"Legal" only means no one's passed a law against it yet. If speech is only free as long as it's "legal" speech, then you can censor anything you want by passing a law against it, no?
There was a time, not long ago, when advocating communism was illegal. Opposing the Government's position in a time of war can easily become illegal. The present administration seems to believe that it has the right to declare pretty much anybody an "enemy combatant" and lock them up on that basis - the judicial branch didn't back them up and it's still touch and go, but what if "un-patriotic" speech became illegal, and you disagree with the administration's view on the meaning of "un-patriotic"? Remember Joe McCarthy and the HUAC?
I think anonymous speech is far more a power for good than for evil, but I recognize that it is all or nothing; if I want speech to be free, the option for anonymity must be there, and anonymity is purchased at the price of allowing speech I abhor.
I'm willing to pay the price of abhorrence for freedom, because I have confidence that freedom opens more doors to good than evil.
No matter what freenet does technologically, it will always be marginalized because normal people just don't want other people to be able to speak anonymously.
Well, color me abnormal. In case that wasn't clear, I want other people to be able to speak anonymously.
I'll tolerate or ignore whatever speech you want to give, but when you break the law with speech
You assume that the only reason for wanting anonymity is to avoid responsibility for breaking the law. You ignore, for example, the possibility that anononymity may be required to avoid illegal retribution from neighbors, employers, or (gasp!) corrupt officialdom.
Re:Great, here come the CP trolls
on
Revamping Freenet
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That the gains from proof of election fraud outweigh the losses from child porn.
You don't have a child, do you.
I do, and if you think my support of FreeNet means that you're free to move in on my kid you're liable to become a candidate for a Darwin Award. In a couple of different ways, should you be male. If you get my drift. Or even if you don't.
I protect my kid, and although I'm glad to have the help and support of my society and its police (many and perhaps most of whom are among the finest people said society has to offer), I'm not willing to betray my kid's potential future in a free society in exchange for a little more convenience in safeguarding his present well-being.
Taking the long view, after all, is one of the things parents are supposed to do for their kids, because kids aren't all that great at it, and for good reason; it takes wisdom, born of experience, to see past the immediate issue to the larger ramifications, and it takes courage, born of wisdom, to accept that "Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety." (Shakespeare, Henry IV, III, i, 62, if anyone cares).
I also think that anyone running a freenet node is legally on the hook for aiding and abetting child molestors, since it's widely known that it's a primary use of the network.
Okay, responding strictly to this one attempt to fly below the radar: to whom is it "widely known", and are they simply assuming their preconceptions are "knowledge" or do they actually know that child pornography is a primary use for the network? If the latter, how do they know this?
I don't know whether I'm ironically referring back to the first clump of posts, or just didn't bother checking to see how many other people would use the same obvious joke. Hey, I guess I can check back...
Aw, nuts.
Re:"Merge onto I-5 HAL" "Sorry Dave, I can't do th
on
Cars that Can't Crash?
·
· Score: 1
Tensing up in an accident actually increases injuries and blanking out the windows for the scary parts might help.
That's what your JooJunta Peril-Sensitive CoolGuy
(tm) sunglasses are for.
At the first hint of danger, they turn totally opaque, thereby preventing you from seeing anything which might further alarm you.
People slag Star Trek for having every alien be humanoid, but that is deliberate. Roddenberry wanted people to see the humanity in every character.
Source, please? I have always assumed it was because there simpy wasn't the budget or technology to use more varied aliens; heck, the Klingins mutated like mad between the TOST and STTNG budgets.
I'm no hard-core Trekkie, but I know the transporter beam was initiated specifically because they lacked the budget for 'landing craft' sequences (much like the holodeck was brought in to make up for the lack of imagination of TNG scriptwriters), and subsequently they had to tapdance constantly around why the damn technology didn't solve all their problems.
The point being, it was a fine series and all, but don't try to dress up the flaws it had and the production problems they worked around as deliberate artistic choices.
That said, looking at the (original) series in the context of its times and you do see, as you point out, humans getting along with aliens, as well as women with men (if that's not redundant), Russians working with Americans, Negroid with Asian with Caucasian, and so on. That was groundbreaking stuff at the time, and it hasn't advanced as far beyond that as it should have IMO.
Or possibly someone's been reading "Life-Line" by Robert Heinlein, published in 1939 and still in print in various collections, including at least one published this year. IOW, among the most famous and seminal short stories in the genre, one any serious reader of SF is pretty likely to know about.
