And I really don't see the problem, if you're a law abiding citizen.
First, if I'm a law-abiding citizen, they have no right to spy on me. Second, the only non-law-abiding citizens these have much effect are are either very petty crimes, or crimes that have no business being crimes.
Want to make the public safe by surveillance? Those cameras should be going into government offices and corporate boardrooms. Corporate crime is much, much deadiler and more costly than street crime.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You mean the CCTVs which were responsible DIRECTLY for the identification (nd subsequent arrest and prosecution) of the murderers?
You mean the CCTVs without which those two would have been free to carry on murdering?
Are you sure they would have carried on murdering? Most murderers, IIRC, are single offenders.
Regardless, though, that's the limitation of any sort of law enforcement. They do very little to directly protect you; they just draw the chalk outline around your body and try to track down the murderer and lock him away. That might protect others, if your murderer has intentions to repeat the crime, but often that's not the case anyway.
What protects you from violence is being able to defend yourself, and having neighbors who are able and willing to help defend you.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Seconded! I got mine less than two weeks ago,
updated it, and now use it daily. That help page is excellent; there are some other great resourced linked from
http://developer.agendacomputing.com.
Perfect? No. Usable? Yes. Bugs getting fixed? Yes. Inspiring some hacking? Yes, I want to port a rhyming dictionary (probably have to store the data
zipped and use zlib, or something).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If there is the connectivity to the desktop box it's time to buy.
There is. It has a serial port; you run pppd on your desktop, start the network app on your Agenda, and you're set. You can rsync or telnet to the Agenda - even mount an NFS partition!
(I had a heck of a time getting this working - but that's because the serial port on my Linux desktop was fscked.)
If you're a Linux geek looking for a neat hacker's toy, get one now and start playing. If you're looking for a gift for your tech-unsavvy mom, I'd say wait a few months, but it's getting there.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The easiest way for America to change over is to change what is taught in schools first, then start placing both types of units on
consumer products. When that generation has grown up, there will be no need for the old units and they can be dropped.
That ws the theory when I was in elementary school (1976-1981). We were only taught the metric system. To this day I still get confused by quarts, gallons, pints, and cups.
But the only area where metric has really caught on are liter bottles of water and some liquors, in grams of drugs (legal and illegal), and in measuring the diameter of bullets.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I shouldn't have to make the point that the Republican party is "pro-free speech," simply because the Republican
Party believes in the sanctity of the US Constitution.
They do? Great! Then they're in favor of the immediate end of the War on Drugs and a restoration of the Fourth Amendment? And they'd never consider amending the Constitution to outlaw expression like burning the flag, right?
And they're outraged about inequal protection of the right to vote, such as giving poor communities inferior voting-tabulating technology? And George W. Bush is demanding inquiry into the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida? And they would never be in favor of preventing Pagans in the military from exercising their First Amendment rights to freely practice their religion?
Of Republicans and Democrats, Democrats (with exception of John McCain) are the largest supporters of "Campaign Finance Reform," a notion that would restrict freedom of speech.
Oh, please. Giving money to an elected official, or an elected official wannabe, is bribery, not speech.
You're either trolling, or so far removed from reality that further discussion is pointless. Neither the Republican nor the Democratic party leadership have any interest in the Constitution other than how they can use it to serve their agendas and put more members of their party into power.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Which one of us is upset that I am having a debate on a rhetorical level?
If this was a debate on anything approaching a rhetorical level, maybe we'd be somewhere near the original point...you know, about whether the Republican party has a history of censorship. Maybe you'd even provide a fact or two, instead of ad homiem insults based on misdefintions and semantic nitpicking (on a point already yielded).
If you have an argument that the Republican party has always been a staunch supporter of free expression, go ahead and make it.
Note: the fact that there are plenty of Democrats who are also pro-censorship (though usually with different justiciations/excuses) is not disputed but is not relevant to the proposition under discussion. Nor is it disputed that there are members of the Republican party who are strong free speech advocates. The question is about the overall position and direction of the Republican party political leadership.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
How is a being with its own genetic code and manifest as a whole human a part of the mother
Since when is having a unique genetic code the critera for being or not being part of another being? Identical twins have the same genetic code but are not the same being.
Mitochondria and cancer cells in the human body have genetic codes different from their hosts but are not separate beings.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "manifest as a whole human", but I don't see how an early term embryo or fetus without a well formed brain, even comes close to being a "whole human".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The "study", to begin with, is not a study. It is a poll.
