Money contributed from PAC of the corperation.
(From the top contributors page)
Microsoft Corp $32,200
I'm amazed that you can buy politicians and get them to sponsor bills involving billions of dollars, for pocket change like this. The leverage is remarkable. I'm sure to buy a poltician in Indonesia, for instance, is much more expensive.
Of course, that does not mean one shouldn't tell which one of the north and south "part" one mean when on refer to one of them specifically
Well, I assume you would say you came from "America". Though that is rather definitely permanently divided into North and South, "Americans" just assume that only refers to the USA.
I seem to recall that the Korean War never actually ended -- North and South are still at war, but in a state of semi-permanent ceasefire. Is this still the case?
Yes. NK recently withdrew from the "negotiations" in an attempt to get the US to treat directly with it (also they sabre rattled their nukes).
How is it that China, with more than 1 billion people, could keep control of a population so big with nary a protest (save the Tibetans monks that were slaughtered)?
Tiananmen Square, 1989. Numerous smaller demonstrations before and since that don't get so much publicity. They work hard to keep these out of the limelight.
In face to face conversations you will be held responsible for what you say. why not online?
Because an online conversation can be dug up later by someone with a grudge against you, any government (not just your government) that takes an interest in you, any employer or prospective employer, and used in a different context to make you look bad. Look for instance at what happens to politicians who "misspeak". It dogs them forever -- who can recall Dan Quayle and not think of "potatoe", or Al Gore "Inventor of the Internet"?
I had a little flame war on a local BBS a few months ago. Then recently a new guy took offence at something I wrote, and he dug up the old flames and republished them. Imagine that in real life. For the rest of your life.
If people were forced to use their real names then I think that trolling would pretty much be eliminated, and there probably wouldn't even be any need for moderation either.
No, people would just generate fakes or steal real identities when they didn't want to use their own.
'Korea' alone means South Korea. In fact, the country's official name according to the CIA World Factbook is 'Republic of Korea' -- one way of asserting dominance over the whole peninsula, I guess.
Yes, and North Korea is really the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". I don't know what claims the "South" makes, but the "North" definitely does claim sovereignty of the whole peninsula. For instance, if you look at maps published in China, which supports the DPRK, it has Pyongyang as the capital of a single, undivided country.
It's similar to the former East and West Germanies, which were respectively the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR" and "Federal Republic of Germany 1949-1989. Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
Simply, the rest of the world can't remember which "republic", claiming the entire country is which, so we label the north/south, east/west.
For that matter, "Taiwan" is actually the "Republic of China", as opposed the "People's Republic of China", and both governments claim sovereignty of the entire country.
Yes but most judges would throw out such a prosecution shoud the cops or prosecutors be dumb enough to proceed. That's why you have judges, to make such calls.
According to the FA, the PC was acting strangely and a virus was suspected. After scanning failed to find anything, one of the techs was browsing through the file system looking for suspicious files (ie, ones created by a virus), and on opening a folder the image previews jumped up (I guess that's MS's Active Desktop). That's their story, possibly they were really snooping but it's plausible.
No mention of what, if anything, actually was wrong with the PC.... maybe the guy clicked one of those popups on a porn site that install diallers or the like.
The moral is obvious, if you have crap like that on your hard disk, don't send it for repair. Ask someone to replace the hard disk while you watch and take it away and destroy it with a hammer. "Security" would serve as the excuse, and in these paranoid times it'd be unquestioned. Next time move everything to CDR (encrypted if you can manage) and keep it locked up. Or wait till you're at home. Buy and old-fashioned wank mag at your local sex shop when you need relief in your executive washroom.
The US and Britain are more concerned about people viewing it than the people making it.
And even more strangely, crimninalising possession of fake porn, that is made by morphing stuff in Photoshop or whatever. Then it has become simply enforcement of moral values, but still has all the force of the original laws created to stop explotation of the models.
"if you were an idiot and did 'x', then this is how you blah blah blah..." Would not being insulted count?
