What's the point of an 'internet wiretap' when anything important to law enforcement is probably encrypted with a key long enough to take years to crack?
Terrorists and foreign government agents use encryption.
Today is Memorial Day. I hope that all Americans will take time today to reflect on the costs of freedom and the American men and women in our armed forces who have paid for our freedoms with their service, their wounds, and their lives.
I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes.
Funny, back when I was studying history, I made a point to avoid reading historical fiction.
The problem is that unless the author has a really good grasp of the history in question and the ability to understand and overcome the prejudices of his own time, those modern prejudices inevitably will distort the history being related in the author's fiction.
Or more concisely, as an English professor once put it to our class, all fiction, regardless of its setting, is about (the issues of) its own time.
Let me make this more concrete with a thought experiment involving not history, but science fiction. You're probably not a vegan, and you probably don't consider meat-eaters to be morally flawed.
Now imagine that, two hundred years from now, everyone is a vegan vegetarian -- and that they grew up the children and grandchildren of vegans, the result of a bloody war begun in 2161 to abolish meat eating. Imagine further that although the vegetarians did win that war, for decades after the war, the resentful losing meat-eaters did their best to surreptitiously continue meat eating, until the vegetarians responded by becoming strict vegans and changing the culture by teaching the moral wrongness of meat eating or any sort of animal exploitation in all the schools.
So two hundred years from now, every school child is taught in elementary school the horrors of the farm and slaughterhouse, and about the valiant war that put an end to the holocausts that supplied the meat aisles of the grocery stores, and the bottom line, that meat eating was not a choice, not just an inefficient allocation of scarce resources, but a disgusting moral wrong.
Now that school child, when he thinks about life in 2004, will find it puzzling, at best, how the vast majority of Americans of our time could go to McDonald's and casually enjoy the results of the abuse, murder, and consumption of an innocent animal. Only the thoughtful children will even get to "puzzled"; most will simply dismiss us as brutes and barbarians.
And the historical novelist of two hundred years from now, who will himself be a confirmed vegan, will write books that, consciously or not, incorporate his moral belief that exploiting animals is wrong, and will tend to cast his sympathetic characters as vegans, or at least as holding vegan attributes, or anachronistically treating their pets as co-equal "animal companions", all out of proportion to the actual number of strict vegans in the real america of 2004.
Just substitute "abolitionist" for "vegetarian" and "Civil Rights supporter" for vegan" in the above, and you'll have an understanding of how difficult it is to write honest historical novels about slavery and racism in America in 1804. In 1804, slavery was considered by some to be a moral wrong (just as some today are vegans), but the vast majority saw it as a political problem or even as a natural way of life endorsed by the Bible. Even of those who in 1804 were against slavery ("vegetarians"), only a very very few believed in racial equality ("vegans"); perhaps the closest they came were proposals to forcibly send ex-slaves back to Africa.
Even those who were ardent supporters of slavery were not necessarily judged to be immoral men for it, unless they seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in being cruel to their slaves; and many slave owners were -- and are -- considered to be great mean -- among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But since the Civil War and the messy, inconclusive aftermath that was Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era, Americans have made racism -- and by extension, slavery -- into a moral issue that transcends all others. Nowadays, nearly the worst thing you can accuse a public figure of is racism -- only sex crimes against children are more inflammatory.
Me too. I still find it somewhat distracting when someone starts talking about going out to buy some more "DDR memory" for his computer.
Yeah, "DDR memory" makes me think it's another example of socialist technological excellence, in the "proud" tradition of the Trabi car.
(For our younger Slashdotters, the Trabi's external body was made of plastic strengthened with, of all things, wool; I believe TV show The Simpsons pays homage to the Trabi by depicting it as having a house fly as a hood ornament.)
Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymn Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins")
Heh.
I should have been more suspicious of a DDR anthem mp3 with the file name "daywork.mp3"; I just assumed it was a different version than the one I'd previously download. After I posted, I downloaded it, only to be confused by a song that's in German but is certainly not the DDR hymn.
Man, since this is Slashdot wouldn't you expect the article be about computer memory when you see 'DDR'...
Not at my age: to me, "DDR" will always be the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, that is, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, Prussian disdain and Hitler's Berlin "transformed" by the New Socialist Man and drab gray concrete apartments named after "Heroes of the Proletariat".
Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymm Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins") (get more of your "Socialism before it hit the dustbin of history" groove on here; in all honesty if you can ignore the frozen political prisoners of the,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag'>Gulag Archipelago, the music itself is pretty stirring).
So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won't work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default
Let's be even more sensible: your firewall rules should allow your email client to make connections to your mail server ONLY, and only to its ports 110 and 25 (I'm assuming POP3; IMAP would be other orts).
(Not for linux users: Microsoft Windows firewalls typically allow setting rules separately for separate applications, by associating a process name (and in serious firewalls, the executable's MD5 sum) with the process requesting the connection.)
