Which part of "I think they're a horrible idea" do I need to clarify?
Also, I was referencing FIRE as an organization, not that particular weblog entry, but as long as you're discussing it:
The state school thinks that this violates Separation of Church and State, which sounds pretty correct to me.
You must have missed the part where there is precedent set in multiple Supreme Court cases stating the opposite, and where there is a ruling from the 7th Circuit which is binding upon UW but which the school has ignored.
The Torch is the weblog for FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group which fights the pervasive threat against free expression by students, faculty, and staff at educational institutions. Public universities, as subsidiaries of the government, are bound by the US Constitution to protect, rather than hinder, our free speech rights, yet many public universities institute "speech codes" that outlaw unpopular or offensive speech.
The extremism of the two major political parties just points out one of the flaws in a partisan system. By making each candidate jump through the hoop of a primary election, they pretty much have to pander to the party base rather than play the middle.
Look what happened to Joe Lieberman. He crossed the aisle on a few issues and is generally regarded as being fairly centrist, so the Democratic Party decided to ditch him and replace him with someone more amenable to their political strategy. Now he's 10 points ahead in the polls running outside his party affiliation based on the strength of his popularity amongst moderates. The problem is that few candidates have the name recognition or finances to accomplish such a feat (being an incumbent helps a lot). And so, partisanship continues to drive a wedge into the political process, right through the backs of moderates like us who actually put people into office, by making us choose from the better of two evils.
Agreed. I even use VANs with retailers I trust. The only ones I regularly use my regular CC number for are Newegg and Amazon, purely for historical reasons (I gave them my number before VANs were available).
In fact, the only rule even more important than this one (in my book, anyway) is to never use a debit card.
Note that in each of those cases, we're talking about the highest levels of federal government taking overt acts to revoke our First Amendment rights. Compare that with this particular case of some local TSA moron doing something stupid.
Yes, I'm aware of the "free speech zones" at debates and conventions in recent elections, and I think they're a horrible idea, but at least in those cases it's motivated by the inability of police to guarantee the safety of the people both inside and outside the building when a terror target is that high-profile. On the other hand, those events are infrequent compared with the hindrances on free speech rights that take place at our public educational institutions every day, this time motivated by left-leaning political correctness advocates rather than by right-leaning Patriot Act advocates.
It's fitting that Poulsen is reporting on this issue, then, because this whole "getting the key to the castle via dumpster diving" thing is remarkably similar to the way that many of the basic phone phreaking techniques were originally uncovered. Of course, the phone industry mitigated their problems by moving control communications out-of-band. The analogue would be to stop making these functions accessible via the ATM keypad. This wouldn't solve all their problems (a mandatory password change upon installation of the machine would help as well, for starters), but it sure couldn't hurt.
Space Pirate: Avast, mateys! Electronically transfer your space doubloons, afore I send thee to Davey Jarg's locker!
(Of course, mere text doesn't do justice to the fact that he has four shoulders, three of which have parrots on them, three out of four peg-legs, and three eyes with two eyepatches.)
The "Snakes on a Plane" hype stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of what was driving people to pay attention to the hype. The studios and critics thought that it all came from genuine excitement about the movie, while the Intarweb-using public actually was wondering how the hell anybody could name a movie something so dumb.
Maybe there's something similar going on concerning the Pirate Party, but one big difference between the two is that the Pirate Party will get another bite at the apple in future elections (such that any attention at all is good attention), whereas "Snakes on a Plane" will never see another theatrical release (thank god).
Apologies - I should have looked it up instead of going from memory. I should have said 4x the vote margin, but it doesn't matter, since the vote total there went heavily for Kerry anyway.
You mention Hitler in your argument, you automatically lose. You mention Diebold in Ohio for 2004 and you also automatically lose.
Diebold machines were only used in two counties in Ohio - Hardin and Lucas - and in both counties, these were optical scan machines. The total population of these two counties is less than 500,000, or about 1.5x the vote margin in the entire state. Couple that with the fact that Lucas County went heavily in favor of Kerry in that election, and we see that implicating Diebold in improprieties in Ohio's 2004 election is a load of crap. Most left-wing noisemakers have the good sense not to implicate Diebold directly, instead trying to make a tenuous connection to the former Diebold CEO's comments about winning the election for Bush, and letting suspicion and paranoia take care of the rest. But never let the truth stand in the way of political propaganda on Slashdot!
Diebold machines were used in about half the state's counties in 2005, so if you want to rail about that, go right ahead.
You accused me of trying to blame Clinton for the report shredding. I didn't blame Clinton at all. I blamed Powell. I think that's a key problem with your perspective - you don't seem to grasp that oftentimes, the chief executive isn't actually calling the shots. Yes, when bad decisions get made by the heads of various government departments, the President (whoever it may be at the time) often doesn't expend political capital correcting the situation, which is unfortunate, but it's not the same thing.
