Later in your post I think you are branding religions as a cult just because they ban things your denomination doesn't ban. I could easily list the things Southern Baptists seek to ban and say they are cultists for telling their members how to live. Telling people how to live is what most religions do, its how they are defined.
That's just... wrong. By that definition, the government is a cult because it tells you that you aren't allowed to park your car in the middle of an intersection.
If I stop going to church, noone will call me at work and tell me that I'm going to Hell. I don't answer to the church for pretty much anything I do, except in the case I mentioned where my actions would directly affect the church (in which case the ultimate penalty would be to tell me that I couldn't attend that particular church anymore).
Perhaps you mean instead the lengths to which a denomination seeks to enforce its dictates might indicate a cult.
Well, yes, that was pretty much my whole point.:-)
I assure they exert a massive degree of control over their members.
Maybe that's a per-ward (isn't that what they call their regional divisions?) thing. As I said, I didn't personally see that among my friends in San Diego.
I think you are just setting the standards where you find convenient and where your comfort level is.
Of course I am. I'd have a hard time imagining anyone doing differently. I'm certain that no Jehovah's Witness who was happy with his church has said "boy, those Southern Baptists are A-OK, but my church? Man, it's a cult!"
Ok, I laughed along with everyone else when I read that, but seriously: what hellhole do you live in?
My city is filled with nice people. Sure, there are some jackasses, but they largely marginalized. If you're checking out at the grocery store and the new cashier isn't smiling and pleasant and talkative, then he probably won't still be working there the next time you go. Our local Department of Motor Vehicles is clean and smells nice, and the counter employees are friendly and helpful. The post office clerk is friendly and laughs a lot. Even the IRS agent that I had to deal with when they mis-filed a quarterly tax return was polite and cheerful ("Oh, sorry about that! We stuck it in the '2003 folder' instead of the '2004 folder'. We apologize for our mistake. Have a nice week!").
I know people who genuinely like living around a bunch of surly jackasses - they feel that it gives their city character, and it honestly amuses them when the gum-smacking idjit at the post office gives them a rude brush-off. That's fine. On the other hand, I personally hate it and live in a place where someone like that would be fired after 15 minutes.
I think the only difference between "cult" and "mainstream" is the number of warm bodies in the particular denomination and how much economic and political power they have.
I'd have to disagree with that. I think the difference between "mainstream" and "cult" is the amount of control the organization has over the lives of its members.
For example, I'm a Southern Baptist. When I do something that goes against the Southern Baptist Convention's definition of acceptable behavior, then I answer to God - not man. With the exception of "sins" that directly affect the church, it's pretty much none of their business. For all the talk of the "right-wing extremist Christian voting bloc", noone has ever told me how to vote or asked me how I voted. Basically, I choose to follow their teachings but do not in anyway submit myself or my family to their control.
On the other hand, I personally define a "cult" as a group that tells its members how to live, where to work, how to think, and so on. If a church pressures its members to cut itself off from mainstream life and to do only physical labor that requires little to no independent thought, it's a cult. If it won't allow a woman to wear makeup in her own house, it's a cult. If it won't allow its members' children to go to a non-church school because everyone else is out to poison their young minds, it's a cult. If you can't have a blood transfusion because a church leader decided that it would be immoral, it's a cult.
I don't think that the Mormon church is a cult because I've had some very close Mormon friends who regarded their church much as I see mine. That is, they followed its teachings but they were definitely independent thinkers. This didn't seem to get them in trouble or cause other hardships; as far as I can tell it was the expected norm. Jehovah's Witnesses, on the other hand, largely seem to subsume their own identities to their church, which is why I think they're a cult.
Frequently all that's needed is the fact that you communicated with somebody for evidence - not the specifics of what you said.
Martha Stewart went to prison based on what she communicated with her stock broker, not that she communicated with him. I'm sure both parties there would've been happy to have a bit of plausible deniability.
This is a tool with a very specific purpose, and its unsuitability for other purposes doesn't make it worthless. I can't drive a nail with a cold chisel, but that's not a flaw in the chisel's design.
I live in DC [...] we don't even have a good society as an excuse.
I think I see the problem.
