We can extradite anyone who has broken our laws in our country from any country with which we have extradition treaties. This includes most countries in the world
Until Skylarov, I wouldn't have said this was an issue, as I'm sending a message from my country, using my software in that country - if someone from the USA reads it, not my problem.
Though this depends on the drafting of the law - is using the software an offence, or sending the message. If it's the sending of the message, I can imagine the US applying for extradition on the grounds someone sent an encrypted message into the US. If it's use of the software, they can't do anything about it.
Though moves like this have been talked about in Australia as well, so I could be stuffed either way (bring on winnowing & chaffing)..
The ideal of "freedom and justice for all" is more important than any number of American lives
What, all of them?
This is a great country. It's worth our blood to keep it that way.
Read Catch-22. No ideal is worth dying for, because any ideal that relies on your death is not worth defending (this is Pratchett more than Catch-22).
For a cause you shouldn't die, but live as long as you can, and work for that ideal as hard as you can. I know this is offtopic, but the world has seen enough death in previous weeks, and I hate it when the first response is just to kill more people.
Yet not a single social science study, to my knowledge, has provided conclusive evidence that money contributions influence congressional votes to any large degree. There have been several such studies, taking various innovative approaches, and none have been able to point to statistically significant incidence of influence-peddling. Does this mean there is no influence-peddling in Congress? Of course not. Does it mean that influence peddling is probably not a systemic occurrence? Yes.
Could you post links to these studies - I'd be very interested to see a study that suggests that paying someone $50,000 won't change their opinions or the way they act. I'd also like to see who paid for the study - remember all those studies, paid for by tobacco companies, that 'showed' that smoking was harmless? Coming from a country where the government weaselling out of $800 of tax is considered front page news, the idea that those kind of contributions aren't going to seriously affect the judgement of these people sounds very very strange to me.
Or take it from the other side - would the industries be paying all this money to congressmen and women for _no_reason_? Just out of the goodness of their hearts? Even if the studies do hold out, they are against all common sense and knowledge of human nature. If someone paid _me_ $100,000 US, _I'd_ be their bitch.
And if you want a general overview of the particular areas in which there is fairly strong evidence of vote-buying, read http://www.theawfultruth.com/pimp/ and http://www.opensecrets.org for some examples. We're not talking double-blind scientific surveys here, but fairly strong correlations - Blue Shield pays $8 million, proposals for universal health care never get supported. NRA pays however much money, gun control is only paid lip service. This isn't social science - this is Occam's Razor.
The plane is a variant of the Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft manufactured by General Atomics and used by the U.S. Air Force.
The Predator is unpiloted. Completely, I believe. It flies, lands, and takes off all by itself. I believe it's similar to the Global Hawk, a surveillance plane that can fly an entire recon mission just from one person making two mouse clicks.
But they also say:
Wegener said the Altus II, which is controlled by pilots on the ground, still needed to clear a few hurdles
My own emphasis. Can anyone clarify this? They are calling it a robot plane (which to me suggests an unpiloted plane), but then they say it's remotely piloted (a rather different thing, I thought). My guess as to what it means is that either: a) they're going to make it unpiloted, but haven't yet, or b) It's 'sort of' piloted - it doesn't fly the whole mission by itself, but you have someone giving a good general idea of what to do most of the time.
Either way, a valuable project. It's through stuff like this that Artificial Intelligence, one of the most hyped up fields of research that ever existed, can have useful, visible products.
I thought one of the golden rules of any sort of engineering is that before you try to do something, work out whether you can do it or not. Then try. Otherwise, it's all just wasted effort.
Am I the only person who thinks the whole concept of e-book encryption with the goal of stopping dedicated piracy is pointless?
Encrypting the contents of a transmission between two parties so that no 3rd party can read it is do-able, and has always been the main thrust of encryption. But what people like Adobe and Microsoft are essentially trying to do is make it impossible for the second party to read the message - because as soon as you read the message, you can reproduce it.
Assume that Adobe/Microsoft encrypt this with something that will provably take an untenable amount of time to crack - say 1024-bit public key encryption (sorry, IANACryptologist, I don't know the proper term.). I won't be able to crack the book itself, but since it appears on the screen at some point, I'm going to be able to read it sooner or later - and I can copy it.E-book encryption is the equivalent of the club lock - it'll stop casual copiers, not the dedicated copier - and this approach will only work until the first dedicated copier writes a program to let everyone else do it.
