> For all Americans out there, our situation is like this: 85% of all the seats in the house are republican and the president is republican as well.
Well, sorta. It's got nothing to do with which party's in power.
Unlike America, where Congressmen and Senators often vote across party lines to represent their constituents, Canadian MPs cannot. (Technically, they can, but it's the end of their career, as it usually means expulsion from the party and thus, no re-election funds.)
In the US, it's common for Reps and Senators to vote across party lines. Right-leaning Democrats might vote for a stimulus package or tax cuts. Liberal Republicans might vote for abortion rights. That is, "the government" can introduce a bill, but its passage is never guaranteed.
In Canada, every bill is effectively a "vote of confidence" in the government. Thus, failure to pass any bill results in a new federal election; as a result, nobody dares vote against their party's wishes.
(There's nothing inherently flawed in the parliamentary system - IIRC, Britain's works reasonably well, by saying that only "money bills" count as votes of confidence. Canada's rather odd historical response was essentially to say "well, everything's a 'money bill', so always vote along party lines." Whups.)
The advantage is that Canada is protected from gridlock. What the PM and Cabinet wants, they draft, they introduce as a bill, and the bill's passage into law is guaranteed.
The disadvantage is that while Canada is protected from gridlock, it can't be protected by gridlock. IMNSHO, the great advantage of US system is that it acknowledges the fact that (if legislators are representing their constitutents' interests) a bill that can't get a majority among said legislators probably doesn't deserve to become law.
That said - if you're a Canuck, get to those hearings, or prepare a submission. It's your only chance to influence the law in the direction of preserving fair use while it's still being drafted. By the time a bill hits the House of Commons, it's too late.
> What would be even more interesting is if the logs couldn't be entered into evidence because of the two-party thing, but AOL was able to cough up transcripts of the conversation after the fact.
Good point. OTOH, if the two-party issue prevents the messages from being entered into evidence, I can't see how any copies retained by AOL's servers would be admissible. (That is, how you'd get a court order to demand copies from AOL, if the evidence on which the court order was based was itself inadmissible? IANAL, I don't know how that'd turn out.)
> After all, messages traverse their servers. Might be pretty scary to find out how long they hold on to them.
An even better point. Though I think that'd be a good national-security justification for AOL not releasing the messages. (Or better yet, for saying "Sorry, we only keep messages for an hour", thereby giving the illusion of the messages being transitory, while in reality, the messages are retained indefinitely for use in FISA cases.)
> If that's not the case, then no "wiretap" has taken place--a party to the conversation turned over the logs to the police, and they are admissible at trial.
IMNSHO, the article makes it pretty clear that the cops didn't sniff anything. The girl called the cops and turned over the logs.
The scumb^H^H^H^H^Hdefendant then pulled the same stunt chatting to a detective posing as another girl. Even if the initial logs weren't admissible, the logs of this conversation, IMNSHO, would be, as they were part of an investigation. (It ain't entrapment, since Joe Scumbag wasn't asked to solicit sex from the detective - Joe did it all by himself. Yes, I'm presuming a basic level competence on the part of the cops here. "How not to entrap" is something they teach in Cop School 101.)
The only reason I can think of that the first logs wouldn't be admissible is because (unlike phone messages) IM logs can be trivially forged (think "5 minutes with a hex editor", if not "30 seconds with a text editor", and might constitute "hearsay" and thus be inadmissible.
If (very plausibly!) the girl didn't know how to forge the logs, and/or she testified that the logs weren't forged, I'd say there's still enough to get a court order to ask the IM server if, indeed, messages were sent.
So we pick up the trail from there. Maybe the IM server only knows that a message went from IP address xx.xx.xx.xx to yy.yy.yy.yy on a certain date/time (and knows nothing of the content of that message). But if all of those entries match the date/timestamps on the girl's logs, and if the ISPs, when asked (via another court order) "which of your users had these IP address at these times" answer "Joe Scumbag was on xx.xx.xx.xx at that date" and "Jane Doe was on yy.yy.yy.yy at that date", and Joe's ISP says "The radius logs show that xx.xx.xx.xx was logged into via his account and his phone number, and the phone company's logs confirm that someone from his house called his ISP at that time", I'd say you have a pretty open-and-shut case.
To summarize, saying "I got an ICQ message" might not be admissible.
Saying "I got an ICQ message, AOL's logs confirm it, the ISP's logs tell me who it was, and where he called from, and the phone company's logs confirm it" is another kettle of fish entirely.
Under some circumstances, I might have reasonable doubt that someone forged an ICQ message.
