> I've grown-up in the middle of Pennsylvania's soft coal country, and have been surrounded my whole
life by HUGE piles of coal ash and red dog. This stuff is quite possibly the worst environmental hazard
that I've ever seen.
Amen.
And for all you enviroweenies talking about how we need Kyoto, and how horrible the US is for burning fossil fuels:
From a site on the weird chemistry going on around the Centralia Coal Fire, which has only burned a town in PA, something for comparison:
A very large underground fire burns through large coal beds in
Northern China. The fires consume up to 200 million tons of coal
each year. This fire is quite a bit larger then the largest
Pennsylvania fire (Centralia), releasing almost "as much carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere as do all the cars in the United States"
(Kittl, 1999).
Now, could someone explain to me again why nuclear power is bad? Sheesh.
> Also, you might want to consider faith based views on killing one's self.
If you've managed to achieve immortality through the clever use of nipple rings, why would you give a damn about the afterlife?
(That is, if you achieve immortality, I have a hunch God's gonna be more pissed at you for breaking his monopoly on eternal life than for your subsequent suicide. He'll probably thank you for offing yourself, because if you're otherwise immortal, how the hell can He send you to HELL for infringing on his immortality patent;-)
> There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the
information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that
that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
There's little any Government would have to say against that. Unfortunately, that "little" reads as follows:
"Oh shit, that also means us!"
It would therefore be followed up with a ban on use of the software, with draconian penalties.
> > [over 10000 years] how would we
show the people of the future that this is a BAD building to enter? > >
Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working.
Agreed. The last thing you want is a "grand and visible emblem".
My solutions, in order of preference:
1) Use it in breeder reactors. Turn it into something less dangerous (shorter half-life) and get some energy out of it. Sticking this much energy in a hole in the ground is a waste.
2) Stick it (if you must waste it!) in a hole in the ground with the rest of the waste. Call the place Yucca Mountain. Guard the hell out of it while our civilization lasts, but place no big-ass warning signs designed to attract curiosity-seekers for the next 10,000 years.
If our descendants in the year 12,001 have at least our level of technology, they'll know it's bad juju by the time they get anywhere near it. (And they'll probably wonder why the hell we buried all this useful Pu-239 instead of using it to power our cities!!)
If our descendants have stone-age technology, they won't be able to dig through a mile of rock salt. No warning needed.
If our descendants have 19th-century technology, no matter how intimidating the warning, they'll dig their way in, the same way we dug our way into the Pyramids. "Look, the ancient Americans placed big ugly spikes and pictures of dying people all over this site to warn us off. Silly primitives."
(Or in the words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, "Great! We really must be onto something if they're trying to kill us!")
No warnings, no memorials, nothing that could interest a passer-by, be he a civilian or an archaeologist.
Better idea: A memorial (in the traditional sense) to those who died to bring us this technology. Your contributions will not be forgotten.
> I'm not sure that I can agree with that. So, the FBI is free to act counter to the laws of other
countries, in order to aprehend criminals in the United States? Really?
It appears so. (I'm not saying it's a good precedent either, but...)
> So what happens when the russian cops file extredition papers with the US state depertment, to
extradite the FBI agents who commmitted these crimes? Do you think they'd be honored? Sounds
like an international incident waiting to happen.
Sounds like a calculated risk, one the FBI was willing to take. Knowing the FBI, they probably never bothered to check, but I'm sure a phone call to the Department of State would have clarified things pretty quickly: "No, they probably won't charge you, and if they do, we'll smooth it out for you."
> So then what? Perhaps Martian law applies? Certainly there is some set of laws that cover access to
this property of a Russian national that existed on Russian soil...
I think what Judge Coughenour is saying is that yes, the FBI agents' actions were against Russian law, but that that was something for the Russian cops to investigate/charge/bust 'em for, and the Russian courts to sentence 'em for, not the FBI.
Which is to say, if you're an FBI agent cracking Russian computers, stay out of Russia. (Well, unless your name is Robert Phillip Hannsen and you're a mole working for the Russians;-)
> yes, CD sales are up... because thanks to Napster, people who
would otherwise be out of the loop have now heard of the Swamp Terrorists, Birmingham 6, C-tec, Front 242, Front
Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Jethro Tull, and countless other bands and performers.... none of which are RIAA "A
list" contrived acts.
Whoa, never thought I'd see Tull on that list!
More seriously - I've paid for nearly complete discographies of most of the bands you mention. (Uh-oh, they're coming to take me away!)
MP3s have come in handy for filling in the gaps - the track that only appeared on the Japanese release of some obscure single, etc. etc., again - things RIAA would never market down here.
MP3s have also come in handy for discovering new stuff - there are just too many bands to go into a meatspace-based CD store and spend 2-3 hours listening to a couple of tracks from "everything" before finding stuff you like. The MP3 newsgroups solve this problem for me - a never-ending fire-hose of neat stuff to sip from, that I never even knew existed.
Cheezy plug for one of many such cool bands: S.P.O.C.K. A little more techno/trancey than the industrial stuff, but very fscking cool. SPOCK:1999 is unbelievably tongue-in-cheek, and equally-unbelievably dancey.
> And a steak prepared in a toaster oven can be quite tasty indeed - it's really not so different from an
oven.
