Ah. So folks with more money should have a louder voice?
They do have a louder voice, in the sense that they can afford to purchase more television and radio ads, etc. That may be unfortunate, but it's the way it is. Nothing gives the government any authority to restrict an individual from spending their money on political speech, so if some rich billionaire wants to dump his fortune on promoting a candidate, it must be allowed.
They have a greater right to have their opinions heard?
Nobody has any "right" to have their opinion heard. Everybody has an equal right to speak, but to suggest a right (or, more properly, an entitlement) to be heard suggests than one can somehow force others to listen to your speech.
Anyway, the problem that everybody is missing is this: We *care* about this whole election / campaign finance / political blogging thing only because the government has assumed more power than it properly should have. If our government were as small and restricted as it should be, and the sovereignty of the individual was widely acknowledged, then nobody would be spending millions of dollars to campaign for office, because there wouldn't be any incentive. We look at the President of the United States and say "there is the most powerful man in the world" when we should look at him and say "There is our servant, who is no more important than any other man."
... if we can't rely on the Democrats to protect our freedoms
When have you ever been able to rely on Democrats to protect your freedoms?!? This is the party that doesn't acknowledge your right to retain the fruits of your own labor, which implies that they don't respect your right to property at all. Well, if you don't own property then you don't own yourself, so who do you belong to? "The government?" "Society?" Do you really want to know?
Democrats don't have one bit more concern for your freedoms than Republicans... I'm amazed that there are still people in this country who haven't figured that out yet.
, then who are we to rely on?
I would suggest that, if freedom is an important concern to you, you look to the Libertarians.
Bloggers (and everybody else) are already exempt from dealing with those hundreds of pages of crap, because that crap has no authority in the first place. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to free speech... and even if it didn't, government has no authority other than what comes from consent of the governed; so anybody who wants my simply choose to not allow the government to regulate their speech.
Repeat after me: Government has NO intrinsic authority or dominion over anybody; We The People are the ultimate and final source of ALL political power and authority... the government has ONLY what authority we grant it; and what is granted may be taken back at any time. Sovereign individuals not belong to, and are not subjects of, the United States government... they answer to us, not the other way around.
Hmm, not knowing that liquid nitrogen is completely non-flamable and ~200 degrees below zero...? Priceless. Way to go BBC, bang on science reporting as usual.
Pretty much any sealed container filled with any liquid can BLEVE though. The contents don't have to be flammable. A sealed water container can BLEVE and the shrapnel from the container can do a lot of damage (ie, kill or seriously maim human beings). So it is a threat of some significance, even if it is "just" liquid nitrogen.
But what about all the people who support Intelligent Design? Oh sorry... I must be new here.
I personally believe in something like ID, but I agree that it's not a provable theory and don't think it should be taught in schools. There are holes in the theory of evolution / abiogenesis, and ID is one possible way to fill in those. Perhaps science will eventually fill in all the holes and it will be obvious that there is no room for ID... until that day comes, I have no problem saying that I believe it is likely there is some sort of "intelligent designer."
And I am most definitely not a Christian Fundamentalist or anything of that nature. I'm not even a Christian, the closest you could get to labeling my religious beliefs would be to call me "Theistic Agnostic." So my saying I believe in something along the lines of ID is not the same as saying I believe in biblical creationism or the christian (or any other) view of God.
And FWIW, the reason I lean towards ID is essentially the "irreducible complexity" argument. I have not yet been convinced that current scientific theory can explain how something as complex as the human eye / optical nerve / etc. could evolve without "help." Again, I don't pretend to claim that this is a falsifiable theory or anything that should be taught to school-children, exactly because it's not science. And anyway, people who are prone to believe this kind of stuff will discover it on their own anyway, so not teaching it in school isn't depriving anybody of anything.
Unfortunately in today's climate, this seems to be a losing proposition. "Something you have, and something you know" becomes "Something you can lose, and something you can forget."
