Dreamhost has basically the same thing for $9.95/month on a monthly basis, less on an annual or two-year basis - except you start with half the bandwidth and disk space of your plan - but it grows weekly - 1GB space per week, 16GB bandwidth weekly. I don't know what amount I've got now but it's something huge.
But yeah, why spend a fortune on disk storage plans when your Web site is basically one big disk storage plan? AND your Web site has all this stuff like unlimited MySQL databases, CGI, Perl, Gallery, etc. - you can do anything with that space. much more than the plain storage plans offer.
has a "Files Forever" service where you pay I think around $2.50 per GB ONE TIME and they host the files forever. You can also sell access to those files to other people using their service.
I think $500/year for 250GB which works out to $2.00/year/GB isn't too bad, but it's annual. Dreamhost is ONCE.
MegaUpload gives you 250GB of storage for $70 for TWO years which is a mere $3/month or $35/year or a bit over one cent a month per GB.
One consideration would be risk, however - we expect Google to be around in two years. Do we know for sure that other companies would be? Of course, that is only relevant if your storage company is being used as the only store for those files - if merely used for backup, it's not relevant.
This is the usual tempest in a teapot. MySQL is in no way, as I read the article, not complying with OSS requirements. As someone elsewhere pointed out, even if MySQL doesn't distribute the tarball, any of their customers who have it can do so. So it's hardly restricting access to the tarbell. It's merely an organizational move to clearly delineate the Enterprise product from the Community product.
To illustrate the stupidity one hears in these discussions, one idiot at another OSS site said that nobody should use PostgreSQL - or even test it - because their BSD-style license allowed companies to take the code and use it and not release their proprietary enhancements. This is the sort of stupid fanaticism that gives "free" and OSS software a bad name to anyone with a brain.
These morons don't realize that some licenses were explicitly designed to allow just that - companies to develop their own products on top of OSS. This is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Although giving back enhancements to an OSS product to the original project is a benefit to everyone who uses that product, not EVERY enhancement is necessarily worth it and not EVERYBODY in the world needs to be a "free software" developer. It allows OSS products to find their way into more and more products, thus validating the OSS model - even if some companies do not adhere to it strictly. If the alternatives are a company using OSS and not returning improvements to the community vs not using OSS at all, obviously the latter is worse. And that is the choice companies must make.
Whether the former choice has any impact on the development of OSS is another matter entirely. The notion that somehow the entire corporate world is going to "steal" OSS and somehow convert it all to proprietary products and thus "destroy" OSS is utterly ridiculous on the face of it.
This is why Linus opposes the GPLv3 and he is correct to do so. It's the difference between a truly free market and socialism.
The test they ran is completely meaningless from a statistical viewpoint and was almost certainly skewed in some way by the organizers, despite the submission of viruses to be tested from the audience (shills? Not impossible!)
Despite the claims of the company that conducted the test, ClamAV HAS been tested by several AV testing outfits, and it came up poorly in all of them. In some tests it was down around 36-60%. It did poorly on both "in the wild" and "zoo" viruses. While the commercial AV's also do extremely poorly when confronted with over half a million viruses, bots, spyware and trojans in two tests, ClamAV was not in the high range in either test.
ClamAV's only advantage appears to be in detecting email viruses (since it was mostly designed to be an email scanner frontend) and in being quick to issue new detection signatures due to its community-based submission process.
ClamAV might be suitable for home users, but it is not suitable for any company with a significant email and Web traffic. And those are the companies who would be using it in Untangle's and other appliances.
An exception might be made for the version integrated with Spyware Terminator. For a small company that doesn't have that many malware vectors, this combo is a lot cheaper (free) than paying $500-1000 a year for multiple licenses from the commercial AV companies and will probably protect against spyware better, which is the main threat these days. The only problem with Spyware Terminator is its intrusiveness, when the HIDS hueristic IDS is turned on (it's off on a default install.)
"Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client."
As a company that distributes a free product, no one should ever have to pay for the BitTorrent client. Ashwin told Slyck.com that by keeping the source closed, it creates a "certain amount of distinction" between the official client and maliciously repackaged software."
I call bullshit. This is the usual excuse when closing source - "Gee, somebody else will screw our customers - so we better screw them first."
MySQL is now limiting its Enterprise source code to paying customers. Now they are doing this to make the distinction clear between their Enterprise product and the Community product. I understand that move. And since the source code is still available (both from MySQL to their paying customers and from anyone else who got the product under the GPL), this is no real problem.
