> You still get an X Prize, just not 10 million dollars. You still get into the history books. You're still the "first rich asshole in space".
Well, I haven't seen any poor assholes building spaceships lately, so I'll fly with whoever's building.
> I imagine the X Prize winner forgetting that the 10 mill is in the glove compartment of his car, because it's not worth the hassle of going to the bank to cash it.
I imagine the X Prize winner will take that $10M and use it to fund R&D that will go towards further reductions in his/her cost of launch.
Maybe to NASA, whose most advanced manned vehicle is a $500M-per-flight flying white elephant, $10M is a fart in a jar. But to a Carmack or Rutan or Musk, all of whom would love to see launch costs down to the $5-10M range or lower, $10M can go a long way.
> couldn't think of a good response to number 2 could you. sort of sad isn't it?
Well, sorta. But I think your #2 question ("What could you do with a tie-breaking vote in every election") is a little contrived. Having #2 amounts to absolute deciding power over who gets elected, but not over who's on the ballot. The only practical use of such power would be to sell it off to people who have a better use for it. (You could probably make more money at $10000 per Mayor than you would selling Presidencies at a billion apiece.:)
As for #5 - I'm still not convinced. Taking abortion as the example, Congress can pass a law banning abortion (or mandating it:). The Supremes can overturn that law, but in the interim, that law stands. If it really wants to, the Legislature can do an end-run around the Judiciary by repeating this technique. One could argue that the clockword extension of "limited time" copyright terms every time Steamboat Willie threatens to pass into the public domain is an example of this in action. (And in that case, it's not the Supreme Court they're working around, it's the Constitution itself:)
The root cause of this is the limitation on the number of voters - 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. Each vote represented a few thousand constituents in the "golden age", but that's now up to millions, even tens of millions.
Were I to redraft the Constitution for 2003, it'd look pretty much like it does, except that I'd allow represenatives and senators to vote remotely (with some means of authentication/identification), and increase the number of represenatives by a factor of 10. (1000 Senators at 100 per state, 4350 Representative for about 60,000 constituents per Representative).
Increased numbers would devalue the vote of each Congresscritter to the point where it would be more difficult to purchase enough of them to get a bad law passed.
Remote voting would allow the 'critters to spend more time (perhaps all of their time) with their constituents.
This would partially address your concern about Representatives "being more local" - with only 60,000 people to represent (vs. the present 600,000), they're going to have to respond to local concerns.
You'd also get a serious boost to continuity of government from distributing representatives geographically, which is absolutely off-topic to the current debate, but it'd do wonders from a HomeSec mandate to know that the government was immune to a decapitation strike.
> Our overpaid, spoiled population has unreastic expectations about marriage and life, and they'll continue to be miserable, materialistics wretches until the day they drop dead while choking on a cheeseburger.
Amen, brother. Everything I needed to know about marriage I learned on "Married with Children".
Al to Peg: "Gee honey, I don't regret going to college. Why then I might not have married you! What would have become of me then? [*fantasizes with big ear-to-ear grin on his face*] I'd be living a lonely empty existence ordering pizza and hookers till I dropped dead with a slice in my mouth and a greasy hooter in my hand!"
Remember, "Christmas is not the time for regrets... that's what anniversaries are for!"
> The author of that statement, for the uninformed, thick-skulled, is saying, "How can we sneak off to have sex once and a while without Timmy asking for a drink of water everytime I make a move on you?"
Old joke: You can always tell married people by the way they think of lube during sex. "Wow, honey, that's real slippery! If we smear it on the doorknob after we put Timmy to bed, the little bastard'll never be able to get in here!"
> More like ditch the kids so we can get some "us" time > > Slashdot bachelors might not understand this concept.
Some Slashdot bachelors understand the concept quite well. No wife pretty much means no kids. So anytime is "me^H^Hus" time.
I mean, I'm a grown man! I can get my own beer from the fridge, so what the hell do I need a wife for?
Sure, you could always try to build a robot to get your beers for you... but how's a married guy going to get the necessary time off from the family to try and build one?
And finally, I defy any married guy to tell his wife that the reason he's spending every weekend in the workshop/lab is to build a beer-fetching robot that responds to the voice command "Yo, serving wench! Get me a beer!"
> if you are a white middle to upper class male receiving no entitlements, your vote simply does not count at all in any significant way that [a]ffects you.
As a WMTUCMRNE, I'll bite.
> 1. explain how your life would have been different in the past based upon whether the minority party had been in control? (for those of us who do not receive entitlements the fact is there would have been no difference).
I would be paying higher marginal tax rates under Gore than Bush II. I would be paying lower marginal tax rates under Bush I than Clinton. And I would be paying astronomical taxes under Mondale or Carter than Reagan.
> 2. explain how you as a white middle or upper class male could effect a change in your life by having the tie breaking vote in every single municipal, state and federal election?
By selling off my vote to the highest bidder, thereby exiting the middle or upper class for the elite!:)
> 3. how many votes on a national scale would you have to control to equal the power you could wield as the editor of a major media outlet? the media is in fact another branch of the government subject to virtually no checks or balances.