But I cannot fathom anyone 31337 enough to forge an ICQ message, an ICQ-message-sent log on AOL's server, steal Joe Scumbag's password to dial in to an ISP using his account, hack the ISP's Radius server logs to reflect Joe Scumbag's phone number instead of 37337-h4x0r's number, and then hack the local phone provider's logs to make it looks like Joe Scumbag was on the phone to his ISP at that time.
I'm not alleging that the trail of evidence in this case is anywhere near as bulletproof as in my extreme hypothetical example. All I'm saying is that anyone who thinks an IM log can be dismissed as hearsay is... well, not thinking far enough;-)
(Next up -- when can we expect law enforcement to apply the same treatment to Joe Spammer? Surely sending spam for "HOT BEASTIE WOMEN" to 15-year-old girls is just as bad. You listening, Mr. Spammer in Dallas-Ft.Worth and Michigan?)
> Designer babies worldwide are heavily selected to be male, perhaps on a rediculous scale, say 4:1 or more. Fast
forward 30 years. [... ] > >
Now comes some charismatic leader and, well, I hope I'm in the grave by that point.
What, you get pretty fireworks and solve the "too many males and not enough females" problem. Evolution in action;-)
> How much time do you expect a Chinese bureaucrat to spend prosecuting a fellow countryman because he made 1000
foreigners delete a bothersome message?
When China Telecom gets 1000 bounces saying:
550 - Falun Gong Xmit JFIIZ WNAZO
with the five-character blocks being randomly generated, once per bounce message, quite a lot;-)
> But, how can you be sure your tin wasn't pre-tained? Do you mine the tin yourself? The Reynolds people have great influence over those who provide tin. And, if you're thinking of switching to aluminum, forget it. The Alcoa people are iluminati as well.
Yeah, but look at the front page of www.alcoa.com! You'll see "Reynolds Wrap" right there. Alcoa's taken over everything!
I was gonna say they were aluminati as opposed to illuminati (there's a difference, believe you me!), but then I saw Alcoa's corporate logo, and realized that it's nothing more than a stylized eye-in-the-pyramid.
Then I went to the Reynolds site. The aluminum starts out in Hot Springs, Arkanasa (Bill Clinton's home state!) Then, according to the site, the 30,000-pound aluminum coils that make Reynolds Wrap are turned into aluminum foil in two locations: Louisville, Kentucky and Richmond, Virginia. That's right! Richmond, VA! A stone's throw from CIA headquarters in Langley!
All that's left is to explain what the CIA is doing in fnord Louisville.
It's all a conspiracy, I tell you, all a conspiracy! A great big giant conspir$^&}}!{!NO CARRIER.
> As I pointed out in another post - Lucas intends to add more original content when he releases the DVD (which is why he hasn't released it yet). Whatever original content he adds will have a fresh new copyright on it.
Oh, great. Luke blows up the Death Star and it explodes into showers of cute, fuzzy little KaboomBabies(tm), 'cuz there weren't enough cute cuddly little things in the original. And there'll be SnowBunnies(tm) all over Hoth in the reissued Empire Strikes Back. Thanks a lot, George. Now I won't want 'em on DVD:-)
> FAQ: >[...] >Q: Why doesn't the floppy I got at codecon match the signature above? > A: because I screwed up & wrote a nvram.md5 file to the floppy I then used as a master. I had to remove that file from every floppy. The result is that the MD5sum of the codecon floppies should be: 3608290765de7d5283a1a22813677a56
Hah! A likely story!
As if I'm gonna trust that They(tm) didn't h4x0r Slashdot and change the MD5sum in CitznFish's FAQ repost to the MD5sum for Magic Lantern Linux!
(For the record, I wear mine shiny side out. Shiny-side-in folks are nuts or part of the Conspiracy. Though I suppose I could transmit messages by switching back and forth between shiny-side-out and shiny-side in on a daily basis. Bandwidth would kinda suck, though.;-)
> The act [hick.org] was purchased by the entertainment industry in a transparent (and successful) attempt to extend the length of
copywrite terms even longer. The sucker is even retroactive! Sonny Bono was nothing more than a tool of the media corporations.
...and his favorite UFO cult, which has very close ties with a lot of what goes on in Hollyweird.
On the other hand, look at it as evolution in action. The guy died because he skied into a tree. A little research yields OT7-48, where he'd be instructed to "Find some plants, trees, etc., and communicate to them individually until you know they received your communication.".
Hey, maybe if he'd paid his $300,000 to said nut cult, the tree would have gotten out of his way.
