In American courtrooms, evidence which is obtained illegally is treated no different than any other evidence, as long as the government had no role in the illegality.
If the government played any role in the illegality, then the evidence is suppressed.
FBI agent Lou Horouchi participated in a cold blooded murder
His name is Lon Horiuchi. If you're going to slander a man's reputation, at least spell his name right.
The facts of the matter are very much disputed, depending on which side of the government-paranoia fence you are and how good your common-sense filters are. However, the founder of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, Danny Coulson, has publically described Horiuchi's experience as the "tortures of the damned".
First he was excoriated in an FBI inquiry; then a separate governmental inquiry exonerated him. Then he was indicted on manslaughter statutes for Vicki Weaver's death, and then a judge declared that Horiuchi was immune to prosecution because he was acting in good faith.
And just last month, a Federal appeals court set aside the immunity decision, clearing the way for Horiuchi to be tried.
Contrary to what you believe, Horiuchi is not out of the woods. Barring intervention from the Supreme Court, it is overwhelmingly likely that Horiuchi will soon be tried for manslaughter in the death of Vicki Weaver.
the FBI jackboot who is persecuting Sklyarov is up to become HEAD of the FBI!
Robert Swan Mueller III is the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. The charges against Sklyarov were pressed by one of his subordinates. It is overwhelmingly likely that Mueller was never consulted about the Sklyarov prosecution.
Again, if you're going to slander someone, then at least get which branch of the government they work for correct.
The next time you decide to rant off with your anti-government rhetoric, please do your research.
Heston's speech regarding the handgun is about human nature, not guns. Yes, Heston is an NRA bigwig. Heston is very opinionated on the subject of guns. If you'd ever read his writings on that subject, though, you'd discover that his speech surrounding the handgun was totally orthogonal to his gun-control beliefs.
Heston's speech was about the dangers of human nature; that it is human nature to develop ever-better tools, and to apply those ever-better tools to the task of killing things. This isn't hyperbole; it's fact. Every time we invent something new, it's only a matter of time before someone looks into how to use it for military purposes.
That's what Heston's speech in the remake was about. Beware humans, for they are hardwired to build and to destroy--and to build things which only exist to destroy.
While body-cavity searches are sometimes necessary for the safety of the wardens and other prisoners, the Supreme Court has recognized that it's extraordinarily demeaning conduct. Dmitry is, as of this moment, an innocent man. The jailers are aware of that, as is the US Attorney, as is Dmitry's attorney, as is everyone else.
Convicts lose a great deal of their civil liberties. Innocent people, infinitely less so. Jail isn't pleasant, but it's a helluva lot more pleasant to be a presumed-innocent individual awaiting trial than a convict.
No possibility of parole
Ever since sentencing reform in the early '80s ('84, I think), there has been no parole anywhere in the Federal system. When you get convicted of a Federal offense, such as the DMCA, you don't get parole. If the judge says you do five years, well, guess what--you do five years.
Prison conditions
Since Dmitry is a nonviolent offender, he would be a prime candidate for Club Fed treatment (minimum security facility, perks, etc.). However, there's a Bureau of Prisons directive in effect which says that BuPris considers all aliens to be flight risks. As such, BuPris categorically refuses to house aliens in minimum-security facilities. Real prison, real time, real lockup, alongside real serious offenders.
If you actually knew a damn thing about the way the system works, you'd have already known that the two things you're harping about aren't problems at all, and the biggest problem Dmitry faces (if convicted) is one that you were totally ignorant of.
No, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a guy who does his research. I'd hope that Slashdot's editorial staff would do theirs, too.
Unfortunately, most feedback mechanisms employed by Fortune 500 companies don't have such mechanisms.
The Net, speaking generally, has no feedback mechanism. It has a really effective blowback mechanism, but that's it.
Feedback is when information--not data--is fed back into the system. If I'm learning how to SCUBA dive, I'll have a dive instructor watch me, critique my technique, and tell me what needs to change. That's feedback. He sees what I'm doing, separates the important from the unimportant, and gives me information back. This changes the behavior of the system for the better, and I become a competent SCUBA diver.
Blowback is when data--not information--is fed back into the system. Data, devoid of meaning. Noise, not signal. If I learn to SCUBA dive by listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn albums, well, I'm going to have a very short dive career.
The Net is a great source of data, but it's a mediocre source of information. Many sites are filled, not with people who want to carefully critique and correct each other's posts to separate out gold from dross, but a bunch of people who want to scream ``Me, Too!'' and get on Ye Olde Bandwagon... whatever the bandwagon is.
There's an old joke about two paranoids walking down the street. One of them stops and points at an innocent, innocuous shrub. "Who's in that shrub?" the first paranoid asks. The second paranoid answers, "I dunno, but I think I know the guy in there with him!"
... Blowback, not feedback.
Substitute "two loser Linux guys" for paranoids, and "Microsoft" for the shrubbery, and you've got a pretty good description of the behavior we've all seen and condemned.
A few sites--not many, but some, Slashdot among them--have tried to implement feedback mechanisms in an attempt to limit the damage blowback can cause. Moderation and meta-moderation are SLashdot's feedback mechanism.
It's a pretty badly broken mechanism, of course, but it's a helluvalot better than nothing.
Sometime, take a look at Revolutionary War pamphlets and newsletters published by the Revolutionaries. The majority of them were published anonymously, out of fear the government would come after the authors and their families.
