It is clear there are no "Sharia courts" in countries like Canada and the UK. Try harder, I said they are trying to get them. That is say, when a population of Muslims gets to a certain size, they want to insert eastern jurisprudence into pockets of the western world. This undermines basic Western concepts of justice, and demonstrates a lack of assimilation on the parts of the immigrants in question.
The only actual threat to the justice systems of these countries is the War on Terror, which is seeking (successfully -- unlike your Muslim bogeyman) to replace courts and fair trials with kangaroo courts and military prisons. Try to stay within the context of my argument here. The War on Terror is not derived from any institutional religious concept. On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is, namely Jihad. The two are not equivalent, because the War on Terror and Christianity are not related, and in the minds of terrorists and many Muslims, Jihad is Islam working in harmony. You can say the War on Terror is broken and I would agree with you; where I differ is that I am saying that the War on Terror is not derived from Christian Fundamentalism, which is what I was talking about: equivalencing Christian fundamentalism with Islamic Fundamentalism. Christianity in some sense got us this far, whereas Islam got Islamic countries where they are today. Which culture would you rather live in?
You cannot see the forest for the trees. Individual facts are blinding you from the big picture. Here is what I am saying. It is a demonstrative fact that this country was settled by hardcore Christians from hardcore Christian countries. Look at where we are today. Now look at hardcore Muslim countries. Which countries run themselves suitably well to the benefit of most of the people in them, and which do not? Which ones practice pervasive religious intolerance at all social and political levels, and which do not?
Christian fundamentalism is a 19th century phenomenon, so it wasn't around back in the 1600's. Yes, there were religious Christians, but they weren't following Christian fundamentalist philosophy. Why don't you consider the Puritans to be fundamentalist Christians?
If Christian values are being promoted on both sides of a conflict, that's your indication that religion is being used as a justification rather than the origin of an argument. I think it's pretty clear that's what was happening with slavery and civil rights. The Mormon wars were over the fact that Mormons were infiltrating government and having people killed. You sound like a smart guy, so I don't know why you can't see that. On the other hand, Jihad is a religious concept that originated from Islam. I am not seeing arguments between Christians and Muslims over who does Jihad right, because It's a Muslim thing.
It isn't Christian vs. Muslim. It is intolerance vs. everybody else. The fact that you so proudly wave the Christian banner and so readily denounce those who you don't agree with your religious views shows which side of the divide you're on. I'm not a Christian. I'm smart enough to tell the difference between the substance of threats from Christians and Muslims.
Try and stay on topic by reading OP:
Has it dawned on these people that a large number of Middle-Easterners might have the same sentiments regarding the religeous extremeism, tyrranical regimes and terrorist groups that are common in their home lands? THAT is why it's disturbing. The concern is specific to Muslim ideology, or the perception thereof.
How is it more dangerous than the inside threat of Christian Fundamentalists that threaten the very nature of the US? Christian Fundamentalists have been here since the 1600s and haven't turned this country into Afghanistan yet. On the other hand you look at sizable immigrant Muslim communities in countries like Canada and the UK, and people are pushing for Sharia courts. The system that gives you rules for how hard you can beat your wife and details appropriate punishment for being a rape victim.
For that matter, Christianity doesn't even have an equivalent of Jihad in either codification or practice. They did in practice six hundred years ago on another continent, but that really isn't relevant in the America of today. We've had a couple of abortion doctor shooters, which were loners and which has been uniformly denounced by all major Christian denominations. Compare this to honor killing.
Why why why why is it automatically assumed that encryption by non-government entities is in actual fact an attempt to cover up illegal activity? In this case it is not automatically assumed. A significant portion of bittorrent traffic is in fact infringing copyright. If a bunch of it suddenly goes encrypted, I don't know why you wouldn't suspect that the encrypted traffic wasn't largely illegal as well. It may well not be, but the fact that it's encrypted works against that assumption based on the legality of unencrypted traffic. You can see that a large portion of visible traffic is infringing and you can exclude from your stats the stuff that isn't; you can't exclude the legal stuff if the content is encrypted, therefore your best indication is that it's probably just like most other BT traffic, illegal. Nobody may like hearing that, but it's the truth.