This takes care of all web bugs, inline images, and javascript pop-ups or Active-x in Microsoft HTML email.
Note that with any sensible email client, this won't block html links, as clicking an html link should invoke a separate browser application, with its own firewall rules.
It will block linked (not inline) images, but only a very small minority of email linked images that are at all useful to view -- in this case I just save the email as html and open in a web browser.
I've always wondered, is it better to kill a cow without it knowing, or to use the current method of lining the cows up for slaughter?
Stress causes muscles to tense up and prevents the release of toxins from the muscle tissue into the bloodstream. Relaxed muscles do the opposite and are usually fairly clean because of a fresh supply of aerobic blood.
Wrong on two counts.
Cows do line up, but they don't show any sign of knowing that they're going to die. Noted animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, in her book Thinking in Pictures (which is actually about her autism), writes that cows are stressed to be separated from their fellows, but are calmed to be able see one another -- seeing that the cow in front is unstressed cues the cow behind to be unstressed. Except in Kosher slaughterhouses, death comes so suddenly (either by a bolt shot into the brain or by electrical stunning) that the following cow hasn't time to become upset before it too dies. To help ensure this, Grandin introduced curving passageways, such that the cow can see the cow ahead, but only the cow immediately ahead.
As to the effects of stress, you're also (mostly) wrong. Stress causes the release of cortisol, but this isn't a toxin per se. But a standard method in societies that butcher and eat meat immediately, is to chase or terrorize animals for a while prior to butchering, not to release cortisol, but to tire the muscles, using up oxygen reserves, so that lactic acid is released. Lactic acid is a natural tenderizer -- it's that "burn" you feel in muscles when you do aerobic exercises (but distinct from the pain of torn muscles as in weight training, although that tearing no doubt adds to the tenderizing too).
Additionally, in Korea and other countries that believe in the aphrodisiacal properties of dog meat, it is believed that the longer the dog is terrorized and beaten prior to slaughter, the greater the aphrodisiacal properties of the meat.
If you really want flavorful, tender meat, you want to look to the lineage of the beef, to control fat to muscle ratio, etc., and to the animals' diet -- what do you think "corned beef" is --, to control flavor. To add more flavor and to tenderize met, a good marinade is probably a good bet too.
I am dyslexic.... Finding a path that is challenging and rewarding that you struggle and succeed is somewhere in between but that is a path the you will most likely be happy on.
I don't mean this as a slam or a wise-crack, but as serious, constructive criticism, noting that you are dyslexic.
Your writing would be considerably easier to understand if you:
spell-checked it (hey, I can't spell either, but for $15 I bought a hot-key invoked spell-checker), and
if, after writing, you read your sentences to yourself slowly, adding commas where you naturally pause for breath (you're already doing a good job breaking your post into short paragraphs, which is also very helpful).
It's become almost trite to assume that many people in computing -- especially programmers -- are on the autistic spectrum. Usually this means Asperger's rather than "classic" Kanner autism, but in truth, it's not yet clear what bright-line (if any) separates the two conditions, and many studies have lumped Asperger and Kanner autistics together.
The lay distinction is that Asperger's is high-functioning autism, or autism without mental retardation, and in some cases of Asperger's even higher than average intelligence; but while there are more high-functioning individuals with Asperger's than Kanner's, high-functioning and low-functioning individuals with both syndromes exist. A diagnosis of Asperger's, unlike Kanner's does not include late speech or speech followed by a loss of speech, but both forms involve speech abnormalities of one sort or another, and both involve significant social impairment, related to an inability to "read" others' body language or (more so in Kanner's) an inability to conceive that others' perceptions differ from the autistic person's.
Autistics are often seem as having less empathy or "flatter" emotions, although Temple Grandin, a high-functioning Kanner type autistic, reports that autistic have different emotions with the predominant emotion being a pervasive sense of fear. It is unclear whether this fear is the cause, effect, or just a correlate of, the social impairments of autistic.
Autistics genenerally have special areas of interest which they obsess over, and this is in fact one required criteria for diagnosis.
Autism has only been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook of (American) psychiatry, since 1994, and so was apparently often mis-diagnosed (as depression, schizophrenia, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder) until recently; in many cases, the diagnosis of a child has led to a retroactive diagnoses (usual of Asperger's, as it's more "subtle") of one or both parents. Autism is one of the most strongly inherited neurological syndromes.
For more and more balanced information (I happened tonight to be browsing the journal articles that I cited, thus my emphasis on them) see (as usual) Wikipedia's article on autism.
To the submitter: do you know what form of autism you have?
In reality, she was trying to boost the self-esteem of overweight women and let them know about events where they could meet guys interested in larger women.
Guys who are interested in "larger women" can find them in any chat room.
In fact, that, and "larger" women pretending to be petite women, and other guys pretending to be petite women, is about all you can find in chat rooms.:)
Paypal does have a habit of scamming its customers.