Conceded - millions. But that First Amendment thing - I think "checks and balances" on the media would be a cure worse than the disease.
> 4. describe a law which you could pass by referendum that would not be subject to constitutional challange?
Why in God's name would I want any law, whether passed by referendum or not, to be above Constitutional challenge?
You're right that everything we do requires court approval, but that's what separation of powers (Executive/Legislative/Judicial) is all about. That's a feature, not a bug!
> 5. has the number of things we cannot vote upon (which we used to be able to vote upon) been increased or decreased in the last 50 years?
It's remained constant. We could never vote on the issues (abortion, educational requirements for a janitor). We elect representatives. The problem is that those representatives don't necessarily reflect the wishes of their constituents.
You sound like you're advocating a return to Athenian-style direct democracy. All well and good - but that is not, and has never been - the model by which the US is governed.
> we are returning to a feudal society of classes rights and duties. democracy has been dead for a long time.
One thing that could be done without a constitutional amendment would be a change in the way representatives view themselves.
Suppose a private, apolitical organization set up "e-voting" boxen. Suppose that (say Bill Gates dropped 'em a few gigabucks) this organization spread its message far and wide via a massive (expensive) campaign of print and television advertising.
You sign up for the organization, you get a token. Every day, you log onto the website, and you're presented with a list of bills for which your [State and Federal] represenatives must vote.
You click on "Yea/Nay" for each bill.
In real time, your representative sees the numbers, and chooses to accept or ignore them at his peril.
S.9999 - Protection of Termites in Wetlands: YEA: 40, NAY: 99 (Nobody cares, I'll vote for whoever gives me $50 in donations first)
S.9997 - Ultra-Mega-DMCA Bill: YEA: 1, NAY: 4182 (Hmm, the only people who care are the one RIAA executive and 4182 geeks in my district, maybe I can ignore them, maybe not.)
S.9996 - Legalization of Pot, Spend The Money We Save On Counterterrorism Bill: YEA: 48113, NAY: 1531 (Crap, maybe I have to go out on a limb here and cross party lines)
S.9996 - Privatization of Social Security: YEA: 221344, NAY: 264718 (I have a serious political problem here, and will have to hold some sort of town hall meeting to explain my views)
> If voters start voting online, I belive they will have a greater tendancy to find information online.
If voters start voting online, I believe they will have a greater tendency to have their systems hijacked by "voteware" - the electoral equivalent to spyware - and won't have a frickin' clue who they voted for, or why.
Imagine downloading a EULA that says "By installing this software, you agree to install VoteGator on your system! VoteGator keeps you informed of $PARTY's hot new offers! Use VoteGator for all your voting needs!"
(And just think of the "fun" an enemy agent could have with a.VBS worm:)
Call me a Luddite, but I think I'll pass on e-voting.
> It may or may not be worth saying that the story of how Oppenheimer got dumped is a whole lot
more complicated than that.
It is.
To bring it back on track - yes, I think Linus meant to say "Teller", not Oppenheimer. Teller was the apolitical engineer interested in advancing the technology for its own sake, and placing the moral responsibility for the use of the technology on the end users of said technology.
For the record, I think both Oppenheimer and Teller got raw deals.
Teller isn't a Dr. Strangelove - and he never was.
He's stuck to his convictions about what he believes to be the proper nature of scientific research in general (and yes, including his own research in particular) for a lifetime. Science is about asking questions and a means for discovering the answers to them - if you are afraid of knowing the answer to a question, and that fear stops you from even asking the question, you've stopped doing science.
Meantime, if you're in the business of asking questions about how to stick nuclei together to extract energy, you talk to him. What you do with the energy you extract is your own business.
As for Teller, he's still alive and well, grants the occasional interview, and doing some teaching/consulting work at Livermore on their fusion projects.
"Long term bet" material coming up: If oil ever drops to $2.00 per barrel because fusion power has made the internal combustion engine obsolete, odds are very good that you'll have Teller to thank for it. But no prophet is honored in his own time.
Back on topic - Some people like DRM and have a need for it. I'm not one of those people. Most of us reading this aren't in that subset. But as Linus pointed out, the kernel is just a bunch of compiled source code. What you do with the code you compile into it is your own business.
> And the irony is that the kind of people who quote that line are usually so deeply embedded in their armchair that 'defend to the death' would simply mean a heart attack during their struggle to get out of their 'armchair of rhetoric.'
More accurately, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to a -2 karma modifier your right to say it. Unless it involves penis birds.
> Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't write about things that would get you in trouble.
4/18: I started off with a pretty normal day, reminding myself that arrays' elements start with zero and count up from there, and that ints were four bytes long, and that there are 8 bits to a byte.
4/19: Today I learned that master keys and player keys are the same things, and that DVD vendors don't control them all. I also found out that you could get disk keys from disks, and decrypt them with player keys. Title keys can also be read per file. The disk key can be used to decrypt the title key and the show.
