I can think fo no othe way to describe this question other than frickin retarded.
First off, we have much more important things to worry about.
Second, the assertion that our failure to use mertic is hurting our economy is stupid. Capitalism dictates that when there is an ACTUAL finicacial benefit to the use of metric, it will be done. (Many American cars DO use metric for example.) We do not need to force metric conversion. If people see a benefit, they will convert, if they don't we're not much of a "free society" if we force them to.
Third, US measurements are often much more useful in everyday situations.
Good examples of this would be measuring temperature in degrees farenheight and speed in MPH. In both cases, the "American" units are much more in line with actual human sensory experience. Do you really want to have to use three significant figures on your house thermostat?
Fourth, there are cases where switching to metric is just plain stupid because the established standard IS "english/american" units. In these cases, switching to all metric would do nothing but result is a whole bunch of needless tooling costs and unnecessary incompatibility.
Slashdotters first say "We want company XYZ to support Linux!" then bitch, "Did you see how company XYZ is making money off of Linux?! Evil! Death to them!"
I don't think I've EVER seen that happen.
Unless of course you count violating copyright (and the GPL) as supporting Linux. Then you'd be right, we're all over them like a pack of wild dogs, but with very good reason.
Repeat after me: "You have no right to privacy in public." (especially when you are outdoors)
But what about when you're on your own land, surrounded by ten acres of forest?
Don't you think you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy then?
IMO, we need to pass some privacy laws concerning aerial photography, and satellite imagery. I'm not saying ban it outright, but aerial imagery of another's PRIVATE property should be severely limited.
Flat Panels *will* ghost and blur, however they do not lag.
Everything lags.
Analog or digital, the monitor has to decode the input before it can display it. This means lag.
(See my earlier post about about lag problems with HDTVs.)
It seems unlikely that the lag for the display is *that* large, but it is possible (perhaps his monitor has to resample the original image to fit the resolution of the actual LCD panel and for some reason this is taking a long time).
I'll have to say BS on this. My suggestion is to borrow a second CRT and hook it up the same way. Most likely the lag will still be there. I have no idea what OS as the video is down. My answer is to upgrade the video drivers and check for some stupid setting being messed up.
As an EE I'll say that what the article is talking about is possible, but not likely. (It would be stupid to make a display with that much delay.)
It comes down to this, any sort of processing has an inherent delay. If this particular LCD was using a really long pipeline to process the incoming data stream, he could be seing the effects of this.
It's not totally crazy to believe that this is what's going on. There has already been one HDTV manufacturer who has offered to replace circuit boards inside their TVs with new ones that have faster chips due to customer complaints about the delay. Apparently some of the new TVs out there have a pretty significant problem.
Request? REQUEST? It's a threat. A threat the Chinese gov't didn't hesitate to let become reality once already. So there is no doubt they would do it again (I refer to blocking Google).
Yes, you refer to "blocking google". China is not going to send a special ops team to the US to arrest google executives. The biggest thing that could happen to Google is them getting blocked. As far as me or the Chinese gov't is concerned, that is basically a "request".
Maybe you're so worried about somebody else's money that you just can't stand the thought of Google making slightly less profit, but believe it or not, it's not a big deal.
Yes, they could refuse to censor and don't do business in China. And maybe that would be the Right Thing to do. But it's far from saying that they a willing helper, what you seem to imply.
You're leaving out two key points here, in one of these cases:
The censorship is obvious. (The people will actually know they are using some other search engine instead of the REAL Google.)
Google is not doing dirty work for a totolitarian regieme in exchange for money. (In my book, that's basically evil. These guys aren't even being threatened with loss of life or liberty, just a little bit of money.)
Google is most definately a "willing helper" NO ONE IS FORCING THEM TO DO THIS. If they said no, the would get blocked, and they would lose a little money.
On a side note, censorship is the surest proof that what a government is doing is not for the good of the people.
Which is why Google shouldn't be helping them hide the fact that they do it!
If google was banned from China entirely, a LOT more people would go "Hey! What gives!"
Google is helping them make information disappear. That is a bad thing.
Google is doing this to increase its profits.
That's just plain filthy and disgusting.
People who make decisions like this are no less than traitors to their fellow man.
At least under that scenario the people know that Google IS being censored.
If you place NO VALUE WHATSOEVER on freedom of speech and information, then the people of China loose, but if you do, it's pretty easy to claim that the people of China would be BETTER OFF under that situation.
To me, the fact that google is stating exactly what they are doing makes it perfectly all right to me. It's either that or not exist there at all. If they were hiding what they were doing it would be very different.
But they are: IN CHINA
Who gives a flying F--- whether or not we know the Chinese Google is getting censored, the Chinese people need to know this (and you can bet this news will be censored in China)
How would that help their fellow men in China? It would only limit their information even further.
You're kinda missing the point here, it not just censorship, it's secret censorship.
