All superbly insightful, except for the final sentence. We don't demonize heterosexual relations with adults the same way, and few crimes have such a low rate of apprehension and conviction as rape: yet heterosexual rapists sometimes kill the women they rape. I think murderous babyrapers kill their child victims for the same reason that murderous rapists in general kill woman, and murderous homosexual rapists kill men: sadistic pleasure, unbounded by any moral restraints.
Your horse may well know the way home already, from constant repetition. It also is (usually) too smart to slam into a tree or jump off a cliff, if it's not spooked.
Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years.
Palaeos.com has a good discussion of the conflicting evidence for the climate at this time. It doesn't match the Snowball Earth hypothesis particularly well, but then it doesn't match any other hypothesis, either. As Palaeos concludes: "You must be kidding! Conclusions are for people who understand what's going on."
You're close. They know a judge will overturn these monstrosities as unconstitutional. Then they denounce the "activist judges" and look good to their constituents.
It's a fun game for the wingnuts. The real victims are the judicial system and the country, and who cares about those?
It's counterintuitive at first glance, but was suggested more than a decade ago, that global warming could lead to a new ice age.
The basic concept behind this is, there's such a thing as it's being too cold to snow much, as any skier can tell you. Ice ages do not necessarily happen because things get colder per se. All you need for an ice sheet to form is for more snow to fall in winter than melts in summer. It's as simple as that.
So, if global warming causes warmer winters in a region, it's likely to have greater snowfall. If the global warming does not also cause summers to get hot enough or long enough to melt the greater quantity of snow, then a glacier forms there -- and over thousands of years, an ice sheet. And as any mountain climber can tell you, glaciers make their own weather. Let the glaciers or the ice sheets get large enough, and the world climate can tip over from global warming into a new glaciation. At least, that's the hypothesis.
However, The Day After Tomorrow scenarios are out. Forming a continental ice sheet takes tens of thousands of years.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, the mother's body doesn't produce enough milk to keep the baby fed, and then she has no choice but to use formula. Don't be too quick to judge.
Consigning space programs to private industry will detach it from popularity issues? Space programs don't make a profit (to my knowledge), so the main reason private industry would want to take them over would be the publicity value and the possibilities of a tourist trade.
The only kinds of space exploration likely to attract corporate support would be stuff draws tourists or wows the public (which might have no scientific value at all). Or, stuff that makes money quickly (and therefore makes stockholders happy). And given the short-sightedness of most corporations, they won't be interested in investing in something that may not pay off for a generation or two.
It appears that the Japanese scientists involved want to clone up a mammoth for an "Ice Age wildlife park" in northeastern Siberia. If so, they're going to have more problems than just creating a mammoth.
Siberia and unglaciated Alaska may have had a very different ecosystem way back then, if what paleontologists like R. Dale Guthrie have claimed is correct. The climate was colder but dryer, with a "mammoth steppe" that was more like the American West than modern-day tundra and coniferous forest, with more grass and shrubs. (Read Guthrie's Frozen Fauna: The Story of Blue Babe for details.) That's the only way it could have supported those spectacular large animals.
I wish the article had more information on the proposed park and exactly what's going on. If they don't have any way of changing the local ecosystem back to mammoth steppe, they're going to have to feed the animals artificially, making it more like a zoo than a wildlife preserve.
Yet, according to the article, they've already gone ahead and imported musk oxen and several hundred wild horses and are negotiating with Canada to buy bison.
...We also need courses in logic, preferably starting in early grade school.
Even on Slashdot, I constantly see otherwise intelligent people falling into the same logical fallacies as everyone else -- the ad hominem attack, the vox populi argument, the slippery slope (libertarians *love* to use that one when they argue about the First Amendment), etc.
Unfortunately, I suspect that this is the last thing the religious fundamentalists, the ideologues (and no, I do *not* mean the mythical "leftist college professor" bogeyman) and lazy parents would want. These, sadly, are the kind of people who control our children's education now.
Scientists have been able to do this for so many years, the concept of doing it with humans even appears in an old science-fiction novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy. Piercy describes doctors using it on people in mental institutions, to "help" them.
This is not particularly newsworthy. The main problem with turning humans into robots in this fashion, like in Piercy's book, is that you have to cut away quite a bit of brain tissue to implant all those electrodes. Then again, most people don't use their brains that much, anyway . . .
