however there's nothing wrong with enjoying only one genre.
There's nothing "wrong" with it, in the ethical sense. But it is limiting. I read very little except sf when I was young. Then when I began writing sf, I realized what most serious sf writers will tell you: that the best writers of the 20th century were not all sf writers. In fact, relatively few of them were.
I still love the genre, but now I read everything else, too.
If you've already got the "name" and you've got lots of money (or a couple of bestsellers in the hole), you're practically guaranteed to stay a success. If, on the other hand, you have to compete against the "brand names" and everybody else submitting their work 'over-the-transom', your chances of achieving even that first foot-in-the-door publication are very small. Your talent, or lack thereof, isn't usually much of a deciding factor.
I don't mean to be unkind, but this is a viewpoint that the untalented often use to comfort themselves.
My experience leads me to believe that that first publication is not terribly difficult to achieve, given a little talent and enough industry. Unfortunately, the obvious implication of Sturgeon's Law is that talent is substantially less generously distributed than most would-be writers would like to believe. If 90% of everything published is crap, then it would appear that 90% of published writers are seriously deficient in talent. The situation is certainly far worse among unpublished writers, whose work has not yet risen to the level of salable crap. Talented writers may produce flawed work, but it's usually not so bad that you'd want to flush it down the sewer.
That said, it would be a mistake to equate "publication" with "success." Even writers like Spinrad who are quite successful for a time are always in danger of falling from grace, should sales of the latest work suffer a serious decline. That doesn't mean they don't get published, usually. It just means that their advances become too small to support them financially.
The sad fact is that most published writers do not make a living from their work, and this applies even to some extremely talented and productive writers.
Good point. Fortunately, I didn't buy it, I found it on the New Books shelf at my local library. So, I didn't read the amazon blurb or even the subtitle, before I tucked it under my arm, along with a couple thrillers and a book on laying ceramic tile.
I read this recently, and although it's a pretty good introduction to the conman profession, I was a little disappointed in the lack of actual examples of clever hacking.
The book is primarily about social engineering. Most of the example crimes in this book could have been perpetrated by folks who had no more than a casual acquaintance with the inner workings of computers. In other words, Mitnick tells you how to exploit the stupidity of human beings in large organization, and not how to exploit weaknesses in operating systems and security software.
Part of this is probably due to court-ordered vagueness; the court obviously didn't want Mitnick spreading dangerous knowledge.
On the other hand, Mitnick is probably correct in his contention that the greatest factor leading to compromised systems is the naivete of the folks who work with them.
OK, that's a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority." Recognize it?
Here are key phrases to examine for significance:"commercially available combination of supplements" and "several individual supplements." See the difference?
Weil is just being honest with his first sentence. In his second sentence, he's expressing a personal belief, based on anecdotal evidence. Though anecdotal evidence is not conclusive, neither should it be ignored, since most scientific advancements started with anecdotal evidence.
I don't agree with everything Weil says, but his conclusions are more likely to be supported by the evidence than, say, the conclusions of various government propaganda outfits. Remember the food pyramid?
You don't get to decide. The gummint, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that giving you a choice would simply confuse and frighten you. So they refuse to implement truth-in-labeling laws for GM foods.
Aren't you glad they think you're an idiot?
Why didn't you give Ron Goulart co-author status on the Tek books? It's obvious to anyone familiar with his work that he wrote every word. Wasn't it really pretty cheesy to just thank him for his "help?"
You said: "After a number of these testosterone impaired virus writers share some time with a 6?6? 300 lb lifer that thinks that they are cute; writing viruses will no longer seem so funny."
So you'd discourage script kiddies by subjecting them to repeated rape? Hey, the Taliban got nothing on you.
The problem with your "solution" is that you start out with a self-centered, thoughtless kid, and after a couple years in the brutalizing society of prison, you end up with a seriously pissed-off, hardened criminal with computer skills and no future. If you're the one who put him in prison, you'd better start keeping your money in your mattress, because he's not going to rest until he's ruined you. And he's got the tools to do it. The motivation came from you, and your simplistic efforts to solve the problem just made it worse for all of us.
You wrote: "You're position is that the guns give you freedom. That's just plain wrong. I live in Canada, I don't own a gun. But I'm relatively free."
Oh, you're probably more free than I am, because Canada is a small enough country that its government must be responsive to the will of the people. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case in the USA-- the federal government is now a self-powered juggernaut which pays no attention to citizens. But you miss the point. Gun ownership is not illegal in Canada, and in fact many Canadians own guns. The point is not whether you personally own a gun. The point is that you could probably get a gun if the state started loading your neighbors on cattlecars. Read about the Warsaw ghetto if you'd like some historical perspective on what happens when there are no guns in private hands.
You wrote: "The people are the ones that take your freedoms not the inanimate guns."
Duhh! People with guns. People without guns aren't going to take anyone's freedoms away.
You wrote: "And you casually refer to things like the square as if civil violence is unknown in the states. Hey lets hate us some nigga!"
I guess you don't know much about the civil rights era. Read Malcolm X for some pithy comments on the wisdom of gun ownership. Or look into the history of concealed weapons laws, which were first promulgated as a way of disarming black folks and others that society wished to keep powerless. The same thing is still going on. Consider the anti-"Saturday-night-specials" laws that have been proposed in many places. These are laws that forbid people to own cheap guns. They are aimed at disarming poor people. They're a lot like the laws that forbid people to sleep under bridges. Only poor people are affected, even though the rich are also forbidden to sleep under bridges.
