It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
At age 89, he might still be in for an awakening like the Wise Old Eagle in Thurber's "A Glass in the Field" who also gets to find out (the hard way) that there is indeed such a thing as "the air crystallizing".
Let's hope he'll be blogging about this (and how he should have listened to the goldfinch ever since 1994) as he turns 100.
It may seem hard to understand why a budding party would welcome a seasoned politician fallen into disrepute.
However, there are peculiar aspects to this case which demonstrate why contrary to what one might perceive at first glance, this stance is imperative and not political suicide on the Pirates' part:
With the Slashdot-appointed stand-in Horseman of the Infocalypse as the scapegoat of the year, incessant witch hunt reasoning ("hairesis maxima est opera maleficarum non credere") has been used along with insidious rhetoric to try and silence as alleged child molesters anyone questioning the official claims that "for the children" (Godwin's Law leaves it to you to look up which infamous politician coined this "incontestable" strategy!), a technically content-agnostic censorship infrastructure (central DNS black-list, i.e. easily circumvented by any but the most stupid perverts, but a supreme target for anyone trying to shut down the nation) had to be instituted to block "countless massive commercial" child-porn resources purportedly openly available on the Web, as well as against anyone demanding that such servers (illegal in probably every civilized nation on earth) be shut down (and their operators and suppliers brought to justice) rather than hidden from the public's view.
Fed up with misleading information from police authorities and a number of astroturfing organizations closely related to the politicians who stood to benefit from an adoption of presumably unconstitutional censorship, the defector and new-found Pirate, who had been fighting online smut for years and was one of only a few tech-savvy MPs, apparently (and possibly in an overzealous way) tried to prove his opponents wrong by demonstrating that the porn-trading scene had long moved elsewhere.
The surprise was not that he could be found in possession of some material that may have become illegal (under laws he himself had helped adopt) - when his parliamentary immunity was lifted, reportedly by a committee controlled by lawmakers with close ties to his opponents. Rather, the startling fact is how the news media had been called in to the immediate search and seizure operations, as if to make sure he would be thrown to the wolves of a lynch mob of public opinion, in utter disrespect for the presumption of innocence, so as to "finish him" in the voters' eyes no matter what the outcome of a fair trial (yet to be held) might be.
It would be a sad state of affairs if Western democracies that consider themselves the "beacons of liberty" had to re-learn the Rule of Law from a Pirate Party.
But even if we assumed for a moment that both this politician and the Swedish pirate captains were guilty as hell, this scenario in which their purported "crimes" are used to foster ulterior motives and measures would give a principled Pirate Party true to the defense of civil liberties every reason to stand up for the accused unless convicted by final verdict in a court of law, as in the words of Henry Louis Mencken:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
no human being is known to have died from staying awake
The case of a woman in her 20s compelled to work several days and nights through until her fatal collapse in the Japanese financial services sector (not strictly karoshi as the cause of her demise seems to have been neither cardiac nor a stroke, but attributed to the sleep deprivation itself) is notorious in particular as her family was denounced for suing the employer, which public opinion reportly considered an immoral action there.
Finally, you may ask how the servos are being driven. Well, routers are used to send bits of information down a series of twisted pair wires usually. Guess what it takes to send packeted information? An IC that would work really well as a PWM! I did some haxoring around on this, and read what other nerds had done on the internet, and the next thin[g] you know I have a servo with a Cat5E plug on the end of it.
Now you're talking. Schematics/code? Hope he'll share them (there's no better backup) before the next rm...
I was distracted by some girl in my bed (Don't EVAR program PHP with a girl(s) in your bed!) and maybe a beer or six in my blood. [...] While girl was yammering in my ear I typed rm *.php instead of rm 8.php, and hit enter. [...] There were some major hurdles. While range testing one night, I received a call from a girl. She was pretty insistent on me going to a party or something. So now I had two huge problems, incoming calls would kill the link to the craft, and I had to figure out if I had any clean clothes without R/C Logos on them to wear out.
Copyright was meant as an incentive - how much of that can you give to the deceased?
