The "IP" that ICANN cares about isn't the "Internet Protocol" - it's "Intellectual Property". The real influence behind ICANN is the WIPO-mongers, whoever they are, that have gotten ICANN to insist that anybody who registers a domain name anywhere under their control provide enough information to serve them with a subpoena for a trademark lawsuit (and possibly for a website-content lawsuit from RIAA, etc., but it's really trademarks that matter.)
So are you proposing that it would be better that people register anonymously? What if there is a real need to know who the real person behind the domain name is, such as in the case of someone running a spam operation? While there have been admittedly few convictions for spamming, in many cases it was the domain name registration info that led to the real person.
While I will say that the conduct of organizations like the RIAA is certainly still cause for concern, it is in no way as much an issue as freedom of speech, and that is what I would be more worried about if control went to the UN. At least under the current system, I'm free to register a domain name whose purpose would be to speak out against the RIAA and there is nothing that they can do about it. Several members of the UN have expressed a desire to have a say in the content of the internet. Even ICANN does not have a real say in that, except where possibly copyright law is considered.
Nobody panic. This is CYA, pure and simple. If the RIAA comes knocking at their door, the project can claim that they dutifully changed the code to reject sharing of unlicensed works.
RIAA: But look, we found these modified versions that bypass it!
LimeWire: Sorry, man, that's not our code. Go yell at them, not us.
Or if you prefer a more geekoid version:
LimeWire (waves hand): This is not the code you are looking for.
RIAA: This is not the code we are looking for.
LimeWire: Our code is clean
RIAA: Their code is clean.
LimeWire: Move along
RIAA: Move along
The whole argument just smacks of fearmongering, and throws the word anthrax around as much as possible. They're not creating a biological weapons lab, just procuring enough to probably use for threat assessment of biological weapon dispersion. This is something I'd actually expect a sane government to do, and not be surprised about.
If there is anyone here that does not trust the Bush administration, it's me, and even I agree with this statement.
The main reason I'm not all that worried about the US developing biological weapons is for the simple reason that it would be an enormous waste of time and money. We already have a very clear policy in place that we will meet any attack by WMDs with a retaliatory strike of WMDs. We already have a very effective WMD arsenal of nuclear weapons. In my view, this is a more effective deterrent than a biological arsenal. A country wanting to attack us with bio weapons or wanting to assist terrorist groups in attaining them now has to contend with the possibility of lovely mushroom clouds where its major cities used to be if the US discovers they were behind it.
Building a biological warfare arsenal just makes no sense in light of this, but attempting to find ways to defend against one is perfectly logical.
Sure you can call that consentual sex, but, pretty much the real deal is that you have a bunch of low self esteem women with no job skills doing anything they can to get their next drug fix, or avoid getting the shit beat out of them by their boyfriend.
Ok, with regards to prostitution specifically, this may be true. I don't agree that it can be applied to all porn, but for the sake of argument, let's say it's at least true for some women. But now you say this:
The sex industry degrades women.
Based on what you just said, it sounds like these women already degraded themselves. You can't blame the sex industry for that. We can make laws to insure that women who participate in pornographic activities consent to their participation; we can't legislate their frame of mind.
There are some very legitimate reasons to consider pornography as socially destructive because of the exploitive treatment of women in pornographic media.
Yes, I agree! I think it is positively heinous how all this exploitive porn is plastered all over the net! It's terrible how these photographers set up people with large guns right off camera, ready to murder any woman who doesn't comply, and...
Wait, they don't do that. Most of the women are posing of their own free will.
No, the fact that 55% of our country believe that God created man in his exact current form has relegated the Democratic party to semi-permanent minority status. The Democratic party: the party for the other 45% of us.
This is extreme hyperbole.
No party can get elected in the US without some pandering to the Judeo-Christian agenda. Your statement makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of atheists. Unless you can offer proof that every one of those 55% are republicans, your statement is a gross exaggeration.
The fact is that electing Bush as President has put in place a far more moralizing attitude within the attorney general's office and other enforcement-related branches of the government.
