Here's what I think is really going on. Gravity isn't us being pulled toward the earth, it's us being pushed towards it. Why do I think this? The Zero Point Energy field. It's everywhere. Einstein always said there was more than enough energy in the space occupied by a coffee cup to vaporize all of Earth's oceans. He wasn't talking about the strong nuclear force, you know, the one that makes the wonders of atomic weapons possible. No, he was talking about the energy inherent in space-time itself. It's everywhere -- not only in pure vacuum, through which it constantly streams unobstructed, but also both inside and outside every object, every atom, every *thing* that exists. It's what keeps the negatively-charged electrons orbiting an atom's nucleus instead of spiraling right down into it, attracted there by the positively-charged proton. Because it's everywhere, it exerts a force in every direction. This force extends outward without bound, its strength decreasing with distance. It also interacts with matter, which "blocks" it somewhat. And what happens when a force meets resistance? It tends to push that resistance in the same direction as its force vector; at the same time, some of its energy is consumed by the work it does (moving the matter it hit). But what happens when this force is pushing on an object from *every* direction at once? You might think it'd crush it. Nope. Remember; to be crushed, there would have to be a "pressure" or force differential between the object's inside and outside and, as explained previously, the force is equally pressing from both within and without the object. This is analogous to our own very observable situation on earth. We exist under a rather thick layer of atmosphere. Right now, there are millions, if not billions, of tons of force pressing down on your head from the weight of the air above you. Why aren't you crushed under all that weight? Because there's an equal force balancing it from the opposite side. (Just trust me on this one.) Same thing with the ZPE field.
So here we have this great big giant ball of matter we lovingly refer to as "Earth." It, being made of matter, presents resistance against the force of the ZPE field, and it dissipates some of that force before it gets all the way through the earth to the other side. Now, because all the energy coming from every side of the earth interacts with the earth's matter in the same way, with resistance, it doesn't push the earth in any one direction -- just like the air above your head doesn't push you right into the ground. But think now of something sitting ON the earth, something that can be considered part of its matter. Something like you, sitting there at your computer. You too have ZPE energy coming at you from all sides; up, down, inside, outside, left, right, etc. But because the earth, in interacting with it, is shielding some of that energy by absorption during its travel through the earth (some comes from beyond the other side of the earth from you, some comes from 12 feet under your chair, some comes from.001 millimeters under your butt sitting on the chair, etc, but all of it is absorbed in some way by passing through matter), there is NOT a net zero ZPE force acting upon you. There is in fact more of it pushing you down from the relatively unshielded "Up" direction than there is from the highly shielded "Down" direction; therefore, you are pushed down towards the center of the earth, and the force with which you are pushed is in direct correlation to your mass and the earth's mass. Does that sound familiar?:)
Now think of a black hole. Eerie, scary things. They are of course extremely dense collections of matter, where even the electrons can't orbit because it has been crushed so competely. In ordinary matter, there is LOTS of empty space; a neutrino could pass all the way from your forehead to the sole of your right foot without even touching any of the matter that makes you up. That's why only a very very small percentage of the ZPE energy interacts with you in a direction that isn't balanced from the other side (ie, through the earth) -- because there's very little there to interact WITH. But what about a black hole? Very very dense, trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of tons of matter all smashed into a tiny ball -- there isn't ANY free space inside it; it's all matter. So what does that mean? Yep; ALL the ZPE energy gets absorbed by interacting with it, from every direction, and so the energy flowing from behind you, through you, and towards the black hole isn't balanced by anything pushing back FROM the black hole -- and you are completely crushed into it.
This is also why there is such a thing as the Gravitational Constant. It refers to the amount of interaction between the ZPE energy force and matter. It is very very small, and is multiplied by the mass of two objects to determine the amount of gravitational attraction between them (the GxM1xM2/d^2 formula). That number, "G", is literally how much of the energy in the ZPE field gets absorbed by passing through one kilogram of matter. Let's get into a bit of math here...
The gravitational force, in Newtons, between objects having masses of M1 and M2, in kilograms, and separated by a distance of d, in meters, is the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them... multiplied by G, which is 6.673e-11 Newton-meters squared per kilogram squared (the odd units associated with G are there so they cancel out all the units in the formula other than the result, which is in Newtons). Two 1-kg objects separated by 1 meter would yield Gx1x1/1x1 Newtons, or 6.673e-11 Newtons. Not very much. This means that most of the ZPE energy passes through these objects unobstructed. But how much doesn't? Literally, "G" doesn't... thus, 0.000000006673% of the energy gets absorbed and translated into "motion" by pushing the matter in the direction in which it is imbalanced. I may have said it before, but it's worth repeating: Nature doesn't abhor a vacuum. Nature abhors imbalance. All things will seek balance. That's how you can siphon gas out of your gas tank, and that's why you get pushed to the earth.
Let's take a more realistic example: you and the earth. You have a mass of, let's say, 80 kg (176 pounds); the earth's mass is 5.974e24 kg (rather a lot of pounds). The distance from you to the earth isn't 0, as you might think; it's the distance from your center of mass to the earth's center of mass, which is roughly 3,185,500 meters. So plugging all that crap into the formula, we get 4.71e+13 * G, which makes 3,142.83 Newtons of force pushing you to the earth. G is the percentage of "gravitational" energy that gets absorbed or deflected by its interaction with the matter making up you and your body.
I haven't completely worked out ALL the math yet, but something tells me this is right. It answers all the unknown things about gravity, it explains momentum and inertia, it explains what keeps atoms from just collapsing into themselves... hell, it might even be the definition OF matter. So come on; let's see you armchair physicists blow some holes in my theory...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck
I know for a fact that many many times in the twentieth century, there have been inventors who came up with carburetor designs that enabled ANY vehicle to get 300 miles to the gallon or even more. My dad knew one such person personally. He invented a 300MPG carb, tried to market it, and instantly got bought out by Ford, I think it was. They bought his design for $50,000 (this was in the 50's, when 50 grand was actually worth something:) and then smothered it. Nobody heard of it again.
And if you really want to get into conspiracy theories, I suggest you just do a web search for "zero point energy". There are so many ways to use ZPE it's sickening, considering the fact that NONE of them have been even mentioned in mainstream media (owned by big business). It is possible to take damn near any existing electrical motor, add a few parts, and turn it into a generator that runs itself without any fuel. You just give it a spin and it runs forever. But guess what happens when someone tries to patent such a device? The patent office replies, "Oh. That, by definition, is a perpetual motion machine. We can't give patents on those. Sorry." They don't even bother testing the patent's claims, or try building one themselves, or even let the guy demonstrate it... they just refuse to patent it and move on. In New Zealand, a man who tried to patent a perpetual motion machine in 1970 suddenly found himself dead, and all his research materials and lab supplies and equipment just mysteriously vanished. History is replete with examples of this tyranny, and just about all of it is the big business collusion that keeps the oil producers making their trillions. What would happen if everyone alive knew they could get a generator the size of a small desk, put it in their garage, and cut the power lines to their house, and never have to buy fuel or pay for electricity ever again? Why, it would destroy Exxon, Texaco, Shell, and all of OPEC just about overnight. Can't have that. It's financial evolution: "Survival of the richest."
So, again, this is something you'll have to go do research on. Explaining how to convert a motor into a perpetual-motion generator is well beyond the scope of a slashdot post. Again, do "zero point energy" and "ZPE" searches on Metacrawler and prepare yourself for enlightenment.
Do not simply see the phrase "perpetual motion machine" in this post and scoff immediately. Science and physics doesn't even know what magnetism or gravity is, yet it claims to be able to state with absolute certainty that perpetual motions machines are impossible?? The sheer arrogance is staggering. "Yes, well, we realize we only understand about 0.01% of how the universe works, but we know you can't have perpetual motion. It's just preposterous." Give me a break.