Seriously, I wish that some of the people who hate the place they live would check out some of the other possibilities. You know, despite the panicked hand-wringings of network news reporters, some of the "underpopulated red states" are pretty pleasant places to raise a family.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in DC. Fortunately, we live in a huge freakin' country with an enormous variety of lifestyles and I've found a nice place that suits me well. If you truly believe that you "don't even have a good society", then get out and look around. I'm willing to bet that there's at least one other city/town/village where you'd feel more at home.
Disliking someone is NOT a valid reason to assign low grades.
I wouldn't entirely dismiss it. You remember that guy from class. He talked down to other students because he was the wunderkind. After a 50-minute lecture, he'd ask a question that proved that he didn't understand a thing about the subject matter ("So, let me get this straight: When you `add' two numbers, you're really just writing them next to each other with a period between them, and that's what makes this line integral work?"). He monopolized teacher resources. In general, he made life hell for the professor and made every other student want to drop the class.
Imagine a teacher telling that student that they weren't getting special dispensation simply "because I don't like you". In the words of Chris Rock, I'm not saying I condone it, but I understand.
I'm not saying that the OP's friend was the class anchor-around-the-neck, but that would seem to be a possibility.
It's just an idea, but what if I wanted to get a job at, say, IBM. So I go to IBM.jobs, and they have their resume-submittal criteria, or whatever, for people who are interested in gaining employment.
It's obvious anyone at ICANN ever heard of balanced trees and binary searches. If you want to create a useful TLD, figure out what half the current.com domains have in common and make something that relates to that (maybe that's what.xxx is for?)..jobs clearly does not achieve that goal.
I can think of dice.jobs, guru.jobs, and hot.jobs and not a whole lot else. What does that do to effectively partition the.com uber-TLD?
You don't need to be a Sollog to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: multiple concurrent images of *BSD face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for single-server *BSD farms because *BSD-as-a-guest-OS is dying...
Awww, hell with it. How do the trolls make this stuff up so quickly?
..and Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Georgia, and Arkansas, and Missouri, and Oklahoma, and Kansas...
How many ways are there to cover a map of the United States with an object a third the size of its contiguous land mass without touching the enormous piece of land right in the middle of it?
To paraphrase, sometimes a gigantic alien hand is just a gigantic alien hand.
However, the Bush family and that crowd will never allow nuclear fusion to become a reality - they make too darned much money on oil, and cash is all they understand.
Are you saying that if fusion became practical, then everyone would build and operate their own personal reactor? Unless you are, your hypothesis makes no sense.
The Bushes have made a lot of money from selling energy. Although it happened to be in oil form, oil was never their core product. Any energy producer that wants to convert from oil-era millionaire to fusion-era billionaire will be selling off assets as fast as possible to raise money to build fusion plants all over the place.
If you think that ending the predominance of oil will bankrupt energy companies, then you're in for a surprise.
I think a cntral signatory agency would be kinda neat.
That's pretty much exactly what x509 is. You pay Verisign to issue a signed certificate to you, and anyone who trusts Verisign's verification procedures can then trust that you are really you.
I've always thought that would be an obvious Digital Age upgrade to the services provided by notary publics. Their seal is already valid on all sorts of contracts and legal documents, so why can't they also be taught to use PGP to sign public keys?
Thanks. I was in a bit of a rush out the door and I couldn't remember C and D. I was going to mention something about FBI Agent Mallory, but didn't want to confuse the issue.:)
GnuPG caches keys in its local keyring, so you'll only have to retrieve foo@example.com's key one time.
pgp.com seems to have good connectivity.
They are hardly the only public keyserver currently in operation. Other servers cope with the load just fine, so it's probably that pgp.com's servers will also.
if the central repository is located in USA and the FBI want to do a man-in-the-middle attack?
Not unless you're amazingly trusting of the repository. Read up on the "web of trust" and how to personally verify the keys you're using to send messages.
For example, my pubkey has been signed by several friends, and I have signed their pubkeys in kind. If I get a signed email from Charlie (whom I don't know), but his pubkey has been signed by Bob (whom I do know) using his key that I myself signed, then there is a direct path of trust between Charlie and me. If I believe that Bob is an honest guy who wouldn't have signed Charlie's key without personally verifying his identity, then I have cause to that key.
