> [the poster agrees with] 1. Banning propaganda solely intended to cause the breakdown and destruction of a democratic system, and spreading of hate [and claims this is different than] 2. Banning things you disagree with.
Question 1 for the poster:
A lot of folks have made jokes in recent times to the effect that "1984 is not a HOWTO document!".
Ought we to ban Orwell's 1984 a manual for what to do to institute a police state (because it can certainly be used as such, especially the appendix on the design of Newspeak), or ought we to encourage its dissemination as a manual describing what citizens should be on the lookout for?
Question 2 for the poster:
The arguments used for banning Mein Kampf because "other people might be seduced into fascism" sound a lot like the arguments for banning pr0n because "other people might decide sex for pleasure instead of procreation is fun", or banning strong crypto because "[terroists|pedophiles|drugdealers] could abuse it", or to ban disclosure of security holes because h4x0rz could abuse it.
How come the book-burners never say "I want this information banned because I have the self-restraint necessary to use this information responsibly?"
It's always someone else who can't be trusted, isn't it?
A Modest Proposal:
I propose the jailing of those who would limit my access to information, because in their hearts they see themselves as my master. They do not deserve this power. They cannot be trusted with it. Their ideas ought to be the ones suppressed in a free and democratic society.
> I hope for everyones sake that people realise how futile alot of this sort of legislation would be - none of it would actually
have stopped 9/11 or the anthrax stuff either.
Trivia question: Name the man who was arrested, tried, and convicted for a bus bombing in Israel in 1986, and subsequently released (after much arm-twisting by the US!) as a "political prisoner" as part of the Oslo Accords.
Hint: He capped off a lifelong career of "political protest" by piloting a planeload of civilians into the World Trade Center.
The terrorists didn't use encryption. Perhaps had we "abused" Mr. Atta's rights earlier -- or better yet, realized that "political prisoners" aren't always innocent -- there would be at least 3,000 people still alive, and one tower standing.
> Second, and even more importantly, this
monitoring cannot be used as evidence against the detainee.
Yes, this is crucial.
At the risk of getting my door knocked down by a bunch of Feebs in the middle of the night, I only see a conflict of interest if FBI ("cops") perform this monitoring, but not CIA or NSA ("spooks").
It's the cops' job to bust people who have commited crimes and testify against them in court. Cops shouldn't listen to attorney-defendant discussions, because they're likely to be testifying in court against the defendant.
It's the spooks' job to find badasses before crimes are committed and warn the cops ahead of time. Spooks ought to be able to listen to attorney-defendant discussions, because they sure as fsck won't be testifying in court.
There's a world of difference between Offiser Bob saying "Your Honor, we picked him up for speeding, searched him, and found drugs, which he denies knowing about, but the defendant admitted he was drug trafficking in his lawyer's office and that he hoped to get away with only a speeding ticket" and Spooky Sam phoning Officer Bob to say "Bob, you might just want to point your radar gun down Highway 12 at 3:00 in the morning and pick up whoever's speeding by exactly 4 miles per hour, because one of our agents has just tweaked someone's speedometer by 5 mph."
> It sounds like the DoJ is just seeking to formally recognize that some detainees may be seeking to use their
lawyers as agents of future violence, not just sources of legal advice, and wish to prevent that. Risky, but not
unreasonable.
Agreed.
Diplomatic immunity does not give blanket authorization to commit acts of espionage. (That is, diplomats may themselves be spied upon, and expelled if involved in activities inconsistent with their privileged diplomatic status.)
Likewise, attorney-client privilege ought not to be used as authorization to facilitate conspiracy. (By way of analogy, attorneys suspected of facilitating the crimes of their clients are as subject to search as their clients, and attorney-client privilege - a privilege granted by the state - ought to be revocable in cases where such facilitation has been established.)
> They should have the presumption of innocence. > >
Those who feel otherwise should try living in a police state. > >
Those who feel a police state is an improvement should stay there.
And if 200 million out of 300 million Americans are already convinced that a police state is an improvement, then what?