"The world is round," Columbus said. "Preposterous," the "scientists" of the 15th century said. "You'll fall off the edge."
"Diseases are caused by microscopic creatures that I call 'germs' which get inside us and do harm to our cells," said Louis Pasteur. "Preposterous," the "scientists" said.
"The earth actually revolves around the sun, and not the other way around," said Galileo. "Preposterous," the Catholic Church's "scientists" said. "Shut up or we'll torture and kill you."
"Travelling faster than 60 MPH would be fatal."
"Travelling faster than the speed of sound is impossible."
"Travelling faster than light is impossible."
"Perpetual motion machines simply cannot exist."
Does anyone see a pattern here? Humans are so stupid that they believe things just because they come out of an authority figure's mouth. Think for yourselves! Do your own research! It sickens and saddens me to know that the salvation of humanity is so close, yet people refuse to reach out and grab it just because they've been brainwashed all through school and childhood to not believe in it. I mean, please... How far would we have gotten if Columbus had just believed what the scientists told him without question instead of being brave and intelligent enough to go find out on his own? What would the world be like today if Pasteur hadn't thought "Hmm; I know people are going to laugh at me and perhaps worse for publishing the results of my research, but I have to do it because it'll save lives"? What if Orville & Wilbur Wright had just given up because everyone kept telling them that only birds could fly because God gave them wings and not us? Who knows how many times in history some brilliant bit of new thought has been squelched just because the person who thought it up believed the rhetoric against it? Say people had listened to Nicola Tesla instead of destroying him. How much further along would science be today if he'd been allowed to produce his electromagnetic shield, or his car that ran on nothing more than the electricity in the air? He had a car with a black box in it that had a lot of antennae sticking out of it; no engine, no fuel tank, no nothing, and all of this verified. He drove it around for many many years. But how many people have heard of it? It's just one of the truly innovative inventions of history that's been crushed out of existence by Those In Power who'd rather keep making money than let us have something that will bring pollution to a COMPLETE END. There never should have BEEN any pollution; Tesla and Marconi had perpetual motion generators 100 years ago but they went nowhere with them. Westinghouse destroyed Tesla. Even the Smithsonian (run by You Know Who Inc., of course) is trying to bury Tesla in obscurity in favor of Edison's crappy stab at electrical production.
So. Does anyone believe me? How many of you can break through your years of schooling and conditioning and brainwashing to see the real truth? How many of you will go further, and see for yourselves what is possible in the field of fuelless power generation? 'Cause I can't take much more of this. If you people allow yourselves to be ruled and crushed by big business and politicians, there's no hope for humanity. We'll just keep falling farther and farther into slavery until there's no more clean water, no more clean air, and no more fossil fuels left... but you can bet that as soon as the earth runs out of resources, big business will suddenly go "Oh, looky here! We've just discovered perpetual motion machines ARE possible! Now bow down and thank us for saving you!" and you fucking sheep will do it.
Baaaaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Any source or destination port on the network in question can be monitored, whether it's sendmail or exchange or SSH (though that'd probably be useless to monitor) or gopher or irc or Grandma Blattenzweig's Happy Fun Mail Exchange Protocol (GBHFMEP) Server. And yes, I'm sure the FBI would include Exchange ports in their snoopery... since there are plenty of companies out there ignorant enough to use it instead of sendmail just because it has calendars in it or some shit...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Filtering E-mail requires access to the application layer...
Bzzzzt. Incorrect. Thanks for playing.
All email is transmitted from place to place using the well-known SMTP port (port 25). All a router has to do is forward any packets with that destination port (incoming OR outgoing) in their header to the original destination and the FBI's destination, where the individual packets can be put back together into the complete email using all the other fun stuff in the various packet headers. It's like making a copy of every email that gets sent to or from that network. Of course, there really wouldn't be any way for a simple router to know WHO those emails are for; they're not capable of, say, doing a "grep" operation on the actual contents of the data of the packets to find the "To: " field of the email. This of course would mean that every email that goes through that network would end up in the FBI's evil little hands. EVERY EMAIL. Similarly, if they were to forward ports 20 and 21, every FTP packet could be forwarded to the FBI as well as its actual destination. For port 23, every byte of every telnet session. For port 80, every bit of a webpage. You get the idea. And what else is in every TCP/IP packet? Yep; the destination IP address. So the FBI could also know precisely what machine was on the receiving end of every packet, too... isn't that great?
Now, there's no guarantee that these Carnivore boxes wouldn't do the same thing, of course, but if they only forward emails from/to a particular address (because they DO have access to the Application layer), that would be much better than having to set a router to forward ALL emails to the FBI's minions. Not that I'm saying Carnivore isn't evil... it quite clearly is. "I'm from the government; I'm here to help" isn't one of the All-Time Greatest Lies for nothing, you know.
Unfortunately, I suppose there are people in this world that are ignorant enough to write stuff like that, let alone buy it.
...and other people who, having only part of the knowledge required to accurately pass judgement on someone, are ignorant enough to dispute it. Know your facts before speaking...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I can't believe this stupid thing. I actually moderated this article up ("insighful") but The Mighty Slashcode interpreted the "insightful" as "redundant" and moderated it down instead.
All right for using beta code in a production server... perhaps someone should look into this? Maybe?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
A steam box is an olde-tyme contraption that's used by artists and carpenters and such-like to bend wood; it gets your board all wet and steamy and then you just bend it however you want, and it dries and sets like that. In the context of Valenti's testimony, however, there's no telling; perhaps it's something that breaks encryption, and when it "dries," it sticks that way? It being a secret should tell you something...
Serious answer follows:
Bad transcript; it should have been "Streambox," which is a search engine for streaming media (audio, video, etc).
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
"If Mr. Garbus asks you a question about something, and you only know the answer because the lawyers told you the answer earlier, you should go ahead and answer the question, but don't say how you know the answer."
No, I don't know why lawyers can't speak English, either.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Well hey, if it works, I'll gladly use it...:) But I'm not in any course, there is no instructor; I'm a book learner. I have the Exam Cram(tm) and the official CCNA exam guide; that's it. And neither of those includes a sim for any platform... they just say "Get a router and play with it." Useless...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Seriously. You're playing right into their hands. All they have to do is release a convincing-enough-looking report full of charts and numbers and figures and utterly devoid of factual conclusions ("...and signifying nothing"), and people like you eat it right up. I bet 80% of the people who've read that article and have not also read all these comments here (and thus been made to slowly realize the truth) believe every word of it. That's the whole point of FUD: to make people believe lies by disguising them as truth well enough that they don't look like lies.
Here's what needs to happen. Yahoo! (tm) and any other organization that makes "news" reports needs to stop just belching out what someone else has told them is "truth." They have reporters, don't they? Do they report, or are they just mouthpieces for Big Busine$$? There is no opportunity to debate the issue. You get the "news" story, and that's it; "Well, it was on Yahoo!(tm), so it must be true!" People just don't do their own research anymore; they just believe everything they read from places like Yahoo!(tm), CNN(tm), ZD Net(tm), and C|Net(tm) because it would be too much effort to dig into, for example, that "study" and realize what a great steaming fly-infested pile of donkey dung it really is. Most people have never heard of causation, and thus something like "The sun rose today just as I was taking a dump... so the action of flushing the toilet must have made it come up!" still makes sense to them.
What it all comes down to is education. Yes, even septagenarians need to be educated at times. These widely-held beliefs like "Record companies have to pay the artists lots of money; that's why CDs still (STILL!) cost so much" have to be eradicated from the societal archetype, the racial memory that most everyone's belief structure comes from and which gets taught to the children, who teach it to their children, who... etc. You have to look at who benefits from a particular belief to know where to begin correcting it. Here are the facts:
The publishing companies pay royalties of perhaps 1% to the artists who created, performed, and recorded their music.