Spamming -- a form of malicious hacking
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Isn't that what using someone else's open relays for spam really is?
All right, call it "cracking" if you want to be a purist, but the fact remains. Spamming software is designed to find vulnerable servers, exploit those vulnerabilities and use the servers without the owners' permission, at the same time harming the Net with the sheer volume of the bandwidth that they consume. It's not that much different from a DDoS attack by a script kiddie, except that the spammer and the software's creators are trying to make money off it.
THIS is one of the angles we should emphasize to lawmakers, and to businesses that might be thinking of using spam to advertise themselves.
Okay, so the "offenders" were in Italy and subject to Italian jurisdiction. I can think of two ways the Italian police found them:
1. They were dumb enough to put their real names on the site.
2. Italian authorities actually managed to persuade the American ISP's to give them the names of the account holders.
Does anyone know which one it was? I find number 2 even more disturbing. If it's true, what happens if Chinese dissidents put up a website on an American server, and the Chinese authorities ask the ISP for names and information?
At the very least, there should be limits to how much information an ISP can give a foreign government about an account holder.
And another thing: how much money and man-hours did the Italian authorities put into busting these guys for putting up websites they didn't like? The VNUnet article says the investigation lasted two years. Is crime in Italy so scarce that the police have to investigate thought crime to justify their budget?
...Americans seem to have real trouble with abstract intellectual concepts. Physical symbols, such as flags, are much easier for us to grasp. It's the same mentality that wears crosses for "protection against evil" or that confuses statues of gods with the deities they represent.
It doesn't help that many Americans are so anti-intellectual, either openly or half-consciously. They're very suspicious of people who "think too much" or who can grasp complex ideas -- note how Al Gore was mocked as a "policy wonk" because he actually had some grasp of the issues and didn't rely on mindless slogans.
It's probably too much effort, and a little scary for these people to actually read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (and if they read it without being told what it was, they might denounce it as "communistic" or "liberal"). They'd rather revere a piece of brightly colored cloth and invest it with all manner of mystical powers and significance -- thus the flag worship.
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. See http://www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pledge.ht m for the details.
"While the long-term political impact of the Internet remains an open question..." (italics mine)
Yes, in the short to medium term, totalitarian governments can indeed survive and even profit from the Internet. What will happen in the long term, as the effects of the Net percolate into public opinions, attitudes and ideals and erode the state-prescribed memes, is something else again.
What it means, from the music industry's point of view, is that it needs to gain more political clout in the Netherlands -- and anywhere else where court cases go against it.
The moment it thinks it can be reasonably sure it will face a judge appointed by politicians beholden to it, it will try again with another court case, and another. It will keep trying until it succeeds, or until it crashes and burns in the flames of its own unsound business practices and no longer has the money to buy politicians.
We can hope for temporary victories; we can ultimately hope for the latter; but we won't *ultimately* win this one in the courts or the legislatures.
Re:Need to do more than complain
on
CFP 2002 Wrapup
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· Score: 1
Let's keep in mind that John and Jane Doe support the entertainment industry with their purchases -- and that they will also be supporting it with their tax dollars if federal laws are used to prop up an industry that is becoming obsolete. They have the right to say "No".
No one concerned themselves with these alleged problems when the automobile destroyed the horse-and-buggy industry.
In that case, why not use postcards instead of envelopes for all your snail-mail letters? After all, it's cheaper to send a postcard -- and since you're not up to anything bad, you don't mind if everybody reads your most intimate letters to friends and family, right?
If it means that 20 years from now, my children will be growing up in a society free of random murders, pedophilia, assault, and all the rest, I'm for it.
Crime is, in a sense, a tax we pay on freedom. *You* may be willing to give up some of that freedom in exchange for a lower tax, but I never agreed to that and will not allow you to impose it upon me.
But you *can* live in a society free of these things -- just by moving to a totalitarian country such as Singapore right now. Of course, then you'll be totally unprotected from crimes committed by the government and its representatives, but that's the trade-off you made to get that illusion of safety.
I don't know what the situation is in Britain, but at least here in the U.S., the onus should be on those such as you who want more safety and fewer rights, not on those who want to hang on to their rights.
The simple fact is that these go against some the principles the United States was founded upon. To a certain extent, crime is a tax that we pay on freedom. It's the price we pay for not being a totalitarian dictatorship.