Easier by far, methinks, to relocate or re-educate the 100 million in the minority.
Of the minority, I would suspect that 90% or more can be trivially pacified by just waiting a year or two (c'mon, how many of you American Slashdotters left the country due to Clipper, CDA, COPPA, DMCA, and of the 99% of you still here, how many will leave due to the upcoming SSSCA?).
This leaves only a hard core of, at most, million or so unreliable elements for increased surveillance to identify and eliminate the few thousand who actually present any threat.
Not pretty, but considering the body count racked up by states which tried it achieved before the availability of widespread high-tech surveillance, nowhere near as ugly, nor as disruptive to the economy, as it would have been even in the J. Edgar Hoover era.
> Sometimes people are tried and (*gasp*) not convicted,
which according to our system means that they weren't guilty in the first place.
No, it means they would have been convicted, had the prosecution been aware of the defence's legal strategy in advance.
("Your Honor, we present this tape, during which the defendant admits responsibility for the crime to his landshark, and proposes an insanity defence. We're filing charges against the lawyer for harboring a fugitive, on the grounds that a lawyer, once he becomes aware of the guilt of his client, must either withdraw from the case or turn the fucker in!")
> it has one huge constitutional drawback - it
establishes two standards of treatment for defendants. If you're detained, the DoJ can eavesdrop on your
conversations with your lawyer. If you can post bail, they can't. (Think they'll be able to bug lawyer's offices?
ha ha ha ha!)
Huh? We just passed the laws that would let us bug the lawyers' offices. (Think about the implication of "roving wiretap" on a suspect - and the idea that you might want to "wiretap" the things he says using vocal cords and air as a transmission medium. In order to minimize the risk of accidentally infringing upon the lawyer's right not to be wiretapped, you use some sort of voiceprint tech to record only the criminal's voice, not the voice of his lawyer, or the voices of the lawyer's other clients.)
Or did all landsharks suddently become counterintelligence experts, equipped with s00per-s33kr1t goggles of bug-detection?
> Tick, to my mind, is an ideal hero icon for the current generation. He has good intentions, but isn't too aware of the fine
details (well, even some gross details) of the world around him. He tries hard, and things tend to work out after a
fashion, but usually not as a result of any particular brilliance on his part. Tick fulfills the iconic image of style over
substance, of good intentions versus understanding, of the brawn and machismo not directed by a terribly powerful
cranium, and of accidental destruction as a consequence of his good intentions and bungling execution.
Tick, in other words, is J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the infinitely fallible superhero.
I think that's why I admire him so much. I agree with you -- he's defintely the ideal heroic type for today's confused times.
> 1. Be less edgey, the tick would have NEVER said "BITCH". Unfortunately, that comment alone probably killed a lot of
familes from watching it.
Hmph. I spewed coffee all over myself when I heard that. Methinks they know the Tick's core audience (rabid cult fans such as those likely to post to/.) very well.
Re:Ahh ... those were the days.
on
RLX Gets Denser
·
· Score: 1
> I even heard someone who managed to run a prerelease of WinXP on his HP-80 Calculator.
Small wonder, then, that HP shut down their calculator division in protest!
> So RMS wanted an alternative to KDE bacause it was not "Free Enough" and created GNOME. They build the proyect
on GTK Toolkit which is LGPL. LGPL allows to be used by non-Free products (see why LPGL is bad [fsf.org]) > >But now KDE is completely GPL and Free (Qt Toolkit now is GPL). So it is the perfect Free Desktop. Meanwhile
GNOME have walk the oposite path and now is commercial.
And you tell your CTO that this is why you have to write two versions of any GUI-based application if you want to get into the Linux market, and make sure you compile each version with the right libraries, and that the end user somehow know what libraries they need, he says "two versions? and what the fuck user knows about libraries?", nixes the project, and people wonder why there's such a dearth of graphical applications for Linux.