Take Hurricane Katrina for example. It wasn't Bush's job to micromanage the disaster and rescue efforts immediately following the storm. That's what Michael Brown was supposed to do, but Brown sucked total ass and attached himself to the problems that Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco would otherwise have been responsible for. Bush's error was in taking too long to see/admit that Michael Brown was doing such a bad job. Eventually, Brown got fired, but only after the cost of ignoring the political pressure grew greater than the political capital expended in firing Brown.
Now, if Bush ignores the need to fix things at FEMA, then he becomes culpable the next time a disaster strikes and FEMA's response is once again unacceptable. But the left insists upon blaming Bush now, because the intense public division surrounding Bush makes it an easy way to conceal Nagin's and Blanco's mismanagement.
Anyway, arguing with you about this is probably a waste of time, because you (a) accuse me of holding Bush blameless for everything that he actually does, while you yourself (b) hold the Democrats blameless for everything that they do. What I've actually been saying here the whole time is to blame Bush for the stuff he has done, and stop trying to pin everything else under the sun on him as well.
Michael Powell was first appointed to the FCC board of commissioners by Clinton, and only later promoted to chair the commission by Bush. Powell continued to serve through 2005, and supported the measure to increase media ownership that's being discussed here. The contradictory report was completed in 2004, and it is likely (though not confirmed in media reports yet) that the actions taken to attempt to destroy the report happened around that time. Powell resigned in 2005 and was replaced as Chairman by Kevin Martin, who, according to Wikipedia (though no source was cited, unfortunately), has taken steps to purge Powell's staff since then.
It should also be noted that many Republicans were opposed to the media ownership rules, including Trent Lott.
Any finger-pointing on this issue should probably go toward Powell. Martin is actually much closer to the Bush administration, having worked on his campaign, and the purges indicate that any relationship between Powell's oversight of this report and the Bush administration is tenuous if even existent.
If you have substantial contradicting information, I'd love to read it.
BTW - I don't listen to right-wing talk radio. I'm just right-of-center, and have no love for the current administration or the current GOP leadership in Congress. The warrantless wiretapping was the last straw for me, and I'm hoping for some moderation to emerge from the 2008 fiasco. If McCain and Lieberman were to run together, I'd be tempted to help out with the campaign.
I believe that truth is the most important factor in politics, and I believe that your unwavering finger-pointing at Bush regardless of the issue and regardless of fault harms your efforts to get the blame to stick for the things he has done. It's reminiscent of MoveOn.org taking a position on network neutrality. They took an issue which should have been neutral and made it highly partisan, because they also can't stop pointing the finger (which finger is debatable) at Bush for every bad thing in the dictionary. They harm their own cause, because their vitriol makes it hard for moderates to get at the truth, and therefore scares them away from important issues that would otherwise transcend partisan boundaries.
And then you go and start dropping Karl Rove's name as well. John Murtha and Barbara Boxer would be proud.
The truth is that the assault on our sensibilities comes from all sides. The Republican leadership uses the FUD of terrorism to scare us into supporting draconian suspensions of civil rights, while the Democratic leadership uses FUD about everything else to call our attention away from terrorism. Neither side is telling the truth.
With the GOP having control of the largest political target in the nation (the presidency, of course), the Democrats try to indoctrinate their supporters with the idea that Bush is at fault for everything that goes wrong. We won't get our government back in shape until our politicians are accountable for their actions. As long as they continue not to earn the blame for the bad things they do, and continue to get blamed for the bad things that other people do, things will never improve.
So instead of blaming Bush for everything every time you get the chance, do some research and put the blame where it's due. The FCC has needed a shakeup for many, many years now (going back before this administration), not just in personnel, but also in philosophy. As long as fingers keep getting pointed at Bush, real change will never happen.
I need to modify my logic in my post above. While that logic is valid under a CC Share-Alike license, it turns out that all CC licenses explicitly forbid technological protection measures on redistributed works. Therefore, #3 should read, "The CC license forbids the use of DRM on redistributed works."
Actually, I apologize - this isn't actually correct. The CC license in all forms explicitly prohibits distribution if the work is encumbered with a technological protection measure, hence the translation analogy is also not apt.
Slashdot Mirror
In one example, they found that from just seven aggregated sessions they could distinguish between two different surfers with a confidence of 86.7%.
Well, I know I'm one of the websurfers. Who's the other one?
Which part of "I think they're a horrible idea" do I need to clarify?
Also, I was referencing FIRE as an organization, not that particular weblog entry, but as long as you're discussing it:
The state school thinks that this violates Separation of Church and State, which sounds pretty correct to me.
You must have missed the part where there is precedent set in multiple Supreme Court cases stating the opposite, and where there is a ruling from the 7th Circuit which is binding upon UW but which the school has ignored.