> Or, here is another case. Your great grandfather was a famous writer. Your parents never did anything with the property where his
house was, but when you inherited it, you went up there and found a first draft, never been published, masterpiece. But it has been
far more than 20 years since he died and publishers refuse to publish it because it is already public domain. Which gives you NO
financial incentive to see the work published. > >All works should have the same set copyright period. I'd pick 20 years (the same period patents enjoy.)
(Side note - I agree with your "should have the same copyright period" comment)
Where I differ with you is the "no incentive to publish" bit. That's what's changed in the past 30 years.
There once was a time when "publish" meant "spend a lot of money printing dead trees, or shining light through acetate films onto photosensitive compounds".
Today, that family could see to it that the masterpiece was "published" by spending an hour scanning the document through some OCR software and posting it to USENET.
As for Mickey Rat, Disney could still use trademark law to sue the fsck out of anyone selling Mickey merchandise, or making new Mickey cartoons, by saying "Mickey is a trademark of Disney, Inc."
All that shortening the copyright term to 20 years would do allow you to say "Click here to download an MPEG of Steamboat Willie, ca. 1928".
Disney could still make new Rat products, they could still make money selling Rat products back to the '80s. Hell, they could still make money selling a "Limited Edition DVD of Steamboat Willie". (Want the DVD? Buy it from them. Just want the video stream? Download it from some d00d who copied it.)
The other Good Reason (IMNSHO) for shortening copyright terms is because, for intellectual property, there's no longer any substantial difference difference between the aims of copyright and patent law.
Both were intended to give inventors temporary monopolies in order to promote invention/innovation/science/art. But today, they're treated radically differently.
Patent: I'm Mr. Pfizer, and I invented Viagra. Here's my patent application, which shows you how to make your own. In exchange for sharing my discovery with the world, the government grants me a 17-year monopoly on producing it. Until that time is up, you gotta buy it from us, or pay us royalties to let you make it yourself. After 17 years, you can make a generic version all by yourself, and we'll have to compete on price. We're willing to do that because we think we can make back our R&D costs in 17 years.
Copyright: Here's my song! Here's my movie! Here's my program! I tell everyone how to replicate it by distributing the bitstream on shiny plastic disks. In return, the government gives me a 75-year-plus-life-of-creator monopoly on those bits? What the fsck?
If the company that invents a cure for AIDS is expected to make their money back in 17 years, why can't we ask the same of the company that markets big-titted lip-syncing chicks and goddamn cartoon mice?
> If the Supreme Court has a brain (or brains), they'll see these two facts: > >
Congress has the sole power to set the limits on copyright (subject to the Constitution). >
However, one of the limits implicit in the Constitution is that these limits can only apply to future works.
Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I could.
It's gonna be a hell of an interesting case. Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic -- I trust the Supremes a hell of a lot more than I trust Congress.
> Why didn't they just jumped over a couple of generations to the X-Ray Disk? Possible advantages...[...]
Ah, but there's also a disadvantage -- Osama would be able to blow us all to hell if the power source
for an X-Ray laser were available for $500 in any consumer electronics store;-)
> This new format is a next generation format. 27GB per layer is a very cool capacity.
Combined with MPEG2 and AC3 whole seasons of 'startrek' may be on one disc.
...and if MPAA has their way, you'll still be getting two episodes per disc (and 90% blank space), at $29.99.
> I've been wondering who the "known criminals are for many years. If you know who these dastardly no-goods are, please respond to this message and put my mind at ease. Thank you.
Poke around groups.google.com in news.admin.net-abuse.email.sightings or news.admin.net-abuse.email to find out who your pet spammer is. Learn.
Punch your pet spammer's name into ROKSO. Learn more.
Many of these individuals have prior convictions for fraud. Some may still be on probation. Why the FTC has ignored them for so long is utterly beyond me.
> It always amazed me why China connected to the public internet anyways if they are going to censor everything except the stuff _they_ want their citizens to see. Wouldn't it have been much more efficient to build the network and not connect it to the public internet?
China learned from the mistakes made in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
By "banning" information outright, you increase its allure - and it takes a lot of manpower to keep track of everything. Plus, it's incredibly bad PR.
By letting information flow, but monitoring who accesses it, you get better tracking data on your society's unreliable elements (whom you can dispose of quietly, and on your timetable), as well as the good PR of saying "Sure, we're an open society!".
Technology plays a part here - East Germany comes to mind as an example of a state that collapsed under the weight of its own police force. (The running gag was that half the population was doing nothing but spying on the other half on behalf of Stasi. The historical record shows that it wasn't much of an exaggeration.)
