There actually are legitimate purposes for government. In this case, the idea of wireless networking replacing most of the wired infrastructure would be very progressive--but anathema to the politically influential phone companies. Of course, those pork-barrel-politicians in Texas are going to jump in and stifle the alternatives. Lots of imaginative possibilities, but if they intefere with big business, just forget it.
In the long run, it doesn't matter. As America regulates and scams itself into technical obscurity, more innovative and--dare I say--democratic societies will have competitive advantages and eventually eclipse her. Mostly reminds me of the 20-year stall on FM radio because the big old boys were perfectly happy with the profits they were making on AM. Eventually FM won out (of course), because it was technically superior.
As an American, I am of course sad to see it coming, but any country where rougly half want Dubya as a leader should expect repercussions.
Well, I tried to go through the process for the free report, but they refused to provide anything. It actually felt more like I was participating in a phishing scam with an especially impressive click-through-and-we-own-your-firstborn-child legal agreement.
Actually, I think the real explanation is that they have a bunch of lawyers on their side, and they are looking very carefully at every loophole and possible reason to avoid telling you anything. Sure, legally speaking, they have to provide the information, but they don't have to make it easy. How many people are going to keep jumping through the hurdles?
Too many? No problem! Just add a few more hurdles.
I may try again later, but I think the situation is that I have used two of my attempts, and if I fail the third time, then I have to wait three days before trying again.
Serirously- this isn't paperclips these people are selling ITS YOUR PERSONAL DATA. They need to be closed, and whoever responsible needs to go to jail- and everyone involved in covering up the crime deserves to live in poverty for the rest of their fucking lives.
Nice thought, but Dubya would pardon them. After all, this is the same company that put him in the White House in the first place. Or have you forgotten that he claims to have won by 500 votes while ChoicePoint helped disenfranchise thousands of primarily Democratic voters.
(Of course, Dubya's margin was so slim that *LOT'S* of groups can claim discredit for slipping him into the White House. Irregardless of the various culprits, we're all suffering for it now.)
Anyway, as I noted in the earlier thread on this topic, I think we need to establish the principle that *YOU* own the personal data about *YOU*, and no one can use it or sell it without *YOUR* permission. This is actually a logical implication of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. However, to give it teeth, I think we also need to appeal to "Possession is nine points of the law", and *YOU* should be able to store your own data on *YOUR* own computer. Anyone wants to see it, they ask for your permission (or prove they deserve a search warrant).
I'm fairly sure that libel requires intent, and there's none there. ChoicePoint just says we received the report in good faith and passed it on--which is all they claim to do. (In reality, they often do much more analysis than that, but that's getting into different privacy issues.)
Actually, I don't remember the citation now or even enough details to Google it, but some of the UK newsgroups are prime examples of the worst of usenet. In particular, there were some strong community-based newsgroups that were totally destroyed by trolls some years ago. I think Liverpool was one of the prime targets.
In general, I do think that non-English newsgroups still have decent SNRs, but I think there are two factors involved there. One is relative politeness, with newsgroups providing some of the best evidence that Americans are especially rude people. I would like to think of myself as a gentleman, but gentility has little place in the current usenet. It's a jungle of the rudest sort.
The other factor is relative numbers. Most countries are still lagging behind in net access, and the users are still concentrated among the technical elite. (That's why I like the n00B filter on/. (of course).)
When the "signal" is mostly false information, the SNR goes negative. Or how else do you want to interpret it? Or are you asking for a categorization of the types of newsgroup noise? Trollage? Puffery? Cut-and-paste propaganda from the wildest Web pages? Talon News?
I do have to ask... Can anyone explain why the trolls are so averse to using proper spelling? Is it some kind of badge or something?
I said "average SNR" for that reason, and I also acknowledged the continued existence of pockets of actual information, though even in those places you have to beware of puffery these days, which is yet another form of noise. In response to your indirect query, I'll also admit that I have spent far too much time in some alt.* newsgroups, which are leading the way downward. As a former sociologist of sorts, I'm kind of interested in such group dynamics.
