think that this crackdown is silly as well and that there should be a focus on guns instead.
"Do it to Julia!"
But you should acknowledge that there is a relationship between seeing and doing. If there wasn't why am I constantly saturated by advertising? The concept is that if kids see a bunch of Nike and coke ads they will want to drink only coke and wear only nike shoes.
It didn't work on me, which may be why I tend to be disdainful of this line of argument. Yes, people need to develop a certain degree of mental toughness before confronting the seamier realities of the world, but this is ultimately a parental, not government, responsibility. /.
Unless there's something I don't know about, the MPAA (the group which rates movies) is not a gov't organization, it is a privately owned company that movie studios trust to rate their movies (well, trust is a bad term, but you get the idea).
Nominally true; however, the hand of government was pulling the strings ("clean up your act or we'll do it for you"). Remove the government's ability to apply such pressure, and consumers and sellers will find their own balance of rules (which can easily be modified by taking one's business elsewhere). /.
Most average people who are identified with the "religious right" simply want the government to leave them alone.
The problem is that the leadership of various "religious right" organizations has been hijacked by ambitious politicians who see an opportunity to use the obnoxious (and hence highly visible) minority of bigots and crazies as a springboard to power. /.
Katz went and mentioned libertarianism, then derides private business owners for setting rules for their own establishments. What gives?
Sure, governments are talking about regulating the theatre business, and in some locales, already are. But this wasn't the main point of the article. Rather, it bemoaned the fact the theatre owners were setting rules for their businesses.
Nominally "private" rules made under government duress are, to all intents and purposes, equivalent to government rules. If we lived in a country where the government is too weak to strongarm theaters (e.g. the sort of system allegedly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution) and a theater makes restrictive rules, then circumventing those rules would be a violation of property rights (not to mention unnecessary, since in that case you could simply find another theater with rules more to your liking). /.
How many of you have been virtually forced to get a "membership card" at your local supermarket?
Don't forget - Microsoft would be ruling right now if the government hadn't stepped in (as incompetently as it is though).
Stop hyperventalating; you'll ruin your lungs.
You show me some cases of someone being thrown in jail or shot because they refused to get a supermarket membership card or installed Linux instead of Windoze, and we'll talk. Until then, you're just making a particularly braindead attempt to equate petty (corporate) nuisances with serious (government) coercion.
If we don't like censorship, we can write to our representatives.
We can also do a rain dance, which will do about the same amount of good. /.
Since I refuse to believe that any of our elected representatives are actually stupid, it remains that you must have _some_ reasonable motive for retaining these inane, damaging, and futile controls. What that is, no one else can figure out; but we, the people of the United States, would certainly like to hear it.
Oh, some of us figured it out long ago -- it's to make the use of strong encryption enough of a PITA so that the government can continue to use Echelon-style driftnet fishing expeditions.
Of course, neither Weldon nor anybody else is going to 'fess up to that. /.
Shooting down the government's excuse (that the regs prevent the hob-goblin du jour from hiding behind strong crypto) is trivial in itself.
More fundamental is the government's actual reason for the restrictions (to hobble the process of building strong crypto into the communications infrastructure for routine use). For obvious reasons, the government does not wish to acknowledge this motivation; it would then be too obvious that the real agenda is to preserve the ability to pull COINTELPRO-style dirty tricks against law-abiding but annoying citizens.
Blowing away the excuse smokescreen is valuable not so much for refuting the government's official argument, which is so weak as to be a straw man, but for exposing the government's underlying dirty laundry. /.
Do all US Reprehensibles think the enemies of the US are stupid?
Perhaps -- it would be a textbook case of what psychologists call "projection".
Either is is blatently unconstitutional, or we need to shoot the buggers and start from scratch.
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
I'll say it again... it's time for us to head for the moon and live there.
Nah, let's send Weldon and his friends to the moon. Since they know so much more about how to properly manage technology than mere industry experts do, I'm sure they'll have no trouble at all extracting oxygen and water from the rocks and otherwise sustaining themselves there without any input from us geek peasants. /.
The USPS can claim one thing that FedEx, UPS, and e-mail can't: a cancelled stamp can be admitted in court as a certified document, unlike the others.
What the devil is a cancelled stamp supposed to certify? Certainly not the date of a document -- any idiot can mail himself an unsealed envelope and stuff something in it later. /.
