The police ARE trying to listen in on private phone calls, in the hopes of finding something there. Would you say police seaching private homes was OK simply because they're only looking for criminals? Not if you believe in any form of privacy.
"Al-Qaeda cells coordinating international terrorism is an everyday occurence in many German cities" -- you have direct knowledge of this? I haven't seen it reported anywhere. Maybe we suspect it is "an everyday occurrence" but suspicion without evidence is nothing, and acting on that to monitor 20,000 numbers would be harassment. Police doing "everything they can" would logically include what besides phone taps? Fighting terrorism is a worthy cause, but trashing everything we believe in to do it is not.
Give blame where blame is due, but nothing is gained by mindlessly rounding up the usual suspects. Al Queda is evil, and so is an authoritarian police state.
Face-saving -- oh, I doubt the two gov'ts are necessarily different in wanting this, but the Russians are more ruthless in getting it. They're climbing out of a history of brutal repression, while we are descending into censorship; maybe we'll pass each other at some point, who knows?
One of the worst things about these changes is that they're not necessary, and no one has even tried to show they would made 9/11 less likly. Rather things like the Patriot Act appear to be opportunism by groups who have wanted to do this for a long time.
But ultimate responsibility lies with the voters -- if they care they need to show it. And I think most people support or tolerate things as they are now, and until it's too late.
You have a lovely sense of taste. So you think, what, that Senator Wellstone and two members of his family dies because he was a "socialist"? You dare to class him with Hitler? I suppose you think his death was divine justice?
"Welfare recipients" do NOT receive EIC -- it's call the Earned Income Credit for a reason.
Clearly you have no dignity.
Actually ... the Chicago Tribune
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 2
The Tribune was the one with the early deadline, Republican ownership, and cavalier attitude. And I don't think they've ever quite lived it down.
That airliner didn't fly into a live fire area, until the USS Vincennes decided to make it one. The question became not whether Robocruiser made a mistake but how. An interesting story, albeit tragic.
On my way to pick up my first grader to go vote now. (Beaming.) There was an NPR piece this morning on research showing that kids who went to the polling place with their parents were twice as likely to vote as adults. Hey, I remember doing it with my mom.
As for the other that matter, if anyone has solutions I'll listen to them in any forum. But more seriously, freedom of speech is, well, pretty philosophically close to the GPL movement. There's also a lot of interest in DMCA and other freedom v. law issues. Fianlly, government monitoring of computer activity has frightening implications... hence the interest in PGP. There's a pattern, at least arguably enough to justify this posting.
That doesn't mean any posting on free speech belongs here -- there ought to be a technology angle.
Well, you see, in America we don't have to be reminded to vote.
Most of us don't do it, reminded or not. But the nerds will vote in droves if they ever put in on the Internet.;-)
I think turnout today is predicted below 40%. OK, it's not a Presidential election, but if you're following Yank politics the Senate is hanging in the balance, politically. And just a couple of years ago those nice folks in Florida showed us that each vote does count (usually).
Gotta go pick up my 6 y.o. so we can go vote (I let him press the buttons but not make the choices).
I don't suppose you came across Eunice Stone there?
She may be a lovely person, but to me she typifies the nervous, unworldly, vaguely racist people that make so much mischief possible.
And I have never heard of a library donation being declined! All of them? I accidentally donated a 30 y.o. ZIP code directory to our Arlington, VA library and they took it. (Well, they probably didn't find it before we pulled out of the parking lot.)
Law enforcement has to have some particular reason to suspect YOU specifically before it probes through generally accepted expectations of privacy. The depth of the intrusion is propotional to the persuasiveness of the evidence. BUT NO FISHING EXPEDITIONS.
The Patriot Act relies on a hysterical and ill-defined notion of a future terrorist threat to provide justification. This has been characteristic of many "emergency measures" in many countries over the years -- you know, we have to shut down the presses because it might cause trouble, etc. Now, it's been fairly quiet for over a year in the States -- when do you think they'll dilute the Act?
A recent example abroad -- the Russian gov't interfered with internet and print press in the wake of the theater hostage-taking crisis. Although antiterrorism was the justification, a good portion of this appears to have been to save face for the gov't. They politely call this censorship "media restrictions." (NYT 11/2) Good precedent?
Now, are we aiming to be more like the Russians, or more like us?