You wrote: "Seriously learn to think critically about your *OWN* country before you try to think critically about anyone elses."
Seriously, learn to think critically.
You wrote: "Oh yeah, and you have gun rights! So that blows your entire post out of the water."
Only if you believe that I have less freedom than a disarmed Chinese peasant.
"I.e you have the right to own a gun. The average chinese person probably [don't know for sure] doesn't see the relevence to defend gun rights. They have less gun violence too! So we should force gun rights on the chinese too?"
I guess you're right, if a state-mandated bullet in the back of the neck isn't "gun violence."
I think Mao was a monster, but he was a very bright monster. He was right when he said that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" If only the soldiers have guns, only the soldiers will have power.
If you ask me, the folks who ended up clogging the tank tracks in Tienanmen Square might have had some belated respect for the wisdom of "gun rights." Just guessing here, but if they'd had a few antitank rockets, their protests might have accomplished more.
The fact is that those who have no guns are rarely in a position to have any other freedoms. The Chinese have the right to own guns, because the right to defend oneself is a natural right that all human beings have. If they're caught by their government trying to exercise that right, they get the aforementioned bullet in the back of the neck.
Call me a western imperialist if you must, but I think that's wrong, and I'd bet the Chinese people think it's wrong too. But they don't have guns, so there's nothing they can do about it.
So, I assume you believe that, using current technology, it would be impossible to insert feline genetic material into human germ plasm?
I think you're wrong, since the genetic divide between non-primate animals and humans is far narrower than the gap between tomatoes and flounders. And I have to assume you haven't read Cordwainer Smith, whose obvious subtext was that it is easy to disenfranchise beings based in relatively minor deviations from whatever the powers-that-be define as "human." If, say, the gene for nicitating membranes was expressed in an otherwise human creature, some would inevitably insist that such a creature was not human. They've done it before on the even more trivial basis of skin color, so I think old Cordwainer was on to something, don't you?
Someone probably ought to mention that this is the name of a logical _fallacy_. Here's an example: "My son started smoking pot, and then he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Therefore, smoking pot causes schizophrenia."
It's a very popular logical fallacy, especially in politics.
I think this overstates the seminal importance of Neuromancer. Gibson is a fine writer, but in my view, the most vivid tropes in his book were taken from the movie Blade Runner, and I see that movie as the primordial genesis of today's cyberculture, such as it is. Gibson cheerfully admits that he knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer, though certainly that didn't keep him from coming up with an engaging visual metaphor for data systems.
Getting back to technology and sf, the stories written by Cordwainer Smith back in the (I believe) 50s concern genesplicing. His best-known theme concerns animals elevated to sentience via genetic engineering, to serve as slaves to the fully-human. This is only a small step, in conceptual terms) from tomatoes with flounder genes, which already exist.
I recommend "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" as a start.
To claim that there is any moral equivalence between violation of the GPL and violation of the copyright laws is to say that there was no difference between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham-- since both were thieves, in the ethical if not legal sense.
The significant point here has nothing to do with the legal and ethical definition of "theft." The RIAA is a vestigial organization, clearly doomed by media evolution, and will only be remembered in the decades to come as an organization that went down hard, and caused a lot of misery during its death throes.
The distribution of music is going to be different than it was in the past. There will be very little profit associated with distribution in digital form. The challenge for musicians is to adapt to these new realities, and figure out ways to get paid for their art. All else is natter.
Am I the only person too stupid to make any sense out of Red Hat Network?
I went out last week and bought RH 7.1 Deluxe Workstation, doing my patriotic OS-supporting duty. I'd used 6.2 and 7.0 in the past, but this is the first distro I actually paid for.
The distribution seems fine, in general-- installation was smooth, and configuration went without a hitch. Then I activated my account at rhn and things went south
rhn_register kept puking out halfway through registration. I killed the partial profile several times before a registration went all the way to the end. I discovered that up2date didn't work. I dl'ed and installed the bugfixed up2date rpms and finally got the system to update.
Then I installed RH 7.1 on a second system, and also manually upgraded the up2date rpms. But it doesn't work-- I keep getting a server error, usually during rpm header fetch.
So then I resigned myself to using the rhn website. Has anyone here ever seen a more convoluted, obscure, and user-unfriendly website? But that wouldn't be so bad, if the damn thing actually worked. Software Manager claims to schedule updates, but either they never start, or they crash with a server error half-an-hour into the process. So, going with the next least-complicated option, I attempted to fight my way through the channel pages, selected 5 packages out of the 1000 or so in the channel, and dl'ed them in.tar form. Imagine my surprise when out of the 5 packages, three were corrupt.
So then I tried getting individual packages without going through the thicket of unnecessary complications referred to above. I dl'ed the three netscape rpms listed under the security errata. One was corrupt.
I'm about to give up. I may have just listed a whole slew of reasons why I'm an unlearned idiot, but I've been running Linux on one or another of my boxes for 5 or 6 years, starting with Slackware oh so long ago. If I can't figure this stuff out, there's a pretty good chance Joe Average User is going to be driven into a homicidal rage by the frustrations of using the website.
You said:
"It's a scandal what the rich and well-connected get away with but it is no worse now than it ever was. I can't see that using drugs is a right however harmless it may be."