Anonymous free speech has a long and distinguished history in the United States, predating even the Constitution itself. Every Federal judge in the country knows this, and I doubt that a single one of them would want to remove the right to anonymous free speech, given its important role in our history.
Nemesis is the pet theory of Professor Richard Mueller, who (as of last I checked) was a physics professor at Berkeley.
Really nice guy, too. In '93 I wrote him a letter and asked him what the status of the Nemesis Hypothesis was, and he wrote a very nice and thorough reply in which he indicated that Hipparcos, a satellite which was supposed to resolve it once and for all, suffered an instrumentation failure. They were falling back to a manual sky-search and were hoping to have it done by 2000.
Given that it's now 2001 and we haven't heard anything, I think we can conclude either
The search is taking far longer than expected
Fundamental problems in the search methods kept it from being a productive observation
The search was concluded and nothing was found, and Nemesis is pretty much a dead theory
... That being said, Richard Mueller is a very serious scientist. It angers me when I hear people call him a kook for the Nemesis Hypothesis (not that the original poster did).
The Nemesis Hypothesis was classic scientific work. It was a blindingly creative look at a very difficult problem. It explained past observations and made predictions for future observations. The hypothesis was, is, testable (admittedly, not easily testable).
Compare this to superstring theory, which has no observational support, no experimental support, no predictions for future observations. While I like superstring theory--it's a really cool thought exercise--it's not science.
So why is it so many hail Brian Greene (superstring theory luminary) as the next Einstein, and in the next breath condemn Mueller as a kook?
Python 2.1 is free software
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Why not Ruby?
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Python 2.1 is free software; it is simply not GPL-compatible free software, due to the clause which specifies Virginia as the state of jurisdiction. Python 2.1 meets every single freedom listed in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Please don't spout FUD regarding Python's license. Instead, call a spade a spade and say, "Python is free software, but is not GPL-compatible. In this sense, it's no worse than the Mozilla Public License."
What, and Python doesn't?
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Why not Ruby?
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Try checking out the __add__, __radd__, __mul__, __rmul__, __div__, __rdiv__, etc. methods in Python. If you want to override the "*" operator for a class, all you have to do is write your own __mul__ (and, optionally, __rmul__) method and presto, operator overloading.
If you're going to bash a language, you really should make it a point to at least learn the language first.
On the contrary--they hold tremendous weight! An appellate court's role is strictly limited: did the defendant receive a fair trial? Is the law Constitutional? Was the law fairly applied?
Appellate courts don't revisit the facts of the case. They only evaluate the propriety of the trial, nothing more.
Lawyers are actually a minority in Congress; there are more businessmen there now than lawyers.
Not only that, the government is made up of the people--and it's not true that 90% of the people are lawyers.
If the American public really wanted that sort of legal reform, rest assured, the American public would get it. When the American public wakes up from its slumber and tells the politicians, very clearly, what they're going to do or else, politicians scurry to obey the great Leviathan that's the body politic.
Unfortunately, 90% of Americans can't be bothered to give a damn about anything in law or government.
Many compilers do honor the register keyword. They don't automatically store the variable in a register, but the variable does get marked as needing a high degree of optimization.
I prefer to write applications in Perl or Python, myself. Once the app is at a usable state, I run it through a profiler to see where the bottlenecks are. If the bottlenecks can't be opened up by tweaking the code and algorithm, then I code the bottlenecks in C or C++ and call them from Perl/Python.
Code spends 90% of its time in the same 10% of code. So this technique actually winds up working pretty well.
Remember that C is a lot more than a language. A lot of people overlook one of the most important features of the language--namely, the preprocessor. In C++, the preprocessor by itself is a Turing environment; any computing task which you can think of, you can do in the preprocessor alone just by giving it some particularly weird templates to compile.
How does a scripting language plan on implementing the preprocessor? If it doesn't, then should it really have "C-like" in the name?
The other issue is... what's the point? I hate to tell people this, but C/C++ are two of the worst languages on the planet. I say this as a long-time C++ hacker and C++ enthusiast: the languages are awful. There are pointers all over the place, there's God-knows how many levels of indirection, there's detailed memory management... C/C++ are so powerful because they give you such fine-grained control over every aspect of the CPU. But they're cast-iron bitches to program in, because they're so intolerant of any error.
Scripting languages, on the other hand, are inefficient. They're slow. But they're also wonderful to program in as a result--their syntax isn't as rigorous, there's very little memory management to be had, there's no need to know the difference between the register and auto keywords, or the difference an inline amd a macro.
A C-like scripting language seems like the worst of both worlds. You've got the pedantic syntax and attention to detail of C, and the lackluster performance of a scripting language.
You're making several important mistakes here which are savagely undercutting your own argument. First, you're attempting to show that Microsoft is benevolent because, after all, the old-time robber barons turned out to be beneficial. There are two problems with this:
There is no agreement among economists that the robber barons were, indeed, beneficial,
All attempts to prove by analogy are nothing less than intellectual fraud.
Right there, you lose half your argument. Moving on, we see you say that:
Microsoft has no contract obligations, they produce a product and the consumer is the one who signs the contract
... The problem is you're assuming that Microsoft is the arbiter of what a contractual obligation consists of. Microsoft is not, and not even Microsoft's lawyers would claim to be. The only organization with any authority to determine what is or is not a contractual obligation is a court of law.
This means that Microsoft may very well have contractual obligations via their EULA. It's a well-established proposition of law that there is no contractual obligation which can withstand the scrutiny of consumer-protection legislation. If Microsoft says in their EULA that they have no liability whatsoever for their incredibly shoddy products, and a legislature decides that businesses are responsible for their shoddy products, well, guess what: that part of the EULA is null and void.
