> Your pride in technological advance does not have any relevance. I can just see the comparison in a turn of the 20th century sweat shop -- "but, hey, we have electric lights and flush toilets, when used to crap in the woods with a candle, so it's all good."
> >No, it wasn't and it is not.
"But hey, when we used to crap in the woods with a candle, we didn't live half as long, the cities were full of smog."
Yes, it is, and it is.
> In 1970, the bottom 10% earned $8,276 In 1970, the top 10% earned $90,209 In 2000, the bottom 10% earned $10,877 In 2000, the top 10% earned $149,273 Figures in 2001 dollars. > > So, the bottom increased 31% over 30 years. The top increased 66% over 30 years.
In dollar terms, sure. I'm arguing that the number of dollars you make doesn't change your standard of living nearly as much as what you can buy with dollars.
Tell you what. You think the 70s were so damn equal? You think the poor have gotten worse off? Tell ya what, here's $90,209 2001 dollars. Go live in the lap of 70s luxury, but live it. As in, you can have all the 1970 dollars you want, but you can't buy anything made after 1971. You can't use medical technology. No heart transplants. A few old-school antibiotics. No composite materials for hip/knee replacements. If you get in trouble out there, hope you dropped $1000 for a cell phone, otherwise it's a long wait for the next trucker with a CB radio to drive by the crash site. Your car will be a gas-guzzling Dodge that belches blue smoke at 18 mpg, no lap belts, no airbags, and you'll be thankful when it only breaks down three times a year. Entertainment? Hope you enjoy ABC, NBC, and CBS. And you're good with adjusting the bunny ears on your TV.
I'll take $10,877 2001 dollars. And live in a small apartment. But I'll have a 1 GHz computer, a 19" CRT at 1600x1200, and a used Toyota that gets 30 MPG and 100,000 miles before I have to worry about it breaking down. When I get busted up, I'll use my nose to punch 911 on my $20/mo prepaid cell phone and someone will be there within an hour to drag my half-dead carcass into a hospital, and although my crappy HMO will put me in a room with 8 other poor folks, I will get medical treatment, and it'll still beat what you'll be able to buy in 1970. I'll also have 300 channels... and there still won't be anything worth watching, but it'll look good on my $500 32" TV with subwoofer.
Income inequality can rise, and standards of living can rise. The system that causes standards of living to rise also causes income inequality to rise. (Funny you should mention the nomenklatura - a class that exists solely as a result of a system designed to eradicate income inequality!)
Pity you're more interested in spreading the misery around in order to decrease income inequality. I'm into spreading the wealth around, even if it increases income inequality.
Re:A lot of the world still lives that way...
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> Pragmatically, you describe your wealth as evidence that "capitalism" has improved your standard of living incredibly from the level experienced by your grandparents. Indeed it has -- my own grandparents lived in unheated row housing in England when they were children. This seems more like a product of scientific progress, however -- capitalism is the mechanism whereby the capitalist uses his or her personal power (i.e access to capital) as leverage to gain even more access to capital. In other words, capitalism is about capital, not about progress. > > There are still (billions of) people living like our grandparents in the world. There are still people who think of a block of ice as a fridge, [... ]
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If it was about scientific progress and not capitalism, wouldn't those people have fridges by now?
I don't have a fridge because someone discovered the Ideal Gas Law. I don't have a fridge because someone discovered that the Ideal Gas Law could be applied in such a way as to create a heat exchanger, and stick one side of that heat exchanger in a box, and the other side of the heat exchanger outside the box.
I have a fridge because some capitalist decided he could build heat exchangers and boxes for less than what I'm willing to pay to own a heat exchanger and a box.
You're correct that capitalism is about capital, not progress, but progress is a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. And it's a Damn Nice outgrowth. It's sufficiently Damn Nice that it's why I think capitalism makes the world a better place, wherever it takes root.