The same is true of sound files, though maybe not to the same level, as the concept of digital watermarking can be applied. I still think the same rules apply. As a result, I can't help but think of the whole e-book and sound-file encryption push as smoke and mirrors, meant to convince people that bits can be made uncopyable.
Why did we let them in in the first place? They thought they were gonna get rich and make billions of dollars from the web doing stuff like extracting personal and private information and forcing us to buy stuff from insecure and badly administered web sites. We knew this was not what the internet was about, and we (most of us) knew there wasn't that much money to be made on it. So why did we let them do it? Is it because we wanted to "stick it to the man" without him realizing until it was too late?
Isn't it a bit greedy to try and keep the internet as a 'geeks-only' thing? We've got our patch - slashdot, tom's hardware, penny-arcade - but presumably all those people using AOL and MSN are actually getting something out of it. They may find out information they couldn't on TV. They may communicate with someone in a different state - in a different country, for no more than a local phone call. If it broadens their mind one iota, makes life that little bit better, then surely it's a good thing. And if not, I thought the internet was about freedom. If you stop the corporations from coming in, or the people who don't know computers too well, aren't you perpertrating the same ideology that the corporations have been creating for years?
Why do we keep trying to make it easier for people of lower IQ to use computers, especially when it just makes computers less useful? Just look at all those "Dummies" books that popped up (must be a lot of dummies out there).
Well, I'm sure all those people who use those dumbed-down computers are really disappointed they miss out on compiling their own kernels. That's so much fun. They may not know computers because they've never had the opportunity to have a computer before. Not everyone has $1000 lying around. Or maybe, they are actually good at other things (medicine, law, business, art, music) rather than computing. Perhaps they want a computer that just runs, all the time, without having to re-install or fix things or screw things up because you clicked in the wrong place. Hell, I'm sure plenty of people posting here own a computer like that - it's called a PS2, or a Dreamcast, or a 2600.
Whether we like them or not, the computer-illiterate will be with us. Surely it's better to deal with them rather than avoid them. Some of them might start listening to us, and if we want the world to change, we're going to have to do more than just preach to the choir.
Nah - it's because us Americans, for the most part, with notable exeptions, are lazy technophobes who have been convinced that if technology isn't "so easy a complete moron could use it", or doesn't look super-slick and glitzy, that it's not worth using.
Don't be so hard on America. The rest of the world's full of idiots as well. It's just we get to see more of them from America - how else would Jerry Springer keep making shows?
And for people that feel they "shouldn't be bothered" with pr0n or various disgusting content sites - here's a clue: "Don't go back there if you didn't like what you've seen there!"
Does anyone else get the feeling sometimes that the so-called 'moral crusaders' are actually just very very sexually repressed? From most of their speeches on how easy it is to find pr0n on the net, they've been spending a lot more time looking for it than I..er.. my friends have.
I can imagine them now... "Let's try topheavybabes.com... oh! How disgusting! What about bigvaginas.com... oh! That's even MORE disgusting... Damn all this research I have to do."
You fucking ignoramous, the government *IS* the guy with the gun telling you what to do, do you want the sky to be aqua or pale blue? Definitely pale blue. Infinitely better than that terrible and obviously diametrically opposed aqua.
No I don't mean government as metaphoric guy with gun. I mean absolute guy with gun. There are guys with guns who work for the government, but none of them have pointed them at me. Government is supposed to protect us from the absolute guy with gun and the fact that I haven't seen one yet suggests they're doing an alright job. If they weren't, I'd guess that some guy with a gun would be taking ALL my money and threatening my freedoms. I would suggest the difference between these two states is rather broad.
I would be interested to see the system you propose in which some form of social order, social freedom, and free enterprise is maintained without some power, in the end, coming down to the hands of a few. I'd be all for it if it worked.
It is this sort of relatively stupid attempt at an overly Draconian long-arm statute law that will eventually destroy respect for the judiciary and could conceivably backfire.
IANAL, but this hasn't even involved statute yet - it is a judge's ruling on existing defamation statutes. Hopefully the Victorian government will realise how stupid this is and draft a statute to stop this - not that I'm holding my breath or anything.
This tanker was in Australian waters.
No cross-border rights involved. And the captain DID ask for assistance for Australia. Maybe he didn't get was he was expecting, but Australia didn't violate anyone else's borders. They are very, very careful about that.
freedom in this example would be fairly obvious, the freedom to not attend some ridiculous farcical attempt at an emulation of the flawed ideal of democracy.
So tell me where this wonderful, perfect democracy is, buddy. Where? THE WORLD IS NOT A PERFECT PLACE. THe Australian system is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of places - take the USA for example.
