I would suggest looking at Scribus as a possible solution not only for replacing InDesign, but also for replacing Acrobat Pro. It's got a pretty complete set of PDF creation tools already.
The debate over the.xxx domain should have died years ago. If you're really anal about protecting children, the.kids domain idea is a much better prospect.
ICANN hasn't done enough in being a domain name regulator, IMHO. What's the purpose of a TLD if it doesn't really mean anything? If.orgs aren't non-commercial organizations, and.nets aren't network-related, then why bother? The only domains that are reasonably well-regulated right now are the various governmental domains, plus.edu.
If someone offers for sale (on eBay) an e-Book or PDF of a physical book, that comes perilously close to illegality, IMHO. Whether or not a copy was sent is a matter of timing... No barrier exists in this case to anyone downloading copyrighted material whenever they choose.
This is, in the end, about a legal technicality and about what the law currently states. Ruling against the RIAA would open up the absurd but possible scenario of an automated book publisher "making available" a book such that an anonymous user could click a button on the Internet, a press would start printing, and a robot would automatically ship the book without anyone knowing that anything had actually happened except the person pushing the button. Does that make the theoretical book publisher a copyright violator for making the book available, or is it only a copyright violation if they can catch a copy being shipped out the door?
IMHO, willfully offering copyright material is essentially solicitation or intent to commit a civil and/or criminal violation. The question here is: does the law recognize that right now?
Except... 1) It's a third-party investigator, and 2) Distribution is the violation, not receipt.
Even if the valid copyright holder downloaded the available content, the person making the content available is the one doing the distribution, and hence the one violating the copyright.
What remains is proof that the person being sued is in fact responsible for the shared folder in question: was the sharing intentional or willfully negligent, and was the person named the one responsible for maintaining that system and the owner of that folder?
(PS, before someone posits it: it's also not entrapment; that's limited to government law enforcement...)
I don't know exactly what this has changed, but it has certainly increased visibility of some of the sites I maintain; I'm guessing that some SEO tricks are now seen for what they are, and "good" behavior is once again rewarded.
The various divisions of the Executive branch (IRS, cabinet posts, etc. that you cite) are all subject to the control of the President anyway, and there is no dissenting theory that I know of on that matter. Very few quasi-governmental bodies are independent of the President; it is, as you note, the Constitutional responsibility of the President to carry out the execution of the laws - and hence to oversee all Executive branch agencies.
Cheney, et al, are proponents of the Unitary Executive theory that we're talking about (and have been since Nixon...): that the President can essentially do anything he wants precisely because he is the executor of the laws of the land, and because he is the C-in-C. If the courts rule against him, he is free to ignore them; if Congress passes a law, even one overriding his veto, he can ignore that as well. That is the theory, and it's been used in practice... The President has completely overruled FISA and the FISA court system; he has bypassed the Geneva Convention treaties and the US War Crimes Act; and he has openly thumbed his nose at the court system when it rules against him, as in the Jose Padilla detention/habeas corpus case. That is the Unitary Executive theory.
A Presidential signing statement is only legal as it directs the Executive on operational details on carrying out the new law. The President has no legal authority to modify, create, or select the law - in fact, doing so directly contravenes the Constitutional assignment of powers.
Signing statements have history, but IIRC there are a total of two prior examples that purported to make any selective enforcement, and none that tried to actively alter laws as passed by Congress beyond selective enforcement.
As to martial law, Public Safety is not the active part of that clause; rather, "Cases of Rebellion or Invasion" would be the only legal reasons for a declaration of martial law. This was discussed extensively during the Katrina disaster.
The consideration you receive for signing off on a company's Acceptable Use Policy is that you get paid for your work - it's part of your contract that you agree to corporate policies. In this particular case, it was also the receipt of a corporate laptop for use.
Have to agree with you on negotiability, though - it's really hard to negotiate with an employer. I've managed a few small concessions in my past several jobs relating to off-hours work (hobbyist programmer and part-time photographer), but I wouldn't expect negotiability on Acceptable Use Policy.
Personally, I don't see this as being in the same category as an EULA. And if this becomes a generally-accepted ruling, it seriously damages AUPs not only at places of employment, but also at ISPs; think of the spam, man!
The number of exemptions listed in the Executive Order effectively neuter the entire order. Does the Federal Government ever take private property for reasons outside of those listed below?