The use of computers, packet sniffers, and such, makes surveillance of an electronic network vastly cheaper than surveillance of "society at large". The only thing left is to make your unreliable elements prefer your monitored network over word-of-mouth. The way you do that, is you let 'em get the content they want only through the monitored network.
Build a better mousetrap, and the mice will beat a path to your door.
It may be evil, but it's a pretty fucking cool bit of social engineering;-)
> If they're so successful at restricting access to the Internet, why are 10% of the spam sources and 8% of the hacking
attempts against my servers from.cn domains?
"Dear clueless Chinese sysadmin. You are running an open relay. Yesterday, it was used by spammers to send thousands of emails to Americans. Tomorrow, it will be used by Americans to send Falun Gong propaganda to thousands Chinese. This email was sent by an open relay. Falun Gong thanks you for your cooperation in keeping this vital communications channel open. Please check your bank account to confirm receipt of payment."
Either the.cn admin closes his relay, or the.cn government closes it for him.
One way, there's one less open relay. The other way, there's one less clueless sysadmin. Win-win situation.
(A more serious hypothesis I've seen is that China wants to be unable to send email outside its borders -- having the rest of the world block.cn for spam reduces the odds that unreliable elements in Chinese society will be able to email Western contacts.)
> I think the biggest casuality of of 9/11 was America's sense of measure - the empire is now like a wounded beast, with rage
clouding its reason. The U.S. likes to see itself as a Christian nation, but it appears to me it is much more closer to the spirit
of the Old Testament ("An eye of an eye") than that of the New.
Ahem? They blew up what was arguably the most sacred icon of American capitalism and murdered 3000 civilians in an unprovoked attack, and you think what we did in Afghanistan was "an eye for an eye?"
Our response has been extremely restrained in both tone and intensity, and IMNSHO, that decision has been extremely wise.
If we were fighting this war with "An eye for an eye" as our doctrine, the commensurate response (both in terms of symbolism and needless civilian casualties) would have been to reduce Mecca to little more than a smudge in the middle of a 20-mile-wide glowing green glass plate.
> After all, even the most sophisticated lasers (or Missile Defense System) would have
been useless to avert the WTC tragedy.
In a word, bullshit.
The ABM system we had in the 1960s would have been sufficient to take out any of those aircraft. As a last-ditch line of defence, analog computers and vaccuum tubes were able to put a telephone pole-sized missile at Mach 3 through the front windshield of incoming Soviet bombers. Accuracy was measured in feet at ranges of over 100 miles.
(The only point I'll concede in your argument is that, on 9/11, whether a battery commander would have been authorized to fire on a commercial airliner in time to prevent said airliner from reaching its target, is an open issue.)
Thankfully, passenger resistance stopped Flight 93 from reaching its target. Likewise, passenger resistance stopped the shoe-bomber from succeeding in his mission. The conclusion I draw from this is that an alert cvilian populace, prepared to take action on its own, has done a shitload more to secure air travel than anything else -- aside, of course, from the vital national interest served having our stuff stolen, and female significant others getting felt up, by high-school dropouts (but they're dropouts with badges!) every time we travel by air.
None of which has much to do with big-ass lasers, other than to say that, well, big-ass lasers are fucking cool, and if there's one thing that kicks more ass than a C-130 Spectre, it's a Spooky with a gigawatt laser. (Shit, that's just about the only weapon the Spectre doesn't carry yet;-)
> The whole concept [of AI priests] is idiotic. How can a machine with no soul possibly perform an absolution for God? Who would visit
such a confessional except for yuks?
"Who would visit any confessional except for yuks?"
- Some Guy Who Nailed 95 Theses To A Cathedral Door A Long Time Ago.
> I rarely ever got telemarketing calls. >
> Last week I applied for a telemarketing job. >
Within hours I started getting calls, and I've gotten 5 a day since.
Since only a moron would want to be a telemarketer (i.e. would believe the "Make $$$ at our call center, d00d!" flyers on campus), it stands to reason you got placed on a "sucker's list" as a result of applying for the job.
If I were in a good mood I'd call it poetic justice and leave it at that.
But I'm not in a good mood today, so I'll just gloat by pointing out that payback's a bitch, and on behalf of the rest of us who no longer answer our phones because of pieces of subhuman shit such as yourself (oh, sorry, you only applied for the job, that makes you a wannabe subhuman piece of shit:) that I sincerely hope you never receive a non-telemarketing phone call again as long as you live.
> I can understand getting burned out on excuses and all that. But, SPEWS might be doing the anti-spammers a big dis-favor by sending the innocent into nanae. My customer now feels that ALL anti-spammers are a bunch of jerks who just want to bully people around.