4/20: I took this encrypted disk key, that was six bytes long (well, five bites and a zero at the end), and figured it would take about 3.5 hours to recover one by brute forcing it.
4/21: So, like there's this pointer "KEY", to these bytes. And there's this other pointer, "im", to the six bytes that make up the player key (but those six bytes are a trade secret.)
4/22: I played in an online lottery called Lotto 5/255. I lost, but I heard the winning pick was 81, 103, (someone must have liked 103, because 103 was rolled twice), 197, and 224. The ticket emailbot added a "0" after the 224.
4/23: Suppose your code had some internal variables t1 through t6. Wait a minute, there's these guys at the door wearing black suits. They sound angry. I'd better answer the door.
> You joke, but I have been sorely tempted to track down notorious criminals like Alan Ralsky and brutally beat them to within an inch of their life, then set them on fire.
You joke, but were anyone to actually do that, and were they ever to be charged, and were I to serve on such a jury, I would vote "Not Guilty", because no crime had been committed.
The laws on assault, battery, forcible confinement, and homicide were written before spammers existed. To apply these laws to people who do assault, batter, forcibly confine, and slaughter spammers would be unjust.
In the event that such actions are performed on spammers, I believe that no crime would have been committed, and that therefore, the laws proscribing such actions, insofar as they pertain to spammers, should be nullified.
I would dearly love to see a fully-informed jury make such a statement, and I would dearly love for that to become a legal precedent - effectively declaring "Open Season" on spammers with no bag limit - until such time as Congress (or a State legislature) decides to pass a new law that explicitly protects spammers. Whereupon the cycle of jury nullification would begin anew. Or until we run out of spammers. Whichever comes first.
> The reason things are so tense between the USA and all these poor countries that harbor terrorists is that our societies are so different. We are advancing and delivering a richer curriculum to more and more of our own people, while "they" are getting less and less.
A good post - we pretty much agree on the end goal for the middle east, but I think you're looking too short-term in terms of analyzing the means.
> In pure Machiavellian politics' terms, the best way to neutralize a threat is to become a means to the enemy's ultimate ends.
If by "the enemy", you mean "the poor schmucks in the Arab street", and by "their ends", you mean "A society so prosperous that they can't be bothered blowing up discotheques for sport, let alone for $25K to put food on the table" perhaps that's exactly how the US is going about it -- by becoming the means (via imposing education, rule of law, human rights, which ought to lead to prosperity in a few years) to that end.
Have you considered that it's pretty hard to deliver a rich curriculum to "them" while "they" are under dictatorships? If it weren't for the Jews, the poor schmuck on the Arab street would have nobody to blame for his miserable situation but his rulers!
Given that situation, perhaps deposing the tinpot dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, "Palestine", and Iraq would be a good start.
I mean, maybe I've got some of this backwards. For instance, we wouldn't even have to depose those dictators in the order listed. *g*
> Conceded: the older people in the power seats of those nations are just too slow to chnage their attitudes. However, their children, especially their teenagers, are psychologically and developmentally receptive to American doctrine of rights and limited government, etc.. The real crime is that THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE WE SHOOT!
No argument there. I'm betting that we'll see a real change in this in the next year. Iraq's regime is toast. Iran - with its "student movement" already Western-friendly from the reign of terror of its clerics - is due to topple very soon. Arafat's grip on power is slipping. That's one domino down, two more on the way.
IMO the administration's strategy is working, but it's not going to happen overnight. And it ain't necessarily gonna work either. But file my interpretation away as "a possibility" and see where it stands in a couple of years.
> Why don't those in charge understand that it isn't in _their_ long term interests?
Preach it brother.
I support most of the actions of the Administration, particularly in foreign policy.
This action, however, is shortsighted. Dumb. A big fucking mistake. 10 pounds of stupidity in a 5-pound bag.
NSA, if you're reading this (and we all know you are:), thanks for a nice after-dinner "snac" of consolidated security tips I can pass on to my users. I humbly submit that the "Secure American b0xen against furriner 0wnij" part of your dual mandate demands that you deliver a righteous bitchslapping upon the right people in the right places as regards open source development.
Politicians don't listen to geeks, because we don't speak politician. They might listen to you.
> You might wonder whether the above constitutes slander and libel.
Actually, that's the one thing I didn't wonder about - there's a world of difference between saying (1)"X happened", (2) "I believe X happened", (3) "I think X might have happened", and (4) "I wonder if X happened".
Assuming "X" didn't happen, then only statements of the form #1 are libel. #2 is a grey area.
Legally, I made sure my post was #4, and frankly, my honest opinion is somewhere between #3 and #4. #3 is even too strong - because I don't know.
Neither do you. Only Mr. Ritter and/or Iraqi intelligence can answer that question, and Ritter has right not to talk about it, and Iraqi intelligence ain't in a position to talk.
It is an observable fact that his opinion on Iraq changed pretty dramatically over a very short time period. It's also a known fact that the "honey trap" is a time-honored counterintelligence gambit employed by regimes both despotic and free alike.