> Frankly, though, even if you are sincerely interested in the welfare of other people,
(For the record, I'm not. I just think it's a neat side effect. The only time I'm interested in their welfare is seeing it get high enough that people like me can start selling stuff to them, (or buying shares in the companies that will sell stuff to them. Same thing, really.) I'm in the software business, not the grass hut business. So I'd like to see everybody on the planet decide they Really Really Want a cell phone, gaming console, and a few computers.:)
>
you should try to expand your consideration of who benefits to the "invisible" people who make your shirts, assemble your electronics, and still live like your grandparents did.
...have you taken a look at a before/after picture of the industrial and technological centers in Malaysia from 30 years ago and today?
The anonymous people who build my computers don't live like my grandparents did. If for no other reason than that someone living without running water wouldn't be allowed within two airlocks of a fab's clean room.
The anonymous people who make my shirts are flocking to the cities and the "sweatshops" and living like my grandparents, yes. Because living on $5/day is a damn sight better than living like my grandparents' grandparents, who were subsistence farmers with a life expectancy of 40.
> As you pointed out, a person can only eat so much caviar -- even so, it seems like there are people who will continue to buy new warehouses to store the caviar in for themselves, rather than recognizing this fact.
Which is fine by me; I'll make a pretty penny by buying 1000 shares of Beluga Farms Inc, and another 1000 shares of Sturgeons 'R' Us.
> Lucas' stroytelling prowess seems to have diminished with the ensuing decades after Jedi, but have they diminished this much? I sincerely doubt it. Even taking Ep I into consideration.
That's what I thought. Then I saw Star Wars Galaxies!
> What about communication channels that cannot be monitored?
Barring cost breakthroughs in quantum cryptography that will bring this down to the level of the end user, there's no such thing.
Actually, even when quantum cryptography produces the unsnoopable connection (i.e. a connection that, when snooped by Frank, tells Alice and Bob that they're being watched), there's nothing to prevent someone from laying down the TEMPEST smack on Alice, or doing DSP with r/g/b filters with the input being the flickers of Bob's CRT against his window shades.
> Do two (or more) people have the right to communicate through a secure channel of arbitrary bittage?
I believe they do.
But if they're suspected of criminal activity, law enforcement has the right to attempt to crack that security by whatever means they deem fit.
> > > "The last I heard, the median for income earners in America was $27,000 per year... doesn't sound so poor to me."
>
> True enough, until you account for the cost of living in America.
This all started when someone posted that Marxian meme that "The rich get richer, the poor get poorer".
BULLSHIT.
Then people started talking about median and/or average incomes in dollars. Nice, but you're missing the point. You're thinking about dollars, but dollars are useless without wealth.
If you want to know how "the poor" are doing, you've gotta be talking "wealth".
My grandparents were working class. Their idea of a "fridge" was a block of ice. Their idea of "luxury" was cranking ice cream by hand in a steel container surrounded by rock salt and ice chunks. And it took days to cross the Atlantic, a trip that was only for the Filthy Rich.
My parents were working class. Their idea of "comfort" was when they got air conditioning. Their idea of "luxury" was when they went from black and white to a color TV. And took hours to cross the Atlantic, and that was only for the Pretty Well Off.
I'm working class. When I was a kid, my idea of "cool" was the 3D graphics in "Tron", and my idea of "luxury" was a Cray Supercomputer I could call my own. And from my 2.0 GHz laptop with 3D card with T&L capabilities, I can alt-Tab out of Max Payne, and with a few mouse clicks, cross the Atlantic (alas, it still takes a few hours) for half the price of the laptop.
And I can show my grandparents that laptop.
I don't mind if Bill Gates has enough money to fly to the moon for his vacation. Because if someone builds commercial space tourism for the Bill Gateses of the world, I can rest easy knowing that by the time I'm in my hip-fracture years, I'll be living them in 1/6 gravity.
The rich are getting richer, but only linearly. One can eat only so much caviar per hour. Wherever capitalism has flourished, however, the poor, on the other hand, have done fantastic.