> I gauren-damn-tee that you don't, and won't, listen to *all* the the files on that 40 gigs. I would wager that 20%
you actually will ever play, and the rest are taking up space.
Over several years of collecting MP3z and/or ripping/encoding your own CDs, yeah, you will listen to everything in your collection, at least once.
If you're ripping your own CDs, you won't know the rip/encode was "good" until you've listened to the MP3.
If you're l33ching MP3z, you won't know you "got" the song (that is, you won't know that the idjit posting the file did his job of previewing the MP3 before he uploaded it) until you've listened to the MP3.
Thus, any serious MP3 collector will probably have listened to every piece in his or her collection at least once, and arguably multiple times.
> [It's network hogs like this that...]... bog down ISPs and cause people to "Dump broadband, and dig out their modem".
No, it's the ability to get music and video in minutes, not hours, that caused people to dump modems and get broadband.
Remember that Qworst commercial - a seedy cheap-azz hotel, and the disinterested desk clerk saying that each room "...has every movie ever made, available on demand"?
We've got that, through P2P and USENET.
The only problem was that MPAA, RIAA, Disney and AOL/TW wanted you to only see small parts of what they "owned", they wanted you to see it on their schedule, and they wanted you to stream it, dumping all the bits in the bit bucket so you could pay again to listen to, or view it again.
That, as we know, failed.
But P2P systems that allowed you to save the bits to your hard drive (and fuck the intellectual property landsharks) grew and flourished, and contributed materially to demand for broadband.
I say again, it's network hogs like P2P and Napster and USENET that could have saved broadband.
Instead, the fucking landsharks killed them, and with them, killed demand for broadband.
> If one could use animals to gather ground-level surveillance, it would save human
operative's lives.
Actually, I agree. The concept is great. The execution, on the other hand, left much to be desired.
I have visions of two agents looking at each other, then at the squashed cat, and saying "OK, suppose we got this large wooden badger..." as they realize that someone forgot that getting a cat to go where you want it to go is a nontrivial proposition.
I think the Japanese experiments where they glued mini-cameras onto cockroaches, and controlled cockroach movements by remote control, are a good step in the right direction.
And for those who don't enjoy the cloak-and-dagger stuff, it would also come in handy for search-and-rescue operations.
(Though in response to your "Guard 1 / Guard 2" scenario, I'd think "VOA: 'Godless Taliban Guards Machine-Gun Kitten to Death! Click here for.rm file'" would be more appropriate:-)
Sick observation:...because obviously, footage of Taliban troops machine-gunning human females to death didn't outrage us enough over the past 5-6 years. Maybe kittens are what it'll take.
Slashdot Mirror
Question 1 for the poster:
A lot of folks have made jokes in recent times to the effect that "1984 is not a HOWTO document!".
Ought we to ban Orwell's 1984 a manual for what to do to institute a police state (because it can certainly be used as such, especially the appendix on the design of Newspeak), or ought we to encourage its dissemination as a manual describing what citizens should be on the lookout for?
Question 2 for the poster:
The arguments used for banning Mein Kampf because "other people might be seduced into fascism" sound a lot like the arguments for banning pr0n because "other people might decide sex for pleasure instead of procreation is fun", or banning strong crypto because "[terroists|pedophiles|drugdealers] could abuse it", or to ban disclosure of security holes because h4x0rz could abuse it.
How come the book-burners never say "I want this information banned because I have the self-restraint necessary to use this information responsibly?"
It's always someone else who can't be trusted, isn't it?
A Modest Proposal:
I propose the jailing of those who would limit my access to information, because in their hearts they see themselves as my master. They do not deserve this power. They cannot be trusted with it. Their ideas ought to be the ones suppressed in a free and democratic society.
Trivia question: Name the man who was arrested, tried, and convicted for a bus bombing in Israel in 1986, and subsequently released (after much arm-twisting by the US!) as a "political prisoner" as part of the Oslo Accords.
Hint: He capped off a lifelong career of "political protest" by piloting a planeload of civilians into the World Trade Center.
