"Ironically, you could have typed four words into Google and understood what he was referring to, rather than typing in several dozen insulting him unfairly."
Yes, but then he would have denied us the opportunity to learn something important about him. This could even be a win-win situation, if he learns something about himself, too. You got to look on the bright side of things, am I right?
"Wouldn't that polar ice that melts have to go somewhere? Like maybe a few feet inland along the coasts of the world. That probably isn't good is it?"
The north polar ice is already floating in the water. It is (almost exactly) displacing the same volume[1] of water it would be if it were to melt.
The rising sea levels due to global warming are/would be the result of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps partially melting, which are on land and are enormous. Only minor melting of small, outlying portions, decreased global, glaciation, and increase movement of glaciers to the water all have a major impact.
It's also safe to assume that any influx of fresh water into the ocean will cause an even distribution of increased depth, but I know what you meant.:)
[1] The masses are necessarily the same, but the volume slightly differs because of the variance of the density of fresh to salt water.
I agree, but I'm trying to understand your assumption that the royalties would be enough to completely offset the export. My assumption that they wouldn't is just as tenuous, of course.
If Brazil could export TV's to the US, then they'd be building them from the same components the US is building them from, much of which come from Asia. Their advantage, though, would be lower labor costs.
I'm pretty disapointed in my fellow American and European liberals for being all upset about exporting of jobs to developing countries and their (by our standards) exploitative labor laws and working conditions. They need an influx of capital to develop their economies--capital that results from trade and not loans--and selling off their precious natural resources dirt-cheap is squandering many non-renewable resources compared to labor, which is renewable and in great supply. I'm convinced the "concern" that American workers feel for developing world workers is a veil behind which hides pure self-interest.
Anyway, I think my main point still stands. A developing economy has to be very concerned with globalized trade in all their economic decisions because being a part of the global economy is the only way they will prevent their continuing being sucked dry or be isolated and withering.
...which is still a net influx of dollars. Exporting is good, but diversifying your exports is even better.
At any rate, my sense is that it's much more important for a developing world economy to factor in market globalization concerns--even over technical concerns--than it is for, say, the US. It's probably a necessity. The US can devalue both technical and globalization concerns due to its monolithic nature. Lucky us. This is continually becoming less and less true, thank goodness.
Schwartz is a bad example. It's been a long time since I reviewed the details of this case, but IIRC, what he did was not in any sense what they were paying him to do. He did it from home, violating security procedures of which he was aware. He had as much business finding and using a security hole as any other person who isn't being paid to find such things--that being none. He broke the law.
Presumably, this guy is being hired to do work that is primarily, or includes, security related. He still should contact a lawyer and get all the wording right and loopholes closed; but even if he doesn't, anything he does do won't be comparable to what Schwartz did.
"How do the ISP's get away with providing these, and more importantly, WHY?"
USENET is a peer-to-peer network that is still exemplary of the decentralized, democratic values that were at the core of the burgeoning Internet culture. As such, administrators have tried to be "hands off" as much as possible. In particular, the alt heirarchy exists specifically to provide a medium for almost completely unrestricted content. More to the point, in the spirit of the purpose of the alt heirarchy, additions of groups to the alt heirarchy are largely propogated by default. This is significant for a reason I'll explain in a moment.
As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.
Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".
One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.
And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.
Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)
Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.
(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.
I've been trying to talk to people on both sides of this issue for years. I've actually been pretty darn successful on an individual basis; but, even so, me and everybody I've influenced are but a tiny droplet in an ocean of highly-charged rhetoric and ill-will.
The point that I make in my post is why, for example, I use the terms that each side prefers for describing their own position: pro-choice and pro-life.
My own position is a little bit complicated by the fact that I do not believe in a "soul" or any other metaphysical quality of personhood. A lot of pro-lifers are "soulists"; and the assumption of a soul is, as rational assumptions go, a very strong and far-reaching one. You can just arbitrarily point to something and say, regardless of how it looks or acts, "that's a person". (It's interesting to me that many pro-lifers who are also soulists still, oddly, try to justify their belief in the personhood of a fetus on empirical grounds. I suppose that it's either a concession to our empiricist world-view, or a weakness in their faith in souls, or both.) You can also arbitrarily say that something is not a person, which is scary and has led to quite a bit of evil in the past. Anyway, for me, accepting only an empirical standard for evaluating personhood, it seems clear that the issue is both very murky and that it is highly unlikely that, ultimately, there's a "bright line" rather than a continuum. As such, I believe that a fertilized egg is not in the least a person, and a newborn baby is, and that one grows gradually into the other. And assuming that, I decide that the acceptability of abortion also gradually changes from entirely acceptable to entirely unacceptable. Since we do have to draw some arbitrary lines somewhere, I'd prefer a trimester basis which says, "Yes", "Sometimes", and "No". The problem here, of course, is that this position freaks out both extremes of the abortion debate because their assumptions don't allow for such a gradation. I think, however, that the majority of Americans would prefer such a compromise but the two minority partisan camps have complete control of the issue. The majority only makes their sentiments heard when one of the two sides gets too powerful.