I've heard the same argument used with North Korea. People refuse to send food to the starving people because some of that food gets used by the govt to feed their army. Some of the food, though, does save lives of innocent civilians.
A much more fair example would be one of a US company sending the Chinese gov't American-branded food (say McNuggets) with secret fertility-reducing drugs mixed in, per the Chinese gov'ts specifications.
There are other things to eat besides McNuggets, and there are other search engines besides Google, and secretly modifying either at the request of a totalitarian regieme in the persuit of a buck, is just wrong.
If China wants to secretly screw over its own citzens, make them do their own dirty work.
Additionally, a lot of your argument is just that it's going to happen anyways. If EVERYBODY refuses, it's not going to get done, is it?
It's kind of like saying "It's okay that I gassed that group of toddlers because if I hadn't done it, the gov't would have done it anyways and I wouldn't have made $200."
It's just frickin wrong. Period.
It doesn't matter that someone else might do it instead, it's still WRONG. It is not the way we should treat fellow human beings.
Jesus people, we're not even talking about people who's life or liberty is going to be threatend by the gov't, this is all about making MONEY by screwing your fellow man.
The exectives at Google could choose not to if they wanted to, and the only suffering they would face would be not having enough money for a second gold-plated Ferrari.
If they refused to abide by the law of the Chinese government, China would simply block google (as they have in the past). Then no one (not using a proxy) in China would have access to google at all. They are helping their "fellow man" more by allowing people in China limited access to google, so that they can at least access non-political information and things that the government forgot to censor.
Nope.
China MIGHT block google. Or they might not.
If China did block google, they would miss out on a pretty high quality seach service and put themselves at a comparative disadvantage to the rest of the world.
Besides hurting then economically, this also pisses off their citizenry, which will then increase the pressure on their gov't to stop being evil.
The planet is less of "total shithole" now that Chinese have at least some access to google than it was when google was blocked.
You said this, but you really don't substanitally back it up. The only way this would be obviously true from what you said is if one placed absolutely no value on free speech.
Then it's a simple question of Google vs. no Google. But the question is not that simple, Google is HELPING THE CHINESE G'OVT CENSOR CONTENT.
This is a bad thing. Very bad. One could pretty easily argue that this is much worse that "not having google at all".
Another thing you're ingoring is the insidiousness of this form of censorship. The people thing they're looking a Google, but they're reallying looking at some crappy Chinese g'ovt approved version of it. If google refused to help them, the Chinese gov't would have to set up their OWN seach service and the censorship would be obvious, but google is not just helping them censor content, it's helping them hide the fact that they do so.
To me, that's selling your fellow man up the river in exchange for money, and a very shitty thing for a person to do.
Google, as much as we love it, is a priviate company, and they have to abide by the laws, regulations and codes of conduct in forign countries, whose markets they wish to enter.
That does not in any way change that fact that Google is run by humans, who should behave as if they have at least SOME respect for their fellow man.
If corporations get the same rights as people, they also get the same social obligation to not turn this planet into a total shithole.
Don't get upset with goodle over cencorship, get upset with the government who's laws they must abide.
It's perfectly reasonable to get upset with google or cisco for helping a repressive regieme violate the rights of its people. They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
That's a beautiful concept that I'd love to hear from the Supreme Court of the U.S., but it's actually one that SCotUS has already turned down in Eldred v. Ashcroft, saying that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act was constitutional because 75 years is less than infinity, and you can't prove that they're going to jack it up to higher 20 years from now because that's in the mysterious future.
Damn, you haven't read ANYTHING about this have you.
First off this case is about a totally seperate law than the Elred vs Ashcroft case.
Second, this law says that it is illegal to sell bootleg recordings FOREVER.
That's right, forever.
Not 75 years. Not 750 years. Forever.
That's what the law says. I have a tough time seeing how prohibiting the distribution of a copyrighted work forever does anything but really obviously run counter to the "limited time" provision set out in the constitution.
I'm sure that the RIAA is going to try to get this overturned, but they're going to have a much tougher time of it than you let on. It would probably be much easier for them to get a new law passed that only makes the sale of bootleg recording illegal for 999,999,999 years. At least then they could argue that the new law wasn't technically providing infinate copyright.
And now for the really cool part which no one else has brought up (that I have noticed).
This sets a great precedent for striking down the DMCA:
By prohibing the circumvention of copy-protection devices, even after copyright has expired, the DMCA is effectively establishing an infinate copyright (there is no legal way to distribute works in the public domain).
That's not correct. From http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm
Although this belief is widespread and has at times been reported as factual in the mainstream media, the truth of the matter is that unemployment statistics are gathered through a process of sampling a representative number of households; they are not arrived by counting the number of unemployment insurance claims made during a particular month. Data collected in the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of over 60,000 households, is used for this purpose. From this data, an extrapolation is made about the unemployment status of the country as a whole.
