The UK does *not* have jurisdiction to enforce UK law abroad
Hopefully you will see this as a key to the problem: Terrorists train in Pakistan, doing perfectly legal things like firing AK-47s and learning how to communicate secretly, then do a perfectly legal thing like fly to London, then do a perfectly legal thing like associate freely with one another. Then they all get on the Underground on July 7 and blow themselves up, murdering dozens of people, the majority of whom believed the war in Iraq was wrong.
I invite you to consider the difference between the following two statements:
"Abortion is wrong and should be stopped."
"Abortion is wrong and should be stopped by murdering the doctors who perform them. Here are the home addresses of ten doctors who perform abortions:"
Believe it or not, there are legitimate limitations on speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the right to free speech does not include the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. He went on to write "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
Granted, that's about free speech in the United States, where for the most part any asshole can speak his mind, including me. But the right to free speech, here or anywhere, grants nobody sovereign protection to place a want ad that says "I will give a hundred thousand dollars to the first person who agrees to murder my billionaire husband."
September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005, and March 11, 2004 show the flaw in honoring an international border that your enemy does not. It does not matter in what country it was said "I will teach you how to glorify God by detonating explosives with a cell phone" when 190 are killed in Madrid as a consequence. If there was a time when a criminal could stand across a border and shout "neener neener" at those whose countrymen he is about to kill, that time has ended, and I wholeheartedly endorse every effort to disrupt the enemy's lines of communication.
We criticize terrorists for choosing violence over speech to make their point. Then we take away their ability to speak.
We may well also be taking away their ability to coordinate. For operatives in a first-world city like London, Internet access is utterly trivial. As would be making subtle changes to the site's content which, to those who understand the code, mean "execute the attack on the morning of 7 July."
And I don't count among practical uses the ability to pretentiously extol the virtues of near-dead niche languages, the way tools like Paul Graham do.
Valuing aesthetics over the mindless grinding out of product does not make one a tool. To Graham, programming is an art. If you think it has no worth beyond the paycheck it can generate, that's your right. To others, it has value beyond what it can be sold for, as any work of art has value beyond what it can fetch on eBay.
Because if you don't give me a special day I can make your every workday miserable and unproductive in subtle and untraceable ways. For example, critical Word documents might mysteriously corrupt themselves, requiring several hours to restore from backup. Pity you have a plane to catch.
Your secretary can do the same. For example, the 10 AM direct flight is booked and all that's available anymore is an economy class seat on the 6 AM, changing planes twice. A center seat. Next to an evangelist. For a really fucked-up religion. That thinks bathing is a sin. As is mouthwash.
You are absolutely right---I should suck it up and publish the damned thing. I am on vacation right now but I will put up a small project site here by Thursday 28 July. It will consist of a paper (in Word format (sorry!)) and some source files.
It's to crappy and unfinished to publish, I think. Basically, I'm embarrassed to let somebody else see it. Plus I wouldn't have the least clue how to go about doing that.
Do you have an SMS-enabled cell phone? For an operating systems class project this spring I wrote a simple PAM module what would look up the user's cell phone number then send an eight-digit random number to the user's cell phone, which the user has to type in at the login prompt. I used this module to secure the outward-facing sshd (on port 7xxx), blocking port 22 at the firewall so I could continue to ssh around my home network without spending $0.15 every time I rebooted my laptop.
As long as your phone has a signal, you have effective token-based authentication.
I read an interview with Joel and Trace where they said there were two reasons they never did Plan 9. The first is that the movie speaks for itself. The second and more pragmatic is that the movie has a lot of fairly delicious narration and the MysTie treatment would have stepped all over it.
I don't doubt that Intel is strongarming customers in Japan, but Japan calling exclusionary practices illegal is like the pot calling the kettle an illegal color. If these same charges were leveled against Hitachi they'd vanish without a trace.
Clark Howard is a consumer advocate with a radio show in Atlanta---it may be syndicated elsewhere, I don't know. His show's mottow is "Get more, pay less, and avoid getting ripped off." He's an excellent resource for anyone who wants to know how to handle finances, has found themselves in a scary financial situation, who is worried about the legitimacy of a situation (generic hint: if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is not true).
Anyone who clicks on the above link, I encourage them to look around the rest of the site for stuff on credit cards, mortgages, landlords, buying on-line, and just about everything else a consumer might need to know.
Disclosure: I am a big fan with no affiliation with Clark Howard or WSB Radio.
the legal usage of an armor piercing round is essentially zero, and the legal uses of a high stopping power round very few (certain types of big game hunting, extreme cases of self defense).