Hey, if you want to hide from the truth by hiding behind semantical hair-splitting, don't let me stop you. Fine, it's a "poll", not a "study".
...New York, which is disproportionally Democratic. As such, the poll it is completely useless for the argument you are trying to make in regards to _all_ Republicans.
Non sequitor. How does the fact that New York is disproportionally Democratic prove or dispove that the attitudes of New York Democrats and Republicans towards censorship are not representative?
Specifically, it refers to the situation that occurred last year in the New York public art museum, where public funds were
used to support art that insulted a segment of the New York population.
Specifically, it also asked about the general issue of censorship in various contexts, including books and film, as well as publically funded art exhibits.
You provided no further
information about the bill Ashcroft supported, and as such, I can not speak for or against him.
Why would the Republicans censor movies? Do they have a history of Censorship?
Where the heck have you been? Yes, of course they have a history of censorship. The Republican leadership have been the lap dogs of the Religious Right for years. Does the name "Ed Meese" mean anything to you? How about Henry Hyde?
According to this study of attitudes towards censorship in New York, while pro-censorship attitudes were disturbingly high among all groups, they were significantly more common amoung Republicans than Democrats.
I suggest you start paying attention to the antics of John Ashcroft, who supported the CDA, supported mandatory internet filtering, and supported a law that would have made it illegal to talk about how drugs are made.
... is the Republican party interested in censorship? I thought they were all about less government interference in peoples' lives.
Right. The Republicans don't want to interfere in people's personal lives, just so long as the people don't want to do anything the Republicans don't like.
The Republican mainstream is all for freedom of religion - you can be any sort of Protestant you like! They'll even tolerate Catholics and Jews. (Atheists, though, are not really citizens because this is one nation under God. And Wicca is not a religion, so it's okay discriminate against Pagans.) And they respect your right to control your own body. (Excepting having an abortion, performing certain consenual sex acts, putting certain drugs into your body, and other such Satanic perversions.) And they repsect free speech and expression (so long as it's not UnAmerican, or obscene, or pornographic,
or disrespectful to the flag).
Yep, under a Republican regime, straight white Judeo-Christian patriotic drug-free Americans who prefer the missionary position (of course, only in the confines of marriage) have nothing to fear.
(Note: none of the above it to be taken as an endorsement of the Republicans chief competitor for the hearts, minds, and votes of Americans, the Democratic Party; which has plenty of problems of its own.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yes, you can sync with Linux. You set up a PPP connection, then you can use Samba's rsync, or NFS, or whatever.
I just got one of these puppies last week. It's fun. A way to go before it's ready for your mom to use (unless she's a hacker too), but it's fun and has definite potential.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
When you say stuff like 'The whole concept of software 'use license' is wrongheaded and has no sound legal basis' why do
you limit the scope of what you say? You should just come out and say there's no basis for private property and be honest with us.
I'll leave the discussions about the general basis of private property to guys like Proudhon, thanks. As for "intellectual property", it is defintely artifical, but it does have some small legal basis in Congress's constitutional power to grant copyrights and patents. (Although it is a significant error to consider these temporary state-created monopolies as "property".)
However, even "intellectual property" notions of copyright do not justify user licences! The justification is that loading a program into memory is making a copy. Nonsense. Loading a program is no more copying it than reading a book in making a copy in my brain.
We've seen you on this board prattling and spreading your crap for ages now, and it's always the same.
I'm flattered that you care enough to recognize and track my little missives.
Shouldn't you be out
there handing out leaflets or something, or hacking the party Paper?
Uh, what party is that? I've been an indepentant since the day I registered to vote fourteen years ago. The only "party paper" I have anything to do with is when I print up invitations to a shindig at my place. And no, you're not invited.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Plants and animals have been undergoing genetic modification by humans for a long time, now we're just being a bit more direct about it.
I am so tired of this half-truth from apologists for GM crops that I am ready to scream.
GM is fundamentally different than artifical selection. Despite all the cross-breeding and hybridization of, say, tomatos, that's gone on, no new genes were introduced. Barring the (rare) possibility of mutation, no gene is in a non-GM tomato today that wasn't in a tomato 100 years ago. GM alters the genome of a species.
Is that a good idea? It might be argued that it was if we knew the genome and how we were altering it. We don't. We don't understand the genome of the crops we're fucking with, and we don't know how they're being altered by GM. We're taking bits of DNA we think do what we want and shooting them into cell nuclei and hoping to get the results we want. This is not engineering. This is not science. This is little better than alchemy, but with higher profit margins. And risk to the global ecosystem.