Or worse yet, "Something that can be removed from your body with a saw;" in the case of biometrics. This is why biometrics don't appeal to me... if somebody wants my id with a password or smartcard, they don't have to do serious physical damage to me to get it (granted, they might anyway just to be malicious) but with biometrics, they *have* to cut off your thumb, or pop your eye out or what have you. Thanks, but no thanks.
How can the World Wide Web as we know it keep going without Google Search?
Google is no longer significantly better than any of the other major search engines. Yahoo, MSN, A9 and probably numerous others offer equivelant capabilities. If Google closed down tomorrow, it wouldn't mean much for the 'Net as a whole.
True, but if you happen to own a trademark on the name, then you can prevent anybody else from making use of it, which negates the profit incentive for them to grab your domain. Trademark your domain, and you can probably get your domain back in cases like this, without too much effort.
I bet lots of people in the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama aren't so much in favor of smaller government anymore.
Why? Bigger government wouldn't have prevented this catastrophe. And the already huge government system we have is proving slow to respond to mitigate the damage and assist survivors.
The problem is, people have become overly dependent on "The Goverment" to solve all their problems for them. Everybody just sits back and expects that when something bad happens, "The Government" will just show up and make everything better automatically (and overnight!) and when that doesn't happen (which it clearly couldn't) they are disappointed and angry.
People need more of a sense of self-reliance, and reliance on smaller, more local (and therefore more immediately responsive) government, civic and charitable organizations. Calling for bigger government is not the answer.
Right now, the federal government needs to give the army corp of engineers an unlimited budget to fix the leeves & pumping system as fast as physically possible.
And where, pray tell, does the money for this "unlimited budget" come from???
Quite frankly, loosing (sic) New Orleans, one of the most historic cities in the U.S., would be a great tradgey.(sic)
Tragic it might be, but that does not justify taking money from everybody else in the country, to rebuild Nola. What happens when another hurricane hits next week, say in NC, and the people there need their money to rebuild their own cities and towns?
Of course anybody who lives in NO should be free to spend their own money on repair and reconstruction if they want. But neither I, nor anyone else, should not be forced to help foot the bill for rebuilding a city that probably should not be rebuilt.
A city that's built in a below sea-level bowl, near a major river and lake, in a hurricane strike prone area is simply a bad idea. As another posted asked, when do you stop rebuilding when you're located in a danger prone area? 3rd time's the charm? 100th? 10,000th?
This is about as smart as those people in CA who knowingly build their houses in wildfire prone areas, and then act surprised when their homes burn down.
When even complete laymen were practically screaming in hurricane-related forums for New Orleans to be evacuated, when every computer model had New Orleans dead center in the crosshairs of a Cat 5 hurricane ambling across the Gulf, unwaveringly on course, where was the ordered timely evacuation?
Anybody who knew the situation, and waited for the Mayor to order an evacuation before evacuating, has themselves to blame if they didn't get out in time. Whatever happened to "personal responsibility?"
I don't know about you, but I'm capable of watching CNN and visiting www.weather.com, and deciding for myself if it's time to "get out" and I don't need any government official to tell me one way or the other. And I'm nothing special, so there's no good reason why most everybody else can't do the same thing.
Sometimes it's simply a vent of frustration and helplessness, something no doubt all of us feel in greater or lesser degrees. But there also is accountability for trusts placed in public officials. When they fail, their failures are real. When their failures result in untold mayhem and destruction to property and lives, they are accountable.
This is exactly why it's stupid to place any significant trust in "elected officials," especially when it goes to the point of abdicating responsibility for one's own health & safety.
I must be dense, but I had to read it twice to actually understand what Clarke was saying. The sentence structure, the grammar, it all just appears very foreign. Is this a normal British thing? I'm honestly at a loss.
FWIW, I'm an American, and I didn't find it particularly bothersome. I haven't read the entire book yet, but up to where I am, the grammar hasn't really been something I've noticed.
Then again, I really enjoy British literature, TV, music, etc., so maybe I'm just conditioned to accept it?