Having explained my own evaluation, I want to add a bit more. Firstly, as strongly as I am committed to anti-sexism and women's rights--and I am very strongly committed to anti-sexism and women's rights--I simply can't avoid the conclusion that there's an important asymmetry involved here. Taking each extreme assumption and seeing them as a statement about an indivudal's rights, it's hard to see those two sets of rights as being, at their extremes, equal in importance. The right to live clearly trumps almost all other rights, including reproductive rights. For me, this is only a problem to the degree to which I accept that there's a person to whom the right to live is in jeopardy. Near the beginning of gestation, I don't see a person at all, and so it isn't an issue. On the other hand, because there's an asymmetry, and because it's tilted in favor of the fetus, I am not comfortable with a continuum which assumes a balance between the two, which my preferred legal framework seems to assume. For that reason, during the middle period when it's "sometimes", I would weight it towards "No", rather than "Yes" ("it" being the acceptability of abortion).
Secondly, because the pro-life assumption is an assumption of personhood, and because (assuming personhood) it is an issue of life and death, even though I personally don't think that an early-term fetus is a person, I see pro-lifers as heroic and noble, assuming they are what they claim they are. They think they are trying to save millions of lives. In a world where millions upon millions of people have been killed in the past with their murder justified on the basis of their lack of personhood, I prefer the existence of people that fight against that and be wrong in the specific than that those people not exist at all. The very history of liberalism is one that constantly expands the definition of the class of beings that possess inalienable rights. It is better to include than exclude. It is better to error in inclusion than error in exclusion. It bothers me that more pro-choice liberals don't understand this.
And, having said that, I want to make something very clear: many pro-choicers explicitly do not believe that pro-lifers are what they claim they are. As I said earlier, many pro-choicers believe that pro-lifers are specifically anti-choice. And while it is very unfair to characterize the pro-life position as being essential anti-choice in disguise; it also is the case that many pro-lifers really are essentially anti-choice. You can tell this by a correlation between pro-life views and sexist views. I steadfastly refuse to estimate how many pro-lifers are really anti-choice. I steadfastly refuse to let their existence be my model for all pro-lifers. But I also believe it is important to acknowledge their existence. As for pro-choicers being "really" anti-life; that is much more unlikely for the exact same reason that the pro-lifers have the more morally compelling position. It's far more acceptable and reasonable in our society to be sexist than an advocate of murder.
I hope this has been helpful or thought-provoking for you. Thanks again for the compliment. It's nice to know that someone's listening.
The German government's inclusion of anti-abortion sites in their ban makes sense from their point of view.
The problem with the abortion debate is that no one ever makes the effort to understand the other side's position.
In this case, I imagine that the censorship of anti-abortion sites is rationalized in the context of seeing anti-abortion activism as being fundamentally anti-woman. And here I'll ask the reader to re-read my second sentence. Many, many people who are pro-choice believe either that a fetus isn't a person and therefore the only issue here is the rights of the woman; or they believe that a fetus may be a person in some sense but that any rights it has are nevertheless subsumed by the mother. Again, from their point of view, it's only an issue of a woman's right to control her own body. From that point of view, it is a civil rights issue.
Pro-life activists are no less one-sided in their position that the only real issue is the rights of the unborn child and they do not acknowledge this as being about reproductive rights at all.
My point is that I am pretty sure that probably as much as 90% of Germans see this issue from the perspective of the pro-choice position I describe above. As such, anti-abortion is equated to anti-woman, which is on par with the other things they are censoring.
I'm not saying I agree with any of the positions I've described. But at least I am able to understand and recognize the legitimacy of an argument assuming its premises. Both the extreme pro-choice and pro-life arguments make perfect sense, and are important matters of human rights, and as such are noble and reasonable, assuming their respective premises. I wish that somehow both sides would make the effort to recognize the legitimacy of each other's arguments so that, finally, the real discussion can begin--which is about whether and how much they can agree about those premises. Maybe they can't. But right now they're talking right past each other and unfairly characterizing their opponents as specifically trying to work against the implications of their assumptions. (That is to say, pro-life people characterize their opponents as being anti-life; while pro-choice people characterize their opponents as being anti-choice. They really think that being "anti-X" is really what the other side's all about. That's why there's so much rancor involved.)
I studied Attic and Homeric Greek for a couple of years in college, and Koine came along for the ride. In fact, I struggled with Attic and Homeric, felt like an idiot compared to many of my classmates, but discovered that I actually had learned something when I found I could easily read New Testament stuff (well, Revelations was a problem).
A lot of the stuff that's available out there for learning Koine Greek specifically is not that reliable or rigorous. My sister is an evangelical minister and missionary; and although her education has improved over what it once was, at one point early on she was being taught some seriously skewed Greek. She tried to assure me that "logos" meant primarily "word of God".
(Incidentally, I experimented with some Unicode typefaces and page-encoding, and made
The Gospel of Matthew available from my personal web page. The page includes a note with links to some Greek typefaces and tools.)
I would love to have some Latin. At my school (and probably elsewhere), one often hears (to this day, I'm sure) a quote from, I believe, Gertrude Stein:
"Greek and Latin are wonderful languages to
have learned."
I've lost most of my Greek, but it made me think a lot more carefuly about language, which was mostly the point. That and having a stronger grasp of some of the writers we read.