Hey, that's nothing. I hear tell that the agribusiness interests have been sneaking foods made out of ATOMS onto grocery shelves, without so much as a warning label. /.
A little enclave of South American Nazis produces these people, as part of their ongoing efforts to produce a Master Race.
As you can see, the process is still in alpha testing. The brain in particular is very difficult to get just right, but they say they'll have the IQ up to 50 Real Soon Now.... /.
This old saw is very appropriate, but not in the way usually intended by people who trot it out. It originated in a case ( Schenck vs United States) which exemplifies the governmental habit of invoking phony hob-goblins as an excuse to infringe upon civil liberties.
By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards.
You seriously undermine your case by lumping together "families" and "communities". Families have certain natural prerogatives in raising children to the point where they are capable of independent judgment. Communities have no such prerogatives -- I am an unreconstructed unmutual when it comes to Hillary's Village. /.
The point (and, like Ellen deG, I do have one) is that these examples are localized; I agree with the general sentiment that "law and order" regimes^h^h^h^h^h^h^h administrations generally have this kind of worry behind them, but the abuses usually seem to be localized (yes I have heard of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Freemen).
One word is the key to distinguishinging between a basically decent system tainted by occasional abuse on the one hand and a corrupt system characterized by abuse on the other. That word is "consequences".
The cop who raped Abner Louima is (according to what I recall from recent news accounts) in prison, where he belongs. Lon Horiuchi (the Ruby Ridge sniper) and Larry Potts (the issuer of the death order) are free to walk the streets, where they manifestly do not belong. /.
there needs to be a longle-term solution too, and it is THERE where the internet taxt would come in.
On the contrary, subsidies are the very thing that would forestall long-term solutions, which must ultimately come from the local people building a society in which development and investment are worthwhile options. Attempts to fix problems from outside just don't "take", which is why they are only useful in short-term emergency situations. /.
Goverments pay for the police and public education among other things.
Police are a good thing when their authority is restricted to the few laws on the books in a free society. However, they are a mixed blessing at best when their authority has bloated to its current extent. That's what causes the widespread instant gut reaction of antipathy towards any new government initiative.
As for the public education system, don't even get me started.
Getting back to the subject, it's hardly realistic to suppose that an Internet initiative sponsored by the UN, most of whose member states are kleptocratic fiefdoms, is going to respect the basic pro-freedom perspective of Net culture. Fortunately, this one is going nowhere, since its vacuousness is obvious even to politicians. /.
I do hope Seth Finkelstein doesn't throw his shoulder patting himself on the back, but the fact is that his statement is not at all "informative". Every account of this matter I've seen describes it as a "proposal", and all he does is repeat at length that it is, in fact, a "proposal". /.
They don't need UN or NATO-soldiers to enforce some peace-deal between two clans, but need a economic enviroment in which in makes more sence to work together and not fight another (civil or inter-state) war.
The only way to create such an economic environment is to provide security for investments. If any newly created profits is simply going to be destroyed in civil strife or stolen by crooks (either freelance or government), obviously nobody is going to bother creating anything.
Infusions of money through this or any other hare-brained scheme would actually retard this process, by propping up the kleptocratic regimes that are a large part of the problem (as I said, why bother building a communications infrastructure, or anything else, if the Maximum Supreme People's Leader would just confiscate it and give it to his second cousin's brother-in-law? /.
What's wrong with the idea that rich people pay towards the common good?
If you see a strong correlation between what governments buy with tax money and any sort of "common good", I have to wonder what color the sky is in your world. /.
Re:The problem is that it's not bloated enough!
on
All Hail Bloatware
·
· Score: 1
>Software companies take your wish lists >seriously, and then make them happen.
I wish for a program that saves to the file format of the previous four or five generations of this software.
"We've added a German-loanword mode that automagically converts 'ae', 'oe', and 'ue' to 'ä', 'ö', and 'ü' as you type them."
I said, I wish for a program that saves to the file format of the previous four or five generations of this software.
"We also upgraded the line-spacing feature so that you can set leading in barleycorns as well as the old inches, centimeters, millimeters, and points."
DAMN IT! I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAVE TO OLDER FILE FORMATS!!!
"And look at this dancing paperclip animation...."
[Narn Bat Squad mercifully enters the scene at this point to put the salesdroid out of our misery.] /.