Armor-piercing capability makes an ammunition worse for big game hunting, not better. I use this fact to point out that don't you know very much about firearms except that they are icky.
Certainly the uses to which they are commonly put are more often illegal than not.
They are commonly used to put holes in pieces of paper. Since nearly all rifle ammunition can penetrate a protective vest, you are implying that nearly all uses of a rifle are illegal. This is not the case.
But let's assume for a moment that by "ammunition" you mean "handgun ammunition" and by "armor-piercing" you mean "Kop Killerz." They're illegal in the United States. You can't sell them to civilians. The only people who own "armor-piercing bullets" are the government. Outside of law enforcement, they are a myth. Since they are all owned by the cops and the army, pretty much all their use is legal. By the way, cops don't use them to pierce armor. They use them to pierce windshields and engine blocks. The military, for the most part, don't use them at all.
The courts (and legislatures) seem to be far more willing to draw fine lines with software than they do with guns - this is due, no doubt, to the enormously powerful gun lobby.
What does the "enormously powerful gun lobby" have to do with software?
If we're still talking about guns, though, in 1986, the "enormously powerful gun lobby" helped draft the legislation which outlawed the sale of armor-piercing handgun rounds in the United States---except to law enforcement and the military.
You say that marketing based on stopping power is legal - well, why is it?
Mostly because self-defense is legal, as is hunting. Stopping power is a matter of degree, in is in part subjective. It is not a matter of infringing/non-infringing. There is no yes/no threshold for "illegal" stopping power as there is with copyright infringement. But the more important fact is that there are substantial legal uses for firearms and ammunition. For example, I can "stop" a deer with a firearm and ammunition.
For an even *better* comparison, how about car manufacturers advertising based on speed and acceleration features that can only legally be used on private roads?
"Acceleration features that can only legally be used on private roads?" Tsk tsk. As for top speed, you'll be hard pressed to find an automobile advertisement that mentions top speed. Oh, and if you do find mention of a vehicle's performance characteristics, you will invariably find the disclaimer "Obey all traffic laws" in there somewhere. That's how they get around it: by not advocating the violation of laws.
Get some exercise. Walk every flight of stairs you can in 20 minutes. If you're on a campus, briskly walk a trail.
If you're going to wuss on exercise, just go sit cross-legged on the lawn playing cards and munching. Play bridge, if you're up to it, or spades, hearts, pitch, oh-hell, rummy, gin, whatever.
Get a few games of go or chess going. Keep the boards up all the time so that whoever's playing can wander by whenever they please to stare at the board. Or play go and chess online with each other.
You'll thank me later if you actually drag yourself away from the computer, but if you insist on staying in your cube, find a nice FPS and blow the hell out of each other for 20 minutes a day.
Do you still have your copy of De Re Atari handy, along with the assembler/editor cartridge? Programming the 6502 is a hoot.
I crammed my 400 to 48KB (how strange it feels to type "KB"!) so I could get the floppy upgrade and play Jumpman. I sure hope the disk still exists, and survived the attic heat.
I doubt that future archeologists could learn anything more interesting than what they could learn from all our print, audio and video media
Until they get to the patient records archives at the CDC or even a local hospital's TB clinic. Then they can learn a whole hell of a lot about how a disease used to spread and its epidemiological characteristics in a society that doesn't have "modern" medicine to control it.
I worked for Georgia's Division of Public Health in the 1990s. One of the most interesting projects I worked on was to recover data from the Medical College of Georgia's TB clinic. It was all on 9-track tape and was recorded from 1966 to 1973. The doctor who wrote the software was in his late 70s when I met him. He still understood the data encoding that he created for his clinic's dinosaur computer system and was working independently to import it all into a PC-based database. The concept of relational data was practically alien for minicomputers of the era; the way he had to encode the clinic's data to build statistical models out of it was fascinating, but it would have been lost forever if the original coder weren't still alive.
The RIAA and everybody else certainly wouldn't want you to think it's your music on there---where do you get off having a "My Music" folder when it's their music, and all you're doing is storing a licensed and registered local copy for them to monitor, deactivate or delete at their discretion?
I'm sorry, but with all the DRM technology that's getting embedded in Longhorn and affiliated technologies, "Our Computer" isn't exactly a candidate for "Funny" moderation.
We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district.
That's either a well-crafted, seductive troll, or an infuriatingly sloppy bit of equivocation. Do you actually think that this information is all posted to a website that everybody in the world can just browse through? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, parents have to sign up, get an account, and choose a password for that account? Sheesh.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
Are you implying that monitoring what my child eats for lunch is irresponsible? Perhaps you are implying that I am fulfilling my responsibility by simply assuming my child spent the money I gave him on what he claims to be spending it on.
