It is amazing how many people don't realize that's how Trump creates leverage. Even major news anchors don't indicate they have the slightest clue. They are so consumed with being mad they can't even think.
Or the story authors and editors feeding the network talking heads don't want them to explain what Trump is doing to their audience. Explaining it would interfere with their agenda.
Two things to remember about mainstream news:
1. They get political power primarily by creating illusions in the minds of legislators. The latter are largely isolated in their capitols and disconnected from their constituents. So if the newsies can convince them their voters want something other than what they do want, they can swing their votes - both getting legislation they want and jeopardizing their opponents' reelection.
They get it secondarily by creating illusions for the population: Using social pressure and learned helplessness to change their opponents' ideas or, if they won't change, to stop them from taking action to promote their own interests.
2. The mainstream news networks are solidly in the camp of the Democratic Party establishment. This, including their deliberate lies and fabrications, was exposed by, among others, Wikileaks during the last presidential election.
The mainstream newsies lost a LOT of their power as a result. (It is especially funny that their coinage of "Fake News", an attempt to pull the teeth of attempts to expose them when they lie, was turned on them and continues to marganilize their efforts.
Things to remember about international politics at the head-of-state level:
Much of international politics is a variant of the "Game of Chicken", where two people drive cars at each other and the first to turn away loses - but if neither turns they crash. To win, you must convince your opponent you're crazy enough to go through with it.
At the head-of-state level this applies to war (brush, conventional, or nuclear) and all the "war by other means" relations (such as "trade war").
The primary example is the doctrine of "Mutual Assured Destruction", appropriately abbreviated "The MAD doctrine": The claim is "If you use WMDs on us we'll nuke you into glass. If this sterilizes the Earth, so be it. So let's settle this without resort to nuclear, biologithe groundcal, or chemical weapons." This sounds crazy. But it works. International politics switched from World Wars to conventional once Nukes and MAD were in place.
But for MAD to work the head-of-state has to LOOK both crazy enough to "push the button" AND rational enough to be willing to avoid it IF you come to a reasonable deal. Regan, for instance, was an expert at this. Trump appears to be another. (Sadly, Democrats usually aren't. It doesn't fit their ideology. This is part of why they tend to start and escalate wars.)
The diplomatic efforts based on "tickling the dragon's tail" of nuclear was was called "Brinksmanship".
Whatever else you might think about Trump, realize this: As a businessman, at the CEO level, he was able to turn about a million bucks of inheritance into several billion - more than a three orders of magnitude gain - by negotiating successful deals. Any bets on whether the "game of chicken" is in his playbook?
Now he's applying this skill to international politics. Surprise! It seems to work there, too.
Bargaining includes offers, counter-offers, and threats of what will happen if a deal isn't reached. There's lots of posturing as the parties work out what their potential partners will accept, what they'll give up, and what they'll trade away for something they want more. But most of these positions are being displayed for effect, rather than as set-in-stone will-happen promises.
With all the leaks - and all the characterization of them as oncoming disasters - (thanks to the mainstream news media mentioned above), someone who believes these stories would be in a panic and not thinking straight. But it's just the discredited media operations trying to salvage their power by doubling-down. So the rest of us are not concerned.
Its already a natural landfill. Let's just continue that, it can probably hold all of our plastic waste.
If I had mod points right now I'd give that an "insightful". Oceanic trenches ARE the planet's landfill, sucking the seabottom debris under the mantle, to be melted and perhaps eventually released via volcanism.
(They'd be a GREAT place to dispose of radioactive waste if one could be sure it wouldn't get loose before being sucked under.)
If you have nothing to hide... then why are you using PGP? It is only used by criminals and the like.
Ha, ha.
But seriously. If you have nothing to hide, do all your communication with your bank, mortgage holder, broker, 401(k) administrator, and doctor solely by postcard. And take the shades off your windows.
Law-abiding people have PLENTY to hide. And they have a RIGHT to hide it. The Fourth Amendment, among other parts of the constitution, explicitly recognizes this, and the Supreme Court has issued a ruling making explicit and binding an easy-to-understand "Right to Privacy" interpretation of a combination of several pieces of the Constitution.
But the particular fraud he was charged with is falsifying the caller I.D.
This fraud would get some people to answer when they otherwise would not, wasting their time on the call they otherwise wouldn't have accepted. Damage.
The company at which I'm currently working used to do internatinal virtual meetings with Skype, before Microsoft bought it and for a short time after. They now do the meetings with Zoom.
I used to maintain a profile with LinkedIn. I haven't updated it since Microsoft bought the company.
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them.
The first amendment keeps the government from preventing speech before the fact.