I have to chuckle at the question of the vocational utility of an aquaintence with Latin. Hell, a large portion of the stuff that one learns in contemporary American universities that supposedly is of vocational utility, isn't. Just getting the degree is the most important thing on a superficial level. On the deeper level, working hard learning how to learn will serve a student well for the rest of his or her life. Learning a classical language, among many other subjects, is a good, challenging endeavor.
Re:Wardriving is not illegal
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not a bad analogy, it's entirely appropriate. There's nothing wrong with receiving the EM that's being sent out by a WAP, but connecting to the WAP is like trying the front door (which is arguably not an intrusion), and using it is like going inside and cooking up a meal (which is undoubtedly an intrusion).
I'm getting really damn tired of the obtuseness of so many people that bend over backward to justify network intrusions. I don't get this fetish over the fact that it's broadcast over EM. So what? You don't need a freaking wire to connect. Otherwise, it's the same as any other network. And, on any other network, you are not presumed to have a right to access network assets you have not explicitly been explicitly been granted, regarldess of whether it's been secured. If someone has their permissions screwed-up on their shell account on some machine, you still don't have a right to go accessing their files. If, as once was common, you find that with your spiffy new cable modem there are suddenly thirty machines in your "Network Neighborhood", you still don't have a right to access those shares, if any. Permission has to be explicitly granted. If you haven't been explicitly given permission to use a WAP, then you are breaking the law by using it.
This isn't about "worlds". I, too, want to live in a world where there are public access wireless networks, just like I want to live in a world where there are public restrooms. The answer isn't to proclaim that all unlocked restrooms are (or should be) presumed "public", but to presume that all restrooms are private unless explicitly labeled as "public". A more thoughtful technology would use a protocol that can explicitly mark a WAP as being public. Until then, it's invasive, self-serving, unethical, and illegal to use a WAP that you don't have explicit permission to use. It just doesn't matter whether it's secured or not. Under the rule of law, the responsibility isn't on the potential victim of an injury to protect themselves from it (such as locking your doors), it's on the perpetrator to not inflict the injury. This marks the difference between the sort of society where the strong are encouraged to prey upon the weak and a society where every human being is presumed capable of moral choice--the onus is on them to choose correctly.
Your restroom analogy is very poor because the whole of it is in the context of a public place. A public restroom is explicitly public. Any random unsecured WAP is not. It's merely unsecured. So, you can "look" under the door, but it doesn't matter because, no matter what, you don't have a right to go in.
Re:Wardriving is not illegal
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with going around testing doors to buildings to see if they're unsecured because, after all, some buildings are public. Then, if the door's unlocked, it's okay to go in because, after all, an unlocked door means that the building is public, right?
Here's a clue: just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should do something whether it's legal or not. In this case, not.
"Accountability" is a euphemism for persecuting the unpopular.
That's a nice turn of phrase, but it's utter bullshit. "Accountability" is why you (probably) don't tell your spouse that she's/he's annoying the crap out of you right now and you wish they'd just shut up. The things you do and say have consequences beyond merely satisfying your urge to do and say them.
The quality and level of discourse on the Internet isn't purely a matter of honestly any more than what you say to your spouse is purely a matter of honesty. Honesty is just one virtue among many.
But even if honesty was paramount in all things, you are wrong if you think that it is the chief characteristic of anonymous Internet discourse. It isn't. Viciousness is the chief characteristic. Viciousness, and the indulgence in a toddler-like anger and hurtfulness just because you can. Truth doesn't require such things; and, for that matter, neither do lies.
"Accountability" means not avoiding the responsibility for what one says and does. It's part of being an adult, and it's part of being an adult member of civil society.
Many people today, especially in the US, seem to have gotten it into their heads that they have something like a "natural right" to privacy.
I will acknowledge that a pretty good argument can be made that we have a right to privacy regarding the most intimate portions of our lives and our bodies. But that's a far cry from expectations of privacy in the public sphere--such as the expectation that one has a right to walk down the street unobserved and unrecognized. Part of what it means to be a member of society is to be accountable for one's actions within that society--anonymity should be the exception, not the rule. Look at how anonymity affects the level and quality of discourse all over the Internet. This is why I have used my real world identiy as my online identity for many years now.
From the article:
"I sometimes wonder if I'm living on the same planet as David Brin," said Philip E. Agre, an associate professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everyone can watch the common people, but that has nothing to do with the political question of who can watch the powerful."
There is a perfect two-word response to this: Rodney King.
However, you're still wrong. These two letters were written by McCall on state stationary. I have no doubt that such letters are completely covered under various freedom of information laws.
Finally, again I call bullshit on you. It's absurd to assume that merely sending someone a piece of correspondence relinquishes the presumed copyrights of the author's. Writing and mailing a poem to a girlfriend does not relinquish one's rights to the poem, enabling the girlfriend to do whatever she wants with it. There is no distinction that matters in this context between that poem and anything else one writes. And, it's pretty weak reasoning to assume that if a newspaper did something, it must necessarily be kosher.
Huh, I did read the story, but I must have rad too quickly. Um, well, I read their statement. Was that the same as the story? It's been so long ago. Hours, even.
