to solve Boeing's sales problems."
Consider that 800 737s are in the air worldwide at any given time. One 737 takes off every 6 seconds on average world-wide (per the NTSB). Its become the DC-3 of the latter quarter of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st.
Also consider that the 737 is coming to the end of its design lifecycle with the -700 series. And the 757 has been partially superseded by the 767, yet nothing quite fills its old niche (737 too small, 767 too big).
Airlines are looking for cheaper to operate, more fuel efficient aircraft that will lure back the business traveler, in the 180-210 passenger size (which probably constitutes a majority of the revenues for regional and US carriers).
The 7E7 fits that description quite well. So thats why they are spending the money - theres a market for this aircraft, the same market Boeing has dominated with the 737/757, and one that will be opening up by the time this aircraft becomes operational. The biggest gain is in operating efficiency (modular electronics, easier crew servicing of aircraft, etc) and fuel efficiency.
As an example, if United could drop its operating and fuel costs both by 10% annually, it would be profitable to the tune of several hundred million dollars, instead of in bankruptcy court.