How dare you sit at your keyboard and accuse them of being "shadow employees of weapons dealers".
Even the employees of weapons dealers can have the best of intentions.
I'd expect that most (or at least many) of the people who work in the pentagon have the best of intentions, but they've gown up in an environment where might makes right and they have the most might. It's not generally the best crucible for peacemakers.
To paraphrase Einstein:
The thinking it took to get us into this mess is not the same thinking that it's going to get us out of it.
The leaders paradox is that the kinds of people who are willing to fight for power tend to be precisely the kinds of people that you don't want in power.
it's all too easy to make someone stop hating you at gunpoint. Just pull the trigger.
Yeppers... That sure stops them hating you (in this world, at least -- can't say much for the afterlife). But then of course, there's their friends and family.
And their friends and family
And so on, and so on....
Although murder and genocide can stop the victims from hating you, it tends to generates enemies among the survivors.
Force of arms won't stop people from hating you. It won't even make them respect you.. The best it can do is make them fear you. If you make people fear you, they'll bow down while you have that gun pointed at their head, but damned if you know what they'll do once you turn your back on them.
With 300 million of you and 6 billion of them, that's about 20-1 odds... I really doubt that murder and mayhem and threats are going to carry the day on this one (no matter how you want to justify it). You'll just go on making more and more enemies until somebody gets around to dropping your own grenade down your shorts while you're not looking.
If this law is written right, it shouldn't give them any sort of vulnerability against prosecution. The burden of proof should be on the company to prove that the only way the information could have come to public / enforcement attention would have been a leak of PCII submissions.
Even the PCII papers that a company compiles should not be subject to any sort of immunity... This is, generally, information that the company already has. The fact that this information has been compiled and/or submitted to the government doesn't provide any sort of real immunity -- especially if it is being used internally by the company for any other sort of purpose.
The second that a PCII document is used for any sort of internal company purpose, whatsoever, then there should be absolutely no reason why the company copies should have any sort of special immunity on account of a copy having been sent to PCII.
Some of the above will depend on how the law is written. the rest will depend on the first plaintifs who come against a PCII wall having really good lawyers.
As I remember it, a couple of weeks ago, MS was telling people that, if we didn't want to type in URLs by hand, we should be using SSL to ensure that the site we're on is really the site that we thought we were on.
Now, we find out that if we followed their suggested workaround on that serious bug, we were open to another security hole that's possibly worse, and that they've been sitting on for 6 months.
And you wonder why I've been slowly switching all my friends to Linux....
As one friend of mine said: "It doesn't matter what you've got, as long as you know what to do with it". Given her, uhm, breadth of experience, I'm just gonna have to trust her on this... In the other direction, though, I can say that women's breasts (which women worry over) don't have much bearing on how good sex is either.... I mean, yeah, I enjoy fondling, but it's mostly because it seems to increase my lovers's enjoyment.
In any event: I think that, for most people, the size of the organ isn't anywhere near a important as how we get treated the other 23 hours of the day.
That having been said, I can easily understand why people are loathe to sue these people, because they'd have to not only publicly admit, but publicly claim that:
They think that their penis is too small.
they paid more than a hundred dollars to get it bigger
their penis is still too small
And, of course, these have to be people who care enough about their organ size to spend the money on enlargers.
And worse than all that, they'd have to admit that they bought something from a spammer.
Microsoft suggests customers stop surfing the net.
In response to flaws recently exposed in it's software Microsoft has suggested that customers stop using hyperlinks -- the core feature of the World Wide Web. The bugs, which were exposed in the last few weeks, allow scammers on the net to make their website links to look like a legitimate site (e.g. Microsoft, Ebay or Visa), where they can then ask for identifying information, card numbers and passwords, or cause you to launch executable programs that Internet Explorer describes as more innocuous types (e.g. PDFs).
Rather than immediately releasing a bug fix, Microsoft is now suggesting that users no longer click on web page hyper-links. Their suggested solution is that users manually type in any web address they want to visit in the menu bar.
.....
Other web browser providers (e.g. Mozilla) claim that their browsers are not susceptible to these bugs, and claim that users surfing the web with their browsers are not subject to these problems.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't moderate in that thread, but I haven't been given mod points in months.