The idea of a quantum computer, if I'm reading all this correctly, is to set up a set of particles in such a way that their wave functions will collapse into a configuration that corresponds to the answer to a given problem.
How difficult is it to do this setup?
Given that the experiments I've heard of are on the 2+2=4 level, how do we know that the difficulty of setting up a quantum computer to factor a specific 1024-bit number isn't comparable to the difficulty of doing the factoring by deterministic algorithms? /.
Am I really getting to be an old fart just because I don't think this stuff is that funny?
Nope; you just see through the pretension. Writing a long stream of cusswords is a lot easier than writing Swiftian satire -- doing the former and getting credit for the latter is a great scam if you can pull it off. /.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do it to Julia!"
But you should acknowledge that there is a relationship between seeing and doing. If there wasn't why am I constantly saturated by advertising? The concept is that if kids see a bunch of Nike and coke ads they will want to drink only coke and wear only nike shoes.
It didn't work on me, which may be why I tend to be disdainful of this line of argument. Yes, people need to develop a certain degree of mental toughness before confronting the seamier realities of the world, but this is ultimately a parental, not government, responsibility.
/.
Nominally true; however, the hand of government was pulling the strings ("clean up your act or we'll do it for you"). Remove the government's ability to apply such pressure, and consumers and sellers will find their own balance of rules (which can easily be modified by taking one's business elsewhere).
/.
The problem is that the leadership of various "religious right" organizations has been hijacked by ambitious politicians who see an opportunity to use the obnoxious (and hence highly visible) minority of bigots and crazies as a springboard to power.
/.
Sure, governments are talking about regulating the theatre business, and in some locales, already are. But this wasn't the main point of the article. Rather, it bemoaned the fact the theatre owners were setting rules for their businesses.
Nominally "private" rules made under government duress are, to all intents and purposes, equivalent to government rules. If we lived in a country where the government is too weak to strongarm theaters (e.g. the sort of system allegedly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution) and a theater makes restrictive rules, then circumventing those rules would be a violation of property rights (not to mention unnecessary, since in that case you could simply find another theater with rules more to your liking).
/.
Don't forget - Microsoft would be ruling right now if the government hadn't stepped in (as incompetently as it is though).
Stop hyperventalating; you'll ruin your lungs.
You show me some cases of someone being thrown in jail or shot because they refused to get a supermarket membership card or installed Linux instead of Windoze, and we'll talk. Until then, you're just making a particularly braindead attempt to equate petty (corporate) nuisances with serious (government) coercion.
If we don't like censorship, we can write to our representatives.
We can also do a rain dance, which will do about the same amount of good.
/.
What the devil is an "economical crime"? Is that one where the crook gets his ski mask and gloves at a thrift store?
/.
Oh, some of us figured it out long ago -- it's to make the use of strong encryption enough of a PITA so that the government can continue to use Echelon-style driftnet fishing expeditions.
Of course, neither Weldon nor anybody else is going to 'fess up to that.
/.
More fundamental is the government's actual reason for the restrictions (to hobble the process of building strong crypto into the communications infrastructure for routine use). For obvious reasons, the government does not wish to acknowledge this motivation; it would then be too obvious that the real agenda is to preserve the ability to pull COINTELPRO-style dirty tricks against law-abiding but annoying citizens.
Blowing away the excuse smokescreen is valuable not so much for refuting the government's official argument, which is so weak as to be a straw man, but for exposing the government's underlying dirty laundry.
/.
Perhaps -- it would be a textbook case of what psychologists call "projection".
Either is is blatently unconstitutional, or we need to shoot the buggers and start from scratch.
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
I'll say it again... it's time for us to head for the moon and live there.
Nah, let's send Weldon and his friends to the moon. Since they know so much more about how to properly manage technology than mere industry experts do, I'm sure they'll have no trouble at all extracting oxygen and water from the rocks and otherwise sustaining themselves there without any input from us geek peasants.
/.
What the devil is a cancelled stamp supposed to certify? Certainly not the date of a document -- any idiot can mail himself an unsealed envelope and stuff something in it later.
/.
Hey, that's nothing. I hear tell that the agribusiness interests have been sneaking foods made out of ATOMS onto grocery shelves, without so much as a warning label.
/.