This is largely a function of Bush's personality and his foolish decisions to burn his party's bridges rather than just the fact that he is republican. What I mean by this is: Bush is in a position that few presidents in recent decades have had. His party controls both houses of Congress during a republican presidency. He is pushing this to the limit, throwing this in the faces of the democrats, refusing to compromise unless his own party starts to disaggree with him. He is failing to consider the future. The democrats will remember this slap in the face and the first chance they get, they will make life hell for the republicans. Unfortunately, it's the country as a whole that will suffer the most, since little will get done.
I may personally find scat porn, BDSM, etc. distasteful, disgusting or even offensive or demeaning, but if you want to do that in the privacy of your own home, that's your business.
And on this point, I can wholeheartedly agree with you.
Sure it makes much MUCH more of a difference. Katrina was a Cat 1 when it hit florida, the hot gulf waters drove it to a Cat 5 right quick. Whether that's global warmings fault is debatable, but certainly plausible.
It's true that global warming COULD have been a contributing factor. I personally believe that global warming is real and is an imminent threat to our ecosystem, but at the same time, I want to use more substantial correlations when trying to convince people. I hesitate to jump on every little thing that MIGHT be proof, otherwise I'd come off sounding like a fanatic.
We've been through this before. This is not the first time this has shown up on Slashdot. Several times before this particular piece of misinformation gets out claiming that the next generation of DVD players will require internet hookup. Each time the companies involved categorically state that NO internet hookup will be required for stand-alone play.
Now, what MIGHT happen is that the new players will allow DVDs to run code that checks for modified players and refuse to allow themselves to be played if it finds such a modification. That is more what we need to be concerned about.
I'd be interested to hear you expand on this. Are you referring to the scenes where Picard gathered up his command personnel in the Ready Room? To me, that sounds like a good strategy: gather together people who are experts in their fields, obtain information from them, solicit their opinions, and then make an informed decision. Not to mention it gave the writers a chance to give backplot where needed.
I have to agree with the MST3K crew that there are several others even worse, like Manos.
My wife and I are big fans of MST3K, and we kept hearing how Manos was a classic episode because of how bad the movie was. Well, we were disappointed at the MST3K's performance in this one. We think it was because the movie was TOO bad. There was not enough story in the movie for making jokes. The main problem was that incredibly long travelogue near the start of the movie. There were only so many jokes that could be made about watching someone drive down the road.
Some better treatments by the MST3K crew:
The Thing That Couldn't Die
I Was A Teenage Werewolf
Prince Of Space
Invasion of the Neptune Men
Maybe those movies were not as intrinsically bad as Manos, but the provided much more joke material.
I remembered another interesting experience with a collection agency, and this on a debt that wasn't even mine.
It was about a year after I had moved into my apartment in New Jersey, my first time living outside my parents' place. I got this call from a collections agency asking for a fellow that did not live at that address. I politely told the person they had the wrong number and hung up. No surprise or shock there. For the first few months after I had moved in, I used to regularly get calls from people asking how much I charged to paint a house, finding out later that the last edition of the phone book listed my number for a paint store that went out of business. I figured something similar was at work here.
Next day, they call back again, again ask for the same person. I again politely tell them that no such person lives there. However, I got intrigued by this, and did a little research. Turned out the fellow they were looking for was the previous tenant of the apartment. Cool, I thought. Now I could tell them the real deal if they called back.
And called back they did. I gave them what I knew, that this person used to live there but moved away before I moved in, and I had no more info than that.
So what does this fucktard from the collection agency do? He started accusing me of "covering" for this dude and starts threatening me with all sorts of dire legal consequences if I don't bring him to the goddamn phone RIGHT NOW.
Well, by this time, I knew exactly what my rights were, and I let him know it. I told him in no uncertain terms that I had no idea where this guy was, and even if I did, I was under no legal obligation to tell them, and if they called back again, I would remand the incident to my lawyer, and then hung up.
I had an experience with debt collection concerning the old BYTE magazine. I used to receive a subscription to this magazine but decided to cancel it when I felt the quality went downhill. I decided to cancel by simply not renewing, though I explicitly send back a renewal notice and wrote CANCEL on it.