They also force the artists to sign away all rights to their own music so the publisher has full control of it.
They decide which songs will be released and which will not be.
They also decide which songs will receive airtime (radio; remember that?) and how much of it.
Songs that they want to be popular will be played 7 times an hour for months on end until it's been so beaten into all impressionable young minds that they can't stop humming or singing it or get it out of their head. Most eventually end up buying the CD in question, usually to hear the other songs on it.
Let's say Acme Publishing owns the rights to all songs by the group "Dave." Dave has written some pretty cool songs. What is Acme's strategy? Take one or two of the good songs, mix with 6 or 7 of the bad songs, and make a CD. Then do it again. And again. So instead of one CD that's really worth buying, you get 5 CDs, none of which are worth buying... especially at $20 a pop. Or, they'll release Dave singles CDs, one good song each, and maybe a few with the bad songs too.
But they also get to determine which songs are "good," and their definition of "good" is usually "what will the teenagers like?" They get a little focus group of teens, play everything Dave wrote to them, and ask them which ones they'd like to hear again. Those will be the songs they cram down America's throat: MTV, radio, advertising, and all the other tools they use to manipulate our buying decisions.
Then they just watch the cash roll in.
But along comes MP3s. Napster. IRC. Usenet. An infinity of new distribution channels they don't control and which make them zero money. Why, artists are even able to bypass them completely and produce their own music!! Unheard of!! Preposterous!! It must be stopped!!
Enter the FUD Meisters. "Make something up that will get the public on our side," they say. "We must destroy MP3s, or artists will stop signing their lives and souls away to us." And the lies begin.
And that's where we stand now. The battle lines have been drawn, the soldiers are preparing, the mud is being slung, the lies are being propagated and believed by the masses of uneducated people who can't be bother to do any original thinking or research of their own into a subject that, frankly, they could care less about. You think the average housewife cares about record companies or MP3s? It doesn't affect them. The tide of public sentiment will never change from the status quo if the majority of people don't care about it. Court judges will continue to back up Big Busine$$, juries will still rule against the Little Guys (utterly forgetting their right of Jury Nullification), and nothing will change because of the golden rule: "He who has the most gold makes the rules."
What a pitiable species humans are.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
About a year ago I found an even better picture of the space shuttle with all sorts of other American megacorporations, but I cannot seem to find that one again...
Then you condense that whole thing down into an American-sound-bite-sized nugget for me. I realize people have infinitesimal attention spans these days, but sometimes you just can't say what needs saying and still be brief.
And it was still witty, so... nyah.:)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Amen, brother. The US gov't caters to the whims of the rich elites, not to the middle-class or the poor. They could care less what we think, in fact; as long as they keep us just happy enough to elect them into power, they're going to listen more to Big Busine$$ and their own needs (stay in power, keep getting into the pants of Congressional Pages, etc) than to us. Where are the founding fathers when we need them... why, look; they're right here in this document written on hemp paper called the "Constitution" and this other one called the "Bill of Rights." We don't need the founders anymore; we should be able to retake our freedom and free will all by ourselves, just using the power inherent in all those words they pretend to revere but secretly hate because it's the only thing that does give us power. What's stopping us? No willpower. Too comfortable to rock the boat. Afraid of change. Liking the status quo. Don't wanna rile the government and make them come after us. People seem to think their votes matter... Ha! If any American reading this truly feels represented in Congress, I'd love to hear about it. When's the last time they listened to you? To me? To anything but their egos, wallets, astrologers, and need for power?
I'm too tired to go off on yet another rant. If you all haven't figured it out by now, nothing I say will matter anyway... go back to your microwaved TV dinners and enjoy watching Ally McBeal until they take that away too.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
One trite cliche which only exists because someone said it a few years ago and which has been repeated over and over again since then is nothing to build your whole philosophy on. It isn't very realistic, for one thing; there are many things attributable to malice that cannot be explained away by stupidity. Just ask any of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims. To say "never" in that statement is just plain misleading. It wasn't even real life; it was Robert Heinlein, in a fictional novel ("Logic of Empire", 1941). You want something more reality-based to quote as a cliche? Try this one:
"The less believable a conspiracy is, the more likely it is that it's true."
Here's another one:
"When you can't say 'Fuck,' you can't say 'Fuck The Government.'"
Ahhh, that Lenny Bruce; such a wise man.
I try to avoid cliches completely, myself. They're just so trite, so cutesy. Instead of telling someone "A stitch in time saves nine," I'll tell them "You better fill up your gas tank now before you run out of it in the middle of nowhere and get beaten to death by gangs of hooded hoodlums who would really like to steal everything you own and perhaps rape you in the process." It has more of an impact that way. Similarly, I say now:
Since strong encryption is so easy to come by outside the US and EU, and always has been easy to come by, why have the US, France, and the UK (mentioned in the story) always been so against it? Why not, say, Germany? They seem to be just about even with those other three countries in their maniacal approach to the internet (a side note here for France: Lighten up, guys!! Who cares if you can get Nazi helmets in an online auction, for christ's sake???) so why not on the encryption issue? There are many countries that simply don't see it as a threat. Israel, for example, has certainly had its share of terrorist activity over the years, and I doubt it's gotten any worse because of the internet in any country, whether the terrorists are using strong encryption or Cracker Jack Secret Decoder Rings to secure their transmissions. The law enforcement agencies of the world have no right intercepting and reading the mail of whomever they please. They do it anyway, of course; violating our human rights at will, then either denying it or becoming aloof -- "We have every right to read anything we want to; we have to keep the world safe from (______), don't we?" You may fill in that blank with any perceived "threat" you wish; whether or not it really exists, the end result is the same: it lets the Powers-That-Be do whatever they want to "prevent" or "combat" the real or imagined threat. Look at Communism in the 50's; what a joke that was. McCarthy was an idiot. How about the Nuclear Threat, which has been around for more than 50 years now? Ever since the US permitted their use, people have been terrified of nuclear weapons. It wouldn't have been much of a deterrent if they hadn't used them, of course. Japan had been trying to surrender to us for weeks before we wiped two of their cities off the earth. Why didn't we accept their surrender? Ask Henry Stimson, US Secretary of Defense ("War") at the time. They couldn't let Japan surrender to us until we were ready with the A-bomb and had a chance to use it... and not just use it, but use it on real humans! That's the whole reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wiped off the earth: to scare the Russians. Because then the Russians knew that not only did we have the bomb, but (crucially) that we were willing to use it on people. The A-bomb didn't "bring the war to a swift end;" the war was prolonged to make its use possible. After Hiroshima, the Japanese were begging us to take their land, their sovreignty, their women... but no, we hadn't made our point yet. We had to drop another one just to show Russia we meant business. Now, how believable is this conspiracy? I swear to you, it's the God's honest truth, but I bet 90% of you out there have already rejected it simply because that ain't how it happened in the history books you read in school. But remember something: history is always, always written by the victor. Do you honestly think the US History textbook your child reads every day would have the aforemention true story in it? Assume it really happened for a moment. Assume the US decided to slaughter a few hundred thousand Japanese, who just happened to conveniently be our enemies at the time (but they're our friends now; wouldn't you try your damndest to keep on the good side of someone who'd nuked you twice??) just to make a point to the Russians that we wouldn't hesitate to do it to them. Do you really think that would get written down as the Official Version of History? I think not. Whatever people believe to be true because they've been told it's the truth by people they believe and trust is what will be put into the history books. And people with power who are capable of the things the US government has done over the years (biological weapons testing in New York subways in the 1960's; injecting women and children with plutonium just to see what it did to them in the 1950's; the Tuskegee experiments where black men were allowed to die of syphillis just to see what it did to them in the 1940's -- and they called Dr. Mengele evil!) are capable of anything, believe me. Do you truly doubt it? Do you have that much faith in the leaders of this country? They are humans, you know, and thus susceptible to overpowering greed, lust, fear, hate, and all the other things that make people do bad things... and the more power you have, the worse the things you can do and get away with doing through a cover-up!