It's hard to explain the web of trust without making it sound more complicated than it really is. It's somewhat analogous to a friend introducing you to a person you've never met before. If your friend is very gullible, then you won't put much confidence in the ID of the person they're introducing. If your friend is, say, a loan officer who just spent the last month vetting the new person's identity, then you can be reasonably sure that they're giving you accurate information about that person.
Which brings us back to your question. If you're corresponding with a new contact with no trust pathway to that person, then you have exactly zero reason to believe in their identity simply because they were able to download GnuGP and create a new key. However, if that new person's key was signed by Alice, whose key was signed by Charlie, whose key was signed by Bob, whose key was signed by you, then you have at least some reason to think they're who they say they are.
There is no real concept of blindly trusting a new person in real life. GnuPG does not magically change this.
I assert that no essential behavior on a web-page requires Javascript -- it's ALL needless.
I had a problem with one of my web applications where a user could request a report that took up to a minute to generate. They'd inevitably get impatient and start click-click-clicking the "Submit" button which would eventually grind the server to a halt as it tried to render 20 reports simultaneously.
I solved this by creating a unique request ID tied to the user's login cookie (yes, I also use cookies, bad me!) and pointing the request form to an intermediate page that would load instantly, then set a meta-refresh to take the user to the real report generator. The request ID could only be used once, so if they got impatient and hit "reload" then they'd get an error message telling them (politely) not to do that again.
Worked great - except that IE (up through version 6) has some pretty tight limits on how long the destination URL in a meta-refresh can be and implements those limits by truncating the request. While we weren't exactly sending an encyclopedia in the GET request (just the usual "startdate=", "enddate=", "imagelist=1,2,3,4,5,6", "sortorder=lastname" stuff), our visitors using IE would get damaged results about 25% of the time.
My eventual workaround was to replace the meta-refresh with a Javascript "window.location.replace" call, and a plain ol' href tag for people with Javascript disabled (which is little better than the original situation - people still have a "clicky-link" that they can hit 20 times until they get a 500 error and call tech support).
Yes, I know all too well that IE is not standards-compliant, but I still have to provide full functionality to the majority of our visitors who use it. Because of its brokenness, there is no standard HTML way of accomplishing my goal. I have to use Javascript to get a working simulation of what should have worked in the first place.
Would you PLEASE, for the love of all that is good and holy, learn the freakin' difference between "communist" and "totalitarian".
I know quite a bit about the subject, as well as the difference between "capitalist" and "anarchist" (the true opposite of totalitarian).
Having said that, how can a completely state-controlled population have an open capitalistic economic system? That is, if the government tells you where to live, where to work, and provides your food and shelter in exchange, then where does a free market fit in?
Conversely, how would a communistic anarchy work, since no government could be directing the flow of goods through the society?
Yes, "communist" and "totalitarian" have different meanings. However, their power structures are inherently related and I challenge you to show me an example of one without the other in a society that lasted more than a few years.
You've noticed that capitalism doesn't magically bring about the end of totalitarian states
You're wrong. If I country can't or won't control how its populace spends its money, then they can't control how it makes its money. Once that happens, the society is no longer totalitarian (although it may still be relatively restrictive).
I have an m130 with Graffiti 2. Yes, 2. They shipped at least two versions of this device, and the later ones had a version of PalmOS that was identical to the older one except that it uses Graffiti 2 instead of the original.
The practical upshot is that I have a Palm that cannot be upgraded to Graffiti 1. I'd love to be proven wrong, but haven't seen any counterevidence so far.
Regardless, the unit's screwed up in other even worse ways. If I manually make a perfectly horizontal line in a drawing program, it runs at a 5 degree downhill slant from the left side of the screen to the right. I have to compensate by calibrating the top of the display correctly but the bottom right corner a little high, so that the ideal horizontal line and the actual horizontal line intersect somewhere in the middle of the screen. In this way, most of the widgets near the bottom of the screen are off by a little, but they're close enough that I can still use it somewhat.