Australia is more democratic than USA because of:
a) EVERY vote is hand-counted.
b) The elections are overseen by an independent, non-party-affiliated body - the Australian Electoral Commission. Not, say as in the US, the BROTHER of one of the candidates.
c) The voting system is completely identical throughout the country. None of those 'drafting irregularities' you get in the US.
d) How about the fact that almost every senator in the US country is receiving SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS every year from 'lobby groups'. In Australia, we get in a big panic just becuase a senator accepts a few free airline tickets or a bottle of Grange.
The right, of course, is that is the government and it may do as it chooses, because it is in fact a dictatorship with smoke and mirrors in tow.
The government makes you do stuff. Well tough shit. Every single government in the world makes you do stuff. They take money from you as taxes, they make you do military service in wars, and you people are getting in a snit because Australia asks it's citizens to give an opinion every three years? Well, gee, I'm emigrating to the USA right now, so I have the right to sit and whine about how terrible the government is without having to accept any responsibility for it. Go talk to some people in Afghanistan, find out what a REAL dictatorship is, and STOP WHINING!
It is blatantly extortionate, no better than an organised criminal syndicate involved in racketeering where you get to choose the wiseguy with the best pinstripe suit to fuck you over on a regular basis.
So any government that forces it's citizens to do stuff is extortionate? How about ANY government then? Government's tell you to do stuff - that's what they're for. If the government wasn't there, it'd just be some guy with a gun telling you what to do, and frankly, I'd take government any time.
And once again you do not validate your claims by this example, you simply point out another example of blatant government extortion, the government of Australia taxes it's citizens at 48.5 percent over the minescule rate of 60,000$ per annum (that's about 30k USD, which is probably not far above the poverty line over there).
Well I make about $36,000 before tax. I have my own new car, I live in a high-quality inner-city suburb and go out to dinner most weekends. There's a little thing called 'cost of living' - a hell of a lot smaller here than there.
And you ignore that as an Australian citizen, I am entitled to a quality school education for less than $200 a year, an interest-free loan for all of college, and adequate government health-care. That money does acutally go toward something, you know.
I don't like some of the Australian government's decisions. I'm sure it could be improved. But to assume anything compulsory results in a dictatorship is a naive viewpoint that appears to be based on very little knowledge of the Australian political system, or any political system for that matter. Considering that the secret ballot is in fact known as the 'Australian Ballot', since we invented the thing, and that Australians are generally part of UN election-monitring groups, I'd suggest that the general world view is that we know a thing or two about free elections. And I'd suggest if you want to accuse anywhere in the world of being a dictatorship, pick somewhere were the most wealthy 5% pick the leader, rather than somewhere where 100% pick the leader.
And how do we interpret it strictly? Should we re-draft it in C:
if (timestamp(law_drafted) > timestamp (offence)) constitutionality[law] = false;
(Computer Code not expressive speech, my arse)
The meaning of any document changes over time. You can't help this - the very meanings of the words change over time - in English more than any other language, probably. Any document of law is interpreted based on the wishes of the people in power of the time. They may only be able to bend it, not break it, but bend it they will.
No matter how good a constitution you have, without a fair and open government administering that constitution, the wishes of the drafters of the constitution will not be followed.
I remember once hearing something on Law and Order:
"What can the British tell us about justice? They don't even have a Bill of Rights!"
God that was hilarious.
Re:Finally, some news from Russia
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 1
The citizens of Russia probably don't have the same quality of information channels Westerners do, which is probably why it's taken this long for the first protests to be organized.
The Web was about political transformations, but not necessarily of the type the trite journalists of the Sunday NYT think. We had a Web service in Sarajevo in 1992 during the seige.
... And people in countries where the government wants to control information (say China, Afghanistan, Australia if some of the bloody stupid legislation gets up) can connect and read info from anywhere they want. The government can't control the information anymore. You can control Radio, control the papers, control the news, but you can't control the information from the internet. Surely if the internet is going to be assigned a 'purpose', this is it - that people anywhere in the world with an internet connection can communicate with people anywhere else in the world. It breaks the government monopoly on information. Why else do you think the governments of the world are so scared of it (think DMCA)?
Isn't there a simple answer? Americans are more efficient than other countries in allowing personal decisions even at a young age on future career plans - so those who are destined for scientific careers can go at it gung ho from first grade, and the others can basically ignore it and leave that science stuff to the science geeks.