It's IMO logical to question what sorts of things may have motivated such a change. You raise another possibility - that there were indeed no WMDs, or at least that Ritter honestly believed there were no WMDs.
But getting back to the original point - my main purpose in posting wasn't so much to cast aspersons on Mr. Ritter's character, but to point out that surveillance is a two-edged sword: Iraqi officials, had they known about Mr. Ritter's sexual peculiarities, had as much to gain from exploiting Ritter's natural desire to keep it hidden ("Drink this warm cup STFU on how we blocked your inspections, or we'll leak this to destroy your credibility!"), as US officials had to gain by leaking it ("He didn't take our warm cup of STFU on the way we think he was wrong on the WMD issue, so we'll... leak this to destroy his credibility").
Moral of the story: If you're in a politically-sensitive job, or think you might be, keep your frickin' nose clean. *G*
> You might want to ask Scott Ritter [nydailynews.com] about a misdemeanor "sealed" arrest record that strangely became public knowledge after he publicly criticized recent Iraq policies.
Ah, but that cuts both ways.
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises.
> Cisco is playing lab dog to the government but not its customers.
There's no lapdogging by Cisco or Cisco's customers.
The law requires that Cisco's customers use eavesdrop-capbble gear, or get they azz shut the fuck down.
Cisco is providing a valuable service to those ISPs.
Now, you may not like the fact that your ISP is required to provide eavesdropping capability. Your ISP may not like the fact that they're required to provide eavesdropping capability. It is, however, the law. If your ISP doesn't comply, it will face enormous fines collected by men with guns, or it will be shut down by men with guns. So your ISP has a need to purchase eavesdrop-capable gear on the open market, and Cisco fills that need.
If you think the law's unjust, you're free to set up your own ISP and refuse to provide wiretap support as an act of civil disobedience.
But until then, it's literally none of your business. In the meantime, consider that compliance with laws - whether "just" or "unjust" - is not an optional thing. If it were, they'd be called "suggestions", not "laws".
> Isn't our privacy guaranteed within the constitution preventing actions anywhere near this?
In a word, No.
> Shouldn't simple encryption be able to circumvent the schemes that are being implemented into the hardware?
Yes. But knowing who a bad guy is talking to is often every bit as useful as knowing what was said.
Get a girlfriend. They like to be eaten out, and unless you're real bad at it, you don't have to pay anything. *rimshot*
Seriously - learn to cook!
$12 - 2 12-oz New York Strip steaks
$ 1 - 2 potatoes, big pile of veggies
$ 1 - Half-pound o' mushrooms
$ 1 - Miscellany - butter, olive oil, sprinkle of flour, beef bouillon, splash of milk, dash of cognac
$10 - Bottle of half-decent Cabernet Sauvignon
$ 4 - Bar of really good dark chocolate.
---
$29 - Dinner for Two: 12-oz New York Strip steak, sauteed mushrooms w/ cream sauce, drinks, and dessert.
You can do a pretty good job on the steaks with a frying pan, and that also leaves you with lots of nice flavors to work the sauteed 'shrooms. Use parallel processing - basically, slice the 'shrooms while you're doing the steak, set the steak aside on a warm plate and cook the veggies in the microwave while you saute the shrooms and build the sauce.
After a few tries to learn what you can/can't do in parallel, you can cut the total prep and serving time for this meal to about 20 minutes from "open fridge" to "chow down". Even without doing stuff in parallel, 30 minutes is pretty easy.
> I buy my share of tech gizmos and other toys, but feel like I could be doing more with the money.
If you're happy with your standard of living, no, you shouldn't.
Save it. Invest it. You are under no obligation to purchase things you neither need nor want.
> Suppose you were getting two paychecks a month ($1400 a month take-home) - What would you spend your money on?
The idea that you're "supposed" to spend your paycheck as soon as you can is the reason why predatory lenders and check-cashing operations stay in business. It's why you get all those "consolidate your debt!" spams. It's why late-night-TV is full of "do YOU have a MONEY EMERGENCY?!" ads.
Stay out of debt in the first place, build up a cash reserve of 6 months' living expenses, and invest the rest.
If you get a raise, don't go out and buy a new car that'll drop in value by 30% the minute you drive it off the lot -- invest it in something that will provide a positive return. Buy the same car a year later at a 30% savings... and note that you've probably made 5-10% on your investment in the interim. (The 3-year bear market in stocks is an aberration - you could have made money in bonds over the past three years. Bonds are IMO overvalued now, and it's probably time to look seriously at stocks again. "Stocks" doesn't just mean eBay. What's wrong with buying a well-diversified mutual fund that owns shares in steelmakers, health insurance companies, and office supply houses?)
I'm reminded of an old 80s slogan that came true in the '90s - with the rise of the blogosphere and what-not: "Don't hate the media - become the media!"
The same idea applies in your financial life:
Don't envy the investor class. Become the investor class.