See, the text you just posted says NOTHING to contradict what you were trying to contradict. So I choose to pick 60,000 households to get my number from, big deal. I can STILL fuck with the numbers By counting the people in those house as not unemployed, even though they don't have jobs.
The reality of the situation is that the Bush admistration has redfined what constitutes "unemployed".
The text you posted is nothing but a bait-and-switch argument. Snopes doesn't give you enough information to actually show that the claim they're refuting is false, nor does the page the're linking
It's like me saying, "Look a Corvette!"
And you responding, "No, it's blue."
And then a third party coming along based upon only hearing the conversation and note actually seeing the car, claiming it most definately not a Corvette. The reality is that there has been no information presented to you that proves it's not a Corvette.
Additionally, do NOT trust snopes as a sole source for information.
For example, this article is flat out worng: link
I have emailed them with multiple refences which seem to support that Charles Proteus Steinmetz, did indeed perform the feat in question.
(Not just web links, one of these is a historical sidenote from an advanced math book I used at Cornell.)
Nonetheless, the snopes article was not changed at all. I dodn't think that particular article is a huge deal or anything, but the lack of change to the pages or even a reply to my email, makes seriously doubt the intellectual rigor of any "investigation" they do.
So now everyone in the city is compelled to invest in this guy's new venture?
Everyone in the city has ALREADY paid for the photographs.
As part of the FOIA request, he has to pay any costs involved with duplication.
The cost, to taxpayers, of this man's request is ZERO.
The only legitimate issue that is raised here is one of privacy.
On that topic the gov't is in a sticky place.
If they try to claim that giving him these pictures will violate other citizen's privacy rights, then they are admitting that THEY are reducing the privacy of private citizens.
Personally, I think these images should be released ASAP. I think the privacy issue is pretty much nil. There aren't any laws against this guy getting his own plane and duplicating these photographs, so how can one reasonably claim that he should not be able to have them?
If people don't like it, they should pass a law banning arial photography of another's property without consent. Personally I would support such a law (with exceptions) because I believe that if your house is surrounded by ten acres of woods, you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you decide to sunbathe nude, there shouldn't be any way for that image to legally end up of the freakin internet.
I think parent's point, which you seem to have missed when you called it a "fluff definition" is that marriage is both a religious/social institution and a legal one; however we don't clearly distinguish between them today.
My point is that we do.
The state does not issue a bunch of religous dictactes about what you must do when you get married. If only deals with the LEGAL aspect of marrige.
If two atheists, who plan to live in different states, raise no family, and have sex with other people want to get married, they can.
Clearly that's against a whole bunch of fundamentalist religious and social edicts, but the state deals strictly with the LEGAL side of things.
The purpose of these bills is to call attention to the fact that Bush is unwilling to share the burdens of the war in Iraq among all Americans. The wealthy get tax cuts, the middle class (their children actually) get the bill, and the poor, without jobs or access to job training, have few alternatives except to do the fighting. A draft without any exemptions would even the burden somewhat.
Like it did with our current president?
It seems only fair that the children or grandchildren of these fine folks should be given a chance to die for their country just like the rest of us. Maybe it would make their parents think a little longer about the need to go to war and then do a better job of planning for the occupation afterword.
Again, see my above comment. What you're suggesting is just absurd. Look at your own examples. You freaking giving examples of politicians and their sons getting out of the draft and you're saying, that it won't happen again?
First of all, the government doesn't "prevent" marriage. People have marriage ceremonies without the government's consent, and it doesn't matter. The question is (a) should government recognize marriage, and (b) in what cases should government recognize marriage.
Yes it does. You're just trying to distort the issue by choosing a "fluff" definition of marriage.
By you're logic I could say that the govnment to does make murder illegal because murder consists of sneezing at someone.
Just as there is a LEGAL definintion for murder, there is one for marriage and that is the definition being used when to gov't passes laws.
If marriage is viewed as an act of love, then government has not reason for involvement whatsoever. However, if you view marriage as the foundation platform for a family, then that view changes, for several reasons: [blah blah blah]
See, you're just playing with the defintion of marriage to dodge the real issue. The real issue here is all about legal protections NOT philosophy. Gay couples want the same legal protections as straight couples.
It's that simple. Whatever your own personal philosophy on "what marriage means to me" is, gay couples just want the ability to get married in the legal sense.
On a different topic, one could also point out the absurdity of calling anything between same-sex partners "marriage".
Or one could comment on someone in a "free society" thinking that their own views of what is absurd should interfere with what is none of their damn business.
Only one of those serves the real purpose of marriage: Keeping track of patriarchal family trees.
Marriage is a contract by which a woman enters into an exclusive sexual relationship with a man in exchange for material gain. If gay people are so desperate to be declared "normal" by emulating the rites and tradition of the patriarchal society that they reject by their lifestyle choice, then they should go see a mental health specialist instead of trying to have laws change to accomodate their insecurities.