I'll tell you why I think this, the entire reason Slashdot exists and is popular is because it targets to a specific audience and gives specialized news. Politics are a GENERAL HUMAN INTEREST topic, and as such of questionable value to a specialized site. I can go out onto the net and get a universe of news and debate on politics. The reason why I come HERE is because I want "news for NERDS." The topic at hand here has NOTHING directly to do with "news for nerds" because I don't see anything of SPECIFIC interest to me AS a presumed nerd. This does not exclude politics, but does limit it to a subset of politics, that which would foster debate on specifically "nerd" issues.
Furthermore, I take umbrage with your assertion that Slashdot is for debates that intelligent people might want to discuss. "Nerd" isn't a well-defined term, but it definitely is false that a nerd is just an intelligent person. I'm really interested in the history of the Olympics, and I'd like to think I've got a pretty good grasp on it as the result of a lot of reading and undergraduate study. I'd love to get into discussions about it with other smart people interested in the history of the Olympics, but that is not an appropriate topic for a "news for nerds" site, despite it requiring a high degree of knowledge and intelligence. Also, I don't care about "Firefly" or most sci-fi. It's not a prerequisite for intelligence, although interest in scifi is one of those things that gets you currency in the nerd category. "nerd" != "intelligent person."
OK, so people voted up politics stories, but no one is only a nerd, and are interested in many things. It is not their responsibility to keep the site on track, that is the responsibility of editors. So I don't blame people for being interested in politics, indeed I am as well. I blame the slow drift of the site on the last presidential election and the creation of the "politics" section which in its current form I believe is a mistake.
you may not agree with me, but I wanted to address your statement because I believe that by picking up general topics, Slashdot is diminishing its value. You can already witness the increasingly frustrating and snarky debate that goes on in every Politics post. It draws, feeds and creates new trolls, which in turn consume mod points that in turn cannot be used to increase the quality of discussion in EVERY OTHER PART OF THE SITE. There are actual, negative consequences to the entire site due to the inclusion of the politics section because it is a troll magnet that eats up mods points by downmodding.
Women outlive men worldwide because men tend to be the lifelong breadwinners and take up the majority of the riskiest jobs which pull down the average. They are the ones working 40+ hours a week and doing jobs like coalmining and putting out fires and logging. Even in the USA where women work, they on average are working less hours than men in lower-impact jobs, and tend to drop out of the workforce earlier to raise families. I'm sure higher rates for violent death due to crime at an early age also pulls down the male average.
We aren't talking about driving, we are talking about recognizing a state-issued ID from another state. It's unrelated that the driver's license is used for that purpose.
Granted, there might be some benefits to a unified ID across the 50 states, but combating terrorism isn't one of them. The lack of unified ID is one of the things that makes data mining less effective. Devil's advocate, if we had an actual national ID, it would be easier to notice of for example, someone was taking flight lessons in Nebraska, buying a bunch of fertilizer in Iowa, and holds a rapidly accruing bank account in Missouri. Because currently, any investigation of one of those events is going to more or less end at that state's database.
In my state it's illegal to register or drive a car without insurance, but people still do it, for example illegal aliens. I suppose they don't register their vehicles for the same reason they don't get licenses. I don't think being illegally without insurance is a deterrence for people that are here illegally already and are driving without a license. Unless I am missing something here.
Article 4, section 1: Full Faith and Credit Clause.
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof. This is the reason that your state-issued marriage license is recognized in the entire country (and incidentally, why the DOMA Act banning a state's obligation to recognise other states' gay marriages is a crock of crap.)
Because the driver's license has been a de-facto state ID since forever, and changing that would upset a lot of social convenience. It seems like a lot of anguish so that some politicians can passive-aggressively avoid dealing with the immigration debate. The logical and correct solution is to stop avoiding the immigration debate. It's stupid on its face to everyone who doesn't have an agenda to give state IDs to people who are not here legally.
One purported benefit of Real ID was uniform standards for state identification. Constitutionally states are obligated to recognize others' state IDs, so it would be nice to have a standard in place so that if my state's ID is good, people don't just go next door where the license is printed on card stock or something. I read part of Real ID was a minimum standard for preventing forgery, and I don't think this is a bad idea.