The Torch is the weblog for FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group which fights the pervasive threat against free expression by students, faculty, and staff at educational institutions. Public universities, as subsidiaries of the government, are bound by the US Constitution to protect, rather than hinder, our free speech rights, yet many public universities institute "speech codes" that outlaw unpopular or offensive speech.
Maybe I should have just linked their regular front page.
The extremism of the two major political parties just points out one of the flaws in a partisan system. By making each candidate jump through the hoop of a primary election, they pretty much have to pander to the party base rather than play the middle.
Look what happened to Joe Lieberman. He crossed the aisle on a few issues and is generally regarded as being fairly centrist, so the Democratic Party decided to ditch him and replace him with someone more amenable to their political strategy. Now he's 10 points ahead in the polls running outside his party affiliation based on the strength of his popularity amongst moderates. The problem is that few candidates have the name recognition or finances to accomplish such a feat (being an incumbent helps a lot). And so, partisanship continues to drive a wedge into the political process, right through the backs of moderates like us who actually put people into office, by making us choose from the better of two evils.
Agreed. I even use VANs with retailers I trust. The only ones I regularly use my regular CC number for are Newegg and Amazon, purely for historical reasons (I gave them my number before VANs were available).
In fact, the only rule even more important than this one (in my book, anyway) is to never use a debit card.
Do you mean 1918, 1861, or 1798?
Note that in each of those cases, we're talking about the highest levels of federal government taking overt acts to revoke our First Amendment rights. Compare that with this particular case of some local TSA moron doing something stupid.
Yes, I'm aware of the "free speech zones" at debates and conventions in recent elections, and I think they're a horrible idea, but at least in those cases it's motivated by the inability of police to guarantee the safety of the people both inside and outside the building when a terror target is that high-profile. On the other hand, those events are infrequent compared with the hindrances on free speech rights that take place at our public educational institutions every day, this time motivated by left-leaning political correctness advocates rather than by right-leaning Patriot Act advocates.
More than anything, this guy is a business dumbass for doing the work and providing the results before even a contract was drawn up.
But street bums do that to my windshield all the time!
It's fitting that Poulsen is reporting on this issue, then, because this whole "getting the key to the castle via dumpster diving" thing is remarkably similar to the way that many of the basic phone phreaking techniques were originally uncovered. Of course, the phone industry mitigated their problems by moving control communications out-of-band. The analogue would be to stop making these functions accessible via the ATM keypad. This wouldn't solve all their problems (a mandatory password change upon installation of the machine would help as well, for starters), but it sure couldn't hurt.
Space Pirate: Avast, mateys! Electronically transfer your space doubloons, afore I send thee to Davey Jarg's locker!
(Of course, mere text doesn't do justice to the fact that he has four shoulders, three of which have parrots on them, three out of four peg-legs, and three eyes with two eyepatches.)
The "Snakes on a Plane" hype stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of what was driving people to pay attention to the hype. The studios and critics thought that it all came from genuine excitement about the movie, while the Intarweb-using public actually was wondering how the hell anybody could name a movie something so dumb.
Maybe there's something similar going on concerning the Pirate Party, but one big difference between the two is that the Pirate Party will get another bite at the apple in future elections (such that any attention at all is good attention), whereas "Snakes on a Plane" will never see another theatrical release (thank god).
Alternatively, if you'd rather just be a robot, your choices include being in a plane crash at age 9 or working on an undersea research laboratory.
Apologies - I should have looked it up instead of going from memory. I should have said 4x the vote margin, but it doesn't matter, since the vote total there went heavily for Kerry anyway.
You mention Hitler in your argument, you automatically lose. You mention Diebold in Ohio for 2004 and you also automatically lose.
Diebold machines were only used in two counties in Ohio - Hardin and Lucas - and in both counties, these were optical scan machines. The total population of these two counties is less than 500,000, or about 1.5x the vote margin in the entire state. Couple that with the fact that Lucas County went heavily in favor of Kerry in that election, and we see that implicating Diebold in improprieties in Ohio's 2004 election is a load of crap. Most left-wing noisemakers have the good sense not to implicate Diebold directly, instead trying to make a tenuous connection to the former Diebold CEO's comments about winning the election for Bush, and letting suspicion and paranoia take care of the rest. But never let the truth stand in the way of political propaganda on Slashdot!
Diebold machines were used in about half the state's counties in 2005, so if you want to rail about that, go right ahead.
When more of these type of programs are available, Slashdot will list them all, and will become an RSS Feed Feed Feed.
Imagine an RSS feed of those!