But even worse than this, PayPal forces you to be a customer.
I made a purchase from 78s2CD.com> (they offer old 78 rpm recordings in CD form, hence the name, and do an excellent job of it too -- it's a great source for vintage Gilbert & Sullivan recordings, among others).
After I gave PayPal my credit card information, I found I had an unwanted, unasked for account with PayPal.
So I logged on to PayPal to close the account -- only to find that, in order to close the account, I first had to provide more information in order to activate it..PayPal required my Social Security Number and my mother's maiden name in order for me to activate and access the account, even though all I wanted to do was close it.
Now, many banks, unfortunately, use this data, Social Security Number and mother's maiden name, to identify customers: by providing that to PayPal, I'd have made it much, much easier for PayPal -- or a rogue PayPal employee, or someone who hacked PayPal's servers -- to gain access to my brick-and-mortar bank account (remember, the credit card number identifies this, and PayPal already had that) or to otherwise steal my "identity".
Naturally, I didn't want to give this information -- among other things, I have no way of knowing that would be deleted when I closed my account. But under the USA Patriot Act, giving incorrect information to a financial institution might be illegal. So I couldn't just fake it and close the account either.
So I contacted Paypal, and talked to a rep -- who told me that PayPal could not (sure) close the account, and I'd have to log in and provide my personal information.
To his credit, when I contacted 782CDs's owner, Jim Lockwood, he apologized, and offered to let me send check in the future -- and even said that he'd ship the CDs before he got the check, on my word that I'd sent it. And now, 782Cds accepts both Paypal and credit cards directly.
But I'll never buy (or donate, sorry OSS projects) via PayPal again. Even though my PayPal account still exists in some database limbo, neither closed nor fully open.
Think of this utopia: The government is honest, never abuses info collected about the people,... Now would you really mind having a lot of data about yourself collected,... Collecting personal data by itself is harmless.
Now, imagine that your utopia is The Netherlands. And imagine it's not May 15, 2004, but May 15, 1940 -- one day after The Netherlands surrendered to Nazi Germany. Note that in surrendering, The Netherlands legally turned over government control to the Nazis. Presumably that would included your database -- if the Nazis hadn't simply seized it outright.
Your utopian database contains the details of all residents, anyone who might join the Resistance, and all the Jews -- including Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot and Anne. The Frank family managed to hide from the Nazis for two years; how long do you think they'd manage in your "utopia".
Now some will say that there's little chance of Nazi invasions these day, so we should feel safe with "utopian" databases. But it doesn't take a foreign invasion to radically change a government: sometimes it just takes an election, of an Anzar or a Berlusconi or a Blair & Blunkett team or a Bush or a Howard -- or a former war criminal like Waldheim.
It's an ancient Greek slogan, often used to commemorate the Greeks' victories over their opponents in war. Curiously, the slogan is not grammatically correct, even in the original Greek, but the fractured phrase, once established, was never corrected out of deference to tradition.
Fake security - real control. This is to keep people IN - not out.... "In Soviet America, Passport stamps You!"
The parent got modded funny for the Soviet Russia joke; but he should be getting modded Insightful for pointing out the real reason from these new passports.
Like me expand a bit on his insight: these biometric passports are the thin edge -- a proof of concept, if you will -- of mandatory National ID cards.
Indeed, Homeland Security will point out stories, like the one posted above about the 88 illegal immigrants taking a domestic flight from California to New Jersey and the general ability if illegals to bypass our borders, as evidence that we will need a "fool-proof" way of ascertaining identity not only at the borders but inside the United States.
And since the biometric passport will by then have been, however reluctantly, accepted, the government will apply the same technology to National ID cards.
Of course, a National ID card is only useful if it's checked, so expect to see uniformed men asking you to present it: "Your papers, Citizen!". This will also have the useful -- for the government -- side effect of getting the citizenry used to seeing and docilely taking orders from uniformed "security" officers; you can already see that happening in airports and government buildings, where we've all learned to shut-up and passively follow orders from any guy with three days of training and a badge, on penalty of delay, harassment or arrest.
(This acclimation to the presence of soldiers as quasi law-enforcement, incidentally, is one of the requirements Army War College grad Charles Dunlap posits for "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", co-winner in 1992 of the of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition -- in other words, it's not a fringe tin-foil hat screed.)
Expect also that the government will quickly thereafter require presentation of the National ID for transactions that "terra'ists use", like banking or buying plane and train tickets, similar to the "Know Your Customer" requirements of the "Patriot" Act. A little way down the road, expect that the government will expanded the "significant economic activity" to encompass all credit card purchases -- and perhaps using the fig leaf of "preventing (economic) identity theft", will require your National ID Card be presented for all credit card purchases.
At that point, you'll either have to present you National ID Card several times a day, or remove yourself from "the grid" entirely. I can think of few ways better to suppress dissent than letting anyone contemplating it know that their movements can be tracked with this sort of granularity: "why did you use the ATM machine a block from the People Against Surveillance meeting, Citizen? are you a member of this anti-Patriotic organization"?