Actually, the only people claiming that Macs are immune to malware, are people like you claiming others are doing so specifically so you can say these mythical people are wrong. What a crock of shit. What I have been witnessing for years is Mac users saying "Macs don't have Viruses!!!1!" and someone else saying "Viruses aren't the only malware, idiot" before getting modded into oblivion. What you're shoving down the memory hole is that for years Mac users almost never even ADDRESSED the issue of trojans, either because of fanboism or because they know it's an argument they would lose. Anybody with a brain knew that when the Mac platform got big enough, you would start seeing trojan horses, because it's not a computer thing, it's a social engineering thing.
I download stuff for my Mac, sometimes it needs administrator authentication and sometimes it doesn't. Does a codec need to authenticate to install? Plausible, OK. How do I know why it needs to be Administrator? I was a computer science major and I write software for a living, and I don't flipping know.
This is only the formative phase of malware for Apple computers. Next, trojan'ed copies of popular software are going to get uploaded to download.com. Then, you are going to see silly-ass toolbars and weatherbug and bonzi buddy, which may or may not even need administrator rights to do their damage. And then the Mac users populating the Internet that constantly parrot "Macs have no viruses!!!" will go away, because the statement will continue to be true but have been proven to be utterly MEANINGLESS.
The Democrats could shut the government down, like the Republicans did over minor tax squabbles in the 1990s. Clinton was the one who kept vetoing Congresses' budget. Details:
1. Ultimately he had a problem with one line item, regarding benefits for the disabled and seniors (big political win.) 2. He lied about what the line-item said (it was a reduction in the percentage increase in medicare, he said it was a cut in medicare benefits. Even after the reduction the percentage exceeded inflation by a large margin.) 3. When he was running for president he proposed almost the same exact thing, but actually a larger reduction. So why veto over it?
The reason was it was absolutely imperative that Clinton do everything in his power to undermine the new Republican majority Congress' "Contract With America," as it would have been highly embarrassing to the Democrats if they succeeded. One of the Republican planks was a balanced budget, Clinton didn't take this on until the Republicans tried to actually do it. So he proposed his own budget, substantively the same as the Republicans and picked out a politically viable attack point ("Republicans want to cut senior citizen benefits!!!") to differ on.
Question: if it was such a minor issue, then why didn't Clinton just sign the budget, which by the way it's Congresses' job to write and not his?
Now look at today, the exact same thing would happen. Congress would shut down government, Bush would say "troops daily are not getting the supplies they need to fight, because the Democrats shut down the government." And he would be more or less right, and he would win. Because his message "sounds" better ("Democrats are putting the troops in danger",) he has the bully-pulpit, and his strategy team is still better than the Democrats'. There is no way that Congress could win that fight, and it probably would in fact prevent some troops from getting supplies they otherwise would have gotten.
If you're being unfairly disenfranchised, how do you affect change in government if you can't vote? Freedom and democracy are connected. The philosophical underpinnings of this country are that the government exists by the consent of the governed.
He's retired and the paper is 50 years old. And if you look at what he's retracting, he's probably embarrassed and is trying to recover his reputation after being associated with those nitwits. Retracting the paper is a pretty low-risk proposition. I compare that to the controversy regarding pre-Clovis American Indian settlements, where guys who had staked their careers on the Clovis Indians being the "first" enacted dirty smear campaigns against archaeologists that were actually amassing evidence to the contrary. If you went up against the "establishment" theory, you would be viciously personally attacked. This guy is doing the right thing, but it is a really the least embarrassing option so it's an oh-so-easy choice if you ask me.
I come from a religious background, though I have largely abandoned it. I never believed in creationism. I've had this argument a number of times, and I can map out exactly how it goes:
creationist: "science says X, which is powerful evidence for creationism" evolutionist: "That's a little simplistic, science really says Y, for these reasons:...So you can see its really not the case." creationist: "(confused) look, I am not a scientist, and it's not really my field of expertise. What it comes down to is, I have faith and this is what I believe. I know God is real, and this is how I have to go about it"
The fact of the matter is, creationists are throwing out science where it agrees with them, and when you get down to the nitty-gritty they admit that it doesn't matter anyway because that's what they believe, because God said so. I believe that is the textbook definition of dogma. If it was really about the science, they would either change their mind or take it upon themselves to go the extra mile and learn what the hell they are talking about.