A little enclave of South American Nazis produces these people, as part of their ongoing efforts to produce a Master Race.
As you can see, the process is still in alpha testing. The brain in particular is very difficult to get just right, but they say they'll have the IQ up to 50 Real Soon Now....
/.
This old saw is very appropriate, but not in the way usually intended by people who trot it out. It originated in a case ( Schenck vs United States ) which exemplifies the governmental habit of invoking phony hob-goblins as an excuse to infringe upon civil liberties.
By saying "open the floodgates" to pornography, with no ability to do blocking, you have circumvented the ability of communities and of families to make and enforce their own decisions about what constititues community and family standards.
You seriously undermine your case by lumping together "families" and "communities". Families have certain natural prerogatives in raising children to the point where they are capable of independent judgment. Communities have no such prerogatives -- I am an unreconstructed unmutual when it comes to Hillary's Village.
/.
One word is the key to distinguishinging between a basically decent system tainted by occasional abuse on the one hand and a corrupt system characterized by abuse on the other. That word is "consequences".
The cop who raped Abner Louima is (according to what I recall from recent news accounts) in prison, where he belongs. Lon Horiuchi (the Ruby Ridge sniper) and Larry Potts (the issuer of the death order) are free to walk the streets, where they manifestly do not belong.
/.
On the contrary, subsidies are the very thing that would forestall long-term solutions, which must ultimately come from the local people building a society in which development and investment are worthwhile options. Attempts to fix problems from outside just don't "take", which is why they are only useful in short-term emergency situations.
/.
Police are a good thing when their authority is restricted to the few laws on the books in a free society. However, they are a mixed blessing at best when their authority has bloated to its current extent. That's what causes the widespread instant gut reaction of antipathy towards any new government initiative.
As for the public education system, don't even get me started.
Getting back to the subject, it's hardly realistic to suppose that an Internet initiative sponsored by the UN, most of whose member states are kleptocratic fiefdoms, is going to respect the basic pro-freedom perspective of Net culture. Fortunately, this one is going nowhere, since its vacuousness is obvious even to politicians.
/.
I do hope Seth Finkelstein doesn't throw his shoulder patting himself on the back, but the fact is that his statement is not at all "informative". Every account of this matter I've seen describes it as a "proposal", and all he does is repeat at length that it is, in fact, a "proposal".
/.
The only way to create such an economic environment is to provide security for investments. If any newly created profits is simply going to be destroyed in civil strife or stolen by crooks (either freelance or government), obviously nobody is going to bother creating anything.
Infusions of money through this or any other hare-brained scheme would actually retard this process, by propping up the kleptocratic regimes that are a large part of the problem (as I said, why bother building a communications infrastructure, or anything else, if the Maximum Supreme People's Leader would just confiscate it and give it to his second cousin's brother-in-law?
/.
If you see a strong correlation between what governments buy with tax money and any sort of "common good", I have to wonder what color the sky is in your world.
/.
>seriously, and then make them happen.
I wish for a program that saves to the file format of the previous four or five generations of this software.
"We've added a German-loanword mode that automagically converts 'ae', 'oe', and 'ue' to 'ä', 'ö', and 'ü' as you type them."
I said, I wish for a program that saves to the file format of the previous four or five generations of this software.
"We also upgraded the line-spacing feature so that you can set leading in barleycorns as well as the old inches, centimeters, millimeters, and points."
DAMN IT! I WANT TO BE ABLE TO SAVE TO OLDER FILE FORMATS!!!
"And look at this dancing paperclip animation...."
[Narn Bat Squad mercifully enters the scene at this point to put the salesdroid out of our misery.]
/.
How difficult is it to do this setup?
Given that the experiments I've heard of are on the 2+2=4 level, how do we know that the difficulty of setting up a quantum computer to factor a specific 1024-bit number isn't comparable to the difficulty of doing the factoring by deterministic algorithms?
/.
Or maybe you could build the guns into the bra. Gives a whole new meaning to "snub-nosed 38s".
/.
Nope; you just see through the pretension. Writing a long stream of cusswords is a lot easier than writing Swiftian satire -- doing the former and getting credit for the latter is a great scam if you can pull it off.
/.
They should use AOL CDs instead -- they'd be easier to see from space and besides they're not useful for anything else except coasters.
/.
How does one "stope"? Is it legal in Virginia?
/.