This is like snipping object code for some functionality out of one program and putting it randomly into another until you get a program that runs. You wanna make any bets about the reliability of a program made this way?
That's right - GM organisms are even more pooly made than today's software.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Monsanto's rep is golden compared to their reality. If Monsanto - the corporation that brought us PCBs, DDT, Agent Orange, and lawsuits over rBGH labeling, not to mention their actions wrt GM crops - had a reputation that reflected reality, their corporate charter would be revoked for their various and asundry crimes, their CEO and Board of Directors would probably be imprisoned, and their headquarters razed and wreckage buried in a deep deep hole.
Monsanto: Pure Concentrated Evil.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Most asteroids hit in the first 500 mil years, or 4 bil years ago. There is a slight risk...
The risk is far more than "slight".
Consider please the 1908 Tunguska event. Best guess it that is was a small comet fragement exploding just above the ground. It had the destructive power of several hundred nuclear bombs and destroyed 500,000 acres of forest.
Now imagine that puppy coming down over New York.
Keep watching the skies.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Try building a house with that attitude. "The foundation is not important. The color we paint the bedroom walls is."
I think if you asked the mythical "average user" to choose between these systems:
System A takes a day to learn the basics of use. There is a 20% chance on any given day that it will crash and need to be rebooted. There is a 10% chanage that in a year's time it will need to be reinstalled from scratch, destroying all your data. It has friendly dancing paperclips! There are lots of "...for Dummies" books about it.
System B takes a week to learn the basics of use. There is a 1% chance per day of needing a reboot and a 1% chance per year of needing a reinstallation. (And if a reinstallation is needed, you've got a good chance of being able to salvage your data). No dancing paperclips. It is not for dummies.
I think a large number of "average users" would pick system B.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The problem is that str is pointing to whatever
miscellaneous address happened to be in the memory allocated to echo()'s stack frame. It points to unallocated memory that quite likely isn't even in the programs address space. Passing around uninitialized pointers is a bad idea; you're crusing for a SIGSEGV or a SIGBUS if you try this on a Unix-oid system.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
At least Jan Claude Van Damme looks the part. SS is a sissy! Segal with the ponytail, the soft face. He'd be someone's bitch in 5 seconds in prison!
I'm certainly not going to defend his "acting", and he comes across as something of a jerk in the interviews I've seen and read, but Segal has genuine martial arts credentials - he's a sichi-dan (7th degree black belt) in aikido. (It's alleged that there may be some politics involved in such a high ranking (nothing to do with the movie stuff, some family business), but that's not uncommon in the martial arts.)
Van Damme, while he's very graceful and atheletic, had a few months of karate training (Shotokan, IIRC) and that's about it.
I have met some extremely competent martial artists over the years. They generally have not been "tough looking" people; in fact, some of them you might have mistaken for soft little wimps...until you see them in action.
They all like the action in his films. Who's the chick who popped out of the cake when he was supposedly a Navy Seal turned cook? Now that's worth eight bucks right there.
Hmm, I think you've got a point there. B-)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Well, "omnivorous" is a broad term; it can be mostly a flesh based diet with occasional plants, or a plant based diet with occasional mean. Our digestive system is certainly not suited to a meat-centered diet, and we can do quite well without any meat at all.
Of our closest primate relatives, gorillas are pretty much herbivorous, though I think they'll sometimes eat bugs; chimps will occasionally hunt small mammals, but IIRC they focus more on plants and bugs. So if we want to talk about "natural" diets for humans, we should probably be eating more bugs.
Why do you think a balanced vegetarian diet is so tricky?
It's not. No more tricky than a balanced diet of any other sort. Sure, you can eat bad as a vegetarian; a diet of french fries and potato chips may be veggie, but it ain't healthy.
I've been a vegetarian of varying degrees for nineteen years, and a vegan for eleven. I keep encountering people who tell me that my diet must lacking vital nutrients and I'm going to keel over any day now, but in reality my health is pretty good.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Slashdot Mirror
First, if I'm a law-abiding citizen, they have no right to spy on me. Second, the only non-law-abiding citizens these have much effect are are either very petty crimes, or crimes that have no business being crimes.
Want to make the public safe by surveillance? Those cameras should be going into government offices and corporate boardrooms. Corporate crime is much, much deadiler and more costly than street crime.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Are you sure they would have carried on murdering? Most murderers, IIRC, are single offenders.