Thanks for backing me up - I figured a lot of grilling purists would rake me over the coals for that - hell, I felt a little queasy (as in "this is wrong, God will smite me for my heresy") when I first tried it, but I was in an apartment, which made grilling not-an-option.
Take yer steak, and spend another minute rubbing it down with pepper, salt, and some sage. The layer of spices on the outside of the steak seems to help hold the moisture. You can also brush lightly with olive oil before applying the rub. (An investment of $10.00 in a hand-operated pepper grinder can really pay off here - IMHO the generic stuff in your pepper shaker is pretty flavorless compared to any equally-generic "look at the pretty colors" multi-peppercorn blend).
All that said, I still prefer steak grilled the way God intended. But the toaster-oven method (broil, yes, but don't overcook it!) works well enough in a pinch. Then again, I like my steaks medium-rare to medium, so I'm not sure if it would work as well if you like it brown-all-the-way-through. And I'm lucky in that I can get a nice thick (1.5" to 2") cut of steak, so drying-out isn't really a problem.
On to the more interesting (and in many cases, valid) objections:
A baked potato ain't McD's fries. Well, yeah. But neither is a steak a Big Mac. I invoke poetic licence here, because I also happen to like McD's fries every now and then. And as someone correctly pointed out, the cost to duplicate those at home would be astronomical:)
Cost of time spent in cleanup after cooking. Good point. I'll wimp out here and suggest you cook the potato on a paper plate, on which you can also eat the steak. Time for cleaning the grilling rack, from experience, is about 30 seconds of scrubbing, and can be reduced to zero if you get creative with aluminum foil (as long as your "creative" remains within the oven manufacturer's recommendations, but when I tried it, I found I spent more time fiddling with the foil than I would have cleaning the broiling rack...)
Energy costs of cooking the steak. If I assume my oven eats 5kW (wild-ass-guess), then a 15-minute session is a little over a kWh, or $0.20-30. Nowhere near the $2.00 that someone suggested.
Your time is worth money. Yeah, but how much useful work can you get done driving to McD's? At least I can read/. while my steak cooks. On the other hand, if McD's is en-route between my $RESIDENCE (I guess $HOME would be wrong here!) and my $WORKPLACE, there's a convenience factor. And you'd likely draw some serious stares if you tried to do this at work, as opposed to just popping in some generic frozen food into the microwave, or hitting McD's with the cow orkers.
E. Coli. Not really mentioned in this thread, but I figured I'd mention it since I said I like medium-rare steaks. Your E. Coli risk with a steak is minimal - one cut of meat from one animal, with a very low surface area per pound of meat. Hamburger doesn't work like that - maximal surface area per pound, and multiple animals ground together. Although I'd recommend against either option, I'd rather eat a whole steak raw than an ounce of raw hamburger. (And I'd point out that good cooking practices can reduce the risk of E.Coli contamination in burgers to nil as well. Just cook it 'till it's well-done.)
Fine if you know how to cook. Not brought up, but worthy of mention. You learn cooking the same way you learn hacking - goof around, see what works, see what doesn't. I'd recommend anyone try it. If you don't like it, there's always restaurants who'll do it for you. But if you do find you enjoy it, you'll get good at it, pretty fast.
That $0.50 can of Coke to make my numbers add up. Guilty as charged. All I was really trying to do was show that the costs in time and money were comparable. Of course, my worst crime here was in cutting that 16-oz strip loin in half to get the cost of the steak portion down to $3.50, but hey, it's not like you got half a pound of actual meat on that Big Mac, is it?;-)
Soneone else said: > That said both McDonalds and Microsoft make a product that works as advertised and actually is capable of fulfilling most of peoples expectations.
The product just does the job and so people will buy it because they don't want to deal with it on thier own. I don't think McDonalds breeds stupid
and uncaring people, I think that stupid and uncaring people bread McDonalds and they are free to do that.
I think this poster put it better than I did. There's nothing wrong with McD's, it's just that there are alternatives if you look around. If it weren't for people willing to forego these potentially-superior alternatives for the sake of perceived convenience (which applies just as well for MSFT vs. Linux), neither organization would stay in business.
But my mind still boggles when I hear people say that they go to McDonald's because they can't afford a steak dinner...
> But people like the convenience, the low price and the
fact that they know what they are getting.
And that's the depressing part. Because if you really look at it, fast food is neither convenient nor cheap.
Big Mac, Fries, and a Coke. About $2.00. Plus maybe a 10-minute drive each way - call it $1.00 for gas and time. And the joy of standing in line waiting for your order, sitting in an annoying fast-food-restaurant seat, etc.
Potato: $0.25, and that's a huge potato.
New York Strip: $7.00 a pound at my local butcher. Take one and cut it in half.
Coke: $0.50/can, bought in bulk.
Total cost: $4.00 for an 8-oz NY Strip loin, baked potato, and Coke.
Total time: 5 minutes to defrost the steak in the microwave, then 15 minutes on the baking/grill-rack in a toaster oven at 350-400F, while the potato gets nuked in parallel for 10 minutes.
For fifty cents more, you can have a goddamn steak in the same time it takes to go to McDonald's.
McDonald's stays in business for the same reason Microsoft does: Market presence and a[n ad campaign designed to ensure the continued existence of a] customer base that's wholly-ignorant of the existence of alternatives.