Ye gods, aren't you an arrogant jerk.
Just what the world needs, another angry feminist who just can't get it through their head that marriage can be a union of equals, not a sale of property.
Marriage is about more that 'furthering the patricary' and 'government control', at its core IT IS ABOUT TWO PEOPLE MAKING A PROMISE TO EACH OTHER.
The debate is NOT about changing the religious meaning of marriage, it's about the right to ANY two people to make the same legal and social contract with each other that is currently limited exclusively to a man and a woman. The problem is that a gay couple is treated as second-class citzens by our current government.
The argument that you're making basically consists of:
Well fuck the establisment anyways.
It might work in the mind of an angry teenager, but a little thought can show us just how silly this argument is:
It's like saying, "I don't like the rules of the road which prohibit me from drivng beause I'm black so fuck driving."
Sure you don't have to follow the rules of the road, but YOU'RE MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
And to your method, how can you know for sure which backup image was a completely clean one?
How can you be sure the install disks you're using to start from scratch are completely clean?
It's all a calculated risk.
I think that at some level, you can but enough effort into checking out the system, to be confident for any level of security (It might come to running the entire hard disk byte-by-byte through a disassembler, if you're a Howard Hughes type.)
Sure there may be some virus code hiding in the frimware of your cdrom drive waiting to buffer overflow your OS and take back over as soon as you eject a CD, but how likely is that really?
(Of course, now that I brought up the idea, someone might just be crazy enough to implement it.)
At some point you have to decide you've done a "good enough" job and move on. The same would be true in the case of a comparison against backups.
You *think* you had the "bob ross" virus. You read up on the virus, and did everything that was reccommened to remove it.
Sure there's a possibility that it wasn't the "bob ross" virus and it was some deviously complex variant specfically designed to look like it and thwart your attempts to remove it, which no one else has ever seen and documented, but that seems pretty unlikely.
On top of that you've looked at every single file that changed since the last backup cycle, and have removed any "suspicious" changes.
All of course, your virus scanners come up clean.
When you lead someone, they are led, not lead. Unless you lead them into your crucible and alchemically make them into the material from which we make bullets.
So then they're Uraniumed?
"I believe it was the fact the he had access to all the code on the system that uraniumed him down his path, believing that you need source code availability to fix/tweak/hack to your needs."
So the PC can have electronics to detect the short and disable the USB port - more likely in an expensive machine, or a server.
AFAIK, it is part of the official USB spec that a USB "host" MUST deal with overcurrent.
I can't remember exactly what the minimum was, but I know that it should not be possible to fry anything by shorting out a USB port.
I did the research when I was building a USB power adapter for my PDA. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn't nuke a computer it the PDA decided it wanted more power than the computer could provide.
Or, it could be keeping your Windows box up-to-date with security patches which were released months or even years ago.
Why is it that when SSH or Linux has an exploit in the wild, everyone jumps in with "there's a patch out to fix it! Woot Open Source!!!"... But when an organization gets owned by Windows bugs which were fixed long ago, people on Slashdot blame Microsoft?
Because the windows security model is absolute shit and the seriousness with which they treat security holes is laughable.
Users run a frigging web browser with full admistrative privielages and it's up to that damned web browser to provide ALL the security. Same thing with email, or pretty much any other app.
It's also funny that you mention SSH. Comparing the security record of OpenSSH to that of windows is like comparing a Ferrari to a Pinto. OpenSSH has had very few remote root exploits is say, the last five years and they are fixed almost instanly. Compare that to windows, where the exploit stream is constant and the time delay is usually in MONTHS.
This basically leadis to a situation where SSH users have been publicly known to be expliotable for probably a week out the the last five years, whereas windows users have basically had their ass hanging out in the wind continuously due the large lag between the announcement of a vulnerability and the frequency of vulnerability announcements.
Honestly, how difficult is it to let Automatic Updates keep your Windows box up-to-date? You don't even have to log in for it to work, for goodness sake.
That would be a great idea.....if every patch worked PERFECTLY and only fixed errors instead of adding new features. Unfortuately MS can and does release bad patches which can screw you over just as much as the average virus. (Sure MS might fix the bad patch eventually, but in the mean time your computer has automagically hosed itself.)
The only way to be sure is to reinstall from trusted, read-only media.
NO!!! That is most definately NOT the only way.
You see, with computers it's actually really easy to compare two different files against each other (and even entire disks).
One possible solution would be to do a full comparison of a current disk image against a non-infected disk image from their.......BACKUPS!
The output of this is a list off all the files that have changed in that time period. Then a human goes through that list and decides what to do on a file-by file basis.
I feel sorry for the company you work for, it sounds like they need to hire someone that knows what they are doing.
You really shouldn't be so arrogant about things you probably spent all of 5 seconds considering. There are all kinds of ways one could veirfy that a disk is "safe" without blowing it away and starting from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think fo no othe way to describe this question other than frickin retarded.