Regardless, though, that's the limitation of any sort of law enforcement. They do very little to directly protect you; they just draw the chalk outline around your body and try to track down the murderer and lock him away. That might protect others, if your murderer has intentions to repeat the crime, but often that's not the case anyway.
What protects you from violence is being able to defend yourself, and having neighbors who are able and willing to help defend you.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Seconded! I got mine less than two weeks ago, updated it, and now use it daily. That help page is excellent; there are some other great resourced linked from http://developer.agendacomputing.com.
Perfect? No. Usable? Yes. Bugs getting fixed? Yes. Inspiring some hacking? Yes, I want to port a rhyming dictionary (probably have to store the data zipped and use zlib, or something).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
(I had a heck of a time getting this working - but that's because the serial port on my Linux desktop was fscked.)
If you're a Linux geek looking for a neat hacker's toy, get one now and start playing. If you're looking for a gift for your tech-unsavvy mom, I'd say wait a few months, but it's getting there.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
That ws the theory when I was in elementary school (1976-1981). We were only taught the metric system. To this day I still get confused by quarts, gallons, pints, and cups.
But the only area where metric has really caught on are liter bottles of water and some liquors, in grams of drugs (legal and illegal), and in measuring the diameter of bullets.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Oh, please. Giving money to an elected official, or an elected official wannabe, is bribery, not speech.
You're either trolling, or so far removed from reality that further discussion is pointless. Neither the Republican nor the Democratic party leadership have any interest in the Constitution other than how they can use it to serve their agendas and put more members of their party into power.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If this was a debate on anything approaching a rhetorical level, maybe we'd be somewhere near the original point...you know, about whether the Republican party has a history of censorship. Maybe you'd even provide a fact or two, instead of ad homiem insults based on misdefintions and semantic nitpicking (on a point already yielded).
If you have an argument that the Republican party has always been a staunch supporter of free expression, go ahead and make it.
Note: the fact that there are plenty of Democrats who are also pro-censorship (though usually with different justiciations/excuses) is not disputed but is not relevant to the proposition under discussion. Nor is it disputed that there are members of the Republican party who are strong free speech advocates. The question is about the overall position and direction of the Republican party political leadership.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Since when is having a unique genetic code the critera for being or not being part of another being? Identical twins have the same genetic code but are not the same being. Mitochondria and cancer cells in the human body have genetic codes different from their hosts but are not separate beings.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "manifest as a whole human", but I don't see how an early term embryo or fetus without a well formed brain, even comes close to being a "whole human".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Specifically, it also asked about the general issue of censorship in various contexts, including books and film, as well as publically funded art exhibits.
Dude, this is /., not a freaking poli-sci doctoral disseration. But a few minutes with Google will show that in addition to backing the CDA, Ashcroft introduced and sponsored the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, which in addition to the usual War on (Some) Drugs atrocities, would send you to jail for talking about how drugs are made. Satisfied?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Where the heck have you been? Yes, of course they have a history of censorship. The Republican leadership have been the lap dogs of the Religious Right for years. Does the name "Ed Meese" mean anything to you? How about Henry Hyde?
According to this study of attitudes towards censorship in New York, while pro-censorship attitudes were disturbingly high among all groups, they were significantly more common amoung Republicans than Democrats.
I suggest you start paying attention to the antics of John Ashcroft, who supported the CDA, supported mandatory internet filtering, and supported a law that would have made it illegal to talk about how drugs are made.
"It's said that we shouldn't legislate morality," Ashcroft told Charisma magazine in December 1999. "Well, I disagree. I think all we should legislate is morality. We shouldn't legislate immorality."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The Republican mainstream is all for freedom of religion - you can be any sort of Protestant you like! They'll even tolerate Catholics and Jews. (Atheists, though, are not really citizens because this is one nation under God. And Wicca is not a religion, so it's okay discriminate against Pagans.) And they respect your right to control your own body. (Excepting having an abortion, performing certain consenual sex acts, putting certain drugs into your body, and other such Satanic perversions.) And they repsect free speech and expression (so long as it's not UnAmerican, or obscene, or pornographic, or disrespectful to the flag).
Yep, under a Republican regime, straight white Judeo-Christian patriotic drug-free Americans who prefer the missionary position (of course, only in the confines of marriage) have nothing to fear.