> I'm guessing that ISPs will end up just disconnecting the entire network connection for the afflicted system, which of course will render the inability to update the patch or virus definition. > > Thus, the endgame is that there will be no network left.
Judging from my spam logs, if you're talking about 200.0.0.0/8 or attbi.com, rr.com, cox.com, and videotron.ca, then GOOD RIDDANCE!
> Since part of the plan is for ISPs to monitor outbound traffic, that would only become a real issue of someone on your same subnet, that was served by the same gateway router, spoofed your address. Otherwise it would be real easy to say, "check the outbound logs on the router at xxx.xxx.xxx.1." Then it would pretty obvious that those packets originated on a different subnet and not from your machine, since the logs on your servicing gateway would be clean.
Spoken like a man who hasn't seen the ping-flooding that's been going non-stop since Welchia came out. Your/16's a mess, dude. But then, so is mine.
> In case you were wondering.
> >
Imagine putting on an arm length rubber glove(yes, it does need to be arm length), then shoving that arm up the elephants ass. You then massage its prostate until it ejaculates.
> >
I saw this on tv. It doesn't look like a whole lot of fun.
In other news today, a Slashdotter referred to the Grand Canyon as a "ditch".
> If you said "Tipper Gore" you might have more agreement.
That is the first time I've seen "cyber" and "Tipper Gore" used in the same post. I must now go and scrub my mind out with red-hot nichrome wire. You bastard.
> Sadly, thanks to the "Help America [Not] Vote Act", you're going to need state-issued ID and proof of residency when you go vote. Which, thanks to budget cuts and closing of some DMV
locations, makes getting said ID difficult for many people.
Which reminds me of the biggest "WTF" generator in the voting process today.
Since when has having a license to drive in a state been an indicator of citizenship in the nation?
> This is not so surprising at all since their claims are all baseless from the beginning, but filing $3B lawsuit against someone WITHOUT solid evidence and/or enough research will probably strengthen IBM's counterclaim against SCO of damaging IBM's business with false claims.
Which makes me wonder... what the fuck is SCO using for version control if they can't look at the history of their own code?
And if SCO does submit changelogs (or is forced to divulge them during the discovery process), is there any way that IBM will be able to determine whether those changelogs were forged or not?
Given the recent history of SCO making demonstrably false statements in the press, I'm beginning to think that they might well do the same when it gest to the courtroom - except with non-demonstrably false statements.
If they do it, it's called perjury. But if they forge a set of CVS or RCS changelogs, how the hell do you prove it?
If you're offering me a ride on a freakin' ship capable of getting me there, an oxygen mask, a portable ground-heating unit, and develop some ultra-cold-resistant lube, I'd be happy to fuck Mars!
> That's sad to hear. Though some might strongly disagree, as a military guy myself, anyone who advances the capability for the USA to protect and defend itself is held in high regard by me.
> >
Thank you Mr Teller.
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
And one doesn't have to be a military guy to be thankful. I'm a civvie.
Einstein was my first childhood hero; his life taught me that science could be fun.
Almost immediately, my classmates taught me that there was a downside to all this fun; being into science could also make you very unpopular.
It was a short hop from Einstein to Oppenheimer (Feynmann was still ten years beyond my comprehension; I'd just learned long division, fer chrissakes!), and from Oppie to Teller.
Teller was my second childhood hero - and possibly the one with the greatest impact on my daily life - because his life taught me that even if the pursuit of scientific knowledge made you unpopular, it was still right to pursue it. Truth comes first. No matter who it offends.
So thanks, Dr. Teller. You made mistakes, and you owned up to them. (And with the benefit of 20 years of history, perhaps you weren't as mistaken about Oppenheimer as you thought). But more importantly, when you hadn't made a mistake (and for anyone who's not perfectly clear on this, Yes, I Mean The H-Bomb), for sticking to your guns, doing the science, and for never letting the bastards get you down.
Today, in adulthood, upon reading a few choice passages from Memoirs and today's obituaries, I stood in awe of a mind still active and exploring, even at 95. And I realized I'd be a very happy guy if my mind's only half as functional as that when I'm 65, never mind 95.