Meta-moderate. This seems to make a big difference (presuming that you meta-moderate fairly).
Make sure that the 'i agree to moderate' (whatever it's called) box hasn't been unchecked in your preferences
Post stuff that gets moderated up (I don't consider it Karma-whoring if it really is insightful).
How to actually be insightful, etc. is an entirely different question.
Stop complaining. If you get moderated down for whining, it makes it less likely thaty you'll be picked for moderation.
A really good joke takes at least 3 people. One person to tell the joke. One person to get the joke and one person to laugh at for not understanding it.
Obviously, you're number 3 in this case. Not a problem.. I just hope that you don't mind being laughed at.
Using copyright law in this context is imho pervertion of the law.
There are many uses of law that are a perversion of the law. At least
this is a perversion of the law that is intended to provide some value to the public.
If all goes well, these guys should be able to get an injunction against the people doing this stuff, and perhaps even get a pre-emptive lien against their MasterCard/Visa account. That would hit them where it hurts, and possibly discourage this sort of attack.
It's not original... Current intelligence is that it was first attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead.
I think that I originally (incorrectly) attributed it to George Bernard Shaw. (he probably got it direct from Mead).
How do you think history would treat the suicide bombers and terrorists?
The biggest social fallouts of this era aren't going to be the direct result of the actions of suicide bombers and 'terrorists'. They're going to be the resul of the actions of those who are using the (relatively minor but spectacular) attacks as an excuse to squash civil and human rights in currently 'democratic' societies.
Technically: Terrorism is the use of terror to achieve ones's ends. In that context, the legislators who used the Sept. 11 bombings as an excuse to pass legislation what would have otherwise beeen tossed out as unconstitutional and un-democratic are as much terrorists as Bin Laden and friends.
... And in some circles the above paragraph (effectively calling Bush a terrorist) would be a heresy.
If you don't think that Christianity is based on fact, then you're in the wrong religion.
Christianity isn't based on fact (other than the fact that the bible was written down). It's based on faith. Faith is the belief in something absent proof. If you think that fact is the basis of Christianity, then I think you misunderstand the teachings of Christ.
The acolyte asked the priest "What is the difference between knowledge and faith?"
"Knowledge is like the sun. Faith is like a candle"
"How can you say that? Isn't faith greater than knowledge? The sun outsines the candle by many times!"
"Come ask me that question again at midnight."
There's nothing wrong with faith, but presuming/demanding that someone with a different background than you accept your articles of faith is no less unreasonable than expecting you to accept theirs. This is part of the reason for the constitutional separation of church and state... too many of the founding fathers' forbears had been persecuted, prosecuted, exiled and even murdered because they had dared to disagree with the religious views of the then-current government leadership.
It's not that they hated religion -- quite to the contrary -- They just hated the idea of being forced to accept someone else's religion. They also hated the corruption that power-politics could inject into religious issues if the two were too closely bound.
I'm not Toto, and this isn't Kansas.
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If you take the Landmark Forum and then take their follow up course -- the ubiquitously named "Advanced Course", they have a section when they talk about types of reality. One is "reality by agreement". It reminded me about one rather extreme case of reality by agreement. (which links solidly into this whole heresy thing).
Back in the '80s, there was a company known as "Sir Unicorn Enterprises". They created a game called "Dreamquest" (which later morphed into the LRPS Live Role-Playing System). It was based on a D&D type scenario, where you had different character classes with different abilities etc. However it was done live-action and on a commercial scale... For my first game there were about 75 'players' (paying customers) and a dozen, or two, actors (game creatures).
One of the base rules of the game was "If you're out of your tent, you're in character".
Other than the limitations and powers of your character class, there
was very little limitation to your character. You got to make up their
personality, their costume, their history -- Even the history of how they got to
Samiltan (the country in which the game was played). As an extreme, there was one
guy on my first quest who was dressed in a (civilian) paratrooper's outfit. His story
was that he was on a jump, went through this weird glowing portal thing, and next thing
he knew he was fighting dragons.... Character class: Fighter (of course -- completely
non-magical).
The venue of my first quest was a country club.. We had one small section of the
country club building (basically a large room) and the edges of the property leading down into the river valley.