However, even with all of those disclaimers and restrictions, I think the situation is very bleak almost everywhere in the public newsgroups. The sense of community has pretty much been lost, and I think that was a big chunk of the value in the "old days". It's not just the constant flood of n00Bs, but the migrations of the hordes of lower class trolls. Sometimes they are effectively "driven out" of other newsgroups by nastier trolls, but at other times they are apparently deliberately looking for fresh communities to "plunder" and disrupt.
I can't pretend to understand their motivations. There is obviously no positive benefit to them, no awards or prizes for contributing to the worst of usenet. However, it is also true that there is no negative sanction or penalty.
I don't know either, but I did some research, and that's how the saying goes. "Possession is nine points of the law", and most of the sources mean that it's basically legalese for "finders keepers".
Actually, the newsgroups died quite a while ago. I think the historians of epistemology will eventually date it either to the first time the average SNR went negative, or perhaps the last time it touched positive territory. Trivial distinction.
It's not just that the information content has become quite low, but that there is as much disinformation as actual positive content. Add in all the pure noise and various forms of spam, add in a little creamed troll (and I think all trolls should be pureed), and you have a pretty worthless thing.
Since so much of the negative information is political propaganda, my guess would be that the SNR hits the deepest troughs during elections, and in combination with the arrival of perpetual September, I'd guess the first time the average SNR went negative was probably in 1996 or 1998, but without doubt it was dead by 2000, whichever metric you care to use. (Two main metrics would be number of posts or volume.) I suspect it is already in permanent negative SNR territory, though there are still tiny pockets of actual information scattered hither and yon.
Why? I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.
Hey, I understand about forgetting to read the article (though this one was worth the reading), but if you're going to reply to a specific post, at least you ought to read that. Specifically Step 9 of the little example.
However, that doesn't mean it needs to be your real address if you don't want to reveal that. Do they still do General Delivery?
Given that the cost of copying information is approaching quite close to zero, how do you propose to enforce that liability? Copying it back and forth, it will be impossible to know who is liable for anything, no matter what the statutes say.
We really need to start by saying that there is no god-given (or Constitutional or what-have-you) right to have our personal information, or the cat is already out of the bag and off to the races, leaving a trail of decanned worms everywhere.
(Yes, it's actually a serious topic, but my atomic metaphor mixer got out of control.)
Actually, in theory there is no reason for the bank to know anything about you, even including your name or address. I'll construct a simple concrete scenario around your example of an online purchase:
Go to Web site and log in (or otherwise establish your identity--I actually think a secure system should really have at least two security elements of something you have and something you know, but this is getting off the topic here).
Select the merchandise and order it.
The store contacts your computer for payment information.
Your computer asks for confirmation that you made the order.
After confirmation, your computer returns a bank number, an account number, and an authorization to withdraw some money.
The store contacts the bank and asks for money.
For extra security, the bank might double-check with your computer again. (Just an example of what should be user-controllable security settings that could be included in the certificate. If you were really paranoid, you might insist that the bank doublechecks directly with you, especially for larger purchases, but in that case the certificate would also need to include some personal information about you and how to contact you. Your decision whether or not to do that, however.)
Money is transferred to the store.
The store contacts your computer again, confirms payment and asks for the shipment information.
Merchandise is shipped.
There is no intrinsic requirement here for the bank to know more than the source and destination account numbers and how to examine the certificate for authenticity. The bank has no reason to know how much money you have in other banks, or anything beyond the fact that this account number has enough money to cover the requested transfer. (Your other example is almost exactly the same, but with the transfer coming from your employer to an account you have specified.)
Actually, it's kind of a reverse technology thing... Not so long ago, almost all of the data about you was stored in your head, and if anyone wanted to know about you, they'd have to ask you questions. For the important stuff, they'd need to check your statements against the witnesses who were involved.
For example, before all this computerization, if you wanted to borrow some money, you told the bank about who you borrowed from in the past, and they would check to see what those people said about the loans and your repayments. You might claim to own a particular piece of land as collateral, but they would check with the property ownership records to see what was really going on.