So goodbye, Dr. Teller. And thanks for being an inspiration to me one more time.
> This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines.
Spoken like a dude who's forgotten how long it's been since he blocked 12.0.0.0/8 (attbi.com), 24.0.0.0/8 (rr.com and other cable modem providers), and wide swaths in 64.0.0.0/8 and 66.0.0.0/8 for the rest of the North American cablemodem and DSL providers.
> Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.
That used to be the case. Now they just 0wn unpatched Windoze boxen on residential broadband connections (SoBig), or leech off of clueless fuckwits who set themselves up with open proxies.
> 2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico?
In the event of a break-in, I think some US-based ISPs might take action. But for the ongoing flood of spam from consumer-level broadband, North American ISPs clearly don't give a shit.
If I didn't know better, I'd think the position of the residential broadband ISP is that outbound spam is a revenue generator. (After all, it's a chance to hit the sucker with a "bandwidth cap" charge for every gig of spam he unknowingly spews out.
After all, if it comes down to "More spam for everyone because our customers are clueless fuckwits", vs "an extra $2/month for every one of our clueless fuckwit customers who leaves his proxy open for spammers", what do you think AT&T or your cable company's gonna choose?
> Isn't it more likely that they're saying something more like "Yes, this technology will be used to increase the effectiveness of our military to kill other soldiers, but if i do a good job and it's useful, maybe it'll save more people than it helps kill."
A glance at the casualty and collateral damage figures (tonnage of munitions dropped per target, civilian casualties per square mile per day, basically any metric you want) from wars fought in the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2003, leads me to conclude there's no "maybe" about it.
More efficient and effective ways of killing people has reduced the amount of killing that needs to be done.
> > Privacy is not a basic human right. > > Please reply with all of your information please. We want to know, and you do not have any right to stop us from knowing.
Privacy is not a basic human right. But in answer to your question "no". There is no contradiction here.
It's not a basic human right, because the State (Specifically, the Executive branch, empowered by laws passed by the Legislative branch, but only insofar as such laws pass Constitutional muster as evaluated by the Judicial branch) has the right to my data.
To put this in the most explicit possible terms: The State has been given the right to take the IP address associated with the packets involved in this Slashdot posting, cross-reference it with other TCP/IP packets initiated from this IP address, make a reasonable guess as to my identity, and cross-reference that smidgeon of data with my SSN, credit cards, and anything else they know about me.
(To the poster who asked if he'd post on Slashdot with a camera behind his back -- if the Fed's smart enough, he probably just did.)
The State has the right to do all of the above and more; they even have the right to smite those whose records indicate a threat. (This is a different right; but it's backed by the same system -- Executives do the smiting according to the rules laid down by Legislators, so long as Judges agree the rules meet the standards of Fair Enough To Play By.)
But unless, however, the State has been greatly diminished in power to the point that it's been reduced to begging on Slashdot, you have no such right - and therefore you can only ask politely for my identification, and I therefore retain the right to tell you "no".
> So I/dont/ have the right to assume no one is watching my every move, reading ever letter i write to my friends and family, listening to every conversation i have NOT in a public setting? Out in public is one thing, but in a private setting come on!?
"Out in public". Interesting term you use.
When you own a chunk of copper, and have property rights to every square foot of land through which it runs on the way from your house to your friend's house, then you have the right to total privacy over whatever sequence of electrical impulses you shovel down that chunk of copper.
Until then, it's Qwest's, or Worldcon's, or whoever else's hunk of copper - you're only renting a sliver of it.
And you're renting that sliver of copper from people who work where the laws say that the Fed has the right to tap certain slivers of copper. And where the owners of those copper slivers (namely, ISPs and backbone providers) have decided to comply with those laws.
Don't like it? Buy your own copper and string it yourself. Can't buy enough land to string copper from your house to your friends' houses? Stick to Cat5 and a home LAN, and invite your friends over for a LAN party.