It does NOT keep the government from, after the act, penalizing a crime, of which fraudulent speech was a central element, in which harm was deliberately (and improperly) caused.
For someone who quotes Ron Paul in his sig line you show a remarkable lack of respect for private property and contract. If the artist who makes a song can't dictate how i enjoy it,...
But to a large extent the artist who makes a song, if he retains copyright to it, CAN dictate the conditions under which it is performed - by terms of the license to perform it.
(I recall, for instance, attending a concert that included on orchestrial piece, composed back in the Vietnam confilct era, where the composer had written a political rant, and required it be read to the audience before the piece was performed. The rant, though dated, was duly read.)
This whole cult of the founder/artist in programming, and their dictatorial whims over an OPEN SOURCE project is sickening. He was free to keep his code all to himself, but he can't c.ntrol what people do with it after he decides to share it with the world
But he CAN. By licensing it open source he IS. The license is based on retaining ownership and control - then easing PART of the control. Use it in a way that is forbidden by the license and you lose the license to use it AT ALL>
Yes, he licensed it in a way that lets others hack the joke out of the comments and republish. But he's also an authority in the organization that maintains the current mainline distribution. So he gets, in this case, to dictate how THAT distribution deals with the joke.
And that will stick: To get a fork to take over from the current mainline you'll have to contribute more and/or better maintenance of the whole library than the current organization.
Are you, and your friends, willing to spend that much of YOUR time, resouces, and talents to the project? HE is. His friends are.
They're giving us this stuff we like - in return for other things from us that they value. That includes not locking up fixed/augmented versions of it, contributing other software that THEY like, recognition of their contributions, and respect for their wishes.
So if he values having a joke - relevant to the political situations around open source publication - in the comments (where it doesn't affect the function of the software), I say let him have it, even if the open source contract doesn't require it, even if I don't agree with it. For him it's more valuable than money, and having his way encourages him to make more good software for us. For us it's LESS valuable than money. So in this free market it's a fantastic bargain.
You're welcome to suggest it. I suggest anyone considering such a thing reject the proposal, or only continue using and developing on the un-forked version.
Contributors to open source projects (ESPECIALY the seminal projects and the pioneers like Stallman) are giving us their work. But it's not for free. They still expect to be paid - but in things far more valuable than money.
Removing this joke is stealing part of Stallman's pay for his work. And it's a piece of his pay that he values enough to raise a stink about it.
For thousands of years the prescription of essentially every moral code has been "pay the worker what you promised". Example: "... the labourer is worthy of his hire." (Luke 10:7, King James Version).
Let's not succumb to the censor's tactic of punishing people who don't totally conform to the current group-think prescription by stealing their stuff - starting with those things they value the most, and with those most connected to denying them free speech.
Assuming that this hypothetical cycle looks anything like a sine cycle...
Also: Assuming it looks like a sine the middle is where the rate of change is the greatest.
This is one of the Milankovich cycles, which have been known and studied (by people other than Milankovitch) since at least 1941 and part of any reasonable long-term computer-supported climatic model since such were practical.
What's new here is they found physical evidence to validate the connection between this cycle and climate, and push the connection back from 50 million to 215 million years.
Climate scientists' "valid theoretical orbital solutions [are] limited to only the past 50 million years." What's new here is physical evidence that "provide[s] empirical confirmation that the unimodal 405-kiloyear orbital eccentricity cycle reliably paces Earthâ(TM)s climate back to at least 215 million years ago, well back in the Late Triassic Period." So orbital forcing is real and we have a solid handle on one of the components of it.
= = = =
I wonder how this ties in with another work not long ago.
Notice, in the Orbital Forcing wikipedia article, the shape of the Vostok Petit data graphs of temperature during the interglacials: A sharp spike (typically to a bit warmer than we are now), followed immediately by a ramp back into the next ice age. Notice, also, how the latest one deviates: Its trendline levels out, with the temperature hanging in there rather than taking the usual dive.
A couple years back there was an article in Scientific American (NOT a hotbed of "climate-change deniers", but more of a marching band in the anthropogenic climate change parade). The authors had compared their computations of the expected effect of the Milankovitch cycles to the climate record available at the time and got a nice match, ending with exactly that deviation.
Then they tried attributing the deviation to greenhouse warming from human fossil carbon burning and cranked out a good match to the deviation: The rise of humans corresponded to a remarkable levelling of the temperature curve, which "should have been" bending down in an accelerating dive into the next ice age. (This sounds to me like a feedback process you'd expect: Colder winters, more fuel burning, making the next winters milder. With the rise of human population roughly tracking the accelerating curve into the ice age, the net result might be level enough for this feedback to become an effective regulator as people went from a few plains apes to populous farming and metalworking civilizations.)