To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler..." America's more efficient, yes, but this doesn't mean effective. How many kids get pushed into a certain career path because they are late bloomers, or their teacher doesn't understand them? Pigeonholing education means you train someone to do one thing in life - if it turns out they're no good at it, that's their career down the toilet. It also makes it more likely for whole SCHOOLS (*cough* inner-city public *cough*) to get pigeonholed and put into those blocks of scientific have-nots.
I'm now doing my PhD in AI. In Year 11, I wanted to be either an architect or a lawyer - both occupations I later turfed because either would have boring as hell for me (or so I was told) 3 years out of uni. So now I'm doing a PhD, and I'm pretty happy.
The point is, that I can't see how anyone _knows_ what they're going to do at grade 1 - hell, I didn't know what I was going to do in my PhD until about 2 months before I started. I was going to also do a degree in Physics - until I saw how insanely evil university Physics is to learn.
A point of the guy's article is that you shouldn't "leave that science stuff to the science geeks". I disagree with him about the importance of doctorate scientists in high school - I can't see what a doctor of physics could teach to a high-school kid that someone with a bachelor in physics couldn't. I think the whole focus on physics is tainted by self-interest - surely we should also be teaching these kids biology (real biology - that means evolution), chemistry, and computer science to function in the world as well. Especially the last, the way things are going (self-interest for me, I know). But his central point is one I agree with - that we shouldn't just partition society into the science geeks and the rest.
A lot of science & engineering undergraduates and postgraduates end up in areas such as consulting, where they don't use their scientific skills. Why? Because of their reasoning skills - science and engineering teach you to think, and approach problems, in a logical and complete manner. This is a life skill, dammit, and considering how much bullsh*t we get thrown in us through life, we should be teaching every kid how to look at problems in an objective manner.
on the other hand overall the balance is determined pretty well by market forces (how well are scientists paid, exactly?) - so maybe our system is just fine....
IAAMS (I Am A Moderate Socialist), but if we work on those grounds, we should spend every school day teaching kids how to play sport. Judging from what they get paid, that is obviously the most important occupation in our society. See what market forces have done to the american public school and health systems.
There is a nerd running in the US. His name is Ralph Nader. And I don't know his views on DMCA, but he's been condemning Microsoft before it was popular, and he's spent 40 years as a consumer advocate, fighting the power of big corporations. If you really want to run for office, talk to the US Green party.
The Green Party - it's not just tree-hugging hippie crap, you know.
Where is the moral difference between using force of a gun to steal from someone, and using the force of government (also a gun) to steal from someone?
By this analogy, aren't you stealing from them by driving on THEIR roads? Using THEIR power lines?
Governments ask money, but they repay this in services... infrastructure, education, health, law (yes, law is SUPPOSED to be a service to the people, to allow the protection of personal freedoms.. just this doesn't always happen). If they don't do this, there IS no government. They effectively don't exist.
The difference between more socialist countries (Canada, Australia, UK - hell, just about everyone) and the US is that you pay more, but you're supposed to get more - say, full education, full health care (not necessarily the best health care, but adequate), unemployment benefits.
Another ideological reason for socialist governments is the a government should be involved with all citizens - not in the totalitarian sort of way, but in a democratic way. The government does stuff for you, on a regular basis. If you don't like it, you can get involved and change it. Heck, we ARE the government, we picked these people. This link seems to have been lost in the US - the government is not representative of the people it rules.
This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma.
I'm starting to think that society in the future really will degenerate into a group of apathetic people who are only concerned with what they can buy, eat, or fuck.
What do you mean, degenerate?
Though on a more serious note, until 20 years ago the environment wasn't considered an issue. Until 40 or 50 years ago racism wasn't considered an issue. We were never a society of concerned, active, intelligent individuals - that's just nostalgia. What happens now is that we can SEE all these injustices happening, whereas in the old days we thought the world was a good place because we couldn't see these things happening. And a lot of people don't care - hell, that's always been true. Just history doesn't remember the ones that didn't care. Hopefully, they'll remember Slashdot. To quote Marilyn Manson:
The times haven't become more violent - they've become more televised.
Slashdot Mirror
We can extradite anyone who has broken our laws in our country from any country with which we have extradition treaties. This includes most countries in the world
Until Skylarov, I wouldn't have said this was an issue, as I'm sending a message from my country, using my software in that country - if someone from the USA reads it, not my problem.
Though this depends on the drafting of the law - is using the software an offence, or sending the message. If it's the sending of the message, I can imagine the US applying for extradition on the grounds someone sent an encrypted message into the US. If it's use of the software, they can't do anything about it.