There's another reason why they want to keep encryption out of our hands: to save face. If we can keep secrets from them, the most powerful "intelligence" agencies on earth, anyone can... and they just can't have us realizing it. Perhaps this whole "Echelon" thing is just disinformation; whether it exists or not, if we believe that it does, and thus they can hear every phone conversation we have, read every email we send, intercept every fax we transmit, and view every web site we look at along with us, it severely limits what we feel "safe" doing, doesn't it? And the less secure we feel in doing what we do, the more we Fear them. That's the key: Fear. If we don't fear them, they pretty much become obsolete. Same as with God. Without our fear of them, they cannot control us.
And "control," the terror that comes with it, the feelings of utter helplessness, the impetus to Obey Thy Master or Suffer The Consequences, are the things without which they cannot continue to enslave the world. So, of course, encryption they can't break Must Go because otherwise, we might feel a bit safer and more secure... and They can't have that. Does anyone out there feel safe in today's world? At any instant you could become just another one of the victims of violent crime. You could die in a drive by shooting 30 seconds from now, or some crazed person could run into your workplace with an Uzi and shoot everyone in it, or terrorists could detonate a nuclear bomb in your city (do NOT laugh at this one; it's truly amazing it hasn't happened yet, what with the 100 missing suitcase nukes from Russia -- Read Schroedinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson if you need some convincing); if you're gay, you could be gay-bashed; if you're an ethnic minority in your neck of the woods, or even if you aren't, you could become a victim of hatred at any moment. Matthew Sheppard. Rodney King. Columbine. Waco. Oklahoma City. Ruby Ridge. Paducah. How endless is this list? How far back in time does it go? How far into the future will it go? And every time something like that happens, are we allowed to just forget it happened and move on? No. CNN has to blare the news for weeks afterward, sometimes years. Every anniversary they remind us of just how unsafe we are, how much we need Them to "keep us safe." We're supposed to just blindly let Them have all the control and power over us They want, because otherwise they might not "be able to" prevent another Columbine massacre. It's like Mafia insurance; "Ya gives us what we wants, and we'll make sure nothin' happens to ya..." And strong encryption is just the tiniest aspect of that. It's all about power and them keeping it... and keeping it from us, the ones who actually deserve it and who might even be able to use it wisely without exploiting everyone along the way to keep it.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Yes! Let me say it again: Jury Nullification Jury Nullification Jury Nullification Jury Nullification Jury Nullification
And by the way... screw this god-damned lame-ass lameness filter. Maybe if it used some decent algorithms it might be useful. Next time you're bored, program a smart ad banner picker instead (you know, so the slashdot pages don't sit there for 45 minutes waiting for a lame ad banner to load from the remote banner server because it won't allow you to view the page you wanted to see until all the friggin' ads are fully in place on it because it was designed that way???)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Some of you idiot moderators wouldn't know a good post if it poured hot grits all over your keyboard. Here I am, telling you how to Save The World, and you moderate it down.
It sure as hell won't shut me up, though.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Good.... for when one becomes scared, one's eyes become their most open, and suddenly things which were hidden before become clearly visible, as if you had taken the red pill....
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
"The tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots" -Benjamin Franklin
Not to be picky or anything, but that was actually Thomas Jefferson. And he was right... and so are you. When a law is wrong, it MUST be challenged and destroyed; that's why they saw fit to include a little thing known as "Jury Nullification" in the founding laws of this nation. Basically, it means that a jury can find a defendant fully and completely guilty of a violation of law, but refuse to punish him for it because they don't think that law should BE a law. And you will NEVER hear it mentioned in a court of law, on TV, or anywhere except in a few books and movies (and, now, a few websites). Try to guess why. That's right: if We, the Sheeple, knew about it, why, we'd be chopping down laws all over the place! Can't have THAT, now can they? Undermining their hard-fought-for and bought-with-lobbyists laws like that would take away some of Their power, now wouldn't it?
So what better forum to spread knowledge of its existence than right here on good old slashdot?
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
There. Now go do some research on the topic, and shudder with anger when you realize how you've been lied to all these years by judges and lawyers...
As you can see if you read the links above and fully understand them, the power of Jury Nullification is about the only power left to We the People. We don't have enormous wealth, we aren't in positions of political power, we don't have adequate representation in the legislative bodies of the government (meaning, of course, we can't be taxed either, but that's a whole 'nuther post), we don't have a stranglehold on any particular commodity or service (though think what would happen if we all suddenly configured our firewalls and BGP routers to stop letting packets through:)... Jury Nullification was GIVEN to us by the founding fathers because they knew in their wisdom that we would never have as much power as those who are so easily corrupted by it. It Is Our ONLY Weapon Against Them And Their Evil, People!! Do not let it fall by the wayside again. Tell everyone you know about it. Print out all the above webpages I linked to in 48-point Arial and paste them all up and down the streets of your cities. Don't Let THEM Win!!!
Thank you.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Here it is... there's a nice little search box on the site's main page.
Surprising the RIAA hasn't gone after the CD Database yet. I mean, my god; all those albums and songs and artists in one giant list, cut & paste-able without any restrictions or "click here to accept the license agreement" messages?? It's anarchy! Must be costing the recording industry many negative billions of dollars a year...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I've never seen mysql be unreliable. In what way is its unreliability legendary?
The bug, yes. Well, the database in question has two columns, latitude and longitude, in it. The values in these columns are float values accurate to 6 decimal places. The fields themselves are set to "auto-decimal-places" or whatever Access calls it. When exporting as any kind of comma- or tab-separated values flat file, it rounded them down to 3 decimal places. I tried setting the field type to "floating - 6 decimal places." It then chopped the values in the database to ONE decimal place. The only way I could get it to export a flat file and not screw up the data was with the "formatted report" option. (This is Access 97 running on NT server 4, incidentally.) I didn't try any ODBC stuff; it wasn't worth installing myODBC, rebooting the server, etc to get it to work; far easier to make something that could parse whatever it shat out. Besides; I have MySQL's permissions (and inetd.conf for that matter) set to disallow all external server connections for security; I didn't want to change that either.
Now on to crashing web servers. I've been administering one single Linux box running apache, mysql, msql, php, modperl, etc for over two years now. It serves up Twenty (20) different sites in 128 meg of RAM. Several hundred thousand hits per day. That one box has never needed a failover server, because the only time it's been down is from power failures (which would have killed any failover servers too; our colocation site kinda sucks), planned hardware upgrades at 3am, one DOS attack... never because the box just suddenly crashed. I also have an NT box sitting right under it; it's twice as fast, RAID array, 256 meg of RAM, and serves up One (1) site. Just One. In the past two weeks, I have had to drive up to the place and manually reboot the thing THREE TIMES because of either (a) Cold Fusion server sucking up 600 meg of memory and bringing everything to a crashing halt, or (b) inetinfo.exe suddenly deciding it needs to consume 100% of the CPU cycles and refuse to let anything else do anything. So you can see why I think as I do about running a web server on NT; it's as sturdy and trustworthy as a skyscraper made out of toothpicks and Elmer's glue. 4 non-Intel quad-cpu servers (wasn't MS going to drop Alpha support from NT? Odd they're still using it...) running Unix would be easily twice as stable as it would if they were running NT. Hell, 1 dual-P-II Linux box doing 20 times as much as a dual-P-III NT box is more stable. Any non-brainwashed sysadmin knows the truth...