Your network, your rules. Qwest's network, Qwest's rules. Fed's legal jurisdiction over Qwest, Fed's rules apply to what traffic on Qwest's network gets sniffed.
> "Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said Cary Sherman, the RIAA's president. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action. This 12 year old girl stole from us and we are going to make her bleed. When we are done, not only will she and her single mom be homeless and destitute, but music fans worldwide will be afraid to cross any line we draw."
The scary thing is I still checked, just in case you weren't trolling.
"She downloads one of your songs, you send her mother a bill for $150,000. She downloads a whole album, you send her and the rest of her family to the morgue. That's the RIAA way."
> You're looking at doubling the US prisonm population. We already have the highest prison
population of any democracy in the world. Do you really want to be feeding a whole bunch of file swappers with your tax dollars?
Depends. Is there broadband in prison?
If this tech job stuff doesn't work out, I could handle being locked in a 10x10x10 cell, as long as I had broadband, and as long as we build enough prisons so that I can be in solitary 24/7.
I mean, this is Slashdot. Being in solitary 24/7 with broadband wouldn't be much different from how I spend my weekends.
Slashdot Mirror
>
>No, it wasn't and it is not.
"But hey, when we used to crap in the woods with a candle, we didn't live half as long, the cities were full of smog."
Yes, it is, and it is.
> In 1970, the bottom 10% earned $8,276 In 1970, the top 10% earned $90,209 In 2000, the bottom 10% earned $10,877 In 2000, the top 10% earned $149,273 Figures in 2001 dollars.
>
> So, the bottom increased 31% over 30 years. The top increased 66% over 30 years.
In dollar terms, sure. I'm arguing that the number of dollars you make doesn't change your standard of living nearly as much as what you can buy with dollars.
Tell you what. You think the 70s were so damn equal? You think the poor have gotten worse off? Tell ya what, here's $90,209 2001 dollars. Go live in the lap of 70s luxury, but live it. As in, you can have all the 1970 dollars you want, but you can't buy anything made after 1971. You can't use medical technology. No heart transplants. A few old-school antibiotics. No composite materials for hip/knee replacements. If you get in trouble out there, hope you dropped $1000 for a cell phone, otherwise it's a long wait for the next trucker with a CB radio to drive by the crash site. Your car will be a gas-guzzling Dodge that belches blue smoke at 18 mpg, no lap belts, no airbags, and you'll be thankful when it only breaks down three times a year. Entertainment? Hope you enjoy ABC, NBC, and CBS. And you're good with adjusting the bunny ears on your TV.
I'll take $10,877 2001 dollars. And live in a small apartment. But I'll have a 1 GHz computer, a 19" CRT at 1600x1200, and a used Toyota that gets 30 MPG and 100,000 miles before I have to worry about it breaking down. When I get busted up, I'll use my nose to punch 911 on my $20/mo prepaid cell phone and someone will be there within an hour to drag my half-dead carcass into a hospital, and although my crappy HMO will put me in a room with 8 other poor folks, I will get medical treatment, and it'll still beat what you'll be able to buy in 1970. I'll also have 300 channels... and there still won't be anything worth watching, but it'll look good on my $500 32" TV with subwoofer.
Income inequality can rise, and standards of living can rise. The system that causes standards of living to rise also causes income inequality to rise. (Funny you should mention the nomenklatura - a class that exists solely as a result of a system designed to eradicate income inequality!)
Pity you're more interested in spreading the misery around in order to decrease income inequality. I'm into spreading the wealth around, even if it increases income inequality.
>
> There are still (billions of) people living like our grandparents in the world. There are still people who think of a block of ice as a fridge, [
Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If it was about scientific progress and not capitalism, wouldn't those people have fridges by now?
I don't have a fridge because someone discovered the Ideal Gas Law. I don't have a fridge because someone discovered that the Ideal Gas Law could be applied in such a way as to create a heat exchanger, and stick one side of that heat exchanger in a box, and the other side of the heat exchanger outside the box.