Sec. 3. Specific Exclusions. Nothing in this order shall be construed to prohibit a taking of private property by the Federal Government, that otherwise complies with applicable law, for the purpose of:
(a) public ownership or exclusive use of the property by the public, such as for a public medical facility, roadway, park, forest, governmental office building, or military reservation;
(b) projects designated for public, common carrier, public transportation, or public utility use, including those for which a fee is assessed, that serve the general public and are subject to regulation by a governmental entity;
c) conveying the property to a nongovernmental entity, such as a telecommunications or transportation common carrier, that makes the property available for use by the general public as of right;
(d) preventing or mitigating a harmful use of land that constitutes a threat to public health, safety, or the environment;
(e) acquiring abandoned property;
(f) quieting title to real property;
(g) acquiring ownership or use by a public utility;
(h) facilitating the disposal or exchange of Federal property; or
(i) meeting military, law enforcement, public safety, public transportation, or public health emergencies.
And how many times did the Republicans fail back in the good old days of Democratic Party dominance? How many times did they have to put candidates up in order to change the debate in the GOP before they succeeded?
The Kos dozen were mostly underdogs to begin with in 2004 (with some exceptions, like Obama). The Democratic Party is waking up to the fact that it's ineffective at electing candidates outside of its strongholds. In many states, the local parties are in disarray or are non-existant. Kos, Howard Dean, and others who have taken control of swaths of the Democratic Party since 2004 are building a new machine to replace the old clunker that's been sputtering along for a decade now; it takes time to finish the machine, test it, and run it in a couple of races to fine-tune it until it can win.
They've shown that even in hopeless races there is some hope; Hackett's campaign would not have come within 2% of beating *any* GOP candidate in Ohio-2 last year without the support of the netroots, and I doubt the "old" Democratic Party would have even wasted a dime on it. But if a Progressive candidate can come within 2% of winning in a solid Red district like OH-2, there is a lot more hope for the Democratic Party than is visible from the numbers.
Even with all those ballot choices, minor parties have it rough. They have to qualify for that ballot slot, in every state, every election cycle; major parties are automatically "in"; if Perot's Reform Party hadn't derailed, they might have lasted long enough to get in on the fun, but even the perennial parties like Natural Law, Constitution, Libertarian, and Green have to go through the rigamarole every year or two with the current laws.
Third party candidates rarely qualify for Federal matching funds for the Presidential race. Third party candidates don't usually get their candidates on every state's ballot. And it's nigh on impossible to build up a third party's base to the point where they can challenge on a major ticket. Bernie Sanders is the only elected Independent in a national office (Jeffords was elected as a Republican before defecting in 2001).
And the reason many of the parties can't build up their base is that, come election time, no-one wants to vote for a candidate when another candidate - not quite as good but from a major party - might lose because of the vote split. We need to institute Instant Runoff or Condorcet voting if we want third parties to thrive. And we need to make the tournament field a bit easier to qualify for on a long-term basis; the parties I mentioned above have been around for a long time; they deserve better than they get.
If someone's speculating on new investments, at least they're putting in an actual investment on an actual company. Speculation only goes so far; I don't think many people would invest in the next company who comes up with a Pet Rock or a Jump To Conclusions Mat...
While I agree my proposal would hurt "average investors" too, what are we really doing by shuffling money around the stock market? Stocks used to trade on dividend value; now they trade almost exclusively on speculation value, and that's not productive to society - no actual investment is being made, nor benefit to the company realized. In otherwords, trading in stocks that are not "first transaction" is essentially making money with money and not investing in anything "real". I'm not proposing this as a solution to the salary/stock option problem - there are other solutions out there for that - I'm just saying that as a society, we have a vested interest in setting a tax policy that encourages development over magical wealth generation.
PS - If I were writing the legislation, I'd probably put IRAs and other retirement investment plans into the lower bracket.
In this case, the Google founders and executives are cashing in on their IPO. It's not really the same as the typical salary to stock option crap that's going around. Let's face it, if you could get paid via capital gains (15% tax rate, until it's not taxed at all...) instead of salary (38% tax rate), why would you want a salary?
Make dividends and true stock investments (investing in IPOs, new stock offerings, and startup stock payments) taxable at the capital gains rate and revert all the daytrading/recycled stock profits to the full tax rate; it will benefit new technologies and put the brakes on silly speculation trading (read: gambling for the rich).