But perhaps I am speaking from ignorance instead of experience. Maybe the version of NT they release in Australia is more reliable (128-bit encryption notwithstanding). Maybe I should trust what people tell me instead of what I personally have to deal with on a daily basis. Maybe... not.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Unfortunately, the web weenies all use Macs to edit things with (no Mac version of PHPed). They've been using DW3 for months now, and it still does the Bad Stuff with PHP. I've looked at the extension template stuff for DW; looked too complicated to be worth it for the few times they'd need it (usually, they make the page first, then give it to me, and I stuff PHP into it with pico:) I also, of course, had to write a little PHP script to convert their files from the Mac-format linefeeds to Unix-format ones because I can't get them to set the "Use Unix linefeeds" option in DW and leave it there...
Mac Weenies.:) (Yes, they crash just as much as Windoze boxes do, and use up twice as much RAM doing it...)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I've got my asbestos on, so flame away.
Here's what I think is really going on. Gravity isn't us being pulled toward the earth, it's us being pushed towards it. Why do I think this? The Zero Point Energy field. It's everywhere. Einstein always said there was more than enough energy in the space occupied by a coffee cup to vaporize all of Earth's oceans. He wasn't talking about the strong nuclear force, you know, the one that makes the wonders of atomic weapons possible. No, he was talking about the energy inherent in space-time itself. It's everywhere -- not only in pure vacuum, through which it constantly streams unobstructed, but also both inside and outside every object, every atom, every *thing* that exists. It's what keeps the negatively-charged electrons orbiting an atom's nucleus instead of spiraling right down into it, attracted there by the positively-charged proton. Because it's everywhere, it exerts a force in every direction. This force extends outward without bound, its strength decreasing with distance. It also interacts with matter, which "blocks" it somewhat. And what happens when a force meets resistance? It tends to push that resistance in the same direction as its force vector; at the same time, some of its energy is consumed by the work it does (moving the matter it hit). But what happens when this force is pushing on an object from *every* direction at once? You might think it'd crush it. Nope. Remember; to be crushed, there would have to be a "pressure" or force differential between the object's inside and outside and, as explained previously, the force is equally pressing from both within and without the object. This is analogous to our own very observable situation on earth. We exist under a rather thick layer of atmosphere. Right now, there are millions, if not billions, of tons of force pressing down on your head from the weight of the air above you. Why aren't you crushed under all that weight? Because there's an equal force balancing it from the opposite side. (Just trust me on this one.) Same thing with the ZPE field.
So here we have this great big giant ball of matter we lovingly refer to as "Earth." It, being made of matter, presents resistance against the force of the ZPE field, and it dissipates some of that force before it gets all the way through the earth to the other side. Now, because all the energy coming from every side of the earth interacts with the earth's matter in the same way, with resistance, it doesn't push the earth in any one direction -- just like the air above your head doesn't push you right into the ground. But think now of something sitting ON the earth, something that can be considered part of its matter. Something like you, sitting there at your computer. You too have ZPE energy coming at you from all sides; up, down, inside, outside, left, right, etc. But because the earth, in interacting with it, is shielding some of that energy by absorption during its travel through the earth (some comes from beyond the other side of the earth from you, some comes from 12 feet under your chair, some comes from .001 millimeters under your butt sitting on the chair, etc, but all of it is absorbed in some way by passing through matter), there is NOT a net zero ZPE force acting upon you. There is in fact more of it pushing you down from the relatively unshielded "Up" direction than there is from the highly shielded "Down" direction; therefore, you are pushed down towards the center of the earth, and the force with which you are pushed is in direct correlation to your mass and the earth's mass. Does that sound familiar? :)
Now think of a black hole. Eerie, scary things. They are of course extremely dense collections of matter, where even the electrons can't orbit because it has been crushed so competely. In ordinary matter, there is LOTS of empty space; a neutrino could pass all the way from your forehead to the sole of your right foot without even touching any of the matter that makes you up. That's why only a very very small percentage of the ZPE energy interacts with you in a direction that isn't balanced from the other side (ie, through the earth) -- because there's very little there to interact WITH. But what about a black hole? Very very dense, trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of tons of matter all smashed into a tiny ball -- there isn't ANY free space inside it; it's all matter. So what does that mean? Yep; ALL the ZPE energy gets absorbed by interacting with it, from every direction, and so the energy flowing from behind you, through you, and towards the black hole isn't balanced by anything pushing back FROM the black hole -- and you are completely crushed into it.
This is also why there is such a thing as the Gravitational Constant. It refers to the amount of interaction between the ZPE energy force and matter. It is very very small, and is multiplied by the mass of two objects to determine the amount of gravitational attraction between them (the GxM1xM2/d^2 formula). That number, "G", is literally how much of the energy in the ZPE field gets absorbed by passing through one kilogram of matter. Let's get into a bit of math here...
The gravitational force, in Newtons, between objects having masses of M1 and M2, in kilograms, and separated by a distance of d, in meters, is the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them... multiplied by G, which is 6.673e-11 Newton-meters squared per kilogram squared (the odd units associated with G are there so they cancel out all the units in the formula other than the result, which is in Newtons). Two 1-kg objects separated by 1 meter would yield Gx1x1/1x1 Newtons, or 6.673e-11 Newtons. Not very much. This means that most of the ZPE energy passes through these objects unobstructed. But how much doesn't? Literally, "G" doesn't... thus, 0.000000006673% of the energy gets absorbed and translated into "motion" by pushing the matter in the direction in which it is imbalanced. I may have said it before, but it's worth repeating: Nature doesn't abhor a vacuum. Nature abhors imbalance. All things will seek balance. That's how you can siphon gas out of your gas tank, and that's why you get pushed to the earth.
Let's take a more realistic example: you and the earth. You have a mass of, let's say, 80 kg (176 pounds); the earth's mass is 5.974e24 kg (rather a lot of pounds). The distance from you to the earth isn't 0, as you might think; it's the distance from your center of mass to the earth's center of mass, which is roughly 3,185,500 meters. So plugging all that crap into the formula, we get 4.71e+13 * G, which makes 3,142.83 Newtons of force pushing you to the earth. G is the percentage of "gravitational" energy that gets absorbed or deflected by its interaction with the matter making up you and your body.
I haven't completely worked out ALL the math yet, but something tells me this is right. It answers all the unknown things about gravity, it explains momentum and inertia, it explains what keeps atoms from just collapsing into themselves... hell, it might even be the definition OF matter. So come on; let's see you armchair physicists blow some holes in my theory...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Heh. Exactly what I was talking about. "That stupid Einstein guy says you can split atoms and release lots of energy. What a quack."
<insert your own examples here>
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I know for a fact that many many times in the twentieth century, there have been inventors who came up with carburetor designs that enabled ANY vehicle to get 300 miles to the gallon or even more. My dad knew one such person personally. He invented a 300MPG carb, tried to market it, and instantly got bought out by Ford, I think it was. They bought his design for $50,000 (this was in the 50's, when 50 grand was actually worth something :) and then smothered it. Nobody heard of it again.
And if you really want to get into conspiracy theories, I suggest you just do a web search for "zero point energy". There are so many ways to use ZPE it's sickening, considering the fact that NONE of them have been even mentioned in mainstream media (owned by big business). It is possible to take damn near any existing electrical motor, add a few parts, and turn it into a generator that runs itself without any fuel. You just give it a spin and it runs forever. But guess what happens when someone tries to patent such a device? The patent office replies, "Oh. That, by definition, is a perpetual motion machine. We can't give patents on those. Sorry." They don't even bother testing the patent's claims, or try building one themselves, or even let the guy demonstrate it... they just refuse to patent it and move on. In New Zealand, a man who tried to patent a perpetual motion machine in 1970 suddenly found himself dead, and all his research materials and lab supplies and equipment just mysteriously vanished. History is replete with examples of this tyranny, and just about all of it is the big business collusion that keeps the oil producers making their trillions. What would happen if everyone alive knew they could get a generator the size of a small desk, put it in their garage, and cut the power lines to their house, and never have to buy fuel or pay for electricity ever again? Why, it would destroy Exxon, Texaco, Shell, and all of OPEC just about overnight. Can't have that. It's financial evolution: "Survival of the richest."