Well, under DMCA, if RIAA mails you (if you're a US ISP) and tells you that Message-ID: $FOO1.. FOO45 represent parts 1-45 of a copyright violation, you still have to delete it or issue (forged) cancels.
Of course, no other USENET server has to accept the cancels. And it's likely that by the time you received the DMCA complaint, the articles will have expired anyways:)
More interestingly - absmp3.beatles isn't carried at my ISP. Rationale - the Beatles don't want their work posted on USENET. This newsgroup charter implies that the content of the group would exclusively consist of copyright violations. So my ISP (wisely, IMHO) chooses not to carry the group. But absmp3 has no such charter. Could be indie groups posting their own work. Could be the Grateful Dead, who don't mind sharing. Could also be a lot of copyrighted stuff too. But because absmp3 is "all of the above", my ISP chooses to carry it, because it's not clear that every post is intended to be a copyright violation. (It's just a lucky coincidence;-)
Anyways, RIAA hasn't left USENET alone. They're no doubt logging NNTP-Posting-Host: headers and keeping track of who the largest posters are, and sending mails to various ISPs asking them to either nuke the poster or fork over the info for a lawsuit. Nuking the poster for TOS violation is probably cheaper (one mail to abuse@), and has much less negative PR impact (than a lawsuit), so that's probably the way they're going.
Thankfully, just as reading USENET is like drinking from a fire hose, so's suing MP3 posters off of USENET. At least for the time being. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has with the increase in the size of a full feed. What the hell, at least I can say I was there during the Golden Age, survived Endless September, and still managed to get enough out-of-print music out of it during the "My God, It's Still Alive!" stage to last me a lifetime.
(Actually, that may be the other reason RIAA has left USENET alone - RIAA makes most of its CD sales revenue off the latest teenybopper band single, not the back-catalogue. Napster's loaded with top-40. USENET's the exact opposite - the top 40's there, but the balance has shifted to favor the rare/obscure/OOP stuff. Much more interesting mix of stuff, IMHO.
> GOOGLE GROUPS is an anagram of LOG RUSE: GO GOP!
Of course it's a plot to make all our pr0n belong to the $epublicans! Why else would English professors be obsessing about phallic symbols and bathroom tile?:)
> Currently, it is rather difficult to post something anonymously to a newsgroup. Especially if
your only newsgroup access is via your ISP.
Mail-to-News gateway. St00pidly-adminned Sendmail 8.6 box (just read your spam to find 'em!) or a cypherpunk chain of anonymous remailers. Library or university.
> Usenet seems in the best shape in ages - the endless september seems to have ended.
While it's better than it was in 1998-9, I wouldn't go that far... A full feed now saturates an OC-3 (~260G/d), and the types of cluelessness now exhibited is the type that hurts.
Current record-holder: Someone who posted 1.8G of MP3s in a single day through his brand-new cablemodem. "75M/d recommended posting limit in absmp3? What limit? They can't possibly mean me! I've got a cablemodem! I'm cooler than that!"
The scary bit is that this guy was a drop in the bucket - there are groups where 600M DivX'd movies and ISO images are thrown around with regularity.
Meanwhile, transit servers continue to drop articles on the floor as the load escalates. Bad enough to try and justify to the Board of Directors why you need another terabyte of storage, but another OC-3?:-)
Yeah, USENET was never designed for large binaries , but if the binaries cause ISPs to drop all USENET support, the text groups may go with 'em. Google's archives aren't much use without a backbone of transit servers to propagate the articles. If Google becomes the only way to access USENET, the distinction between USENET and any other "message board" web site goes away.
> And no duh, becuase the engine arrangement in Discovery most certainly isn't meant to harken to
bathroom tiles; it is a sensible engineering solution which was probably approved by Kubrick after
it originated with a model-maker or engineer (or combination thereof).
Yeah, but you're trying to talk sense to an academic. Once they get their mind wrapped around something, no matter how crazy, they cannot be budged. (I mean, there's grant money riding on it!)
Cripes, I've seen academics argue that real rockets - as in, the ones we use today - are shaped the way they are, not by engineering constraints, but because they were originally built by male weaponeers, who wanted them to look as phallic as possible.
They're serious about this - as though somehow rockets would somehow be shaped like giant flabby Earth-Mother Gaia-Figure tits if they'd been invented by women instead of men.
(Reading this article was a great reminder why I left University to work in the private sector... the day I got my degree, I was fuckin' gone, man, I couldn't get away fast enough;-)
> Is it just me, or does this author seem incredibly petty?
Cynical answer: The author is likely an academic - perhaps a Ph.D. in English Literature - pettiness and endless squabbling over mind-pummelingly insignificant crap is part of his job description.
Insightful answer: he's a geek - like you and me - except that he's a geek of English-Lit. In the same way that you and I can bitch for hours about the merits of vi vs. EMACS, or GNOME vs. KDE, he can bitch for hours about how Discovery was more about a man with cool shades and bathroom tiles up his ass than it was a really neat-looking model of what a spaceship to Jupiter might look like.
Take whichever answer you like. I still kinda prefer the cynical version myself. Because even though the insightful version is more likely a reflection of the truth, I refuse to believe that the emacs-vs-vi debate is petty. I mean, eight megs and constantly swapping, how could anyone use emacs over the wonder that is vi, and how could anyone fail to realize that the debate is hardly petty, I mean, you watch 2001, but you live within your text editor!