I hope they're not designing the devices based on the experiment where Milgram asked subjects to electrocute other people strapped to chairs for getting answers to simple questions wrong. (They weren't really getting electrocuted, but they acted as though they were)
That's being studied at the Abu Ghraib Research Center.
The subject stands on a box with his head covered by a hood, and pretty soon.... the honor of the United States is eternally blemished and we are all shamed.
Roberts S. McNamara was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, and largely responsible for the quagmire that the Vietnam War became. (After avoiding responsibility for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold thousands or millions of Vietnamese, McNamara was rewarded with the Presidency of The World Bank for twelve years.)
Donald Rumsfeld, of course, is the current Secretary of Defense who decided to ignore military doctrine and top Pentagon generals and top military lawyers in favor of his own ideas on war doctrine and the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.
Here's what one retired officer (an officer right-wing enough to have compared Howard Dean to Hitler, but also an excellent novelist), Ralph Peters, had to say about Rumsfeld today (emphasis mine):
...I have never seen such distrust of a public official [as Donald Rumsfeld] in the senior ranks. Not even of Bill Clinton.
Rumsfeld & Co. have trashed our ground forces every way they could.... Rumsfeld has wounded our military and sent our troops to die for harebrained schemes. In place of sound plans, he substituted political prejudices. Election year or not, he has to go.
So I've decided that it's only fair to remind ourselves of our "proud" history of quagmires, by referring to the Secretary of Defense as 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld.
Ironically, Sami Al-Hussayen came to america to avoid arrest in Egypt for condemning Islamic violence.
Basically, Al-Hussayen's crime was to be associated with a web site that praised suicide bombing in Chechnia and Israel.
Now, I'm against terrorism in Israel (and also against the hard-line Likud land grabs, for that matter), but I'm not convinced the Chechens are not freedom fighters in their fight against the Russians as much as were the Afghans who fought the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Does that mean that if I set up a web site calling for support of Chechen independence, I'd go to prison? Apparently so. What happened to the right to hold an opinion and freely speak it?
Yes, today in the country that calls itself the "Land of the Free", where George Bush claims our enemies "hate us for our freedoms", you can go to Federal Prison for helping to set up a web site that the government later decides to outlaw.
we have a law which allows secret investigations and arrests, and prohibits the accused from telling anyone about what's being done to them
I've wondered, when someone receives a "National Security Letter" -- since it's illegal to reveal you've gotten one -- how does the recipient go about getting a lawyer?
"Law Offices."
"Uh, hi, I think I need a lawyer."
"What sort of legal services do you need sir?"
"Uh, I can't say."
"You can't say?"
"No, that's illegal, but I need a lawyer, to help me with this thing I can't talk about. You know, a secret lawyer for secret charges."
This is not the United States of America I learned about in school.
Wake up -- this is the same administration that ignored warnings of 9/11. Why do we keep rewarding this secretive, authoritarian, and incompetent administration?
This is the Bush Administration that still won't say how mnay "detainees" are held at Guantanamo, or under what conditions those detainees are being held.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorists and foreign government agents use encryption.
But dissidents and "trouble-makers" don't.
Terrorists blow things up and kill about 1/10th the number of Americans who die in highway deaths each year, but in doing do they stiffen our resolve and so never get anywhere near to changing our fundamental America values.
But dissidents and domestic trouble-makers can cause real problems for a regime that calls questioning its mistakes tantamount to aiding America's enemies.
Today is Memorial Day. I hope that all Americans will take time today to reflect on the costs of freedom and the American men and women in our armed forces who have paid for our freedoms with their service, their wounds, and their lives.
On this Memorial Day, let's really support our troops by following the advice of so many retired officers and men by insisting that "Robert S." Rumsfeld and his band of incompetent chicken-hawks resign -- or be fired.
I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes.
Funny, back when I was studying history, I made a point to avoid reading historical fiction.
The problem is that unless the author has a really good grasp of the history in question and the ability to understand and overcome the prejudices of his own time, those modern prejudices inevitably will distort the history being related in the author's fiction.
Or more concisely, as an English professor once put it to our class, all fiction, regardless of its setting, is about (the issues of) its own time.
Let me make this more concrete with a thought experiment involving not history, but science fiction. You're probably not a vegan, and you probably don't consider meat-eaters to be morally flawed.
Now imagine that, two hundred years from now, everyone is a vegan vegetarian -- and that they grew up the children and grandchildren of vegans, the result of a bloody war begun in 2161 to abolish meat eating. Imagine further that although the vegetarians did win that war, for decades after the war, the resentful losing meat-eaters did their best to surreptitiously continue meat eating, until the vegetarians responded by becoming strict vegans and changing the culture by teaching the moral wrongness of meat eating or any sort of animal exploitation in all the schools.