The terrorists didn't use encryption. Perhaps had we "abused" Mr. Atta's rights earlier -- or better yet, realized that "political prisoners" aren't always innocent -- there would be at least 3,000 people still alive, and one tower standing.
Yes, this is crucial.
At the risk of getting my door knocked down by a bunch of Feebs in the middle of the night, I only see a conflict of interest if FBI ("cops") perform this monitoring, but not CIA or NSA ("spooks").
It's the cops' job to bust people who have commited crimes and testify against them in court. Cops shouldn't listen to attorney-defendant discussions, because they're likely to be testifying in court against the defendant.
It's the spooks' job to find badasses before crimes are committed and warn the cops ahead of time. Spooks ought to be able to listen to attorney-defendant discussions, because they sure as fsck won't be testifying in court.
There's a world of difference between Offiser Bob saying "Your Honor, we picked him up for speeding, searched him, and found drugs, which he denies knowing about, but the defendant admitted he was drug trafficking in his lawyer's office and that he hoped to get away with only a speeding ticket" and Spooky Sam phoning Officer Bob to say "Bob, you might just want to point your radar gun down Highway 12 at 3:00 in the morning and pick up whoever's speeding by exactly 4 miles per hour, because one of our agents has just tweaked someone's speedometer by 5 mph."
Close, but no cigar.
"5 amendments scratched offa the paper, five amendments scratched off..."
Look in the bright side - they have to stop before amendment 16!
Martin Niemoller left out the part where they came for the trite.
Agreed.
Diplomatic immunity does not give blanket authorization to commit acts of espionage. (That is, diplomats may themselves be spied upon, and expelled if involved in activities inconsistent with their privileged diplomatic status.)
Likewise, attorney-client privilege ought not to be used as authorization to facilitate conspiracy. (By way of analogy, attorneys suspected of facilitating the crimes of their clients are as subject to search as their clients, and attorney-client privilege - a privilege granted by the state - ought to be revocable in cases where such facilitation has been established.)
>
> Those who feel otherwise should try living in a police state.
>
> Those who feel a police state is an improvement should stay there.
And if 200 million out of 300 million Americans are already convinced that a police state is an improvement, then what?
Easier by far, methinks, to relocate or re-educate the 100 million in the minority.
Of the minority, I would suspect that 90% or more can be trivially pacified by just waiting a year or two (c'mon, how many of you American Slashdotters left the country due to Clipper, CDA, COPPA, DMCA, and of the 99% of you still here, how many will leave due to the upcoming SSSCA?).
This leaves only a hard core of, at most, million or so unreliable elements for increased surveillance to identify and eliminate the few thousand who actually present any threat.
Not pretty, but considering the body count racked up by states which tried it achieved before the availability of widespread high-tech surveillance, nowhere near as ugly, nor as disruptive to the economy, as it would have been even in the J. Edgar Hoover era.
No, it means they would have been convicted, had the prosecution been aware of the defence's legal strategy in advance.
("Your Honor, we present this tape, during which the defendant admits responsibility for the crime to his landshark, and proposes an insanity defence. We're filing charges against the lawyer for harboring a fugitive, on the grounds that a lawyer, once he becomes aware of the guilt of his client, must either withdraw from the case or turn the fucker in!")
Huh? We just passed the laws that would let us bug the lawyers' offices. (Think about the implication of "roving wiretap" on a suspect - and the idea that you might want to "wiretap" the things he says using vocal cords and air as a transmission medium. In order to minimize the risk of accidentally infringing upon the lawyer's right not to be wiretapped, you use some sort of voiceprint tech to record only the criminal's voice, not the voice of his lawyer, or the voices of the lawyer's other clients.)
Or did all landsharks suddently become counterintelligence experts, equipped with s00per-s33kr1t goggles of bug-detection?
Tick, in other words, is J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the infinitely fallible superhero.
I think that's why I admire him so much. I agree with you -- he's defintely the ideal heroic type for today's confused times.