For us, sure. But what about those who don't know what they're buying? For those who don't even get the chance to opt out?
The scariest moment I had last year was when I went and helped fix a co-worker's Dell machine. "It crashes when we read our email".
Out-of-the-box, it had "built-in" Internet through AT&T. I don't know what it used for a browser, but it wasn't IE or Nutscrape. It was this little goofy window with big buttons and, of course, constantly-refreshing banners. If I hadn't known better, I'd have sworn it was AllAdvantage or some other free-if-you-look-at-the-ads thing. Nope - they swore up and down that "this is how it came, this is how they told us to read our email", and showed me their monthly bill for internet access.
(The reason they couldn't read their mail was that one of the *advertising* partners had spammed them - with gobs of HTML - and the retarded email client blew up on a buffer overflow when it tried to render the HTML in the Subject: header. As if I didn't need any other excuse to tell them that privacy-invasion is the default, not the exception.
I never thought I'd say that I felt good about seeing someone run Outbreak Excess and IE5. But after a couple of hours of patches, they were at least able to read mail using the client they were used to using at work, and browse the web without being tracked any more than normal.
It was a real wake-up call for me. I'd recommend any/.er walk over to a Gateway Country booth or talk to a clueless-newbie friend (you may have to ask your friends to introduce you to their friends to find one!;-) who just got a new Dell "with all the goodies already set up".
Would I need Xanax if something like Predictive's technology comes pre-installed on WinXP? (Well, I suppose not, because I'd rather eat a pound of broken glass, shit it all out, and roll in the resulting mess until I bled to death than run XP.)
But when someone says "it doesn't hurt children", they usually mean because I'm trying to distract you from the fact that it was designed to hurt you.
> Predictive's Mr. Hosea acknowledges that the company's new technology isn't foolproof. But he notes that Predictive doesn't permit ads for
pornography, alcohol or firearms. And the technology increases the chances that children won't see ads targeted at older people, he says.
Well, then, I guess if it's designed not to harm the pwecious chylllldrun, it's OK!
Way to go, Mr. Hosea! You're a really swell guy! I mean, now that you've told me you won't use it to hurt chillllldrun, I think it's really awesome that you can can monitor my mouse-gesture and record my every keystroke! After all, isn't any privacy invasion justified as long as the invader promises that not a single chyuld is harmed?
(Yeah, Hosea, and the rest of his scumbag marketroids, I've got a fuckin' gesture for you, and it's got nothin' to do with my mouse.)
> I would dare
say that Slashdot is worse than CNN in that most of the people here appear to know what
they're talking about, but in the vast majority of cases, they don't.
The reason I rely on/. for news more than CNN is because on Slashdot, when a poster fucks up, they get flamed for it, and the truth comes out. Every reader sees what the mistake was, and what the correction is.
To the great unwashed, the talking heads on CNN also "appear" to know what they're talking about, and in the vast majority of cases (we know damn well) they don't. When CNN's talking heads fuck up, the great unwashed never finds out what the truth was.
> While I admit Quebec language laws have gone somewhat ridiculous, I just can't equate "requiring any
English contents to be translated in French" with "deporting and/or killing all English-speaking
Canadians".
1) I don't think Godwin's Law applies when you're actually talking about a political movement where many of its early leaders sympathized with the government of Germany during WW2.
History moment: There was an intense Anglo/Protestant vs. Francophone/Catholic ethnic mess going on in Quebec since the 1700s. Anti-Semitism was part of the baggage you happened to carry if you were a Quebec Catholic in the 1930s. Supporting the Germans in WW2 was natural for a Quebecois - because WW2 was portrayed to them as "just another silly British war like WW1" and they were still collectively bitter over that. Hence the Quebecois opposition to Conscription, which was the Canadian/British policy, and the resulting increase in sympathy with the you-know-whos in Germany. The fact that the German government shared the hardliners' hate-on for the Jews just made it easier for the meme to spread among the French population of Quebec.)
2) This isn't about requiring English documents to be translated into French. When laws call for fines (and if you don't pay the fine, presumably imprisonment) for putting up English signs and web sites, when laws call for unilingual French - outlawing English - at workplaces over 50 people, and so on, I don't see it as anything other than the start of a programme whose goals are indistinguishable from any other ethnic cleanser's. It's the thin edge of a sick wedge.
Perhaps a look at the demographics of Montreal during the period 1970 through 1990 would suffice?
ObGodwin: ("We don't persecute $ETHNICs, they just all seem to want to leave! We even help them pack!")
I'll grant you that ethnic cleansing is too strong a word for what the PQ is doing now. How 'bout "linguistic profiling"?
("You sir, you with the English on your website, gotta send the tonguetroopers over to your store to make sure you're not putting English signs up." seems pretty comparable to "You sir, you with the black/gold/green bumpersticker and the dreadlocks, pull over, you're doing 31 in a 30 zone, gotta check you out!")
As for the straw man accusation, I beg to split a hair:
I agree entirely with the poster that coercion may very well be the only way to preserve French in Canada.
When I read the post, however, it looked (to me) like the poster was presenting this thesis in a sympathetic context, implying that such coercion was justified.