At first, things are cool. Magazines stop coming after the subscription expires, nothing happens for three months. Then I get the letter from a collection agency. I owe BYTE magazine $1.36 for "underpaying my subscription". Pay up or else.
I shit you not. $1.38. They went to a collection agency for a fucking $1.38.
This letter came at a particularly stressful point in my life, and I was in no mood for this shit. At the time, I did not really understand how collection agencies and the law worked, so I simply bypassed the collection agency, called up BYTE magazine directly, and majorly unloaded on their customer support. The poor girl that happened to answer my call must have been new, for by the end of it I swore she was almost in tears, telling me to forget all about it, sorry for the inconvenience, blah blah blah, have a nice day.
I never received anything more from them or had anything bad pop up on my credit report.
I hear Nethack has a hidden mini-game like this too.
If you're talking about the "seduction attack" for the succubus/incubus, that's extremely tame (but damn amusing) compared to the GTA stuff. The first time that happened and I gained "experience" for that, I laughed my ass off.
Of course, that just made my wife wonder what the heck I was laughing at so I had to explain it to her. Fortunately she thought it was funny, too.
This is yet another example of the riduculous double standard we have in this country. Why people get worked up over graphic sex in a game that already has gratuitous, bloody violence in it is beyond me.
If I had a kid, and I had to choose between having him see graphic sex and graphic violence, I'd choose the sex. At least then I can sit the kid down and explain to him that this is something that he can enjoy when he's older. Can't say the same about the violence.
What I personally will never, ever get around is how someone can become so sick that they believe they are doing the Right Thing when participating in terror acts such as this.
I certainly agree with this statement. I'm never in favor of killing innocents to prove a point. That said, however, the reality of the situation is that there are people motivated about their cause enough to do such a thing. To simply have the attitude "Fuck the terrorists" as the parent said, is too simplistic an approach towards solving the problem. We have to first understand WHY terrorists do what they do, which means asking hard questions about the policies and past actions of various nations.
Dont you/. fuckers realize this isnt some joke, and you arent in your shitty MMORPGs? Get a life and mourn like the rest of us dont make comments like that
In any case, we should bomb Mecca every time something like this happens.
Yeah, making hundreds or even thousands of new martyrs for the cause will really stop terrorism. Keep those brilliant ideas coming, please.
Re:Ever wonder why ice melts?
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 1
a. Summary is plagiarized from the article, unless I've missed some nested quotes.
Just curious as to why you state this implying that this is a problem. I prefer it this way myself. I much rather would see the opening summary paragraph verbatim from the article rather than someone's interpretation of it. Too many times in the past, something gets lost in the translation, or the article is made to sound more sensational than it is.
We can survive in anything from tropical jungles to frozen tundra. Starvation due to huge decreases in the amount of food available would sharply reduce our population, but if anything more advanced than insects and grasses survive, there's every reason to believe we will too.
Yes, that would allow humans as a species to survive, but it does nothing for human civilization
If a catastrophic event causes the destruction of enough of the population, civilization as we know it will collapse. All the millennia of human advancement and knowledge goes poof. We would have to do it all over again.
The colonization of other worlds is a hedge against this. Take out the homeworld, and human civilization, technology, and culture survives. That I feel is more important than "just" humanity itself surviving as a species.
Slashdot Mirror
So are you proposing that it would be better that people register anonymously? What if there is a real need to know who the real person behind the domain name is, such as in the case of someone running a spam operation? While there have been admittedly few convictions for spamming, in many cases it was the domain name registration info that led to the real person.
While I will say that the conduct of organizations like the RIAA is certainly still cause for concern, it is in no way as much an issue as freedom of speech, and that is what I would be more worried about if control went to the UN. At least under the current system, I'm free to register a domain name whose purpose would be to speak out against the RIAA and there is nothing that they can do about it. Several members of the UN have expressed a desire to have a say in the content of the internet. Even ICANN does not have a real say in that, except where possibly copyright law is considered.
Wow. Whoever thought we'd see the day where the Slashdot crowd would use "But think of the children!" as a viable defense.
If anything says the RIAA is really screwed up, that's it.
RIAA: But look, we found these modified versions that bypass it!
LimeWire: Sorry, man, that's not our code. Go yell at them, not us.