If you were insulted by this, and evidently that's how you felt to recount it here, then you're very thin-skinned. This just says that a particular course of action is ill-advised. It says nothing about "you". The tone is informal, that's all. In fact it implies the reader has a brain and a sense of humour.
That is the reason that MS is quite happy that in developing countries that 99% of people, and companies, and government offices, use pirated MS software. They own the market, at no cost to them. If the local economy starts to get somewhere then they start to actually pressure govts to crack down on piracy (rather than just making statements deploring it). After organisations have built systems around MS software, the easiest thing for them to do is just buy the next upgrade once there is a credible threat of being shut down.
This has the very desirable effect of wiping out any local competition, as they just go out of business, as their stuff is pirated too, but they have no external income.
This happened in Hong Kong a few years ago. Used to be that you just bought a PC, and it came "fully loaded" at no extra charge, with whatever software you wanted. Now vendors mostly sell with legal OEM installs. Starting to happen now in China.
Except keyboard trays aren't computer supplies, they're office furniture. So they come out of a different pool of money. (Yep, they're that stupid.)
They cost $5-10 (at least the ones I see at the computer supply shops here). Buy one yourself. If you think they might object to the kind that is screwed under the desktop, just get the enclosed type that you sit the monitor on. Steal some office supplies, instant coffee, toilet paper, etc to even it up.
The current version (as reviewed is 2.8); but you can download "Libranet Essential Edition 2.0", dated July 2002, from LinuxISO.org,
Download.com, etc. Probably could aptget that to something close to the latest version.
I think it's not that straightforward.
Suppose a foreign porn service company.
If they start sending spams to people in US,
I don't see how US court can affect them.
Unless they're giving away their porn, they want to you to pay for it. So they must have a merchant account with an American credit card company (unless they ask you to put dollar bills into an envelope and mail them). At a minimum, that account could be closed, probably any balance in it confiscated.
If you want to get money out of a country, you have to have some business relationship with a business entity in that country. (If you're a drug lord, of course you can courier wads of cash, gold, etc, but I'm talking about the small transactions here.)
Keep each cassette in its case, in a ZipLock baggie, with a fresh silica gel packet (like hard drives are shipped). Avoid temperature extremes and sudden temperature changes.
Too late for me... in Hong Kong for several months we have 95% humidity. All my "old" (more than 6 months) tapes have mould growing inside the cassettes. Same happens to hard disks if you aren't using them. Even my monitor gets freaky and turns itself off several times before it warms up and dries out. If you can't guarantee a controlled environment, go to an optical disk format -- if they get wet, you just carefully wipe them down and they're fine. Even when VCDs and DVDs are a legacy format, the drives are so much cheaper and numerous than tape machines you'll always be able to find a reader.
I wasn't arguing in favour of SDI in my post, but you seem to be.
No, I was addressing these points:
that the threat (ballistic nuclear missiles from "rogue nations") that SDI is designed to attack is not real
that the huge amount of money SDI would suck up would be better spent removing the reasons for hostility
that SDI will never work reliably; even if it did the nukes can simply be delivered another way, and an unreliable defence against nuclear weapons is pointless
I wouldn't want to be told in 14 years that I had one year to develop SDI.
See above. I don't say that there will never be a threat, but that there are much better ways to respond to it than sinking a trillion dollars into defence contractor's snake oil.
Ultimately, the only defence is to remove nuclear weapons, a process that was proceeding slowly but had promise before Bush decided he wanted to rule the world. The problems of the world are political, and can't be solved by military means alone.
>>Triple the budget! And why not?
>Well that's a piss-poor excuse when it comes to security.
When it is going to come in at hundreds of billions of dollars most optimistically, consuming a good proportion of GDP, maybe you should consider where the money is coming from. Or a better way to spend it.
With modern (eg. fast) computers, I could design the damn guidance system myself. If you want an example, just scale-up modern processing systems.
Do it this weekend. After all it's not rocket science, is it?