Yeah. I can't say I blame him:(
Suggested exercise for nanae readers: Watch the TV show "COPS". You'd be amazed at how patient they are (at least on camera:). The lesson to be drawn is to presume innocence, and flame to a crisp only after proof positive that the guy in question Isn't Getting It.
While I'm at it, I think the oft-repeated nanae "You're supporting spammers by staying with the blocked ISP" argument is silly. The customer has no intent to support spammers. Indeed, the customer probably doesn't even care if he/she supports his/her ISP! No customer (with the possible exception of Enron) ever purchased connectivity with the intent of supporting an ISP,
The "pizza delivery" analogy gets around this -- the pizza guy doesn't care where your rent money goes, he just doesn't wanna deal with what he has to step over in your front lawn. Big difference.
Speakin' of 'za, I'm out to get some. Don't interpret a lack of further replies as rudeness, I'm chowin' down. It's Slack(tm) to me.
> First of all, your crack-house metaphor is absurd. Secondly, your "if you dont like it, move" mentality is so amazingly worthless, I'm surprised i'm even taking the time to point it out.
> > If you don't like it, try to make it better.
Moderators - give that guy back a point.
I really should have written "If you don't like it, ask your landlord to evict the dealers. Then think about moving."
Or "If you don't like being listed in SPEWS, and you're not a spammer, ask your ISP to boot the spammers. You, as a customer of the listed ISP, have a hell of a lot more pull with that ISP than the spam recipients do."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sorta. It's got nothing to do with which party's in power.
Unlike America, where Congressmen and Senators often vote across party lines to represent their constituents, Canadian MPs cannot. (Technically, they can, but it's the end of their career, as it usually means expulsion from the party and thus, no re-election funds.)
In the US, it's common for Reps and Senators to vote across party lines. Right-leaning Democrats might vote for a stimulus package or tax cuts. Liberal Republicans might vote for abortion rights. That is, "the government" can introduce a bill, but its passage is never guaranteed.
In Canada, every bill is effectively a "vote of confidence" in the government. Thus, failure to pass any bill results in a new federal election; as a result, nobody dares vote against their party's wishes.
(There's nothing inherently flawed in the parliamentary system - IIRC, Britain's works reasonably well, by saying that only "money bills" count as votes of confidence. Canada's rather odd historical response was essentially to say "well, everything's a 'money bill', so always vote along party lines." Whups.)
The advantage is that Canada is protected from gridlock. What the PM and Cabinet wants, they draft, they introduce as a bill, and the bill's passage into law is guaranteed.
The disadvantage is that while Canada is protected from gridlock, it can't be protected by gridlock. IMNSHO, the great advantage of US system is that it acknowledges the fact that (if legislators are representing their constitutents' interests) a bill that can't get a majority among said legislators probably doesn't deserve to become law.
That said - if you're a Canuck, get to those hearings, or prepare a submission. It's your only chance to influence the law in the direction of preserving fair use while it's still being drafted. By the time a bill hits the House of Commons, it's too late.
Good point. OTOH, if the two-party issue prevents the messages from being entered into evidence, I can't see how any copies retained by AOL's servers would be admissible. (That is, how you'd get a court order to demand copies from AOL, if the evidence on which the court order was based was itself inadmissible? IANAL, I don't know how that'd turn out.)
> After all, messages traverse their servers. Might be pretty scary to find out how long they hold on to them.
An even better point. Though I think that'd be a good national-security justification for AOL not releasing the messages. (Or better yet, for saying "Sorry, we only keep messages for an hour", thereby giving the illusion of the messages being transitory, while in reality, the messages are retained indefinitely for use in FISA cases.)
IMNSHO, the article makes it pretty clear that the cops didn't sniff anything. The girl called the cops and turned over the logs.
The scumb^H^H^H^H^Hdefendant then pulled the same stunt chatting to a detective posing as another girl. Even if the initial logs weren't admissible, the logs of this conversation, IMNSHO, would be, as they were part of an investigation. (It ain't entrapment, since Joe Scumbag wasn't asked to solicit sex from the detective - Joe did it all by himself. Yes, I'm presuming a basic level competence on the part of the cops here. "How not to entrap" is something they teach in Cop School 101.)
The only reason I can think of that the first logs wouldn't be admissible is because (unlike phone messages) IM logs can be trivially forged (think "5 minutes with a hex editor", if not "30 seconds with a text editor", and might constitute "hearsay" and thus be inadmissible.
If (very plausibly!) the girl didn't know how to forge the logs, and/or she testified that the logs weren't forged, I'd say there's still enough to get a court order to ask the IM server if, indeed, messages were sent.