Does the EULA free Microsoft from having to provide technical support? Absolutely not. I'm willing to bet that if Microsoft released an incredibly shoddy product and refused to support it, a court would find that Microsoft was engaging in fraudulent business practices. Their disclaimer of "no warranty expressed or implied" wouldn't hold up worth a damn against a serious consumer-fraud case.
Now, it just so happens that antitrust law is soundly Constitutional; antitrust law rests squarely on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the ability to regulate trade among the states. Antitrust law is an interstate trade regulation, thus, Constitutional. A lot of free-marketers like to claim otherwise, but the Supreme Court hasn't been too kind to their attitudes.
I'm running a stock Red Hat 7.1 box; the only mods are that I'm running GNOME 1.4, Mozilla 0.9.1 (which broke parts of Nautilus), and I've got Python 2.1 installed.
#!/usr/bin/env python
... will always run Python 1.5.x, and
#!/usr/bin/env python2
... will always run Python 2.1.
In other words, exactly what is it that you're complaining about here? Seems to me like you're whining over a problem which doesn't even exist.
In '93 I went to Germany and flew Northwest/KLM. I figured that, given that it was a very long flight, it'd be worth my time to sign up for a Frequent Flyer program. The woman behind the desk was helpful, but she was so tired I thought she was going to fall asleep on me.
So I decided to liven things up some, with dialogue I hoped would get a laugh out of her.
"Name?"
Robert Hansen, thanks.
"Middle initial?"
J.
"Company?"
The Society of Evil Geniuses Working Together for a Better Tomorrow.
"... I'm sorry, sir. That won't fit."
Okay. "Society of Evil Geniuses" will work.
"Thank you, sir. Job title?"
God-Emperor of the Infinite Multiverse. God-Emperor will do, if it won't fit otherwise...
"It won't. Please wait a minute while we get you entered into our system... there. Have a nice flight, God-Emper..."
At that moment, about five seconds after she entered me into the database, she realized what happened. She started laughing so hard she collapsed on the floor.
Today, I still get mail from Northwest/KLM addressed to "God-Emperor Robert Hansen, Society of Evil Geniuses".
All Federal courts are created equal in all regards except jurisdiction. A District Court covers only a state, or portions of a state. A Circuit Court (also called a Court of Appeals) covers many Districts, and their decisions supersede those of District Courts. The Supreme Court covers all Circuits and Districts, both in the United States and all its territories, and the Supreme Court's decisions supersede all others.
But just because the Supreme Court's decision-making capability supersedes that of a local District Court, don't think--not for an instant--that a District Court lacks power and authority. All the powers the Supreme Court has at its disposal are vested in the District Court, within the District Court's area of jurisdiction.
(Now, the Supreme Court does have different jurisdiction from District and Circuit Courts, including a little nugget called "original jurisdiction". But that's not the same as the Supreme Court having any additional powers than the lower courts.)
As an example of a District Court finding law to be unconstitutional, Judge Marilyn Patel, operating out of California, found portions of United States export policy to be unconstitutional--and thus, null and void--in Bernstein v US.
Bernstein was the case which demolished many of the restrictions on the export of cryptography, so it's naturally of interest to Slashdotters.:)
A lot of people condemn Iowa as being a tech backwater. And, well, really, it is. I speak with authority, since I grew up there and fled Iowa after getting my CompSci degree; there just weren't any tech jobs there that I thought were worth having.
But there are some surprisingly clued-in politicians in Iowa when it comes to tech matters. Iowa attorney general Tom Miller is, IMO, one of the finest state AGs in the nation on tech issues. When UCITA had a full-court press going on it, Tom Miller advised the Iowa legislature that UCITA would ultimately be bad for customers; and, taking Miller's advice, the Iowa legislature passed an anti-UCITA law, making it very clear that Iowa not only does not have anything to do with UCITA, but has passed safe-harbor statutes specifying that Iowa consumers cannot be bound by UCITA.
Yes, that's right, you heard me. If you live in Iowa, you cannot be held accountable to UCITA, even if the EULA specifies that the license is enforced in a UCITA state.
The reasoning behind this is clear: no consumer contract can supersede State consumer protections. Since the State of Iowa has deemed UCITA to be dangerous, the Legislature has passed laws specifically to protect Iowans from UCITA.
Those laws wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Tom Miller pushing for them, hard, and educating a lot of the Legislature on the technical and legal implications of UCITA.
Everything created by the Feds exists in the public domain, yes; but public domain works can be used in GPLed programs. For instance, there are a great number of public domain "Hello World" programs out there. For instance, this one, which I hereby donate to the public domain:
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return sayHello();
}
... As can be seen, the second GPLed piece of software uses a line of code that's in the public domain. This doesn't make the second piece of software non-GPLed; it just means that the line containing the cout statement is in the public domain and, once removed from the software, is still public domain and not GPLed.
Depends entirely on how random the random data is. There's a surprising lot of random numbers which can be compressed--this almost always indicates a critical flaw in the random selection process. Even radioisotope-based RNGs aren't immune; by knowing the isotope, its age, and the sort of radiation detector being used, it's often possible to get a faint hint of determinism out of the RNG. That faint hint of determinism can be exploited to result in compressability... sometimes.
By and large you're right that random data can't be compressed. But getting really random data is a far-from-trivial undertaking.