As of right now anyway, what you can't do is apply SP1 to XP. Auto-update works, and all the other non-SP1 stuff words. Eventually, though, you're right in that the large number of pirated copies of XP on campus will end up invaludating some of what I wrote above, and effectively opening up an increasing amoung of security holes. At some point, the problem could be worse for UCSB with XP than it would be for NT/2K.
They don't suggest those OSs because they would be even less secure in these student's hands than NT/2K was. The issue isn't one of the essential security of a particular operating system. The issue is that NT and 2K, in contrast to Win9x and XP, include some networking services, by default, that are relatively insecure, by default. It's not practical to attempt to get these relatively naive users to secure their OSs. Also, along with better security defaults on shares and IIS and other things, XP is more aggressively (naturally) supported by MS in maintaining its security via bug-fixes and patches--and they do so via a very aggressive transparent version of their auto-update mechanism. In practical terms, XP Home or Pro is going to be much more secure as installed on this campus residential network than many other OSs. Not because it's "better", and not because it's inherently more secure than other OSs, including NT/2K or a UN*X. It just is because that's how it plays out in this particular slice of the real world.
My problem with this is mostly financial. Obviously, they can restrict usage to their network any darn way they please. But there are inevitably going to be students who simply don't have the money to upgrade from NT/2K to XP. They're imposing a burden on those students that they should try to ease in some manner.
A good alternative would be a carefully crafted Linux distribution that they pre-configure and make secure according to their needs, and make it available on a CD-ROM. Again, though, even if the security issues were resolved with such a distribution (which would be relatively easy), they would still have to face the costs associated with supporting these naive users using Linux--which would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Thus, they simply say, "Use XP".
Keep in mind that in some sense, these types of administrators have less control over their networks than corporate admins do. They don't own the licenses to the OSs--they expect the students to supply their own OS. This gives them a lot less control over what's on their network. They don't have a right to lock the machine's configurations down to control security. They probably don't want to have too much involvement with the student's machines, since that would imply a corresponding degree of liability on their part for how the student is using it (meaning: doing illegal things). It's pretty easy for them to identify the OS that a student is using, so their solution (requiring XP) has the biggest benefit for the least cost.
It is completely absurd for anyone to assume that they are doing this because they have a vested interest in seeing more copies of XP sold.
And I'd like to add that just because something's legal, that doesn't make it right. Violating someone's privacy without a reasonable justification is a betrayal of trust.
Many people have probably had experiences similar to an experience that I had years ago where I had discussed something in a private email with a friend who then thoughtlessly forwarded my comments along to a semi-public mailing list where some of my comments caused hurt feelings. The things that I wrote were true and I stood by them, but I never would have expressed them to the people to which the comments applied as callously as I did to my friend, to whom they didn't apply. Thus, people were hurt that needn't have been, and it was because my friend had violated the privacy of our correspondence by sharing it with many other people.
This happens all the time with simple verbal conversations, of course. I don't know anyone, certainly not myself, who never repeats to other people things they've been told. It would be impractical to assume complete confidentiality of everything everyone ever says in private. But the trick, I think, is to make an effort to put oneself in the other person's shoes and consider whether or not they would feel violated or hurt in some manner by the disclosure. What isn't right is to stand on some insensitive and absolutist rule like "unless you tell me otherwise, I will presume that everything you say to me is not confidential". People that are too self-serving and too lazy to actually struggle through the muddied waters of ethical behavior are the type of people that cling to simplistic, legalistic guidelines for determining (or rationalizing after the fact) what is acceptable. Again, just because something is legal doesn't make it "right". Not by a long-shot.
I mention this in this context because many people reading the thread may come away from reading it with only the knowledge that email isn't private and not consider that this being the case shouldn't be the final word on the matter. The decision to post people's email willy-nilly on one's web page should be informed by more than merely the legality of doing so.
You, sir, should read the fine print. Most "letters to the editor" submission addresses I've seen in newspapers and elsewhere explicitly state that such letters are considered submissions for publication and become the property of the newspaper to do with as they please. And there probably doesn't need to be the notice, I'd bet, as the "letters to the editor" convention implicitly is one of sumitting something for publication, not of typical interpersonal correspondence.
Regular mail or email, whether assumed to be private or not, is, by what I gather from this discussion, generally original creative work that the writer has complete ownership of. After all, I can write a short story and give you a copy, but that doesn't give you the right to publish it. Qualitatively, what's the difference between the short story and a letter, really?
To summarize....when you write an email and send it, you don't relinquish your copyright to it. Why would you? Whether or not it is considered "private" is a seperate issue from whether or not other people have the right to publish it. As it happens, according to people here, email is not considered private. No one has mentioned what protections there would be on it if it were. Anyway, by publishing someone else's email, you're not going to get in legal trouble for violating their privacy, but you may get in trouble for violating their copyright. But then, copyright law allows for fair use, which would seem to allow for a latitude of inclusion of copyrighted material.
Try not to so casually call someone an idiot unless you are very certain that in doing so you're not revealing that it is you who is the idiot. "Letters to the editor" are both explicitly and implicitly not equivalent to regular correspondence.