> I am running Windows Media Services 9 on Windows Server 2003 RC1. It is simply awesome as a streaming media solution. First of all, if the client is a WMP 9 client.... there is no buffering! Instant start (on broadband only, naturally). Plus, you get a ton of configuration options on the WMS9 side. You can insert adverts automatically, apply all sorts of access control on the media (IP based, user/pass login, DRM, whatever you please)
*blink*
Advertisements built into music/videos? DRM? Locked to IP or user/pass combinations?
You're either astroturfing for Microsoft, or are using some definition of the word "awesome" of which I was previously unaware.
> The major isp's do a tremendous job keeping most of the spam out of our mailbox.
Considering the actions of Verio and uu.net and Rackspace and others who continue to bitbucket complaints on behalf of their spamhauses...
And considering the lack of actions from attbi.com, verizon-dsl.net, rr.com, comcast.com, cogeco.com, shawcable.com, oh, hell, all the frickin' retail broadband ISPs who continue to allow their lusers to run open proxies and spew forth garbage to port 25 on any SMTP machine in the world...
...I'd say say the major ISPs also do a pretty tremendous job in putting most of the spam into our mailboxes, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I haven't seen any poor assholes building spaceships lately, so I'll fly with whoever's building.
> I imagine the X Prize winner forgetting that the 10 mill is in the glove compartment of his car, because it's not worth the hassle of going to the bank to cash it.
I imagine the X Prize winner will take that $10M and use it to fund R&D that will go towards further reductions in his/her cost of launch.
Maybe to NASA, whose most advanced manned vehicle is a $500M-per-flight flying white elephant, $10M is a fart in a jar. But to a Carmack or Rutan or Musk, all of whom would love to see launch costs down to the $5-10M range or lower, $10M can go a long way.
No, that's the science channel!
*sigh*... remember when the "science" channels showed science?
What the fuck's next, Discovery? You gonna give that douchebag from the cold-reading "crossing over" some air time too?
Well, sorta. But I think your #2 question ("What could you do with a tie-breaking vote in every election") is a little contrived. Having #2 amounts to absolute deciding power over who gets elected, but not over who's on the ballot. The only practical use of such power would be to sell it off to people who have a better use for it. (You could probably make more money at $10000 per Mayor than you would selling Presidencies at a billion apiece. :)
As for #5 - I'm still not convinced. Taking abortion as the example, Congress can pass a law banning abortion (or mandating it :). The Supremes can overturn that law, but in the interim, that law stands. If it really wants to, the Legislature can do an end-run around the Judiciary by repeating this technique. One could argue that the clockword extension of "limited time" copyright terms every time Steamboat Willie threatens to pass into the public domain is an example of this in action. (And in that case, it's not the Supreme Court they're working around, it's the Constitution itself :)
The root cause of this is the limitation on the number of voters - 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. Each vote represented a few thousand constituents in the "golden age", but that's now up to millions, even tens of millions.
Were I to redraft the Constitution for 2003, it'd look pretty much like it does, except that I'd allow represenatives and senators to vote remotely (with some means of authentication/identification), and increase the number of represenatives by a factor of 10. (1000 Senators at 100 per state, 4350 Representative for about 60,000 constituents per Representative).
Increased numbers would devalue the vote of each Congresscritter to the point where it would be more difficult to purchase enough of them to get a bad law passed.
Remote voting would allow the 'critters to spend more time (perhaps all of their time) with their constituents.
This would partially address your concern about Representatives "being more local" - with only 60,000 people to represent (vs. the present 600,000), they're going to have to respond to local concerns.
You'd also get a serious boost to continuity of government from distributing representatives geographically, which is absolutely off-topic to the current debate, but it'd do wonders from a HomeSec mandate to know that the government was immune to a decapitation strike.
Amen, brother. Everything I needed to know about marriage I learned on "Married with Children".
Al to Peg: "Gee honey, I don't regret going to college. Why then I might not have married you! What would have become of me then? [*fantasizes with big ear-to-ear grin on his face*] I'd be living a lonely empty existence ordering pizza and hookers till I dropped dead with a slice in my mouth and a greasy hooter in my hand!"
Remember, "Christmas is not the time for regrets ... that's what anniversaries are for!"
Old joke: You can always tell married people by the way they think of lube during sex. "Wow, honey, that's real slippery! If we smear it on the doorknob after we put Timmy to bed, the little bastard'll never be able to get in here!"
>
> Slashdot bachelors might not understand this concept.
Some Slashdot bachelors understand the concept quite well. No wife pretty much means no kids. So anytime is "me^H^Hus" time.
I mean, I'm a grown man! I can get my own beer from the fridge, so what the hell do I need a wife for?
Sure, you could always try to build a robot to get your beers for you... but how's a married guy going to get the necessary time off from the family to try and build one?
And finally, I defy any married guy to tell his wife that the reason he's spending every weekend in the workshop/lab is to build a beer-fetching robot that responds to the voice command "Yo, serving wench! Get me a beer!"
They are not within 200,000 miles of the moon!
Well, he got one right!
As a WMTUCMRNE, I'll bite.
> 1. explain how your life would have been different in the past based upon whether the minority party had been in control? (for those of us who do not receive entitlements the fact is there would have been no difference).