So two hundred years from now, every school child is taught in elementary school the horrors of the farm and slaughterhouse, and about the valiant war that put an end to the holocausts that supplied the meat aisles of the grocery stores, and the bottom line, that meat eating was not a choice, not just an inefficient allocation of scarce resources, but a disgusting moral wrong.
Now that school child, when he thinks about life in 2004, will find it puzzling, at best, how the vast majority of Americans of our time could go to McDonald's and casually enjoy the results of the abuse, murder, and consumption of an innocent animal. Only the thoughtful children will even get to "puzzled"; most will simply dismiss us as brutes and barbarians.
And the historical novelist of two hundred years from now, who will himself be a confirmed vegan, will write books that, consciously or not, incorporate his moral belief that exploiting animals is wrong, and will tend to cast his sympathetic characters as vegans, or at least as holding vegan attributes, or anachronistically treating their pets as co-equal "animal companions", all out of proportion to the actual number of strict vegans in the real america of 2004.
Just substitute "abolitionist" for "vegetarian" and "Civil Rights supporter" for vegan" in the above, and you'll have an understanding of how difficult it is to write honest historical novels about slavery and racism in America in 1804. In 1804, slavery was considered by some to be a moral wrong (just as some today are vegans), but the vast majority saw it as a political problem or even as a natural way of life endorsed by the Bible. Even of those who in 1804 were against slavery ("vegetarians"), only a very very few believed in racial equality ("vegans"); perhaps the closest they came were proposals to forcibly send ex-slaves back to Africa.
Even those who were ardent supporters of slavery were not necessarily judged to be immoral men for it, unless they seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in being cruel to their slaves; and many slave owners were -- and are -- considered to be great mean -- among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But since the Civil War and the messy, inconclusive aftermath that was Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era, Americans have made racism -- and by extension, slavery -- into a moral issue that transcends all others. Nowadays, nearly the worst thing you can accuse a public figure of is racism -- only sex crimes against children are more inflammatory.
The result is that mo
But apparently not so small they can't nevertheless go over some peoples' heads.
Me too. I still find it somewhat distracting when someone starts talking about going out to buy some more "DDR memory" for his computer.
Yeah, "DDR memory" makes me think it's another example of socialist technological excellence, in the "proud" tradition of the Trabi car.
(For our younger Slashdotters, the Trabi's external body was made of plastic strengthened with, of all things, wool; I believe TV show The Simpsons pays homage to the Trabi by depicting it as having a house fly as a hood ornament.)
Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymn Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins")
Heh.
I should have been more suspicious of a DDR anthem mp3 with the file name "daywork.mp3"; I just assumed it was a different version than the one I'd previously download. After I posted, I downloaded it, only to be confused by a song that's in German but is certainly not the DDR hymn.
In fact, www.sovmusic.ru incorrectly linked three songs to this "Day Work" song; the real DDR Anthem is here.
I've emailed the site about the mis-linking.
Man, since this is Slashdot wouldn't you expect the article be about computer memory when you see 'DDR'...
,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag'>Gulag Archipelago, the music itself is pretty stirring).
Not at my age: to me, "DDR" will always be the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, that is, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, Prussian disdain and Hitler's Berlin "transformed" by the New Socialist Man and drab gray concrete apartments named after "Heroes of the Proletariat".
Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymm Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins") (get more of your "Socialism before it hit the dustbin of history" groove on here; in all honesty if you can ignore the frozen political prisoners of the
And here's the workout, starting with the youth cadre, The Young Pioneers of the Five-Year Balance Beam Plan (learn more about "mass gymnastics under communism", and remember to scroll right-- the pages are literally about 800 X 4000).
I wonder why the Nazis lost the war then.
Because Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz weren't running our military then?
So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won't work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default
Let's be even more sensible: your firewall rules should allow your email client to make connections to your mail server ONLY, and only to its ports 110 and 25 (I'm assuming POP3; IMAP would be other orts).
(Not for linux users: Microsoft Windows firewalls typically allow setting rules separately for separate applications, by associating a process name (and in serious firewalls, the executable's MD5 sum) with the process requesting the connection.)
This takes care of all web bugs, inline images, and javascript pop-ups or Active-x in Microsoft HTML email.
Note that with any sensible email client, this won't block html links, as clicking an html link should invoke a separate browser application, with its own firewall rules.
It will block linked (not inline) images, but only a very small minority of email linked images that are at all useful to view -- in this case I just save the email as html and open in a web browser.
I've always wondered, is it better to kill a cow without it knowing, or to use the current method of lining the cows up for slaughter?
Stress causes muscles to tense up and prevents the release of toxins from the muscle tissue into the bloodstream. Relaxed muscles do the opposite and are usually fairly clean because of a fresh supply of aerobic blood.
Wrong on two counts.