I think it is delusional, but everyone in their everyday life takes tons of things on faith because they are not an expert in that field. I don't have a problem with that, it's perfectly rational behavior. What annoys me is that they pretend like they actually know what they are talking about. I have no doubt in my mind that some scientists jut blindly dismiss spirituality, but in this case he knows people are perverting his errors in that paper and he wants it to stop.
That's great and I agree, but the article is about people using virtualization for purported security benefits, and Theo de Raadt saying that it is actually less secure. If you're using virtualization to simplify administration and reduce costs, you are using it for its intended purpose.
ack, I didn't address your specific example. Theo's position here is: now, instead of an exploitable app and an exploitable OS, you have two exploitable OS (guest and host) and two exploitable apps (your app and the VM.) Making this worse is that the the exploitability of each individual piece is amplified by the potential promoting of an OS crash into an application exploit (VM.)
You're missing the point. Your virtualization product is an application, which weakens the security of the OS running under it. So now you can have attacks from both sides. As Theo says, now an OS crash (inside the VM) can become an attack on the host system, and application attacks on the VM can become an attack on the OS running in the VM.
His position has many facets. As I understand it:
* programmers make buggy code, and now programmers are programming virtual hardware * the hardware they are emulating (PC architecture) is a nightmare, they have to do crazy, unsafe crap to implement it. * application flaws in the VM can compromise the guest OS. * OS flaws in the guest OS can potentially compromise the host OS. * virtualizing hardware is inherently less secure than the physical segmentation of using actual, separate machines, so when you consolidate many machines onto a VM system you have a net loss in security.
Totally agreed, none of this stuff will work unless its done even-handedly, which I am not sure is even possible in our system anymore. Carbon credits bug me as well. I can forsee a point where rich people, wanting to keep flying their jets and heating their enormous houses, end up valuing carbon credits so high that it is financially infeasible for anyone else to hold onto them. Sure you get money for selling your allotment, but what it ends up is that the super-rich can live however they want while everyone else takes a massive lifestyle cut, because only the super-rich can afford to buy extras.
Because of everything you just said is precisely the reason this should be done at the federal level. Then businesses cannot play states against each other in a race to the bottom. I'm aware that coal is about all we have, the goal here is to replace the coal plants one day because they are a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot see the forest for the trees. Individual facts are blinding you from the big picture. Here is what I am saying. It is a demonstrative fact that this country was settled by hardcore Christians from hardcore Christian countries. Look at where we are today. Now look at hardcore Muslim countries. Which countries run themselves suitably well to the benefit of most of the people in them, and which do not? Which ones practice pervasive religious intolerance at all social and political levels, and which do not?
For that matter, Christianity doesn't even have an equivalent of Jihad in either codification or practice. They did in practice six hundred years ago on another continent, but that really isn't relevant in the America of today. We've had a couple of abortion doctor shooters, which were loners and which has been uniformly denounced by all major Christian denominations. Compare this to honor killing.
Illegal Video Downloads Surpass Legal Alternatives 5 to 1
I'll tell you why I think this, the entire reason Slashdot exists and is popular is because it targets to a specific audience and gives specialized news. Politics are a GENERAL HUMAN INTEREST topic, and as such of questionable value to a specialized site. I can go out onto the net and get a universe of news and debate on politics. The reason why I come HERE is because I want "news for NERDS." The topic at hand here has NOTHING directly to do with "news for nerds" because I don't see anything of SPECIFIC interest to me AS a presumed nerd. This does not exclude politics, but does limit it to a subset of politics, that which would foster debate on specifically "nerd" issues.
Furthermore, I take umbrage with your assertion that Slashdot is for debates that intelligent people might want to discuss. "Nerd" isn't a well-defined term, but it definitely is false that a nerd is just an intelligent person. I'm really interested in the history of the Olympics, and I'd like to think I've got a pretty good grasp on it as the result of a lot of reading and undergraduate study. I'd love to get into discussions about it with other smart people interested in the history of the Olympics, but that is not an appropriate topic for a "news for nerds" site, despite it requiring a high degree of knowledge and intelligence. Also, I don't care about "Firefly" or most sci-fi. It's not a prerequisite for intelligence, although interest in scifi is one of those things that gets you currency in the nerd category. "nerd" != "intelligent person."