(Now don't try to tell me they all started singing -ages ago- with nothing on their minds but the burning desire to create something that would feed their yet-to-be families for generations to come...)
The premise is flawed.
Not only since the advent of spam zombies and botnets can it never be said that average users should be billed
based on how much consumers use the Internet
- as the Internet "uses them" (by fair means or foul) while they "use the Internet" and providers must face the fact that short of unplugging the modem, most customers have zero grasp of and control over how much data is sent and received.
(Even if they did, the idea of volume would make no quantifiable sense in most people's minds - it would only expose them to a high-stakes gamble of price discrimination.)
Advertising services that require always-on (unmetered) traffic and the speed of connections has certainly played no small part in this (lack of) understanding.
...of treatment and the same is true for bronchitis, sinusitis, and sore throats
Arguably no less harm can be done by doctors who fail to prescribe antibiotics even in cases where these conditions are less harmless than they'd "typically" expect them to be.
Its not a good choice either to just look at "the protocol" rather than at the patient...;-/
eBay says 100% of reported listings were removed from the site last year, most within 12 hours, and the company uses sellers' background information to make sure that they don't create new accounts to sell delisted items.
They were able to validate these allegations every single time and be sure after proper audi alteram partem that the expulsion of the seller was warranted?
So eBay and rightholders are unfailing, Dave?
schools to instruct maths classes that "Pi is a theory, not a number", give equal time to all 10 alternatives of its last digit (the value of which they invited their critics to "simply prove") and make sure all books contain respective warnings as drafted by the Landover Education Board.
If RAND wants to make the world a better place with reports, linking spam to terrorism is the way to do it.
With the potential of most botnets to stop spamming and start DDoSing entire nations within instants, bot-herders should indeed be prosecuted like any other suspect procuring the means for and possibly preparing a terrorist assault.
Then again, the DMA probably won't afford (or even appreciate) stor^H^Hudies like this these days to make the case for a crackdown on what are probably perceived as "just a few rogue advertisers" by many authorities, without realizing their botnets' capabilities to wreak havoc on more than just port 25...
they release a study saying that the physical distribution of DVDs funds terrorism in some cases, and the response is well what about P2P?
Because the existence of P2P (and DVD writers in most PCs these days) doesn't exactly lend plausibility to the assertion of counterfeit movies as an easy way to substantial funding?
[...] these pirates are the ones the *AA should have been fighting all the time, not the people downloading a few things.
These pirates are the ones who attempt to make an exact copy down to the packaging. They use professional grade DVD hardware that will read/write the disk CSS, serial number, media ID and all.
It is still implausible why The Godfather or the average warlord would want to catch their share of cuts from a falling knife too, and should have found no avenues to criminal proceeds that are more profitable and rather effortless in comparison to imitating the burdensome physical distribution (against equally illegal "competition" from the dark side of P2P that has no such expenses) which makes it difficult to turn a profit even for studios themselves these days.
To get rich quick, anyone looking ahead to a life in jail if caught for running a sophisticated crime syndicate would probably rather want to deserve their time as a drug kingpin than for peddling fake DVDs.
Precisely, by this logic, giving tax dollars to major torrent trackers and making their use compulsory (and probably even taught in schools;-)) would cut off financing for mobsters and terrorists...;-/
The term "intellectual property" [...] leads to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these disparate laws have - that they create artificial privileges for certain parties - and to disregard the details which form their substance: the specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages an "economistic" approach to all these issues.
[...]
Thus, any opinions about "the issue of intellectual property" and any generalizations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish. If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which is any good.
Yeah, sure, al-Quaeda and the mob have got be in it for all the ginormous heaps of money to be made e.g. from sharing ripped screeners for free on P2P networks, or selling camcorder copies on backyard markets at pennies above the price of the blanks.
Actually they are being used as a unit of scaremongering, and a strange kind of filesharing that would be where one server holds every file in full, amounting to a total of 65 TB.