Ya know, I was deeply affected by the events of 9/11. I've been a volunteer firefighter nearly my entire life, and I feel a bond of brotherhood with the guys from FDNY, despite the fact that they're career and I'm a volunteer, and the fact that they're up in NY and I'm in NC. I felt like I lost 343 brothers on 9/11.
But as painful as it was, the events themselves and the loss I felt on that day, isn't what I find most traumatizing about the whole ordeal. What bothers me most is the reaction TO 9/11 by others. Specifically I'm referring to actions taken by our government, done in knee-jerk fashion, which accomplish nothing and will infringe on the freedoms that Americans consider their natural birthright, for many years to come. Things like the Patriot Act, that thing authoring the director of DHS to do basically anything he wants, etc., in the name of the "War on Terror." That is what is truly traumatic.
Today's "coin-operated" American youth will look at average pay for a scientist, and average pay for a lawyer, and, really, you don't have to be a wiz at calculus to see that yearly vacations to Cabo aren't in the cards for the average scientist, as they are for the average lawyer.
Right, the laywer stands to earn a better average salary over a period of time. Maybe as much as 50% more, hell maybe even more.
But if a lawyer makes $120,000 / year for 20 years, while an engineer makes $60,000 over the same period of time, the laywer has made
20 * 60,000 = $1,200,000 more.
Now that's not chump change.. but it's pretty trivial against what you can make by creating an innovative new product, launching a company, and then selling our or going public. If you start a company that goes public with a valuation of, say 40 million dollars, and you own 10 percent of the stock, you're sitting on $4,000,000 if you sell out. And that's a pretty lowball example for a successful company.
And even if you don't IPO, an acquisition can be a profitable exit strategy. Look at Gluecode who were recently acquired by IBm for $25 million. I imagine you could build a company as attractive as Gluecode where the founder(s) retained well more than 10% of the company. Say you started the next Gluecode, retained 50% of the company, and got yourself acquired for 25 mill... you're now sitting on 12.5 million for yourself.
The point I'm trying to make is, starting your own successful business (or being an early stage employee / investor in one) and owning a big chunk of stock in a valuable company, is a better path to *real* wealth, than drawing a base salary over X years, for almost any occupation you can name.
So we need to educate children to have this entrepreneurial attitude, to go along with an interest in technology and engineering. Educate kids to understand that if they want to be *really* rich, engineering + enterpreneurship trumps most other fields.
Kevin Mitnick was actually on the FBI's most wanted list and arrested eventually. Now that hes out of jail he does consulting (hes not actually allowed to even touch a computer), and he also released a book called "The Art of Deception: Exploiting the Human Element of Security". The book is about social engineering (using lots of short stories to illustrate the scenarios).
I could be wrong, but I think the restriction on Mitnick not being able to touch a computer has expired. Also, he's now written his second book as well:
"The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers"
saying that E-Bay uses ISAPI / C may be oversimplifying things. I see that some of their url's still include isapi.dll, which does suggest using ISAPI. But they had gone on the public record a few years ago as saying they were migrating to Java / J2EE, specifically IBM WebSphere software.
Just to be clear, I don't "support violence" in the sense that I consider violence the first choice. I very much want to see our country restored to a state where we can consider ourselves the most free nation in the world, and I very much hope it can happen without any violence. Myself, I would hate to have another man's blood on my hands, for any reason.
However, that said... I am not against using violence if it comes to the point that there is no other option. But clearly, any sort of violent revolution should be the last resort. For now I still hold out some small hope that by voting and campaigning and doing all those things, we can effect some positive change. But that hope keeps growing weaker as I see the shit happening around us.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. So folks with more money should have a louder voice?
They do have a louder voice, in the sense that they can afford to purchase more television and radio ads, etc. That may be unfortunate, but it's the way it is. Nothing gives the government any authority to restrict an individual from spending their money on political speech, so if some rich billionaire wants to dump his fortune on promoting a candidate, it must be allowed.
They have a greater right to have their opinions heard?
Nobody has any "right" to have their opinion heard. Everybody has an equal right to speak, but to suggest a right (or, more properly, an entitlement) to be heard suggests than one can somehow force others to listen to your speech.