He was exactly what "we think of engineer", you moron. His undergraduate degree from the Naval Academy was Nuclear Engineering. He did graduate work, but didn't get a graduate degree, in Nuclear Physics at Union College.
The Naval Academy is a real university, and it's better than most.
Jimmy Carter was trained as an engineer probably moreso and better than the average Slashdot reader who self-identifies as "engineer".
Sheesh. "I hoped this has helped a little." Yeah, right.
You're correct only insofar as it's true that the American public doesn't think much of anyone that smacks of intellectualism and rarely do contemporary candidates emphasize their academic credentials. Carter's status as a real engineer, in fact, worked against him as it was used to validate the view that he was a hopelessly naive scientist/engineer type out of his depth in big-time politics. And, honestly, there was probably truth to that at the time.
The breaking up of their usual form with interesting apostrophes which suggest common grammatical mistakes...
I concede that including an apostrophe before a pluralizing "s" is a sadly not-uncommon mistake. (And I would hesitate to call it an error of grammar - seems to me that it's more likely a variety of typographical error.) But in this case the sentence is grammatically correct when the apostrophe is included; and its meaning is extremely close to the phrase you claim he actually intended.
In my strong opinion, this provdes an opportunity for the reader to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - something the reader should always do as a matter of good faith. You did otherwise. You ignored the possibility that the writer was employing a valid though non-standard version of a common English saying in favor of finding something to criticize. This is rude and petty. It's not even rudeness and pettiness in service to correcting a presumed error that is relevant to the discussion. It's rudeness and pettiness for its own sake.
I corrected you because I believe that this sort of discursive habit you demonstrated (and perhaps its antecedent habit of thought) is a pollutant of intellectual life that sullies all of us.
You attempt to offer a justification of your behavior - but all I can glean from your explanation is that you were annoyed and felt compelled to strike out at the source of your annoyance. Well, there was a bit about "simplicity" and "adherence to some basic rules" thrown in there, but since a good faith reading is an expression of both simplicty in discourse and an adherence to some basic rules, I can't imagine that this was anything more than a self-justifying attempt to elevate your annoyance to something more noble.
Slashdot Mirror
The rising sea levels due to global warming are/would be the result of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps partially melting, which are on land and are enormous. Only minor melting of small, outlying portions, decreased global, glaciation, and increase movement of glaciers to the water all have a major impact.
It's also safe to assume that any influx of fresh water into the ocean will cause an even distribution of increased depth, but I know what you meant. :)
[1] The masses are necessarily the same, but the volume slightly differs because of the variance of the density of fresh to salt water.
It is my understanding that last summer ('01) the geographical North Pole was open water.
If Brazil could export TV's to the US, then they'd be building them from the same components the US is building them from, much of which come from Asia. Their advantage, though, would be lower labor costs.
I'm pretty disapointed in my fellow American and European liberals for being all upset about exporting of jobs to developing countries and their (by our standards) exploitative labor laws and working conditions. They need an influx of capital to develop their economies--capital that results from trade and not loans--and selling off their precious natural resources dirt-cheap is squandering many non-renewable resources compared to labor, which is renewable and in great supply. I'm convinced the "concern" that American workers feel for developing world workers is a veil behind which hides pure self-interest.
Anyway, I think my main point still stands. A developing economy has to be very concerned with globalized trade in all their economic decisions because being a part of the global economy is the only way they will prevent their continuing being sucked dry or be isolated and withering.
At any rate, my sense is that it's much more important for a developing world economy to factor in market globalization concerns--even over technical concerns--than it is for, say, the US. It's probably a necessity. The US can devalue both technical and globalization concerns due to its monolithic nature. Lucky us. This is continually becoming less and less true, thank goodness.
Presumably, this guy is being hired to do work that is primarily, or includes, security related. He still should contact a lawyer and get all the wording right and loopholes closed; but even if he doesn't, anything he does do won't be comparable to what Schwartz did.
As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.
Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".
One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.
And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.
Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)
Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.
(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.
I've been trying to talk to people on both sides of this issue for years. I've actually been pretty darn successful on an individual basis; but, even so, me and everybody I've influenced are but a tiny droplet in an ocean of highly-charged rhetoric and ill-will.
The point that I make in my post is why, for example, I use the terms that each side prefers for describing their own position: pro-choice and pro-life.
My own position is a little bit complicated by the fact that I do not believe in a "soul" or any other metaphysical quality of personhood. A lot of pro-lifers are "soulists"; and the assumption of a soul is, as rational assumptions go, a very strong and far-reaching one. You can just arbitrarily point to something and say, regardless of how it looks or acts, "that's a person". (It's interesting to me that many pro-lifers who are also soulists still, oddly, try to justify their belief in the personhood of a fetus on empirical grounds. I suppose that it's either a concession to our empiricist world-view, or a weakness in their faith in souls, or both.) You can also arbitrarily say that something is not a person, which is scary and has led to quite a bit of evil in the past. Anyway, for me, accepting only an empirical standard for evaluating personhood, it seems clear that the issue is both very murky and that it is highly unlikely that, ultimately, there's a "bright line" rather than a continuum. As such, I believe that a fertilized egg is not in the least a person, and a newborn baby is, and that one grows gradually into the other. And assuming that, I decide that the acceptability of abortion also gradually changes from entirely acceptable to entirely unacceptable. Since we do have to draw some arbitrary lines somewhere, I'd prefer a trimester basis which says, "Yes", "Sometimes", and "No". The problem here, of course, is that this position freaks out both extremes of the abortion debate because their assumptions don't allow for such a gradation. I think, however, that the majority of Americans would prefer such a compromise but the two minority partisan camps have complete control of the issue. The majority only makes their sentiments heard when one of the two sides gets too powerful.
