No, the rumors were flying around very quickly--in fact, too quickly for anyone to know what was going on, though people like you already knew what you were going to believe. Go ahead, keep on running away from the real issues, you Bushevik clown.
In this particular case, the *real* issue is who faked the memos.
And the *real* truth is that Dubya skated out of Nam.
Oh, so you think the fake documents just magically materialized?
Sorry, but I think being gullible is different from deliberate lying.
It's actually an interesting problem, when you think about it. Dan Rather's job as an anchorman is to be believable. However, would you believe someone who doesn't believe you?
I didn't think so.
The obvious conclusion is that someone in that trusted job is going to be at least slightly trusting.
However, in this case, it wasn't just a matter of fooling one guy. The fake documents were good enough to fool several people. Much of that was just how closely they support reality--which is why I'm almost certain that they were at least based on some real documents. Almost certain the real documents have been burned, and I'm even more certain that making the fakes was a bigger crime for which no one has been punished. (At least not yet.)
You are making a very strange combination there, comparing Rather to the other two cases, especially Guckert. Blair was probably led astray, but Guckert was dedicated to lying--and his entire journalistic career was based on lying about everything, especially his own background.
In contrast, Dan Rather is a real journalist, and is dedicated to finding and revealing the truth. The simple truth is that Dubya skated out of Nam, and Rather was actively searching for all the evidence for and against that. The interesting thing about the fake letters is that Rather had no involvement in their creation. They were deliberate forgeries created by someone else to exploit the situation. There was lots of other evidence, but the letters were the kind of icing on the cake that any journalist would have loved to find--and they were carefully forged and delivered by some still unknown criminal with the deliberate intent of obscuring and destroying the truth.
You can blame Rather for getting suckered, but you have to admit it was well done. And whoever did it is the real criminal--who apparently got away with the crime.
It should be obvious that "journalism" involves a certain set of activities, and some bloggers are doing those things. Do you need a dictionary definition? Insofar as a particular blogger is engaging in journalistic practices, then that blogger is a journalist.
However, it is also quite obvious that most bloggers are *NOT* journalists, and don't come even remotely close. All they are doing is writing a diary that happens to be visible all around the world. However, there's nothing about having "readers" that per se makes it into journalism, even if you are eager to extend the definition of journalism into the new media.
There is obviously a key shared activity, in that journalism and blogging both involve writing, but journalism is much more than just writing. It requires a firm desire to find out the truth and present it honestly--and that is precisely why *REAL* journalism is under such vigorous attack from propagandists of every stripe. Journalists are dedicated to truth, but propagandists are dedicated to a set of beliefs without *ANY* regard for truth--but that just destroys the propagandists credibility.
So how can propagandists get anyone to believe them? The two main approaches are obvious--tell lies or attack the truth (obscuring and devaluing it). This Gannon/Guckert affair is one of the most amazing examples to come to light--which only means there'll probably be a more amazing one tomorrow. However, to recap, Guckert is a propagandist spewing his faith but lying to pretend that he's a journalist who's actually telling the truth. Meanwhile, his personal truth (of his own involvement with illegal activities) is the real truth he would like to destroy and obscure. (Then again, you can certainly understand why anyone might try to hide criminal activities.)
One more comment. Good writing is a fine thing, but most blogs are *NOT* good writing. Most blogs should be compared to verbal diarrhea. Writing alone is not enough. Editing is required, but editing is a dying art. Getting off the topic, but editing also has a set of principles, just like journalism.
It should actually be done as part of a larger accounting picture where your contribution to the network is balanced against the resources you want. For example, you might have an ADSL connection that you allow to be partly shared over the WLAN network, and in recognition of your value contributed, you would accumlate local "accounting credit" that you might use for other purposes. Simple example, the people who use part of your ADSL agree to provide you some disk space to be used for backup storage, or they agree to give you higher priority access to their network caches. (The backups would be split up and encrypted of course, but that's a different problem.)
Glad to see it's finally moving forward, though it's not exactly a new idea. Actually goes back much farther than in the following link (so I don't feel like it's really tooting my own horn), but just rehashing from a slightly different (more ideological?) perspective: We, the Internet. They should have a date somewhere on there, but it was probably 2000 or 2001 (but based on ideas that go back at least to the late '80s).