But claiming you have to close the source because somebody will take your OSS product and distribute it maliciously is just plain bullshit.
She didn't - she wasn't the producer or the director.
Besides, given what she got paid for it, well...
Plus she got both a Golden Globe and a Saturn Award from the The Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy & Horror Films for it. Couldn't have been that bad.
Actually, I think Bush isn't as dumb as he SOUNDS. He SOUNDS dumb because he's really arrogant, and doesn't give a damn what people think, therefore he doesn't give a damn what he says, no matter how stupid it ends up sounding.
He just doesn't give a shit. He just bullshits and doesn't care.
In other words, we could forgive him being stupid, but not if he's just an asshole. And all the evidence indicates the latter.
It's a known controversy. Do a Google. Plenty of articles on it pro and con.
Nobody can be certain that Roosevelt allowed the war to happen, but there appears to be some evidence of this. IIRC, it was more the Secretary of State who influenced the result than Roosevelt, but I might be wrong.
"tapping communications from other countries that route through our own. Because we have such a large communication infrastructure it is not infrequent that calls made from one country to another outside the US, actually route through the US - and the government wants to be able to tap those calls when the happen."
No, that's the EXCUSE. The REALITY is probably one one-hundredth or one one-thousandth of "interesting" calls fit that criteria.
First of all, if you already KNOW the call is interesting, tap it outside the US with Echelon or whatever which everyone is saying we can and do ALREADY. So why do we need this law? If you do NOT know the call is interesting, the only way to know is to tap EVERYTHING - and that is by definition un-Constitutional. THIS law is intended to bypass the Constitution by using an EXCUSE to MAKE ABUSE EASY!
It's a "get out of jail free" card for Gonzales and the FBI and the NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup crowd to abuse the system - just as the FBI has been caught abusing the Patriot Act repeatedly (not that they weren't abusing the rest of the "justice" system for decades now - just ask the American Indian Movement who won Federal court cases proving the FBI did illegal blackbag jobs for years against them.)
It's that simple.
It has absolutely NOTHING to do with legitimate signals intelligence or fighting terrorism or anything else that could be construed as legitimate under the Constitution.
It should be apparent by now to anyone with an IQ over 50 that ANYTHING the Bush crowd does is both illegal and un-Constitutional by definition and is intended to increase the power of the state at the expense of the population and/or to line the pockets of their cronies.
The Bush administration is purely and simply a CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE - much like the entire Bush family. People who refer to "the Bush crime family" have it exactly right. Has everybody ignored the recent documentary about how one of the Bush elders planned a military COUP in the US decades ago? HELLO!
We're gonna see isolation you wouldn't believe, starting with China, pissed off because they're cut off from Iranian oil and gas, dumping a trillion US dollars on the market. What's left of the US economy, already devastated because of the $10-20/gallon gas prices the war will cause, will evaporate.
Exactly. The whole point of this law is to MAKE ABUSE EASY!
In fact, that's the whole point of the entire Bush administration! Anybody who hasn't figured that out by now definitely belongs with the 25-30 percent of the US morons who still support Bush in anything.
And all the morons here who are citing "foreign nationals" are either just that - morons - or people who know damn well the point is to make abuse easy and they agree with that because they're closet fascists themselves.
"If I was Bush, I'd be thinking about bringing some of those National Guardsmen home. Just in case."
I believe that is already in the works, according to some articles I've seen recently, where the Pentagon is setting up systems and training for urban control IN THE US using the same methods being used in Iraq (i.e., shoot anybody who doesn't stop their car instantly - although they don't admit that.)
Bush and the neocons KNOW - but don't care - what is going to happen when they attack Iran. They KNOW that car bombers and suicide bombers will start operating inside the US - and they intend to gut what little is left of the Constitution in response to the stupid panic the US people will experience when a car bomber cleans Times Square at rush hour and a couple suicide bombers blow themselves up in the New York subway system at rush hour.
The odds of their BEING a 2008 election - or one four years later - is receding as the war plans for Iran are finalized. The sales of arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel just announced are intended to make them buy in to the Iran war (for the Saudis) and convince Israel (who doesn't need to buy in) to initiate the Iran war on their own in order to bring the US into it when Iran retaliates against the US in Iraq.
Israeli Minister Avigdor Lieberman has told the Israeli government that they have the "green light" from the US to initiate the war on Iran. This is how Bush will evade Congressional authorization to attack Iran - let the Israelis do it. When Iran retaliates against the US - as it has said it will - Bush will have a free hand in attacking Iran with no Congressional dissent - especially from the Democratic election front-runners Clinton and Obama who are already on board with such an attack.