Re:FAS is AGAINST nuclear weapons
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Fission in a Box
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Wrong.
Like Bungie says, "Sorry don't make it so". Neither does "wrong".
Yes, U-238 is quite common, but U-235 is NOT
Sure it is. It's about 0.1%, or thereabouts, as a percentage of the total mass fraction. If you've got a kilo of uranium, you've got a gram of U235 in there. Where's your problem? The difficulty is in refining, not procuring.
And what are you calling "fast-fissile material"?
Material which can undergo explosive fission easily.
If the US did not want someone to release scientific material, do you really think that they would sue them?
The Magic 8-Ball of History says... "Clearly, Yes". Ever heard of The Pentagon Papers? Ever heard of the New York Times? Ever heard of a couple of journalists named Woodward and Bernstein? All of these people and agencies came under withering governmental pressure to not publish information deemed harmful to the national security. The courts have historically been extremely hard to convince that national security overrides the First Amendment.
In matters of national security, the people would be arrested or worse...
Paranoid ranting from someone who's losing the arguments on merits, so he's turning this into an "if YOU only knew what I knew, YOU'D agree with me, too!". Sorry. I outgrew that mode of debate when I was in fifth grade.
When you are citing "proof" of your arguments, you should not use biased sources, or if you do, you should include a source from each side of the argument. The American Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists is a non-profit organization devoted to ENDING the arms race and is AGAINST nuclear weapons.
Just because they have a mission in life doesn't mean they're lying. I know a senior officer in the USAF who's in command of a missile silo. Let me tell you, nobody on Earth hates nukes as much as he does. If you think that ending the arms race makes FAS partial, then all I can imagine is that you don't want the arms race ended.
Buddy, everybody who's involved with nukes wants the arms race to end. Even Pat Buchanan wants the arms race to end. The only difference of opinion is how the arms race ought to end--by one side making a moral stand and unilaterally disarming, or both sides negotiating a mutual disarmament.
FAS wants the arms race stopped. So does SAC and NORAD and Dubya and Clinton and all of Congress. If you want me to find a source from a party that wants the arms race to go on, I'm sorry, there aren't any reliable sources out there.
All the people who want the arms race to go on are absofuckinglutely nuts, and the entire world knows it.
Re:You do not have the slightest clue
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Fission in a Box
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Most of the power in an H-bomb IS due to fusion
Wrong. Check out the Federation of American Scientists, who have a remarkably accurate FAQ on the matter. Check out this link for details.
Or, for those who are goatse.cx averse, I'll just reprint a snippet of the FAQ here: The 5 Mt Redwing Tewa test (20 July 1956 GMT, Bikini Atoll) had a fission fraction of 85%.
The next claim of yours--namely, "It is naive of anyone to believe that nuclear weapons design is common knowledge"--is just as absurd. The principles behind nuclear-weapons design are straightforward and are taught in college classrooms to undergraduates. In the height of the cold war, nuclear-weapons design was published in the open literature. One physicist might write a paper detailing the particular physical properties of compounds exposed to extremely high radiation flux and whatnot, comparable to those found in the heart of a star--a perfectly acceptable scientific article, but when you say "heart of a star" I hear "in a nuclear weapon undergoing supercriticality".
The Manhattan Project was chaired by General Leslie Groves of the Army Air Corps/USAF, but all the principals involved were scientists. Have you ever tried to get a scientist to keep something a secret? They can't. They're genetically incapable of secrecy. It's right there in their DNA sequence, somewhere in that giant double-helix, that says, "if it's cool and it furthers our understanding of the cosmos, I've GOT to tell people about it!"
As far back as the early 1980s, the magazine The Progressive was sued by the United States Government to prevent them from publishing extremely detailed specifications and schematics of nuclear weapons. The DOE only withdrew the lawsuit after it became clear that to get an injunction against The Progressive, they'd have to declassify even more documents and put even more weapons-design material into the public record.
In the Manhattan Project days, it was VERY difficult to obtain large amount (mere pounds) of weapons grade U-235 and plutonium.
No it wasn't. Uranium is a very common element. You can refine it out of granite, for crying out loud. The difficulty has never been in getting fast-fissile material; the difficulty has been in separating it out. Yes, centrifuging it all out is tremendously power-intensive, but if you want the bang, you gotta pay the buck.
The main reason most nations cannot produce nuclear weapons (specifically hydrogen-based nuclear weapons) is because they don't know how to arrange the materials
Nope. The engineering behind it is well-known. The difficulty comes in getting refined fissile material--world governments keep an excruciatingly close eye on stockpiles of refined fissile material (save in the former USSR, which is why it's a source of such concern to arms-proliferation wonks), and building facilities to refine raw material into enriched fissile material is considered extremely destabilizing to regional peace, and as such, is strongly discouraged.
Unfortunately, Ed, the poster is quite right. The First Amendment does protect anonymous political speech, just as it protects attributed political speech.
What the First Amendment does not protect is speech that is devoid of artistic, political, scientific or social value--such as libel. Such speech falls outside the purview of First Amendment protections a priori, and as such the question ot whether or not the First Amendment protects anonymous speech such as these is just trivial.
The Supreme Court has made it absolutely clear: the First Amendment protects speech, both attributed and unattributed, insofar as the speech possesses some sort of redeeming quality.
If I want to anonymously post a webpage about how Slashdot sucks, and I make my case with such withering accuracy that Slashdot's ad revenue drops off by fifty percent, would Slashdot have any legal recourse to force my ISP to divulge my identity?... Probably not.