"The Universe was created 14 billion years ago, and for the first..."
I put down my scroll. "Moses? 14 billlion years?"
He nodded. "Absolutely. I'm inspired." His eyes flamed with certainty.
Well, you can't argue with my brother's inspirations, not when he's on a roll like that. "Go on, then, but let's move it along."
"Okay, so about four and a half billion years ago the Sun, Moon, Earth and planets were formed. Life started about two billion years later, with the formation of..."
Well, there's a limit. "Look, Mose, we've got a mostly illiterate audience - we're going to have to read this out loud to most of them. Can't we edit this a bit? Just hit the high points."
He pouted a bit, but nodded. "Okay. Let's see... Okay. In a steamy African valley, some ten million years ago... What? I can't trim it much more than that, Aaron!"
"Please. Moses, bubbe, please! We've got six blank scrolls and two flasks of ink. Sacrifice a little accuracy, trim the backstory to a week or so, and let's get into the boy-meets-girl part. There is a girl, right?"
Moreover, you could print or otherwise rasterize the document, thereby losing the font source -- which is basically equivalent to compiling the source into binaries.
That would effectively turn it into a simple typeface, not a program, and the typeface itself is not copyrightable.
Sorry, but I was also a waiter once, and a bartender more than once, and a cashier way more than once, and I have no sympathy.
The fact that a scam can start with those words is a reason to be wary. It is not a reason to shut a person down before they have a chance to explain what the mistake was.
Many a scam starts out with "Hello" too. Assuming that every conversation which starts with "Hello" is a scam is not only stupid, it's bad business.
Assuming that your customers are con artists causes you to end conversations which would otherwise have benefitted you - as was the case with my conversation with the Woolworth's cashier.
I didn't make the assumption that the cashier I encountered was a typical employee, but if she treated others the way she treated me I'd imagine that Woolworth's lost a hell of a lot of business... probably far more than they saved by shutting off conversations with conmen who then went on to find other avenues for exploitation.
Not only do I use Sacajawea ("golden") dollars on a daily basis in the vending machines at work, but since the change machine often spits out Susan B's for my sawbuck as well, I use those too.
I've never had any trouble distinguishing them from a quarter, and lest you think it's a geek thing, neither have any of my machine operators or the janitorial staff. Maybe you'd be surprised how quickly people learn to recognize the denominations of common currency.
I don't doubt that the "Carter quarter" caused confusion in the first few months of its release, but once people know to look out for it they're not confused, any more than they would be if $2 bills were common in circulation instead of collector's items. Come on, this is in a country where all bills are the same size and shape, and mostly the same shade of green.
I once got a $50 bill back in change when I should have gotten a $20. Not wanting to screw over some poor cashier I tried to Do The Right Thing (tm) and return the money.
"You've made a small mistake," I said - I swear, that's verbatim what I said, and the verbatim reply I got was "NO. I don't make mistakes."
Being, in some situations, a slow learner, I repeated my assertion; "No, really, there's been a little mistake made." (Note the regression into passive speech - I was really, really trying to avoid assigning blame here.)
Nope. About six degrees Kelvin comes the reply, "I told you, I don't make mistakes."
"Fine," I replied, walking away, "at the end of the day, when you're adding up, remember that the mistake you didn't make was a $30 mistake."
You forget, it is no longer so cool to be pale-skinned and blue-eyed; while it's still a bit declasse in some circles to actually be "black" in the Samuel Jackson sense, it's okay to have a touch of "African-American" as long as you've got some Halle Berry type cream in your coffee, and it's not even a hardship to be Middle Eastern in a George Clooney way.
As for the more exotic "darkies", soon the corporations which design your offspring will be outsourcing to India and China. Just let Bollywood and Hong Kong Filmy have a bit of time, you'll soon see melanin deprivation is actually rather a niche preoccupation these days.
I actually don't disagree with you that a danger exists of a 'genetic divide', but conflating it with the failed dreams of a thoroughly discredited meme doesn't help. A blue-eyed, pale-skinned master race is neither worse nor better than a dark-eyed, dark-skinned one. Hitler would have loved such a capability, true, but so would Chaka Zulu or Genghiz Khan, Pol Pot or Kim Jong-Il.
Focus on the issue; there's a possibility that within the next few decades humans will be able to design their offspring to some extent. How do we deal with that? A simple Luddite response of "NO" won't work; the tools will exist, and they will either be used generally or used privately.