Several people have suggested a Linux software RAID (md) setup, and I agree. With 250GB SATA drives out there for "cheap", a trio or more of RAID-5 disks (or a duo RAID-1) will easily do the trick for storage. Motherboards support SATA out of the box now; no special hardware required.
If you're using the RAID storage as your primary storage, you'll want a pair of arrays instead of a single array; better, you'll want a duplicate system as your real backup box. RAID is not on its own a backup as the system itself can still fail or data become corrupted. So the second part of the recommendation is: use rdiff-backup. It's standard on Fedora Core now, and it's a breeze to use. It won't take up space with anything that hasn't changed, either.
HTTP was designed to be stateless while retaining the reliability of TCP. This is a Good Thing. Maybe you don't like it, but it's still good.
Neither the server nor the client side is necessarily stateless in AJAX; the server has its session object, and the client has a persistent JavaScript object store and DOM. Processing appropriate to the client end takes place on the client end, and processing appropriate to the server side takes place on the server side; a real programmer can even make the two co-operate in maintaining a common state.
And, most importantly, you miss the whole point about AJAX concepts; under AJAX, you don't refresh entire screens, unless you're changing to a new application. The concepts behind DHTML are the same as those you'd apply to a GUI package like TCL/TK, GTK+, or Java, but screen objects are designed to be user-modifiable via CSS.
The result is a site-configurable, distributed, secured access application.
You miss the distinction; individual ISPs and businesses choose to use blacklists; the publisher is not doing a DDoS, but rather each ISP is choosing to accept advice from that blacklist.
If the ISP uses SpamAssassin, the blacklist is only part of a score used to determine spam-ness. If the ISP works like AOL or Yahoo, the blacklisted mail goes into a junk box for further user-based processing.
At a minimum, the Betamax argument applies; it has a substantial non-illegal use, and so is legal. But more generally, it isn't a denial of service to refuse to accept e-mail - that is the receiver's perogative, as e-mail is a service just like Telnet; the computer's owner has every right to deny access to his own systems.
Defamation (slander/libel) is only valid if you are knowingly and publically stating false facts. MAPS (and apparently SBL - shame, I used to trust you...) are stating that the addresses they block are involved in some way with spam, and they are, if only indirectly. MAPS has always believed that a sort of Internet Death Penalty was valid against ISPs who refused to own up to their problems, and people who subscribe to MAPS seem to agree.
And, since the service is voluntary, not necessarily the sole determining factor of spam, and not governmental, there are few if any laws that could apply.
A spammer once threatened me with unfair business practices because I sent notices to his upstream provider due to repeated spam; he was kicked off the system. My ISP, being an understanding bunch, supported me and backed up my claims when I responded that he was illegally using my system to support his own business practices and was violating his ISP's use policy. And, yes, I was publishing a "blacklist" at the time - a voluntary filter written in Perl, that worked with procmail.
He backed off - I haven't heard that argument in quite a while now.
Samba itself can only be harmed if Microsoft uses this declaration as a wedge to enforce what it sees as its rights to a proprietary protocol (that they (a) didn't originally create, and (b) published a couple of RFCs about).
But... Sun and IBM and RedHat and HP and Novell, who all use the Samba server in their OS offerings to compete with Microsoft, will definitely be harmed by this decision if it stands.
As to why a monopolist aggressor should be forced to dismantle itself, a corporation is an artificial entity created to serve the needs of the citizens; in relatively recent times, a corporation is a demi-person. If we can inflict significant penalties (most of a person's life) for crimes, what is irrational about forcing a monopolist to disclose protocol documentation?
This is a huge morass, and might be the single straw that breaks the back of McCain-Finegold.
There are tons of collaborative political sites out there on both sides, who aren't associated with the parties or candidates yet strongly support their causes. They deserve the freedom they had through the 2004 elections.
And then there's the blogs like the pro-Thune blog in S.D., where the bloggers were paid for their blogging efforts by the campaign itself. They don't deserve crap under McC-F.
But the law doesn't distinguish - it only tries to gauge the value of an effort. How ugly can it get?
It's not so much that they took the stuff - it's back and intact (AFAIK). The government's position is that the person/entity whose stuff they rifled through has no standing to find out why, not because it's "sensitive information", but because they didn't serve the warrant on IndyMedia to begin with.