Depends on whether or not my ISP can afford a court battle. And that's a far different legal issue.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government wants us to obey the law, the government really should set a better example.
:)
If the government wants us to be without guns, the government really should set us an example.
If the government wants <foo>, they should be prepared to <foo> first, to provide us with an example.
At least, that's my own personal political philosophy. Take it for what it's worth.
In American courtrooms, evidence which is obtained illegally is treated no different than any other evidence, as long as the government had no role in the illegality.
If the government played any role in the illegality, then the evidence is suppressed.
FBI agent Lou Horouchi participated in a cold blooded murder
His name is Lon Horiuchi. If you're going to slander a man's reputation, at least spell his name right.
The facts of the matter are very much disputed, depending on which side of the government-paranoia fence you are and how good your common-sense filters are. However, the founder of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, Danny Coulson, has publically described Horiuchi's experience as the "tortures of the damned".
First he was excoriated in an FBI inquiry; then a separate governmental inquiry exonerated him. Then he was indicted on manslaughter statutes for Vicki Weaver's death, and then a judge declared that Horiuchi was immune to prosecution because he was acting in good faith.
And just last month, a Federal appeals court set aside the immunity decision, clearing the way for Horiuchi to be tried.
Contrary to what you believe, Horiuchi is not out of the woods. Barring intervention from the Supreme Court, it is overwhelmingly likely that Horiuchi will soon be tried for manslaughter in the death of Vicki Weaver.
the FBI jackboot who is persecuting Sklyarov is up to become HEAD of the FBI!
Robert Swan Mueller III is the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. The charges against Sklyarov were pressed by one of his subordinates. It is overwhelmingly likely that Mueller was never consulted about the Sklyarov prosecution.
Again, if you're going to slander someone, then at least get which branch of the government they work for correct.
The next time you decide to rant off with your anti-government rhetoric, please do your research.
Heston's speech regarding the handgun is about human nature, not guns. Yes, Heston is an NRA bigwig. Heston is very opinionated on the subject of guns. If you'd ever read his writings on that subject, though, you'd discover that his speech surrounding the handgun was totally orthogonal to his gun-control beliefs.
Heston's speech was about the dangers of human nature; that it is human nature to develop ever-better tools, and to apply those ever-better tools to the task of killing things. This isn't hyperbole; it's fact. Every time we invent something new, it's only a matter of time before someone looks into how to use it for military purposes.
That's what Heston's speech in the remake was about. Beware humans, for they are hardwired to build and to destroy--and to build things which only exist to destroy.
- Strip searches.
- No possibility of parole
- Prison conditions
If you actually knew a damn thing about the way the system works, you'd have already known that the two things you're harping about aren't problems at all, and the biggest problem Dmitry faces (if convicted) is one that you were totally ignorant of.While body-cavity searches are sometimes necessary for the safety of the wardens and other prisoners, the Supreme Court has recognized that it's extraordinarily demeaning conduct. Dmitry is, as of this moment, an innocent man. The jailers are aware of that, as is the US Attorney, as is Dmitry's attorney, as is everyone else.
Convicts lose a great deal of their civil liberties. Innocent people, infinitely less so. Jail isn't pleasant, but it's a helluva lot more pleasant to be a presumed-innocent individual awaiting trial than a convict.
Ever since sentencing reform in the early '80s ('84, I think), there has been no parole anywhere in the Federal system. When you get convicted of a Federal offense, such as the DMCA, you don't get parole. If the judge says you do five years, well, guess what--you do five years.
Since Dmitry is a nonviolent offender, he would be a prime candidate for Club Fed treatment (minimum security facility, perks, etc.). However, there's a Bureau of Prisons directive in effect which says that BuPris considers all aliens to be flight risks. As such, BuPris categorically refuses to house aliens in minimum-security facilities. Real prison, real time, real lockup, alongside real serious offenders.
No, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a guy who does his research. I'd hope that Slashdot's editorial staff would do theirs, too.
Unfortunately, most feedback mechanisms employed by Fortune 500 companies don't have such mechanisms.
The Net, speaking generally, has no feedback mechanism. It has a really effective blowback mechanism, but that's it.
Feedback is when information--not data--is fed back into the system. If I'm learning how to SCUBA dive, I'll have a dive instructor watch me, critique my technique, and tell me what needs to change. That's feedback. He sees what I'm doing, separates the important from the unimportant, and gives me information back. This changes the behavior of the system for the better, and I become a competent SCUBA diver.
Blowback is when data--not information--is fed back into the system. Data, devoid of meaning. Noise, not signal. If I learn to SCUBA dive by listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn albums, well, I'm going to have a very short dive career.
The Net is a great source of data, but it's a mediocre source of information. Many sites are filled, not with people who want to carefully critique and correct each other's posts to separate out gold from dross, but a bunch of people who want to scream ``Me, Too!'' and get on Ye Olde Bandwagon... whatever the bandwagon is.
There's an old joke about two paranoids walking down the street. One of them stops and points at an innocent, innocuous shrub. "Who's in that shrub?" the first paranoid asks. The second paranoid answers, "I dunno, but I think I know the guy in there with him!"
... Blowback, not feedback.
Substitute "two loser Linux guys" for paranoids, and "Microsoft" for the shrubbery, and you've got a pretty good description of the behavior we've all seen and condemned.
A few sites--not many, but some, Slashdot among them--have tried to implement feedback mechanisms in an attempt to limit the damage blowback can cause. Moderation and meta-moderation are SLashdot's feedback mechanism.