Cows do line up, but they don't show any sign of knowing that they're going to die. Noted animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, in her book Thinking in Pictures (which is actually about her autism), writes that cows are stressed to be separated from their fellows, but are calmed to be able see one another -- seeing that the cow in front is unstressed cues the cow behind to be unstressed. Except in Kosher slaughterhouses, death comes so suddenly (either by a bolt shot into the brain or by electrical stunning) that the following cow hasn't time to become upset before it too dies. To help ensure this, Grandin introduced curving passageways, such that the cow can see the cow ahead, but only the cow immediately ahead.
As to the effects of stress, you're also (mostly) wrong. Stress causes the release of cortisol, but this isn't a toxin per se. But a standard method in societies that butcher and eat meat immediately, is to chase or terrorize animals for a while prior to butchering, not to release cortisol, but to tire the muscles, using up oxygen reserves, so that lactic acid is released. Lactic acid is a natural tenderizer -- it's that "burn" you feel in muscles when you do aerobic exercises (but distinct from the pain of torn muscles as in weight training, although that tearing no doubt adds to the tenderizing too).
Additionally, in Korea and other countries that believe in the aphrodisiacal properties of dog meat, it is believed that the longer the dog is terrorized and beaten prior to slaughter, the greater the aphrodisiacal properties of the meat.
If you really want flavorful, tender meat, you want to look to the lineage of the beef, to control fat to muscle ratio, etc., and to the animals' diet -- what do you think "corned beef" is --, to control flavor. To add more flavor and to tenderize met, a good marinade is probably a good bet too.
I don't mean this as a slam or a wise-crack, but as serious, constructive criticism, noting that you are dyslexic.
Your writing would be considerably easier to understand if you:
Just my two cents.
What a load of crap! Just because ESR thinks he's "a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God", that doesn't mean other hackers have to.
So then are Microsoft Visual Basic programmers are the shamans and vessels of the Goatse.cx Guy/God?
It's become almost trite to assume that many people in computing -- especially programmers -- are on the autistic spectrum. Usually this means Asperger's rather than "classic" Kanner autism, but in truth, it's not yet clear what bright-line (if any) separates the two conditions, and many studies have lumped Asperger and Kanner autistics together.
The lay distinction is that Asperger's is high-functioning autism, or autism without mental retardation, and in some cases of Asperger's even higher than average intelligence; but while there are more high-functioning individuals with Asperger's than Kanner's, high-functioning and low-functioning individuals with both syndromes exist. A diagnosis of Asperger's, unlike Kanner's does not include late speech or speech followed by a loss of speech, but both forms involve speech abnormalities of one sort or another, and both involve significant social impairment, related to an inability to "read" others' body language or (more so in Kanner's) an inability to conceive that others' perceptions differ from the autistic person's.
In nuerotypical (i.e., normal) brains, the part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus is activated to "read" another person's emotional state from the other's facial expression. In autistic persons (either Kanner or Asperger), the fusiform gyrus is not activated, with some studies showing autistic used parts of the brain used for object processing and others that each autistic individual uses a different brain areas to process facial emotional cues. High-functioning autistics generally explain that they process faces consciously, apparently as part of general problem solving.
Autistics are often seem as having less empathy or "flatter" emotions, although Temple Grandin, a high-functioning Kanner type autistic, reports that autistic have different emotions with the predominant emotion being a pervasive sense of fear. It is unclear whether this fear is the cause, effect, or just a
correlate of, the social impairments of autistic.
Autistics genenerally have special areas of interest which they obsess over, and this is in fact one required criteria for diagnosis.
Autism has only been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the handbook of (American) psychiatry, since 1994, and so was apparently often mis-diagnosed (as depression, schizophrenia, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder) until recently; in many cases, the diagnosis of a child has led to a retroactive diagnoses (usual of Asperger's, as it's more "subtle") of one or both parents. Autism is one of the most strongly inherited neurological syndromes.
For more and more balanced information (I happened tonight to be browsing the journal articles that I cited, thus my emphasis on them) see (as usual) Wikipedia's article on autism.
To the submitter: do you know what form of autism you have?
In reality, she was trying to boost the self-esteem of overweight women and let them know about events where they could meet guys interested in larger women.
:)
Guys who are interested in "larger women" can find them in any chat room.
In fact, that, and "larger" women pretending to be petite women, and other guys pretending to be petite women, is about all you can find in chat rooms.
Paypal does have a habit of scamming its customers.
But even worse than this, PayPal forces you to be a customer.
I made a purchase from 78s2CD.com> (they offer old 78 rpm recordings in CD form, hence the name, and do an excellent job of it too -- it's a great source for vintage Gilbert & Sullivan recordings, among others).
After I gave PayPal my credit card information, I found I had an unwanted, unasked for account with PayPal.
So I logged on to PayPal to close the account -- only to find that, in order to close the account, I first had to provide more information in order to activate it..PayPal required my Social Security Number and my mother's maiden name in order for me to activate and access the account, even though all I wanted to do was close it.