Capsule summary--the privately-owned WLAN infrastructure should bypass and where possible replace the wired corporate-owned network infrastructure. There are three main facilitating aspects:
Certain content is very popular, and can therefore greatly benefit from distributed caching.
Much content is intrinsically local (such as local business specials and ads).
The system can scale very well. Actually, by using variable power transmitters, as density increased the individual power requirements would actually decrease while the local bandwidth would remain constant, and without requiring any additional frequency spectrum.
You anonymous troll racists are distinctly annoying--but I can certainly understand why you want to hide your identity from the Immigration officials in whichever country you're hiding in these days. Nor is it sufficient to make you disappear by ranking your posts down, since some people persist in feeding the trolls.
Tell you what. Why don't you do us the big favor of dropping dead? Seriously. Do you imagine there is anyone who will miss you? Or even notice that you're gone? One less anonymous coward. Whoopee.
You left out the crucial meta-aspects here. The original idea of patents was to encourage innovation, but the authors of the actual laws to implement that idea are basically corporate lawyers whose primary concern was *NOT* innovation for the public good, but only maximizing corporate profits for their very private good. They have so thoroughly corrupted the original good idea that patents is now just a peculiar game played between companies. Having a "useful" patent is just a kind of legal monopoly, a kind of hole card to play against your competitors. The sad part is that most innovation comes from clever *INDIVIDUALS*, not companies, but the inventors can't even afford to play the game these days.
This is actually quite similar to what has happened to copyright. The original idea was to *ENCOURAGE* innovation, but over the years the laws were rewritten by the publishers to stifle and prevent innovation, both by extending the term of copyright to ridiculous lengths, and by extending the notion of "derivative works" to its current obscene levels. Now it's almost impossible to come up with a "new" idea that someone can't make a copyright claim against. Again, the most viable option for the actual creator is to sell the idea to some company that has enough lawyers to support and defend the copyright--but the actual profits go to the companies, not the creators.
Hey, moron. I just want to thank you for posting under a real name so I can mark you as foe and miss the rest of your future garbage. You Busheviks should stop projecting on your voter fraud sins. Aren't you afraid your head will explode from the hypocrisy?
P.S. Only saw your tripe from the random meta-mod.
Or did he *REALLY* mean that they were biased against the spammer? You have to admit that it would be pretty hard to find any potential member of the jury who did *NOT* want to hang the spammer by the private parts from the highest tree. It's like they'd have to find 12 people who've never used email in this day and age? Or maybe that's what he meant be "confused by technical evidence"? These jurors were still trying to understand their quill pens?
In case it isn't obvious, I would be disqualified from any such jury. Heck, I'd be booted for trying to bribe the *OTHER* candidates to disqualify themselves so that I could get in.
By the way, laws are *NOT* going to solve the problem of spam. It's an economic problem, and it requires an economic solution. As soon as the spammers are forced to pay the actual costs, then the spam will be gone. Can't be done within the pseudo-economic non-model of SMTP, where they pretend email is free and the spammers respond by dividing by zero.
How about a little factual background information before we fly into the aether. Then again, this is/.
Gerstner has an engineering degree from Dartmouth and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The Harvard MBA and various honorary degrees are less relevant. Just because he's most famous as a bean counter rather than for technical work is no reason to compare him to the sugar water salesman at Apple.
What a chickenshit troll. Only reason I saw your fresh crap was from the metamod, but you're such a traitor to America that I was hoping to add you to my foe list--except that you're too great a coward to post under your own name.
Somebody please mod that troll appropriately. (There are substantive responses, but no sense in wasting them on a mindless troll.)
I'm quite willing to acknowledge that right and wrong and even the finest legal principles have to exist in a less than perfect world. However, you can't get less perfect than becoming a troll.
The fundamental problem here is that these companies are selling something that belongs to you, *YOUR* personal information. Who suffers if they screw up and let the wrong people get it? How many guesses do you need? Hint: It isn't them.
This is not really a new problem. Technology has just changed the way we deal with it. Before all of this computerization, if someone wanted to know about you, they had to ask you questions. The dialog might go like this:
"What is your salary?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"Well, if you want to borrow money from our bank, then you must provide us with the certain information and evidence."
"Okay. In that case I am willing to tell you..."