I give my child lunch money to buy lunch with. I give him an allowance to spend on whatever the hell he wants to. I don't ask what he spends his allowance on. Well, I do, but mostly so I can tell what sorts of things he's into so I can be involved in his life. But it's his money. He can spend it as he pleases. He can burn it, watch a movie, whatever.
Lunch money, however, is my money, which I am spending to feed him. It is every bit my money as is the money I spend at the grocery store to feed him. It's earmarked. I am entrusting with it. If he spends it inappropriately, or embezzles it, he is lying to me, which is not very grown-up behavior. I expect I will deduct that amount from his allowance next week. The next time, I will deduct double that amount. Finally, I will revoke his lunch money privileges and start making him lunches myself, or requiring him to make his own lunches, under my supervision.
If he's embezzling, I will discuss with him why he thinks he needs more money. We will negotiate allowance, and discuss how he can earn additional income.
You can tell me anything you want about his rights, and how I should respect his privacy, but my role as his father is to teach him well, and to monitor and facilitate his progress from childhood to adulthood. I have the right to find out if he's spending his lunch money on pot because he's already blown his allowance on beer.
When I was at school in Britain, every morning we said a prayer to God...from this side of the pond that looks rather like like "brainwashing starting in kindergarten."
Did you get candy? Were you refused candy until you prayed to Queen Elizabeth?
I can understand being against hunting for sport, but hunting for food, resources, etc.... what's wrong with that?
If I shoot a water moccasin, I have to eat it? If I hunt for food, I can't take a trophy? If I can afford a cheeseburger I'm not allowed to own a rifle?
Hunting is morally superior to the supermarket precisely because it is sport. If there is an ethics problem, it is with breeding animals for the sole purpose of slaughtering them for food after they've stood flank to flank with thousands of other animals for a couple of years, ankle deep in their own shit.
You can't leave meat in the field in Alaska because it attracts bears. The kind of bears they have in Alaska are the kind you don't want getting a taste for meat that has the scent of humans on or around it.
But Alaska's not the only state like that. I know for a fact Colorado has that law (for game animals, anyway), and I'm pretty sure that Georgia does, too.
Body Count was a damned interesting project---Ice-T reclaiming hard rock as a black musical form. "KKK Bitch" is as badassed as it gets, BTW---or it was, until the track "Cop Killer" came up.
Frankly I'm more than a little disappointed by the decision to pull Body Count then re-release it without that one song. Chickenshit, really---shows the industry for what whores they are. So much for standing up for their artists.
As an Irish Citizen and against the War I'm insulted to be linked to it this way.
I'll be sure to pass that along. Perhaps if we renamed it "Route Pablo?"
The names are somewhat random and mostly meaningless. Something needed an "I" name and "Irish" came to mind.
The only real naming rules in the military are that names should be phonetically unambiguous---if someone's shouting over a choppy radio connection that they're being fired upon, there should be no question of whether they are on "Route France" or "Route Ants."
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully you will see this as a key to the problem: Terrorists train in Pakistan, doing perfectly legal things like firing AK-47s and learning how to communicate secretly, then do a perfectly legal thing like fly to London, then do a perfectly legal thing like associate freely with one another. Then they all get on the Underground on July 7 and blow themselves up, murdering dozens of people, the majority of whom believed the war in Iraq was wrong.
I invite you to consider the difference between the following two statements:
Believe it or not, there are legitimate limitations on speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the right to free speech does not include the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. He went on to write "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
Granted, that's about free speech in the United States, where for the most part any asshole can speak his mind, including me. But the right to free speech, here or anywhere, grants nobody sovereign protection to place a want ad that says "I will give a hundred thousand dollars to the first person who agrees to murder my billionaire husband."
September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005, and March 11, 2004 show the flaw in honoring an international border that your enemy does not. It does not matter in what country it was said "I will teach you how to glorify God by detonating explosives with a cell phone" when 190 are killed in Madrid as a consequence. If there was a time when a criminal could stand across a border and shout "neener neener" at those whose countrymen he is about to kill, that time has ended, and I wholeheartedly endorse every effort to disrupt the enemy's lines of communication.
We may well also be taking away their ability to coordinate. For operatives in a first-world city like London, Internet access is utterly trivial. As would be making subtle changes to the site's content which, to those who understand the code, mean "execute the attack on the morning of 7 July."
You mean the ones you can unlock with a Bic pen?
we have an "I Love the Bee Gees" bumper sticker on the side.
Thereby guaranteeing it will be blown up by an anti-disco activist---as in "If we don't blow up this server, the disco Taliban will have won."