Or if you prefer a more geekoid version:
LimeWire (waves hand): This is not the code you are looking for.
RIAA: This is not the code we are looking for.
LimeWire: Our code is clean
RIAA: Their code is clean.
LimeWire: Move along
RIAA: Move along
If there is anyone here that does not trust the Bush administration, it's me, and even I agree with this statement.
The main reason I'm not all that worried about the US developing biological weapons is for the simple reason that it would be an enormous waste of time and money. We already have a very clear policy in place that we will meet any attack by WMDs with a retaliatory strike of WMDs. We already have a very effective WMD arsenal of nuclear weapons. In my view, this is a more effective deterrent than a biological arsenal. A country wanting to attack us with bio weapons or wanting to assist terrorist groups in attaining them now has to contend with the possibility of lovely mushroom clouds where its major cities used to be if the US discovers they were behind it.
Building a biological warfare arsenal just makes no sense in light of this, but attempting to find ways to defend against one is perfectly logical.
Ok, with regards to prostitution specifically, this may be true. I don't agree that it can be applied to all porn, but for the sake of argument, let's say it's at least true for some women. But now you say this:
The sex industry degrades women.
Based on what you just said, it sounds like these women already degraded themselves. You can't blame the sex industry for that. We can make laws to insure that women who participate in pornographic activities consent to their participation; we can't legislate their frame of mind.
Yes, I agree! I think it is positively heinous how all this exploitive porn is plastered all over the net! It's terrible how these photographers set up people with large guns right off camera, ready to murder any woman who doesn't comply, and ...
Wait, they don't do that. Most of the women are posing of their own free will.
Uh ... what was your point again?
This is extreme hyperbole.
No party can get elected in the US without some pandering to the Judeo-Christian agenda. Your statement makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of atheists. Unless you can offer proof that every one of those 55% are republicans, your statement is a gross exaggeration.
The fact is that electing Bush as President has put in place a far more moralizing attitude within the attorney general's office and other enforcement-related branches of the government.
This is largely a function of Bush's personality and his foolish decisions to burn his party's bridges rather than just the fact that he is republican. What I mean by this is: Bush is in a position that few presidents in recent decades have had. His party controls both houses of Congress during a republican presidency. He is pushing this to the limit, throwing this in the faces of the democrats, refusing to compromise unless his own party starts to disaggree with him. He is failing to consider the future. The democrats will remember this slap in the face and the first chance they get, they will make life hell for the republicans. Unfortunately, it's the country as a whole that will suffer the most, since little will get done.
I may personally find scat porn, BDSM, etc. distasteful, disgusting or even offensive or demeaning, but if you want to do that in the privacy of your own home, that's your business.
And on this point, I can wholeheartedly agree with you.
It's true that global warming COULD have been a contributing factor. I personally believe that global warming is real and is an imminent threat to our ecosystem, but at the same time, I want to use more substantial correlations when trying to convince people. I hesitate to jump on every little thing that MIGHT be proof, otherwise I'd come off sounding like a fanatic.
Now, what MIGHT happen is that the new players will allow DVDs to run code that checks for modified players and refuse to allow themselves to be played if it finds such a modification. That is more what we need to be concerned about.
The decision making....psh, command by committee?
I'd be interested to hear you expand on this. Are you referring to the scenes where Picard gathered up his command personnel in the Ready Room? To me, that sounds like a good strategy: gather together people who are experts in their fields, obtain information from them, solicit their opinions, and then make an informed decision. Not to mention it gave the writers a chance to give backplot where needed.
Wow, not only is the topic three years old, but so are the comments.
1. Shouldn't kill even spammers.
2. This happened b/c he was spamming.
3. Yeah! Kill the bastards!
Followed by:
4. I, for one, welcome our brutal spammer murdering overlords.
My wife and I are big fans of MST3K, and we kept hearing how Manos was a classic episode because of how bad the movie was. Well, we were disappointed at the MST3K's performance in this one. We think it was because the movie was TOO bad. There was not enough story in the movie for making jokes. The main problem was that incredibly long travelogue near the start of the movie. There were only so many jokes that could be made about watching someone drive down the road.