Having explained my own evaluation, I want to add a bit more. Firstly, as strongly as I am committed to anti-sexism and women's rights--and I am very strongly committed to anti-sexism and women's rights--I simply can't avoid the conclusion that there's an important asymmetry involved here. Taking each extreme assumption and seeing them as a statement about an indivudal's rights, it's hard to see those two sets of rights as being, at their extremes, equal in importance. The right to live clearly trumps almost all other rights, including reproductive rights. For me, this is only a problem to the degree to which I accept that there's a person to whom the right to live is in jeopardy. Near the beginning of gestation, I don't see a person at all, and so it isn't an issue. On the other hand, because there's an asymmetry, and because it's tilted in favor of the fetus, I am not comfortable with a continuum which assumes a balance between the two, which my preferred legal framework seems to assume. For that reason, during the middle period when it's "sometimes", I would weight it towards "No", rather than "Yes" ("it" being the acceptability of abortion).
Secondly, because the pro-life assumption is an assumption of personhood, and because (assuming personhood) it is an issue of life and death, even though I personally don't think that an early-term fetus is a person, I see pro-lifers as heroic and noble, assuming they are what they claim they are. They think they are trying to save millions of lives. In a world where millions upon millions of people have been killed in the past with their murder justified on the basis of their lack of personhood, I prefer the existence of people that fight against that and be wrong in the specific than that those people not exist at all. The very history of liberalism is one that constantly expands the definition of the class of beings that possess inalienable rights. It is better to include than exclude. It is better to error in inclusion than error in exclusion. It bothers me that more pro-choice liberals don't understand this.
And, having said that, I want to make something very clear: many pro-choicers explicitly do not believe that pro-lifers are what they claim they are. As I said earlier, many pro-choicers believe that pro-lifers are specifically anti-choice. And while it is very unfair to characterize the pro-life position as being essential anti-choice in disguise; it also is the case that many pro-lifers really are essentially anti-choice. You can tell this by a correlation between pro-life views and sexist views. I steadfastly refuse to estimate how many pro-lifers are really anti-choice. I steadfastly refuse to let their existence be my model for all pro-lifers. But I also believe it is important to acknowledge their existence. As for pro-choicers being "really" anti-life; that is much more unlikely for the exact same reason that the pro-lifers have the more morally compelling position. It's far more acceptable and reasonable in our society to be sexist than an advocate of murder.
I hope this has been helpful or thought-provoking for you. Thanks again for the compliment. It's nice to know that someone's listening.
The problem with the abortion debate is that no one ever makes the effort to understand the other side's position.
In this case, I imagine that the censorship of anti-abortion sites is rationalized in the context of seeing anti-abortion activism as being fundamentally anti-woman. And here I'll ask the reader to re-read my second sentence. Many, many people who are pro-choice believe either that a fetus isn't a person and therefore the only issue here is the rights of the woman; or they believe that a fetus may be a person in some sense but that any rights it has are nevertheless subsumed by the mother. Again, from their point of view, it's only an issue of a woman's right to control her own body. From that point of view, it is a civil rights issue.
Pro-life activists are no less one-sided in their position that the only real issue is the rights of the unborn child and they do not acknowledge this as being about reproductive rights at all.
My point is that I am pretty sure that probably as much as 90% of Germans see this issue from the perspective of the pro-choice position I describe above. As such, anti-abortion is equated to anti-woman, which is on par with the other things they are censoring.
I'm not saying I agree with any of the positions I've described. But at least I am able to understand and recognize the legitimacy of an argument assuming its premises. Both the extreme pro-choice and pro-life arguments make perfect sense, and are important matters of human rights, and as such are noble and reasonable, assuming their respective premises. I wish that somehow both sides would make the effort to recognize the legitimacy of each other's arguments so that, finally, the real discussion can begin--which is about whether and how much they can agree about those premises. Maybe they can't. But right now they're talking right past each other and unfairly characterizing their opponents as specifically trying to work against the implications of their assumptions. (That is to say, pro-life people characterize their opponents as being anti-life; while pro-choice people characterize their opponents as being anti-choice. They really think that being "anti-X" is really what the other side's all about. That's why there's so much rancor involved.)
A lot of the stuff that's available out there for learning Koine Greek specifically is not that reliable or rigorous. My sister is an evangelical minister and missionary; and although her education has improved over what it once was, at one point early on she was being taught some seriously skewed Greek. She tried to assure me that "logos" meant primarily "word of God".
(Incidentally, I experimented with some Unicode typefaces and page-encoding, and made The Gospel of Matthew available from my personal web page . The page includes a note with links to some Greek typefaces and tools.)