Clearly, the best way to protect the server is to put it in a large bucket, then to pour molten titanium into the bucket. Then encase it in carbonite.
Valuing aesthetics over the mindless grinding out of product does not make one a tool. To Graham, programming is an art. If you think it has no worth beyond the paycheck it can generate, that's your right. To others, it has value beyond what it can be sold for, as any work of art has value beyond what it can fetch on eBay.
Your secretary can do the same. For example, the 10 AM direct flight is booked and all that's available anymore is an economy class seat on the 6 AM, changing planes twice. A center seat. Next to an evangelist. For a really fucked-up religion. That thinks bathing is a sin. As is mouthwash.
You are absolutely right---I should suck it up and publish the damned thing. I am on vacation right now but I will put up a small project site here by Thursday 28 July. It will consist of a paper (in Word format (sorry!)) and some source files.
It's to crappy and unfinished to publish, I think. Basically, I'm embarrassed to let somebody else see it. Plus I wouldn't have the least clue how to go about doing that.
Do you have an SMS-enabled cell phone? For an operating systems class project this spring I wrote a simple PAM module what would look up the user's cell phone number then send an eight-digit random number to the user's cell phone, which the user has to type in at the login prompt. I used this module to secure the outward-facing sshd (on port 7xxx), blocking port 22 at the firewall so I could continue to ssh around my home network without spending $0.15 every time I rebooted my laptop.
As long as your phone has a signal, you have effective token-based authentication.
I read an interview with Joel and Trace where they said there were two reasons they never did Plan 9. The first is that the movie speaks for itself. The second and more pragmatic is that the movie has a lot of fairly delicious narration and the MysTie treatment would have stepped all over it.
I don't doubt that Intel is strongarming customers in Japan, but Japan calling exclusionary practices illegal is like the pot calling the kettle an illegal color. If these same charges were leveled against Hitachi they'd vanish without a trace.
Anyone who clicks on the above link, I encourage them to look around the rest of the site for stuff on credit cards, mortgages, landlords, buying on-line, and just about everything else a consumer might need to know.
Disclosure: I am a big fan with no affiliation with Clark Howard or WSB Radio.
Armor-piercing capability makes an ammunition worse for big game hunting, not better. I use this fact to point out that don't you know very much about firearms except that they are icky.
Certainly the uses to which they are commonly put are more often illegal than not.
They are commonly used to put holes in pieces of paper. Since nearly all rifle ammunition can penetrate a protective vest, you are implying that nearly all uses of a rifle are illegal. This is not the case.
But let's assume for a moment that by "ammunition" you mean "handgun ammunition" and by "armor-piercing" you mean "Kop Killerz." They're illegal in the United States. You can't sell them to civilians. The only people who own "armor-piercing bullets" are the government. Outside of law enforcement, they are a myth. Since they are all owned by the cops and the army, pretty much all their use is legal. By the way, cops don't use them to pierce armor. They use them to pierce windshields and engine blocks. The military, for the most part, don't use them at all.
The courts (and legislatures) seem to be far more willing to draw fine lines with software than they do with guns - this is due, no doubt, to the enormously powerful gun lobby.
What does the "enormously powerful gun lobby" have to do with software?
If we're still talking about guns, though, in 1986, the "enormously powerful gun lobby" helped draft the legislation which outlawed the sale of armor-piercing handgun rounds in the United States---except to law enforcement and the military.
You say that marketing based on stopping power is legal - well, why is it?
Mostly because self-defense is legal, as is hunting. Stopping power is a matter of degree, in is in part subjective. It is not a matter of infringing/non-infringing. There is no yes/no threshold for "illegal" stopping power as there is with copyright infringement. But the more important fact is that there are substantial legal uses for firearms and ammunition. For example, I can "stop" a deer with a firearm and ammunition.
For an even *better* comparison, how about car manufacturers advertising based on speed and acceleration features that can only legally be used on private roads?
"Acceleration features that can only legally be used on private roads?" Tsk tsk. As for top speed, you'll be hard pressed to find an automobile advertisement that mentions top speed. Oh, and if you do find mention of a vehicle's performance characteristics, you will invariably find the disclaimer "Obey all traffic laws" in there somewhere. That's how they get around it: by not advocating the violation of laws.
If you're going to wuss on exercise, just go sit cross-legged on the lawn playing cards and munching. Play bridge, if you're up to it, or spades, hearts, pitch, oh-hell, rummy, gin, whatever.
Get a few games of go or chess going. Keep the boards up all the time so that whoever's playing can wander by whenever they please to stare at the board. Or play go and chess online with each other.