Some better treatments by the MST3K crew:
Maybe those movies were not as intrinsically bad as Manos, but the provided much more joke material.
I remembered another interesting experience with a collection agency, and this on a debt that wasn't even mine.
It was about a year after I had moved into my apartment in New Jersey, my first time living outside my parents' place. I got this call from a collections agency asking for a fellow that did not live at that address. I politely told the person they had the wrong number and hung up. No surprise or shock there. For the first few months after I had moved in, I used to regularly get calls from people asking how much I charged to paint a house, finding out later that the last edition of the phone book listed my number for a paint store that went out of business. I figured something similar was at work here.
Next day, they call back again, again ask for the same person. I again politely tell them that no such person lives there. However, I got intrigued by this, and did a little research. Turned out the fellow they were looking for was the previous tenant of the apartment. Cool, I thought. Now I could tell them the real deal if they called back.
And called back they did. I gave them what I knew, that this person used to live there but moved away before I moved in, and I had no more info than that.
So what does this fucktard from the collection agency do? He started accusing me of "covering" for this dude and starts threatening me with all sorts of dire legal consequences if I don't bring him to the goddamn phone RIGHT NOW.
Well, by this time, I knew exactly what my rights were, and I let him know it. I told him in no uncertain terms that I had no idea where this guy was, and even if I did, I was under no legal obligation to tell them, and if they called back again, I would remand the incident to my lawyer, and then hung up.
Never heard back from them again.
At first, things are cool. Magazines stop coming after the subscription expires, nothing happens for three months. Then I get the letter from a collection agency. I owe BYTE magazine $1.36 for "underpaying my subscription". Pay up or else.
I shit you not. $1.38. They went to a collection agency for a fucking $1.38.
This letter came at a particularly stressful point in my life, and I was in no mood for this shit. At the time, I did not really understand how collection agencies and the law worked, so I simply bypassed the collection agency, called up BYTE magazine directly, and majorly unloaded on their customer support. The poor girl that happened to answer my call must have been new, for by the end of it I swore she was almost in tears, telling me to forget all about it, sorry for the inconvenience, blah blah blah, have a nice day.
I never received anything more from them or had anything bad pop up on my credit report.
If you're talking about the "seduction attack" for the succubus/incubus, that's extremely tame (but damn amusing) compared to the GTA stuff. The first time that happened and I gained "experience" for that, I laughed my ass off.
Of course, that just made my wife wonder what the heck I was laughing at so I had to explain it to her. Fortunately she thought it was funny, too.
If I had a kid, and I had to choose between having him see graphic sex and graphic violence, I'd choose the sex. At least then I can sit the kid down and explain to him that this is something that he can enjoy when he's older. Can't say the same about the violence.
I certainly agree with this statement. I'm never in favor of killing innocents to prove a point. That said, however, the reality of the situation is that there are people motivated about their cause enough to do such a thing. To simply have the attitude "Fuck the terrorists" as the parent said, is too simplistic an approach towards solving the problem. We have to first understand WHY terrorists do what they do, which means asking hard questions about the policies and past actions of various nations.
You're new here, aren't you?
Yeah, making hundreds or even thousands of new martyrs for the cause will really stop terrorism. Keep those brilliant ideas coming, please.
Just curious as to why you state this implying that this is a problem. I prefer it this way myself. I much rather would see the opening summary paragraph verbatim from the article rather than someone's interpretation of it. Too many times in the past, something gets lost in the translation, or the article is made to sound more sensational than it is.
And yes, I did RTFA.
No, he isn't. He's a renegade Time Lord and the sleigh and reindeer is his TARDIS (but with a working chameleon circuit).
... that if a bunch of Marxists decided to hold one of their meetings in this place, they would be plotting Communist revolutions? (Ba-DUM)
Yes, that would allow humans as a species to survive, but it does nothing for human civilization
If a catastrophic event causes the destruction of enough of the population, civilization as we know it will collapse. All the millennia of human advancement and knowledge goes poof. We would have to do it all over again.
The colonization of other worlds is a hedge against this. Take out the homeworld, and human civilization, technology, and culture survives. That I feel is more important than "just" humanity itself surviving as a species.