On the Friday night, we were given very explicit instructions to not go beyond the end of
the one room, because there was a wedding going on, and we were NOT to go beyond there.
Disturbing the 'mundanes' (non-players) could get us booted out.
In game parlance, The world ends there.
Of course the country club didn't warn the wedding party about our
presence (why should they? They knew that we wouldn't go past the
"end of the world").
And of course, a couple of wedding party members wandered into the game space.
I'm thinking that the first thing that they learned was not to go past "the
end of the world".
But they wanted to go home, so they started talking to people, and hearing
stories -- stories from past dreamquests and the present one... stories of
magic, demons dragons and an impending doom if "the unnamed one" could not
be stopped.
At first, they were highly skeptical (of course), but they didn't really care,
they just wanted to get home -- unfortunately, nobody could tell them about
how to get home -- of course, nobody could, since it made sense that anybody
who got home probably {w,c}ouldn't come (willingly) back from a mundane (non-magical) world.
Nonetheless, it was possible (but not guaranteed) that a powerful enough
wizard might be able to get them home. One thing that they had going
for them, though, was that recent events in this corner of Samiltan had
resulted in the gathering of some of the most powerful wizards known (and
probably the cause of their own troubles). Thus, if anyplace had hope of
getting them home, it was likely to be here.
About the only thing that they learned for sure, however, was that they should not go
past the end of the world... People were adamant about that -- beyond there lay death.
From what I can tell, they were in the game area for at least an hour... maybe two.
Word was going around the players that a couple of characters (possibly actors)
were playing guests from the wedding, and trying to get people to break character.
but we knew better, right?
Nobody would break character for them.
The guy in the parachute outfit probably clinched it for them... If they
could expect a straight answer out of anybody, it would be h
You mean back before the big guy said they could eat from any tree in the garden except that particular one? 'Cause I don't think that just telling them has ever worked since.
Yeah, but back then, it was like... It was like we were in the Garden of Eden.
in the early '70s had an anticipated lifetime of 1015 years;
I originally thought of this as a troll, but people are marking it insightfull rather than funny.
That should have been 10~15 years. It was a cut and past from the refrenced article, but the paste of the non-ascii character was eaten by SlashDot's ever-helpful (not) filters. (sigh).
Ah, for the days when 'security' meant telling people "don't do this (oops)".
His solution isn't really non-recursive.. I actually replied to this point in another comment (that I thought was a reply to this) which includes a more honestly non-recursive solution (and a pointer to an implentation of it even).
His "non-recursive" solutions aren't really non-recursive. They simply store the state (what's being moved where) onto the stack, and then pulls and pops the state. It's just a simple enough 'machine' that you only have 4 variables (from, to, using, depth). All you've really done is taken the stackwork away
frm th compiler.
Back in the late '70s, me and some friends came up with a solution that is more honestly non-recursive:
Move the smallest disk to the right (cyclically). If the other two stacks are empty, you're done, else move the smallest top disk of the two stacks to the other stack (the only move you can make if you're not moving disk 1 again).
(note: The above solution only works for an even number of disks... For an odd number of disks, disk 1 moves to the LEFT.)
Oh, sigh... The perl implementation of this is on my website.
Yes, the solution is provably correct, but I don't have the time to write it up right now... Just consider the fact that you can never move disk1 twice in a row, (or you're wasting a move), and if you're not moving disk1, there's only one move, then you have to move disk1 again (or you're wasting a move). All you have to do then is prove that disk1 always moves in the same direction.
It wouldn't make TV, but this, if it ever gets to trial, is going to be one heck of a show.
The thought of this issue at trial makes me think of Monty Python's "How to Defend Yourself Against a Banana". (if you'll excuse the complete mangling of the original).
BLAM!
Oh, my god, You shot him!.
Of course.. He had a banana.
But, but, It's just a banana.
Yes, but he might have had an afidavit in it
I rather doubt it
Well, SCO started the fight, and I had to presume that there was something dangerous in his hands -- or why would he come after us?
It was my lunch.
Oh. (peels banana, breaks it in half, finds nothing but banana). Well, here then. Sorry 'bout that. Bye.