You miss the point. Of course the rules have always been different for rich and poor, but the drug war is a sort of lottery that punishes the unlucky. If who becomes President and who becomes a convicted felon is decided by the flip of fate's coin, then there is a systemic problem. In any rational legal system, people should be punished for the harm they do, not for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The drug war is used to further marginalize troublesome populations-- this is not debatable. Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates, You might find it interesting to look up who is more likely to go to jail for doing so. The ratios are astounding.
And those who fought at Concord would be astonished to know that the government they gave so much to found has now taken it upon itself to tell Americans what they can ingest. Those who framed the Constitution would be astonished to learn that the interstate commerce clause has been twisted into a flimsy pretext for a federal police force dedicated to arresting citizens for possessing unpopular vegetables. If you were a student of the Constitution, you would be aware that it is not a defense of personal liberties. It is a regulatory framework that was intended to strictly limit the powers of the federal government. Nowhere in it is any plausible grant of power to regulate the substances used by Americans.
"The justice system is never above criticism. However, if there are a large number of miscarriages of justice it is not because people's legal rights have been systematically abridged or denied as they were under segregation."
This is your opinion, to which you are entitled. However, how do you explain the fact that a much larger percentage of black Americans are in prison now than were imprisoned during the worst of Jim Crow? If it is not due to systematic abridgement of rights, then what has caused this unfortunate situation?
You then go on to make a series of assertions which appear to be directly contrary to the actual facts. You should perhaps check with the Justice Dept. for the applicable stats.
You say:
" The right to an attorney and a speedy trial has been extended."
The facts are these: most sentences do not result from a trial, speedy or otherwise-- they result from plea bargains coerced from defendants under the threat of draconian sentences. Most defendants who must make do with public defenders will find that these lawyers, overworked and underpaid, frequently advise them to take these plea bargains, whether or not their clients claim innocence.
You say:
"The right to trial by jury is intact." See above. And there is a strong judicial movement to suppress the time-hallowed practice of jury information. See the Laura Kriho case. Or look up the rulings in the pre-trial motions of the late Peter McWilliams, who was enjoined against mentioning medical marijuana, even though that was the centerpiece of his defense. (For reasons that will become instantly understandable to anyone who learns about the case, Mcwilliams took a plea bargain. He died while awaiting sentencing.)
"The rules for probable cause are more strictly enforced than ever." Incorrect. Recent rulings have advanced the notion that formerly inadmissable evidence may now be admitted if the police *believed* they were acting in "good faith."
"The use of DNA testing exonerates people that would have previously been convicted." Again, you are not current. In just the last few days, a ruling came down that only those who did not accept a plea bargain can later demand DNA testing in an attempt to clear their names.
I will certainly agree that most Americans do not fully value those rights that remain to them. But rights do not "atrophy" via some mysterious process unconnected with government. Rights are lost to the purposeful actions of governments, which is why the Founding Fathers gave us the Constitution. It is no longer respected, and has become largely impotent, which is a pity.
You say:
"It's ingenuous to compare the treatment of criminals to the treatment of law abiding citizens."
It is silly to pretend that the conversion of ever-greater numbers of citizens into criminals is not germane to a discussion of freedom. If your thesis is that citizens who do not wish to lose their freedoms ought to refrain from such ferociously criminal acts as smoking politically incorrect vegetables, then why are not more of our most powerful politicians in jail? Many of them have admitted to committing the same criminal acts. Justice so unevenly applied must be regarded as injustice, in any rational appraisal of the justice system.
Then you say:
"There have been miscarriages of justice throughout American history and it is similarly ingenuous use them to pillary the whole justice system."
The "miscarriages" I referred to are systemic, not isolated aberrations, and the proof of this is indisputable. We jail many times the number of our citizens that other western democracies do. Is it your feeling that Americans are simply morally inferior to most of the other people in the world?
Finally, let me ask you if, during the Jim Crow years, you would have regarded criticisms of the justice system as "ingenuous?"
Our government is far more powerful than the terrorists. Who should we fear more, the gangbanger with the Uzi or the old lady with the cane? The old lady with the cane might hate us more, but the gangbanger can do us a lot more harm.
Unfortunately, you appear to be able to see only the decisions that enforce your personal viewpoint, except for the two decisions you cite as against this putative extension of civil rights. Further, you have apparently not done the math-- the vast majority of cases you cite as protective of the Bill of Rights were ruled on before 1980. You have largely ignored that aspect of Supreme Court jurisprudence known colloquially as the "drug war exceptions to the Constitution." Your summation is deceptive is another way-- you do not touch upon the many lower court decisions that the Supremes simply allowed to stand.
The Supreme Court, of late years, has faithfully supported the extra-Constitutional police powers needed to continue this "war." These powers are of necessity extra-Constitutional, because these laws attempt to suppress consenual acts-- in other words, convictions can only be obtained by such Constitutionally suspect methods as anonymous informers, wiretaps, anti-privacy banking regulations, and other restrictions on personal liberty that would have been regarded with horror by most Americans 50 years ago.
It's even more difficult to make the argument you appear to be making-- that Americans are more free than ever before, when you realize that a larger percentage of Americans are in prison than ever before. In fact, we are now the world's foremost jailers, keeping a larger percentage of our population in jail than any other country in the world (with the possible exception of Russia-- opinions and estimates vary.) Your assertion that the vast number of citizens in prison is due to higher crime rates is difficult to defend logically, because incarceration rates have vastly outgained crime rates.