If they are talking about some FTPWelt.com kind of pay-for-download archive, there seems to be something fishy (in particular at this point in time) about the purported link between TPB and an alleged über-Camorra known as -OMG, shiver me timbers- "The Scene".
the server is part of an international pirate network called "The Scene,"
What a well-organized network that must be to have such unmistakably identifiable persons (some even being computers!) among its membership under this absolutely new and unique trademark name.;-)
Now where are the ships and home port of their evil "pirate" fleet?
Incumbent short-sighted players have been able to hinder and harm progress, but they can't keep it down completely. That culture of improvement can't be stopped entirely.
[...] often [...] the innovators of yesterday seek to stop the innovators of tomorrow, but the march of innovation hasn't been stopped yet.
Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. [...] an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Can't help thinking the decisive factors for getting at the helm of a project to build the bomb of the day were not exactly compassion and empathy but more in the province of "demonstrably having had no qualms about killing", and probably a presumed yearning to succeed big time on a second chance at that...
Slashdot Mirror
At age 89, he might still be in for an awakening like the Wise Old Eagle in Thurber's "A Glass in the Field" who also gets to find out (the hard way) that there is indeed such a thing as "the air crystallizing".
Let's hope he'll be blogging about this (and how he should have listened to the goldfinch ever since 1994) as he turns 100.
However, there are peculiar aspects to this case which demonstrate why contrary to what one might perceive at first glance, this stance is imperative and not political suicide on the Pirates' part:
With the Slashdot-appointed stand-in Horseman of the Infocalypse as the scapegoat of the year, incessant witch hunt reasoning ("hairesis maxima est opera maleficarum non credere") has been used along with insidious rhetoric to try and silence as alleged child molesters anyone questioning the official claims that "for the children" (Godwin's Law leaves it to you to look up which infamous politician coined this "incontestable" strategy!), a technically content-agnostic censorship infrastructure (central DNS black-list, i.e. easily circumvented by any but the most stupid perverts, but a supreme target for anyone trying to shut down the nation) had to be instituted to block "countless massive commercial" child-porn resources purportedly openly available on the Web, as well as against anyone demanding that such servers (illegal in probably every civilized nation on earth) be shut down (and their operators and suppliers brought to justice) rather than hidden from the public's view.
Fed up with misleading information from police authorities and a number of astroturfing organizations closely related to the politicians who stood to benefit from an adoption of presumably unconstitutional censorship, the defector and new-found Pirate, who had been fighting online smut for years and was one of only a few tech-savvy MPs, apparently (and possibly in an overzealous way) tried to prove his opponents wrong by demonstrating that the porn-trading scene had long moved elsewhere.
The surprise was not that he could be found in possession of some material that may have become illegal (under laws he himself had helped adopt) - when his parliamentary immunity was lifted, reportedly by a committee controlled by lawmakers with close ties to his opponents. Rather, the startling fact is how the news media had been called in to the immediate search and seizure operations, as if to make sure he would be thrown to the wolves of a lynch mob of public opinion, in utter disrespect for the presumption of innocence, so as to "finish him" in the voters' eyes no matter what the outcome of a fair trial (yet to be held) might be.
It would be a sad state of affairs if Western democracies that consider themselves the "beacons of liberty" had to re-learn the Rule of Law from a Pirate Party.
But even if we assumed for a moment that both this politician and the Swedish pirate captains were guilty as hell, this scenario in which their purported "crimes" are used to foster ulterior motives and measures would give a principled Pirate Party true to the defense of civil liberties every reason to stand up for the accused unless convicted by final verdict in a court of law, as in the words of Henry Louis Mencken:
The case of a woman in her 20s compelled to work several days and nights through until her fatal collapse in the Japanese financial services sector (not strictly karoshi as the cause of her demise seems to have been neither cardiac nor a stroke, but attributed to the sleep deprivation itself) is notorious in particular as her family was denounced for suing the employer, which public opinion reportly considered an immoral action there.
Now you're talking. Schematics/code? Hope he'll share them (there's no better backup) before the next rm...
Ludwig Catta, is that you?! ;-)
...would be the other obvious question, though for performers the change is not quite as extreme as 70-95 years "post mortem auctoris".