I'm not convinced that one or more of the three plaintiffs aren't part of IndyMedia. One of the names is X'd out, one is some university-affiliated group, and the other is EFF. Does anyone have a good idea of who IndyMedia really is?
To me, unless the three plaintiffs have nothing to do with IndyMedia, the government is using some seriously twisted logic here...
... we didn't serve IndyMedia - we served RackSpace.
Ah, the complexities of an information society. According to the government, you'd better own the equipment, not just the data. Data owners apparently have no standing to sue if they aren't directly served, even if it's their data that's confiscated.
The article does mention approximately what he's trying to use, though not the specific hardware. It says he's got an on-board Intel sound system. I'd be interested to know what brand system he owns; it's probably some standard sound system that's been munged by the system manufacturer.
It also says he's tried 10 distributions (I find this hard to believe); his forum replies indicate he hasn't yet tried Mandrake (9.2 or 10), and he hasn't even gotten through Red Hat 9 yet. What's he testing, Red Hat 5.2?
Since when was a magnet's "energy" - potential or otherwise - derived from its creation?
An iron magnet can be formed simply by allowing molten iron to cool slowly in one position. The Earth's magnetic field aligns the iron atoms during cooling. You can also do the same by striking an iron nail a couple of times with a hammer while aligning it with N-S. There is no energy involved in the first example, and much less than the force (over time) which can be performed with the second.
A magnet becomes demagnetized by being overcome with a strong enough magnetic field of differing alignment. The opposing field forces the atoms/molecules of the magnet out of alignment, reducing and eventually eliminating any co-ordinated magnetic effect. "Permanent" magnets are extremely resistant to this effect and last much longer than iron magnets, but the strength of the electro-magnetic field required to induce molecular alignment is nearly the same for both.
A magnet generates its field from the aligned motion of its electrons (a magnetic field is generated perpendicularly to the motion of an electrical charge). As the electrons are doing all of the "work", you'll have to confront their energy source when determining whether this is a bunch of BS or not.
Do you know how electrons keep their orbital energy? I don't. I really don't in the face of an opposing magnetic field, which *should* alter their energy flow.
I'd cut down on the "it's BS" comments until you can give up a satisfactory explaination.
The "Laws of Thermodynamics" are still theories, just like relativity. Learn to live with uncertainty.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest looking at Scribus as a possible solution not only for replacing InDesign, but also for replacing Acrobat Pro. It's got a pretty complete set of PDF creation tools already.
The debate over the .xxx domain should have died years ago. If you're really anal about protecting children, the .kids domain idea is a much better prospect.
.orgs aren't non-commercial organizations, and .nets aren't network-related, then why bother? The only domains that are reasonably well-regulated right now are the various governmental domains, plus .edu.
ICANN hasn't done enough in being a domain name regulator, IMHO. What's the purpose of a TLD if it doesn't really mean anything? If
This is a really thin line.
If someone offers for sale (on eBay) an e-Book or PDF of a physical book, that comes perilously close to illegality, IMHO. Whether or not a copy was sent is a matter of timing... No barrier exists in this case to anyone downloading copyrighted material whenever they choose.
This is, in the end, about a legal technicality and about what the law currently states. Ruling against the RIAA would open up the absurd but possible scenario of an automated book publisher "making available" a book such that an anonymous user could click a button on the Internet, a press would start printing, and a robot would automatically ship the book without anyone knowing that anything had actually happened except the person pushing the button. Does that make the theoretical book publisher a copyright violator for making the book available, or is it only a copyright violation if they can catch a copy being shipped out the door?
IMHO, willfully offering copyright material is essentially solicitation or intent to commit a civil and/or criminal violation. The question here is: does the law recognize that right now?
Except...
1) It's a third-party investigator, and
2) Distribution is the violation, not receipt.
Even if the valid copyright holder downloaded the available content, the person making the content available is the one doing the distribution, and hence the one violating the copyright.
What remains is proof that the person being sued is in fact responsible for the shared folder in question: was the sharing intentional or willfully negligent, and was the person named the one responsible for maintaining that system and the owner of that folder?
(PS, before someone posits it: it's also not entrapment; that's limited to government law enforcement...)
I don't know exactly what this has changed, but it has certainly increased visibility of some of the sites I maintain; I'm guessing that some SEO tricks are now seen for what they are, and "good" behavior is once again rewarded.
Um, not what proponents say...