Upon rereading the post (and parent post) in context, -the part of the article that says "I'm not sure how many
Quebecois would choose to continue carrying the handicap of a language spoken by almost no one else in this
hemisphere without these laws." and the part that says "I don't see [the loss of French in Michigan] as a loss", don't appear to advocate such coercion.
Good call. I didn't set up a straw man per se... but I sure misinterpreted the post to which I was replying;)
> the people who care about preserving French in Canada aren't
necessarily mistaken about coercion being the only way to do it.
Ah, I see, so if $COERCION is required to preserve $ETHNICITY in $GEOGRAPHICAL_REGION, that makes it OK?
I suppose you have no problem, then, with what happened in Bosnia... or Rwanda... or Cambodia... or, well, we won't mention that little country in Europe 60 years ago that decided it was OK to use a little bit of force to gain some "living space" for its ethnically-pure citizens.
Do a google search on "pur laine" (lit: "pure wool"). You'll see that there is a sizable segment of the Quebec population that thinks of itself as racially-pure.
Better source: The story of Jean-louis Roux, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, and his time as a Nazi sympathizer in the early 40s where he took part in Montreal's little mini-Kristallnacht: Source: 1996 B'Nai Brith article.
Bottom line: There are some (to use the clinical diagnosis) seriously sick motherfuckers in Quebec. They have a hell of a lot of power, given how sick they are - they've kept a lot of secrets, and they've had a lot of cooperation in covering things up. Quebec language policies are just the tip of the iceberg - the underlying ethnic nationalism is a real problem, and a real threat, to fundamental freedoms in Canada.
> I am an advocate of freedom of speach, but [...] They did break local law, as silly as it may be.
I like this guy, he's funny. He's an advocate for freedom of speech - even if he can't spell it.
Like my Dad's army buddy, who said "Fuck the war in VietNam! Of course I hate the draft, but it's against the law not to register for the draft, man! Ya gotta register!"
Or my great-uncle, who said "Ah'm all fer civil rights, but don't they know it's agin' the law fer niggers t'drink from the whites-only fountain!"
And my great-great-grandpappy, who said "Hey, universal suffrage is a cool idea, but don't those silly dames realize it's against the law for women to vote?"
So I guess I'm all for freedom of speech... as long as the government hasn't outlawed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen.
And for all you enviroweenies talking about how we need Kyoto, and how horrible the US is for burning fossil fuels:
From a site on the weird chemistry going on around the Centralia Coal Fire, which has only burned a town in PA, something for comparison:
Now, could someone explain to me again why nuclear power is bad? Sheesh.
Slashdot: Now THAT would be an interview! Un-ALTERED reproduction and DISSEMINA... oh, never mind...
If you've managed to achieve immortality through the clever use of nipple rings, why would you give a damn about the afterlife?
(That is, if you achieve immortality, I have a hunch God's gonna be more pissed at you for breaking his monopoly on eternal life than for your subsequent suicide. He'll probably thank you for offing yourself, because if you're otherwise immortal, how the hell can He send you to HELL for infringing on his immortality patent ;-)
There's little any Government would have to say against that. Unfortunately, that "little" reads as follows:
"Oh shit, that also means us!"
It would therefore be followed up with a ban on use of the software, with draconian penalties.
>
> Well, I'm no psychologist, but I can't imagine anything of the sort working.
Agreed. The last thing you want is a "grand and visible emblem".
My solutions, in order of preference:
1) Use it in breeder reactors. Turn it into something less dangerous (shorter half-life) and get some energy out of it. Sticking this much energy in a hole in the ground is a waste.
2) Stick it (if you must waste it!) in a hole in the ground with the rest of the waste. Call the place Yucca Mountain. Guard the hell out of it while our civilization lasts, but place no big-ass warning signs designed to attract curiosity-seekers for the next 10,000 years.
If our descendants in the year 12,001 have at least our level of technology, they'll know it's bad juju by the time they get anywhere near it. (And they'll probably wonder why the hell we buried all this useful Pu-239 instead of using it to power our cities!!)
If our descendants have stone-age technology, they won't be able to dig through a mile of rock salt. No warning needed.
If our descendants have 19th-century technology, no matter how intimidating the warning, they'll dig their way in, the same way we dug our way into the Pyramids. "Look, the ancient Americans placed big ugly spikes and pictures of dying people all over this site to warn us off. Silly primitives."
(Or in the words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, "Great! We really must be onto something if they're trying to kill us!")
No warnings, no memorials, nothing that could interest a passer-by, be he a civilian or an archaeologist.
Better idea: A memorial (in the traditional sense) to those who died to bring us this technology. Your contributions will not be forgotten.
It appears so. (I'm not saying it's a good precedent either, but...)
> So what happens when the russian cops file extredition papers with the US state depertment, to extradite the FBI agents who commmitted these crimes? Do you think they'd be honored? Sounds like an international incident waiting to happen.
Sounds like a calculated risk, one the FBI was willing to take. Knowing the FBI, they probably never bothered to check, but I'm sure a phone call to the Department of State would have clarified things pretty quickly: "No, they probably won't charge you, and if they do, we'll smooth it out for you."
I think what Judge Coughenour is saying is that yes, the FBI agents' actions were against Russian law, but that that was something for the Russian cops to investigate/charge/bust 'em for, and the Russian courts to sentence 'em for, not the FBI.