The American justice system is seriously compromised, with almost all power now residing in the hands of prosecutors. The proliferation of laws has made it impossible for the average citizen in trouble with the law to defend himself in the way he might have in the past. Prosecutors decide what charges are brought, and should the citizen be so uppity as to dispute the charges and demand his day in court, he can be sure that every possible charge will be prosecuted against him. Mandatory minimums, which remove sentencing power from judges, intensify this prosecutorial power. If an accused citizen persists in spite of this (very few do) he will find that prosecutors will be able to use the testimony of criminals against him, and these criminals will be rewarded for their testimony by large reductions in their prison sentences.
One of the most insidious attacks on liberty and the rule of law are the RICO statutes, which treat those with only peripheral (or even innocent!) involvement in criminal enterprises as co-conspirators, liable to the same penalties as conspiracy kingpins. For example, two brothers in Georgia are now serving 10 year sentences in a marijuana conspiracy case, because they sold growlights from their garden shop to persons later caught growing marijuana. No evidence was ever introduced to show that they participated in any illegal activities, and no drugs were found in their possession. There are many other horror stories, for anyone who is interested.
Even those who have no sympathy for drug offenders might wish to consider that bad law proliferates and spreads beyond the confines of its original purpose. A man who lives in my area, and his son, went to prison for almost two years because he filled a mudhole in his back yard without seeking the proper regulatory permits.
The war against terrorism is similar to the war against drugs in that it is an open-ended conflict which can easily be defined as never-ending. In fact, it is very dangerous to define the government's anti-terrorist activities as a "war." It should be regarded as simply a criminal matter, for many good reasons unrelated to the opportunistic attacks now being mounted against our remaining civil liberties.
But I'm not optimistic that common sense will prevail. The trend in America is toward the limitation of freedoms. The events of 9/11 will only accelerate that trend.
Another point to bear in mind is that although Microsoft controls the American desktop market and to a large extent the market in other western democracies, most of the people in the world do not live here.
That leaves a very large market unexploited. While it may be difficult to imagine your average camel driver as a computer owner, it was even harder 30 years ago to imagine the average American as a computer owner.
At some point, international aid agencies are going to start distributing simple inexpensive computers to thirdworld villages. If the Linux community is alert, they'll see that these machines are running Linux, and it shouldn't be a hard sell. Linux will run on very inexpensive hardware, is free, and even more important, Linux users are not charged for upgrading their systems in the way that Windows users are.
The consequences of developing a base of users several billion strong could be enormous. Bright kids are just as likely to be found living in mud huts as in gated communities, and if Linux recruits these kids into the Linux development fold, they will vastly outnumber the developers in the Microsoft camp. The most important asset in the OS wars is sheer brainpower. Microsoft may soon be overwhelmed by a tide of thirdworld coding geniuses.
So, Linux zealots... join the Peace Corps and spread the Linux meme to the world.
Untrue. It would be far more accurate to say that the war on drugs cost the Democrats the Whitehouse. Consider that the Clinton administration prosecuted the war much more vigorously than the Republicans (for example, the total number of drug arrests during the 8 years of Clinton was substantially more than the total during the 12 years of Reagan-Bush.)
This played out in Florida, in which the number of blacks who had lost their voting rights due to felony drug convictions was several times the margin of Bush's victory.
Furthermore, Nader campaigned on a drug law reform platform, which attracted many voters who might otherwise have voted Democrat, in the mistaken belief that the Dems are more rational than Bush on drug reform matters.
You say, "You ask who would control the system. My answer is that the database would be controlled by the government -- which would in turn be controlled by the database."
Apart from the chicken-egg logical paradox you espouse here, your implicit assumption would appear to be this: that for some unknown reason, powerful people would resist the temptation to corrupt the system to their advantage.
This seems unreasonably optimistic. History indicates (without a single countervailing example) that the only way to avoid the inevitable human-rights problems associated with powerful governments is to avoid giving governments too much power. We passed that line some time ago, alas.
You say, "Strangely, this could make the world a freer place and a place more tolerant of non-conformity."
You are naive to the point of bathos. You evidently do not grasp that non-conforming acts can easily be made criminal, particularly in an atmosphere of hysteria and fear.
You say,"How do you prevent abuse of the system? First ask yourself if it is easier to control a well-defined system or a pell mell system like we currently have. If the system were well defined, you would have the right, as in credit reporting, to dispute your record and to know what it is."
The germane question is this: who would control the system? Ask yourself what happens with regard to your credit report if you and the issuing agency disagree as to the facts. Are you guaranteed that it will be changed to reflect your view of the matter? Of course not. And consider further-- have you ever filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act? Do you think that you will, for example, automatically receive everything in your FBI dossier? Of course not. What you get will likely be heavily redacted, for "reasons of national security."
You say, "You wouldn't have government officials asserting that someone was "linked" to something by who knows what vague circumstance." See above. You would have precisely the same drawbacks as you do now when you attempt to discover what information the government holds against you, except that the government's store of information about you would be greatly increased.
Again, conformity can be legislated, once you abandon the Constitution. You say, "But if you don't like the laws, change the laws or the penalties for breaking them." Recent history is not reassuring in this regard. For example, the citizens of a number of states have now voted, by large majorities, to allow the use of medical marijuana without penalty. The government continues to arrest sick people, by simply stating that federal drug laws trump state drug laws, even though *nowhere* in the Constitution are the feds permitted to make such laws. They did it anyway, and a supinely political Supreme Court has gone along with this emasculation of our country's most important legal document.