Though moves like this have been talked about in Australia as well, so I could be stuffed either way (bring on winnowing & chaffing)..
Oh no, I'm sure they'll reverse the encryption backdoor laws.
Just after the someone finds out the backdoor, distributes it at www.backdoor.com, then sends out every congressmans' credit card number.
The ideal of "freedom and justice for all" is more important than any number of American lives
What, all of them?
This is a great country. It's worth our blood to keep it that way.
Read Catch-22. No ideal is worth dying for, because any ideal that relies on your death is not worth defending (this is Pratchett more than Catch-22). For a cause you shouldn't die, but live as long as you can, and work for that ideal as hard as you can. I know this is offtopic, but the world has seen enough death in previous weeks, and I hate it when the first response is just to kill more people.
Yet not a single social science study, to my knowledge, has provided conclusive evidence that money contributions influence congressional votes to any large degree. There have been several such studies, taking various innovative approaches, and none have been able to point to statistically significant incidence of influence-peddling. Does this mean there is no influence-peddling in Congress? Of course not. Does it mean that influence peddling is probably not a systemic occurrence? Yes.
Could you post links to these studies - I'd be very interested to see a study that suggests that paying someone $50,000 won't change their opinions or the way they act. I'd also like to see who paid for the study - remember all those studies, paid for by tobacco companies, that 'showed' that smoking was harmless? Coming from a country where the government weaselling out of $800 of tax is considered front page news, the idea that those kind of contributions aren't going to seriously affect the judgement of these people sounds very very strange to me.
Or take it from the other side - would the industries be paying all this money to congressmen and women for _no_reason_? Just out of the goodness of their hearts? Even if the studies do hold out, they are against all common sense and knowledge of human nature. If someone paid _me_ $100,000 US, _I'd_ be their bitch.
And if you want a general overview of the particular areas in which there is fairly strong evidence of vote-buying, read http://www.theawfultruth.com/pimp/ and http://www.opensecrets.org for some examples. We're not talking double-blind scientific surveys here, but fairly strong correlations - Blue Shield pays $8 million, proposals for universal health care never get supported. NRA pays however much money, gun control is only paid lip service. This isn't social science - this is Occam's Razor.
Anyone who's scared
of AI, don't worry so -
we can't do shit yet.
what scares me about
AI research is how much
hype and FUD appears.
The plane is a variant of the Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft manufactured by General Atomics and used by the U.S. Air Force.
The Predator is unpiloted. Completely, I believe. It flies, lands, and takes off all by itself. I believe it's similar to the Global Hawk, a surveillance plane that can fly an entire recon mission just from one person making two mouse clicks.
But they also say:
Wegener said the Altus II, which is controlled by pilots on the ground, still needed to clear a few hurdles
My own emphasis. Can anyone clarify this? They are calling it a robot plane (which to me suggests an unpiloted plane), but then they say it's remotely piloted (a rather different thing, I thought). My guess as to what it means is that either: a) they're going to make it unpiloted, but haven't yet, or b) It's 'sort of' piloted - it doesn't fly the whole mission by itself, but you have someone giving a good general idea of what to do most of the time.
Either way, a valuable project. It's through stuff like this that Artificial Intelligence, one of the most hyped up fields of research that ever existed, can have useful, visible products.
Yeah - I agree. That's why I said the same is true of these systems. They're maybe just a teeny bit less pointless.
I thought one of the golden rules of any sort of engineering is that before you try to do something, work out whether you can do it or not. Then try. Otherwise, it's all just wasted effort.
Am I the only person who thinks the whole concept of e-book encryption with the goal of stopping dedicated piracy is pointless?
Encrypting the contents of a transmission between two parties so that no 3rd party can read it is do-able, and has always been the main thrust of encryption. But what people like Adobe and Microsoft are essentially trying to do is make it impossible for the second party to read the message - because as soon as you read the message, you can reproduce it.
Assume that Adobe/Microsoft encrypt this with something that will provably take an untenable amount of time to crack - say 1024-bit public key encryption (sorry, IANACryptologist, I don't know the proper term.). I won't be able to crack the book itself, but since it appears on the screen at some point, I'm going to be able to read it sooner or later - and I can copy it.E-book encryption is the equivalent of the club lock - it'll stop casual copiers, not the dedicated copier - and this approach will only work until the first dedicated copier writes a program to let everyone else do it.
The same is true of sound files, though maybe not to the same level, as the concept of digital watermarking can be applied. I still think the same rules apply. As a result, I can't help but think of the whole e-book and sound-file encryption push as smoke and mirrors, meant to convince people that bits can be made uncopyable.