I would love to have some Latin. At my school (and probably elsewhere), one often hears (to this day, I'm sure) a quote from, I believe, Gertrude Stein:
I've lost most of my Greek, but it made me think a lot more carefuly about language, which was mostly the point. That and having a stronger grasp of some of the writers we read.I have to chuckle at the question of the vocational utility of an aquaintence with Latin. Hell, a large portion of the stuff that one learns in contemporary American universities that supposedly is of vocational utility, isn't. Just getting the degree is the most important thing on a superficial level. On the deeper level, working hard learning how to learn will serve a student well for the rest of his or her life. Learning a classical language, among many other subjects, is a good, challenging endeavor.
I'm getting really damn tired of the obtuseness of so many people that bend over backward to justify network intrusions. I don't get this fetish over the fact that it's broadcast over EM. So what? You don't need a freaking wire to connect. Otherwise, it's the same as any other network. And, on any other network, you are not presumed to have a right to access network assets you have not explicitly been explicitly been granted, regarldess of whether it's been secured. If someone has their permissions screwed-up on their shell account on some machine, you still don't have a right to go accessing their files. If, as once was common, you find that with your spiffy new cable modem there are suddenly thirty machines in your "Network Neighborhood", you still don't have a right to access those shares, if any. Permission has to be explicitly granted. If you haven't been explicitly given permission to use a WAP, then you are breaking the law by using it.
This isn't about "worlds". I, too, want to live in a world where there are public access wireless networks, just like I want to live in a world where there are public restrooms. The answer isn't to proclaim that all unlocked restrooms are (or should be) presumed "public", but to presume that all restrooms are private unless explicitly labeled as "public". A more thoughtful technology would use a protocol that can explicitly mark a WAP as being public. Until then, it's invasive, self-serving, unethical, and illegal to use a WAP that you don't have explicit permission to use. It just doesn't matter whether it's secured or not. Under the rule of law, the responsibility isn't on the potential victim of an injury to protect themselves from it (such as locking your doors), it's on the perpetrator to not inflict the injury. This marks the difference between the sort of society where the strong are encouraged to prey upon the weak and a society where every human being is presumed capable of moral choice--the onus is on them to choose correctly.
Your restroom analogy is very poor because the whole of it is in the context of a public place. A public restroom is explicitly public. Any random unsecured WAP is not. It's merely unsecured. So, you can "look" under the door, but it doesn't matter because, no matter what, you don't have a right to go in.
Here's a clue: just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should do something whether it's legal or not. In this case, not.
The quality and level of discourse on the Internet isn't purely a matter of honestly any more than what you say to your spouse is purely a matter of honesty. Honesty is just one virtue among many.
But even if honesty was paramount in all things, you are wrong if you think that it is the chief characteristic of anonymous Internet discourse. It isn't. Viciousness is the chief characteristic. Viciousness, and the indulgence in a toddler-like anger and hurtfulness just because you can. Truth doesn't require such things; and, for that matter, neither do lies.
"Accountability" means not avoiding the responsibility for what one says and does. It's part of being an adult, and it's part of being an adult member of civil society.
Many people today, especially in the US, seem to have gotten it into their heads that they have something like a "natural right" to privacy.
I will acknowledge that a pretty good argument can be made that we have a right to privacy regarding the most intimate portions of our lives and our bodies. But that's a far cry from expectations of privacy in the public sphere--such as the expectation that one has a right to walk down the street unobserved and unrecognized. Part of what it means to be a member of society is to be accountable for one's actions within that society--anonymity should be the exception, not the rule. Look at how anonymity affects the level and quality of discourse all over the Internet. This is why I have used my real world identiy as my online identity for many years now.
From the article:
There is a perfect two-word response to this: Rodney King.However, you're still wrong. These two letters were written by McCall on state stationary. I have no doubt that such letters are completely covered under various freedom of information laws.
Finally, again I call bullshit on you. It's absurd to assume that merely sending someone a piece of correspondence relinquishes the presumed copyrights of the author's. Writing and mailing a poem to a girlfriend does not relinquish one's rights to the poem, enabling the girlfriend to do whatever she wants with it. There is no distinction that matters in this context between that poem and anything else one writes. And, it's pretty weak reasoning to assume that if a newspaper did something, it must necessarily be kosher.
Huh, I did read the story, but I must have rad too quickly. Um, well, I read their statement. Was that the same as the story? It's been so long ago. Hours, even.
As of right now anyway, what you can't do is apply SP1 to XP. Auto-update works, and all the other non-SP1 stuff words. Eventually, though, you're right in that the large number of pirated copies of XP on campus will end up invaludating some of what I wrote above, and effectively opening up an increasing amoung of security holes. At some point, the problem could be worse for UCSB with XP than it would be for NT/2K.
My problem with this is mostly financial. Obviously, they can restrict usage to their network any darn way they please. But there are inevitably going to be students who simply don't have the money to upgrade from NT/2K to XP. They're imposing a burden on those students that they should try to ease in some manner.