Anyway, the problem that everybody is missing is this: We *care* about this whole election / campaign finance / political blogging thing only because the government has assumed more power than it properly should have. If our government were as small and restricted as it should be, and the sovereignty of the individual was widely acknowledged, then nobody would be spending millions of dollars to campaign for office, because there wouldn't be any incentive. We look at the President of the United States and say "there is the most powerful man in the world" when we should look at him and say "There is our servant, who is no more important than any other man."
... if we can't rely on the Democrats to protect our freedoms
When have you ever been able to rely on Democrats to protect your freedoms?!? This is the party that doesn't acknowledge your right to retain the fruits of your own labor, which implies that they don't respect your right to property at all. Well, if you don't own property then you don't own yourself, so who do you belong to? "The government?" "Society?" Do you really want to know?
Democrats don't have one bit more concern for your freedoms than Republicans... I'm amazed that there are still people in this country who haven't figured that out yet.
, then who are we to rely on?
I would suggest that, if freedom is an important concern to you, you look to the Libertarians.
Bloggers (and everybody else) are already exempt from dealing with those hundreds of pages of crap, because that crap has no authority in the first place. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to free speech... and even if it didn't, government has no authority other than what comes from consent of the governed; so anybody who wants my simply choose to not allow the government to regulate their speech.
Repeat after me: Government has NO intrinsic authority or dominion over anybody; We The People are the ultimate and final source of ALL political power and authority... the government has ONLY what authority we grant it; and what is granted may be taken back at any time. Sovereign individuals not belong to, and are not subjects of, the United States government... they answer to us, not the other way around.
I dunno about that, but I'm waiting for the open-source OS/2 clone to become
available so we can have Debian GNU/OS/2 available.
Hmm, not knowing that liquid nitrogen is completely non-flamable and ~200 degrees below zero...? Priceless. Way to go BBC, bang on science reporting as usual.
Pretty much any sealed container filled with any liquid can BLEVE though. The contents don't have to be flammable. A sealed water container can BLEVE and the shrapnel from the container can do a lot of damage (ie, kill or seriously maim human beings). So it is a threat of some significance, even if it is "just" liquid nitrogen.
.. why google has been buying tons of dark fiber in the past couple of years.
Heh, I thought the exact same thing when I saw this. The guys at google aren't stupid, ya know...
But what about all the people who support Intelligent Design? Oh sorry... I must be new here.
I personally believe in something like ID, but I agree that it's not a provable theory and don't think it should be taught in schools. There are holes in the theory of evolution / abiogenesis, and ID is one possible way to fill in those. Perhaps science will eventually fill in all the holes and it will be obvious that there is no room for ID... until that day comes, I have no problem saying that I believe it is likely there is some sort of "intelligent designer."
And I am most definitely not a Christian Fundamentalist or anything of that nature. I'm not even a Christian, the closest you could get to labeling my religious beliefs would be to call me "Theistic Agnostic." So my saying I believe in something along the lines of ID is not the same as saying I believe in biblical creationism or the christian (or any other) view of God.
And FWIW, the reason I lean towards ID is essentially the "irreducible complexity" argument. I have not yet been convinced that current scientific theory can explain how something as complex as the human eye / optical nerve / etc. could evolve without "help." Again, I don't pretend to claim that this is a falsifiable theory or anything that should be taught to school-children, exactly because it's not science. And anyway, people who are prone to believe this kind of stuff will discover it on their own anyway, so not teaching it in school isn't depriving anybody of anything.
Unfortunately in today's climate, this seems to be a losing proposition. "Something you have, and something you know" becomes "Something you can lose, and something you can forget."
Or worse yet, "Something that can be removed from your body with a saw;" in the case of biometrics. This is why biometrics don't appeal to me... if somebody wants my id with a password or smartcard, they don't have to do serious physical damage to me to get it (granted, they might anyway just to be malicious) but with biometrics, they *have* to cut off your thumb, or pop your eye out or what have you. Thanks, but no thanks.
How can the World Wide Web as we know it keep going without Google Search?