I would be paying higher marginal tax rates under Gore than Bush II. I would be paying lower marginal tax rates under Bush I than Clinton. And I would be paying astronomical taxes under Mondale or Carter than Reagan.
> 2. explain how you as a white middle or upper class male could effect a change in your life by having the tie breaking vote in every single municipal, state and federal election?
By selling off my vote to the highest bidder, thereby exiting the middle or upper class for the elite! :)
> 3. how many votes on a national scale would you have to control to equal the power you could wield as the editor of a major media outlet? the media is in fact another branch of the government subject to virtually no checks or balances.
Conceded - millions. But that First Amendment thing - I think "checks and balances" on the media would be a cure worse than the disease.
> 4. describe a law which you could pass by referendum that would not be subject to constitutional challange?
Why in God's name would I want any law, whether passed by referendum or not, to be above Constitutional challenge?
You're right that everything we do requires court approval, but that's what separation of powers (Executive/Legislative/Judicial) is all about. That's a feature, not a bug!
> 5. has the number of things we cannot vote upon (which we used to be able to vote upon) been increased or decreased in the last 50 years?
It's remained constant. We could never vote on the issues (abortion, educational requirements for a janitor). We elect representatives. The problem is that those representatives don't necessarily reflect the wishes of their constituents.
You sound like you're advocating a return to Athenian-style direct democracy. All well and good - but that is not, and has never been - the model by which the US is governed.
> we are returning to a feudal society of classes rights and duties. democracy has been dead for a long time.
One thing that could be done without a constitutional amendment would be a change in the way representatives view themselves.
Suppose a private, apolitical organization set up "e-voting" boxen. Suppose that (say Bill Gates dropped 'em a few gigabucks) this organization spread its message far and wide via a massive (expensive) campaign of print and television advertising.
You sign up for the organization, you get a token. Every day, you log onto the website, and you're presented with a list of bills for which your [State and Federal] represenatives must vote.
You click on "Yea/Nay" for each bill.
In real time, your representative sees the numbers, and chooses to accept or ignore them at his peril.
S.9999 - Protection of Termites in Wetlands: YEA: 40, NAY: 99 (Nobody cares, I'll vote for whoever gives me $50 in donations first)
S.9997 - Ultra-Mega-DMCA Bill: YEA: 1, NAY: 4182 (Hmm, the only people who care are the one RIAA executive and 4182 geeks in my district, maybe I can ignore them, maybe not.)
S.9996 - Legalization of Pot, Spend The Money We Save On Counterterrorism Bill: YEA: 48113, NAY: 1531 (Crap, maybe I have to go out on a limb here and cross party lines)
S.9996 - Privatization of Social Security: YEA: 221344, NAY: 264718 (I have a serious political problem here, and will have to hold some sort of town hall meeting to explain my views)
At no time would the representative be
If voters start voting online, I believe they will have a greater tendency to have their systems hijacked by "voteware" - the electoral equivalent to spyware - and won't have a frickin' clue who they voted for, or why.
Imagine downloading a EULA that says "By installing this software, you agree to install VoteGator on your system! VoteGator keeps you informed of $PARTY's hot new offers! Use VoteGator for all your voting needs!"
(And just think of the "fun" an enemy agent could have with a .VBS worm :)
Call me a Luddite, but I think I'll pass on e-voting.
It is.
To bring it back on track - yes, I think Linus meant to say "Teller", not Oppenheimer. Teller was the apolitical engineer interested in advancing the technology for its own sake, and placing the moral responsibility for the use of the technology on the end users of said technology.
For the record, I think both Oppenheimer and Teller got raw deals.
Teller isn't a Dr. Strangelove - and he never was. He's stuck to his convictions about what he believes to be the proper nature of scientific research in general (and yes, including his own research in particular) for a lifetime. Science is about asking questions and a means for discovering the answers to them - if you are afraid of knowing the answer to a question, and that fear stops you from even asking the question, you've stopped doing science.
Meantime, if you're in the business of asking questions about how to stick nuclei together to extract energy, you talk to him. What you do with the energy you extract is your own business.
As for Teller, he's still alive and well, grants the occasional interview, and doing some teaching/consulting work at Livermore on their fusion projects.
"Long term bet" material coming up: If oil ever drops to $2.00 per barrel because fusion power has made the internal combustion engine obsolete, odds are very good that you'll have Teller to thank for it. But no prophet is honored in his own time.
Back on topic - Some people like DRM and have a need for it. I'm not one of those people. Most of us reading this aren't in that subset. But as Linus pointed out, the kernel is just a bunch of compiled source code. What you do with the code you compile into it is your own business.
More accurately, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to a -2 karma modifier your right to say it. Unless it involves penis birds.
4/18: I started off with a pretty normal day, reminding myself that arrays' elements start with zero and count up from there, and that ints were four bytes long, and that there are 8 bits to a byte.
4/19: Today I learned that master keys and player keys are the same things, and that DVD vendors don't control them all. I also found out that you could get disk keys from disks, and decrypt them with player keys. Title keys can also be read per file. The disk key can be used to decrypt the title key and the show.