Nowadays, you are not involved in any of this process. All of your personal information is flowing around behind the scenes between companies that trust each other, but *NOT* you. However, the amount of personal information is increasing to the point that the resulting questions might be more like this:
"From checking our records, we see that you had dinner in El Torito on the night of February 22nd. Did you know that a suspected terrorist was dining with you? Were you really there for a secret rendezvous? We also see that on the previous Saturday..."
The catch is "our records" really is "your records" that they have collected without mentioning to you.
Solution: We need a legal principle that it is *YOUR* data and it is *YOUR* right to decide who knows it and what is done with it. (This is actually implicit in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.) We also need a technical principle that *YOUR* data should be stored on *YOUR* own computer. (This is the old "Possession is nine points of the law.")
How it works: If someone wants to record information about you, they should contact *YOUR* computer and store it there. They can include whatever signature they like to insure that you can't tamper with the content. They can include a binding request that you back up the data. However, if they want to see that information later, they must ask *your* computer to provide it, and *your* computer will only provide the information if *YOU* agree. (Actually, this means you would define privacy policies for your computer to enforce, including such things as "doublecheck with me anytime someone claims I owe them more than $10", etc.)
I had a really witty and cunning response to his criticism, but I seem to have forgotten what it was. Oh well, maybe I'll remember to add it to my blog later.
Seriously, I think this is one aspect of the serious Internet-derived problem of link-suck. It's really hard to stay focused when the mysterious lure of the next link-click lies before you. These days it is just so easy to get *VAST* amounts of meaningless data, but the effort of sustained reading (as in a non-fiction book) is harder to make. And cohesive writing? The limit of most Americans is about two sentences explaining the "honor and integrity" of Dubya.
Just the natural state of American politics these days. For example, there used to be this thing called "truth" and they used to make an issue of it. These days the new issues are "betrayal" by friends who expose that ugly old truth. There used to be something called "journalists", but now all we have are "evil attack blogs" with more of those ugly old truths.
Why shouldn't we have this scammer in charge of our "data privacy and integrity"? After all, he's the expert in violating our privacy. Just another fox guarding the henhouse. Given that he got the appointment, it's safe to guess which grand old party he donates to.
Well, I was teaching in university around that time, and I used to get some of those machine translations. It was extremely obvious what was going on. Sometimes I would confront the student about it, but usually I just made the effort to teach the student to correct the worst of the problems. Of course that did nothing for the computer that was doing the translations, and the next time around it would be just as bad--so I'd take out double on the grade.
My feeling was that it usually worked out okay. Those students were only going to pass the course in the first place simply because it was my policy to make it harder to fail than to pass. Required classes are like that. Yeah, it would be nice if they learned something along the way, but... (However, there were always a few who were determined to make the supreme efforts. Then I'd have them again the next year.)
Not sure about the exact wording of the law, but I think it should be easy enough to deal with.
First, make sure it is very easy to contact you with any complaint from anyone who sees child pornography either via your network or posted anywhere on your system. Make sure that this abuse contact information is easily and publicly visible on your Web pages, email sigs, billing correspondence, etc.
Make sure you have logs and make it clear that any suspected violation of this law will be sent straight to the coppers. That in itself will scare off any perps--as long as you can make them aware of it.
Ask your customers to help you and encourage them to report any violations they see.
Kill your NNTP servers. Usenet is dead anyway.
You've done your job, and that should be enough. Anyway, my general opinion on the topic is that anyone who is interested in seeing child porn should be required to have some serious psychiatric treatment, preferably at their own expense. Anyone who sells it for profit should be put away for a good long stretch. For anyone who actually makes it, they should get double of both and some more besides.
Shucks, I don't understand why you Busheviks don't use the anonymous coward option. It saves more people from seeing your tripe. The problem with marking you as a foe is that there is a limit of 200 there, and there are apparently more than 200 idiots using/. these days.
Well, he says "from us", so maybe he's posting from Alpha Centauri. Of course in that case, he apparently has a faster-than-the-speed-of-light Internet connection, or his message would have been dated at least 3 years ago.
Must be one of those phase-inverted tachyon thingamajiggers.
Slashdot Mirror
In this particular case, the *real* issue is who faked the memos.
And the *real* truth is that Dubya skated out of Nam.
Sorry, but I think being gullible is different from deliberate lying.