A good alternative would be a carefully crafted Linux distribution that they pre-configure and make secure according to their needs, and make it available on a CD-ROM. Again, though, even if the security issues were resolved with such a distribution (which would be relatively easy), they would still have to face the costs associated with supporting these naive users using Linux--which would probably be more trouble than it's worth. Thus, they simply say, "Use XP".
Keep in mind that in some sense, these types of administrators have less control over their networks than corporate admins do. They don't own the licenses to the OSs--they expect the students to supply their own OS. This gives them a lot less control over what's on their network. They don't have a right to lock the machine's configurations down to control security. They probably don't want to have too much involvement with the student's machines, since that would imply a corresponding degree of liability on their part for how the student is using it (meaning: doing illegal things). It's pretty easy for them to identify the OS that a student is using, so their solution (requiring XP) has the biggest benefit for the least cost.
It is completely absurd for anyone to assume that they are doing this because they have a vested interest in seeing more copies of XP sold.
Many people have probably had experiences similar to an experience that I had years ago where I had discussed something in a private email with a friend who then thoughtlessly forwarded my comments along to a semi-public mailing list where some of my comments caused hurt feelings. The things that I wrote were true and I stood by them, but I never would have expressed them to the people to which the comments applied as callously as I did to my friend, to whom they didn't apply. Thus, people were hurt that needn't have been, and it was because my friend had violated the privacy of our correspondence by sharing it with many other people.
This happens all the time with simple verbal conversations, of course. I don't know anyone, certainly not myself, who never repeats to other people things they've been told. It would be impractical to assume complete confidentiality of everything everyone ever says in private. But the trick, I think, is to make an effort to put oneself in the other person's shoes and consider whether or not they would feel violated or hurt in some manner by the disclosure. What isn't right is to stand on some insensitive and absolutist rule like "unless you tell me otherwise, I will presume that everything you say to me is not confidential". People that are too self-serving and too lazy to actually struggle through the muddied waters of ethical behavior are the type of people that cling to simplistic, legalistic guidelines for determining (or rationalizing after the fact) what is acceptable. Again, just because something is legal doesn't make it "right". Not by a long-shot.
I mention this in this context because many people reading the thread may come away from reading it with only the knowledge that email isn't private and not consider that this being the case shouldn't be the final word on the matter. The decision to post people's email willy-nilly on one's web page should be informed by more than merely the legality of doing so.
Regular mail or email, whether assumed to be private or not, is, by what I gather from this discussion, generally original creative work that the writer has complete ownership of. After all, I can write a short story and give you a copy, but that doesn't give you the right to publish it. Qualitatively, what's the difference between the short story and a letter, really?
To summarize....when you write an email and send it, you don't relinquish your copyright to it. Why would you? Whether or not it is considered "private" is a seperate issue from whether or not other people have the right to publish it. As it happens, according to people here, email is not considered private. No one has mentioned what protections there would be on it if it were. Anyway, by publishing someone else's email, you're not going to get in legal trouble for violating their privacy, but you may get in trouble for violating their copyright. But then, copyright law allows for fair use, which would seem to allow for a latitude of inclusion of copyrighted material.
Try not to so casually call someone an idiot unless you are very certain that in doing so you're not revealing that it is you who is the idiot. "Letters to the editor" are both explicitly and implicitly not equivalent to regular correspondence.
The Naval Academy is a real university, and it's better than most.
Jimmy Carter was trained as an engineer probably moreso and better than the average Slashdot reader who self-identifies as "engineer".
Sheesh. "I hoped this has helped a little." Yeah, right.
You're correct only insofar as it's true that the American public doesn't think much of anyone that smacks of intellectualism and rarely do contemporary candidates emphasize their academic credentials. Carter's status as a real engineer, in fact, worked against him as it was used to validate the view that he was a hopelessly naive scientist/engineer type out of his depth in big-time politics. And, honestly, there was probably truth to that at the time.
If you read Tom's article, you'll see that Yamaha's using special hardware to accomplish more gradations in albedo.
I concede that including an apostrophe before a pluralizing "s" is a sadly not-uncommon mistake. (And I would hesitate to call it an error of grammar - seems to me that it's more likely a variety of typographical error.) But in this case the sentence is grammatically correct when the apostrophe is included; and its meaning is extremely close to the phrase you claim he actually intended.
In my strong opinion, this provdes an opportunity for the reader to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - something the reader should always do as a matter of good faith. You did otherwise. You ignored the possibility that the writer was employing a valid though non-standard version of a common English saying in favor of finding something to criticize. This is rude and petty. It's not even rudeness and pettiness in service to correcting a presumed error that is relevant to the discussion. It's rudeness and pettiness for its own sake.
I corrected you because I believe that this sort of discursive habit you demonstrated (and perhaps its antecedent habit of thought) is a pollutant of intellectual life that sullies all of us.
You attempt to offer a justification of your behavior - but all I can glean from your explanation is that you were annoyed and felt compelled to strike out at the source of your annoyance. Well, there was a bit about "simplicity" and "adherence to some basic rules" thrown in there, but since a good faith reading is an expression of both simplicty in discourse and an adherence to some basic rules, I can't imagine that this was anything more than a self-justifying attempt to elevate your annoyance to something more noble.
"Hat is off to you" has a subject: "hat". "My" is not required.