So we pick up the trail from there. Maybe the IM server only knows that a message went from IP address xx.xx.xx.xx to yy.yy.yy.yy on a certain date/time (and knows nothing of the content of that message). But if all of those entries match the date/timestamps on the girl's logs, and if the ISPs, when asked (via another court order) "which of your users had these IP address at these times" answer "Joe Scumbag was on xx.xx.xx.xx at that date" and "Jane Doe was on yy.yy.yy.yy at that date", and Joe's ISP says "The radius logs show that xx.xx.xx.xx was logged into via his account and his phone number, and the phone company's logs confirm that someone from his house called his ISP at that time", I'd say you have a pretty open-and-shut case.
To summarize, saying "I got an ICQ message" might not be admissible.
Saying "I got an ICQ message, AOL's logs confirm it, the ISP's logs tell me who it was, and where he called from, and the phone company's logs confirm it" is another kettle of fish entirely.
Under some circumstances, I might have reasonable doubt that someone forged an ICQ message.
But I cannot fathom anyone 31337 enough to forge an ICQ message, an ICQ-message-sent log on AOL's server, steal Joe Scumbag's password to dial in to an ISP using his account, hack the ISP's Radius server logs to reflect Joe Scumbag's phone number instead of 37337-h4x0r's number, and then hack the local phone provider's logs to make it looks like Joe Scumbag was on the phone to his ISP at that time.
I'm not alleging that the trail of evidence in this case is anywhere near as bulletproof as in my extreme hypothetical example. All I'm saying is that anyone who thinks an IM log can be dismissed as hearsay is... well, not thinking far enough ;-)
(Next up -- when can we expect law enforcement to apply the same treatment to Joe Spammer? Surely sending spam for "HOT BEASTIE WOMEN" to 15-year-old girls is just as bad. You listening, Mr. Spammer in Dallas-Ft.Worth and Michigan?)
>
> Now comes some charismatic leader and, well, I hope I'm in the grave by that point.
What, you get pretty fireworks and solve the "too many males and not enough females" problem. Evolution in action ;-)
>- One for the time he forgot her birthday
>- One for the time he forgot the wedding aniversary
Solution obvious: At proposal-time, "Honey, wouldn't it be more romantic if we got married on your birthday?"
(Of course, if, after pulling this off, you still forget, you're fscked. Or more accurately, you won't doing much fscking quite some time.)
When China Telecom gets 1000 bounces saying:
550 - Falun Gong Xmit JFIIZ WNAZO
with the five-character blocks being randomly generated, once per bounce message, quite a lot ;-)
Yeah, but look at the front page of www.alcoa.com! You'll see "Reynolds Wrap" right there. Alcoa's taken over everything!
I was gonna say they were aluminati as opposed to illuminati (there's a difference, believe you me!), but then I saw Alcoa's corporate logo, and realized that it's nothing more than a stylized eye-in-the-pyramid.
Then I went to the Reynolds site. The aluminum starts out in Hot Springs, Arkanasa (Bill Clinton's home state!) Then, according to the site, the 30,000-pound aluminum coils that make Reynolds Wrap are turned into aluminum foil in two locations: Louisville, Kentucky and Richmond, Virginia. That's right! Richmond, VA! A stone's throw from CIA headquarters in Langley!
All that's left is to explain what the CIA is doing in fnord Louisville. It's all a conspiracy, I tell you, all a conspiracy! A great big giant conspir$^&}}!{!NO CARRIER.
Oh, great. Luke blows up the Death Star and it explodes into showers of cute, fuzzy little KaboomBabies(tm), 'cuz there weren't enough cute cuddly little things in the original. And there'll be SnowBunnies(tm) all over Hoth in the reissued Empire Strikes Back. Thanks a lot, George. Now I won't want 'em on DVD :-)
>[...]
>Q: Why doesn't the floppy I got at codecon match the signature above?
> A: because I screwed up & wrote a nvram.md5 file to the floppy I then used as a master. I had to remove that file from every floppy. The result is that the MD5sum of the codecon floppies should be: 3608290765de7d5283a1a22813677a56
Hah! A likely story!
As if I'm gonna trust that They(tm) didn't h4x0r Slashdot and change the MD5sum in CitznFish's FAQ repost to the MD5sum for Magic Lantern Linux!
(For the record, I wear mine shiny side out. Shiny-side-in folks are nuts or part of the Conspiracy. Though I suppose I could transmit messages by switching back and forth between shiny-side-out and shiny-side in on a daily basis. Bandwidth would kinda suck, though. ;-)
Yeah, but this time around, the labels are getting paid for it!