So, again, this is something you'll have to go do research on. Explaining how to convert a motor into a perpetual-motion generator is well beyond the scope of a slashdot post. Again, do "zero point energy" and "ZPE" searches on Metacrawler and prepare yourself for enlightenment.
Do not simply see the phrase "perpetual motion machine" in this post and scoff immediately. Science and physics doesn't even know what magnetism or gravity is, yet it claims to be able to state with absolute certainty that perpetual motions machines are impossible?? The sheer arrogance is staggering. "Yes, well, we realize we only understand about 0.01% of how the universe works, but we know you can't have perpetual motion. It's just preposterous." Give me a break.
Does anyone see a pattern here? Humans are so stupid that they believe things just because they come out of an authority figure's mouth. Think for yourselves! Do your own research! It sickens and saddens me to know that the salvation of humanity is so close, yet people refuse to reach out and grab it just because they've been brainwashed all through school and childhood to not believe in it. I mean, please... How far would we have gotten if Columbus had just believed what the scientists told him without question instead of being brave and intelligent enough to go find out on his own? What would the world be like today if Pasteur hadn't thought "Hmm; I know people are going to laugh at me and perhaps worse for publishing the results of my research, but I have to do it because it'll save lives"? What if Orville & Wilbur Wright had just given up because everyone kept telling them that only birds could fly because God gave them wings and not us? Who knows how many times in history some brilliant bit of new thought has been squelched just because the person who thought it up believed the rhetoric against it? Say people had listened to Nicola Tesla instead of destroying him. How much further along would science be today if he'd been allowed to produce his electromagnetic shield, or his car that ran on nothing more than the electricity in the air? He had a car with a black box in it that had a lot of antennae sticking out of it; no engine, no fuel tank, no nothing, and all of this verified. He drove it around for many many years. But how many people have heard of it? It's just one of the truly innovative inventions of history that's been crushed out of existence by Those In Power who'd rather keep making money than let us have something that will bring pollution to a COMPLETE END. There never should have BEEN any pollution; Tesla and Marconi had perpetual motion generators 100 years ago but they went nowhere with them. Westinghouse destroyed Tesla. Even the Smithsonian (run by You Know Who Inc., of course) is trying to bury Tesla in obscurity in favor of Edison's crappy stab at electrical production.
So. Does anyone believe me? How many of you can break through your years of schooling and conditioning and brainwashing to see the real truth? How many of you will go further, and see for yourselves what is possible in the field of fuelless power generation? 'Cause I can't take much more of this. If you people allow yourselves to be ruled and crushed by big business and politicians, there's no hope for humanity. We'll just keep falling farther and farther into slavery until there's no more clean water, no more clean air, and no more fossil fuels left... but you can bet that as soon as the earth runs out of resources, big business will suddenly go "Oh, looky here! We've just discovered perpetual motion machines ARE possible! Now bow down and thank us for saving you!" and you fucking sheep will do it.
Baaaaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Any source or destination port on the network in question can be monitored, whether it's sendmail or exchange or SSH (though that'd probably be useless to monitor) or gopher or irc or Grandma Blattenzweig's Happy Fun Mail Exchange Protocol (GBHFMEP) Server. And yes, I'm sure the FBI would include Exchange ports in their snoopery... since there are plenty of companies out there ignorant enough to use it instead of sendmail just because it has calendars in it or some shit...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Filtering E-mail requires access to the application layer...
Bzzzzt. Incorrect. Thanks for playing.
All email is transmitted from place to place using the well-known SMTP port (port 25). All a router has to do is forward any packets with that destination port (incoming OR outgoing) in their header to the original destination and the FBI's destination, where the individual packets can be put back together into the complete email using all the other fun stuff in the various packet headers. It's like making a copy of every email that gets sent to or from that network. Of course, there really wouldn't be any way for a simple router to know WHO those emails are for; they're not capable of, say, doing a "grep" operation on the actual contents of the data of the packets to find the "To: " field of the email. This of course would mean that every email that goes through that network would end up in the FBI's evil little hands. EVERY EMAIL. Similarly, if they were to forward ports 20 and 21, every FTP packet could be forwarded to the FBI as well as its actual destination. For port 23, every byte of every telnet session. For port 80, every bit of a webpage. You get the idea. And what else is in every TCP/IP packet? Yep; the destination IP address. So the FBI could also know precisely what machine was on the receiving end of every packet, too... isn't that great?
Now, there's no guarantee that these Carnivore boxes wouldn't do the same thing, of course, but if they only forward emails from/to a particular address (because they DO have access to the Application layer), that would be much better than having to set a router to forward ALL emails to the FBI's minions. Not that I'm saying Carnivore isn't evil... it quite clearly is. "I'm from the government; I'm here to help" isn't one of the All-Time Greatest Lies for nothing, you know.
Unfortunately, I suppose there are people in this world that are ignorant enough to write stuff like that, let alone buy it.
...and other people who, having only part of the knowledge required to accurately pass judgement on someone, are ignorant enough to dispute it. Know your facts before speaking...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I can't believe this stupid thing. I actually moderated this article up ("insighful") but The Mighty Slashcode interpreted the "insightful" as "redundant" and moderated it down instead.
All right for using beta code in a production server... perhaps someone should look into this? Maybe?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
A steam box is an olde-tyme contraption that's used by artists and carpenters and such-like to bend wood; it gets your board all wet and steamy and then you just bend it however you want, and it dries and sets like that. In the context of Valenti's testimony, however, there's no telling; perhaps it's something that breaks encryption, and when it "dries," it sticks that way? It being a secret should tell you something...
Serious answer follows:
Bad transcript; it should have been "Streambox," which is a search engine for streaming media (audio, video, etc).
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
"If Mr. Garbus asks you a question about something, and you only know the answer because the lawyers told you the answer earlier, you should go ahead and answer the question, but don't say how you know the answer."
No, I don't know why lawyers can't speak English, either.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Noooo, no online course for me. Have to go the cheap route. Cheap business, cheap routes. :/
Unless it's a free online course? HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA....... sorry...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Well hey, if it works, I'll gladly use it... :) But I'm not in any course, there is no instructor; I'm a book learner. I have the Exam Cram(tm) and the official CCNA exam guide; that's it. And neither of those includes a sim for any platform... they just say "Get a router and play with it." Useless...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
What?!?!?!
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
It's people like you what cause unrest!
Seriously. You're playing right into their hands. All they have to do is release a convincing-enough-looking report full of charts and numbers and figures and utterly devoid of factual conclusions ("...and signifying nothing"), and people like you eat it right up. I bet 80% of the people who've read that article and have not also read all these comments here (and thus been made to slowly realize the truth) believe every word of it. That's the whole point of FUD: to make people believe lies by disguising them as truth well enough that they don't look like lies.
Here's what needs to happen. Yahoo! (tm) and any other organization that makes "news" reports needs to stop just belching out what someone else has told them is "truth." They have reporters, don't they? Do they report, or are they just mouthpieces for Big Busine$$? There is no opportunity to debate the issue. You get the "news" story, and that's it; "Well, it was on Yahoo!(tm), so it must be true!" People just don't do their own research anymore; they just believe everything they read from places like Yahoo!(tm), CNN(tm), ZD Net(tm), and C|Net(tm) because it would be too much effort to dig into, for example, that "study" and realize what a great steaming fly-infested pile of donkey dung it really is. Most people have never heard of causation, and thus something like "The sun rose today just as I was taking a dump... so the action of flushing the toilet must have made it come up!" still makes sense to them.