The attack will also be coordinated with an Israeli attack on Syria and Lebanon. Israel will attack Syria, roll up Damascus, then cut left and come in on Hizballah's flank in the Bekaa Valley.
The neocons and Israel are going for broke. They intend to "bomb the Iraq war off the front pages" and further destabilize the Middle East and seize more state power here at home, while the Israelis use the war as cover to further ethnic cleanse the Palestinians.
This will undoubtedly occur sometime between now and the elections next year - the timing is unclear, but probably after the reports from Iraq due in September and October arrive. Bush will need to move to avoid even further problems with the US Congress, where even Republicans are getting antsy about the Iraq war. The Israelis will bail him out, as they have been planning for another war with Syria and Lebanon to make up for their humiliating defeat last year. They are also getting antsy about Bush's inability to derail Iran's nuclear energy program because he can't get either the Pentagon or Congress to just allow him to attack Iran unilaterally.
"point was, Roosevelt has done something quite illegal, but he is still respected today."
Right - and we're all going to respect Bush in the future.
Right.
I think Kristol wrote something like that recently. And he was considered a complete lunatic for doing so.
The only reason we respect Roosevelt today is because nobody except people over 60-70 years old even remember the asshole.
It's called "whitewashing history."
Or did you forget the part about Pearl Harbor being ALLOWED to happen so the US could get into the war. An interesting parallel with 9/11 - and numerous other events like the Tonkin Gulf.
All of which is irrelevant to the point that warrantless wiretapping - no matter the EXCUSE being used - can - and based on past RECENT history WILL - be abused and therefore should not be allowed regardless of the so-called "cost/benefit" - which has never been established in any event.
Eventually a species progresses to nanotechnology, then Transhumanism (or Trans-whatever-the-hell-they-are, to be more precise.)
Once you've done that, you probably don't NEED anything to survive that is detectible over interstellar distances. And if you do, odds are it's so big a project that it ends up looking natural, or is too big or too advanced to be detectible by our primitive detection methods. You might not even need a "civilization" per se other than for intellectual stimulation - if you even need that.
Michio Kaku has pointed out that we could easily be like ants living next to a superhighway. How aware are ants of the technology next to them?
And exactly HOW are we trying to detect ETI? Listening for RADIO signals? Bitch, please...And how complete a scan has been done for other methods of detecting life? What percentage of even the Milky Way galaxy has been thoroughly scanned using the most subtle methods of detection possible for us? I rather doubt any scientist would responsibly claim we have done enough to determine the issue one way or the other.
The Fermi Paradox is basically a skeptic's attempt to derail any speculation that humans aren't the top of the food chain - as are all the attempts to suggest that the universe is too hostile to life which makes us the lucky winners...
Personally, I think it is likely that a protohuman evolved here and got intelligent before the protohuman that became man did. I think that species developed nanotech as little as a few centuries before our recorded history began (which would explain a lot of legends about advanced civilizations in some religions). With ubiquituous nanotech, they could have erased all signs of their previous existence and technology easily. By now, they would millions of years ahead of us in technology - all the while still permeating the Earth and near space, almost completely indetectible to us. This would explain all the UFO and assorted other paranormal phenomena humans have experienced for thousands of years. These entities would be so far advanced from humans as to have little or no interest in us, other than recognizing us as conceptual processing entities.
I would expect any other advanced species from some other star to be in the same state.
As someone once said, "The gods will not speak to us face to face until we ourselves have a face."
The sheer complexity - and then the inevitable failure.
You spend a lot of time trying to find what you're looking for that STILL HAS A FUNCTIONING SEED - good luck with that! None of the sta
And then, once the torrent starts, you sit and wait. Eventually it speeds up.
And then you get to the last piece - which doesn't seem to exist ANYWHERE NOW!
So you've spent X hours and still don't have anything to show for it.
Until they fix this sort of thing, P2P is a real drag. The legal file sharing systems should be applauding the P2P screwups since they wouldn't have any customers if they didn't make it easier to download than the P2P people do.
Triple-X: "You know where you blew it? With HER! My aunt was in the restaurant business all her life. There's no way in hell a career waitress comes to work in high heels! She'd have blisters the size of pancakes before lunch. And if SHE ain't real, then this whole thing ain't real."
"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them"
This part is actually valid, although probably not the way this individual meant it.