It's actually an interesting problem, when you think about it. Dan Rather's job as an anchorman is to be believable. However, would you believe someone who doesn't believe you?
I didn't think so.
The obvious conclusion is that someone in that trusted job is going to be at least slightly trusting.
However, in this case, it wasn't just a matter of fooling one guy. The fake documents were good enough to fool several people. Much of that was just how closely they support reality--which is why I'm almost certain that they were at least based on some real documents. Almost certain the real documents have been burned, and I'm even more certain that making the fakes was a bigger crime for which no one has been punished. (At least not yet.)
In contrast, Dan Rather is a real journalist, and is dedicated to finding and revealing the truth. The simple truth is that Dubya skated out of Nam, and Rather was actively searching for all the evidence for and against that. The interesting thing about the fake letters is that Rather had no involvement in their creation. They were deliberate forgeries created by someone else to exploit the situation. There was lots of other evidence, but the letters were the kind of icing on the cake that any journalist would have loved to find--and they were carefully forged and delivered by some still unknown criminal with the deliberate intent of obscuring and destroying the truth.
You can blame Rather for getting suckered, but you have to admit it was well done. And whoever did it is the real criminal--who apparently got away with the crime.
However, it is also quite obvious that most bloggers are *NOT* journalists, and don't come even remotely close. All they are doing is writing a diary that happens to be visible all around the world. However, there's nothing about having "readers" that per se makes it into journalism, even if you are eager to extend the definition of journalism into the new media.
There is obviously a key shared activity, in that journalism and blogging both involve writing, but journalism is much more than just writing. It requires a firm desire to find out the truth and present it honestly--and that is precisely why *REAL* journalism is under such vigorous attack from propagandists of every stripe. Journalists are dedicated to truth, but propagandists are dedicated to a set of beliefs without *ANY* regard for truth--but that just destroys the propagandists credibility.
So how can propagandists get anyone to believe them? The two main approaches are obvious--tell lies or attack the truth (obscuring and devaluing it). This Gannon/Guckert affair is one of the most amazing examples to come to light--which only means there'll probably be a more amazing one tomorrow. However, to recap, Guckert is a propagandist spewing his faith but lying to pretend that he's a journalist who's actually telling the truth. Meanwhile, his personal truth (of his own involvement with illegal activities) is the real truth he would like to destroy and obscure. (Then again, you can certainly understand why anyone might try to hide criminal activities.)
One more comment. Good writing is a fine thing, but most blogs are *NOT* good writing. Most blogs should be compared to verbal diarrhea. Writing alone is not enough. Editing is required, but editing is a dying art. Getting off the topic, but editing also has a set of principles, just like journalism.
It should actually be done as part of a larger accounting picture where your contribution to the network is balanced against the resources you want. For example, you might have an ADSL connection that you allow to be partly shared over the WLAN network, and in recognition of your value contributed, you would accumlate local "accounting credit" that you might use for other purposes. Simple example, the people who use part of your ADSL agree to provide you some disk space to be used for backup storage, or they agree to give you higher priority access to their network caches. (The backups would be split up and encrypted of course, but that's a different problem.)
Capsule summary--the privately-owned WLAN infrastructure should bypass and where possible replace the wired corporate-owned network infrastructure. There are three main facilitating aspects:
Answer: Not married and not a fucking prayer of it.
Tell you what. Why don't you do us the big favor of dropping dead? Seriously. Do you imagine there is anyone who will miss you? Or even notice that you're gone? One less anonymous coward. Whoopee.
This is actually quite similar to what has happened to copyright. The original idea was to *ENCOURAGE* innovation, but over the years the laws were rewritten by the publishers to stifle and prevent innovation, both by extending the term of copyright to ridiculous lengths, and by extending the notion of "derivative works" to its current obscene levels. Now it's almost impossible to come up with a "new" idea that someone can't make a copyright claim against. Again, the most viable option for the actual creator is to sell the idea to some company that has enough lawyers to support and defend the copyright--but the actual profits go to the companies, not the creators.
P.S. Only saw your tripe from the random meta-mod.
In case it isn't obvious, I would be disqualified from any such jury. Heck, I'd be booted for trying to bribe the *OTHER* candidates to disqualify themselves so that I could get in.