The various divisions of the Executive branch (IRS, cabinet posts, etc. that you cite) are all subject to the control of the President anyway, and there is no dissenting theory that I know of on that matter. Very few quasi-governmental bodies are independent of the President; it is, as you note, the Constitutional responsibility of the President to carry out the execution of the laws - and hence to oversee all Executive branch agencies.
Cheney, et al, are proponents of the Unitary Executive theory that we're talking about (and have been since Nixon...): that the President can essentially do anything he wants precisely because he is the executor of the laws of the land, and because he is the C-in-C. If the courts rule against him, he is free to ignore them; if Congress passes a law, even one overriding his veto, he can ignore that as well. That is the theory, and it's been used in practice... The President has completely overruled FISA and the FISA court system; he has bypassed the Geneva Convention treaties and the US War Crimes Act; and he has openly thumbed his nose at the court system when it rules against him, as in the Jose Padilla detention/habeas corpus case. That is the Unitary Executive theory.
A Presidential signing statement is only legal as it directs the Executive on operational details on carrying out the new law. The President has no legal authority to modify, create, or select the law - in fact, doing so directly contravenes the Constitutional assignment of powers.
Signing statements have history, but IIRC there are a total of two prior examples that purported to make any selective enforcement, and none that tried to actively alter laws as passed by Congress beyond selective enforcement.
As to martial law, Public Safety is not the active part of that clause; rather, "Cases of Rebellion or Invasion" would be the only legal reasons for a declaration of martial law. This was discussed extensively during the Katrina disaster.
The consideration you receive for signing off on a company's Acceptable Use Policy is that you get paid for your work - it's part of your contract that you agree to corporate policies. In this particular case, it was also the receipt of a corporate laptop for use.
Have to agree with you on negotiability, though - it's really hard to negotiate with an employer. I've managed a few small concessions in my past several jobs relating to off-hours work (hobbyist programmer and part-time photographer), but I wouldn't expect negotiability on Acceptable Use Policy.
Personally, I don't see this as being in the same category as an EULA. And if this becomes a generally-accepted ruling, it seriously damages AUPs not only at places of employment, but also at ISPs; think of the spam, man!
Sec. 3. Specific Exclusions. Nothing in this order shall be construed to prohibit a taking of private property by the Federal Government, that otherwise complies with applicable law, for the purpose of:
(a) public ownership or exclusive use of the property by the public, such as for a public medical facility, roadway, park, forest, governmental office building, or military reservation;
(b) projects designated for public, common carrier, public transportation, or public utility use, including those for which a fee is assessed, that serve the general public and are subject to regulation by a governmental entity;
c) conveying the property to a nongovernmental entity, such as a telecommunications or transportation common carrier, that makes the property available for use by the general public as of right;
(d) preventing or mitigating a harmful use of land that constitutes a threat to public health, safety, or the environment;
(e) acquiring abandoned property;
(f) quieting title to real property;
(g) acquiring ownership or use by a public utility;
(h) facilitating the disposal or exchange of Federal property; or
(i) meeting military, law enforcement, public safety, public transportation, or public health emergencies.
And how many times did the Republicans fail back in the good old days of Democratic Party dominance? How many times did they have to put candidates up in order to change the debate in the GOP before they succeeded?
The Kos dozen were mostly underdogs to begin with in 2004 (with some exceptions, like Obama). The Democratic Party is waking up to the fact that it's ineffective at electing candidates outside of its strongholds. In many states, the local parties are in disarray or are non-existant. Kos, Howard Dean, and others who have taken control of swaths of the Democratic Party since 2004 are building a new machine to replace the old clunker that's been sputtering along for a decade now; it takes time to finish the machine, test it, and run it in a couple of races to fine-tune it until it can win.
They've shown that even in hopeless races there is some hope; Hackett's campaign would not have come within 2% of beating *any* GOP candidate in Ohio-2 last year without the support of the netroots, and I doubt the "old" Democratic Party would have even wasted a dime on it. But if a Progressive candidate can come within 2% of winning in a solid Red district like OH-2, there is a lot more hope for the Democratic Party than is visible from the numbers.
Even with all those ballot choices, minor parties have it rough. They have to qualify for that ballot slot, in every state, every election cycle; major parties are automatically "in"; if Perot's Reform Party hadn't derailed, they might have lasted long enough to get in on the fun, but even the perennial parties like Natural Law, Constitution, Libertarian, and Green have to go through the rigamarole every year or two with the current laws.