For most of human history, children were the responsibility not just of their parents but of the entire tribe. The tribe couldn't afford troublemakers and losers, so the training of children was a tribal responsibility. There were specific things every child had to know how to do to be functional in the tribe, and these things were trained into the child and the child tested with specific rituals. The "child" also stopped being a "child" at puberty, as nature intended.
The industrial revolution screwed that up royally. Add in the screwed up notions of education and "morality" from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - and that's why you're all morons who can't get laid, defend yourselves, or fix anything in your house now.
Leaving morons to turn their offspring into morons was society's worst mistake in some centuries - almost on a par with accepting the notions of the state and religion.
Until those three notions are reversed, things are going to continue to get worse, not better.
Yeah, he never finished his service, he never finished his businesses, he never finished New Orleans (well, actually, he did, but not that way), he never finished the war - so he hasn't finished being retarded yet.
But "we will not falter and we will not fail" - so he'll get there.
"There needs to be a masculist movement or something"
I think you're talking about something called "patriarchy" - and last I checked, we were still in one, which is why this article - and the ladies involved - got noticed here at/. - home of the lonely geek.
Of course, one reason the article is news is that actresses aren't exactly considered to be smart (aside from the odd individual like Jodie Foster). Given that Mayim Bialik isn't exactly on the top ten list of "Hollywood babes", I guess the article pretty much proves that point as well.
Or maybe somebody just wanted to offset the steady stream of "Lindsay Lohans" we've been getting.
"The surprising thing though is the openness at which the real issue here is control"
It was ALWAYS about control. Intellectual property is and always was about control. It was NEVER about "stimulating invention for the benefit of the species." That has never been established anywhere in history or in theory.
And if you accept the basic premise of IP, it leads inexorably to exactly this situation - total control over your behavior.
And it's not just the state that wants total control of your behavior - it's everybody else, too.
Basic primate psychology: "If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And that means I have to control everything you think and do - assuming I let you live at all."
And since we have the state, the easiest way to do that is to bribe it to pass laws so I can draw on the state's "monopoly on violence" to my own benefit. Because I'm afraid I don't have the power to compel you the way I want to without the state's support. Which is also why I bow to the state - because they might kill me otherwise.
This is the way the human species works - non-stop, pervasive fear. The only solution is: transcend human nature so it is no longer ruled by primate emotions.
Fortunately that is likely to happen in this century as nanotechnology and biotechnology allow us to alter the human body and brain into new configurations.
In the meantime, things will get worse before they get better.
Like Anto Drennan and Keith Duffy of the Corrs and many other artists. I see Anto and Keith logging into their MySpace pages DAILY - unlike some other artists who are computer illiterate and need someone else to do it for them (Andrea, are you listening? - Probably not since you just learned how to use email in 2005!) And these guys are trading comments back and forth with other artists.
Half their friends on any artist's MySpace page are other artists.
So Elton is wrong when he says the Internet is having a negative effect on artists hanging out. Artists hang out all over the world now! It's not just hanging out in a Dublin pub when they happen to be in town.
REAL terrorists - not the wannabes that the FBI and Scotland Yard keep nabbing these days - train in real camps, not online. They use live ammo and construct real bombs. There's no other way to learn. You have to actually fire weapons, you have to actually recon a live target to detect the security patterns in use, etc. Only an idiot would rely on a simulation of a target that could easily miss critical details that would matter in a real operation.
The notion that the minor disruption of Al Qaeda's camps in Afganistan has forced them into using virtual simulators is complete nonsense. You can go practically anywhere in Afghanistan, Pakistan, indeed, throughout the Middle East and South Asia and find plenty of places to set up a small camp where you can train. You don't need a Camp Pendleton for this stuff. All you need is some empty space free from neighbors who will report you to the authorities - or you need bribed authorities, which is not hard to find in many countries.
And the notion that somebody is going to use "virtual bucks" to transfer operational funds is utterly brain dead. The Middle East has more than enough mechanisms for the untraceable movement of funds. They don't need to use some computer game to do it. That's idiotic.
Anybody with any knowledge of real terrorism knows this story is complete bunk.
These are "wannabe terrorist" hackers - the terrorist equivalent of "script kiddies."
The story is intended to justify regulating the Internet and fanning the "terror scare" flames, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Dreamhost has basically the same thing for $9.95/month on a monthly basis, less on an annual or two-year basis - except you start with half the bandwidth and disk space of your plan - but it grows weekly - 1GB space per week, 16GB bandwidth weekly. I don't know what amount I've got now but it's something huge.
But yeah, why spend a fortune on disk storage plans when your Web site is basically one big disk storage plan? AND your Web site has all this stuff like unlimited MySQL databases, CGI, Perl, Gallery, etc. - you can do anything with that space. much more than the plain storage plans offer.