Now, for many Americans, the tax may seem too high; however, this country has no equivalent of the Berlin Wall. There are plenty of other countries based on very different principles, where there is less freedom but more safety (at least from private criminals) -- China, Singapore and Thailand come to mind. Those who really want their government to look after them and protect them from all danger should feel free to emigrate to one of these countries, rather than demand that everything here be changed to accomodate their wishes. (Of course, in such countries you have no protection from criminal *governments*.)
As for me, that isn't the kind of nation I want to live in. I value my freedom to read what I will and say what I will, and I'm willing to do without a certain amount of government "protection" in order to have that freedom.
Granted. Under the (obscenely vague and probably unconstititional, but as yet untested) provisions of the Patriot Act, the bombmaking information might be a crime. The hacking into other servers, government or no, was definitely a crime. But the advocating of violent revolution was not a crime, and that was my point.
>>How can someone advocate violent overthrow of the government and expect the government to look the other way?
Well, regardless of what Sherman expects, for the past half century the Supreme Court has routinely expected the government to do just that. The phrase that applies here is "clear and present danger".
The phrase first came about in 1919 from the Schenck v. United States case. But it didn't really have any teeth until 1957 and Yates v. United States, when the Court ruled that, to quote my old book on the law of public communications, "a conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the government was too far removed from immediate danger to be punished."
The real precedent used nowadays is Brandenburg v. Ohio, (1969) in which the Court overturned the conviction of some KKK members for advocating "unlawful methods of industrial or political reform", then a crime under Ohio state law. To be constitutional, the Court said, a statute can only ban speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such actions."
The Court backed this precedent up in 1973 with Hess v. Indiana, in which an antiwar demonstrator had been convicted for shouting "We'll take the fucking street later." The Court ruled that this "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time".
So, unless what Sherman put up on the Web was really both meant and likely to produce immediate illegal action, or the current Supreme Court is ready to overturn this precedent (very possible, given its obvious partisanship and corruption), he hasn't broken the law by advocating overthrowing the federal government.
I'm sure these rulings are on the Web somewhere but I'm too tired to karma whore any further just now.
Slashdot Mirror
Or solenodons? Come on, they deserve more respect than that.
All superbly insightful, except for the final sentence. We don't demonize heterosexual relations with adults the same way, and few crimes have such a low rate of apprehension and conviction as rape: yet heterosexual rapists sometimes kill the women they rape. I think murderous babyrapers kill their child victims for the same reason that murderous rapists in general kill woman, and murderous homosexual rapists kill men: sadistic pleasure, unbounded by any moral restraints.
The short lifespan of large dog breeds is correlated more with their early growth rates than with size as such.
Excellent idea! What this country needs is more stay-at-home fathers.
Your horse may well know the way home already, from constant repetition. It also is (usually) too smart to slam into a tree or jump off a cliff, if it's not spooked.
Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years.
Palaeos.com has a good discussion of the conflicting evidence for the climate at this time. It doesn't match the Snowball Earth hypothesis particularly well, but then it doesn't match any other hypothesis, either. As Palaeos concludes: "You must be kidding! Conclusions are for people who understand what's going on."
You're close. They know a judge will overturn these monstrosities as unconstitutional. Then they denounce the "activist judges" and look good to their constituents.
It's a fun game for the wingnuts. The real victims are the judicial system and the country, and who cares about those?
It's counterintuitive at first glance, but was suggested more than a decade ago, that global warming could lead to a new ice age.
The basic concept behind this is, there's such a thing as it's being too cold to snow much, as any skier can tell you. Ice ages do not necessarily happen because things get colder per se. All you need for an ice sheet to form is for more snow to fall in winter than melts in summer. It's as simple as that.
So, if global warming causes warmer winters in a region, it's likely to have greater snowfall. If the global warming does not also cause summers to get hot enough or long enough to melt the greater quantity of snow, then a glacier forms there -- and over thousands of years, an ice sheet. And as any mountain climber can tell you, glaciers make their own weather. Let the glaciers or the ice sheets get large enough, and the world climate can tip over from global warming into a new glaciation. At least, that's the hypothesis.
However, The Day After Tomorrow scenarios are out. Forming a continental ice sheet takes tens of thousands of years.
So which chapter of Genesis are we to believe?
Chapter 1, in which man and woman are created simultaneously?
Or Chapter 2, in which God creates the man first, and only creates the woman some time afterward?