Hmph. I spewed coffee all over myself when I heard that. Methinks they know the Tick's core audience (rabid cult fans such as those likely to post to /.) very well.
Small wonder, then, that HP shut down their calculator division in protest!
>
>But now KDE is completely GPL and Free (Qt Toolkit now is GPL). So it is the perfect Free Desktop. Meanwhile GNOME have walk the oposite path and now is commercial.
And you tell your CTO that this is why you have to write two versions of any GUI-based application if you want to get into the Linux market, and make sure you compile each version with the right libraries, and that the end user somehow know what libraries they need, he says "two versions? and what the fuck user knows about libraries?", nixes the project, and people wonder why there's such a dearth of graphical applications for Linux.
My take on his shift? Very simple.
"Oh, fuck. The privacy-advocacy market is dead. Time to switch political viewpoints and save my career by joining the winning team."
And even more fortunately, Steve Ballmer wasn't leaning over your monitor, which would also drench it.
Over several years of collecting MP3z and/or ripping/encoding your own CDs, yeah, you will listen to everything in your collection, at least once.
If you're ripping your own CDs, you won't know the rip/encode was "good" until you've listened to the MP3.
If you're l33ching MP3z, you won't know you "got" the song (that is, you won't know that the idjit posting the file did his job of previewing the MP3 before he uploaded it) until you've listened to the MP3.
Thus, any serious MP3 collector will probably have listened to every piece in his or her collection at least once, and arguably multiple times.
A: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Q: Uh, never mind... please stop dancing around, Mr. Ballmer, and for god's sake, man, use some fuckin' anti-perspirant!
No, it's the ability to get music and video in minutes, not hours, that caused people to dump modems and get broadband.
Remember that Qworst commercial - a seedy cheap-azz hotel, and the disinterested desk clerk saying that each room "...has every movie ever made, available on demand"?
We've got that, through P2P and USENET.
The only problem was that MPAA, RIAA, Disney and AOL/TW wanted you to only see small parts of what they "owned", they wanted you to see it on their schedule, and they wanted you to stream it, dumping all the bits in the bit bucket so you could pay again to listen to, or view it again.
That, as we know, failed.
But P2P systems that allowed you to save the bits to your hard drive (and fuck the intellectual property landsharks) grew and flourished, and contributed materially to demand for broadband.
I say again, it's network hogs like P2P and Napster and USENET that could have saved broadband. Instead, the fucking landsharks killed them, and with them, killed demand for broadband.
> "Mommy, I want an accoustic kitty...
Yeah. Wait'll SONY hears about this.
Fuck AIBO!
Actually, I agree. The concept is great. The execution, on the other hand, left much to be desired.
I have visions of two agents looking at each other, then at the squashed cat, and saying "OK, suppose we got this large wooden badger..." as they realize that someone forgot that getting a cat to go where you want it to go is a nontrivial proposition.
I think the Japanese experiments where they glued mini-cameras onto cockroaches, and controlled cockroach movements by remote control, are a good step in the right direction.
And for those who don't enjoy the cloak-and-dagger stuff, it would also come in handy for search-and-rescue operations.
(Though in response to your "Guard 1 / Guard 2" scenario, I'd think "VOA: 'Godless Taliban Guards Machine-Gun Kitten to Death! Click here for .rm file'" would be more appropriate :-)
Sick observation: ...because obviously, footage of Taliban troops machine-gunning human females to death didn't outrage us enough over the past 5-6 years. Maybe kittens are what it'll take.
Well, at least it's nice to see our government standing up for kitten rights by harassing people who make jokes about h4x0ring kittens.
What was that old saying about people who accuse someone of doing "X" are more than likely guilty of "X" themselves?
Napster is to USENET as the record store is to radio.
(...and to get back onto the initial subject of the thread, I speak as one who discovered Rammstein on USENET before they got airplay.)
The sick thing is that after only four replies, I'll bet the metamoderators can no longer tell which "Bill and Hilary" we were talking about.
Great. Now I'll never look at a big wad of bills the same way again.