4/20: I took this encrypted disk key, that was six bytes long (well, five bites and a zero at the end), and figured it would take about 3.5 hours to recover one by brute forcing it.
4/21: So, like there's this pointer "KEY", to these bytes. And there's this other pointer, "im", to the six bytes that make up the player key (but those six bytes are a trade secret.)
4/22: I played in an online lottery called Lotto 5/255. I lost, but I heard the winning pick was 81, 103, (someone must have liked 103, because 103 was rolled twice), 197, and 224. The ticket emailbot added a "0" after the 224.
4/23: Suppose your code had some internal variables t1 through t6. Wait a minute, there's these guys at the door wearing black suits. They sound angry. I'd better answer the door.
You joke, but were anyone to actually do that, and were they ever to be charged, and were I to serve on such a jury, I would vote "Not Guilty", because no crime had been committed.
The laws on assault, battery, forcible confinement, and homicide were written before spammers existed. To apply these laws to people who do assault, batter, forcibly confine, and slaughter spammers would be unjust.
In the event that such actions are performed on spammers, I believe that no crime would have been committed, and that therefore, the laws proscribing such actions, insofar as they pertain to spammers, should be nullified.
I would dearly love to see a fully-informed jury make such a statement, and I would dearly love for that to become a legal precedent - effectively declaring "Open Season" on spammers with no bag limit - until such time as Congress (or a State legislature) decides to pass a new law that explicitly protects spammers. Whereupon the cycle of jury nullification would begin anew. Or until we run out of spammers. Whichever comes first.
"OPM Network... Boca Raton, Florida..."
Yeah, Microsoft, I know which of the 50 states I'd remove, and why.
- The love child of Theo de Raadt and RMS, as quoted to Linus Torvalds' grandson, as leaked through the space-time continuum from the year 2047?
A good post - we pretty much agree on the end goal for the middle east, but I think you're looking too short-term in terms of analyzing the means.
> In pure Machiavellian politics' terms, the best way to neutralize a threat is to become a means to the enemy's ultimate ends.
If by "the enemy", you mean "the poor schmucks in the Arab street", and by "their ends", you mean "A society so prosperous that they can't be bothered blowing up discotheques for sport, let alone for $25K to put food on the table" perhaps that's exactly how the US is going about it -- by becoming the means (via imposing education, rule of law, human rights, which ought to lead to prosperity in a few years) to that end.
Have you considered that it's pretty hard to deliver a rich curriculum to "them" while "they" are under dictatorships? If it weren't for the Jews, the poor schmuck on the Arab street would have nobody to blame for his miserable situation but his rulers!
Given that situation, perhaps deposing the tinpot dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, "Palestine", and Iraq would be a good start.
I mean, maybe I've got some of this backwards. For instance, we wouldn't even have to depose those dictators in the order listed. *g*
> Conceded: the older people in the power seats of those nations are just too slow to chnage their attitudes. However, their children, especially their teenagers, are psychologically and developmentally receptive to American doctrine of rights and limited government, etc.. The real crime is that THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE WE SHOOT!
No argument there. I'm betting that we'll see a real change in this in the next year. Iraq's regime is toast. Iran - with its "student movement" already Western-friendly from the reign of terror of its clerics - is due to topple very soon. Arafat's grip on power is slipping. That's one domino down, two more on the way.
IMO the administration's strategy is working, but it's not going to happen overnight. And it ain't necessarily gonna work either. But file my interpretation away as "a possibility" and see where it stands in a couple of years.
Preach it brother.
I support most of the actions of the Administration, particularly in foreign policy.
This action, however, is shortsighted. Dumb. A big fucking mistake. 10 pounds of stupidity in a 5-pound bag.
NSA, if you're reading this (and we all know you are :), thanks for a nice after-dinner "snac" of consolidated security tips I can pass on to my users. I humbly submit that the "Secure American b0xen against furriner 0wnij" part of your dual mandate demands that you deliver a righteous bitchslapping upon the right people in the right places as regards open source development.
Politicians don't listen to geeks, because we don't speak politician. They might listen to you.
Actually, that's the one thing I didn't wonder about - there's a world of difference between saying (1)"X happened", (2) "I believe X happened", (3) "I think X might have happened", and (4) "I wonder if X happened".
Assuming "X" didn't happen, then only statements of the form #1 are libel. #2 is a grey area.
Legally, I made sure my post was #4, and frankly, my honest opinion is somewhere between #3 and #4. #3 is even too strong - because I don't know.
Neither do you. Only Mr. Ritter and/or Iraqi intelligence can answer that question, and Ritter has right not to talk about it, and Iraqi intelligence ain't in a position to talk.
It is an observable fact that his opinion on Iraq changed pretty dramatically over a very short time period. It's also a known fact that the "honey trap" is a time-honored counterintelligence gambit employed by regimes both despotic and free alike.
It's IMO logical to question what sorts of things may have motivated such a change. You raise another possibility - that there were indeed no WMDs, or at least that Ritter honestly believed there were no WMDs.