If Friday was any indication, the trial (if they ever get that far) is going to consist of 3 days of SCO whimpering about complex cases followed by 4 hours of IBM carefully disecting SCO's throat, while the judge asks where they got such a pretty knife.
Why does everyone keep repeating this urban legend? Please cite some factual evidence that this is what happened.
The Mafia boss walks up to you and unexpectedly plants a firm kiss on each or your cheeks, then walks away. A bit surprised, you watch him walk away, then your attention turns to the two bodyguards who didn't follow him. They're staring at you, guns held passively at their side.
The Maffia boss never said anything explicit, but you know what's coming. You desperately try to remember if you told your children you loved them this morning.....
I'm thinking that their boyancy may have to do with two things.. One is that someone is pretty apparently supporting the stock. The other might have something to do with so many people selling their stock short I'm wondering if a lot of their liquid stock is now caught up in shorts. If nothing else, this might now make it a lot easier to manipulate the prices...
In any case, if SCO's lawyers get their heads kicked in in 34 days (the clock doesn't start ticking until IBM perfects the motion on Wednesday), I don't think that a flock of messiahs could keep their stock afloat.
30 days in a case of this scope is a message in itself.
That's 30 days across Christmas, and the judge was very clear that it was 30 days with a very tight leash attached.
The judge also suspended all other (IBM) disclosure until SCO complied -- That's an explicit sanction.
In other words the judge knocked them down and then kicked them -- gently, but for effect.
I used to do my resume using Nroff.. Easy enough to convert that to plain text, and easy enough to print looking REAL pretty. Unfortunately, I've had enough people ask for it in word format, that I bowed and converted.
I thought of writing an ooffice macro to only display text if not on the first page (a more general solution), but this is a relatively recent development, and I haven't done it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the employees of weapons dealers can have the best of intentions.
I'd expect that most (or at least many) of the people who work in the pentagon have the best of intentions, but they've gown up in an environment where might makes right and they have the most might. It's not generally the best crucible for peacemakers.
To paraphrase Einstein:
The thinking it took to get us into this mess is not the same thinking that it's going to get us out of it.
The leaders paradox is that the kinds of people who are willing to fight for power tend to be precisely the kinds of people that you don't want in power.
Yeppers... That sure stops them hating you (in this world, at least -- can't say much for the afterlife). But then of course, there's their friends and family.
And their friends and family
And so on, and so on....
Although murder and genocide can stop the victims from hating you, it tends to generates enemies among the survivors.
Force of arms won't stop people from hating you. It won't even make them respect you.. The best it can do is make them fear you. If you make people fear you, they'll bow down while you have that gun pointed at their head, but damned if you know what they'll do once you turn your back on them.
With 300 million of you and 6 billion of them, that's about 20-1 odds... I really doubt that murder and mayhem and threats are going to carry the day on this one (no matter how you want to justify it). You'll just go on making more and more enemies until somebody gets around to dropping your own grenade down your shorts while you're not looking.
Even the PCII papers that a company compiles should not be subject to any sort of immunity... This is, generally, information that the company already has. The fact that this information has been compiled and/or submitted to the government doesn't provide any sort of real immunity -- especially if it is being used internally by the company for any other sort of purpose.
The second that a PCII document is used for any sort of internal company purpose, whatsoever, then there should be absolutely no reason why the company copies should have any sort of special immunity on account of a copy having been sent to PCII.
Some of the above will depend on how the law is written. the rest will depend on the first plaintifs who come against a PCII wall having really good lawyers.
Now, we find out that if we followed their suggested workaround on that serious bug, we were open to another security hole that's possibly worse, and that they've been sitting on for 6 months.
And you wonder why I've been slowly switching all my friends to Linux....
It should also be noted that the above statistics were researched by a penis enlargement company.
In any event: I think that, for most people, the size of the organ isn't anywhere near a important as how we get treated the other 23 hours of the day.
That having been said, I can easily understand why people are loathe to sue these people, because they'd have to not only publicly admit, but publicly claim that:
- They think that their penis is too small.
- they paid more than a hundred dollars to get it bigger
- their penis is still too small
And, of course, these have to be people who care enough about their organ size to spend the money on enlargers.And worse than all that, they'd have to admit that they bought something from a spammer.