Rather than fixate on some fantasy of uebermensch and untermensch, let's consider questions like WHO will have access to such technologies (the rich? the poor? the genetically gifted? the genetically cursed?) and HOW they will be permitted to use it (only to detect lethal genes? Correct dangerous genes for diabetes and the like? Correct or select against genes for homosexuality, if that's genetic, or an unfashionable hair color? Positively select useful monomanias in sport or intellectualism, or for native abilities in either?)
There's plenty to think about, and even worry about, without resorting to cheap veiled references to past problems that aren't all that relevant anyway.
Now there is another myth that older people fall into. "Everything was better when I was younger." Humans tend to forget the bad stuff and remember only the good stuff... Older people need to remember the bad things in the past and not just the good.
"Kids today have it so easy. In my day we had to walk five miles in the snow just to go to the bathroom, uphill both ways."
I think the truth is more that people tend to mythologize their memories. My friends and I were cunning and cool, our enemies were cunning and cruel, and amazing things happened routinely.
The things you can make dramatic in your mind stick in your memory. Remembering dull things, dull days, dull people is much harder to do and far less enjoyable.
It seems to me that the real threat to the species is the species itself.
Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation.
In nature most populations are kept in check by predators; nit-pick. It hardly matters, though; if starvation isn't global, it can't eliminate the species. Obesity is a bigger problem than starvation in significant parts of the world; we may lose valuable gene pools in places, but the species is in no danger whatsoever from starvation, barring global catastrophe.
new flu outbreaks could kill millions.
Wow. Millions. Out of a world population of... Yes, it sucks to die, but it's a far cry from extinction of the species. People die all the time.
Mankind seems to think it's a right to have offspring, despite what nature may be telling them.
"Nature" is neither opinionated about rights nor separate from mankind. No other species refrains from having offspring because they lack the 'right' either. Rights are a human construct, in nature there are only opportunities.
Homosexuality - There are theories that nature uses homosexuality to help control population sizes.
The proper thing to do with theories is look for evidence to confirm or refute them. Is there a single example of a population being "controlled" this way? I can't think of one.
No, the odds of the human species eliminating itself are pretty slim. Western civilization, sure... but not the species.
Given the ongoing problems they've had with security leaks, I don't think Microsoft has to worry about anyone in that particular market ripping off their good name.
I would be willing to bet large sums they have quite a lot to do with Iraq... now.
They didn't before because Saddam Hussein liked his domain nice and orderly, and didn't tolerate competition in the thuggery department from radical Islamic fundamentalists or anyone else.
Nowadays, it's a place just about made to order for recruiting and training new Al Quaeda members.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there orcas in Dominican Republic?
So, it's okay to be a little bit pregnant...
"Legal" only means no one's passed a law against it yet. If speech is only free as long as it's "legal" speech, then you can censor anything you want by passing a law against it, no?
There was a time, not long ago, when advocating communism was illegal. Opposing the Government's position in a time of war can easily become illegal. The present administration seems to believe that it has the right to declare pretty much anybody an "enemy combatant" and lock them up on that basis - the judicial branch didn't back them up and it's still touch and go, but what if "un-patriotic" speech became illegal, and you disagree with the administration's view on the meaning of "un-patriotic"? Remember Joe McCarthy and the HUAC?
I think anonymous speech is far more a power for good than for evil, but I recognize that it is all or nothing; if I want speech to be free, the option for anonymity must be there, and anonymity is purchased at the price of allowing speech I abhor.
I'm willing to pay the price of abhorrence for freedom, because I have confidence that freedom opens more doors to good than evil.
Well, color me abnormal. In case that wasn't clear, I want other people to be able to speak anonymously.
I'll tolerate or ignore whatever speech you want to give, but when you break the law with speech
You assume that the only reason for wanting anonymity is to avoid responsibility for breaking the law. You ignore, for example, the possibility that anononymity may be required to avoid illegal retribution from neighbors, employers, or (gasp!) corrupt officialdom.
You don't have a child, do you.
I do, and if you think my support of FreeNet means that you're free to move in on my kid you're liable to become a candidate for a Darwin Award. In a couple of different ways, should you be male. If you get my drift. Or even if you don't.
I protect my kid, and although I'm glad to have the help and support of my society and its police (many and perhaps most of whom are among the finest people said society has to offer), I'm not willing to betray my kid's potential future in a free society in exchange for a little more convenience in safeguarding his present well-being.