It's a pretty badly broken mechanism, of course, but it's a helluvalot better than nothing.
Horse hockey.
Sometime, take a look at Revolutionary War pamphlets and newsletters published by the Revolutionaries. The majority of them were published anonymously, out of fear the government would come after the authors and their families.
Anonymous free speech has a long and distinguished history in the United States, predating even the Constitution itself. Every Federal judge in the country knows this, and I doubt that a single one of them would want to remove the right to anonymous free speech, given its important role in our history.
Really nice guy, too. In '93 I wrote him a letter and asked him what the status of the Nemesis Hypothesis was, and he wrote a very nice and thorough reply in which he indicated that Hipparcos, a satellite which was supposed to resolve it once and for all, suffered an instrumentation failure. They were falling back to a manual sky-search and were hoping to have it done by 2000.
Given that it's now 2001 and we haven't heard anything, I think we can conclude either
- The search is taking far longer than expected
- Fundamental problems in the search methods kept it from being a productive observation
- The search was concluded and nothing was found, and Nemesis is pretty much a dead theory
... That being said, Richard Mueller is a very serious scientist. It angers me when I hear people call him a kook for the Nemesis Hypothesis (not that the original poster did).The Nemesis Hypothesis was classic scientific work. It was a blindingly creative look at a very difficult problem. It explained past observations and made predictions for future observations. The hypothesis was, is, testable (admittedly, not easily testable).
Compare this to superstring theory, which has no observational support, no experimental support, no predictions for future observations. While I like superstring theory--it's a really cool thought exercise--it's not science.
So why is it so many hail Brian Greene (superstring theory luminary) as the next Einstein, and in the next breath condemn Mueller as a kook?
Python 2.1 is free software; it is simply not GPL-compatible free software, due to the clause which specifies Virginia as the state of jurisdiction. Python 2.1 meets every single freedom listed in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Please don't spout FUD regarding Python's license. Instead, call a spade a spade and say, "Python is free software, but is not GPL-compatible. In this sense, it's no worse than the Mozilla Public License."
Try checking out the __add__, __radd__, __mul__, __rmul__, __div__, __rdiv__, etc. methods in Python. If you want to override the "*" operator for a class, all you have to do is write your own __mul__ (and, optionally, __rmul__) method and presto, operator overloading.
If you're going to bash a language, you really should make it a point to at least learn the language first.
These decisions hold very little weight
On the contrary--they hold tremendous weight! An appellate court's role is strictly limited: did the defendant receive a fair trial? Is the law Constitutional? Was the law fairly applied?
Appellate courts don't revisit the facts of the case. They only evaluate the propriety of the trial, nothing more.
Lawyers are actually a minority in Congress; there are more businessmen there now than lawyers.
Not only that, the government is made up of the people--and it's not true that 90% of the people are lawyers.
If the American public really wanted that sort of legal reform, rest assured, the American public would get it. When the American public wakes up from its slumber and tells the politicians, very clearly, what they're going to do or else, politicians scurry to obey the great Leviathan that's the body politic.
Unfortunately, 90% of Americans can't be bothered to give a damn about anything in law or government.
That's where the real tragedy is.
Many compilers do honor the register keyword. They don't automatically store the variable in a register, but the variable does get marked as needing a high degree of optimization.
I prefer to write applications in Perl or Python, myself. Once the app is at a usable state, I run it through a profiler to see where the bottlenecks are. If the bottlenecks can't be opened up by tweaking the code and algorithm, then I code the bottlenecks in C or C++ and call them from Perl/Python.
Code spends 90% of its time in the same 10% of code. So this technique actually winds up working pretty well.
Remember that C is a lot more than a language. A lot of people overlook one of the most important features of the language--namely, the preprocessor. In C++, the preprocessor by itself is a Turing environment; any computing task which you can think of, you can do in the preprocessor alone just by giving it some particularly weird templates to compile.
How does a scripting language plan on implementing the preprocessor? If it doesn't, then should it really have "C-like" in the name?
The other issue is... what's the point? I hate to tell people this, but C/C++ are two of the worst languages on the planet. I say this as a long-time C++ hacker and C++ enthusiast: the languages are awful. There are pointers all over the place, there's God-knows how many levels of indirection, there's detailed memory management... C/C++ are so powerful because they give you such fine-grained control over every aspect of the CPU. But they're cast-iron bitches to program in, because they're so intolerant of any error.
Scripting languages, on the other hand, are inefficient. They're slow. But they're also wonderful to program in as a result--their syntax isn't as rigorous, there's very little memory management to be had, there's no need to know the difference between the register and auto keywords, or the difference an inline amd a macro.
A C-like scripting language seems like the worst of both worlds. You've got the pedantic syntax and attention to detail of C, and the lackluster performance of a scripting language.
What's the point?
Right there, you lose half your argument. Moving on, we see you say that:
... The problem is you're assuming that Microsoft is the arbiter of what a contractual obligation consists of. Microsoft is not, and not even Microsoft's lawyers would claim to be. The only organization with any authority to determine what is or is not a contractual obligation is a court of law.
This means that Microsoft may very well have contractual obligations via their EULA. It's a well-established proposition of law that there is no contractual obligation which can withstand the scrutiny of consumer-protection legislation. If Microsoft says in their EULA that they have no liability whatsoever for their incredibly shoddy products, and a legislature decides that businesses are responsible for their shoddy products, well, guess what: that part of the EULA is null and void.