No, Senator, it's not a truck - it's a safe. It doesn't move.
You're the dump truck.
has a "Files Forever" service where you pay I think around $2.50 per GB ONE TIME and they host the files forever. You can also sell access to those files to other people using their service.
I think $500/year for 250GB which works out to $2.00/year/GB isn't too bad, but it's annual. Dreamhost is ONCE.
MegaUpload gives you 250GB of storage for $70 for TWO years which is a mere $3/month or $35/year or a bit over one cent a month per GB.
One consideration would be risk, however - we expect Google to be around in two years. Do we know for sure that other companies would be? Of course, that is only relevant if your storage company is being used as the only store for those files - if merely used for backup, it's not relevant.
This is the usual tempest in a teapot. MySQL is in no way, as I read the article, not complying with OSS requirements. As someone elsewhere pointed out, even if MySQL doesn't distribute the tarball, any of their customers who have it can do so. So it's hardly restricting access to the tarbell. It's merely an organizational move to clearly delineate the Enterprise product from the Community product.
To illustrate the stupidity one hears in these discussions, one idiot at another OSS site said that nobody should use PostgreSQL - or even test it - because their BSD-style license allowed companies to take the code and use it and not release their proprietary enhancements. This is the sort of stupid fanaticism that gives "free" and OSS software a bad name to anyone with a brain.
These morons don't realize that some licenses were explicitly designed to allow just that - companies to develop their own products on top of OSS. This is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Although giving back enhancements to an OSS product to the original project is a benefit to everyone who uses that product, not EVERY enhancement is necessarily worth it and not EVERYBODY in the world needs to be a "free software" developer. It allows OSS products to find their way into more and more products, thus validating the OSS model - even if some companies do not adhere to it strictly. If the alternatives are a company using OSS and not returning improvements to the community vs not using OSS at all, obviously the latter is worse. And that is the choice companies must make.
Whether the former choice has any impact on the development of OSS is another matter entirely. The notion that somehow the entire corporate world is going to "steal" OSS and somehow convert it all to proprietary products and thus "destroy" OSS is utterly ridiculous on the face of it.
This is why Linus opposes the GPLv3 and he is correct to do so. It's the difference between a truly free market and socialism.
The test they ran is completely meaningless from a statistical viewpoint and was almost certainly skewed in some way by the organizers, despite the submission of viruses to be tested from the audience (shills? Not impossible!)
Despite the claims of the company that conducted the test, ClamAV HAS been tested by several AV testing outfits, and it came up poorly in all of them. In some tests it was down around 36-60%. It did poorly on both "in the wild" and "zoo" viruses. While the commercial AV's also do extremely poorly when confronted with over half a million viruses, bots, spyware and trojans in two tests, ClamAV was not in the high range in either test.
ClamAV's only advantage appears to be in detecting email viruses (since it was mostly designed to be an email scanner frontend) and in being quick to issue new detection signatures due to its community-based submission process.
ClamAV might be suitable for home users, but it is not suitable for any company with a significant email and Web traffic. And those are the companies who would be using it in Untangle's and other appliances.
An exception might be made for the version integrated with Spyware Terminator. For a small company that doesn't have that many malware vectors, this combo is a lot cheaper (free) than paying $500-1000 a year for multiple licenses from the commercial AV companies and will probably protect against spyware better, which is the main threat these days. The only problem with Spyware Terminator is its intrusiveness, when the HIDS hueristic IDS is turned on (it's off on a default install.)
"Developers who produce open source products will often have their product repackaged and redistributed by businesses with malicious intent. They repackage the software with spyware or charge for the product. We often receive phone calls from people who complain they have paid for the BitTorrent client."
As a company that distributes a free product, no one should ever have to pay for the BitTorrent client. Ashwin told Slyck.com that by keeping the source closed, it creates a "certain amount of distinction" between the official client and maliciously repackaged software."
I call bullshit. This is the usual excuse when closing source - "Gee, somebody else will screw our customers - so we better screw them first."
MySQL is now limiting its Enterprise source code to paying customers. Now they are doing this to make the distinction clear between their Enterprise product and the Community product. I understand that move. And since the source code is still available (both from MySQL to their paying customers and from anyone else who got the product under the GPL), this is no real problem.
But claiming you have to close the source because somebody will take your OSS product and distribute it maliciously is just plain bullshit.
She didn't - she wasn't the producer or the director.
Besides, given what she got paid for it, well...