What it all comes down to is education. Yes, even septagenarians need to be educated at times. These widely-held beliefs like "Record companies have to pay the artists lots of money; that's why CDs still (STILL!) cost so much" have to be eradicated from the societal archetype, the racial memory that most everyone's belief structure comes from and which gets taught to the children, who teach it to their children, who... etc. You have to look at who benefits from a particular belief to know where to begin correcting it. Here are the facts:
And that's where we stand now. The battle lines have been drawn, the soldiers are preparing, the mud is being slung, the lies are being propagated and believed by the masses of uneducated people who can't be bother to do any original thinking or research of their own into a subject that, frankly, they could care less about. You think the average housewife cares about record companies or MP3s? It doesn't affect them. The tide of public sentiment will never change from the status quo if the majority of people don't care about it. Court judges will continue to back up Big Busine$$, juries will still rule against the Little Guys (utterly forgetting their right of Jury Nullification), and nothing will change because of the golden rule: "He who has the most gold makes the rules."
What a pitiable species humans are.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
No, no, no; this isn't a troll... it's honest, heartfelt agony pouring out of a soul that has had one too many exposures to capitalism. :)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
About a year ago I found an even better picture of the space shuttle with all sorts of other American megacorporations, but I cannot seem to find that one again...
Well, you're in luck!
Please, please, be kind to my poor pitiful T1..... please!!!
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
after eating my greater than symbol, it looks like slashdot plain text really isnt just plain text after all
Musta been that god-forsaken Lameness Filter(tm)... could someone mv that to /dev/null, please?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Then you condense that whole thing down into an American-sound-bite-sized nugget for me. I realize people have infinitesimal attention spans these days, but sometimes you just can't say what needs saying and still be brief.
And it was still witty, so... nyah. :)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Amen, brother. The US gov't caters to the whims of the rich elites, not to the middle-class or the poor. They could care less what we think, in fact; as long as they keep us just happy enough to elect them into power, they're going to listen more to Big Busine$$ and their own needs (stay in power, keep getting into the pants of Congressional Pages, etc) than to us. Where are the founding fathers when we need them... why, look; they're right here in this document written on hemp paper called the "Constitution" and this other one called the "Bill of Rights." We don't need the founders anymore; we should be able to retake our freedom and free will all by ourselves, just using the power inherent in all those words they pretend to revere but secretly hate because it's the only thing that does give us power. What's stopping us? No willpower. Too comfortable to rock the boat. Afraid of change. Liking the status quo. Don't wanna rile the government and make them come after us. People seem to think their votes matter... Ha! If any American reading this truly feels represented in Congress, I'd love to hear about it. When's the last time they listened to you? To me? To anything but their egos, wallets, astrologers, and need for power?
I'm too tired to go off on yet another rant. If you all haven't figured it out by now, nothing I say will matter anyway... go back to your microwaved TV dinners and enjoy watching Ally McBeal until they take that away too.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
One trite cliche which only exists because someone said it a few years ago and which has been repeated over and over again since then is nothing to build your whole philosophy on. It isn't very realistic, for one thing; there are many things attributable to malice that cannot be explained away by stupidity. Just ask any of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims. To say "never" in that statement is just plain misleading. It wasn't even real life; it was Robert Heinlein, in a fictional novel ("Logic of Empire", 1941). You want something more reality-based to quote as a cliche? Try this one:
Here's another one:
Ahhh, that Lenny Bruce; such a wise man.
I try to avoid cliches completely, myself. They're just so trite, so cutesy. Instead of telling someone "A stitch in time saves nine," I'll tell them "You better fill up your gas tank now before you run out of it in the middle of nowhere and get beaten to death by gangs of hooded hoodlums who would really like to steal everything you own and perhaps rape you in the process." It has more of an impact that way. Similarly, I say now:
Since strong encryption is so easy to come by outside the US and EU, and always has been easy to come by, why have the US, France, and the UK (mentioned in the story) always been so against it? Why not, say, Germany? They seem to be just about even with those other three countries in their maniacal approach to the internet (a side note here for France: Lighten up, guys!! Who cares if you can get Nazi helmets in an online auction, for christ's sake???) so why not on the encryption issue? There are many countries that simply don't see it as a threat. Israel, for example, has certainly had its share of terrorist activity over the years, and I doubt it's gotten any worse because of the internet in any country, whether the terrorists are using strong encryption or Cracker Jack Secret Decoder Rings to secure their transmissions. The law enforcement agencies of the world have no right intercepting and reading the mail of whomever they please. They do it anyway, of course; violating our human rights at will, then either denying it or becoming aloof -- "We have every right to read anything we want to; we have to keep the world safe from (______), don't we?" You may fill in that blank with any perceived "threat" you wish; whether or not it really exists, the end result is the same: it lets the Powers-That-Be do whatever they want to "prevent" or "combat" the real or imagined threat. Look at Communism in the 50's; what a joke that was. McCarthy was an idiot. How about the Nuclear Threat, which has been around for more than 50 years now? Ever since the US permitted their use, people have been terrified of nuclear weapons. It wouldn't have been much of a deterrent if they hadn't used them, of course. Japan had been trying to surrender to us for weeks before we wiped two of their cities off the earth. Why didn't we accept their surrender? Ask Henry Stimson, US Secretary of Defense ("War") at the time. They couldn't let Japan surrender to us until we were ready with the A-bomb and had a chance to use it... and not just use it, but use it on real humans! That's the whole reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wiped off the earth: to scare the Russians. Because then the Russians knew that not only did we have the bomb, but (crucially) that we were willing to use it on people. The A-bomb didn't "bring the war to a swift end;" the war was prolonged to make its use possible. After Hiroshima, the Japanese were begging us to take their land, their sovreignty, their women... but no, we hadn't made our point yet. We had to drop another one just to show Russia we meant business. Now, how believable is this conspiracy? I swear to you, it's the God's honest truth, but I bet 90% of you out there have already rejected it simply because that ain't how it happened in the history books you read in school. But remember something: history is always, always written by the victor. Do you honestly think the US History textbook your child reads every day would have the aforemention true story in it? Assume it really happened for a moment. Assume the US decided to slaughter a few hundred thousand Japanese, who just happened to conveniently be our enemies at the time (but they're our friends now; wouldn't you try your damndest to keep on the good side of someone who'd nuked you twice??) just to make a point to the Russians that we wouldn't hesitate to do it to them. Do you really think that would get written down as the Official Version of History? I think not. Whatever people believe to be true because they've been told it's the truth by people they believe and trust is what will be put into the history books. And people with power who are capable of the things the US government has done over the years (biological weapons testing in New York subways in the 1960's; injecting women and children with plutonium just to see what it did to them in the 1950's; the Tuskegee experiments where black men were allowed to die of syphillis just to see what it did to them in the 1940's -- and they called Dr. Mengele evil!) are capable of anything, believe me. Do you truly doubt it? Do you have that much faith in the leaders of this country? They are humans, you know, and thus susceptible to overpowering greed, lust, fear, hate, and all the other things that make people do bad things... and the more power you have, the worse the things you can do and get away with doing through a cover-up!
There's another reason why they want to keep encryption out of our hands: to save face. If we can keep secrets from them, the most powerful "intelligence" agencies on earth, anyone can... and they just can't have us realizing it. Perhaps this whole "Echelon" thing is just disinformation; whether it exists or not, if we believe that it does, and thus they can hear every phone conversation we have, read every email we send, intercept every fax we transmit, and view every web site we look at along with us, it severely limits what we feel "safe" doing, doesn't it? And the less secure we feel in doing what we do, the more we Fear them. That's the key: Fear. If we don't fear them, they pretty much become obsolete. Same as with God. Without our fear of them, they cannot control us.