Google is no longer significantly better than any of the other major search engines. Yahoo, MSN, A9 and probably numerous others offer equivelant capabilities. If Google closed down tomorrow, it wouldn't mean much for the 'Net as a whole.
Maybe he meant to read both "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" and "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer??"
John Ashcroft knows about as much about Justice as a I know about Neurosurgery; which is to say, nothing at all.
Whaaa-waaaa--wwwwaaattt?????
no Salvage, Blue Thunder, Airwolf, Knight Rider, Automan, Max Headroom or The Prisoner????
True, but if you happen to own a trademark on the name, then you can prevent anybody else from making use of it, which negates the profit incentive for them to grab your domain. Trademark your domain, and you can probably get your domain back in cases like this, without too much effort.
Haven't you heard that you should never apply a Star Trek solution to a Slashdot problem?
In that case, maybe he could fix his problem with a Sonic Screwdriver?
I bet lots of people in the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama aren't so much in favor of smaller government anymore.
Why? Bigger government wouldn't have prevented this catastrophe. And the already huge government system we have is proving slow to respond to mitigate the damage and assist survivors.
The problem is, people have become overly dependent on "The Goverment" to solve all their problems for them. Everybody just sits back and expects that when something bad happens, "The Government" will just show up and make everything better automatically (and overnight!) and when that doesn't happen (which it clearly couldn't) they are disappointed and angry.
People need more of a sense of self-reliance, and reliance on smaller, more local (and therefore more immediately responsive) government, civic and charitable organizations. Calling for bigger government is not the answer.
and have yet to hear from anyone about providing assistance from even our biggest and best allies.
Germany has chimed in with an offer of some unspecified aid / support, FWIW.
Right now, the federal government needs to give the army corp of engineers an unlimited budget to fix the leeves & pumping system as fast as physically possible.
And where, pray tell, does the money for this "unlimited budget" come from???
Quite frankly, loosing (sic) New Orleans, one of the most historic cities in the U.S., would be a great tradgey.(sic)
Tragic it might be, but that does not justify taking money from everybody else in the country, to rebuild Nola. What happens when another hurricane hits next week, say in NC, and the people there need their money to rebuild their own cities and towns?
Of course anybody who lives in NO should be free to spend their own money on repair and reconstruction if they want. But neither I, nor anyone else, should not be forced to help foot the bill for rebuilding a city that probably should not be rebuilt.
A city that's built in a below sea-level bowl, near a major river and lake, in a hurricane strike prone area is simply a bad idea. As another posted asked, when do you stop rebuilding when you're located in a danger prone area? 3rd time's the charm? 100th? 10,000th?
This is about as smart as those people in CA who knowingly build their houses in wildfire prone areas, and then act surprised when their homes burn down.
When even complete laymen were practically screaming in hurricane-related forums for New Orleans to be evacuated, when every computer model had New Orleans dead center in the crosshairs of a Cat 5 hurricane ambling across the Gulf, unwaveringly on course, where was the ordered timely evacuation?
Anybody who knew the situation, and waited for the Mayor to order an evacuation before evacuating, has themselves to blame if they didn't get out in time. Whatever happened to "personal responsibility?"
I don't know about you, but I'm capable of watching CNN and visiting www.weather.com, and deciding for myself if it's time to "get out" and I don't need any government official to tell me one way or the other. And I'm nothing special, so there's no good reason why most everybody else can't do the same thing.
Sometimes it's simply a vent of frustration and helplessness, something no doubt all of us feel in greater or lesser degrees. But there also is accountability for trusts placed in public officials. When they fail, their failures are real. When their failures result in untold mayhem and destruction to property and lives, they are accountable.
This is exactly why it's stupid to place any significant trust in "elected officials," especially when it goes to the point of abdicating responsibility for one's own health & safety.
I must be dense, but I had to read it twice to actually understand what Clarke was saying. The sentence structure, the grammar, it all just appears very foreign. Is this a normal British thing? I'm honestly at a loss.
FWIW, I'm an American, and I didn't find it particularly bothersome. I haven't read the entire book yet, but up to where I am, the grammar hasn't really been something I've noticed.