But getting back to the original point - my main purpose in posting wasn't so much to cast aspersons on Mr. Ritter's character, but to point out that surveillance is a two-edged sword: Iraqi officials, had they known about Mr. Ritter's sexual peculiarities, had as much to gain from exploiting Ritter's natural desire to keep it hidden ("Drink this warm cup STFU on how we blocked your inspections, or we'll leak this to destroy your credibility!"), as US officials had to gain by leaking it ("He didn't take our warm cup of STFU on the way we think he was wrong on the WMD issue, so we'll... leak this to destroy his credibility").
Moral of the story: If you're in a politically-sensitive job, or think you might be, keep your frickin' nose clean. *G*
Ah, but that cuts both ways.
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises.
Or you might not.
There's no lapdogging by Cisco or Cisco's customers.
The law requires that Cisco's customers use eavesdrop-capbble gear, or get they azz shut the fuck down.
Cisco is providing a valuable service to those ISPs.
Now, you may not like the fact that your ISP is required to provide eavesdropping capability. Your ISP may not like the fact that they're required to provide eavesdropping capability. It is, however, the law. If your ISP doesn't comply, it will face enormous fines collected by men with guns, or it will be shut down by men with guns. So your ISP has a need to purchase eavesdrop-capable gear on the open market, and Cisco fills that need.
If you think the law's unjust, you're free to set up your own ISP and refuse to provide wiretap support as an act of civil disobedience.
But until then, it's literally none of your business. In the meantime, consider that compliance with laws - whether "just" or "unjust" - is not an optional thing. If it were, they'd be called "suggestions", not "laws".
> Isn't our privacy guaranteed within the constitution preventing actions anywhere near this?
In a word, No.
> Shouldn't simple encryption be able to circumvent the schemes that are being implemented into the hardware?
Yes. But knowing who a bad guy is talking to is often every bit as useful as knowing what was said.
Get a girlfriend. They like to be eaten out, and unless you're real bad at it, you don't have to pay anything. *rimshot*
Seriously - learn to cook!
$12 - 2 12-oz New York Strip steaks
$ 1 - 2 potatoes, big pile of veggies
$ 1 - Half-pound o' mushrooms
$ 1 - Miscellany - butter, olive oil, sprinkle of flour, beef bouillon, splash of milk, dash of cognac
$10 - Bottle of half-decent Cabernet Sauvignon
$ 4 - Bar of really good dark chocolate.
---
$29 - Dinner for Two: 12-oz New York Strip steak, sauteed mushrooms w/ cream sauce, drinks, and dessert.
You can do a pretty good job on the steaks with a frying pan, and that also leaves you with lots of nice flavors to work the sauteed 'shrooms. Use parallel processing - basically, slice the 'shrooms while you're doing the steak, set the steak aside on a warm plate and cook the veggies in the microwave while you saute the shrooms and build the sauce.
After a few tries to learn what you can/can't do in parallel, you can cut the total prep and serving time for this meal to about 20 minutes from "open fridge" to "chow down". Even without doing stuff in parallel, 30 minutes is pretty easy.
If you're happy with your standard of living, no, you shouldn't.
Save it. Invest it. You are under no obligation to purchase things you neither need nor want.
> Suppose you were getting two paychecks a month ($1400 a month take-home) - What would you spend your money on?
The idea that you're "supposed" to spend your paycheck as soon as you can is the reason why predatory lenders and check-cashing operations stay in business. It's why you get all those "consolidate your debt!" spams. It's why late-night-TV is full of "do YOU have a MONEY EMERGENCY?!" ads.
Stay out of debt in the first place, build up a cash reserve of 6 months' living expenses, and invest the rest.
If you get a raise, don't go out and buy a new car that'll drop in value by 30% the minute you drive it off the lot -- invest it in something that will provide a positive return. Buy the same car a year later at a 30% savings... and note that you've probably made 5-10% on your investment in the interim. (The 3-year bear market in stocks is an aberration - you could have made money in bonds over the past three years. Bonds are IMO overvalued now, and it's probably time to look seriously at stocks again. "Stocks" doesn't just mean eBay. What's wrong with buying a well-diversified mutual fund that owns shares in steelmakers, health insurance companies, and office supply houses?)
I'm reminded of an old 80s slogan that came true in the '90s - with the rise of the blogosphere and what-not: "Don't hate the media - become the media!"
The same idea applies in your financial life:
Don't envy the investor class. Become the investor class.
*blink*
Advertisements built into music/videos? DRM? Locked to IP or user/pass combinations?
You're either astroturfing for Microsoft, or are using some definition of the word "awesome" of which I was previously unaware.
Considering the actions of Verio and uu.net and Rackspace and others who continue to bitbucket complaints on behalf of their spamhauses...
And considering the lack of actions from attbi.com, verizon-dsl.net, rr.com, comcast.com, cogeco.com, shawcable.com, oh, hell, all the frickin' retail broadband ISPs who continue to allow their lusers to run open proxies and spew forth garbage to port 25 on any SMTP machine in the world...