Why did we let them in in the first place? They thought they were gonna get rich and make billions of dollars from the web doing stuff like extracting personal and private information and forcing us to buy stuff from insecure and badly administered web sites. We knew this was not what the internet was about, and we (most of us) knew there wasn't that much money to be made on it. So why did we let them do it? Is it because we wanted to "stick it to the man" without him realizing until it was too late?
Isn't it a bit greedy to try and keep the internet as a 'geeks-only' thing? We've got our patch - slashdot, tom's hardware, penny-arcade - but presumably all those people using AOL and MSN are actually getting something out of it. They may find out information they couldn't on TV. They may communicate with someone in a different state - in a different country, for no more than a local phone call. If it broadens their mind one iota, makes life that little bit better, then surely it's a good thing. And if not, I thought the internet was about freedom. If you stop the corporations from coming in, or the people who don't know computers too well, aren't you perpertrating the same ideology that the corporations have been creating for years?
Why do we keep trying to make it easier for people of lower IQ to use computers, especially when it just makes computers less useful? Just look at all those "Dummies" books that popped up (must be a lot of dummies out there).
Well, I'm sure all those people who use those dumbed-down computers are really disappointed they miss out on compiling their own kernels. That's so much fun. They may not know computers because they've never had the opportunity to have a computer before. Not everyone has $1000 lying around. Or maybe, they are actually good at other things (medicine, law, business, art, music) rather than computing. Perhaps they want a computer that just runs, all the time, without having to re-install or fix things or screw things up because you clicked in the wrong place. Hell, I'm sure plenty of people posting here own a computer like that - it's called a PS2, or a Dreamcast, or a 2600.
Whether we like them or not, the computer-illiterate will be with us. Surely it's better to deal with them rather than avoid them. Some of them might start listening to us, and if we want the world to change, we're going to have to do more than just preach to the choir.
I apologise for being so harsh on you before, I just don't like being dismissed out of hand
Thanks. I did say flame on - I pretty much asked for it.
Nah - it's because us Americans, for the most part, with notable exeptions, are lazy technophobes who have been convinced that if technology isn't "so easy a complete moron could use it", or doesn't look super-slick and glitzy, that it's not worth using.
Don't be so hard on America. The rest of the world's full of idiots as well. It's just we get to see more of them from America - how else would Jerry Springer keep making shows?
And for people that feel they "shouldn't be bothered" with pr0n or various disgusting content sites - here's a clue: "Don't go back there if you didn't like what you've seen there!"
Does anyone else get the feeling sometimes that the so-called 'moral crusaders' are actually just very very sexually repressed? From most of their speeches on how easy it is to find pr0n on the net, they've been spending a lot more time looking for it than I..er.. my friends have.
I can imagine them now... "Let's try topheavybabes.com... oh! How disgusting! What about bigvaginas.com... oh! That's even MORE disgusting... Damn all this research I have to do."
You fucking ignoramous, the government *IS* the guy with the gun telling you what to do, do you want the sky to be aqua or pale blue? Definitely pale blue. Infinitely better than that terrible and obviously diametrically opposed aqua.
No I don't mean government as metaphoric guy with gun. I mean absolute guy with gun. There are guys with guns who work for the government, but none of them have pointed them at me. Government is supposed to protect us from the absolute guy with gun and the fact that I haven't seen one yet suggests they're doing an alright job. If they weren't, I'd guess that some guy with a gun would be taking ALL my money and threatening my freedoms. I would suggest the difference between these two states is rather broad.
I would be interested to see the system you propose in which some form of social order, social freedom, and free enterprise is maintained without some power, in the end, coming down to the hands of a few. I'd be all for it if it worked.
It is this sort of relatively stupid attempt at an overly Draconian long-arm statute law that will eventually destroy respect for the judiciary and could conceivably backfire.
IANAL, but this hasn't even involved statute yet - it is a judge's ruling on existing defamation statutes. Hopefully the Victorian government will realise how stupid this is and draft a statute to stop this - not that I'm holding my breath or anything.
Or get the CIA to kidnap the person in their own country, and smuggle them into the US? That's an old favourite.
This tanker was in Australian waters. No cross-border rights involved. And the captain DID ask for assistance for Australia. Maybe he didn't get was he was expecting, but Australia didn't violate anyone else's borders. They are very, very careful about that.
This isn't flamebait - it's irony (I'm hoping)...