Which is to say, if you're an FBI agent cracking Russian computers, stay out of Russia. (Well, unless your name is Robert Phillip Hannsen and you're a mole working for the Russians ;-)
Whoa, never thought I'd see Tull on that list!
More seriously - I've paid for nearly complete discographies of most of the bands you mention. (Uh-oh, they're coming to take me away!)
MP3s have come in handy for filling in the gaps - the track that only appeared on the Japanese release of some obscure single, etc. etc., again - things RIAA would never market down here.
MP3s have also come in handy for discovering new stuff - there are just too many bands to go into a meatspace-based CD store and spend 2-3 hours listening to a couple of tracks from "everything" before finding stuff you like. The MP3 newsgroups solve this problem for me - a never-ending fire-hose of neat stuff to sip from, that I never even knew existed.
Cheezy plug for one of many such cool bands: S.P.O.C.K. A little more techno/trancey than the industrial stuff, but very fscking cool. SPOCK:1999 is unbelievably tongue-in-cheek, and equally-unbelievably dancey.
Thanks for backing me up - I figured a lot of grilling purists would rake me over the coals for that - hell, I felt a little queasy (as in "this is wrong, God will smite me for my heresy") when I first tried it, but I was in an apartment, which made grilling not-an-option.
Take yer steak, and spend another minute rubbing it down with pepper, salt, and some sage. The layer of spices on the outside of the steak seems to help hold the moisture. You can also brush lightly with olive oil before applying the rub. (An investment of $10.00 in a hand-operated pepper grinder can really pay off here - IMHO the generic stuff in your pepper shaker is pretty flavorless compared to any equally-generic "look at the pretty colors" multi-peppercorn blend).
All that said, I still prefer steak grilled the way God intended. But the toaster-oven method (broil, yes, but don't overcook it!) works well enough in a pinch. Then again, I like my steaks medium-rare to medium, so I'm not sure if it would work as well if you like it brown-all-the-way-through. And I'm lucky in that I can get a nice thick (1.5" to 2") cut of steak, so drying-out isn't really a problem.
On to the more interesting (and in many cases, valid) objections:
Soneone else said:
> That said both McDonalds and Microsoft make a product that works as advertised and actually is capable of fulfilling most of peoples expectations. The product just does the job and so people will buy it because they don't want to deal with it on thier own. I don't think McDonalds breeds stupid and uncaring people, I think that stupid and uncaring people bread McDonalds and they are free to do that.
I think this poster put it better than I did. There's nothing wrong with McD's, it's just that there are alternatives if you look around. If it weren't for people willing to forego these potentially-superior alternatives for the sake of perceived convenience (which applies just as well for MSFT vs. Linux), neither organization would stay in business.
But my mind still boggles when I hear people say that they go to McDonald's because they can't afford a steak dinner...
And that's the depressing part. Because if you really look at it, fast food is neither convenient nor cheap.
Big Mac, Fries, and a Coke. About $2.00. Plus maybe a 10-minute drive each way - call it $1.00 for gas and time. And the joy of standing in line waiting for your order, sitting in an annoying fast-food-restaurant seat, etc.
Potato: $0.25, and that's a huge potato. New York Strip: $7.00 a pound at my local butcher. Take one and cut it in half. Coke: $0.50/can, bought in bulk.
Total cost: $4.00 for an 8-oz NY Strip loin, baked potato, and Coke.
Total time: 5 minutes to defrost the steak in the microwave, then 15 minutes on the baking/grill-rack in a toaster oven at 350-400F, while the potato gets nuked in parallel for 10 minutes.
For fifty cents more, you can have a goddamn steak in the same time it takes to go to McDonald's.
McDonald's stays in business for the same reason Microsoft does: Market presence and a[n ad campaign designed to ensure the continued existence of a] customer base that's wholly-ignorant of the existence of alternatives.
Well, under DMCA, if RIAA mails you (if you're a US ISP) and tells you that Message-ID: $FOO1 .. FOO45 represent parts 1-45 of a copyright violation, you still have to delete it or issue (forged) cancels.
Of course, no other USENET server has to accept the cancels. And it's likely that by the time you received the DMCA complaint, the articles will have expired anyways :)
More interestingly - absmp3.beatles isn't carried at my ISP. Rationale - the Beatles don't want their work posted on USENET. This newsgroup charter implies that the content of the group would exclusively consist of copyright violations. So my ISP (wisely, IMHO) chooses not to carry the group. But absmp3 has no such charter. Could be indie groups posting their own work. Could be the Grateful Dead, who don't mind sharing. Could also be a lot of copyrighted stuff too. But because absmp3 is "all of the above", my ISP chooses to carry it, because it's not clear that every post is intended to be a copyright violation. (It's just a lucky coincidence ;-)
Anyways, RIAA hasn't left USENET alone. They're no doubt logging NNTP-Posting-Host: headers and keeping track of who the largest posters are, and sending mails to various ISPs asking them to either nuke the poster or fork over the info for a lawsuit. Nuking the poster for TOS violation is probably cheaper (one mail to abuse@), and has much less negative PR impact (than a lawsuit), so that's probably the way they're going.