And "control," the terror that comes with it, the feelings of utter helplessness, the impetus to Obey Thy Master or Suffer The Consequences, are the things without which they cannot continue to enslave the world. So, of course, encryption they can't break Must Go because otherwise, we might feel a bit safer and more secure... and They can't have that. Does anyone out there feel safe in today's world? At any instant you could become just another one of the victims of violent crime. You could die in a drive by shooting 30 seconds from now, or some crazed person could run into your workplace with an Uzi and shoot everyone in it, or terrorists could detonate a nuclear bomb in your city (do NOT laugh at this one; it's truly amazing it hasn't happened yet, what with the 100 missing suitcase nukes from Russia -- Read Schroedinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson if you need some convincing); if you're gay, you could be gay-bashed; if you're an ethnic minority in your neck of the woods, or even if you aren't, you could become a victim of hatred at any moment. Matthew Sheppard. Rodney King. Columbine. Waco. Oklahoma City. Ruby Ridge. Paducah. How endless is this list? How far back in time does it go? How far into the future will it go? And every time something like that happens, are we allowed to just forget it happened and move on? No. CNN has to blare the news for weeks afterward, sometimes years. Every anniversary they remind us of just how unsafe we are, how much we need Them to "keep us safe." We're supposed to just blindly let Them have all the control and power over us They want, because otherwise they might not "be able to" prevent another Columbine massacre. It's like Mafia insurance; "Ya gives us what we wants, and we'll make sure nothin' happens to ya..." And strong encryption is just the tiniest aspect of that. It's all about power and them keeping it... and keeping it from us, the ones who actually deserve it and who might even be able to use it wisely without exploiting everyone along the way to keep it.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Yes! Let me say it again:
Jury Nullification
Jury Nullification
Jury Nullification
Jury Nullification
Jury Nullification
And by the way... screw this god-damned lame-ass lameness filter. Maybe if it used some decent algorithms it might be useful. Next time you're bored, program a smart ad banner picker instead (you know, so the slashdot pages don't sit there for 45 minutes waiting for a lame ad banner to load from the remote banner server because it won't allow you to view the page you wanted to see until all the friggin' ads are fully in place on it because it was designed that way???)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Some of you idiot moderators wouldn't know a good post if it poured hot grits all over your keyboard. Here I am, telling you how to Save The World, and you moderate it down.
It sure as hell won't shut me up, though.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
You're scaring me.
Good.... for when one becomes scared, one's eyes become their most open, and suddenly things which were hidden before become clearly visible, as if you had taken the red pill....
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
"The tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots" -Benjamin Franklin
Not to be picky or anything, but that was actually Thomas Jefferson. And he was right... and so are you. When a law is wrong, it MUST be challenged and destroyed; that's why they saw fit to include a little thing known as "Jury Nullification" in the founding laws of this nation. Basically, it means that a jury can find a defendant fully and completely guilty of a violation of law, but refuse to punish him for it because they don't think that law should BE a law. And you will NEVER hear it mentioned in a court of law, on TV, or anywhere except in a few books and movies (and, now, a few websites). Try to guess why. That's right: if We, the Sheeple, knew about it, why, we'd be chopping down laws all over the place! Can't have THAT, now can they? Undermining their hard-fought-for and bought-with-lobbyists laws like that would take away some of Their power, now wouldn't it?
So what better forum to spread knowledge of its existence than right here on good old slashdot?
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
JURY NULLIFICATION
There. Now go do some research on the topic, and shudder with anger when you realize how you've been lied to all these years by judges and lawyers...
The Fully Informed Jury Association's website
Read some more about it
A list of books on the subject
Even more
More
MORE
MORE MORE MORE
As you can see if you read the links above and fully understand them, the power of Jury Nullification is about the only power left to We the People. We don't have enormous wealth, we aren't in positions of political power, we don't have adequate representation in the legislative bodies of the government (meaning, of course, we can't be taxed either, but that's a whole 'nuther post), we don't have a stranglehold on any particular commodity or service (though think what would happen if we all suddenly configured our firewalls and BGP routers to stop letting packets through :)... Jury Nullification was GIVEN to us by the founding fathers because they knew in their wisdom that we would never have as much power as those who are so easily corrupted by it. It Is Our ONLY Weapon Against Them And Their Evil, People!! Do not let it fall by the wayside again. Tell everyone you know about it. Print out all the above webpages I linked to in 48-point Arial and paste them all up and down the streets of your cities. Don't Let THEM Win!!!
Thank you.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Here it is... there's a nice little search box on the site's main page.
Surprising the RIAA hasn't gone after the CD Database yet. I mean, my god; all those albums and songs and artists in one giant list, cut & paste-able without any restrictions or "click here to accept the license agreement" messages?? It's anarchy! Must be costing the recording industry many negative billions of dollars a year...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I've never seen mysql be unreliable. In what way is its unreliability legendary?
The bug, yes. Well, the database in question has two columns, latitude and longitude, in it. The values in these columns are float values accurate to 6 decimal places. The fields themselves are set to "auto-decimal-places" or whatever Access calls it. When exporting as any kind of comma- or tab-separated values flat file, it rounded them down to 3 decimal places. I tried setting the field type to "floating - 6 decimal places." It then chopped the values in the database to ONE decimal place. The only way I could get it to export a flat file and not screw up the data was with the "formatted report" option. (This is Access 97 running on NT server 4, incidentally.) I didn't try any ODBC stuff; it wasn't worth installing myODBC, rebooting the server, etc to get it to work; far easier to make something that could parse whatever it shat out. Besides; I have MySQL's permissions (and inetd.conf for that matter) set to disallow all external server connections for security; I didn't want to change that either.
Now on to crashing web servers. I've been administering one single Linux box running apache, mysql, msql, php, modperl, etc for over two years now. It serves up Twenty (20) different sites in 128 meg of RAM. Several hundred thousand hits per day. That one box has never needed a failover server, because the only time it's been down is from power failures (which would have killed any failover servers too; our colocation site kinda sucks), planned hardware upgrades at 3am, one DOS attack... never because the box just suddenly crashed. I also have an NT box sitting right under it; it's twice as fast, RAID array, 256 meg of RAM, and serves up One (1) site. Just One. In the past two weeks, I have had to drive up to the place and manually reboot the thing THREE TIMES because of either (a) Cold Fusion server sucking up 600 meg of memory and bringing everything to a crashing halt, or (b) inetinfo.exe suddenly deciding it needs to consume 100% of the CPU cycles and refuse to let anything else do anything. So you can see why I think as I do about running a web server on NT; it's as sturdy and trustworthy as a skyscraper made out of toothpicks and Elmer's glue. 4 non-Intel quad-cpu servers (wasn't MS going to drop Alpha support from NT? Odd they're still using it...) running Unix would be easily twice as stable as it would if they were running NT. Hell, 1 dual-P-II Linux box doing 20 times as much as a dual-P-III NT box is more stable. Any non-brainwashed sysadmin knows the truth...
But perhaps I am speaking from ignorance instead of experience. Maybe the version of NT they release in Australia is more reliable (128-bit encryption notwithstanding). Maybe I should trust what people tell me instead of what I personally have to deal with on a daily basis. Maybe... not.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Unfortunately, the web weenies all use Macs to edit things with (no Mac version of PHPed). They've been using DW3 for months now, and it still does the Bad Stuff with PHP. I've looked at the extension template stuff for DW; looked too complicated to be worth it for the few times they'd need it (usually, they make the page first, then give it to me, and I stuff PHP into it with pico :) I also, of course, had to write a little PHP script to convert their files from the Mac-format linefeeds to Unix-format ones because I can't get them to set the "Use Unix linefeeds" option in DW and leave it there...
Mac Weenies. :) (Yes, they crash just as much as Windoze boxes do, and use up twice as much RAM doing it...)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."