No. The fantasy is thinking that sworn enemies of the U.S.A., and the West in general, can be bought. I give them more credit than that. When they say that they want to destroy us all, I believe them. Why don't you? Don't you think that enemies of the West are honourable, at least to the extent that they mean what they say?
Who is "they"? If you're talking about various Muslim radical groups, they aren't fixated on destroying the US. That's the ridiculous conceit I heard after Sept 11th. Their interest in the US is how it affects their countries. I suggested spending money to solve the problems of the Middle East. Or at least so that the US government isn't seen simply as a tool of Zionists and oil barons, as is the common perception there now.
Building SDI is a reasonable response to unreasonable, but very plausible, threats.
Well, no, because it can't work, or can be sidestepped, as I mentioned. You just blow a trillion dollars for a false sense of security.
Uh, have you been paying attention the last few months? Korea has said they already have a nuclear weapon and are developing more....
North Korea also says that there is no famine there. You believe that too? Even if they had everything they claimed, it wouldn't be a strategic force, at best (worst) they could take out a city or two.
Now what about these facts would lead you to conclude that nobody new is trying to build a strategic missile force that threatens the US?
The CIA threat assessment I mentioned earlier. No credible threat for 15 years was the conclusion. Sorry, I can't give a URL, it was something I read so feel free to call me a a liar if you like.
In the present political climate, what do you think Bush would do if he really believed NK was a threat? Even his most hawkish advisors think they're a joke (at least as far as ballistic missiles).
If other nations knew they had to build hundreds of missiles, countermeasure systems, etc., to plausibly threaten the United States, we might have a lot less of them trying to build those 10.
Anyone who does can spend an extra 10% on measures to defeat SDI. For instance metallic balloons the same shape as warhead look exactly the same on radar and cost pocket change.
Actually, at the present and for the foreseeable future, NOBODY (new; not including China and Russia who already have the capability) is trying to build a strategic missile force that threatens the US. This isn't something that you can do in the Dr Evil fashion, it's not something you can do in secret any more. The CIA had no credible threats on their reports till the Republicans changed the terms of reference to include the most unlikely threats that had been previously discounted. Thus the military-industrial complex gets an enormous porkbarrel to gorge on for decades to come.
If the US spent 5% of what it is proposed to spend on this futile SDI on altruistic aid programs they would eliminate enemies and threats much more reliably and permanently than engaging in another arms race and escalating tensions. Isolationism behind an impenetrable magic shield is just a fantasy.
No national leader is going to launch a ballistic missile attack now, for the same reason no one did in the last 50 years, because it's at best a Pyrrhic victory. Saddam didn't use his "WMD", if he ever had any, even though he was in the most desperate situation imaginable. Kim Jong Il is playing games to get food, everyone know that. Terrorists would use other methods. You can deliver a bomb on a cargo ship, have it detonate in a harbour and goodbye NY, SF, LA, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it is an old story, Security Focus and the Register covered it a month ago.
(From the top contributors page)
Microsoft Corp $32,200
I'm amazed that you can buy politicians and get them to sponsor bills involving billions of dollars, for pocket change like this. The leverage is remarkable. I'm sure to buy a poltician in Indonesia, for instance, is much more expensive.
Well, I assume you would say you came from "America". Though that is rather definitely permanently divided into North and South, "Americans" just assume that only refers to the USA.
Yes. NK recently withdrew from the "negotiations" in an attempt to get the US to treat directly with it (also they sabre rattled their nukes).
Tiananmen Square, 1989. Numerous smaller demonstrations before and since that don't get so much publicity. They work hard to keep these out of the limelight.
Because an online conversation can be dug up later by someone with a grudge against you, any government (not just your government) that takes an interest in you, any employer or prospective employer, and used in a different context to make you look bad. Look for instance at what happens to politicians who "misspeak". It dogs them forever -- who can recall Dan Quayle and not think of "potatoe", or Al Gore "Inventor of the Internet"?
I had a little flame war on a local BBS a few months ago. Then recently a new guy took offence at something I wrote, and he dug up the old flames and republished them. Imagine that in real life. For the rest of your life.