Sometimes, for whatever reason, the mother's body doesn't produce enough milk to keep the baby fed, and then she has no choice but to use formula. Don't be too quick to judge.
Sadly, it would appear that the burning-mouse story is just plain wrong.
Consigning space programs to private industry will detach it from popularity issues? Space programs don't make a profit (to my knowledge), so the main reason private industry would want to take them over would be the publicity value and the possibilities of a tourist trade.
The only kinds of space exploration likely to attract corporate support would be stuff draws tourists or wows the public (which might have no scientific value at all). Or, stuff that makes money quickly (and therefore makes stockholders happy). And given the short-sightedness of most corporations, they won't be interested in investing in something that may not pay off for a generation or two.
It appears that the Japanese scientists involved want to clone up a mammoth for an "Ice Age wildlife park" in northeastern Siberia. If so, they're going to have more problems than just creating a mammoth.
Siberia and unglaciated Alaska may have had a very different ecosystem way back then, if what paleontologists like R. Dale Guthrie have claimed is correct. The climate was colder but dryer, with a "mammoth steppe" that was more like the American West than modern-day tundra and coniferous forest, with more grass and shrubs. (Read Guthrie's Frozen Fauna: The Story of Blue Babe for details.) That's the only way it could have supported those spectacular large animals.
I wish the article had more information on the proposed park and exactly what's going on. If they don't have any way of changing the local ecosystem back to mammoth steppe, they're going to have to feed the animals artificially, making it more like a zoo than a wildlife preserve.
Yet, according to the article, they've already gone ahead and imported musk oxen and several hundred wild horses and are negotiating with Canada to buy bison.
...We also need courses in logic, preferably starting in early grade school.
Even on Slashdot, I constantly see otherwise intelligent people falling into the same logical fallacies as everyone else -- the ad hominem attack, the vox populi argument, the slippery slope (libertarians *love* to use that one when they argue about the First Amendment), etc.
Unfortunately, I suspect that this is the last thing the religious fundamentalists, the ideologues (and no, I do *not* mean the mythical "leftist college professor" bogeyman) and lazy parents would want. These, sadly, are the kind of people who control our children's education now.
This is not particularly newsworthy. The main problem with turning humans into robots in this fashion, like in Piercy's book, is that you have to cut away quite a bit of brain tissue to implant all those electrodes. Then again, most people don't use their brains that much, anyway . . .
Isn't that what using someone else's open relays for spam really is?
All right, call it "cracking" if you want to be a purist, but the fact remains. Spamming software is designed to find vulnerable servers, exploit those vulnerabilities and use the servers without the owners' permission, at the same time harming the Net with the sheer volume of the bandwidth that they consume. It's not that much different from a DDoS attack by a script kiddie, except that the spammer and the software's creators are trying to make money off it.
THIS is one of the angles we should emphasize to lawmakers, and to businesses that might be thinking of using spam to advertise themselves.
Okay, so the "offenders" were in Italy and subject to Italian jurisdiction. I can think of two ways the Italian police found them:
1. They were dumb enough to put their real names on the site.
2. Italian authorities actually managed to persuade the American ISP's to give them the names of the account holders.
Does anyone know which one it was? I find number 2 even more disturbing. If it's true, what happens if Chinese dissidents put up a website on an American server, and the Chinese authorities ask the ISP for names and information?
At the very least, there should be limits to how much information an ISP can give a foreign government about an account holder.
And another thing: how much money and man-hours did the Italian authorities put into busting these guys for putting up websites they didn't like? The VNUnet article says the investigation lasted two years. Is crime in Italy so scarce that the police have to investigate thought crime to justify their budget?
...Americans seem to have real trouble with abstract intellectual concepts. Physical symbols, such as flags, are much easier for us to grasp. It's the same mentality that wears crosses for "protection against evil" or that confuses statues of gods with the deities they represent.
t m for the details.
It doesn't help that many Americans are so anti-intellectual, either openly or half-consciously. They're very suspicious of people who "think too much" or who can grasp complex ideas -- note how Al Gore was mocked as a "policy wonk" because he actually had some grasp of the issues and didn't rely on mindless slogans.
It's probably too much effort, and a little scary for these people to actually read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (and if they read it without being told what it was, they might denounce it as "communistic" or "liberal"). They'd rather revere a piece of brightly colored cloth and invest it with all manner of mystical powers and significance -- thus the flag worship.