Thankfully, just as reading USENET is like drinking from a fire hose, so's suing MP3 posters off of USENET. At least for the time being. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has with the increase in the size of a full feed. What the hell, at least I can say I was there during the Golden Age, survived Endless September, and still managed to get enough out-of-print music out of it during the "My God, It's Still Alive!" stage to last me a lifetime.
(Actually, that may be the other reason RIAA has left USENET alone - RIAA makes most of its CD sales revenue off the latest teenybopper band single, not the back-catalogue. Napster's loaded with top-40. USENET's the exact opposite - the top 40's there, but the balance has shifted to favor the rare/obscure/OOP stuff. Much more interesting mix of stuff, IMHO.
Of course it's a plot to make all our pr0n belong to the $epublicans! Why else would English professors be obsessing about phallic symbols and bathroom tile? :)
Mail-to-News gateway. St00pidly-adminned Sendmail 8.6 box (just read your spam to find 'em!) or a cypherpunk chain of anonymous remailers. Library or university.
While it's better than it was in 1998-9, I wouldn't go that far... A full feed now saturates an OC-3 (~260G/d), and the types of cluelessness now exhibited is the type that hurts.
Current record-holder: Someone who posted 1.8G of MP3s in a single day through his brand-new cablemodem. "75M/d recommended posting limit in absmp3? What limit? They can't possibly mean me! I've got a cablemodem! I'm cooler than that!"
The scary bit is that this guy was a drop in the bucket - there are groups where 600M DivX'd movies and ISO images are thrown around with regularity.
Meanwhile, transit servers continue to drop articles on the floor as the load escalates. Bad enough to try and justify to the Board of Directors why you need another terabyte of storage, but another OC-3? :-)
Yeah, USENET was never designed for large binaries , but if the binaries cause ISPs to drop all USENET support, the text groups may go with 'em. Google's archives aren't much use without a backbone of transit servers to propagate the articles. If Google becomes the only way to access USENET, the distinction between USENET and any other "message board" web site goes away.
Hey, that's a good idea! Let's chip in to buy Professor Wheat a copy of Finnegan's Wake and watch him disappear up his own ass ;-)
Yeah, but you're trying to talk sense to an academic. Once they get their mind wrapped around something, no matter how crazy, they cannot be budged. (I mean, there's grant money riding on it!)
Cripes, I've seen academics argue that real rockets - as in, the ones we use today - are shaped the way they are, not by engineering constraints, but because they were originally built by male weaponeers, who wanted them to look as phallic as possible.
They're serious about this - as though somehow rockets would somehow be shaped like giant flabby Earth-Mother Gaia-Figure tits if they'd been invented by women instead of men.
(Reading this article was a great reminder why I left University to work in the private sector... the day I got my degree, I was fuckin' gone, man, I couldn't get away fast enough ;-)
Cynical answer: The author is likely an academic - perhaps a Ph.D. in English Literature - pettiness and endless squabbling over mind-pummelingly insignificant crap is part of his job description.
Insightful answer: he's a geek - like you and me - except that he's a geek of English-Lit. In the same way that you and I can bitch for hours about the merits of vi vs. EMACS, or GNOME vs. KDE, he can bitch for hours about how Discovery was more about a man with cool shades and bathroom tiles up his ass than it was a really neat-looking model of what a spaceship to Jupiter might look like.
Take whichever answer you like. I still kinda prefer the cynical version myself. Because even though the insightful version is more likely a reflection of the truth, I refuse to believe that the emacs-vs-vi debate is petty. I mean, eight megs and constantly swapping, how could anyone use emacs over the wonder that is vi, and how could anyone fail to realize that the debate is hardly petty, I mean, you watch 2001, but you live within your text editor!
For us, sure. But what about those who don't know what they're buying? For those who don't even get the chance to opt out?
The scariest moment I had last year was when I went and helped fix a co-worker's Dell machine. "It crashes when we read our email".
Out-of-the-box, it had "built-in" Internet through AT&T. I don't know what it used for a browser, but it wasn't IE or Nutscrape. It was this little goofy window with big buttons and, of course, constantly-refreshing banners. If I hadn't known better, I'd have sworn it was AllAdvantage or some other free-if-you-look-at-the-ads thing. Nope - they swore up and down that "this is how it came, this is how they told us to read our email", and showed me their monthly bill for internet access.
(The reason they couldn't read their mail was that one of the *advertising* partners had spammed them - with gobs of HTML - and the retarded email client blew up on a buffer overflow when it tried to render the HTML in the Subject: header. As if I didn't need any other excuse to tell them that privacy-invasion is the default, not the exception.
I never thought I'd say that I felt good about seeing someone run Outbreak Excess and IE5. But after a couple of hours of patches, they were at least able to read mail using the client they were used to using at work, and browse the web without being tracked any more than normal.
It was a real wake-up call for me. I'd recommend any /.er walk over to a Gateway Country booth or talk to a clueless-newbie friend (you may have to ask your friends to introduce you to their friends to find one! ;-) who just got a new Dell "with all the goodies already set up".
Would I need Xanax if something like Predictive's technology comes pre-installed on WinXP? (Well, I suppose not, because I'd rather eat a pound of broken glass, shit it all out, and roll in the resulting mess until I bled to death than run XP.)
But when someone says "it doesn't hurt children", they usually mean because I'm trying to distract you from the fact that it was designed to hurt you.