First off, we have much more important things to worry about.
Second, the assertion that our failure to use mertic is hurting our economy is stupid. Capitalism dictates that when there is an ACTUAL finicacial benefit to the use of metric, it will be done. (Many American cars DO use metric for example.) We do not need to force metric conversion. If people see a benefit, they will convert, if they don't we're not much of a "free society" if we force them to.
Third, US measurements are often much more useful in everyday situations.
Good examples of this would be measuring temperature in degrees farenheight and speed in MPH. In both cases, the "American" units are much more in line with actual human sensory experience. Do you really want to have to use three significant figures on your house thermostat?
Fourth, there are cases where switching to metric is just plain stupid because the established standard IS "english/american" units. In these cases, switching to all metric would do nothing but result is a whole bunch of needless tooling costs and unnecessary incompatibility.
Slashdotters first say "We want company XYZ to support Linux!" then bitch, "Did you see how company XYZ is making money off of Linux?! Evil! Death to them!"
I don't think I've EVER seen that happen.
Unless of course you count violating copyright (and the GPL) as supporting Linux. Then you'd be right, we're all over them like a pack of wild dogs, but with very good reason.
Repeat after me: "You have no right to privacy in public." (especially when you are outdoors)
But what about when you're on your own land, surrounded by ten acres of forest?
Don't you think you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy then?
IMO, we need to pass some privacy laws concerning aerial photography, and satellite imagery. I'm not saying ban it outright, but aerial imagery of another's PRIVATE property should be severely limited.
Flat Panels *will* ghost and blur, however they do not lag.
Everything lags.
Analog or digital, the monitor has to decode the input before it can display it. This means lag.
(See my earlier post about about lag problems with HDTVs.)
It seems unlikely that the lag for the display is *that* large, but it is possible (perhaps his monitor has to resample the original image to fit the resolution of the actual LCD panel and for some reason this is taking a long time).
I'll have to say BS on this. My suggestion is to borrow a second CRT and hook it up the same way. Most likely the lag will still be there. I have no idea what OS as the video is down. My answer is to upgrade the video drivers and check for some stupid setting being messed up.
As an EE I'll say that what the article is talking about is possible, but not likely. (It would be stupid to make a display with that much delay.)
It comes down to this, any sort of processing has an inherent delay. If this particular LCD was using a really long pipeline to process the incoming data stream, he could be seing the effects of this.
It's not totally crazy to believe that this is what's going on. There has already been one HDTV manufacturer who has offered to replace circuit boards inside their TVs with new ones that have faster chips due to customer complaints about the delay. Apparently some of the new TVs out there have a pretty significant problem.
See this eariler slashdot article for details.
Yes, you refer to "blocking google". China is not going to send a special ops team to the US to arrest google executives. The biggest thing that could happen to Google is them getting blocked. As far as me or the Chinese gov't is concerned, that is basically a "request".
Maybe you're so worried about somebody else's money that you just can't stand the thought of Google making slightly less profit, but believe it or not, it's not a big deal.
Yes, they could refuse to censor and don't do business in China. And maybe that would be the Right Thing to do. But it's far from saying that they a willing helper, what you seem to imply.
You're leaving out two key points here, in one of these cases:
Google is most definately a "willing helper" NO ONE IS FORCING THEM TO DO THIS. If they said no, the would get blocked, and they would lose a little money.
By your definition, every company that does business with China is evil. Google isn't the one denying anyone's human rights.
Sure it is.
Google is actively censoring politcal speech at the request of the Chinese gov't.
That's a direct violation of human rights.
This isn't even like Google is selling guns to the Chinese gov't, it's more like google doing the actual shooting for them.
On a side note, censorship is the surest proof that what a government is doing is not for the good of the people.
Which is why Google shouldn't be helping them hide the fact that they do it!
If google was banned from China entirely, a LOT more people would go "Hey! What gives!"
Google is helping them make information disappear. That is a bad thing.
Google is doing this to increase its profits.
That's just plain filthy and disgusting.
People who make decisions like this are no less than traitors to their fellow man.
Game over. The people of China lose.
How do you figure?
At least under that scenario the people know that Google IS being censored.
If you place NO VALUE WHATSOEVER on freedom of speech and information, then the people of China loose, but if you do, it's pretty easy to claim that the people of China would be BETTER OFF under that situation.
To me, the fact that google is stating exactly what they are doing makes it perfectly all right to me. It's either that or not exist there at all. If they were hiding what they were doing it would be very different.
But they are:
IN CHINA
Who gives a flying F--- whether or not we know the Chinese Google is getting censored, the Chinese people need to know this (and you can bet this news will be censored in China)
How would that help their fellow men in China? It would only limit their information even further.
You're kinda missing the point here, it not just censorship, it's secret censorship.
I've heard the same argument used with North Korea. People refuse to send food to the starving people because some of that food gets used by the govt to feed their army. Some of the food, though, does save lives of innocent civilians.