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist, Francis Bellamy. See http://www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pledge.h
"While the long-term political impact of the Internet remains an open question..." (italics mine)
Yes, in the short to medium term, totalitarian governments can indeed survive and even profit from the Internet. What will happen in the long term, as the effects of the Net percolate into public opinions, attitudes and ideals and erode the state-prescribed memes, is something else again.
What it means, from the music industry's point of view, is that it needs to gain more political clout in the Netherlands -- and anywhere else where court cases go against it.
The moment it thinks it can be reasonably sure it will face a judge appointed by politicians beholden to it, it will try again with another court case, and another. It will keep trying until it succeeds, or until it crashes and burns in the flames of its own unsound business practices and no longer has the money to buy politicians.
We can hope for temporary victories; we can ultimately hope for the latter; but we won't *ultimately* win this one in the courts or the legislatures.
Let's keep in mind that John and Jane Doe support the entertainment industry with their purchases -- and that they will also be supporting it with their tax dollars if federal laws are used to prop up an industry that is becoming obsolete. They have the right to say "No".
No one concerned themselves with these alleged problems when the automobile destroyed the horse-and-buggy industry.
In that case, why not use postcards instead of envelopes for all your snail-mail letters? After all, it's cheaper to send a postcard -- and since you're not up to anything bad, you don't mind if everybody reads your most intimate letters to friends and family, right?
If it means that 20 years from now, my children will be growing up in a society free of random murders, pedophilia, assault, and all the rest, I'm for it.
Crime is, in a sense, a tax we pay on freedom. *You* may be willing to give up some of that freedom in exchange for a lower tax, but I never agreed to that and will not allow you to impose it upon me.
But you *can* live in a society free of these things -- just by moving to a totalitarian country such as Singapore right now. Of course, then you'll be totally unprotected from crimes committed by the government and its representatives, but that's the trade-off you made to get that illusion of safety.
I don't know what the situation is in Britain, but at least here in the U.S., the onus should be on those such as you who want more safety and fewer rights, not on those who want to hang on to their rights.
The simple fact is that these go against some the principles the United States was founded upon. To a certain extent, crime is a tax that we pay on freedom. It's the price we pay for not being a totalitarian dictatorship.
Now, for many Americans, the tax may seem too high; however, this country has no equivalent of the Berlin Wall. There are plenty of other countries based on very different principles, where there is less freedom but more safety (at least from private criminals) -- China, Singapore and Thailand come to mind. Those who really want their government to look after them and protect them from all danger should feel free to emigrate to one of these countries, rather than demand that everything here be changed to accomodate their wishes. (Of course, in such countries you have no protection from criminal *governments*.)
As for me, that isn't the kind of nation I want to live in. I value my freedom to read what I will and say what I will, and I'm willing to do without a certain amount of government "protection" in order to have that freedom.
Granted. Under the (obscenely vague and probably unconstititional, but as yet untested) provisions of the Patriot Act, the bombmaking information might be a crime. The hacking into other servers, government or no, was definitely a crime. But the advocating of violent revolution was not a crime, and that was my point.
And you're welcome; I did try to be informative.
>>How can someone advocate violent overthrow of the government and expect the government to look the other way?
Well, regardless of what Sherman expects, for the past half century the Supreme Court has routinely expected the government to do just that. The phrase that applies here is "clear and present danger".
The phrase first came about in 1919 from the Schenck v. United States case. But it didn't really have any teeth until 1957 and Yates v. United States, when the Court ruled that, to quote my old book on the law of public communications, "a conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the government was too far removed from immediate danger to be punished."
The real precedent used nowadays is Brandenburg v. Ohio, (1969) in which the Court overturned the conviction of some KKK members for advocating "unlawful methods of industrial or political reform", then a crime under Ohio state law. To be constitutional, the Court said, a statute can only ban speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such actions."
The Court backed this precedent up in 1973 with Hess v. Indiana, in which an antiwar demonstrator had been convicted for shouting "We'll take the fucking street later." The Court ruled that this "amounted to nothing more than advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time".
So, unless what Sherman put up on the Web was really both meant and likely to produce immediate illegal action, or the current Supreme Court is ready to overturn this precedent (very possible, given its obvious partisanship and corruption), he hasn't broken the law by advocating overthrowing the federal government.
I'm sure these rulings are on the Web somewhere but I'm too tired to karma whore any further just now.