Besides america wouldn't do that - they wouldn't get The Crocodile Hunter anymore
Okay.... FLAME ON!!
freedom in this example would be fairly obvious, the freedom to not attend some ridiculous farcical attempt at an emulation of the flawed ideal of democracy.
So tell me where this wonderful, perfect democracy is, buddy. Where? THE WORLD IS NOT A PERFECT PLACE. THe Australian system is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of places - take the USA for example.
Australia is more democratic than USA because of:
a) EVERY vote is hand-counted.
b) The elections are overseen by an independent, non-party-affiliated body - the Australian Electoral Commission. Not, say as in the US, the BROTHER of one of the candidates.
c) The voting system is completely identical throughout the country. None of those 'drafting irregularities' you get in the US.
d) How about the fact that almost every senator in the US country is receiving SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS every year from 'lobby groups'. In Australia, we get in a big panic just becuase a senator accepts a few free airline tickets or a bottle of Grange.
The right, of course, is that is the government and it may do as it chooses, because it is in fact a dictatorship with smoke and mirrors in tow.
The government makes you do stuff. Well tough shit. Every single government in the world makes you do stuff. They take money from you as taxes, they make you do military service in wars, and you people are getting in a snit because Australia asks it's citizens to give an opinion every three years? Well, gee, I'm emigrating to the USA right now, so I have the right to sit and whine about how terrible the government is without having to accept any responsibility for it. Go talk to some people in Afghanistan, find out what a REAL dictatorship is, and STOP WHINING!
It is blatantly extortionate, no better than an organised criminal syndicate involved in racketeering where you get to choose the wiseguy with the best pinstripe suit to fuck you over on a regular basis.
So any government that forces it's citizens to do stuff is extortionate? How about ANY government then? Government's tell you to do stuff - that's what they're for. If the government wasn't there, it'd just be some guy with a gun telling you what to do, and frankly, I'd take government any time.
And once again you do not validate your claims by this example, you simply point out another example of blatant government extortion, the government of Australia taxes it's citizens at 48.5 percent over the minescule rate of 60,000$ per annum (that's about 30k USD, which is probably not far above the poverty line over there).
Well I make about $36,000 before tax. I have my own new car, I live in a high-quality inner-city suburb and go out to dinner most weekends. There's a little thing called 'cost of living' - a hell of a lot smaller here than there.
And you ignore that as an Australian citizen, I am entitled to a quality school education for less than $200 a year, an interest-free loan for all of college, and adequate government health-care. That money does acutally go toward something, you know.
I don't like some of the Australian government's decisions. I'm sure it could be improved. But to assume anything compulsory results in a dictatorship is a naive viewpoint that appears to be based on very little knowledge of the Australian political system, or any political system for that matter. Considering that the secret ballot is in fact known as the 'Australian Ballot', since we invented the thing, and that Australians are generally part of UN election-monitring groups, I'd suggest that the general world view is that we know a thing or two about free elections. And I'd suggest if you want to accuse anywhere in the world of being a dictatorship, pick somewhere were the most wealthy 5% pick the leader, rather than somewhere where 100% pick the leader.
Are there any plans to introduce a computer interface to the transmitter box for the plantraco R/C blimps? I would LOVE this.
And how do we interpret it strictly? Should we re-draft it in C:
if (timestamp(law_drafted) > timestamp (offence)) constitutionality[law] = false;
(Computer Code not expressive speech, my arse)
The meaning of any document changes over time. You can't help this - the very meanings of the words change over time - in English more than any other language, probably. Any document of law is interpreted based on the wishes of the people in power of the time. They may only be able to bend it, not break it, but bend it they will.
No matter how good a constitution you have, without a fair and open government administering that constitution, the wishes of the drafters of the constitution will not be followed.
I remember once hearing something on Law and Order:
"What can the British tell us about justice? They don't even have a Bill of Rights!"
God that was hilarious.
The citizens of Russia probably don't have the same quality of information channels Westerners do, which is probably why it's taken this long for the first protests to be organized.
Sure they do. It's called Slashdot.
The Web was about political transformations, but not necessarily of the type the trite journalists of the Sunday NYT think. We had a Web service in Sarajevo in 1992 during the seige.
... And people in countries where the government wants to control information (say China, Afghanistan, Australia if some of the bloody stupid legislation gets up) can connect and read info from anywhere they want. The government can't control the information anymore. You can control Radio, control the papers, control the news, but you can't control the information from the internet. Surely if the internet is going to be assigned a 'purpose', this is it - that people anywhere in the world with an internet connection can communicate with people anywhere else in the world. It breaks the government monopoly on information. Why else do you think the governments of the world are so scared of it (think DMCA)?