Does the EULA free Microsoft from having to provide technical support? Absolutely not. I'm willing to bet that if Microsoft released an incredibly shoddy product and refused to support it, a court would find that Microsoft was engaging in fraudulent business practices. Their disclaimer of "no warranty expressed or implied" wouldn't hold up worth a damn against a serious consumer-fraud case.
Now, it just so happens that antitrust law is soundly Constitutional; antitrust law rests squarely on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the ability to regulate trade among the states. Antitrust law is an interstate trade regulation, thus, Constitutional. A lot of free-marketers like to claim otherwise, but the Supreme Court hasn't been too kind to their attitudes.
I'm running a stock Red Hat 7.1 box; the only mods are that I'm running GNOME 1.4, Mozilla 0.9.1 (which broke parts of Nautilus), and I've got Python 2.1 installed.
#!/usr/bin/env python
... will always run Python 1.5.x, and
#!/usr/bin/env python2
... will always run Python 2.1.
In other words, exactly what is it that you're complaining about here? Seems to me like you're whining over a problem which doesn't even exist.
In '93 I went to Germany and flew Northwest/KLM. I figured that, given that it was a very long flight, it'd be worth my time to sign up for a Frequent Flyer program. The woman behind the desk was helpful, but she was so tired I thought she was going to fall asleep on me.
:)
So I decided to liven things up some, with dialogue I hoped would get a laugh out of her.
"Name?"
Robert Hansen, thanks.
"Middle initial?"
J.
"Company?"
The Society of Evil Geniuses Working Together for a Better Tomorrow.
"... I'm sorry, sir. That won't fit."
Okay. "Society of Evil Geniuses" will work.
"Thank you, sir. Job title?"
God-Emperor of the Infinite Multiverse. God-Emperor will do, if it won't fit otherwise...
"It won't. Please wait a minute while we get you entered into our system... there. Have a nice flight, God-Emper..."
At that moment, about five seconds after she entered me into the database, she realized what happened. She started laughing so hard she collapsed on the floor.
Today, I still get mail from Northwest/KLM addressed to "God-Emperor Robert Hansen, Society of Evil Geniuses".
My postman must think I'm some kind of weirdo.
All Federal courts are created equal in all regards except jurisdiction. A District Court covers only a state, or portions of a state. A Circuit Court (also called a Court of Appeals) covers many Districts, and their decisions supersede those of District Courts. The Supreme Court covers all Circuits and Districts, both in the United States and all its territories, and the Supreme Court's decisions supersede all others.
:)
But just because the Supreme Court's decision-making capability supersedes that of a local District Court, don't think--not for an instant--that a District Court lacks power and authority. All the powers the Supreme Court has at its disposal are vested in the District Court, within the District Court's area of jurisdiction.
(Now, the Supreme Court does have different jurisdiction from District and Circuit Courts, including a little nugget called "original jurisdiction". But that's not the same as the Supreme Court having any additional powers than the lower courts.)
As an example of a District Court finding law to be unconstitutional, Judge Marilyn Patel, operating out of California, found portions of United States export policy to be unconstitutional--and thus, null and void--in Bernstein v US.
Bernstein was the case which demolished many of the restrictions on the export of cryptography, so it's naturally of interest to Slashdotters.
A lot of people condemn Iowa as being a tech backwater. And, well, really, it is. I speak with authority, since I grew up there and fled Iowa after getting my CompSci degree; there just weren't any tech jobs there that I thought were worth having.
But there are some surprisingly clued-in politicians in Iowa when it comes to tech matters. Iowa attorney general Tom Miller is, IMO, one of the finest state AGs in the nation on tech issues. When UCITA had a full-court press going on it, Tom Miller advised the Iowa legislature that UCITA would ultimately be bad for customers; and, taking Miller's advice, the Iowa legislature passed an anti-UCITA law, making it very clear that Iowa not only does not have anything to do with UCITA, but has passed safe-harbor statutes specifying that Iowa consumers cannot be bound by UCITA.
Yes, that's right, you heard me. If you live in Iowa, you cannot be held accountable to UCITA, even if the EULA specifies that the license is enforced in a UCITA state.
The reasoning behind this is clear: no consumer contract can supersede State consumer protections. Since the State of Iowa has deemed UCITA to be dangerous, the Legislature has passed laws specifically to protect Iowans from UCITA.
Those laws wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Tom Miller pushing for them, hard, and educating a lot of the Legislature on the technical and legal implications of UCITA.
Everything created by the Feds exists in the public domain, yes; but public domain works can be used in GPLed programs. For instance, there are a great number of public domain "Hello World" programs out there. For instance, this one, which I hereby donate to the public domain:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std::cout;
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
Now let's say that I want to write a piece of GPLed software, such as the following:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std::cout;
int sayHello(void)
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
return sayHello();
}
... As can be seen, the second GPLed piece of software uses a line of code that's in the public domain. This doesn't make the second piece of software non-GPLed; it just means that the line containing the cout statement is in the public domain and, once removed from the software, is still public domain and not GPLed.
Depends entirely on how random the random data is. There's a surprising lot of random numbers which can be compressed--this almost always indicates a critical flaw in the random selection process. Even radioisotope-based RNGs aren't immune; by knowing the isotope, its age, and the sort of radiation detector being used, it's often possible to get a faint hint of determinism out of the RNG. That faint hint of determinism can be exploited to result in compressability... sometimes.
By and large you're right that random data can't be compressed. But getting really random data is a far-from-trivial undertaking.