A much more fair example would be one of a US company sending the Chinese gov't American-branded food (say McNuggets) with secret fertility-reducing drugs mixed in, per the Chinese gov'ts specifications.
There are other things to eat besides McNuggets, and there are other search engines besides Google, and secretly modifying either at the request of a totalitarian regieme in the persuit of a buck, is just wrong.
If China wants to secretly screw over its own citzens, make them do their own dirty work.
Additionally, a lot of your argument is just that it's going to happen anyways. If EVERYBODY refuses, it's not going to get done, is it?
It's kind of like saying "It's okay that I gassed that group of toddlers because if I hadn't done it, the gov't would have done it anyways and I wouldn't have made $200."
It's just frickin wrong. Period.
It doesn't matter that someone else might do it instead, it's still WRONG. It is not the way we should treat fellow human beings.
Jesus people, we're not even talking about people who's life or liberty is going to be threatend by the gov't, this is all about making MONEY by screwing your fellow man.
The exectives at Google could choose not to if they wanted to, and the only suffering they would face would be not having enough money for a second gold-plated Ferrari.
If they refused to abide by the law of the Chinese government, China would simply block google (as they have in the past). Then no one (not using a proxy) in China would have access to google at all. They are helping their "fellow man" more by allowing people in China limited access to google, so that they can at least access non-political information and things that the government forgot to censor.
Nope.
China MIGHT block google. Or they might not.
If China did block google, they would miss out on a pretty high quality seach service and put themselves at a comparative disadvantage to the rest of the world.
Besides hurting then economically, this also pisses off their citizenry, which will then increase the pressure on their gov't to stop being evil.
The planet is less of "total shithole" now that Chinese have at least some access to google than it was when google was blocked.
You said this, but you really don't substanitally back it up. The only way this would be obviously true from what you said is if one placed absolutely no value on free speech.
Then it's a simple question of Google vs. no Google. But the question is not that simple, Google is HELPING THE CHINESE G'OVT CENSOR CONTENT.
This is a bad thing. Very bad. One could pretty easily argue that this is much worse that "not having google at all".
Another thing you're ingoring is the insidiousness of this form of censorship. The people thing they're looking a Google, but they're reallying looking at some crappy Chinese g'ovt approved version of it.
If google refused to help them, the Chinese gov't would have to set up their OWN seach service and the censorship would be obvious, but google is not just helping them censor content, it's helping them hide the fact that they do so.
To me, that's selling your fellow man up the river in exchange for money, and a very shitty thing for a person to do.
Google, as much as we love it, is a priviate company, and they have to abide by the laws, regulations and codes of conduct in forign countries, whose markets they wish to enter.
That does not in any way change that fact that Google is run by humans, who should behave as if they have at least SOME respect for their fellow man.
If corporations get the same rights as people, they also get the same social obligation to not turn this planet into a total shithole.
Don't get upset with goodle over cencorship, get upset with the government who's laws they must abide.
It's perfectly reasonable to get upset with google or cisco for helping a repressive regieme violate the rights of its people.
They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
That's a beautiful concept that I'd love to hear from the Supreme Court of the U.S., but it's actually one that SCotUS has already turned down in Eldred v. Ashcroft, saying that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act was constitutional because 75 years is less than infinity, and you can't prove that they're going to jack it up to higher 20 years from now because that's in the mysterious future.
Damn, you haven't read ANYTHING about this have you.
First off this case is about a totally seperate law than the Elred vs Ashcroft case.
Second, this law says that it is illegal to sell bootleg recordings FOREVER.
That's right, forever.
Not 75 years. Not 750 years. Forever.
That's what the law says. I have a tough time seeing how prohibiting the distribution of a copyrighted work forever does anything but really obviously run counter to the "limited time" provision set out in the constitution.
I'm sure that the RIAA is going to try to get this overturned, but they're going to have a much tougher time of it than you let on. It would probably be much easier for them to get a new law passed that only makes the sale of bootleg recording illegal for 999,999,999 years. At least then they could argue that the new law wasn't technically providing infinate copyright.
And now for the really cool part which no one else has brought up (that I have noticed).
This sets a great precedent for striking down the DMCA:
By prohibing the circumvention of copy-protection devices, even after copyright has expired, the DMCA is effectively establishing an infinate copyright (there is no legal way to distribute works in the public domain).
That's not correct. From http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm Although this belief is widespread and has at times been reported as factual in the mainstream media, the truth of the matter is that unemployment statistics are gathered through a process of sampling a representative number of households; they are not arrived by counting the number of unemployment insurance claims made during a particular month. Data collected in the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of over 60,000 households, is used for this purpose. From this data, an extrapolation is made about the unemployment status of the country as a whole.
See, the text you just posted says NOTHING to contradict what you were trying to contradict. So I choose to pick 60,000 households to get my number from, big deal. I can STILL fuck with the numbers By counting the people in those house as not unemployed, even though they don't have jobs.