(Note: none of the above it to be taken as an endorsement of the Republicans chief competitor for the hearts, minds, and votes of Americans, the Democratic Party; which has plenty of problems of its own.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yes, you can sync with Linux. You set up a PPP connection, then you can use Samba's rsync, or NFS, or whatever.
I just got one of these puppies last week. It's fun. A way to go before it's ready for your mom to use (unless she's a hacker too), but it's fun and has definite potential.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I'll leave the discussions about the general basis of private property to guys like Proudhon, thanks. As for "intellectual property", it is defintely artifical, but it does have some small legal basis in Congress's constitutional power to grant copyrights and patents. (Although it is a significant error to consider these temporary state-created monopolies as "property".)
However, even "intellectual property" notions of copyright do not justify user licences! The justification is that loading a program into memory is making a copy. Nonsense. Loading a program is no more copying it than reading a book in making a copy in my brain.
I'm flattered that you care enough to recognize and track my little missives. Uh, what party is that? I've been an indepentant since the day I registered to vote fourteen years ago. The only "party paper" I have anything to do with is when I print up invitations to a shindig at my place. And no, you're not invited.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I am so tired of this half-truth from apologists for GM crops that I am ready to scream.
GM is fundamentally different than artifical selection. Despite all the cross-breeding and hybridization of, say, tomatos, that's gone on, no new genes were introduced. Barring the (rare) possibility of mutation, no gene is in a non-GM tomato today that wasn't in a tomato 100 years ago. GM alters the genome of a species.
Is that a good idea? It might be argued that it was if we knew the genome and how we were altering it. We don't. We don't understand the genome of the crops we're fucking with, and we don't know how they're being altered by GM. We're taking bits of DNA we think do what we want and shooting them into cell nuclei and hoping to get the results we want. This is not engineering. This is not science. This is little better than alchemy, but with higher profit margins. And risk to the global ecosystem.
This is like snipping object code for some functionality out of one program and putting it randomly into another until you get a program that runs. You wanna make any bets about the reliability of a program made this way?
That's right - GM organisms are even more pooly made than today's software.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Monsanto: Pure Concentrated Evil.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The risk is far more than "slight".
Consider please the 1908 Tunguska event. Best guess it that is was a small comet fragement exploding just above the ground. It had the destructive power of several hundred nuclear bombs and destroyed 500,000 acres of forest.
Now imagine that puppy coming down over New York.
Keep watching the skies.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Bull.
Try building a house with that attitude. "The foundation is not important. The color we paint the bedroom walls is."
I think if you asked the mythical "average user" to choose between these systems:
I think a large number of "average users" would pick system B.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The problem is that str is pointing to whatever miscellaneous address happened to be in the memory allocated to echo()'s stack frame. It points to unallocated memory that quite likely isn't even in the programs address space. Passing around uninitialized pointers is a bad idea; you're crusing for a SIGSEGV or a SIGBUS if you try this on a Unix-oid system.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I'm certainly not going to defend his "acting", and he comes across as something of a jerk in the interviews I've seen and read, but Segal has genuine martial arts credentials - he's a sichi-dan (7th degree black belt) in aikido. (It's alleged that there may be some politics involved in such a high ranking (nothing to do with the movie stuff, some family business), but that's not uncommon in the martial arts.)
Van Damme, while he's very graceful and atheletic, had a few months of karate training (Shotokan, IIRC) and that's about it.
I have met some extremely competent martial artists over the years. They generally have not been "tough looking" people; in fact, some of them you might have mistaken for soft little wimps...until you see them in action.
Hmm, I think you've got a point there. B-)Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Well, "omnivorous" is a broad term; it can be mostly a flesh based diet with occasional plants, or a plant based diet with occasional mean. Our digestive system is certainly not suited to a meat-centered diet, and we can do quite well without any meat at all.
Of our closest primate relatives, gorillas are pretty much herbivorous, though I think they'll sometimes eat bugs; chimps will occasionally hunt small mammals, but IIRC they focus more on plants and bugs. So if we want to talk about "natural" diets for humans, we should probably be eating more bugs.
It's not. No more tricky than a balanced diet of any other sort. Sure, you can eat bad as a vegetarian; a diet of french fries and potato chips may be veggie, but it ain't healthy.
I've been a vegetarian of varying degrees for nineteen years, and a vegan for eleven. I keep encountering people who tell me that my diet must lacking vital nutrients and I'm going to keel over any day now, but in reality my health is pretty good.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/