Now, many banks, unfortunately, use this data, Social Security Number and mother's maiden name, to identify customers: by providing that to PayPal, I'd have made it much, much easier for PayPal -- or a rogue PayPal employee, or someone who hacked PayPal's servers -- to gain access to my brick-and-mortar bank account (remember, the credit card number identifies this, and PayPal already had that) or to otherwise steal my "identity".
Naturally, I didn't want to give this information -- among other things, I have no way of knowing that would be deleted when I closed my account. But under the USA Patriot Act, giving incorrect information to a financial institution might be illegal. So I couldn't just fake it and close the account either.
So I contacted Paypal, and talked to a rep -- who told me that PayPal could not (sure) close the account, and I'd have to log in and provide my personal information.
To his credit, when I contacted 782CDs's owner, Jim Lockwood, he apologized, and offered to let me send check in the future -- and even said that he'd ship the CDs before he got the check, on my word that I'd sent it. And now, 782Cds accepts both Paypal and credit cards directly.
But I'll never buy (or donate, sorry OSS projects) via PayPal again. Even though my PayPal account still exists in some database limbo, neither closed nor fully open.
Think of this utopia: The government is honest, never abuses info collected about the people,... Now would you really mind having a lot of data about yourself collected,... Collecting personal data by itself is harmless.
Ok, I'm thinking of your utopia. I'll even make it a better utopia: I'll posit that no business try to hack into the government databases for personal gain. And I'll go so far as to pretend that no government employee with access ever abuses that access for personal reasons.
Now, imagine that your utopia is The Netherlands. And imagine it's not May 15, 2004, but May 15, 1940 -- one day after The Netherlands surrendered to Nazi Germany. Note that in surrendering, The Netherlands legally turned over government control to the Nazis. Presumably that would included your database -- if the Nazis hadn't simply seized it outright.
Your utopian database contains the details of all residents, anyone who might join the Resistance, and all the Jews -- including Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot and Anne.
The Frank family managed to hide from the Nazis for two years; how long do you think they'd manage in your "utopia".
Now some will say that there's little chance of Nazi invasions these day, so we should feel safe with "utopian" databases. But it doesn't take a foreign invasion to radically change a government: sometimes it just takes an election, of an Anzar or a Berlusconi or a Blair & Blunkett team or a Bush or a Howard -- or a former war criminal like Waldheim.
Remember COINTELPRO?
It's an ancient Greek slogan, often used to commemorate the Greeks' victories over their opponents in war. Curiously, the slogan is not grammatically correct, even in the original Greek, but the fractured phrase, once established, was never corrected out of deference to tradition.
So in English, it roughly translates as:
All
Your
Base
Are
Belong
To
Us
Fake security - real control. This is to keep people IN - not out.... "In Soviet America, Passport stamps You!"
The parent got modded funny for the Soviet Russia joke; but he should be getting modded Insightful for pointing out the real reason from these new passports.
Like me expand a bit on his insight: these biometric passports are the thin edge -- a proof of concept, if you will -- of mandatory National ID cards.
Indeed, Homeland Security will point out stories, like the one posted above about the 88 illegal immigrants taking a domestic flight from California to New Jersey and the general ability if illegals to bypass our borders, as evidence that we will need a "fool-proof" way of ascertaining identity not only at the borders but inside the United States.
And since the biometric passport will by then have been, however reluctantly, accepted, the government will apply the same technology to National ID cards.
Of course, a National ID card is only useful if it's checked, so expect to see uniformed men asking you to present it: "Your papers, Citizen!". This will also have the useful -- for the government -- side effect of getting the citizenry used to seeing and docilely taking orders from uniformed "security" officers; you can already see that happening in airports and government buildings, where we've all learned to shut-up and passively follow orders from any guy with three days of training and a badge, on penalty of delay, harassment or arrest.
(This acclimation to the presence of soldiers as quasi law-enforcement, incidentally, is one of the requirements Army War College grad Charles Dunlap posits for "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012", co-winner in 1992 of the of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition -- in other words, it's not a fringe tin-foil hat screed.)
Expect also that the government will quickly thereafter require presentation of the National ID for transactions that "terra'ists use", like banking or buying plane and train tickets, similar to the "Know Your Customer" requirements of the "Patriot" Act. A little way down the road, expect that the government will expanded the "significant economic activity" to encompass all credit card purchases -- and perhaps using the fig leaf of "preventing (economic) identity theft", will require your National ID Card be presented for all credit card purchases.
At that point, you'll either have to present you National ID Card several times a day, or remove yourself from "the grid" entirely. I can think of few ways better to suppress dissent than letting anyone contemplating it know that their movements can be tracked with this sort of granularity: "why did you use the ATM machine a block from the People Against Surveillance meeting, Citizen? are you a member of this anti-Patriotic organization"?