I have a fridge because some capitalist decided he could build heat exchangers and boxes for less than what I'm willing to pay to own a heat exchanger and a box.
You're correct that capitalism is about capital, not progress, but progress is a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. And it's a Damn Nice outgrowth. It's sufficiently Damn Nice that it's why I think capitalism makes the world a better place, wherever it takes root.
> Frankly, though, even if you are sincerely interested in the welfare of other people,
(For the record, I'm not. I just think it's a neat side effect. The only time I'm interested in their welfare is seeing it get high enough that people like me can start selling stuff to them, (or buying shares in the companies that will sell stuff to them. Same thing, really.) I'm in the software business, not the grass hut business. So I'd like to see everybody on the planet decide they Really Really Want a cell phone, gaming console, and a few computers. :)
> you should try to expand your consideration of who benefits to the "invisible" people who make your shirts, assemble your electronics, and still live like your grandparents did.
The anonymous people who build my computers don't live like my grandparents did. If for no other reason than that someone living without running water wouldn't be allowed within two airlocks of a fab's clean room.
The anonymous people who make my shirts are flocking to the cities and the "sweatshops" and living like my grandparents, yes. Because living on $5/day is a damn sight better than living like my grandparents' grandparents, who were subsistence farmers with a life expectancy of 40.
> As you pointed out, a person can only eat so much caviar -- even so, it seems like there are people who will continue to buy new warehouses to store the caviar in for themselves, rather than recognizing this fact.
Which is fine by me; I'll make a pretty penny by buying 1000 shares of Beluga Farms Inc, and another 1000 shares of Sturgeons 'R' Us.
That's what I thought. Then I saw Star Wars Galaxies!
Barring cost breakthroughs in quantum cryptography that will bring this down to the level of the end user, there's no such thing.
Actually, even when quantum cryptography produces the unsnoopable connection (i.e. a connection that, when snooped by Frank, tells Alice and Bob that they're being watched), there's nothing to prevent someone from laying down the TEMPEST smack on Alice, or doing DSP with r/g/b filters with the input being the flickers of Bob's CRT against his window shades.
> Do two (or more) people have the right to communicate through a secure channel of arbitrary bittage?
I believe they do.
But if they're suspected of criminal activity, law enforcement has the right to attempt to crack that security by whatever means they deem fit.
> > "The last I heard, the median for income earners in America was $27,000 per year... doesn't sound so poor to me."
>
> True enough, until you account for the cost of living in America.
This all started when someone posted that Marxian meme that "The rich get richer, the poor get poorer".
BULLSHIT.
Then people started talking about median and/or average incomes in dollars. Nice, but you're missing the point. You're thinking about dollars, but dollars are useless without wealth.
If you want to know how "the poor" are doing, you've gotta be talking "wealth".
My grandparents were working class. Their idea of a "fridge" was a block of ice. Their idea of "luxury" was cranking ice cream by hand in a steel container surrounded by rock salt and ice chunks. And it took days to cross the Atlantic, a trip that was only for the Filthy Rich.
My parents were working class. Their idea of "comfort" was when they got air conditioning. Their idea of "luxury" was when they went from black and white to a color TV. And took hours to cross the Atlantic, and that was only for the Pretty Well Off.
I'm working class. When I was a kid, my idea of "cool" was the 3D graphics in "Tron", and my idea of "luxury" was a Cray Supercomputer I could call my own. And from my 2.0 GHz laptop with 3D card with T&L capabilities, I can alt-Tab out of Max Payne, and with a few mouse clicks, cross the Atlantic (alas, it still takes a few hours) for half the price of the laptop.
And I can show my grandparents that laptop.
I don't mind if Bill Gates has enough money to fly to the moon for his vacation. Because if someone builds commercial space tourism for the Bill Gateses of the world, I can rest easy knowing that by the time I'm in my hip-fracture years, I'll be living them in 1/6 gravity.
The rich are getting richer, but only linearly. One can eat only so much caviar per hour. Wherever capitalism has flourished, however, the poor, on the other hand, have done fantastic.