What a POS. This is my fourth and final Palm. I've basically relegated it to playing solitaire, and I use a nice leather DayRunner for everything that I used to use a Palm for.
But damn it, we are the richest Country in the word, but more then 2/3 of the people only have (at best) a high school education?
I agree with your for the most part, but not here. College (read: university for non-Americans) used to be the province of the few. A minority graduated from high school, and only a small number of those made it on through undergrad. That's changed to the point that most middle- and upper-middle-class kids are expected to graduate from college (whether they actually do or not).
You can set the bar arbitrarily high and be saddened that only a few people achieve it. It used to be at "most of the people only have an elementary education", then "most of the people only have a junior high education", and now it's "most of the people only have a high school education".
In a hundred years, your grandkids might be bemoaning the fact that "most of the people only have two graduate degrees". Will that be sad then, or could we at least give ourselves a little credit for pushing the majority of our population to that level of schooling?
Slashdot Mirror
That's just... wrong. By that definition, the government is a cult because it tells you that you aren't allowed to park your car in the middle of an intersection.
If I stop going to church, noone will call me at work and tell me that I'm going to Hell. I don't answer to the church for pretty much anything I do, except in the case I mentioned where my actions would directly affect the church (in which case the ultimate penalty would be to tell me that I couldn't attend that particular church anymore).
Perhaps you mean instead the lengths to which a denomination seeks to enforce its dictates might indicate a cult.
Well, yes, that was pretty much my whole point. :-)
I assure they exert a massive degree of control over their members.
Maybe that's a per-ward (isn't that what they call their regional divisions?) thing. As I said, I didn't personally see that among my friends in San Diego.
I think you are just setting the standards where you find convenient and where your comfort level is.
Of course I am. I'd have a hard time imagining anyone doing differently. I'm certain that no Jehovah's Witness who was happy with his church has said "boy, those Southern Baptists are A-OK, but my church? Man, it's a cult!"
My city is filled with nice people. Sure, there are some jackasses, but they largely marginalized. If you're checking out at the grocery store and the new cashier isn't smiling and pleasant and talkative, then he probably won't still be working there the next time you go. Our local Department of Motor Vehicles is clean and smells nice, and the counter employees are friendly and helpful. The post office clerk is friendly and laughs a lot. Even the IRS agent that I had to deal with when they mis-filed a quarterly tax return was polite and cheerful ("Oh, sorry about that! We stuck it in the '2003 folder' instead of the '2004 folder'. We apologize for our mistake. Have a nice week!").
I know people who genuinely like living around a bunch of surly jackasses - they feel that it gives their city character, and it honestly amuses them when the gum-smacking idjit at the post office gives them a rude brush-off. That's fine. On the other hand, I personally hate it and live in a place where someone like that would be fired after 15 minutes.
I'd have to disagree with that. I think the difference between "mainstream" and "cult" is the amount of control the organization has over the lives of its members.
For example, I'm a Southern Baptist. When I do something that goes against the Southern Baptist Convention's definition of acceptable behavior, then I answer to God - not man. With the exception of "sins" that directly affect the church, it's pretty much none of their business. For all the talk of the "right-wing extremist Christian voting bloc", noone has ever told me how to vote or asked me how I voted. Basically, I choose to follow their teachings but do not in anyway submit myself or my family to their control.
On the other hand, I personally define a "cult" as a group that tells its members how to live, where to work, how to think, and so on. If a church pressures its members to cut itself off from mainstream life and to do only physical labor that requires little to no independent thought, it's a cult. If it won't allow a woman to wear makeup in her own house, it's a cult. If it won't allow its members' children to go to a non-church school because everyone else is out to poison their young minds, it's a cult. If you can't have a blood transfusion because a church leader decided that it would be immoral, it's a cult.
I don't think that the Mormon church is a cult because I've had some very close Mormon friends who regarded their church much as I see mine. That is, they followed its teachings but they were definitely independent thinkers. This didn't seem to get them in trouble or cause other hardships; as far as I can tell it was the expected norm. Jehovah's Witnesses, on the other hand, largely seem to subsume their own identities to their church, which is why I think they're a cult.
Don't get me started on Scientology.