Plus she got both a Golden Globe and a Saturn Award from the The Academy of Science Fiction Fantasy & Horror Films for it. Couldn't have been that bad.
Actually, I think Bush isn't as dumb as he SOUNDS. He SOUNDS dumb because he's really arrogant, and doesn't give a damn what people think, therefore he doesn't give a damn what he says, no matter how stupid it ends up sounding.
He just doesn't give a shit. He just bullshits and doesn't care.
In other words, we could forgive him being stupid, but not if he's just an asshole. And all the evidence indicates the latter.
It's a known controversy. Do a Google. Plenty of articles on it pro and con.
Nobody can be certain that Roosevelt allowed the war to happen, but there appears to be some evidence of this. IIRC, it was more the Secretary of State who influenced the result than Roosevelt, but I might be wrong.
"tapping communications from other countries that route through our own. Because we have such a large communication infrastructure it is not infrequent that calls made from one country to another outside the US, actually route through the US - and the government wants to be able to tap those calls when the happen."
No, that's the EXCUSE. The REALITY is probably one one-hundredth or one one-thousandth of "interesting" calls fit that criteria.
First of all, if you already KNOW the call is interesting, tap it outside the US with Echelon or whatever which everyone is saying we can and do ALREADY. So why do we need this law? If you do NOT know the call is interesting, the only way to know is to tap EVERYTHING - and that is by definition un-Constitutional. THIS law is intended to bypass the Constitution by using an EXCUSE to MAKE ABUSE EASY!
It's a "get out of jail free" card for Gonzales and the FBI and the NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup crowd to abuse the system - just as the FBI has been caught abusing the Patriot Act repeatedly (not that they weren't abusing the rest of the "justice" system for decades now - just ask the American Indian Movement who won Federal court cases proving the FBI did illegal blackbag jobs for years against them.)
It's that simple.
It has absolutely NOTHING to do with legitimate signals intelligence or fighting terrorism or anything else that could be construed as legitimate under the Constitution.
It should be apparent by now to anyone with an IQ over 50 that ANYTHING the Bush crowd does is both illegal and un-Constitutional by definition and is intended to increase the power of the state at the expense of the population and/or to line the pockets of their cronies.
The Bush administration is purely and simply a CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE - much like the entire Bush family. People who refer to "the Bush crime family" have it exactly right. Has everybody ignored the recent documentary about how one of the Bush elders planned a military COUP in the US decades ago? HELLO!
Wait until Bush attacks Iran.
We're gonna see isolation you wouldn't believe, starting with China, pissed off because they're cut off from Iranian oil and gas, dumping a trillion US dollars on the market. What's left of the US economy, already devastated because of the $10-20/gallon gas prices the war will cause, will evaporate.
Exactly. The whole point of this law is to MAKE ABUSE EASY!
In fact, that's the whole point of the entire Bush administration! Anybody who hasn't figured that out by now definitely belongs with the 25-30 percent of the US morons who still support Bush in anything.
And all the morons here who are citing "foreign nationals" are either just that - morons - or people who know damn well the point is to make abuse easy and they agree with that because they're closet fascists themselves.
"If I was Bush, I'd be thinking about bringing some of those National Guardsmen home. Just in case."
I believe that is already in the works, according to some articles I've seen recently, where the Pentagon is setting up systems and training for urban control IN THE US using the same methods being used in Iraq (i.e., shoot anybody who doesn't stop their car instantly - although they don't admit that.)
Bush and the neocons KNOW - but don't care - what is going to happen when they attack Iran. They KNOW that car bombers and suicide bombers will start operating inside the US - and they intend to gut what little is left of the Constitution in response to the stupid panic the US people will experience when a car bomber cleans Times Square at rush hour and a couple suicide bombers blow themselves up in the New York subway system at rush hour.
The odds of their BEING a 2008 election - or one four years later - is receding as the war plans for Iran are finalized. The sales of arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel just announced are intended to make them buy in to the Iran war (for the Saudis) and convince Israel (who doesn't need to buy in) to initiate the Iran war on their own in order to bring the US into it when Iran retaliates against the US in Iraq.
Israeli Minister Avigdor Lieberman has told the Israeli government that they have the "green light" from the US to initiate the war on Iran. This is how Bush will evade Congressional authorization to attack Iran - let the Israelis do it. When Iran retaliates against the US - as it has said it will - Bush will have a free hand in attacking Iran with no Congressional dissent - especially from the Democratic election front-runners Clinton and Obama who are already on board with such an attack.