No, people would just generate fakes or steal real identities when they didn't want to use their own.
Yes, and North Korea is really the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". I don't know what claims the "South" makes, but the "North" definitely does claim sovereignty of the whole peninsula. For instance, if you look at maps published in China, which supports the DPRK, it has Pyongyang as the capital of a single, undivided country.
It's similar to the former East and West Germanies, which were respectively the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR" and "Federal Republic of Germany 1949-1989. Bundesrepublik Deutschland."
Simply, the rest of the world can't remember which "republic", claiming the entire country is which, so we label the north/south, east/west.
For that matter, "Taiwan" is actually the "Republic of China", as opposed the "People's Republic of China", and both governments claim sovereignty of the entire country.
The Cold War is not over everywhere.
Yes but most judges would throw out such a prosecution shoud the cops or prosecutors be dumb enough to proceed. That's why you have judges, to make such calls.
According to the FA, the PC was acting strangely and a virus was suspected. After scanning failed to find anything, one of the techs was browsing through the file system looking for suspicious files (ie, ones created by a virus), and on opening a folder the image previews jumped up (I guess that's MS's Active Desktop). That's their story, possibly they were really snooping but it's plausible.
No mention of what, if anything, actually was wrong with the PC.... maybe the guy clicked one of those popups on a porn site that install diallers or the like.
The moral is obvious, if you have crap like that on your hard disk, don't send it for repair. Ask someone to replace the hard disk while you watch and take it away and destroy it with a hammer. "Security" would serve as the excuse, and in these paranoid times it'd be unquestioned. Next time move everything to CDR (encrypted if you can manage) and keep it locked up. Or wait till you're at home. Buy and old-fashioned wank mag at your local sex shop when you need relief in your executive washroom.
And even more strangely, crimninalising possession of fake porn, that is made by morphing stuff in Photoshop or whatever. Then it has become simply enforcement of moral values, but still has all the force of the original laws created to stop explotation of the models.
O'Reilly: "in a nutshell -- in 971 pages"
If you were insulted by this, and evidently that's how you felt to recount it here, then you're very thin-skinned. This just says that a particular course of action is ill-advised. It says nothing about "you". The tone is informal, that's all. In fact it implies the reader has a brain and a sense of humour.
That is the reason that MS is quite happy that in developing countries that 99% of people, and companies, and government offices, use pirated MS software. They own the market, at no cost to them. If the local economy starts to get somewhere then they start to actually pressure govts to crack down on piracy (rather than just making statements deploring it). After organisations have built systems around MS software, the easiest thing for them to do is just buy the next upgrade once there is a credible threat of being shut down.
This has the very desirable effect of wiping out any local competition, as they just go out of business, as their stuff is pirated too, but they have no external income.
This happened in Hong Kong a few years ago. Used to be that you just bought a PC, and it came "fully loaded" at no extra charge, with whatever software you wanted. Now vendors mostly sell with legal OEM installs. Starting to happen now in China.
They cost $5-10 (at least the ones I see at the computer supply shops here). Buy one yourself. If you think they might object to the kind that is screwed under the desktop, just get the enclosed type that you sit the monitor on. Steal some office supplies, instant coffee, toilet paper, etc to even it up.
The current version (as reviewed is 2.8); but you can download "Libranet Essential Edition 2.0", dated July 2002, from LinuxISO.org, Download.com, etc. Probably could aptget that to something close to the latest version.
Unless they're giving away their porn, they want to you to pay for it. So they must have a merchant account with an American credit card company (unless they ask you to put dollar bills into an envelope and mail them). At a minimum, that account could be closed, probably any balance in it confiscated.
If you want to get money out of a country, you have to have some business relationship with a business entity in that country. (If you're a drug lord, of course you can courier wads of cash, gold, etc, but I'm talking about the small transactions here.)
Much better to just kill all those furriners.