Third party candidates rarely qualify for Federal matching funds for the Presidential race. Third party candidates don't usually get their candidates on every state's ballot. And it's nigh on impossible to build up a third party's base to the point where they can challenge on a major ticket. Bernie Sanders is the only elected Independent in a national office (Jeffords was elected as a Republican before defecting in 2001).
And the reason many of the parties can't build up their base is that, come election time, no-one wants to vote for a candidate when another candidate - not quite as good but from a major party - might lose because of the vote split. We need to institute Instant Runoff or Condorcet voting if we want third parties to thrive. And we need to make the tournament field a bit easier to qualify for on a long-term basis; the parties I mentioned above have been around for a long time; they deserve better than they get.
Overseas votes were in fact counted. These ballots are counted by the individual precincts, just as any other absentee ballot.
If someone's speculating on new investments, at least they're putting in an actual investment on an actual company. Speculation only goes so far; I don't think many people would invest in the next company who comes up with a Pet Rock or a Jump To Conclusions Mat...
While I agree my proposal would hurt "average investors" too, what are we really doing by shuffling money around the stock market? Stocks used to trade on dividend value; now they trade almost exclusively on speculation value, and that's not productive to society - no actual investment is being made, nor benefit to the company realized. In otherwords, trading in stocks that are not "first transaction" is essentially making money with money and not investing in anything "real". I'm not proposing this as a solution to the salary/stock option problem - there are other solutions out there for that - I'm just saying that as a society, we have a vested interest in setting a tax policy that encourages development over magical wealth generation.
PS - If I were writing the legislation, I'd probably put IRAs and other retirement investment plans into the lower bracket.
Maybe Diebold his hiding just how craptacular their program really is? It's just an Access database underneath. Really.
Or maybe Microsoft won't permit them to release the specs on Access databases...
In this case, the Google founders and executives are cashing in on their IPO. It's not really the same as the typical salary to stock option crap that's going around. Let's face it, if you could get paid via capital gains (15% tax rate, until it's not taxed at all...) instead of salary (38% tax rate), why would you want a salary?
Make dividends and true stock investments (investing in IPOs, new stock offerings, and startup stock payments) taxable at the capital gains rate and revert all the daytrading/recycled stock profits to the full tax rate; it will benefit new technologies and put the brakes on silly speculation trading (read: gambling for the rich).
If you're using the RAID storage as your primary storage, you'll want a pair of arrays instead of a single array; better, you'll want a duplicate system as your real backup box. RAID is not on its own a backup as the system itself can still fail or data become corrupted. So the second part of the recommendation is: use rdiff-backup. It's standard on Fedora Core now, and it's a breeze to use. It won't take up space with anything that hasn't changed, either.
Got a grudge much?
HTTP was designed to be stateless while retaining the reliability of TCP. This is a Good Thing. Maybe you don't like it, but it's still good.
Neither the server nor the client side is necessarily stateless in AJAX; the server has its session object, and the client has a persistent JavaScript object store and DOM. Processing appropriate to the client end takes place on the client end, and processing appropriate to the server side takes place on the server side; a real programmer can even make the two co-operate in maintaining a common state.
And, most importantly, you miss the whole point about AJAX concepts; under AJAX, you don't refresh entire screens, unless you're changing to a new application. The concepts behind DHTML are the same as those you'd apply to a GUI package like TCL/TK, GTK+, or Java, but screen objects are designed to be user-modifiable via CSS.
The result is a site-configurable, distributed, secured access application.
You miss the distinction; individual ISPs and businesses choose to use blacklists; the publisher is not doing a DDoS, but rather each ISP is choosing to accept advice from that blacklist.
If the ISP uses SpamAssassin, the blacklist is only part of a score used to determine spam-ness. If the ISP works like AOL or Yahoo, the blacklisted mail goes into a junk box for further user-based processing.
At a minimum, the Betamax argument applies; it has a substantial non-illegal use, and so is legal. But more generally, it isn't a denial of service to refuse to accept e-mail - that is the receiver's perogative, as e-mail is a service just like Telnet; the computer's owner has every right to deny access to his own systems.
Defamation (slander/libel) is only valid if you are knowingly and publically stating false facts. MAPS (and apparently SBL - shame, I used to trust you...) are stating that the addresses they block are involved in some way with spam, and they are, if only indirectly. MAPS has always believed that a sort of Internet Death Penalty was valid against ISPs who refused to own up to their problems, and people who subscribe to MAPS seem to agree.