In response to flaws recently exposed in it's software Microsoft has suggested that customers stop using hyperlinks -- the core feature of the World Wide Web. The bugs, which were exposed in the last few weeks, allow scammers on the net to make their website links to look like a legitimate site (e.g. Microsoft, Ebay or Visa), where they can then ask for identifying information, card numbers and passwords, or cause you to launch executable programs that Internet Explorer describes as more innocuous types (e.g. PDFs).
Rather than immediately releasing a bug fix, Microsoft is now suggesting that users no longer click on web page hyper-links. Their suggested solution is that users manually type in any web address they want to visit in the menu bar.
.....
Other web browser providers (e.g. Mozilla) claim that their browsers are not susceptible to these bugs, and claim that users surfing the web with their browsers are not subject to these problems.
Under Kaplain's DECSS decision, this should then make it censorable. (guh!)
How to actually be insightful, etc. is an entirely different question.
There are many uses of law that are a perversion of the law. At least this is a perversion of the law that is intended to provide some value to the public.
If all goes well, these guys should be able to get an injunction against the people doing this stuff, and perhaps even get a pre-emptive lien against their MasterCard/Visa account. That would hit them where it hurts, and possibly discourage this sort of attack.
It's not original... Current intelligence is that it was first attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead.
I think that I originally (incorrectly) attributed it to George Bernard Shaw. (he probably got it direct from Mead).
The biggest social fallouts of this era aren't going to be the direct result of the actions of suicide bombers and 'terrorists'. They're going to be the resul of the actions of those who are using the (relatively minor but spectacular) attacks as an excuse to squash civil and human rights in currently 'democratic' societies.
Technically: Terrorism is the use of terror to achieve ones's ends. In that context, the legislators who used the Sept. 11 bombings as an excuse to pass legislation what would have otherwise beeen tossed out as unconstitutional and un-democratic are as much terrorists as Bin Laden and friends.
Christianity isn't based on fact (other than the fact that the bible was written down). It's based on faith. Faith is the belief in something absent proof. If you think that fact is the basis of Christianity, then I think you misunderstand the teachings of Christ.
There's nothing wrong with faith, but presuming/demanding that someone with a different background than you accept your articles of faith is no less unreasonable than expecting you to accept theirs. This is part of the reason for the constitutional separation of church and state... too many of the founding fathers' forbears had been persecuted, prosecuted, exiled and even murdered because they had dared to disagree with the religious views of the then-current government leadership.
It's not that they hated religion -- quite to the contrary -- They just hated the idea of being forced to accept someone else's religion. They also hated the corruption that power-politics could inject into religious issues if the two were too closely bound.
Back in the '80s, there was a company known as "Sir Unicorn Enterprises". They created a game called "Dreamquest" (which later morphed into the LRPS Live Role-Playing System). It was based on a D&D type scenario, where you had different character classes with different abilities etc. However it was done live-action and on a commercial scale... For my first game there were about 75 'players' (paying customers) and a dozen, or two, actors (game creatures).
One of the base rules of the game was "If you're out of your tent, you're in character".
Other than the limitations and powers of your character class, there was very little limitation to your character. You got to make up their personality, their costume, their history -- Even the history of how they got to Samiltan (the country in which the game was played). As an extreme, there was one guy on my first quest who was dressed in a (civilian) paratrooper's outfit. His story was that he was on a jump, went through this weird glowing portal thing, and next thing he knew he was fighting dragons.... Character class: Fighter (of course -- completely non-magical).
The venue of my first quest was a country club.. We had one small section of the country club building (basically a large room) and the edges of the property leading down into the river valley. On the Friday night, we were given very explicit instructions to not go beyond the end of the one room, because there was a wedding going on, and we were NOT to go beyond there. Disturbing the 'mundanes' (non-players) could get us booted out.
In game parlance, The world ends there.
Of course the country club didn't warn the wedding party about our presence (why should they? They knew that we wouldn't go past the "end of the world").
And of course, a couple of wedding party members wandered into the game space.
I'm thinking that the first thing that they learned was not to go past "the end of the world".