If we go to war in Iraq, we'll see even more severe censorship than in Gulf I (when they couldn't lay hands on Peter Arnett) and who knows what sort of internal investigations looking for seditious intent. How many people here will end up on the list? (Actually, with the increased use of sniffers looking for keywords in email and postings, you probably all are on the list.;-) Look what happened to the medical students in Florida, where even the traffic violation was a lie, disproved by videotape." Watch out for the next Eunice Stone, aided by fear.
I am a great supporter of our government, but stop snooping in our libraries, this is pathetic.
The formal name of the browser product is "Navigator" -- even more annoying. Chimera is the name of the GPL project -- I don't know what they had in mind, but can't keep it because Chimera wouldn't give them permission (I assume trademark). The name game comes up often on their message board, and I'm sure they'd welcome our suggestions (not).
Verion 1.0 would be a nice time to pick a real name. Many have been proposed. My least favorite, iGuana (get it -- "gecko"?).
Something novel... hmmm... how about "Xplorer"?? Or "It Works Better Than It Sounds"?
Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering and free beer/speech (neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?) but cleaner and faster than the competition IMHO. Give it a try. Its own Bugzilla bug reporting makes for a sort of amusing read, if you're idle. Same problem, lots of redundant bugs or "whoops my machine was messed up" or "gee, wouldn't it be great for you to work your tail off for free to deliver this obscure feature."
Bugs can wear you out, the Web is still pretty raw. Now, I didn't want this mention of Chimera to be redundant, so I searched Slashdot first and got:
Searching For: chimera HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:42:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 OK The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Um, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I did NOT criticize the NRA. I said they are (among other things) a lobby (true) and that they give money to pro-gun Congresspeople (true).
No scorn for the "NRA model," just for $$ in politics.
It's kind of silly to criticize a law for being written and pushed by a small number of lawmakers -- most all laws, including some great ones, are like this. And while log-rolling is certainly important on the Hill, in the end a majority needs to vote for a law, and the President has to sign it. Often the real tragedy is the laws that don't get passed, that die in commitee and such.
Some of these laws were passed for lobbyists (DCMA, P2P...) and other to please or pander to the public (CDA, COPA, CDA...). I think some of them are passed by lawmakers knowing full well they're unconstitutional; they take the credit and the courts take care of the bogus law (the flag burning statue, for example).
But on all of them the accountability is clear, and voters should hold their representatives accountable. A list like this helps a lot; the problem is getting folks to look at it and the alphabet soup of statutes. An honest lawmaker will do that pn your behlaf, hence the idea of representation.
Potent is the idea that special interest "buy" legislation through their contributions. Even when the contribution doesn't affect the lawmaker's judgment -- for example, and NRA donation to an avowedly pro-gun lawmaker -- the appearance of impropriety is terrible. And the more common abuse is the laws you don't see, that are quietly killed. Hence the need for even stricter campaign finance reform, within the limits of the 1st Amendment. Strangely Alericans have been quicker to embrace measures like term limits rather than the stream of money that pollutes the debate and most benefits those without compunction at taking it.
I bet these things will be showing up for kids under the Christmas tree (or insert festival of your choice). I get a catalog called "Lifestyle Fascination" which rivals Hammacher Schlemmer for gadget psychosis. Sharper Image is strictly farm league.
The incredible thing is, this stuff really does sell. Really. Someone liked this stuff enough to post this article. And here I'd thought we'd hit the price/value nadir back in the 70's with disco and the Pet Rock.
10) Hard to be sure the performer is "real" 9) Too hard to transmit disease-causing viruses over net 8) No chewing gum stuck to bottom of shoes afterwards 7) Lacks thrill of getting mugged in crappy neighborhood 6) Too clinical without camaraderie of fellow perverts 5) Two words: lightning strikes 4) Risk of getting caught looking goofy is greater at home 3) Hard to explain those funny-looking peripherals to Mom 2) Neighbors tire of cops breaking into holojohn's house 1) Can't replicate thrill of accidentally picking transvestite
Slashdot Mirror
Dontcha think Scheiße pretty much covers it?
Ah German -- a word for everything. What was the one for "that feeling to get when your neighbor's house is on fire"? Ich vergesse.
The police ARE trying to listen in on private phone calls, in the hopes of finding something there. Would you say police seaching private homes was OK simply because they're only looking for criminals? Not if you believe in any form of privacy.
"Al-Qaeda cells coordinating international terrorism is an everyday occurence in many German cities" -- you have direct knowledge of this? I haven't seen it reported anywhere. Maybe we suspect it is "an everyday occurrence" but suspicion without evidence is nothing, and acting on that to monitor 20,000 numbers would be harassment. Police doing "everything they can" would logically include what besides phone taps? Fighting terrorism is a worthy cause, but trashing everything we believe in to do it is not.