Subject: H0T PR1S0N R4P3...........493121742
Subject: R A P E ACTION!
Subject: F|_|CK1NG in Jai1!!1!!1 (ye47fa3d)
You were saying?
Ahem. That's CTX, C++TX, and C#TX, bud.
(If you think that's nuts, when my Dad went to Kindergarten, they thought it was gonna be CTX, PTX, and LTX.)
>
> Thus, the endgame is that there will be no network left.
Judging from my spam logs, if you're talking about 200.0.0.0/8 or attbi.com, rr.com, cox.com, and videotron.ca, then GOOD RIDDANCE!
Spoken like a man who hasn't seen the ping-flooding that's been going non-stop since Welchia came out. Your /16's a mess, dude. But then, so is mine.
>
> Imagine putting on an arm length rubber glove(yes, it does need to be arm length), then shoving that arm up the elephants ass. You then massage its prostate until it ejaculates.
>
> I saw this on tv. It doesn't look like a whole lot of fun.
In other news today, a Slashdotter referred to the Grand Canyon as a "ditch".
Yeah, but anybody answering phones at Verisign is already used to being called a cow-felching pig masturbator for eight hours a day.
CNN must have cut out the part about God roasting the penguins' stomachs in hell after beating then with shoes.
But seriously, you've gotta submit that one to welovethescoinformationminister.org
That is the first time I've seen "cyber" and "Tipper Gore" used in the same post. I must now go and scrub my mind out with red-hot nichrome wire. You bastard.
Prel? Surely you mean Pr3l. You know, like pr0n, but more fun.
Which reminds me of the biggest "WTF" generator in the voting process today.
Since when has having a license to drive in a state been an indicator of citizenship in the nation?
>
>Stars.
Which makes me wonder... what the fuck is SCO using for version control if they can't look at the history of their own code?
And if SCO does submit changelogs (or is forced to divulge them during the discovery process), is there any way that IBM will be able to determine whether those changelogs were forged or not?
Given the recent history of SCO making demonstrably false statements in the press, I'm beginning to think that they might well do the same when it gest to the courtroom - except with non-demonstrably false statements.
If they do it, it's called perjury. But if they forge a set of CVS or RCS changelogs, how the hell do you prove it?
Well, fine. Have it your way.
If you're offering me a ride on a freakin' ship capable of getting me there, an oxygen mask, a portable ground-heating unit, and develop some ultra-cold-resistant lube, I'd be happy to fuck Mars!
>
> Thank you Mr Teller.
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
And one doesn't have to be a military guy to be thankful. I'm a civvie.
Einstein was my first childhood hero; his life taught me that science could be fun. Almost immediately, my classmates taught me that there was a downside to all this fun; being into science could also make you very unpopular.
It was a short hop from Einstein to Oppenheimer (Feynmann was still ten years beyond my comprehension; I'd just learned long division, fer chrissakes!), and from Oppie to Teller.
Teller was my second childhood hero - and possibly the one with the greatest impact on my daily life - because his life taught me that even if the pursuit of scientific knowledge made you unpopular, it was still right to pursue it. Truth comes first. No matter who it offends.
So thanks, Dr. Teller. You made mistakes, and you owned up to them. (And with the benefit of 20 years of history, perhaps you weren't as mistaken about Oppenheimer as you thought). But more importantly, when you hadn't made a mistake (and for anyone who's not perfectly clear on this, Yes, I Mean The H-Bomb), for sticking to your guns, doing the science, and for never letting the bastards get you down.
Today, in adulthood, upon reading a few choice passages from Memoirs and today's obituaries, I stood in awe of a mind still active and exploring, even at 95. And I realized I'd be a very happy guy if my mind's only half as functional as that when I'm 65, never mind 95.
So goodbye, Dr. Teller. And thanks for being an inspiration to me one more time.
> This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines.