But they wanted to go home, so they started talking to people, and hearing stories -- stories from past dreamquests and the present one... stories of magic, demons dragons and an impending doom if "the unnamed one" could not be stopped.
At first, they were highly skeptical (of course), but they didn't really care, they just wanted to get home -- unfortunately, nobody could tell them about how to get home -- of course, nobody could, since it made sense that anybody who got home probably {w,c}ouldn't come (willingly) back from a mundane (non-magical) world. Nonetheless, it was possible (but not guaranteed) that a powerful enough wizard might be able to get them home. One thing that they had going for them, though, was that recent events in this corner of Samiltan had resulted in the gathering of some of the most powerful wizards known (and probably the cause of their own troubles). Thus, if anyplace had hope of getting them home, it was likely to be here. About the only thing that they learned for sure, however, was that they should not go past the end of the world... People were adamant about that -- beyond there lay death.
From what I can tell, they were in the game area for at least an hour... maybe two. Word was going around the players that a couple of characters (possibly actors) were playing guests from the wedding, and trying to get people to break character.
but we knew better, right?
Nobody would break character for them. The guy in the parachute outfit probably clinched it for them... If they could expect a straight answer out of anybody, it would be h
Yeah, but back then, it was like ... It was like we were in the Garden of Eden.
Sigh. I guess I'm just showing my age, aren't I?
I originally thought of this as a troll, but people are marking it insightfull rather than funny.
That should have been 10~15 years. It was a cut and past from the refrenced article, but the paste of the non-ascii character was eaten by SlashDot's ever-helpful (not) filters. (sigh).
Ah, for the days when 'security' meant telling people "don't do this (oops)".
His solution isn't really non-recursive.. I actually replied to this point in another comment (that I thought was a reply to this) which includes a more honestly non-recursive solution (and a pointer to an implentation of it even).
Back in the late '70s, me and some friends came up with a solution that is more honestly non-recursive:
Move the smallest disk to the right (cyclically). If the other two stacks are empty, you're done, else move the smallest top disk of the two stacks to the other stack (the only move you can make if you're not moving disk 1 again).
(note: The above solution only works for an even number of disks... For an odd number of disks, disk 1 moves to the LEFT.)
Oh, sigh... The perl implementation of this is on my website.
Yes, the solution is provably correct, but I don't have the time to write it up right now... Just consider the fact that you can never move disk1 twice in a row, (or you're wasting a move), and if you're not moving disk1, there's only one move, then you have to move disk1 again (or you're wasting a move). All you have to do then is prove that disk1 always moves in the same direction.
The thought of this issue at trial makes me think of Monty Python's "How to Defend Yourself Against a Banana". (if you'll excuse the complete mangling of the original).
If Friday was any indication, the trial (if they ever get that far) is going to consist of 3 days of SCO whimpering about complex cases followed by 4 hours of IBM carefully disecting SCO's throat, while the judge asks where they got such a pretty knife.
My bank account's always empty anyways... If they tried to empty it, the bank would ask them to deposit money first.
The Mafia boss walks up to you and unexpectedly plants a firm kiss on each or your cheeks, then walks away. A bit surprised, you watch him walk away, then your attention turns to the two bodyguards who didn't follow him. They're staring at you, guns held passively at their side.
The Maffia boss never said anything explicit, but you know what's coming. You desperately try to remember if you told your children you loved them this morning.....
fact, schmact
I'm thinking that their boyancy may have to do with two things.. One is that someone is pretty apparently supporting the stock. The other might have something to do with so many people selling their stock short I'm wondering if a lot of their liquid stock is now caught up in shorts. If nothing else, this might now make it a lot easier to manipulate the prices...
In any case, if SCO's lawyers get their heads kicked in in 34 days (the clock doesn't start ticking until IBM perfects the motion on Wednesday), I don't think that a flock of messiahs could keep their stock afloat.
That's 30 days across Christmas, and the judge was very clear that it was 30 days with a very tight leash attached.
The judge also suspended all other (IBM) disclosure until SCO complied -- That's an explicit sanction.
In other words the judge knocked them down and then kicked them -- gently, but for effect.
I thought of writing an ooffice macro to only display text if not on the first page (a more general solution), but this is a relatively recent development, and I haven't done it yet.