Taking the long view, after all, is one of the things parents are supposed to do for their kids, because kids aren't all that great at it, and for good reason; it takes wisdom, born of experience, to see past the immediate issue to the larger ramifications, and it takes courage, born of wisdom, to accept that "Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety." (Shakespeare, Henry IV, III, i, 62, if anyone cares).
Okay, responding strictly to this one attempt to fly below the radar: to whom is it "widely known", and are they simply assuming their preconceptions are "knowledge" or do they actually know that child pornography is a primary use for the network? If the latter, how do they know this?
Aw, nuts.
That's what your JooJunta Peril-Sensitive CoolGuy (tm) sunglasses are for.
At the first hint of danger, they turn totally opaque, thereby preventing you from seeing anything which might further alarm you.
Source, please? I have always assumed it was because there simpy wasn't the budget or technology to use more varied aliens; heck, the Klingins mutated like mad between the TOST and STTNG budgets.
I'm no hard-core Trekkie, but I know the transporter beam was initiated specifically because they lacked the budget for 'landing craft' sequences (much like the holodeck was brought in to make up for the lack of imagination of TNG scriptwriters), and subsequently they had to tapdance constantly around why the damn technology didn't solve all their problems.
The point being, it was a fine series and all, but don't try to dress up the flaws it had and the production problems they worked around as deliberate artistic choices.
That said, looking at the (original) series in the context of its times and you do see, as you point out, humans getting along with aliens, as well as women with men (if that's not redundant), Russians working with Americans, Negroid with Asian with Caucasian, and so on. That was groundbreaking stuff at the time, and it hasn't advanced as far beyond that as it should have IMO.
Of course, Comic-Book Guy probably would have known who Donnie Darko was! ;)
Now, who in the hell is Donnie Darko?
(Rhetorical question, I can Google...)
So have the rules of moral behaviour changed, or is that how we're still supposed to behave?
"The Universe was created 14 billion years ago, and for the first..."
I put down my scroll. "Moses? 14 billlion years?"
He nodded. "Absolutely. I'm inspired." His eyes flamed with certainty.
Well, you can't argue with my brother's inspirations, not when he's on a roll like that. "Go on, then, but let's move it along."
"Okay, so about four and a half billion years ago the Sun, Moon, Earth and planets were formed. Life started about two billion years later, with the formation of..."
Well, there's a limit. "Look, Mose, we've got a mostly illiterate audience - we're going to have to read this out loud to most of them. Can't we edit this a bit? Just hit the high points."
He pouted a bit, but nodded. "Okay. Let's see... Okay. In a steamy African valley, some ten million years ago... What? I can't trim it much more than that, Aaron!"
"Please. Moses, bubbe, please! We've got six blank scrolls and two flasks of ink. Sacrifice a little accuracy, trim the backstory to a week or so, and let's get into the boy-meets-girl part. There is a girl, right?"
Moreover, you could print or otherwise rasterize the document, thereby losing the font source -- which is basically equivalent to compiling the source into binaries.
That would effectively turn it into a simple typeface, not a program, and the typeface itself is not copyrightable.
Sorry, but I was also a waiter once, and a bartender more than once, and a cashier way more than once, and I have no sympathy. .. probably far more than they saved by shutting off conversations with conmen who then went on to find other avenues for exploitation.
The fact that a scam can start with those words is a reason to be wary. It is not a reason to shut a person down before they have a chance to explain what the mistake was.
Many a scam starts out with "Hello" too. Assuming that every conversation which starts with "Hello" is a scam is not only stupid, it's bad business.
Assuming that your customers are con artists causes you to end conversations which would otherwise have benefitted you - as was the case with my conversation with the Woolworth's cashier.
I didn't make the assumption that the cashier I encountered was a typical employee, but if she treated others the way she treated me I'd imagine that Woolworth's lost a hell of a lot of business.
Not only do I use Sacajawea ("golden") dollars on a daily basis in the vending machines at work, but since the change machine often spits out Susan B's for my sawbuck as well, I use those too.
I've never had any trouble distinguishing them from a quarter, and lest you think it's a geek thing, neither have any of my machine operators or the janitorial staff. Maybe you'd be surprised how quickly people learn to recognize the denominations of common currency.
I don't doubt that the "Carter quarter" caused confusion in the first few months of its release, but once people know to look out for it they're not confused, any more than they would be if $2 bills were common in circulation instead of collector's items. Come on, this is in a country where all bills are the same size and shape, and mostly the same shade of green.