By the way, laws are *NOT* going to solve the problem of spam. It's an economic problem, and it requires an economic solution. As soon as the spammers are forced to pay the actual costs, then the spam will be gone. Can't be done within the pseudo-economic non-model of SMTP, where they pretend email is free and the spammers respond by dividing by zero.
Naw, it's just that Dell's motto is "Good enough is good enough", and Intel CPUs are good enough.
Gerstner has an engineering degree from Dartmouth and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The Harvard MBA and various honorary degrees are less relevant. Just because he's most famous as a bean counter rather than for technical work is no reason to compare him to the sugar water salesman at Apple.
What a chickenshit troll. Only reason I saw your fresh crap was from the metamod, but you're such a traitor to America that I was hoping to add you to my foe list--except that you're too great a coward to post under your own name.
I'm quite willing to acknowledge that right and wrong and even the finest legal principles have to exist in a less than perfect world. However, you can't get less perfect than becoming a troll.
This is not really a new problem. Technology has just changed the way we deal with it. Before all of this computerization, if someone wanted to know about you, they had to ask you questions. The dialog might go like this:
Nowadays, you are not involved in any of this process. All of your personal information is flowing around behind the scenes between companies that trust each other, but *NOT* you. However, the amount of personal information is increasing to the point that the resulting questions might be more like this:
The catch is "our records" really is "your records" that they have collected without mentioning to you.
Solution: We need a legal principle that it is *YOUR* data and it is *YOUR* right to decide who knows it and what is done with it. (This is actually implicit in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.) We also need a technical principle that *YOUR* data should be stored on *YOUR* own computer. (This is the old "Possession is nine points of the law.")
How it works: If someone wants to record information about you, they should contact *YOUR* computer and store it there. They can include whatever signature they like to insure that you can't tamper with the content. They can include a binding request that you back up the data. However, if they want to see that information later, they must ask *your* computer to provide it, and *your* computer will only provide the information if *YOU* agree. (Actually, this means you would define privacy policies for your computer to enforce, including such things as "doublecheck with me anytime someone claims I owe them more than $10", etc.)
Seriously, I think this is one aspect of the serious Internet-derived problem of link-suck. It's really hard to stay focused when the mysterious lure of the next link-click lies before you. These days it is just so easy to get *VAST* amounts of meaningless data, but the effort of sustained reading (as in a non-fiction book) is harder to make. And cohesive writing? The limit of most Americans is about two sentences explaining the "honor and integrity" of Dubya.
Class dismissed. (As in the "no class" action suit.)
Why shouldn't we have this scammer in charge of our "data privacy and integrity"? After all, he's the expert in violating our privacy. Just another fox guarding the henhouse. Given that he got the appointment, it's safe to guess which grand old party he donates to.
Move along now. Nothing to see here.
My feeling was that it usually worked out okay. Those students were only going to pass the course in the first place simply because it was my policy to make it harder to fail than to pass. Required classes are like that. Yeah, it would be nice if they learned something along the way, but... (However, there were always a few who were determined to make the supreme efforts. Then I'd have them again the next year.)
- First, make sure it is very easy to contact you with any complaint from anyone who sees child pornography either via your network or posted anywhere on your system. Make sure that this abuse contact information is easily and publicly visible on your Web pages, email sigs, billing correspondence, etc.
- Make sure you have logs and make it clear that any suspected violation of this law will be sent straight to the coppers. That in itself will scare off any perps--as long as you can make them aware of it.
- Ask your customers to help you and encourage them to report any violations they see.
- Kill your NNTP servers. Usenet is dead anyway.
You've done your job, and that should be enough. Anyway, my general opinion on the topic is that anyone who is interested in seeing child porn should be required to have some serious psychiatric treatment, preferably at their own expense. Anyone who sells it for profit should be put away for a good long stretch. For anyone who actually makes it, they should get double of both and some more besides.Eh? Last I heard was that they had gone bankrupt?
Shucks, I don't understand why you Busheviks don't use the anonymous coward option. It saves more people from seeing your tripe. The problem with marking you as a foe is that there is a limit of 200 there, and there are apparently more than 200 idiots using /. these days.
Must be one of those phase-inverted tachyon thingamajiggers.
You must be Jeff Gannon. Got to do something since you blew the White House gig, eh?