Martha Stewart went to prison based on what she communicated with her stock broker, not that she communicated with him. I'm sure both parties there would've been happy to have a bit of plausible deniability.
This is a tool with a very specific purpose, and its unsuitability for other purposes doesn't make it worthless. I can't drive a nail with a cold chisel, but that's not a flaw in the chisel's design.
I think I see the problem.
Seriously, I wish that some of the people who hate the place they live would check out some of the other possibilities. You know, despite the panicked hand-wringings of network news reporters, some of the "underpopulated red states" are pretty pleasant places to raise a family.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in DC. Fortunately, we live in a huge freakin' country with an enormous variety of lifestyles and I've found a nice place that suits me well. If you truly believe that you "don't even have a good society", then get out and look around. I'm willing to bet that there's at least one other city/town/village where you'd feel more at home.
I wouldn't entirely dismiss it. You remember that guy from class. He talked down to other students because he was the wunderkind. After a 50-minute lecture, he'd ask a question that proved that he didn't understand a thing about the subject matter ("So, let me get this straight: When you `add' two numbers, you're really just writing them next to each other with a period between them, and that's what makes this line integral work?"). He monopolized teacher resources. In general, he made life hell for the professor and made every other student want to drop the class.
Imagine a teacher telling that student that they weren't getting special dispensation simply "because I don't like you". In the words of Chris Rock, I'm not saying I condone it, but I understand.
I'm not saying that the OP's friend was the class anchor-around-the-neck, but that would seem to be a possibility.
What's wrong with "jobs.ibm.com"?
That'll just be a referrer to the real site.
I can think of dice.jobs, guru.jobs, and hot.jobs and not a whole lot else. What does that do to effectively partition the .com uber-TLD?
Awww, hell with it. How do the trolls make this stuff up so quickly?
Got a problem with stststutterers, you insensitive clod?
How many ways are there to cover a map of the United States with an object a third the size of its contiguous land mass without touching the enormous piece of land right in the middle of it?
To paraphrase, sometimes a gigantic alien hand is just a gigantic alien hand.
God help us all.
Are you saying that if fusion became practical, then everyone would build and operate their own personal reactor? Unless you are, your hypothesis makes no sense.
The Bushes have made a lot of money from selling energy. Although it happened to be in oil form, oil was never their core product. Any energy producer that wants to convert from oil-era millionaire to fusion-era billionaire will be selling off assets as fast as possible to raise money to build fusion plants all over the place.
If you think that ending the predominance of oil will bankrupt energy companies, then you're in for a surprise.
I don't blame you, especially since screen isn't available for NetBSD.
You owe me a new keyboard. The coffee spewing from my mouth shorted out my old one and I had to dig a spare out of the bone closet.
That's pretty much exactly what x509 is. You pay Verisign to issue a signed certificate to you, and anyone who trusts Verisign's verification procedures can then trust that you are really you.
I've always thought that would be an obvious Digital Age upgrade to the services provided by notary publics. Their seal is already valid on all sorts of contracts and legal documents, so why can't they also be taught to use PGP to sign public keys?
Thanks. I was in a bit of a rush out the door and I couldn't remember C and D. I was going to mention something about FBI Agent Mallory, but didn't want to confuse the issue. :)
Not unless you're amazingly trusting of the repository. Read up on the "web of trust" and how to personally verify the keys you're using to send messages.
For example, my pubkey has been signed by several friends, and I have signed their pubkeys in kind. If I get a signed email from Charlie (whom I don't know), but his pubkey has been signed by Bob (whom I do know) using his key that I myself signed, then there is a direct path of trust between Charlie and me. If I believe that Bob is an honest guy who wouldn't have signed Charlie's key without personally verifying his identity, then I have cause to that key.
It's hard to explain the web of trust without making it sound more complicated than it really is. It's somewhat analogous to a friend introducing you to a person you've never met before. If your friend is very gullible, then you won't put much confidence in the ID of the person they're introducing. If your friend is, say, a loan officer who just spent the last month vetting the new person's identity, then you can be reasonably sure that they're giving you accurate information about that person.