You'll thank me later if you actually drag yourself away from the computer, but if you insist on staying in your cube, find a nice FPS and blow the hell out of each other for 20 minutes a day.
I crammed my 400 to 48KB (how strange it feels to type "KB"!) so I could get the floppy upgrade and play Jumpman. I sure hope the disk still exists, and survived the attic heat.
Until they get to the patient records archives at the CDC or even a local hospital's TB clinic. Then they can learn a whole hell of a lot about how a disease used to spread and its epidemiological characteristics in a society that doesn't have "modern" medicine to control it.
I worked for Georgia's Division of Public Health in the 1990s. One of the most interesting projects I worked on was to recover data from the Medical College of Georgia's TB clinic. It was all on 9-track tape and was recorded from 1966 to 1973. The doctor who wrote the software was in his late 70s when I met him. He still understood the data encoding that he created for his clinic's dinosaur computer system and was working independently to import it all into a PC-based database. The concept of relational data was practically alien for minicomputers of the era; the way he had to encode the clinic's data to build statistical models out of it was fascinating, but it would have been lost forever if the original coder weren't still alive.
I'm sorry, but with all the DRM technology that's getting embedded in Longhorn and affiliated technologies, "Our Computer" isn't exactly a candidate for "Funny" moderation.
That's either a well-crafted, seductive troll, or an infuriatingly sloppy bit of equivocation. Do you actually think that this information is all posted to a website that everybody in the world can just browse through? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, parents have to sign up, get an account, and choose a password for that account? Sheesh.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
Are you implying that monitoring what my child eats for lunch is irresponsible? Perhaps you are implying that I am fulfilling my responsibility by simply assuming my child spent the money I gave him on what he claims to be spending it on.
I give my child lunch money to buy lunch with. I give him an allowance to spend on whatever the hell he wants to. I don't ask what he spends his allowance on. Well, I do, but mostly so I can tell what sorts of things he's into so I can be involved in his life. But it's his money. He can spend it as he pleases. He can burn it, watch a movie, whatever.
Lunch money, however, is my money, which I am spending to feed him. It is every bit my money as is the money I spend at the grocery store to feed him. It's earmarked. I am entrusting with it. If he spends it inappropriately, or embezzles it, he is lying to me, which is not very grown-up behavior. I expect I will deduct that amount from his allowance next week. The next time, I will deduct double that amount. Finally, I will revoke his lunch money privileges and start making him lunches myself, or requiring him to make his own lunches, under my supervision.
If he's embezzling, I will discuss with him why he thinks he needs more money. We will negotiate allowance, and discuss how he can earn additional income.
You can tell me anything you want about his rights, and how I should respect his privacy, but my role as his father is to teach him well, and to monitor and facilitate his progress from childhood to adulthood. I have the right to find out if he's spending his lunch money on pot because he's already blown his allowance on beer.
Did you get candy? Were you refused candy until you prayed to Queen Elizabeth?
If I shoot a water moccasin, I have to eat it? If I hunt for food, I can't take a trophy? If I can afford a cheeseburger I'm not allowed to own a rifle?
Hunting is morally superior to the supermarket precisely because it is sport. If there is an ethics problem, it is with breeding animals for the sole purpose of slaughtering them for food after they've stood flank to flank with thousands of other animals for a couple of years, ankle deep in their own shit.
But Alaska's not the only state like that. I know for a fact Colorado has that law (for game animals, anyway), and I'm pretty sure that Georgia does, too.
m8? I'm sorry, but anybody who texts you to m8 is probably jailb8. Avoid.
And when it's time for job cuts, the MBAs say to go for the costliest employees first. What can I say? Welcome to outsourcing.
Frankly I'm more than a little disappointed by the decision to pull Body Count then re-release it without that one song. Chickenshit, really---shows the industry for what whores they are. So much for standing up for their artists.
I'll be sure to pass that along. Perhaps if we renamed it "Route Pablo?"
The names are somewhat random and mostly meaningless. Something needed an "I" name and "Irish" came to mind.
The only real naming rules in the military are that names should be phonetically unambiguous---if someone's shouting over a choppy radio connection that they're being fired upon, there should be no question of whether they are on "Route France" or "Route Ants."
A vdiff between the censored and unmasked versions suggests that much of what was redacted is operational details, such as:
It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
It briefly describes U.S. Embassy procedures for transporting VIPs along Route Irish and in general.
It details movement of U.S. and Italian Embassy personnel.
It describes possible future procedures and configurations for checkpoints.
In other words it has a lot of information of potential use to an insurgent mission planner and a lot that is nobody's business.