I once got a $50 bill back in change when I should have gotten a $20. Not wanting to screw over some poor cashier I tried to Do The Right Thing (tm) and return the money.
"You've made a small mistake," I said - I swear, that's verbatim what I said, and the verbatim reply I got was
"NO. I don't make mistakes."
Being, in some situations, a slow learner, I repeated my assertion; "No, really, there's been a little mistake made." (Note the regression into passive speech - I was really, really trying to avoid assigning blame here.)
Nope. About six degrees Kelvin comes the reply, "I told you, I don't make mistakes."
"Fine," I replied, walking away, "at the end of the day, when you're adding up, remember that the mistake you didn't make was a $30 mistake."
As for the more exotic "darkies", soon the corporations which design your offspring will be outsourcing to India and China. Just let Bollywood and Hong Kong Filmy have a bit of time, you'll soon see melanin deprivation is actually rather a niche preoccupation these days.
I actually don't disagree with you that a danger exists of a 'genetic divide', but conflating it with the failed dreams of a thoroughly discredited meme doesn't help. A blue-eyed, pale-skinned master race is neither worse nor better than a dark-eyed, dark-skinned one. Hitler would have loved such a capability, true, but so would Chaka Zulu or Genghiz Khan, Pol Pot or Kim Jong-Il.
Focus on the issue; there's a possibility that within the next few decades humans will be able to design their offspring to some extent. How do we deal with that? A simple Luddite response of "NO" won't work; the tools will exist, and they will either be used generally or used privately.
Rather than fixate on some fantasy of uebermensch and untermensch, let's consider questions like WHO will have access to such technologies (the rich? the poor? the genetically gifted? the genetically cursed?) and HOW they will be permitted to use it (only to detect lethal genes? Correct dangerous genes for diabetes and the like? Correct or select against genes for homosexuality, if that's genetic, or an unfashionable hair color? Positively select useful monomanias in sport or intellectualism, or for native abilities in either?)
There's plenty to think about, and even worry about, without resorting to cheap veiled references to past problems that aren't all that relevant anyway.
Look, if the cost of communicating with aliens is the loss of our humanity, then I for one say our alien overlords should be sent to Tunguska!
Oh wait, I've messed up my temporal coor^H^Hotgrits^Hrooc lar...(NO CARRIER)
"Kids today have it so easy. In my day we had to walk five miles in the snow just to go to the bathroom, uphill both ways."
I think the truth is more that people tend to mythologize their memories. My friends and I were cunning and cool, our enemies were cunning and cruel, and amazing things happened routinely.
The things you can make dramatic in your mind stick in your memory. Remembering dull things, dull days, dull people is much harder to do and far less enjoyable.
Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation.
In nature most populations are kept in check by predators; nit-pick. It hardly matters, though; if starvation isn't global, it can't eliminate the species. Obesity is a bigger problem than starvation in significant parts of the world; we may lose valuable gene pools in places, but the species is in no danger whatsoever from starvation, barring global catastrophe.
new flu outbreaks could kill millions.
Wow. Millions. Out of a world population of... Yes, it sucks to die, but it's a far cry from extinction of the species. People die all the time.
Mankind seems to think it's a right to have offspring, despite what nature may be telling them.
"Nature" is neither opinionated about rights nor separate from mankind. No other species refrains from having offspring because they lack the 'right' either. Rights are a human construct, in nature there are only opportunities.
Homosexuality - There are theories that nature uses homosexuality to help control population sizes.
The proper thing to do with theories is look for evidence to confirm or refute them. Is there a single example of a population being "controlled" this way? I can't think of one.
No, the odds of the human species eliminating itself are pretty slim. Western civilization, sure... but not the species.
Given the ongoing problems they've had with security leaks, I don't think Microsoft has to worry about anyone in that particular market ripping off their good name.
Um, gotta nitpick... those laws haven't been regarded as 'completely true' by mainstream physicists for the better part of a century.
Kerry used this phrase to describe his position on abortion.
Of course, the latter would have been even more impressive if that was the word he'd actually meant to use.
BUSH:That's why they're fighting so vociferously.
What, they'd be fighting in a less noisy and clamorous manner otherwise? I think you mean 'viciously' Mr. President.
I would be willing to bet large sums they have quite a lot to do with Iraq... now.
They didn't before because Saddam Hussein liked his domain nice and orderly, and didn't tolerate competition in the thuggery department from radical Islamic fundamentalists or anyone else.
Nowadays, it's a place just about made to order for recruiting and training new Al Quaeda members.