Wrong.
Like Bungie says, "Sorry don't make it so". Neither does "wrong".
Yes, U-238 is quite common, but U-235 is NOT
Sure it is. It's about 0.1%, or thereabouts, as a percentage of the total mass fraction. If you've got a kilo of uranium, you've got a gram of U235 in there. Where's your problem? The difficulty is in refining, not procuring.
And what are you calling "fast-fissile material"?
Material which can undergo explosive fission easily.
If the US did not want someone to release scientific material, do you really think that they would sue them?
The Magic 8-Ball of History says... "Clearly, Yes". Ever heard of The Pentagon Papers? Ever heard of the New York Times? Ever heard of a couple of journalists named Woodward and Bernstein? All of these people and agencies came under withering governmental pressure to not publish information deemed harmful to the national security. The courts have historically been extremely hard to convince that national security overrides the First Amendment.
In matters of national security, the people would be arrested or worse...
Paranoid ranting from someone who's losing the arguments on merits, so he's turning this into an "if YOU only knew what I knew, YOU'D agree with me, too!". Sorry. I outgrew that mode of debate when I was in fifth grade.
When you are citing "proof" of your arguments, you should not use biased sources, or if you do, you should include a source from each side of the argument. The American Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists is a non-profit organization devoted to ENDING the arms race and is AGAINST nuclear weapons.
Just because they have a mission in life doesn't mean they're lying. I know a senior officer in the USAF who's in command of a missile silo. Let me tell you, nobody on Earth hates nukes as much as he does. If you think that ending the arms race makes FAS partial, then all I can imagine is that you don't want the arms race ended.
Buddy, everybody who's involved with nukes wants the arms race to end. Even Pat Buchanan wants the arms race to end. The only difference of opinion is how the arms race ought to end--by one side making a moral stand and unilaterally disarming, or both sides negotiating a mutual disarmament.
FAS wants the arms race stopped. So does SAC and NORAD and Dubya and Clinton and all of Congress. If you want me to find a source from a party that wants the arms race to go on, I'm sorry, there aren't any reliable sources out there.
All the people who want the arms race to go on are absofuckinglutely nuts, and the entire world knows it.
Most of the power in an H-bomb IS due to fusion
Wrong. Check out the Federation of American Scientists, who have a remarkably accurate FAQ on the matter. Check out this link for details.
Or, for those who are goatse.cx averse, I'll just reprint a snippet of the FAQ here: The 5 Mt Redwing Tewa test (20 July 1956 GMT, Bikini Atoll) had a fission fraction of 85%.
The next claim of yours--namely, "It is naive of anyone to believe that nuclear weapons design is common knowledge"--is just as absurd. The principles behind nuclear-weapons design are straightforward and are taught in college classrooms to undergraduates. In the height of the cold war, nuclear-weapons design was published in the open literature. One physicist might write a paper detailing the particular physical properties of compounds exposed to extremely high radiation flux and whatnot, comparable to those found in the heart of a star--a perfectly acceptable scientific article, but when you say "heart of a star" I hear "in a nuclear weapon undergoing supercriticality".
The Manhattan Project was chaired by General Leslie Groves of the Army Air Corps/USAF, but all the principals involved were scientists. Have you ever tried to get a scientist to keep something a secret? They can't. They're genetically incapable of secrecy. It's right there in their DNA sequence, somewhere in that giant double-helix, that says, "if it's cool and it furthers our understanding of the cosmos, I've GOT to tell people about it!"
As far back as the early 1980s, the magazine The Progressive was sued by the United States Government to prevent them from publishing extremely detailed specifications and schematics of nuclear weapons. The DOE only withdrew the lawsuit after it became clear that to get an injunction against The Progressive, they'd have to declassify even more documents and put even more weapons-design material into the public record.
In the Manhattan Project days, it was VERY difficult to obtain large amount (mere pounds) of weapons grade U-235 and plutonium.
No it wasn't. Uranium is a very common element. You can refine it out of granite, for crying out loud. The difficulty has never been in getting fast-fissile material; the difficulty has been in separating it out. Yes, centrifuging it all out is tremendously power-intensive, but if you want the bang, you gotta pay the buck.
The main reason most nations cannot produce nuclear weapons (specifically hydrogen-based nuclear weapons) is because they don't know how to arrange the materials
Nope. The engineering behind it is well-known. The difficulty comes in getting refined fissile material--world governments keep an excruciatingly close eye on stockpiles of refined fissile material (save in the former USSR, which is why it's a source of such concern to arms-proliferation wonks), and building facilities to refine raw material into enriched fissile material is considered extremely destabilizing to regional peace, and as such, is strongly discouraged.
Unfortunately, Ed, the poster is quite right. The First Amendment does protect anonymous political speech, just as it protects attributed political speech.
... Probably not.
What the First Amendment does not protect is speech that is devoid of artistic, political, scientific or social value--such as libel. Such speech falls outside the purview of First Amendment protections a priori, and as such the question ot whether or not the First Amendment protects anonymous speech such as these is just trivial.
The Supreme Court has made it absolutely clear: the First Amendment protects speech, both attributed and unattributed, insofar as the speech possesses some sort of redeeming quality.
If I want to anonymously post a webpage about how Slashdot sucks, and I make my case with such withering accuracy that Slashdot's ad revenue drops off by fifty percent, would Slashdot have any legal recourse to force my ISP to divulge my identity?
Depends on whether or not my ISP can afford a court battle. And that's a far different legal issue.