The reality of the situation is that the Bush admistration has redfined what constitutes "unemployed".
The text you posted is nothing but a bait-and-switch argument. Snopes doesn't give you enough information to actually show that the claim they're refuting is false, nor does the page the're linking
It's like me saying, "Look a Corvette!"
And you responding, "No, it's blue."
And then a third party coming along based upon only hearing the conversation and note actually seeing the car, claiming it most definately not a Corvette. The reality is that there has been no information presented to you that proves it's not a Corvette.
Additionally, do NOT trust snopes as a sole source for information.
For example, this article is flat out worng:
link
I have emailed them with multiple refences which seem to support that Charles Proteus Steinmetz, did indeed perform the feat in question.
(Not just web links, one of these is a historical sidenote from an advanced math book I used at Cornell.)
Nonetheless, the snopes article was not changed at all. I dodn't think that particular article is a huge deal or anything, but the lack of change to the pages or even a reply to my email, makes seriously doubt the intellectual rigor of any "investigation" they do.
So now everyone in the city is compelled to invest in this guy's new venture?
Everyone in the city has ALREADY paid for the photographs.
As part of the FOIA request, he has to pay any costs involved with duplication.
The cost, to taxpayers, of this man's request is ZERO.
The only legitimate issue that is raised here is one of privacy.
On that topic the gov't is in a sticky place.
If they try to claim that giving him these pictures will violate other citizen's privacy rights, then they are admitting that THEY are reducing the privacy of private citizens.
Personally, I think these images should be released ASAP. I think the privacy issue is pretty much nil.
There aren't any laws against this guy getting his own plane and duplicating these photographs, so how can one reasonably claim that he should not be able to have them?
If people don't like it, they should pass a law banning arial photography of another's property without consent. Personally I would support such a law (with exceptions) because I believe that if your house is surrounded by ten acres of woods, you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you decide to sunbathe nude, there shouldn't be any way for that image to legally end up of the freakin internet.
I think parent's point, which you seem to have missed when you called it a "fluff definition" is that marriage is both a religious/social institution and a legal one; however we don't clearly distinguish between them today.
My point is that we do.
The state does not issue a bunch of religous dictactes about what you must do when you get married. If only deals with the LEGAL aspect of marrige.
If two atheists, who plan to live in different states, raise no family, and have sex with other people want to get married, they can.
Clearly that's against a whole bunch of fundamentalist religious and social edicts, but the state deals strictly with the LEGAL side of things.
The purpose of these bills is to call attention to the fact that Bush is unwilling to share the burdens of the war in Iraq among all Americans. The wealthy get tax cuts, the middle class (their children actually) get the bill, and the poor, without jobs or access to job training, have few alternatives except to do the fighting. A draft without any exemptions would even the burden somewhat.
Like it did with our current president?
It seems only fair that the children or grandchildren of these fine folks should be given a chance to die for their country just like the rest of us. Maybe it would make their parents think a little longer about the need to go to war and then do a better job of planning for the occupation afterword.
Again, see my above comment. What you're suggesting is just absurd. Look at your own examples. You freaking giving examples of politicians and their sons getting out of the draft and you're saying, that it won't happen again?
WAKE UP MAN!
First of all, the government doesn't "prevent" marriage. People have marriage ceremonies without the government's consent, and it doesn't matter. The question is (a) should government recognize marriage, and (b) in what cases should government recognize marriage.
Yes it does. You're just trying to distort the issue by choosing a "fluff" definition of marriage.
By you're logic I could say that the govnment to does make murder illegal because murder consists of sneezing at someone.
Just as there is a LEGAL definintion for murder, there is one for marriage and that is the definition being used when to gov't passes laws.
If marriage is viewed as an act of love, then government has not reason for involvement whatsoever. However, if you view marriage as the foundation platform for a family, then that view changes, for several reasons: [blah blah blah]
See, you're just playing with the defintion of marriage to dodge the real issue. The real issue here is all about legal protections NOT philosophy. Gay couples want the same legal protections as straight couples.
It's that simple. Whatever your own personal philosophy on "what marriage means to me" is, gay couples just want the ability to get married in the legal sense.
On a different topic, one could also point out the absurdity of calling anything between same-sex partners "marriage".
Or one could comment on someone in a "free society" thinking that their own views of what is absurd should interfere with what is none of their damn business.
Only one of those serves the real purpose of marriage: Keeping track of patriarchal family trees. Marriage is a contract by which a woman enters into an exclusive sexual relationship with a man in exchange for material gain. If gay people are so desperate to be declared "normal" by emulating the rites and tradition of the patriarchal society that they reject by their lifestyle choice, then they should go see a mental health specialist instead of trying to have laws change to accomodate their insecurities.
Ye gods, aren't you an arrogant jerk.