It is unfortunate, but one of the prices of freedom is that we have to hold our own government in check. The government is already far more powerful than the framers of the Constitution intended. It would be insane to greatly increase those powers.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing "wrong" with it, in the ethical sense. But it is limiting. I read very little except sf when I was young. Then when I began writing sf, I realized what most serious sf writers will tell you: that the best writers of the 20th century were not all sf writers. In fact, relatively few of them were.
I still love the genre, but now I read everything else, too.
Ray Aldridge
I don't mean to be unkind, but this is a viewpoint that the untalented often use to comfort themselves.
My experience leads me to believe that that first publication is not terribly difficult to achieve, given a little talent and enough industry. Unfortunately, the obvious implication of Sturgeon's Law is that talent is substantially less generously distributed than most would-be writers would like to believe. If 90% of everything published is crap, then it would appear that 90% of published writers are seriously deficient in talent. The situation is certainly far worse among unpublished writers, whose work has not yet risen to the level of salable crap. Talented writers may produce flawed work, but it's usually not so bad that you'd want to flush it down the sewer.
That said, it would be a mistake to equate "publication" with "success." Even writers like Spinrad who are quite successful for a time are always in danger of falling from grace, should sales of the latest work suffer a serious decline. That doesn't mean they don't get published, usually. It just means that their advances become too small to support them financially.
The sad fact is that most published writers do not make a living from their work, and this applies even to some extremely talented and productive writers.
Good point. Fortunately, I didn't buy it, I found it on the New Books shelf at my local library. So, I didn't read the amazon blurb or even the subtitle, before I tucked it under my arm, along with a couple thrillers and a book on laying ceramic tile.
I read this recently, and although it's a pretty good introduction to the conman profession, I was a little disappointed in the lack of actual examples of clever hacking.
The book is primarily about social engineering. Most of the example crimes in this book could have been perpetrated by folks who had no more than a casual acquaintance with the inner workings of computers. In other words, Mitnick tells you how to exploit the stupidity of human beings in large organization, and not how to exploit weaknesses in operating systems and security software.
Part of this is probably due to court-ordered vagueness; the court obviously didn't want Mitnick spreading dangerous knowledge.
On the other hand, Mitnick is probably correct in his contention that the greatest factor leading to compromised systems is the naivete of the folks who work with them.
So where's your medical degree from Harvard?
OK, that's a logical fallacy called "appeal to authority." Recognize it?
Here are key phrases to examine for significance:"commercially available combination of supplements" and "several individual supplements." See the difference?
Weil is just being honest with his first sentence. In his second sentence, he's expressing a personal belief, based on anecdotal evidence. Though anecdotal evidence is not conclusive, neither should it be ignored, since most scientific advancements started with anecdotal evidence.
I don't agree with everything Weil says, but his conclusions are more likely to be supported by the evidence than, say, the conclusions of various government propaganda outfits. Remember the food pyramid?
You don't get to decide. The gummint, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that giving you a choice would simply confuse and frighten you. So they refuse to implement truth-in-labeling laws for GM foods. Aren't you glad they think you're an idiot?
Why didn't you give Ron Goulart co-author status on the Tek books? It's obvious to anyone familiar with his work that he wrote every word. Wasn't it really pretty cheesy to just thank him for his "help?"
You said: "After a number of these testosterone impaired virus writers share some time with a 6?6? 300 lb lifer that thinks that they are cute; writing viruses will no longer seem so funny."
So you'd discourage script kiddies by subjecting them to repeated rape? Hey, the Taliban got nothing on you.
The problem with your "solution" is that you start out with a self-centered, thoughtless kid, and after a couple years in the brutalizing society of prison, you end up with a seriously pissed-off, hardened criminal with computer skills and no future. If you're the one who put him in prison, you'd better start keeping your money in your mattress, because he's not going to rest until he's ruined you. And he's got the tools to do it. The motivation came from you, and your simplistic efforts to solve the problem just made it worse for all of us.
You wrote: "You're position is that the guns give you freedom. That's just plain wrong. I live in Canada, I don't own a gun. But I'm relatively free."
Oh, you're probably more free than I am, because Canada is a small enough country that its government must be responsive to the will of the people. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case in the USA-- the federal government is now a self-powered juggernaut which pays no attention to citizens. But you miss the point. Gun ownership is not illegal in Canada, and in fact many Canadians own guns. The point is not whether you personally own a gun. The point is that you could probably get a gun if the state started loading your neighbors on cattlecars. Read about the Warsaw ghetto if you'd like some historical perspective on what happens when there are no guns in private hands.
You wrote: "The people are the ones that take your freedoms not the inanimate guns."
Duhh! People with guns. People without guns aren't going to take anyone's freedoms away.
You wrote: "And you casually refer to things like the square as if civil violence is unknown in the states. Hey lets hate us some nigga!"
I guess you don't know much about the civil rights era. Read Malcolm X for some pithy comments on the wisdom of gun ownership. Or look into the history of concealed weapons laws, which were first promulgated as a way of disarming black folks and others that society wished to keep powerless. The same thing is still going on. Consider the anti-"Saturday-night-specials" laws that have been proposed in many places. These are laws that forbid people to own cheap guns. They are aimed at disarming poor people. They're a lot like the laws that forbid people to sleep under bridges. Only poor people are affected, even though the rich are also forbidden to sleep under bridges.
You wrote: "Seriously learn to think critically about your *OWN* country before you try to think critically about anyone elses."
Seriously, learn to think critically.
You wrote: "Oh yeah, and you have gun rights! So that blows your entire post out of the water."