The attack will also be coordinated with an Israeli attack on Syria and Lebanon. Israel will attack Syria, roll up Damascus, then cut left and come in on Hizballah's flank in the Bekaa Valley.
The neocons and Israel are going for broke. They intend to "bomb the Iraq war off the front pages" and further destabilize the Middle East and seize more state power here at home, while the Israelis use the war as cover to further ethnic cleanse the Palestinians.
This will undoubtedly occur sometime between now and the elections next year - the timing is unclear, but probably after the reports from Iraq due in September and October arrive. Bush will need to move to avoid even further problems with the US Congress, where even Republicans are getting antsy about the Iraq war. The Israelis will bail him out, as they have been planning for another war with Syria and Lebanon to make up for their humiliating defeat last year. They are also getting antsy about Bush's inability to derail Iran's nuclear energy program because he can't get either the Pentagon or Congress to just allow him to attack Iran unilaterally.
It's a done deal now, though.
"point was, Roosevelt has done something quite illegal, but he is still respected today."
Right - and we're all going to respect Bush in the future.
Right.
I think Kristol wrote something like that recently. And he was considered a complete lunatic for doing so.
The only reason we respect Roosevelt today is because nobody except people over 60-70 years old even remember the asshole.
It's called "whitewashing history."
Or did you forget the part about Pearl Harbor being ALLOWED to happen so the US could get into the war. An interesting parallel with 9/11 - and numerous other events like the Tonkin Gulf.
All of which is irrelevant to the point that warrantless wiretapping - no matter the EXCUSE being used - can - and based on past RECENT history WILL - be abused and therefore should not be allowed regardless of the so-called "cost/benefit" - which has never been established in any event.
Eventually a species progresses to nanotechnology, then Transhumanism (or Trans-whatever-the-hell-they-are, to be more precise.)
Once you've done that, you probably don't NEED anything to survive that is detectible over interstellar distances. And if you do, odds are it's so big a project that it ends up looking natural, or is too big or too advanced to be detectible by our primitive detection methods. You might not even need a "civilization" per se other than for intellectual stimulation - if you even need that.
Michio Kaku has pointed out that we could easily be like ants living next to a superhighway. How aware are ants of the technology next to them?
And exactly HOW are we trying to detect ETI? Listening for RADIO signals? Bitch, please...And how complete a scan has been done for other methods of detecting life? What percentage of even the Milky Way galaxy has been thoroughly scanned using the most subtle methods of detection possible for us? I rather doubt any scientist would responsibly claim we have done enough to determine the issue one way or the other.
The Fermi Paradox is basically a skeptic's attempt to derail any speculation that humans aren't the top of the food chain - as are all the attempts to suggest that the universe is too hostile to life which makes us the lucky winners...
Personally, I think it is likely that a protohuman evolved here and got intelligent before the protohuman that became man did. I think that species developed nanotech as little as a few centuries before our recorded history began (which would explain a lot of legends about advanced civilizations in some religions). With ubiquituous nanotech, they could have erased all signs of their previous existence and technology easily. By now, they would millions of years ahead of us in technology - all the while still permeating the Earth and near space, almost completely indetectible to us. This would explain all the UFO and assorted other paranormal phenomena humans have experienced for thousands of years. These entities would be so far advanced from humans as to have little or no interest in us, other than recognizing us as conceptual processing entities.
I would expect any other advanced species from some other star to be in the same state.
As someone once said, "The gods will not speak to us face to face until we ourselves have a face."
See, this is what I don't like about BT sites.
The sheer complexity - and then the inevitable failure.
You spend a lot of time trying to find what you're looking for that STILL HAS A FUNCTIONING SEED - good luck with that! None of the sta
And then, once the torrent starts, you sit and wait. Eventually it speeds up.
And then you get to the last piece - which doesn't seem to exist ANYWHERE NOW!
So you've spent X hours and still don't have anything to show for it.
Until they fix this sort of thing, P2P is a real drag. The legal file sharing systems should be applauding the P2P screwups since they wouldn't have any customers if they didn't make it easier to download than the P2P people do.
Triple-X: "You know where you blew it? With HER! My aunt was in the restaurant business all her life. There's no way in hell a career waitress comes to work in high heels! She'd have blisters the size of pancakes before lunch. And if SHE ain't real, then this whole thing ain't real."
Shoes MATTER!
"In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them"
This part is actually valid, although probably not the way this individual meant it.