OK, so people voted up politics stories, but no one is only a nerd, and are interested in many things. It is not their responsibility to keep the site on track, that is the responsibility of editors. So I don't blame people for being interested in politics, indeed I am as well. I blame the slow drift of the site on the last presidential election and the creation of the "politics" section which in its current form I believe is a mistake.
you may not agree with me, but I wanted to address your statement because I believe that by picking up general topics, Slashdot is diminishing its value. You can already witness the increasingly frustrating and snarky debate that goes on in every Politics post. It draws, feeds and creates new trolls, which in turn consume mod points that in turn cannot be used to increase the quality of discussion in EVERY OTHER PART OF THE SITE. There are actual, negative consequences to the entire site due to the inclusion of the politics section because it is a troll magnet that eats up mods points by downmodding.
Women outlive men worldwide because men tend to be the lifelong breadwinners and take up the majority of the riskiest jobs which pull down the average. They are the ones working 40+ hours a week and doing jobs like coalmining and putting out fires and logging. Even in the USA where women work, they on average are working less hours than men in lower-impact jobs, and tend to drop out of the workforce earlier to raise families. I'm sure higher rates for violent death due to crime at an early age also pulls down the male average.
We aren't talking about driving, we are talking about recognizing a state-issued ID from another state. It's unrelated that the driver's license is used for that purpose.
In my state it's illegal to register or drive a car without insurance, but people still do it, for example illegal aliens. I suppose they don't register their vehicles for the same reason they don't get licenses. I don't think being illegally without insurance is a deterrence for people that are here illegally already and are driving without a license. Unless I am missing something here.
Because the driver's license has been a de-facto state ID since forever, and changing that would upset a lot of social convenience. It seems like a lot of anguish so that some politicians can passive-aggressively avoid dealing with the immigration debate. The logical and correct solution is to stop avoiding the immigration debate. It's stupid on its face to everyone who doesn't have an agenda to give state IDs to people who are not here legally.
One purported benefit of Real ID was uniform standards for state identification. Constitutionally states are obligated to recognize others' state IDs, so it would be nice to have a standard in place so that if my state's ID is good, people don't just go next door where the license is printed on card stock or something. I read part of Real ID was a minimum standard for preventing forgery, and I don't think this is a bad idea.
I download stuff for my Mac, sometimes it needs administrator authentication and sometimes it doesn't. Does a codec need to authenticate to install? Plausible, OK. How do I know why it needs to be Administrator? I was a computer science major and I write software for a living, and I don't flipping know.
This is only the formative phase of malware for Apple computers. Next, trojan'ed copies of popular software are going to get uploaded to download.com. Then, you are going to see silly-ass toolbars and weatherbug and bonzi buddy, which may or may not even need administrator rights to do their damage. And then the Mac users populating the Internet that constantly parrot "Macs have no viruses!!!" will go away, because the statement will continue to be true but have been proven to be utterly MEANINGLESS.
1. Ultimately he had a problem with one line item, regarding benefits for the disabled and seniors (big political win.)
2. He lied about what the line-item said (it was a reduction in the percentage increase in medicare, he said it was a cut in medicare benefits. Even after the reduction the percentage exceeded inflation by a large margin.)
3. When he was running for president he proposed almost the same exact thing, but actually a larger reduction. So why veto over it?
The reason was it was absolutely imperative that Clinton do everything in his power to undermine the new Republican majority Congress' "Contract With America," as it would have been highly embarrassing to the Democrats if they succeeded. One of the Republican planks was a balanced budget, Clinton didn't take this on until the Republicans tried to actually do it. So he proposed his own budget, substantively the same as the Republicans and picked out a politically viable attack point ("Republicans want to cut senior citizen benefits!!!") to differ on.
Question: if it was such a minor issue, then why didn't Clinton just sign the budget, which by the way it's Congresses' job to write and not his?