Only if you believe that I have less freedom than a disarmed Chinese peasant.
"I.e you have the right to own a gun. The average chinese person probably [don't know for sure] doesn't see the relevence to defend gun rights. They have less gun violence too! So we should force gun rights on the chinese too?"
I guess you're right, if a state-mandated bullet in the back of the neck isn't "gun violence."
I think Mao was a monster, but he was a very bright monster. He was right when he said that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" If only the soldiers have guns, only the soldiers will have power.
If you ask me, the folks who ended up clogging the tank tracks in Tienanmen Square might have had some belated respect for the wisdom of "gun rights." Just guessing here, but if they'd had a few antitank rockets, their protests might have accomplished more.
The fact is that those who have no guns are rarely in a position to have any other freedoms. The Chinese have the right to own guns, because the right to defend oneself is a natural right that all human beings have. If they're caught by their government trying to exercise that right, they get the aforementioned bullet in the back of the neck.
Call me a western imperialist if you must, but I think that's wrong, and I'd bet the Chinese people think it's wrong too. But they don't have guns, so there's nothing they can do about it.
So, I assume you believe that, using current technology, it would be impossible to insert feline genetic material into human germ plasm?
I think you're wrong, since the genetic divide between non-primate animals and humans is far narrower than the gap between tomatoes and flounders. And I have to assume you haven't read Cordwainer Smith, whose obvious subtext was that it is easy to disenfranchise beings based in relatively minor deviations from whatever the powers-that-be define as "human." If, say, the gene for nicitating membranes was expressed in an otherwise human creature, some would inevitably insist that such a creature was not human. They've done it before on the even more trivial basis of skin color, so I think old Cordwainer was on to something, don't you?
Someone probably ought to mention that this is the name of a logical _fallacy_. Here's an example: "My son started smoking pot, and then he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Therefore, smoking pot causes schizophrenia."
It's a very popular logical fallacy, especially in politics.
I think this overstates the seminal importance of Neuromancer. Gibson is a fine writer, but in my view, the most vivid tropes in his book were taken from the movie Blade Runner, and I see that movie as the primordial genesis of today's cyberculture, such as it is. Gibson cheerfully admits that he knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer, though certainly that didn't keep him from coming up with an engaging visual metaphor for data systems.
Getting back to technology and sf, the stories written by Cordwainer Smith back in the (I believe) 50s concern genesplicing. His best-known theme concerns animals elevated to sentience via genetic engineering, to serve as slaves to the fully-human. This is only a small step, in conceptual terms) from tomatoes with flounder genes, which already exist.
I recommend "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" as a start.
To claim that there is any moral equivalence between violation of the GPL and violation of the copyright laws is to say that there was no difference between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham-- since both were thieves, in the ethical if not legal sense. The significant point here has nothing to do with the legal and ethical definition of "theft." The RIAA is a vestigial organization, clearly doomed by media evolution, and will only be remembered in the decades to come as an organization that went down hard, and caused a lot of misery during its death throes. The distribution of music is going to be different than it was in the past. There will be very little profit associated with distribution in digital form. The challenge for musicians is to adapt to these new realities, and figure out ways to get paid for their art. All else is natter.
Damn. I guess we should have left Adolf alone.
Am I the only person too stupid to make any sense out of Red Hat Network?
.tar form. Imagine my surprise when out of the 5 packages, three were corrupt.
I went out last week and bought RH 7.1 Deluxe Workstation, doing my patriotic OS-supporting duty. I'd used 6.2 and 7.0 in the past, but this is the first distro I actually paid for.
The distribution seems fine, in general-- installation was smooth, and configuration went without a hitch. Then I activated my account at rhn and things went south
rhn_register kept puking out halfway through registration. I killed the partial profile several times before a registration went all the way to the end. I discovered that up2date didn't work. I dl'ed and installed the bugfixed up2date rpms and finally got the system to update.
Then I installed RH 7.1 on a second system, and also manually upgraded the up2date rpms. But it doesn't work-- I keep getting a server error, usually during rpm header fetch.
So then I resigned myself to using the rhn website. Has anyone here ever seen a more convoluted, obscure, and user-unfriendly website? But that wouldn't be so bad, if the damn thing actually worked. Software Manager claims to schedule updates, but either they never start, or they crash with a server error half-an-hour into the process. So, going with the next least-complicated option, I attempted to fight my way through the channel pages, selected 5 packages out of the 1000 or so in the channel, and dl'ed them in
So then I tried getting individual packages without going through the thicket of unnecessary complications referred to above. I dl'ed the three netscape rpms listed under the security errata. One was corrupt.
I'm about to give up. I may have just listed a whole slew of reasons why I'm an unlearned idiot, but I've been running Linux on one or another of my boxes for 5 or 6 years, starting with Slackware oh so long ago. If I can't figure this stuff out, there's a pretty good chance Joe Average User is going to be driven into a homicidal rage by the frustrations of using the website.
You said: "It's a scandal what the rich and well-connected get away with but it is no worse now than it ever was. I can't see that using drugs is a right however harmless it may be."
You miss the point. Of course the rules have always been different for rich and poor, but the drug war is a sort of lottery that punishes the unlucky. If who becomes President and who becomes a convicted felon is decided by the flip of fate's coin, then there is a systemic problem. In any rational legal system, people should be punished for the harm they do, not for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The drug war is used to further marginalize troublesome populations-- this is not debatable. Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates, You might find it interesting to look up who is more likely to go to jail for doing so. The ratios are astounding.