Nowadays, you might try to borrow some money only to find out that some outfit like ChoicePoint has leaked your personal information, and someone used that data to "borrow" your identity--and now the bank thinks you've already borrowed twice that much. ChoicePoint says "Our data, our mistake, your tough luck." Even worse in the case when they helped disqualify legitimate voters because they were paid to do so... Reminds me of the joke about the "creative" accountant: "You want to know how much is 2 plus 2? Well... How much do you *want* it to be?"
I really think we should have the right to store our own data on our own computers, and if I heard of a country with that kind of law, I'd be thinking very seriously about moving. I really can't imagine that all of the personal data about me is more than the 250 GB of HDD I currently own. Possession is nine points of the law, as they say. If you need to check on me, ask me for permission, and I'll decide whether or not I'm willing to let you look at the data, and you better have a good reason. For example, you might want to check some of my (computerized) records before deciding whether or not to loan me some money.
Right now the data is "out there", somewhere, and no one really knows what happens to any of it. Even worse, the amount of recorded personal data is increasing very rapidly...
Very insightful, and I agree that we need a legal principle that personal information belongs to the individual--but I think we should go farther. I think we should require that the personally-identifiable personal information only be stored on the computer of the person who owns it--and that the authorities need to show probable cause and get a search warrant before they have any acces to it. However, a lot of it should be covered under the Fifth Amendment, too.
Probably won't happen, however. In fact, we are going in the other direction and the companies that hold your data legally "own" it in most cases.
By the way, don't you recognize this particular company? Same one that helped BushCo purge all those voters in 2000. I think they got out of the voter purging business before 2004, but I haven't really been tracking it.
Well, I don't see anything about it so far (or it's moderated below my visibility), but the obvious comment is that Dean's rise is a natural part of the swinging pendulum. The most important factor in the long-term success of the American political system has been moderation. Or perhaps you prefer to call it balance? From separation of powers to checks and balances to the independent judiciary to campaigns directed at the "undecided" moderate voters, the whole system has usually oscillated around central positions and the result has mostly worked very well for most of the people.
Dean is clearly on the left side of the spectrum, but BushCo is much more clearly on the *FAR* right side. The rightwingers have become so dominant that the system is falling out of balance, and there are basically only two outcomes now. One possible outcome is a swing back to the left, and Dean is of course going to be pushing for that. The stronger the swing to the right, the stronger the counterswing will have to be.
The other possible outcome would be bankruptcy and collapse. The United States has already lasted far longer than the average government, and it's showing plenty of symptoms of the kind of senility that often appears before a government collapses.
Main one I can think of is legal. What if the courts ruled that Microsoft's disclaimers of liability are excessive? Gosh, based on my hourly salary, if I could charge back to Microsoft about 2% of the time I've spent fighting their bugs I would be making a *profit* on the deal. Make the OS rebate settlement look like peanuts. However, the speed of the courts is such that this would take a couple of years to roll all the way up through the system, and the corruption of the legal system is so bad that I'm sure Microsoft would get it fixed somewhere along the way.
More spectacular would be a really massive security disaster that Microsoft got blamed for. That would almost have to involve cracking MicrosoftUpdate, the holy grail of the black hat l33t hackers.
The other big vulnerability I can think of involves market rejection of Microsoft's licensing transition. Some evidence of that in the death of their Passport thing. People do not need or want new versions of the year every year, especially when the new versions are inferior to their predecessors but are still rammed down the customers' throats. (Yes, I'm talking about Word XP and Windows XP.) Microsoft's idea of software subscriptions is very *unattractive* to me and lots of other people, and if they push it hard enough, they may actually manage to push enough people into Linux to make a critical mass. Kind of nice to imagine large scale abandonment of Windows...
Of course CBS should have admitted it was their fault they were so brilliantly scammed. So when are you going to admit it was your fault you got conned into voting for Dubya?
Well, you got me to think of a different angle of it...