Isn't there a simple answer? Americans are more efficient than other countries in allowing personal decisions even at a young age on future career plans - so those who are destined for scientific careers can go at it gung ho from first grade, and the others can basically ignore it and leave that science stuff to the science geeks.
To paraphrase Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler..." America's more efficient, yes, but this doesn't mean effective. How many kids get pushed into a certain career path because they are late bloomers, or their teacher doesn't understand them? Pigeonholing education means you train someone to do one thing in life - if it turns out they're no good at it, that's their career down the toilet. It also makes it more likely for whole SCHOOLS (*cough* inner-city public *cough*) to get pigeonholed and put into those blocks of scientific have-nots.
I'm now doing my PhD in AI. In Year 11, I wanted to be either an architect or a lawyer - both occupations I later turfed because either would have boring as hell for me (or so I was told) 3 years out of uni. So now I'm doing a PhD, and I'm pretty happy.
The point is, that I can't see how anyone _knows_ what they're going to do at grade 1 - hell, I didn't know what I was going to do in my PhD until about 2 months before I started. I was going to also do a degree in Physics - until I saw how insanely evil university Physics is to learn.
A point of the guy's article is that you shouldn't "leave that science stuff to the science geeks". I disagree with him about the importance of doctorate scientists in high school - I can't see what a doctor of physics could teach to a high-school kid that someone with a bachelor in physics couldn't. I think the whole focus on physics is tainted by self-interest - surely we should also be teaching these kids biology (real biology - that means evolution), chemistry, and computer science to function in the world as well. Especially the last, the way things are going (self-interest for me, I know). But his central point is one I agree with - that we shouldn't just partition society into the science geeks and the rest.
A lot of science & engineering undergraduates and postgraduates end up in areas such as consulting, where they don't use their scientific skills. Why? Because of their reasoning skills - science and engineering teach you to think, and approach problems, in a logical and complete manner. This is a life skill, dammit, and considering how much bullsh*t we get thrown in us through life, we should be teaching every kid how to look at problems in an objective manner.
on the other hand overall the balance is determined pretty well by market forces (how well are scientists paid, exactly?) - so maybe our system is just fine....
IAAMS (I Am A Moderate Socialist), but if we work on those grounds, we should spend every school day teaching kids how to play sport. Judging from what they get paid, that is obviously the most important occupation in our society. See what market forces have done to the american public school and health systems.
There is a nerd running in the US. His name is Ralph Nader. And I don't know his views on DMCA, but he's been condemning Microsoft before it was popular, and he's spent 40 years as a consumer advocate, fighting the power of big corporations. If you really want to run for office, talk to the US Green party.
The Green Party - it's not just tree-hugging hippie crap, you know.
Where is the moral difference between using force of a gun to steal from someone, and using the force of government (also a gun) to steal from someone?
By this analogy, aren't you stealing from them by driving on THEIR roads? Using THEIR power lines?
Governments ask money, but they repay this in services... infrastructure, education, health, law (yes, law is SUPPOSED to be a service to the people, to allow the protection of personal freedoms.. just this doesn't always happen). If they don't do this, there IS no government. They effectively don't exist.
The difference between more socialist countries (Canada, Australia, UK - hell, just about everyone) and the US is that you pay more, but you're supposed to get more - say, full education, full health care (not necessarily the best health care, but adequate), unemployment benefits.
Another ideological reason for socialist governments is the a government should be involved with all citizens - not in the totalitarian sort of way, but in a democratic way. The government does stuff for you, on a regular basis. If you don't like it, you can get involved and change it. Heck, we ARE the government, we picked these people. This link seems to have been lost in the US - the government is not representative of the people it rules.
This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma.
I'm starting to think that society in the future really will degenerate into a group of apathetic people who are only concerned with what they can buy, eat, or fuck.
What do you mean, degenerate?
Though on a more serious note, until 20 years ago the environment wasn't considered an issue. Until 40 or 50 years ago racism wasn't considered an issue. We were never a society of concerned, active, intelligent individuals - that's just nostalgia. What happens now is that we can SEE all these injustices happening, whereas in the old days we thought the world was a good place because we couldn't see these things happening. And a lot of people don't care - hell, that's always been true. Just history doesn't remember the ones that didn't care. Hopefully, they'll remember Slashdot. To quote Marilyn Manson:
The times haven't become more violent - they've become more televised.