Spoken like a dude who's forgotten how long it's been since he blocked 12.0.0.0/8 (attbi.com), 24.0.0.0/8 (rr.com and other cable modem providers), and wide swaths in 64.0.0.0/8 and 66.0.0.0/8 for the rest of the North American cablemodem and DSL providers.
> Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.
That used to be the case. Now they just 0wn unpatched Windoze boxen on residential broadband connections (SoBig), or leech off of clueless fuckwits who set themselves up with open proxies.
> 2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico?
In the event of a break-in, I think some US-based ISPs might take action. But for the ongoing flood of spam from consumer-level broadband, North American ISPs clearly don't give a shit.
If I didn't know better, I'd think the position of the residential broadband ISP is that outbound spam is a revenue generator. (After all, it's a chance to hit the sucker with a "bandwidth cap" charge for every gig of spam he unknowingly spews out.
After all, if it comes down to "More spam for everyone because our customers are clueless fuckwits", vs "an extra $2/month for every one of our clueless fuckwit customers who leaves his proxy open for spammers", what do you think AT&T or your cable company's gonna choose?
A glance at the casualty and collateral damage figures (tonnage of munitions dropped per target, civilian casualties per square mile per day, basically any metric you want) from wars fought in the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2003, leads me to conclude there's no "maybe" about it.
More efficient and effective ways of killing people has reduced the amount of killing that needs to be done.
>
> Please reply with all of your information please. We want to know, and you do not have any right to stop us from knowing.
Privacy is not a basic human right. But in answer to your question "no". There is no contradiction here.
It's not a basic human right, because the State (Specifically, the Executive branch, empowered by laws passed by the Legislative branch, but only insofar as such laws pass Constitutional muster as evaluated by the Judicial branch) has the right to my data.
To put this in the most explicit possible terms: The State has been given the right to take the IP address associated with the packets involved in this Slashdot posting, cross-reference it with other TCP/IP packets initiated from this IP address, make a reasonable guess as to my identity, and cross-reference that smidgeon of data with my SSN, credit cards, and anything else they know about me.
(To the poster who asked if he'd post on Slashdot with a camera behind his back -- if the Fed's smart enough, he probably just did.)
The State has the right to do all of the above and more; they even have the right to smite those whose records indicate a threat. (This is a different right; but it's backed by the same system -- Executives do the smiting according to the rules laid down by Legislators, so long as Judges agree the rules meet the standards of Fair Enough To Play By.)
But unless, however, the State has been greatly diminished in power to the point that it's been reduced to begging on Slashdot, you have no such right - and therefore you can only ask politely for my identification, and I therefore retain the right to tell you "no".
"Out in public". Interesting term you use.
When you own a chunk of copper, and have property rights to every square foot of land through which it runs on the way from your house to your friend's house, then you have the right to total privacy over whatever sequence of electrical impulses you shovel down that chunk of copper.
Until then, it's Qwest's, or Worldcon's, or whoever else's hunk of copper - you're only renting a sliver of it.
And you're renting that sliver of copper from people who work where the laws say that the Fed has the right to tap certain slivers of copper. And where the owners of those copper slivers (namely, ISPs and backbone providers) have decided to comply with those laws.
Don't like it? Buy your own copper and string it yourself. Can't buy enough land to string copper from your house to your friends' houses? Stick to Cat5 and a home LAN, and invite your friends over for a LAN party.
Your network, your rules. Qwest's network, Qwest's rules. Fed's legal jurisdiction over Qwest, Fed's rules apply to what traffic on Qwest's network gets sniffed.
The scary thing is I still checked, just in case you weren't trolling.
"She downloads one of your songs, you send her mother a bill for $150,000. She downloads a whole album, you send her and the rest of her family to the morgue. That's the RIAA way."
Depends. Is there broadband in prison? If this tech job stuff doesn't work out, I could handle being locked in a 10x10x10 cell, as long as I had broadband, and as long as we build enough prisons so that I can be in solitary 24/7.
I mean, this is Slashdot. Being in solitary 24/7 with broadband wouldn't be much different from how I spend my weekends.