Do you think the press conferences are supposed to be about communicating the truth effectively, or are they supposed to be adversarial situations in which the reporters have to fish for the truth that has not been revealed?
Of course, the White House claims they are just communicating the truth, and it's just one of those funny coincidences that "Jeff Gannon" was so helpful in getting the official BushCo truth® out to the public. Makes you wonder why they need an evasive slime artist like McClellan for the job of handling them? Another funny coincidence?
However, I don't think I'm the only person who regards the press conferences as image management and propaganda, and this fake reporter is exactly the kind of tool you use for such purposes. Quite similar to paying off the various rightwing pundits for their support. (Though the outcry has been about direct payments, I think the indirect payments are much worse--for example, giving them well-paid contracts with FAUX news.)
One thing that really bothers me is that White House security has become so slack that people can wander around there with fake names, as long as they are the proper kind of supportive fanatics. Was this bogus scammer ever in the presence of his majesty Dubya? At least one of the cited questions seems to say he was on at least one occasion. The security issue is that such fanatics are basically crazy, and one of them might decide that Dubya has betrayed the cause and has to be killed. (Sure would be politically awkward if Cheney couldn't keep hiding in the shadows.)
You expose your stupidity and Bushevikian bias with the "(obviously) fake" praise of that brilliant scam--which probably goes all the way back to Karl Rove, though it will probably never be proven exactly by whom and how. The timing and channelling of it was just about perfect from a propaganda perspective, and the plausibility of the memos was so high that I think there are only two cases, and both of them surely point back to someone with the political cunning and scrupulousness of Rove.
Case 1 is that BushCo got a hold of the original memos when they were purging Dubya's TANG records, and they prepared highly similar fakes to be released through controlled channels at the appropriate time. In this case, their main concern would be how to create sufficiently plausible fakes and how to get them exposed to the public by some suitably "liberally biased" channel, but they also had to make sure the fakes contained "proper" flaws that wouldn't be detected until too late.
Case 2 is that the CBS versions were accurate and real, not fakes, but were effectively recast as fakes using the rumor-mongering power of the Internet. In this case, Rove (or possibly someone working for him) may still have known about the original memos, but they had already researched and prepared a discrediting response if the memos ever surfaced in public. However, in that case, the timing was incredibly lucky for Dubya, and I have trouble believing in such miraculous coincidences.
The crack about "watch the watchmen" was especially hypocritical. Or does that mean you're a big fan of Michael Moore?
Whoops, I should have clarified the specific joke, too. A reference to an old Emotion processor that didn't amount to much, implying that the Cell processor might be another flash in the pan. I don't really remember the details, but I think it was graphic chip.
Well, you got replies, but no one seems to have answered your question very directly. The ^H is used to create a kind of visible "Freudian slip", usually as a kind of joke. Usually there is a recognizable word before the string of ^H pseudo-characters, so the idea is that the writer made a mistake, backspaced over it, and finally corrected it with the next word. Of course, the real intent is usually to make a joke by contrasting the "mistaken" word to some more polite or diplomatic expression.
The replies you got mostly addressed the historical usage, though they don't talk about the really ancient days when you did it yourself. I actually think the first <Backspace> keys may have simply been hardware shortcuts for ^H.
These days in HTML you should use the strikethrough tag for the same effect, but it doesn't seem to be supported here on/. (per my limited testing).
Repeating the old comment, but anything MS can do to keep SCO in the game is indirectly beneficial to them because it sustains or increases FUD about Linux. Especially for business users, they don't want to feel like there's a sword hanging over their head with potential lawsuits and surprise licensing fees.
Microsoft would much rather schedule your extortion as official "upgrades", even when they are really downgrades. (As sterling examples, IMNSHO both Windows XP and Word XP are inferior to their predecessors.)
I recently saw an interesting suggestion that some makers should start offering dual-boot machines with Windows and Linux. That actually sounds very attractive to me. I'm sure they could easily include a "remove Windows" command on the Linux side, but I really doubt Microsoft would be mollified by a simple "remove Linux" command on the Windows side--unless it was so simple and in-your-face that they users would be unable to avoid hitting it at some point.