Which brings us back to your question. If you're corresponding with a new contact with no trust pathway to that person, then you have exactly zero reason to believe in their identity simply because they were able to download GnuGP and create a new key. However, if that new person's key was signed by Alice, whose key was signed by Charlie, whose key was signed by Bob, whose key was signed by you, then you have at least some reason to think they're who they say they are.
There is no real concept of blindly trusting a new person in real life. GnuPG does not magically change this.
I had a problem with one of my web applications where a user could request a report that took up to a minute to generate. They'd inevitably get impatient and start click-click-clicking the "Submit" button which would eventually grind the server to a halt as it tried to render 20 reports simultaneously.
I solved this by creating a unique request ID tied to the user's login cookie (yes, I also use cookies, bad me!) and pointing the request form to an intermediate page that would load instantly, then set a meta-refresh to take the user to the real report generator. The request ID could only be used once, so if they got impatient and hit "reload" then they'd get an error message telling them (politely) not to do that again.
Worked great - except that IE (up through version 6) has some pretty tight limits on how long the destination URL in a meta-refresh can be and implements those limits by truncating the request. While we weren't exactly sending an encyclopedia in the GET request (just the usual "startdate=", "enddate=", "imagelist=1,2,3,4,5,6", "sortorder=lastname" stuff), our visitors using IE would get damaged results about 25% of the time.
My eventual workaround was to replace the meta-refresh with a Javascript "window.location.replace" call, and a plain ol' href tag for people with Javascript disabled (which is little better than the original situation - people still have a "clicky-link" that they can hit 20 times until they get a 500 error and call tech support).
Yes, I know all too well that IE is not standards-compliant, but I still have to provide full functionality to the majority of our visitors who use it. Because of its brokenness, there is no standard HTML way of accomplishing my goal. I have to use Javascript to get a working simulation of what should have worked in the first place.
Unfortunately, the m130 doesn't have flash memory. The OS update is in a physical, non-upgradeable ROM package. Yay, Palm.
I know quite a bit about the subject, as well as the difference between "capitalist" and "anarchist" (the true opposite of totalitarian).
Having said that, how can a completely state-controlled population have an open capitalistic economic system? That is, if the government tells you where to live, where to work, and provides your food and shelter in exchange, then where does a free market fit in?
Conversely, how would a communistic anarchy work, since no government could be directing the flow of goods through the society?
Yes, "communist" and "totalitarian" have different meanings. However, their power structures are inherently related and I challenge you to show me an example of one without the other in a society that lasted more than a few years.
You've noticed that capitalism doesn't magically bring about the end of totalitarian states
You're wrong. If I country can't or won't control how its populace spends its money, then they can't control how it makes its money. Once that happens, the society is no longer totalitarian (although it may still be relatively restrictive).
The practical upshot is that I have a Palm that cannot be upgraded to Graffiti 1. I'd love to be proven wrong, but haven't seen any counterevidence so far.
Regardless, the unit's screwed up in other even worse ways. If I manually make a perfectly horizontal line in a drawing program, it runs at a 5 degree downhill slant from the left side of the screen to the right. I have to compensate by calibrating the top of the display correctly but the bottom right corner a little high, so that the ideal horizontal line and the actual horizontal line intersect somewhere in the middle of the screen. In this way, most of the widgets near the bottom of the screen are off by a little, but they're close enough that I can still use it somewhat.
What a POS. This is my fourth and final Palm. I've basically relegated it to playing solitaire, and I use a nice leather DayRunner for everything that I used to use a Palm for.
I agree with your for the most part, but not here. College (read: university for non-Americans) used to be the province of the few. A minority graduated from high school, and only a small number of those made it on through undergrad. That's changed to the point that most middle- and upper-middle-class kids are expected to graduate from college (whether they actually do or not).
You can set the bar arbitrarily high and be saddened that only a few people achieve it. It used to be at "most of the people only have an elementary education", then "most of the people only have a junior high education", and now it's "most of the people only have a high school education".
In a hundred years, your grandkids might be bemoaning the fact that "most of the people only have two graduate degrees". Will that be sad then, or could we at least give ourselves a little credit for pushing the majority of our population to that level of schooling?