And those who fought at Concord would be astonished to know that the government they gave so much to found has now taken it upon itself to tell Americans what they can ingest. Those who framed the Constitution would be astonished to learn that the interstate commerce clause has been twisted into a flimsy pretext for a federal police force dedicated to arresting citizens for possessing unpopular vegetables. If you were a student of the Constitution, you would be aware that it is not a defense of personal liberties. It is a regulatory framework that was intended to strictly limit the powers of the federal government. Nowhere in it is any plausible grant of power to regulate the substances used by Americans.
"The justice system is never above criticism. However, if there are a large number of miscarriages of justice it is not because people's legal rights have been systematically abridged or denied as they were under segregation."
This is your opinion, to which you are entitled. However, how do you explain the fact that a much larger percentage of black Americans are in prison now than were imprisoned during the worst of Jim Crow? If it is not due to systematic abridgement of rights, then what has caused this unfortunate situation?
You then go on to make a series of assertions which appear to be directly contrary to the actual facts. You should perhaps check with the Justice Dept. for the applicable stats.
You say: " The right to an attorney and a speedy trial has been extended."
The facts are these: most sentences do not result from a trial, speedy or otherwise-- they result from plea bargains coerced from defendants under the threat of draconian sentences. Most defendants who must make do with public defenders will find that these lawyers, overworked and underpaid, frequently advise them to take these plea bargains, whether or not their clients claim innocence.
You say: "The right to trial by jury is intact." See above. And there is a strong judicial movement to suppress the time-hallowed practice of jury information. See the Laura Kriho case. Or look up the rulings in the pre-trial motions of the late Peter McWilliams, who was enjoined against mentioning medical marijuana, even though that was the centerpiece of his defense. (For reasons that will become instantly understandable to anyone who learns about the case, Mcwilliams took a plea bargain. He died while awaiting sentencing.)
"The rules for probable cause are more strictly enforced than ever." Incorrect. Recent rulings have advanced the notion that formerly inadmissable evidence may now be admitted if the police *believed* they were acting in "good faith."
"The use of DNA testing exonerates people that would have previously been convicted." Again, you are not current. In just the last few days, a ruling came down that only those who did not accept a plea bargain can later demand DNA testing in an attempt to clear their names.
I will certainly agree that most Americans do not fully value those rights that remain to them. But rights do not "atrophy" via some mysterious process unconnected with government. Rights are lost to the purposeful actions of governments, which is why the Founding Fathers gave us the Constitution. It is no longer respected, and has become largely impotent, which is a pity.
You say: "It's ingenuous to compare the treatment of criminals to the treatment of law abiding citizens."
It is silly to pretend that the conversion of ever-greater numbers of citizens into criminals is not germane to a discussion of freedom. If your thesis is that citizens who do not wish to lose their freedoms ought to refrain from such ferociously criminal acts as smoking politically incorrect vegetables, then why are not more of our most powerful politicians in jail? Many of them have admitted to committing the same criminal acts. Justice so unevenly applied must be regarded as injustice, in any rational appraisal of the justice system.
Then you say: "There have been miscarriages of justice throughout American history and it is similarly ingenuous use them to pillary the whole justice system."
The "miscarriages" I referred to are systemic, not isolated aberrations, and the proof of this is indisputable. We jail many times the number of our citizens that other western democracies do. Is it your feeling that Americans are simply morally inferior to most of the other people in the world?
Finally, let me ask you if, during the Jim Crow years, you would have regarded criticisms of the justice system as "ingenuous?"
Our government is far more powerful than the terrorists. Who should we fear more, the gangbanger with the Uzi or the old lady with the cane? The old lady with the cane might hate us more, but the gangbanger can do us a lot more harm.
Unfortunately, you appear to be able to see only the decisions that enforce your personal viewpoint, except for the two decisions you cite as against this putative extension of civil rights. Further, you have apparently not done the math-- the vast majority of cases you cite as protective of the Bill of Rights were ruled on before 1980. You have largely ignored that aspect of Supreme Court jurisprudence known colloquially as the "drug war exceptions to the Constitution." Your summation is deceptive is another way-- you do not touch upon the many lower court decisions that the Supremes simply allowed to stand.
The Supreme Court, of late years, has faithfully supported the extra-Constitutional police powers needed to continue this "war." These powers are of necessity extra-Constitutional, because these laws attempt to suppress consenual acts-- in other words, convictions can only be obtained by such Constitutionally suspect methods as anonymous informers, wiretaps, anti-privacy banking regulations, and other restrictions on personal liberty that would have been regarded with horror by most Americans 50 years ago.
It's even more difficult to make the argument you appear to be making-- that Americans are more free than ever before, when you realize that a larger percentage of Americans are in prison than ever before. In fact, we are now the world's foremost jailers, keeping a larger percentage of our population in jail than any other country in the world (with the possible exception of Russia-- opinions and estimates vary.) Your assertion that the vast number of citizens in prison is due to higher crime rates is difficult to defend logically, because incarceration rates have vastly outgained crime rates.
The American justice system is seriously compromised, with almost all power now residing in the hands of prosecutors. The proliferation of laws has made it impossible for the average citizen in trouble with the law to defend himself in the way he might have in the past. Prosecutors decide what charges are brought, and should the citizen be so uppity as to dispute the charges and demand his day in court, he can be sure that every possible charge will be prosecuted against him. Mandatory minimums, which remove sentencing power from judges, intensify this prosecutorial power. If an accused citizen persists in spite of this (very few do) he will find that prosecutors will be able to use the testimony of criminals against him, and these criminals will be rewarded for their testimony by large reductions in their prison sentences.