Well, then, I guess if it's designed not to harm the pwecious chylllldrun, it's OK!
Way to go, Mr. Hosea! You're a really swell guy! I mean, now that you've told me you won't use it to hurt chillllldrun, I think it's really awesome that you can can monitor my mouse-gesture and record my every keystroke! After all, isn't any privacy invasion justified as long as the invader promises that not a single chyuld is harmed?
(Yeah, Hosea, and the rest of his scumbag marketroids, I've got a fuckin' gesture for you, and it's got nothin' to do with my mouse.)
The reason I rely on /. for news more than CNN is because on Slashdot, when a poster fucks up, they get flamed for it, and the truth comes out. Every reader sees what the mistake was, and what the correction is.
To the great unwashed, the talking heads on CNN also "appear" to know what they're talking about, and in the vast majority of cases (we know damn well) they don't. When CNN's talking heads fuck up, the great unwashed never finds out what the truth was.
I'll take /. over CNN any day.
1) I don't think Godwin's Law applies when you're actually talking about a political movement where many of its early leaders sympathized with the government of Germany during WW2.
History moment: There was an intense Anglo/Protestant vs. Francophone/Catholic ethnic mess going on in Quebec since the 1700s. Anti-Semitism was part of the baggage you happened to carry if you were a Quebec Catholic in the 1930s. Supporting the Germans in WW2 was natural for a Quebecois - because WW2 was portrayed to them as "just another silly British war like WW1" and they were still collectively bitter over that. Hence the Quebecois opposition to Conscription, which was the Canadian/British policy, and the resulting increase in sympathy with the you-know-whos in Germany. The fact that the German government shared the hardliners' hate-on for the Jews just made it easier for the meme to spread among the French population of Quebec.)
2) This isn't about requiring English documents to be translated into French. When laws call for fines (and if you don't pay the fine, presumably imprisonment) for putting up English signs and web sites, when laws call for unilingual French - outlawing English - at workplaces over 50 people, and so on, I don't see it as anything other than the start of a programme whose goals are indistinguishable from any other ethnic cleanser's. It's the thin edge of a sick wedge.
Perhaps a look at the demographics of Montreal during the period 1970 through 1990 would suffice?
ObGodwin: ("We don't persecute $ETHNICs, they just all seem to want to leave! We even help them pack!")
I'll grant you that ethnic cleansing is too strong a word for what the PQ is doing now. How 'bout "linguistic profiling"?
("You sir, you with the English on your website, gotta send the tonguetroopers over to your store to make sure you're not putting English signs up." seems pretty comparable to "You sir, you with the black/gold/green bumpersticker and the dreadlocks, pull over, you're doing 31 in a 30 zone, gotta check you out!")
I agree entirely with the poster that coercion may very well be the only way to preserve French in Canada.
When I read the post, however, it looked (to me) like the poster was presenting this thesis in a sympathetic context, implying that such coercion was justified.
Upon rereading the post (and parent post) in context, -the part of the article that says "I'm not sure how many Quebecois would choose to continue carrying the handicap of a language spoken by almost no one else in this hemisphere without these laws." and the part that says "I don't see [the loss of French in Michigan] as a loss", don't appear to advocate such coercion.
Good call. I didn't set up a straw man per se... but I sure misinterpreted the post to which I was replying ;)
Ah, I see, so if $COERCION is required to preserve $ETHNICITY in $GEOGRAPHICAL_REGION, that makes it OK?
I suppose you have no problem, then, with what happened in Bosnia... or Rwanda... or Cambodia... or, well, we won't mention that little country in Europe 60 years ago that decided it was OK to use a little bit of force to gain some "living space" for its ethnically-pure citizens.
Do a google search on "pur laine" (lit: "pure wool"). You'll see that there is a sizable segment of the Quebec population that thinks of itself as racially-pure.
Do some more searching, you'll find links between Quebec Nationalism and fascism. Sample source: 1996 article, "A Look At The Catholic Far Right In Quebec"
Better source: The story of Jean-louis Roux, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, and his time as a Nazi sympathizer in the early 40s where he took part in Montreal's little mini-Kristallnacht: Source: 1996 B'Nai Brith article.
I'll leave off with an article from last year: Quebec Language Policy Isn't Funny.
Bottom line: There are some (to use the clinical diagnosis) seriously sick motherfuckers in Quebec. They have a hell of a lot of power, given how sick they are - they've kept a lot of secrets, and they've had a lot of cooperation in covering things up. Quebec language policies are just the tip of the iceberg - the underlying ethnic nationalism is a real problem, and a real threat, to fundamental freedoms in Canada.
I like this guy, he's funny. He's an advocate for freedom of speech - even if he can't spell it.
Like my Dad's army buddy, who said "Fuck the war in VietNam! Of course I hate the draft, but it's against the law not to register for the draft, man! Ya gotta register!"
Or my great-uncle, who said "Ah'm all fer civil rights, but don't they know it's agin' the law fer niggers t'drink from the whites-only fountain!"
And my great-great-grandpappy, who said "Hey, universal suffrage is a cool idea, but don't those silly dames realize it's against the law for women to vote?"
So I guess I'm all for freedom of speech... as long as the government hasn't outlawed it.
("So love me, love me, love me! I'm a liberal!")