The "level" period extended roughly to the industrial revolution (mod some "short-term" tweaks like the mideival warm period), after which the temperature went up a bit. (What you'd expect from the extra coal and oil burning.) So then they projected forward, with a range of assumptions on the rate of burning of fossil carbon and the amount of fossil carbon reserves.
What they got was not the "hockey stick" diverging into a Venus-like planet. Instead they got a rise (that looks like that at the start), followed by a crash back onto the if-humans-hadn't-happened ice-age-descent curve when the economically-useful-for-fuel fossil carbon runs out. That comes in approximately 400 years, though the time, and the height of the temperature peak, vary substantially with how fast the carbon gets burned (and how much it turns out there is).
Under the proposed settlement with the FTC, BLU and Ohev-Zion are prohibited from misrepresenting the extent to which they protect the privacy and security of personal information and must implement and maintain a comprehensive security program that addresses security risks associated with new and existing mobile devices and protects consumer information. In addition, BLU will be subject to third-party assessments of its security program every two years for 20 years as well as record keeping and compliance monitoring requirements. Business model:
1. Break the law. 2. Get paid for it. 3. Get caught. 4. Propose a settlement where you are prohibited from breaking the law in the way you were were already prohibited from breaking the law but did (for pay) anyhow. 5. PROFIT!
So breaking this law is still a way to make money, even if you're caught. Expect a lot more of it.
Granted it's double-plus-ungood for the USER to think he's talking to a particular far end when he's actually talking to something else, and that this is, indeed, much of the POINT of the TLS/SSL layer.
But I seem to recall that some tools for evading governmental censorship/surveillance firewalls (such as the Great Firewall of China) relied on creating encrypted tunnels that SEEMED, to a pipe-tapping observer, to be normal encrypted traffic to a service, such as Google or Amazon, which the state-level actor would be loath to block. These tools exist specifically to "evade restrictions and blocks that can be imposed at [among other places] the TLS/SSL layer".
Does this pair of moves by Google and Amazon break any such tools?
Once all of it's read, will that spell the end of the world?
(Reminds me of a "news item" in the daily newszine of the "Chicon II" World Science Fiction Convention: ~The filksingers finally finished singing "Nine Billion Names of God on the Wall" and the stars started going out.~)
Oops. Pointed the link to the search, not the document.
See the first edition of _Computer Lib/Dream Machines"_ (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
(Note that the printed version of the book was two half-books, like an Ace Double, which you flipped over to read one vs. the other. In the above PDF link you read the _Dream Machines_ half - which is where you find the Hypertext stuff - by starting at the first page and flipping pages forward, the _Computer Lib_ half - which is mostly about what-it-is-a-computer - by starting at the last page and flipping pages backward.)
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks.
Which term, along with "Hypertext", several others, and much of the vision of a web of interconnected online documents, had been coined and promoted by Ted Nelson, many years before. See the first edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
His (ill-fated) Project Xanadu was, by that time, funded and working round-the-clock to try to put together a world electronic library - with substantially more functionality (including an attempt to provide an acceptable emulation of or substitute for everything you can do with paper publications), when Tim's work hit the net and created the World Wide Web.
Xanadu deviated from the WWW design in a number of ways, including:
- "fine-grained links" (where a link end points to a particular range of a target, rather than a whole page or a point within it {unless you want that to be the target}),
- bi-directional links (you can inquire what links are inbound to where you are reading and follow them backward)
- avoidance of the "Library of Alexandra" / broken link problem by distributed database techniques. and I could go on.
But they had bitten off a BIG problem, and the WWW, with its non-proprietary servers filled an immediate need with an immediately usable solution.
You can accept this, or you can keep holding on to an older definition that the vast majority will never know the history of and not accept.
Definitions of words happen by the way they are used. Words can have multiple meanings - even mutually-contradictory ones.
There is no either/or to accepting this vs. striving to promote one meaning over another - especially an older meaning vs. a pejorative corruption - or at least bring to more public attention the existence of the preferred meaning.
It's not tilting at windmills, either. Language doesn't change once and stop. It KEEPS changing. Older meanings often reappear. Newer corruptions fade or become unpopular, to the point that uttering a sentence using the word that way can bring strong reaction from listeners. If all was lost once an undesired meaning was the commonest usage, the politically-correct speech movement would be a bunch of curmudgeons, not something between a major religion and a thriving industry. (And why should THOSE guys be the only ones that get to hack the language? Especially our own term for ourselves?)