One of the most insidious attacks on liberty and the rule of law are the RICO statutes, which treat those with only peripheral (or even innocent!) involvement in criminal enterprises as co-conspirators, liable to the same penalties as conspiracy kingpins. For example, two brothers in Georgia are now serving 10 year sentences in a marijuana conspiracy case, because they sold growlights from their garden shop to persons later caught growing marijuana. No evidence was ever introduced to show that they participated in any illegal activities, and no drugs were found in their possession. There are many other horror stories, for anyone who is interested.
Even those who have no sympathy for drug offenders might wish to consider that bad law proliferates and spreads beyond the confines of its original purpose. A man who lives in my area, and his son, went to prison for almost two years because he filled a mudhole in his back yard without seeking the proper regulatory permits.
The war against terrorism is similar to the war against drugs in that it is an open-ended conflict which can easily be defined as never-ending. In fact, it is very dangerous to define the government's anti-terrorist activities as a "war." It should be regarded as simply a criminal matter, for many good reasons unrelated to the opportunistic attacks now being mounted against our remaining civil liberties. But I'm not optimistic that common sense will prevail. The trend in America is toward the limitation of freedoms. The events of 9/11 will only accelerate that trend.
Another point to bear in mind is that although Microsoft controls the American desktop market and to a large extent the market in other western democracies, most of the people in the world do not live here.
That leaves a very large market unexploited. While it may be difficult to imagine your average camel driver as a computer owner, it was even harder 30 years ago to imagine the average American as a computer owner.
At some point, international aid agencies are going to start distributing simple inexpensive computers to thirdworld villages. If the Linux community is alert, they'll see that these machines are running Linux, and it shouldn't be a hard sell. Linux will run on very inexpensive hardware, is free, and even more important, Linux users are not charged for upgrading their systems in the way that Windows users are.
The consequences of developing a base of users several billion strong could be enormous. Bright kids are just as likely to be found living in mud huts as in gated communities, and if Linux recruits these kids into the Linux development fold, they will vastly outnumber the developers in the Microsoft camp. The most important asset in the OS wars is sheer brainpower. Microsoft may soon be overwhelmed by a tide of thirdworld coding geniuses.
So, Linux zealots... join the Peace Corps and spread the Linux meme to the world.
"Nader cost the Democrats the Whitehouse."
Untrue. It would be far more accurate to say that the war on drugs cost the Democrats the Whitehouse. Consider that the Clinton administration prosecuted the war much more vigorously than the Republicans (for example, the total number of drug arrests during the 8 years of Clinton was substantially more than the total during the 12 years of Reagan-Bush.)
This played out in Florida, in which the number of blacks who had lost their voting rights due to felony drug convictions was several times the margin of Bush's victory.
Furthermore, Nader campaigned on a drug law reform platform, which attracted many voters who might otherwise have voted Democrat, in the mistaken belief that the Dems are more rational than Bush on drug reform matters.
Yeah, that Ghandi... what a lame jerk, huh?
You say, "You ask who would control the system. My answer is that the database would be controlled by the government -- which would in turn be controlled by the database."
Apart from the chicken-egg logical paradox you espouse here, your implicit assumption would appear to be this: that for some unknown reason, powerful people would resist the temptation to corrupt the system to their advantage.
This seems unreasonably optimistic. History indicates (without a single countervailing example) that the only way to avoid the inevitable human-rights problems associated with powerful governments is to avoid giving governments too much power. We passed that line some time ago, alas.
You say, "Strangely, this could make the world a freer place and a place more tolerant of non-conformity."
You are naive to the point of bathos. You evidently do not grasp that non-conforming acts can easily be made criminal, particularly in an atmosphere of hysteria and fear.
You say,"How do you prevent abuse of the system? First ask yourself if it is easier to control a well-defined system or a pell mell system like we currently have. If the system were well defined, you would have the right, as in credit reporting, to dispute your record and to know what it is."
The germane question is this: who would control the system? Ask yourself what happens with regard to your credit report if you and the issuing agency disagree as to the facts. Are you guaranteed that it will be changed to reflect your view of the matter? Of course not. And consider further-- have you ever filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act? Do you think that you will, for example, automatically receive everything in your FBI dossier? Of course not. What you get will likely be heavily redacted, for "reasons of national security."
You say, "You wouldn't have government officials asserting that someone was "linked" to something by who knows what vague circumstance." See above. You would have precisely the same drawbacks as you do now when you attempt to discover what information the government holds against you, except that the government's store of information about you would be greatly increased.
Again, conformity can be legislated, once you abandon the Constitution. You say, "But if you don't like the laws, change the laws or the penalties for breaking them." Recent history is not reassuring in this regard. For example, the citizens of a number of states have now voted, by large majorities, to allow the use of medical marijuana without penalty. The government continues to arrest sick people, by simply stating that federal drug laws trump state drug laws, even though *nowhere* in the Constitution are the feds permitted to make such laws. They did it anyway, and a supinely political Supreme Court has gone along with this emasculation of our country's most important legal document.
It is unfortunate, but one of the prices of freedom is that we have to hold our own government in check. The government is already far more powerful than the framers of the Constitution intended. It would be insane to greatly increase those powers.