If RIAA doesn't get its cut when the artist gets fucked over, the terrorists have won!
On the other hand, look at it as evolution in action. The guy died because he skied into a tree. A little research yields OT7-48, where he'd be instructed to "Find some plants, trees, etc., and communicate to them individually until you know they received your communication.".
Hey, maybe if he'd paid his $300,000 to said nut cult, the tree would have gotten out of his way.
Maybe if time were working against Lucas, he'd have released the friggin' thing on DVD by now.
>
>All works should have the same set copyright period. I'd pick 20 years (the same period patents enjoy.)
(Side note - I agree with your "should have the same copyright period" comment)
Where I differ with you is the "no incentive to publish" bit. That's what's changed in the past 30 years.
There once was a time when "publish" meant "spend a lot of money printing dead trees, or shining light through acetate films onto photosensitive compounds". Today, that family could see to it that the masterpiece was "published" by spending an hour scanning the document through some OCR software and posting it to USENET.
As for Mickey Rat, Disney could still use trademark law to sue the fsck out of anyone selling Mickey merchandise, or making new Mickey cartoons, by saying "Mickey is a trademark of Disney, Inc."
All that shortening the copyright term to 20 years would do allow you to say "Click here to download an MPEG of Steamboat Willie, ca. 1928".
Disney could still make new Rat products, they could still make money selling Rat products back to the '80s. Hell, they could still make money selling a "Limited Edition DVD of Steamboat Willie". (Want the DVD? Buy it from them. Just want the video stream? Download it from some d00d who copied it.)
The other Good Reason (IMNSHO) for shortening copyright terms is because, for intellectual property, there's no longer any substantial difference difference between the aims of copyright and patent law.
Both were intended to give inventors temporary monopolies in order to promote invention/innovation/science/art. But today, they're treated radically differently.
Patent: I'm Mr. Pfizer, and I invented Viagra. Here's my patent application, which shows you how to make your own. In exchange for sharing my discovery with the world, the government grants me a 17-year monopoly on producing it. Until that time is up, you gotta buy it from us, or pay us royalties to let you make it yourself. After 17 years, you can make a generic version all by yourself, and we'll have to compete on price. We're willing to do that because we think we can make back our R&D costs in 17 years.
Copyright: Here's my song! Here's my movie! Here's my program! I tell everyone how to replicate it by distributing the bitstream on shiny plastic disks. In return, the government gives me a 75-year-plus-life-of-creator monopoly on those bits? What the fsck?
If the company that invents a cure for AIDS is expected to make their money back in 17 years, why can't we ask the same of the company that markets big-titted lip-syncing chicks and goddamn cartoon mice?
>
> Congress has the sole power to set the limits on copyright (subject to the Constitution).
> However, one of the limits implicit in the Constitution is that these limits can only apply to future works.
Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I could.
It's gonna be a hell of an interesting case. Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic -- I trust the Supremes a hell of a lot more than I trust Congress.
Ah, but there's also a disadvantage -- Osama would be able to blow us all to hell if the power source for an X-Ray laser were available for $500 in any consumer electronics store ;-)
That's OK, 99% of the classified information is also probably useless too ;)
ROKSO is your friend.
Poke around groups.google.com in news.admin.net-abuse.email.sightings or news.admin.net-abuse.email to find out who your pet spammer is. Learn.
Punch your pet spammer's name into ROKSO. Learn more.
Many of these individuals have prior convictions for fraud. Some may still be on probation. Why the FTC has ignored them for so long is utterly beyond me.
China learned from the mistakes made in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.
By "banning" information outright, you increase its allure - and it takes a lot of manpower to keep track of everything. Plus, it's incredibly bad PR.
By letting information flow, but monitoring who accesses it, you get better tracking data on your society's unreliable elements (whom you can dispose of quietly, and on your timetable), as well as the good PR of saying "Sure, we're an open society!".
Technology plays a part here - East Germany comes to mind as an example of a state that collapsed under the weight of its own police force. (The running gag was that half the population was doing nothing but spying on the other half on behalf of Stasi. The historical record shows that it wasn't much of an exaggeration.)
The use of computers, packet sniffers, and such, makes surveillance of an electronic network vastly cheaper than surveillance of "society at large". The only thing left is to make your unreliable elements prefer your monitored network over word-of-mouth. The way you do that, is you let 'em get the content they want only through the monitored network.
Build a better mousetrap, and the mice will beat a path to your door.