You accused me of trying to blame Clinton for the report shredding. I didn't blame Clinton at all. I blamed Powell. I think that's a key problem with your perspective - you don't seem to grasp that oftentimes, the chief executive isn't actually calling the shots. Yes, when bad decisions get made by the heads of various government departments, the President (whoever it may be at the time) often doesn't expend political capital correcting the situation, which is unfortunate, but it's not the same thing.
Take Hurricane Katrina for example. It wasn't Bush's job to micromanage the disaster and rescue efforts immediately following the storm. That's what Michael Brown was supposed to do, but Brown sucked total ass and attached himself to the problems that Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco would otherwise have been responsible for. Bush's error was in taking too long to see/admit that Michael Brown was doing such a bad job. Eventually, Brown got fired, but only after the cost of ignoring the political pressure grew greater than the political capital expended in firing Brown.
Now, if Bush ignores the need to fix things at FEMA, then he becomes culpable the next time a disaster strikes and FEMA's response is once again unacceptable. But the left insists upon blaming Bush now, because the intense public division surrounding Bush makes it an easy way to conceal Nagin's and Blanco's mismanagement.
Anyway, arguing with you about this is probably a waste of time, because you (a) accuse me of holding Bush blameless for everything that he actually does, while you yourself (b) hold the Democrats blameless for everything that they do. What I've actually been saying here the whole time is to blame Bush for the stuff he has done, and stop trying to pin everything else under the sun on him as well.
Plagiarism is usually a symptom of laziness, not boredom.
Great, now I'm going to have nightmares of really old people playing Dance Dance Revolution.
Michael Powell was first appointed to the FCC board of commissioners by Clinton, and only later promoted to chair the commission by Bush. Powell continued to serve through 2005, and supported the measure to increase media ownership that's being discussed here. The contradictory report was completed in 2004, and it is likely (though not confirmed in media reports yet) that the actions taken to attempt to destroy the report happened around that time. Powell resigned in 2005 and was replaced as Chairman by Kevin Martin, who, according to Wikipedia (though no source was cited, unfortunately), has taken steps to purge Powell's staff since then.
It should also be noted that many Republicans were opposed to the media ownership rules, including Trent Lott.
Any finger-pointing on this issue should probably go toward Powell. Martin is actually much closer to the Bush administration, having worked on his campaign, and the purges indicate that any relationship between Powell's oversight of this report and the Bush administration is tenuous if even existent.
If you have substantial contradicting information, I'd love to read it.
BTW - I don't listen to right-wing talk radio. I'm just right-of-center, and have no love for the current administration or the current GOP leadership in Congress. The warrantless wiretapping was the last straw for me, and I'm hoping for some moderation to emerge from the 2008 fiasco. If McCain and Lieberman were to run together, I'd be tempted to help out with the campaign.
I believe that truth is the most important factor in politics, and I believe that your unwavering finger-pointing at Bush regardless of the issue and regardless of fault harms your efforts to get the blame to stick for the things he has done. It's reminiscent of MoveOn.org taking a position on network neutrality. They took an issue which should have been neutral and made it highly partisan, because they also can't stop pointing the finger (which finger is debatable) at Bush for every bad thing in the dictionary. They harm their own cause, because their vitriol makes it hard for moderates to get at the truth, and therefore scares them away from important issues that would otherwise transcend partisan boundaries.
And then you go and start dropping Karl Rove's name as well. John Murtha and Barbara Boxer would be proud.
The truth is that the assault on our sensibilities comes from all sides. The Republican leadership uses the FUD of terrorism to scare us into supporting draconian suspensions of civil rights, while the Democratic leadership uses FUD about everything else to call our attention away from terrorism. Neither side is telling the truth.
With the GOP having control of the largest political target in the nation (the presidency, of course), the Democrats try to indoctrinate their supporters with the idea that Bush is at fault for everything that goes wrong. We won't get our government back in shape until our politicians are accountable for their actions. As long as they continue not to earn the blame for the bad things they do, and continue to get blamed for the bad things that other people do, things will never improve.
So instead of blaming Bush for everything every time you get the chance, do some research and put the blame where it's due. The FCC has needed a shakeup for many, many years now (going back before this administration), not just in personnel, but also in philosophy. As long as fingers keep getting pointed at Bush, real change will never happen.
So yes, that's right, they're selling wax in a tube to rub on your forehead.
Fixed.
Ah, yes, kind of like suing P2P users.
What, you didn't like Mortal Kombat? It was way better than Street Fighter!
(RIP, Raul Julia.)
I need to modify my logic in my post above. While that logic is valid under a CC Share-Alike license, it turns out that all CC licenses explicitly forbid technological protection measures on redistributed works. Therefore, #3 should read, "The CC license forbids the use of DRM on redistributed works."
Actually, I apologize - this isn't actually correct. The CC license in all forms explicitly prohibits distribution if the work is encumbered with a technological protection measure, hence the translation analogy is also not apt.