However, even that dual-boot solution would be awkward. Perhaps some maker could work out a deal for a large-scale license for VMware, probably with Windows as the host OS. That would get rid of the need to boot when accessing the other OS.
What an evasive propaganda-spewing moron. I sometimes wonder what motivates such stupidity. Certainly not expecting to find any scientific credentials there.
How about if you promise to give up all your "liberal" scientific conveniences? Starting with that computer you cut-and-pasted your crap with?
Seriously, the BushCo people, and espcially the religious fanatic Busheviks, apparently think there's some kind of statute of limitations on scientific reality. If they stall long enough it will just go away. Not.
The sad or annoying thing is that at least a few of them do know better. Dick Cheney, for example. However, the only concern of those few is with cashing the checks before the reality bounce happens. That's not a question of a statute of limitations, but rather the post facto law thing. Sure, in the future people will regard them as a bunch of criminals--but too late.
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In the long run, it doesn't matter. As America regulates and scams itself into technical obscurity, more innovative and--dare I say--democratic societies will have competitive advantages and eventually eclipse her. Mostly reminds me of the 20-year stall on FM radio because the big old boys were perfectly happy with the profits they were making on AM. Eventually FM won out (of course), because it was technically superior.
As an American, I am of course sad to see it coming, but any country where rougly half want Dubya as a leader should expect repercussions.
Since you are a chickenshit anonymous coward...
Actually, I think the real explanation is that they have a bunch of lawyers on their side, and they are looking very carefully at every loophole and possible reason to avoid telling you anything. Sure, legally speaking, they have to provide the information, but they don't have to make it easy. How many people are going to keep jumping through the hurdles?
Too many? No problem! Just add a few more hurdles.
I may try again later, but I think the situation is that I have used two of my attempts, and if I fail the third time, then I have to wait three days before trying again.
(Of course, Dubya's margin was so slim that *LOT'S* of groups can claim discredit for slipping him into the White House. Irregardless of the various culprits, we're all suffering for it now.)
Anyway, as I noted in the earlier thread on this topic, I think we need to establish the principle that *YOU* own the personal data about *YOU*, and no one can use it or sell it without *YOUR* permission. This is actually a logical implication of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. However, to give it teeth, I think we also need to appeal to "Possession is nine points of the law", and *YOU* should be able to store your own data on *YOUR* own computer. Anyone wants to see it, they ask for your permission (or prove they deserve a search warrant).
I'm fairly sure that libel requires intent, and there's none there. ChoicePoint just says we received the report in good faith and passed it on--which is all they claim to do. (In reality, they often do much more analysis than that, but that's getting into different privacy issues.)
In general, I do think that non-English newsgroups still have decent SNRs, but I think there are two factors involved there. One is relative politeness, with newsgroups providing some of the best evidence that Americans are especially rude people. I would like to think of myself as a gentleman, but gentility has little place in the current usenet. It's a jungle of the rudest sort.
The other factor is relative numbers. Most countries are still lagging behind in net access, and the users are still concentrated among the technical elite. (That's why I like the n00B filter on /. (of course).)
I do have to ask... Can anyone explain why the trolls are so averse to using proper spelling? Is it some kind of badge or something?
Hey, they don't need no stinkin' badges.
However, even with all of those disclaimers and restrictions, I think the situation is very bleak almost everywhere in the public newsgroups. The sense of community has pretty much been lost, and I think that was a big chunk of the value in the "old days". It's not just the constant flood of n00Bs, but the migrations of the hordes of lower class trolls. Sometimes they are effectively "driven out" of other newsgroups by nastier trolls, but at other times they are apparently deliberately looking for fresh communities to "plunder" and disrupt.
I can't pretend to understand their motivations. There is obviously no positive benefit to them, no awards or prizes for contributing to the worst of usenet. However, it is also true that there is no negative sanction or penalty.
I don't know either, but I did some research, and that's how the saying goes. "Possession is nine points of the law", and most of the sources mean that it's basically legalese for "finders keepers".