Too late for me... in Hong Kong for several months we have 95% humidity. All my "old" (more than 6 months) tapes have mould growing inside the cassettes. Same happens to hard disks if you aren't using them. Even my monitor gets freaky and turns itself off several times before it warms up and dries out. If you can't guarantee a controlled environment, go to an optical disk format -- if they get wet, you just carefully wipe them down and they're fine. Even when VCDs and DVDs are a legacy format, the drives are so much cheaper and numerous than tape machines you'll always be able to find a reader.
No, I was addressing these points:
- that the threat (ballistic nuclear missiles from "rogue nations") that SDI is designed to attack is not real
- that the huge amount of money SDI would suck up would be better spent removing the reasons for hostility
- that SDI will never work reliably; even if it did the nukes can simply be delivered another way, and an unreliable defence against nuclear weapons is pointless
I wouldn't want to be told in 14 years that I had one year to develop SDI.See above. I don't say that there will never be a threat, but that there are much better ways to respond to it than sinking a trillion dollars into defence contractor's snake oil.
Ultimately, the only defence is to remove nuclear weapons, a process that was proceeding slowly but had promise before Bush decided he wanted to rule the world. The problems of the world are political, and can't be solved by military means alone.
>Well that's a piss-poor excuse when it comes to security.
When it is going to come in at hundreds of billions of dollars most optimistically, consuming a good proportion of GDP, maybe you should consider where the money is coming from. Or a better way to spend it.
With modern (eg. fast) computers, I could design the damn guidance system myself. If you want an example, just scale-up modern processing systems.
Do it this weekend. After all it's not rocket science, is it?
Triple the budget! And why not?
You'd only have to get the thing to detonate within a couple miles of the ICBM to be effective.
The missile is travelling at several miles per second on reentry, it will outpace the blast. You have to be right on top of it.
Who is "they"? If you're talking about various Muslim radical groups, they aren't fixated on destroying the US. That's the ridiculous conceit I heard after Sept 11th. Their interest in the US is how it affects their countries. I suggested spending money to solve the problems of the Middle East. Or at least so that the US government isn't seen simply as a tool of Zionists and oil barons, as is the common perception there now.
Building SDI is a reasonable response to unreasonable, but very plausible, threats.
Well, no, because it can't work, or can be sidestepped, as I mentioned. You just blow a trillion dollars for a false sense of security.
North Korea also says that there is no famine there. You believe that too? Even if they had everything they claimed, it wouldn't be a strategic force, at best (worst) they could take out a city or two.
Now what about these facts would lead you to conclude that nobody new is trying to build a strategic missile force that threatens the US?
The CIA threat assessment I mentioned earlier. No credible threat for 15 years was the conclusion. Sorry, I can't give a URL, it was something I read so feel free to call me a a liar if you like.
In the present political climate, what do you think Bush would do if he really believed NK was a threat? Even his most hawkish advisors think they're a joke (at least as far as ballistic missiles).
Anyone who does can spend an extra 10% on measures to defeat SDI. For instance metallic balloons the same shape as warhead look exactly the same on radar and cost pocket change.
Actually, at the present and for the foreseeable future, NOBODY (new; not including China and Russia who already have the capability) is trying to build a strategic missile force that threatens the US. This isn't something that you can do in the Dr Evil fashion, it's not something you can do in secret any more. The CIA had no credible threats on their reports till the Republicans changed the terms of reference to include the most unlikely threats that had been previously discounted. Thus the military-industrial complex gets an enormous porkbarrel to gorge on for decades to come.
If the US spent 5% of what it is proposed to spend on this futile SDI on altruistic aid programs they would eliminate enemies and threats much more reliably and permanently than engaging in another arms race and escalating tensions. Isolationism behind an impenetrable magic shield is just a fantasy.
No national leader is going to launch a ballistic missile attack now, for the same reason no one did in the last 50 years, because it's at best a Pyrrhic victory. Saddam didn't use his "WMD", if he ever had any, even though he was in the most desperate situation imaginable. Kim Jong Il is playing games to get food, everyone know that. Terrorists would use other methods. You can deliver a bomb on a cargo ship, have it detonate in a harbour and goodbye NY, SF, LA, etc.