Then again, I really enjoy British literature, TV, music, etc., so maybe I'm just conditioned to accept it?
<shrug>
Ya know, I was deeply affected by the events of 9/11. I've been a volunteer firefighter nearly my entire life, and I feel a bond of brotherhood with the guys from FDNY, despite the fact that they're career and I'm a volunteer, and the fact that they're up in NY and I'm in NC. I felt like I lost 343 brothers on 9/11.
But as painful as it was, the events themselves and the loss I felt on that day, isn't what I find most traumatizing about the whole ordeal. What bothers me most is the reaction TO 9/11 by others. Specifically I'm referring to actions taken by our government, done in knee-jerk fashion, which accomplish nothing and will infringe on the freedoms that Americans consider their natural birthright, for many years to come. Things like the Patriot Act, that thing authoring the director of DHS to do basically anything he wants, etc., in the name of the "War on Terror." That is what is truly traumatic.
Today's "coin-operated" American youth will look at average pay for a scientist, and average pay for a lawyer, and, really, you don't have to be a wiz at calculus to see that yearly vacations to Cabo aren't in the cards for the average scientist, as they are for the average lawyer.
Right, the laywer stands to earn a better average salary over a period of time. Maybe as much as 50% more, hell maybe even more.
But if a lawyer makes $120,000 / year for 20 years, while an engineer makes $60,000 over the same period of time, the laywer has made
20 * 60,000 = $1,200,000 more.
Now that's not chump change.. but it's pretty trivial against what you can make by creating an innovative new product, launching a company, and then selling our or going public. If you start a company that goes public with a valuation of, say 40 million dollars, and you own 10 percent of the stock, you're sitting on $4,000,000 if you sell out. And that's a pretty lowball example for a successful company.
And even if you don't IPO, an acquisition can be a profitable exit strategy. Look at Gluecode who were recently acquired by IBm for $25 million. I imagine you could build a company as attractive as Gluecode where the founder(s) retained well more than 10% of the company. Say you started the next Gluecode, retained 50% of the company, and got yourself acquired for 25 mill... you're now sitting on 12.5 million for yourself.
The point I'm trying to make is, starting your own successful business (or being an early stage employee / investor in one) and owning a big chunk of stock in a valuable company, is a better path to *real* wealth, than drawing a base salary over X years, for almost any occupation you can name.
So we need to educate children to have this entrepreneurial attitude, to go along with an interest in technology and engineering. Educate kids to understand that if they want to be *really* rich, engineering + enterpreneurship trumps most other fields.
"and in conclusion, this prevents the World Wide Web."
Classic shit.
Kevin Mitnick was actually on the FBI's most wanted list and arrested eventually. Now that hes out of jail he does consulting (hes not actually allowed to even touch a computer), and he also released a book called "The Art of Deception: Exploiting the Human Element of Security". The book is about social engineering (using lots of short stories to illustrate the scenarios).
I could be wrong, but I think the restriction on Mitnick not being able to touch a computer has expired. Also, he's now written his second book as well:
"The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers"
saying that E-Bay uses ISAPI / C may be oversimplifying things. I see that some of their url's still include isapi.dll, which does suggest using ISAPI. But they had gone on the public record a few years ago as saying they were migrating to Java / J2EE, specifically IBM WebSphere software.
a ppdev/story/0,10801,63692,00.html
http://computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/
I would guess that they're actually using a mix of technologies. Any insiders have any insight they can share? Even anonymously?
Just to be clear, I don't "support violence" in the sense that I consider violence the first choice. I very much want to see our country restored to a state where we can consider ourselves the most free nation in the world, and I very much hope it can happen without any violence. Myself, I would hate to have another man's blood on my hands, for any reason.
However, that said... I am not against using violence if it comes to the point that there is no other option. But clearly, any sort of violent revolution should be the last resort. For now I still hold out some small hope that by voting and campaigning and doing all those things, we can effect some positive change. But that hope keeps growing weaker as I see the shit happening around us.