It's not just that the information content has become quite low, but that there is as much disinformation as actual positive content. Add in all the pure noise and various forms of spam, add in a little creamed troll (and I think all trolls should be pureed), and you have a pretty worthless thing.
Since so much of the negative information is political propaganda, my guess would be that the SNR hits the deepest troughs during elections, and in combination with the arrival of perpetual September, I'd guess the first time the average SNR went negative was probably in 1996 or 1998, but without doubt it was dead by 2000, whichever metric you care to use. (Two main metrics would be number of posts or volume.) I suspect it is already in permanent negative SNR territory, though there are still tiny pockets of actual information scattered hither and yon.
Why? I think abuse of anonymity is probably the single largest killer.
However, that doesn't mean it needs to be your real address if you don't want to reveal that. Do they still do General Delivery?
We really need to start by saying that there is no god-given (or Constitutional or what-have-you) right to have our personal information, or the cat is already out of the bag and off to the races, leaving a trail of decanned worms everywhere.
(Yes, it's actually a serious topic, but my atomic metaphor mixer got out of control.)
There is no intrinsic requirement here for the bank to know more than the source and destination account numbers and how to examine the certificate for authenticity. The bank has no reason to know how much money you have in other banks, or anything beyond the fact that this account number has enough money to cover the requested transfer. (Your other example is almost exactly the same, but with the transfer coming from your employer to an account you have specified.)
For example, before all this computerization, if you wanted to borrow some money, you told the bank about who you borrowed from in the past, and they would check to see what those people said about the loans and your repayments. You might claim to own a particular piece of land as collateral, but they would check with the property ownership records to see what was really going on.
Nowadays, you might try to borrow some money only to find out that some outfit like ChoicePoint has leaked your personal information, and someone used that data to "borrow" your identity--and now the bank thinks you've already borrowed twice that much. ChoicePoint says "Our data, our mistake, your tough luck." Even worse in the case when they helped disqualify legitimate voters because they were paid to do so... Reminds me of the joke about the "creative" accountant: "You want to know how much is 2 plus 2? Well... How much do you *want* it to be?"
I really think we should have the right to store our own data on our own computers, and if I heard of a country with that kind of law, I'd be thinking very seriously about moving. I really can't imagine that all of the personal data about me is more than the 250 GB of HDD I currently own. Possession is nine points of the law, as they say. If you need to check on me, ask me for permission, and I'll decide whether or not I'm willing to let you look at the data, and you better have a good reason. For example, you might want to check some of my (computerized) records before deciding whether or not to loan me some money.
Right now the data is "out there", somewhere, and no one really knows what happens to any of it. Even worse, the amount of recorded personal data is increasing very rapidly...
Probably won't happen, however. In fact, we are going in the other direction and the companies that hold your data legally "own" it in most cases.
By the way, don't you recognize this particular company? Same one that helped BushCo purge all those voters in 2000. I think they got out of the voter purging business before 2004, but I haven't really been tracking it.
Dean is clearly on the left side of the spectrum, but BushCo is much more clearly on the *FAR* right side. The rightwingers have become so dominant that the system is falling out of balance, and there are basically only two outcomes now. One possible outcome is a swing back to the left, and Dean is of course going to be pushing for that. The stronger the swing to the right, the stronger the counterswing will have to be.
The other possible outcome would be bankruptcy and collapse. The United States has already lasted far longer than the average government, and it's showing plenty of symptoms of the kind of senility that often appears before a government collapses.
More spectacular would be a really massive security disaster that Microsoft got blamed for. That would almost have to involve cracking MicrosoftUpdate, the holy grail of the black hat l33t hackers.
The other big vulnerability I can think of involves market rejection of Microsoft's licensing transition. Some evidence of that in the death of their Passport thing. People do not need or want new versions of the year every year, especially when the new versions are inferior to their predecessors but are still rammed down the customers' throats. (Yes, I'm talking about Word XP and Windows XP.) Microsoft's idea of software subscriptions is very *unattractive* to me and lots of other people, and if they push it hard enough, they may actually manage to push enough people into Linux to make a critical mass. Kind of nice to imagine large scale abandonment of Windows...