Give blame where blame is due, but nothing is gained by mindlessly rounding up the usual suspects. Al Queda is evil, and so is an authoritarian police state.
Face-saving -- oh, I doubt the two gov'ts are necessarily different in wanting this, but the Russians are more ruthless in getting it. They're climbing out of a history of brutal repression, while we are descending into censorship; maybe we'll pass each other at some point, who knows?
One of the worst things about these changes is that they're not necessary, and no one has even tried to show they would made 9/11 less likly. Rather things like the Patriot Act appear to be opportunism by groups who have wanted to do this for a long time.
But ultimate responsibility lies with the voters -- if they care they need to show it. And I think most people support or tolerate things as they are now, and until it's too late.
You have a lovely sense of taste. So you think, what, that Senator Wellstone and two members of his family dies because he was a "socialist"? You dare to class him with Hitler? I suppose you think his death was divine justice?
"Welfare recipients" do NOT receive EIC -- it's call the Earned Income Credit for a reason.
Clearly you have no dignity.
The Tribune was the one with the early deadline, Republican ownership, and cavalier attitude. And I don't think they've ever quite lived it down.
But I'm grateful to them for an all-time best political photo.
We're not all alike, it's true. But volunteer vs. paid doesn't necessarily provide the measure.
:)
I am not at liberty to comment on the merits of the case. Or the lawyers.
Wrote Iraqi, thought Iranian. Never mind....... brain fade.
I like it! (But will anyone get it?)
Doonesbury did a classic on this one (site is down). Let's not assume the military is disclosing all.
That airliner didn't fly into a live fire area, until the USS Vincennes decided to make it one. The question became not whether Robocruiser made a mistake but how. An interesting story, albeit tragic.
They're giving us lawyers a bad name!
Oh, wait...
...that's good, right?
Well, we all need that hybrid word. I guess we have one: free.
On my way to pick up my first grader to go vote now. (Beaming.) There was an NPR piece this morning on research showing that kids who went to the polling place with their parents were twice as likely to vote as adults. Hey, I remember doing it with my mom.
... hence the interest in PGP. There's a pattern, at least arguably enough to justify this posting.
As for the other that matter, if anyone has solutions I'll listen to them in any forum. But more seriously, freedom of speech is, well, pretty philosophically close to the GPL movement. There's also a lot of interest in DMCA and other freedom v. law issues. Fianlly, government monitoring of computer activity has frightening implications
That doesn't mean any posting on free speech belongs here -- there ought to be a technology angle.
Well, you see, in America we don't have to be reminded to vote.
;-)
Most of us don't do it, reminded or not. But the nerds will vote in droves if they ever put in on the Internet.
I think turnout today is predicted below 40%. OK, it's not a Presidential election, but if you're following Yank politics the Senate is hanging in the balance, politically. And just a couple of years ago those nice folks in Florida showed us that each vote does count (usually).
Gotta go pick up my 6 y.o. so we can go vote (I let him press the buttons but not make the choices).
...and if this isn't "stuff that matters" I forget what is.
Oh, it's election day, BTW.
I don't suppose you came across Eunice Stone there?
She may be a lovely person, but to me she typifies the nervous, unworldly, vaguely racist people that make so much mischief possible.
And I have never heard of a library donation being declined! All of them? I accidentally donated a 30 y.o. ZIP code directory to our Arlington, VA library and they took it. (Well, they probably didn't find it before we pulled out of the parking lot.)
...because bin Laden is said to be a BIG Harry Potter fan.
Fancies himself to be Professor Dumbledore, my sources say. Professor Snape was lost in the attacks, happily.
...would have approved.
Well, he would have been horrified.
Why? Just because it has the work FUCK in it?
Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck? Fuck?
Praise librarians for believing in free speech.
This posting made possible by the ALA and all those library fines I've paid over the years.
Law enforcement has to have some particular reason to suspect YOU specifically before it probes through generally accepted expectations of privacy. The depth of the intrusion is propotional to the persuasiveness of the evidence. BUT NO FISHING EXPEDITIONS.
;-) Look what happened to the medical students in Florida, where even the traffic violation was a lie, disproved by videotape." Watch out for the next Eunice Stone, aided by fear.