And, since the service is voluntary, not necessarily the sole determining factor of spam, and not governmental, there are few if any laws that could apply.
A spammer once threatened me with unfair business practices because I sent notices to his upstream provider due to repeated spam; he was kicked off the system. My ISP, being an understanding bunch, supported me and backed up my claims when I responded that he was illegally using my system to support his own business practices and was violating his ISP's use policy. And, yes, I was publishing a "blacklist" at the time - a voluntary filter written in Perl, that worked with procmail.
He backed off - I haven't heard that argument in quite a while now.
Samba itself can only be harmed if Microsoft uses this declaration as a wedge to enforce what it sees as its rights to a proprietary protocol (that they (a) didn't originally create, and (b) published a couple of RFCs about).
But... Sun and IBM and RedHat and HP and Novell, who all use the Samba server in their OS offerings to compete with Microsoft, will definitely be harmed by this decision if it stands.
As to why a monopolist aggressor should be forced to dismantle itself, a corporation is an artificial entity created to serve the needs of the citizens; in relatively recent times, a corporation is a demi-person. If we can inflict significant penalties (most of a person's life) for crimes, what is irrational about forcing a monopolist to disclose protocol documentation?
This is a huge morass, and might be the single straw that breaks the back of McCain-Finegold.
There are tons of collaborative political sites out there on both sides, who aren't associated with the parties or candidates yet strongly support their causes. They deserve the freedom they had through the 2004 elections.
And then there's the blogs like the pro-Thune blog in S.D., where the bloggers were paid for their blogging efforts by the campaign itself. They don't deserve crap under McC-F.
But the law doesn't distinguish - it only tries to gauge the value of an effort. How ugly can it get?
It's not so much that they took the stuff - it's back and intact (AFAIK). The government's position is that the person/entity whose stuff they rifled through has no standing to find out why, not because it's "sensitive information", but because they didn't serve the warrant on IndyMedia to begin with.
I'm not convinced that one or more of the three plaintiffs aren't part of IndyMedia. One of the names is X'd out, one is some university-affiliated group, and the other is EFF. Does anyone have a good idea of who IndyMedia really is?
To me, unless the three plaintiffs have nothing to do with IndyMedia, the government is using some seriously twisted logic here...
... we didn't serve IndyMedia - we served RackSpace.
Ah, the complexities of an information society. According to the government, you'd better own the equipment, not just the data. Data owners apparently have no standing to sue if they aren't directly served, even if it's their data that's confiscated.
The article does mention approximately what he's trying to use, though not the specific hardware. It says he's got an on-board Intel sound system. I'd be interested to know what brand system he owns; it's probably some standard sound system that's been munged by the system manufacturer.
It also says he's tried 10 distributions (I find this hard to believe); his forum replies indicate he hasn't yet tried Mandrake (9.2 or 10), and he hasn't even gotten through Red Hat 9 yet. What's he testing, Red Hat 5.2?
Since when was a magnet's "energy" - potential or otherwise - derived from its creation?
An iron magnet can be formed simply by allowing molten iron to cool slowly in one position. The Earth's magnetic field aligns the iron atoms during cooling. You can also do the same by striking an iron nail a couple of times with a hammer while aligning it with N-S. There is no energy involved in the first example, and much less than the force (over time) which can be performed with the second.
A magnet becomes demagnetized by being overcome with a strong enough magnetic field of differing alignment. The opposing field forces the atoms/molecules of the magnet out of alignment, reducing and eventually eliminating any co-ordinated magnetic effect. "Permanent" magnets are extremely resistant to this effect and last much longer than iron magnets, but the strength of the electro-magnetic field required to induce molecular alignment is nearly the same for both.
A magnet generates its field from the aligned motion of its electrons (a magnetic field is generated perpendicularly to the motion of an electrical charge). As the electrons are doing all of the "work", you'll have to confront their energy source when determining whether this is a bunch of BS or not.
Do you know how electrons keep their orbital energy? I don't. I really don't in the face of an opposing magnetic field, which *should* alter their energy flow.
I'd cut down on the "it's BS" comments until you can give up a satisfactory explaination.
The "Laws of Thermodynamics" are still theories, just like relativity. Learn to live with uncertainty.