(Now don't try to tell me they all started singing -ages ago- with nothing on their minds but the burning desire to create something that would feed their yet-to-be families for generations to come...)
- as the Internet "uses them" (by fair means or foul) while they "use the Internet" and providers must face the fact that short of unplugging the modem, most customers have zero grasp of and control over how much data is sent and received.
(Even if they did, the idea of volume would make no quantifiable sense in most people's minds - it would only expose them to a high-stakes gamble of price discrimination.)
Advertising services that require always-on (unmetered) traffic and the speed of connections has certainly played no small part in this (lack of) understanding.
Arguably no less harm can be done by doctors who fail to prescribe antibiotics even in cases where these conditions are less harmless than they'd "typically" expect them to be. Its not a good choice either to just look at "the protocol" rather than at the patient...;-/
They were able to validate these allegations every single time and be sure after proper audi alteram partem that the expulsion of the seller was warranted?
So eBay and rightholders are unfailing, Dave?
...which is ideal e.g. for a Daily_2009-03-14_23-59.log
schools to instruct maths classes that "Pi is a theory, not a number", give equal time to all 10 alternatives of its last digit (the value of which they invited their critics to "simply prove") and make sure all books contain respective warnings as drafted by the Landover Education Board.
;-)
SCNR
...conspiracy literature and impact drills to students with number affinity should not be recommended considering the consequences where they may already suffer from teachers like these.
"Because of the metric system"
On impact, force equals mass by deceleration too... ;-)
Fortunately, few reach this level of "mastery": http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/hp_packaging/
With the potential of most botnets to stop spamming and start DDoSing entire nations within instants, bot-herders should indeed be prosecuted like any other suspect procuring the means for and possibly preparing a terrorist assault.
Then again, the DMA probably won't afford (or even appreciate) stor^H^Hudies like this these days to make the case for a crackdown on what are probably perceived as "just a few rogue advertisers" by many authorities, without realizing their botnets' capabilities to wreak havoc on more than just port 25...
Because the existence of P2P (and DVD writers in most PCs these days) doesn't exactly lend plausibility to the assertion of counterfeit movies as an easy way to substantial funding?
It is still implausible why The Godfather or the average warlord would want to catch their share of cuts from a falling knife too, and should have found no avenues to criminal proceeds that are more profitable and rather effortless in comparison to imitating the burdensome physical distribution (against equally illegal "competition" from the dark side of P2P that has no such expenses) which makes it difficult to turn a profit even for studios themselves these days.
To get rich quick, anyone looking ahead to a life in jail if caught for running a sophisticated crime syndicate would probably rather want to deserve their time as a drug kingpin than for peddling fake DVDs.
Precisely, by this logic, giving tax dollars to major torrent trackers and making their use compulsory (and probably even taught in schools ;-)) would cut off financing for mobsters and terrorists... ;-/
Which you surely put in quotes for a reason (as in the words of Richard M. Stallman):
Yeah, sure, al-Quaeda and the mob have got be in it for all the ginormous heaps of money to be made e.g. from sharing ripped screeners for free on P2P networks, or selling camcorder copies on backyard markets at pennies above the price of the blanks.
Occam's razor points elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
Actually they are being used as a unit of scaremongering, and a strange kind of filesharing that would be where one server holds every file in full, amounting to a total of 65 TB.
If they are talking about some FTPWelt.com kind of pay-for-download archive, there seems to be something fishy (in particular at this point in time) about the purported link between TPB and an alleged über-Camorra known as -OMG, shiver me timbers- "The Scene".
What a well-organized network that must be to have such unmistakably identifiable persons (some even being computers!) among its membership under this absolutely new and unique trademark name. ;-)
Now where are the ships and home port of their evil "pirate" fleet?
Can't help thinking the decisive factors for getting at the helm of a project to build the bomb of the day were not exactly compassion and empathy but more in the province of "demonstrably having had no qualms about killing", and probably a presumed yearning to succeed big time on a second chance at that...