Just what the world needs, another angry feminist who just can't get it through their head that marriage can be a union of equals, not a sale of property.
Marriage is about more that 'furthering the patricary' and 'government control', at its core IT IS ABOUT TWO PEOPLE MAKING A PROMISE TO EACH OTHER.
The debate is NOT about changing the religious meaning of marriage, it's about the right to ANY two people to make the same legal and social contract with each other that is currently limited exclusively to a man and a woman.
The problem is that a gay couple is treated as second-class citzens by our current government.
The argument that you're making basically consists of:
Well fuck the establisment anyways.
It might work in the mind of an angry teenager, but a little thought can show us just how silly this argument is:
It's like saying, "I don't like the rules of the road which prohibit me from drivng beause I'm black so fuck driving."
Sure you don't have to follow the rules of the road, but YOU'RE MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING IMPORTANT.
And to your method, how can you know for sure which backup image was a completely clean one?
How can you be sure the install disks you're using to start from scratch are completely clean?
It's all a calculated risk.
I think that at some level, you can but enough effort into checking out the system, to be confident for any level of security (It might come to running the entire hard disk byte-by-byte through a disassembler, if you're a Howard Hughes type.)
Sure there may be some virus code hiding in the frimware of your cdrom drive waiting to buffer overflow your OS and take back over as soon as you eject a CD, but how likely is that really?
(Of course, now that I brought up the idea, someone might just be crazy enough to implement it.)
At some point you have to decide you've done a "good enough" job and move on. The same would be true in the case of a comparison against backups.
You *think* you had the "bob ross" virus. You read up on the virus, and did everything that was reccommened to remove it.
Sure there's a possibility that it wasn't the "bob ross" virus and it was some deviously complex variant specfically designed to look like it and thwart your attempts to remove it, which no one else has ever seen and documented, but that seems pretty unlikely.
On top of that you've looked at every single file that changed since the last backup cycle, and have removed any "suspicious" changes.
All of course, your virus scanners come up clean.
When you lead someone, they are led, not lead. Unless you lead them into your crucible and alchemically make them into the material from which we make bullets.
So then they're Uraniumed?
"I believe it was the fact the he had access to all the code on the system that uraniumed him down his path, believing that you need source code availability to fix/tweak/hack to your needs."
Hmm.... makes RMS sound like godzilla.
So the PC can have electronics to detect the short and disable the USB port - more likely in an expensive machine, or a server.
AFAIK, it is part of the official USB spec that a USB "host" MUST deal with overcurrent.
I can't remember exactly what the minimum was, but I know that it should not be possible to fry anything by shorting out a USB port.
I did the research when I was building a USB power adapter for my PDA. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn't nuke a computer it the PDA decided it wanted more power than the computer could provide.
Or, it could be keeping your Windows box up-to-date with security patches which were released months or even years ago.
Why is it that when SSH or Linux has an exploit in the wild, everyone jumps in with "there's a patch out to fix it! Woot Open Source!!!"... But when an organization gets owned by Windows bugs which were fixed long ago, people on Slashdot blame Microsoft?
Because the windows security model is absolute shit and the seriousness with which they treat security holes is laughable.
Users run a frigging web browser with full admistrative privielages and it's up to that damned web browser to provide ALL the security. Same thing with email, or pretty much any other app.
It's also funny that you mention SSH. Comparing the security record of OpenSSH to that of windows is like comparing a Ferrari to a Pinto. OpenSSH has had very few remote root exploits is say, the last five years and they are fixed almost instanly. Compare that to windows, where the exploit stream is constant and the time delay is usually in MONTHS.
This basically leadis to a situation where SSH users have been publicly known to be expliotable for probably a week out the the last five years, whereas windows users have basically had their ass hanging out in the wind continuously due the large lag between the announcement of a vulnerability and the frequency of vulnerability announcements.
Honestly, how difficult is it to let Automatic Updates keep your Windows box up-to-date? You don't even have to log in for it to work, for goodness sake.
That would be a great idea.....if every patch worked PERFECTLY and only fixed errors instead of adding new features. Unfortuately MS can and does release bad patches which can screw you over just as much as the average virus. (Sure MS might fix the bad patch eventually, but in the mean time your computer has automagically hosed itself.)
The only way to be sure is to reinstall from trusted, read-only media.
NO!!!
That is most definately NOT the only way.
You see, with computers it's actually really easy to compare two different files against each other (and even entire disks).
One possible solution would be to do a full comparison of a current disk image against a non-infected disk image from their.......BACKUPS!
The output of this is a list off all the files that have changed in that time period. Then a human goes through that list and decides what to do on a file-by file basis.
I feel sorry for the company you work for, it sounds like they need to hire someone that knows what they are doing.
You really shouldn't be so arrogant about things you probably spent all of 5 seconds considering. There are all kinds of ways one could veirfy that a disk is "safe" without blowing it away and starting from scratch.