For most of human history, children were the responsibility not just of their parents but of the entire tribe. The tribe couldn't afford troublemakers and losers, so the training of children was a tribal responsibility. There were specific things every child had to know how to do to be functional in the tribe, and these things were trained into the child and the child tested with specific rituals. The "child" also stopped being a "child" at puberty, as nature intended.
The industrial revolution screwed that up royally. Add in the screwed up notions of education and "morality" from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - and that's why you're all morons who can't get laid, defend yourselves, or fix anything in your house now.
Leaving morons to turn their offspring into morons was society's worst mistake in some centuries - almost on a par with accepting the notions of the state and religion.
Until those three notions are reversed, things are going to continue to get worse, not better.
Yeah, he never finished his service, he never finished his businesses, he never finished New Orleans (well, actually, he did, but not that way), he never finished the war - so he hasn't finished being retarded yet.
But "we will not falter and we will not fail" - so he'll get there.
Dick's coaching him, so he'll make it.
"There needs to be a masculist movement or something"
/. - home of the lonely geek.
I think you're talking about something called "patriarchy" - and last I checked, we were still in one, which is why this article - and the ladies involved - got noticed here at
Of course, one reason the article is news is that actresses aren't exactly considered to be smart (aside from the odd individual like Jodie Foster). Given that Mayim Bialik isn't exactly on the top ten list of "Hollywood babes", I guess the article pretty much proves that point as well.
Or maybe somebody just wanted to offset the steady stream of "Lindsay Lohans" we've been getting.
"The surprising thing though is the openness at which the real issue here is control"
It was ALWAYS about control. Intellectual property is and always was about control. It was NEVER about "stimulating invention for the benefit of the species." That has never been established anywhere in history or in theory.
And if you accept the basic premise of IP, it leads inexorably to exactly this situation - total control over your behavior.
And it's not just the state that wants total control of your behavior - it's everybody else, too.
Basic primate psychology: "If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And that means I have to control everything you think and do - assuming I let you live at all."
And since we have the state, the easiest way to do that is to bribe it to pass laws so I can draw on the state's "monopoly on violence" to my own benefit. Because I'm afraid I don't have the power to compel you the way I want to without the state's support. Which is also why I bow to the state - because they might kill me otherwise.
This is the way the human species works - non-stop, pervasive fear. The only solution is: transcend human nature so it is no longer ruled by primate emotions.
Fortunately that is likely to happen in this century as nanotechnology and biotechnology allow us to alter the human body and brain into new configurations.
In the meantime, things will get worse before they get better.
Operative: It's worse than you know.
Mal: It usually is.
No, dump the bodies in front of the offices of Congress - as a warning to them not to listen to these guys anymore.
Better yet - shoot Congress. With nobody alive to pass laws, we don't have to worry about it anymore.
I need to kick some ass.
I could use a monomolecular blade implant, too.
Like Anto Drennan and Keith Duffy of the Corrs and many other artists. I see Anto and Keith logging into their MySpace pages DAILY - unlike some other artists who are computer illiterate and need someone else to do it for them (Andrea, are you listening? - Probably not since you just learned how to use email in 2005!) And these guys are trading comments back and forth with other artists.
Half their friends on any artist's MySpace page are other artists.
So Elton is wrong when he says the Internet is having a negative effect on artists hanging out. Artists hang out all over the world now! It's not just hanging out in a Dublin pub when they happen to be in town.
REAL terrorists - not the wannabes that the FBI and Scotland Yard keep nabbing these days - train in real camps, not online. They use live ammo and construct real bombs. There's no other way to learn. You have to actually fire weapons, you have to actually recon a live target to detect the security patterns in use, etc. Only an idiot would rely on a simulation of a target that could easily miss critical details that would matter in a real operation.
The notion that the minor disruption of Al Qaeda's camps in Afganistan has forced them into using virtual simulators is complete nonsense. You can go practically anywhere in Afghanistan, Pakistan, indeed, throughout the Middle East and South Asia and find plenty of places to set up a small camp where you can train. You don't need a Camp Pendleton for this stuff. All you need is some empty space free from neighbors who will report you to the authorities - or you need bribed authorities, which is not hard to find in many countries.
And the notion that somebody is going to use "virtual bucks" to transfer operational funds is utterly brain dead. The Middle East has more than enough mechanisms for the untraceable movement of funds. They don't need to use some computer game to do it. That's idiotic.
Anybody with any knowledge of real terrorism knows this story is complete bunk.
These are "wannabe terrorist" hackers - the terrorist equivalent of "script kiddies."
The story is intended to justify regulating the Internet and fanning the "terror scare" flames, nothing more.