Now look at today, the exact same thing would happen. Congress would shut down government, Bush would say "troops daily are not getting the supplies they need to fight, because the Democrats shut down the government." And he would be more or less right, and he would win. Because his message "sounds" better ("Democrats are putting the troops in danger",) he has the bully-pulpit, and his strategy team is still better than the Democrats'. There is no way that Congress could win that fight, and it probably would in fact prevent some troops from getting supplies they otherwise would have gotten.
If you're being unfairly disenfranchised, how do you affect change in government if you can't vote? Freedom and democracy are connected. The philosophical underpinnings of this country are that the government exists by the consent of the governed.
He's retired and the paper is 50 years old. And if you look at what he's retracting, he's probably embarrassed and is trying to recover his reputation after being associated with those nitwits. Retracting the paper is a pretty low-risk proposition. I compare that to the controversy regarding pre-Clovis American Indian settlements, where guys who had staked their careers on the Clovis Indians being the "first" enacted dirty smear campaigns against archaeologists that were actually amassing evidence to the contrary. If you went up against the "establishment" theory, you would be viciously personally attacked. This guy is doing the right thing, but it is a really the least embarrassing option so it's an oh-so-easy choice if you ask me.
I come from a religious background, though I have largely abandoned it. I never believed in creationism. I've had this argument a number of times, and I can map out exactly how it goes:
...So you can see its really not the case."
creationist: "science says X, which is powerful evidence for creationism"
evolutionist: "That's a little simplistic, science really says Y, for these reasons:
creationist: "(confused) look, I am not a scientist, and it's not really my field of expertise. What it comes down to is, I have faith and this is what I believe. I know God is real, and this is how I have to go about it"
The fact of the matter is, creationists are throwing out science where it agrees with them, and when you get down to the nitty-gritty they admit that it doesn't matter anyway because that's what they believe, because God said so. I believe that is the textbook definition of dogma. If it was really about the science, they would either change their mind or take it upon themselves to go the extra mile and learn what the hell they are talking about.
I think it is delusional, but everyone in their everyday life takes tons of things on faith because they are not an expert in that field. I don't have a problem with that, it's perfectly rational behavior. What annoys me is that they pretend like they actually know what they are talking about. I have no doubt in my mind that some scientists jut blindly dismiss spirituality, but in this case he knows people are perverting his errors in that paper and he wants it to stop.
That's great and I agree, but the article is about people using virtualization for purported security benefits, and Theo de Raadt saying that it is actually less secure. If you're using virtualization to simplify administration and reduce costs, you are using it for its intended purpose.
ack, I didn't address your specific example. Theo's position here is: now, instead of an exploitable app and an exploitable OS, you have two exploitable OS (guest and host) and two exploitable apps (your app and the VM.) Making this worse is that the the exploitability of each individual piece is amplified by the potential promoting of an OS crash into an application exploit (VM.)
You're missing the point. Your virtualization product is an application, which weakens the security of the OS running under it. So now you can have attacks from both sides. As Theo says, now an OS crash (inside the VM) can become an attack on the host system, and application attacks on the VM can become an attack on the OS running in the VM.
His position has many facets. As I understand it:
* programmers make buggy code, and now programmers are programming virtual hardware
* the hardware they are emulating (PC architecture) is a nightmare, they have to do crazy, unsafe crap to implement it.
* application flaws in the VM can compromise the guest OS.
* OS flaws in the guest OS can potentially compromise the host OS.
* virtualizing hardware is inherently less secure than the physical segmentation of using actual, separate machines, so when you consolidate many machines onto a VM system you have a net loss in security.
Totally agreed, none of this stuff will work unless its done even-handedly, which I am not sure is even possible in our system anymore. Carbon credits bug me as well. I can forsee a point where rich people, wanting to keep flying their jets and heating their enormous houses, end up valuing carbon credits so high that it is financially infeasible for anyone else to hold onto them. Sure you get money for selling your allotment, but what it ends up is that the super-rich can live however they want while everyone else takes a massive lifestyle cut, because only the super-rich can afford to buy extras.
Because of everything you just said is precisely the reason this should be done at the federal level. Then businesses cannot play states against each other in a race to the bottom. I'm aware that coal is about all we have, the goal here is to replace the coal plants one day because they are a problem.