Now, some will accuse me of wearing my tin-foil hat too tight: I'll refer them to the subpoenaing of protest groups' membership records (dropped only after unfavorable publicity), the CAPPS II Airline screening and the subpoenaing of women's medical records of their abortions (this link from BusinessWeek, of all places, the FBI investigation of Freedom of Information act requests, and the Federal prosecution -- even after state charges were thrown out of court -- of peaceful protestors against Bush. And there are, unfortunately, many many more examples of the current administration supressing dissent -- in fact, if you're reading this, please reply with links to more of these cases.
I hope they're not designing the devices based on the experiment where Milgram asked subjects to electrocute other people strapped to chairs for getting answers to simple questions wrong. (They weren't really getting electrocuted, but they acted as though they were)
That's being studied at the Abu Ghraib Research Center.
The subject stands on a box with his head covered by a hood, and pretty soon.... the honor of the United States is eternally blemished and we are all shamed.
We're all "Good Germans" now.
Roberts S. McNamara was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, and largely responsible for the quagmire that the Vietnam War became. (After avoiding responsibility for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold thousands or millions of Vietnamese, McNamara was rewarded with the Presidency of The World Bank for twelve years.)
Donald Rumsfeld, of course, is the current Secretary of Defense who decided to ignore military doctrine and top Pentagon generals and top military lawyers in favor of his own ideas on war doctrine and the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.
Here's what one retired officer (an officer right-wing enough to have compared Howard Dean to Hitler, but also an excellent novelist), Ralph Peters, had to say about Rumsfeld today (emphasis mine):
So I've decided that it's only fair to remind ourselves of our "proud" history of quagmires, by referring to the Secretary of Defense as 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld.
SCO's CEO was finally bereft of words to describe what it's all been like. In the end he settled for 'This is like...nothing.'
McBride then followed-up: "But at least I'm not 'Robert S.' Rumsfeld,"
If it folded (or better, slid open to reveal a mini-keyboard) I'd buy it to replace my Zaurus and run 20GB of MP3s and a copy of xmms (or winamp).
But with that elbow bend, it's useless.
Anyone have a link that doesn't require registration? I'm sick of telling the WP over and over that I'm a 99 year old woman from Azerbaijan.
No, but I have a username and password pair that works at WaPo:
username: example@example.org
password: example
It is goddamn scary that a U.S. citizen even has to consider posting information on foreign ground to achieve freedom of speech and press.
Sami Al-Hussayen is being tried under the Patriot Act right now for giving "aid and comfort" to "designated terrorist groups."
Al-Hussayen's "crime" was to set up a web site for groups the government claims support terrorism, and acting as few as sixteen times as a "moderator" in a discussion forum on that web site.
Ironically, Sami Al-Hussayen came to america to avoid arrest in Egypt for condemning Islamic violence.
Basically, Al-Hussayen's crime was to be associated with a web site that praised suicide bombing in Chechnia and Israel.
Now, I'm against terrorism in Israel (and also against the hard-line Likud land grabs, for that matter), but I'm not convinced the Chechens are not freedom fighters in their fight against the Russians as much as were the Afghans who fought the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Does that mean that if I set up a web site calling for support of Chechen independence, I'd go to prison? Apparently so. What happened to the right to hold an opinion and freely speak it?
Yes, today in the country that calls itself the "Land of the Free", where George Bush claims our enemies "hate us for our freedoms", you can go to Federal Prison for helping to set up a web site that the government later decides to outlaw.
This is liberty?
we have a law which allows secret investigations and arrests, and prohibits the accused from telling anyone about what's being done to them
I've wondered, when someone receives a "National Security Letter" -- since it's illegal to reveal you've gotten one -- how does the recipient go about getting a lawyer?
"Law Offices."
"Uh, hi, I think I need a lawyer."
"What sort of legal services do you need sir?"
"Uh, I can't say."
"You can't say?"
"No, that's illegal, but I need a lawyer, to help me with this thing I can't talk about. You know, a secret lawyer for secret charges."
This is not the United States of America I learned about in school.
But then neither is sending Canadian Maher Arar to Syria to be tortured, or exposing an undercover CIA agent for petty personal revenge, or setting up secret U.S. prison camps for 10,000, or Military Intelligence encouraging torture in those prisons, or lying about the reasons for going to war.
Wake up -- this is the same administration that ignored warnings of 9/11. Why do we keep rewarding this secretive, authoritarian, and incompetent administration?
Surely what a FBI agent can request would be defined in the PATRIOT act itself, and the ACLU would be free to describe the content of the act itself?
Or am I expecting too much of the US government...
You're expecting too much of the highly secretive Bush Administration.
Unless photos come out, don't expect them to tell you about it.
This is the Bush Administration has gone to the Supreme Court to protect its "right" to keep secret its consultation Oil Industry executives on legislation affecting the Oil Industry.
This is the Bush Administration that still won't say how mnay "detainees" are held at Guantanamo, or under what conditions those detainees are being held.