The Patriot Act relies on a hysterical and ill-defined notion of a future terrorist threat to provide justification. This has been characteristic of many "emergency measures" in many countries over the years -- you know, we have to shut down the presses because it might cause trouble, etc. Now, it's been fairly quiet for over a year in the States -- when do you think they'll dilute the Act?
A recent example abroad -- the Russian gov't interfered with internet and print press in the wake of the theater hostage-taking crisis. Although antiterrorism was the justification, a good portion of this appears to have been to save face for the gov't. They politely call this censorship "media restrictions." (NYT 11/2) Good precedent?
Now, are we aiming to be more like the Russians, or more like us?
If we go to war in Iraq, we'll see even more severe censorship than in Gulf I (when they couldn't lay hands on Peter Arnett) and who knows what sort of internal investigations looking for seditious intent. How many people here will end up on the list? (Actually, with the increased use of sniffers looking for keywords in email and postings, you probably all are on the list.
I am a great supporter of our government, but stop snooping in our libraries, this is pathetic.
AMERICANS: VOTE TODAY!
The formal name of the browser product is "Navigator" -- even more annoying. Chimera is the name of the GPL project -- I don't know what they had in mind, but can't keep it because Chimera wouldn't give them permission (I assume trademark). The name game comes up often on their message board, and I'm sure they'd welcome our suggestions (not).
... hmmm ... how about "Xplorer"?? Or "It Works Better Than It Sounds"?
Verion 1.0 would be a nice time to pick a real name. Many have been proposed. My least favorite, iGuana (get it -- "gecko"?).
Something novel
Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering and free beer/speech (neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?) but cleaner and faster than the competition IMHO. Give it a try. Its own Bugzilla bug reporting makes for a sort of amusing read, if you're idle. Same problem, lots of redundant bugs or "whoops my machine was messed up" or "gee, wouldn't it be great for you to work your tail off for free to deliver this obscure feature."
Bugs can wear you out, the Web is still pretty raw. Now, I didn't want this mention of Chimera to be redundant, so I searched Slashdot first and got:
Searching For: chimera
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:42:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80
Um, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I did NOT criticize the NRA. I said they are (among other things) a lobby (true) and that they give money to pro-gun Congresspeople (true).
No scorn for the "NRA model," just for $$ in politics.
It's kind of silly to criticize a law for being written and pushed by a small number of lawmakers -- most all laws, including some great ones, are like this. And while log-rolling is certainly important on the Hill, in the end a majority needs to vote for a law, and the President has to sign it. Often the real tragedy is the laws that don't get passed, that die in commitee and such.
Some of these laws were passed for lobbyists (DCMA, P2P...) and other to please or pander to the public (CDA, COPA, CDA...). I think some of them are passed by lawmakers knowing full well they're unconstitutional; they take the credit and the courts take care of the bogus law (the flag burning statue, for example).
But on all of them the accountability is clear, and voters should hold their representatives accountable. A list like this helps a lot; the problem is getting folks to look at it and the alphabet soup of statutes. An honest lawmaker will do that pn your behlaf, hence the idea of representation.
Potent is the idea that special interest "buy" legislation through their contributions. Even when the contribution doesn't affect the lawmaker's judgment -- for example, and NRA donation to an avowedly pro-gun lawmaker -- the appearance of impropriety is terrible. And the more common abuse is the laws you don't see, that are quietly killed. Hence the need for even stricter campaign finance reform, within the limits of the 1st Amendment. Strangely Alericans have been quicker to embrace measures like term limits rather than the stream of money that pollutes the debate and most benefits those without compunction at taking it.
I bet these things will be showing up for kids under the Christmas tree (or insert festival of your choice). I get a catalog called "Lifestyle Fascination" which rivals Hammacher Schlemmer for gadget psychosis. Sharper Image is strictly farm league.
The incredible thing is, this stuff really does sell. Really. Someone liked this stuff enough to post this article. And here I'd thought we'd hit the price/value nadir back in the 70's with disco and the Pet Rock.
Top ten reasons it won't happen:
10) Hard to be sure the performer is "real"
9) Too hard to transmit disease-causing viruses over net
8) No chewing gum stuck to bottom of shoes afterwards
7) Lacks thrill of getting mugged in crappy neighborhood
6) Too clinical without camaraderie of fellow perverts
5) Two words: lightning strikes
4) Risk of getting caught looking goofy is greater at home
3) Hard to explain those funny-looking peripherals to Mom
2) Neighbors tire of cops breaking into holojohn's house
1) Can't replicate thrill of accidentally picking transvestite