Of course CBS should have admitted it was their fault they were so brilliantly scammed. So when are you going to admit it was your fault you got conned into voting for Dubya?
Do you think the press conferences are supposed to be about communicating the truth effectively, or are they supposed to be adversarial situations in which the reporters have to fish for the truth that has not been revealed?
Of course, the White House claims they are just communicating the truth, and it's just one of those funny coincidences that "Jeff Gannon" was so helpful in getting the official BushCo truth® out to the public. Makes you wonder why they need an evasive slime artist like McClellan for the job of handling them? Another funny coincidence?
However, I don't think I'm the only person who regards the press conferences as image management and propaganda, and this fake reporter is exactly the kind of tool you use for such purposes. Quite similar to paying off the various rightwing pundits for their support. (Though the outcry has been about direct payments, I think the indirect payments are much worse--for example, giving them well-paid contracts with FAUX news.)
One thing that really bothers me is that White House security has become so slack that people can wander around there with fake names, as long as they are the proper kind of supportive fanatics. Was this bogus scammer ever in the presence of his majesty Dubya? At least one of the cited questions seems to say he was on at least one occasion. The security issue is that such fanatics are basically crazy, and one of them might decide that Dubya has betrayed the cause and has to be killed. (Sure would be politically awkward if Cheney couldn't keep hiding in the shadows.)
Case 1 is that BushCo got a hold of the original memos when they were purging Dubya's TANG records, and they prepared highly similar fakes to be released through controlled channels at the appropriate time. In this case, their main concern would be how to create sufficiently plausible fakes and how to get them exposed to the public by some suitably "liberally biased" channel, but they also had to make sure the fakes contained "proper" flaws that wouldn't be detected until too late.
Case 2 is that the CBS versions were accurate and real, not fakes, but were effectively recast as fakes using the rumor-mongering power of the Internet. In this case, Rove (or possibly someone working for him) may still have known about the original memos, but they had already researched and prepared a discrediting response if the memos ever surfaced in public. However, in that case, the timing was incredibly lucky for Dubya, and I have trouble believing in such miraculous coincidences.
The crack about "watch the watchmen" was especially hypocritical. Or does that mean you're a big fan of Michael Moore?
Nope, I didn't think so.
Whoops, I should have clarified the specific joke, too. A reference to an old Emotion processor that didn't amount to much, implying that the Cell processor might be another flash in the pan. I don't really remember the details, but I think it was graphic chip.
The replies you got mostly addressed the historical usage, though they don't talk about the really ancient days when you did it yourself. I actually think the first <Backspace> keys may have simply been hardware shortcuts for ^H.
These days in HTML you should use the strikethrough tag for the same effect, but it doesn't seem to be supported here on /. (per my limited testing).
Microsoft would much rather schedule your extortion as official "upgrades", even when they are really downgrades. (As sterling examples, IMNSHO both Windows XP and Word XP are inferior to their predecessors.)
I recently saw an interesting suggestion that some makers should start offering dual-boot machines with Windows and Linux. That actually sounds very attractive to me. I'm sure they could easily include a "remove Windows" command on the Linux side, but I really doubt Microsoft would be mollified by a simple "remove Linux" command on the Windows side--unless it was so simple and in-your-face that they users would be unable to avoid hitting it at some point.
However, even that dual-boot solution would be awkward. Perhaps some maker could work out a deal for a large-scale license for VMware, probably with Windows as the host OS. That would get rid of the need to boot when accessing the other OS.
How about if you promise to give up all your "liberal" scientific conveniences? Starting with that computer you cut-and-pasted your crap with?
The sad or annoying thing is that at least a few of them do know better. Dick Cheney, for example. However, the only concern of those few is with cashing the checks before the reality bounce happens. That's not a question of a statute of limitations, but rather the post facto law thing. Sure, in the future people will regard them as a bunch of criminals--but too late.