It may be evil, but it's a pretty fucking cool bit of social engineering ;-)
"Dear clueless Chinese sysadmin. You are running an open relay. Yesterday, it was used by spammers to send thousands of emails to Americans. Tomorrow, it will be used by Americans to send Falun Gong propaganda to thousands Chinese. This email was sent by an open relay. Falun Gong thanks you for your cooperation in keeping this vital communications channel open. Please check your bank account to confirm receipt of payment."
Either the .cn admin closes his relay, or the .cn government closes it for him.
One way, there's one less open relay. The other way, there's one less clueless sysadmin. Win-win situation.
(A more serious hypothesis I've seen is that China wants to be unable to send email outside its borders -- having the rest of the world block .cn for spam reduces the odds that unreliable elements in Chinese society will be able to email Western contacts.)
Ahem? They blew up what was arguably the most sacred icon of American capitalism and murdered 3000 civilians in an unprovoked attack, and you think what we did in Afghanistan was "an eye for an eye?"
Our response has been extremely restrained in both tone and intensity, and IMNSHO, that decision has been extremely wise.
If we were fighting this war with "An eye for an eye" as our doctrine, the commensurate response (both in terms of symbolism and needless civilian casualties) would have been to reduce Mecca to little more than a smudge in the middle of a 20-mile-wide glowing green glass plate.
> After all, even the most sophisticated lasers (or Missile Defense System) would have been useless to avert the WTC tragedy.
In a word, bullshit.
The ABM system we had in the 1960s would have been sufficient to take out any of those aircraft. As a last-ditch line of defence, analog computers and vaccuum tubes were able to put a telephone pole-sized missile at Mach 3 through the front windshield of incoming Soviet bombers. Accuracy was measured in feet at ranges of over 100 miles.
(The only point I'll concede in your argument is that, on 9/11, whether a battery commander would have been authorized to fire on a commercial airliner in time to prevent said airliner from reaching its target, is an open issue.)
Thankfully, passenger resistance stopped Flight 93 from reaching its target. Likewise, passenger resistance stopped the shoe-bomber from succeeding in his mission. The conclusion I draw from this is that an alert cvilian populace, prepared to take action on its own, has done a shitload more to secure air travel than anything else -- aside, of course, from the vital national interest served having our stuff stolen, and female significant others getting felt up, by high-school dropouts (but they're dropouts with badges!) every time we travel by air.
None of which has much to do with big-ass lasers, other than to say that, well, big-ass lasers are fucking cool, and if there's one thing that kicks more ass than a C-130 Spectre, it's a Spooky with a gigawatt laser. (Shit, that's just about the only weapon the Spectre doesn't carry yet ;-)
"Who would visit any confessional except for yuks?"
- Some Guy Who Nailed 95 Theses To A Cathedral Door A Long Time Ago.
>
> Last week I applied for a telemarketing job.
> Within hours I started getting calls, and I've gotten 5 a day since.
Since only a moron would want to be a telemarketer (i.e. would believe the "Make $$$ at our call center, d00d!" flyers on campus), it stands to reason you got placed on a "sucker's list" as a result of applying for the job.
If I were in a good mood I'd call it poetic justice and leave it at that.
But I'm not in a good mood today, so I'll just gloat by pointing out that payback's a bitch, and on behalf of the rest of us who no longer answer our phones because of pieces of subhuman shit such as yourself (oh, sorry, you only applied for the job, that makes you a wannabe subhuman piece of shit :) that I sincerely hope you never receive a non-telemarketing phone call again as long as you live.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Yeah. I can't say I blame him :(
Suggested exercise for nanae readers: Watch the TV show "COPS". You'd be amazed at how patient they are (at least on camera :). The lesson to be drawn is to presume innocence, and flame to a crisp only after proof positive that the guy in question Isn't Getting It.
While I'm at it, I think the oft-repeated nanae "You're supporting spammers by staying with the blocked ISP" argument is silly. The customer has no intent to support spammers. Indeed, the customer probably doesn't even care if he/she supports his/her ISP! No customer (with the possible exception of Enron) ever purchased connectivity with the intent of supporting an ISP,
The "pizza delivery" analogy gets around this -- the pizza guy doesn't care where your rent money goes, he just doesn't wanna deal with what he has to step over in your front lawn. Big difference.
Speakin' of 'za, I'm out to get some. Don't interpret a lack of further replies as rudeness, I'm chowin' down. It's Slack(tm) to me.
>
> If you don't like it, try to make it better.
Moderators - give that guy back a point.
I really should have written "If you don't like it, ask your landlord to evict the dealers. Then think about moving."
Or "If you don't like being listed in SPEWS, and you're not a spammer, ask your ISP to boot the spammers. You, as a customer of the listed ISP, have a hell of a lot more pull with that ISP than the spam recipients do."