I am a hacker in the MIT / Steven Levy sense, and have been recognized as one by a number of the people he wrote about, for a quarter century. (Unlike "(computer) guru", which is never properly self-awarded but only valid if applied by others who are competent to recognize the skill level, a person can legitimately claim to be a hacker without such recognition. But it's nice to have, and relevant to this post.)
My personal definition for hacker is "Someone who can use skill and persistence as a substitute for adequate tools." (You need them at the start of any new tech, or aspect of it. Somebody has to build the tools, after all.) I don't claim this is how other hackers all use it. (See the jargon file.) But it seems close enough for communication.
A close friend of half my life (RIP, Mary) once claimed that "hacker" was also a long preexisting Yiddish term, meaning "someone who makes furniture with an axe" - simultaneously carrying both the same meaning as mine and the question "Is he a dufus to NOT use better tools?", in humorous juxtaposition.
The popular misuse of "(computer) hacker" for "(computer) cracker" (one who breaks into systems), "(computer) pirate" (one who misappropriates data, software, "content", etc. and distributes it) or "(compiter) vandal" (one who alters or destroys information and/or system functionality), has always been, to us, a misuse. In the early days (before distribution of cracking tools enabled "script-kiddies") it took hacker skills to do cracking, piracy, or vandalism. But saying "hacker" when you meant "cracker", "pirate", or "vandal" was akin to saying "sailor" when you meant "(sea) pirate", "cowboy" when you meant "cattle rustler", "painter" when you meant "graffiti tagger", and so on. In each case the bad actor was a member of a larger set, but using the name of the larger set for the malicious actors defamed a whole class of people for the misdeeds of a handful among them.
The origin of this misuse has long been a puzzle to us. In one of the previous rounds of this, another hacker came to the conclusion that it went something like this:
1) In the relevant period, computer operations in business were just expanding from accounting number-crunching to more functions in businesses and similar organizations. "IT" wasn't yet a term, let alone a C-suite position. The need for data security against early crackers and vandals, and the threat of piracy, was just coming into management's attention.
2) One of the earliest self-styled "computer security experts" gave a presentation at a large business conference, attended by many CEOs (and other C-suite denizens). In it he consistently misused "hacker" for crackers/vandals/pirates, much to the confusion of the hackers and other information tech trench-workers in attendance. This was the first exposure of the upper-management types to
Afterwards, if they don't like your payment offer, what can they do? They could sue you - and you could pay the judgement in cash:)
They sue you. You cite the legal tender laws. They lose.
The law, as I understand it, is this:
- You agree to a purchase denominated in dollars.
- They deliver on their side, creating a debt on your side.
- You offer payment in Federal Reserve Notes.
- They either:
1) Accept the payment, settling the debt.
2) Refuse the payment. The debt is cancelled because they refused to accept payment in Federal Reserve Notes.
This we settled (with some governmental violence against people who didn't want to accept FRNs) about a century ago, when FRNs were first introduced. Lots of people who expected payment in real gold and silver coins, made of amounts of valuable metal approximating their face value, or paper notes giving a government promise of on-demand exchange for the equivalent value in silver, didn't want to take bank-generated paper money backed by nothing but the government's promise to make people accept it. So the Federal Government had to force a bunch of people to accept it until they gave up and played along.
The Federal Government has a strong incentive to keep enforcing the rule. Otherwise the system (which lets them skirt constitutional prohibitions and print fiat currency by proxy) falls apart, along with the economy built around it.
AAARGH! The copy/paste buffer had the WRONG QUOTE in it and I missed it. (As the system says: I "should have used the preview button".) Trying again:
... it seems that the only ones that still have the ethics and backbone to do something like have started retiring instead of making a stand.
ORLY?
From the viewpoint of the Liberty Caucus, the ones resigning are the problem, not some ethical, backbone-unimpaired, heroes of political sanity.
Getting them to resign ahead of the primaries and leave the voters with the choice of their successors, rather than getting the voters to kick them out at great expense and get stuck with some maybe-better-than-the-devil-you-know alternative whose only tested qualification is that he can win the primary (as the Rs got stuck with Trump), is keeping the R side of the "Drain the Swamp" campaign promise.
You do realize, don't you, that this is a civil suit and has nothing to do with legal or illegal?
ORLY?
From the viewpoint of the Liberty Caucus, the ones resigning are the problem, not some ethical, backbone-unimpaired, heroes of political sanity.
Getting them to resign ahead of the primaries and leave the voters with the choice of their successors, rather than getting the voters to kick them out at great expense and get stuck with some maybe-better-than-the-devil-you-know alternative whose only tested qualification is that he can win the primary (as the Rs got stuck with Trump), is keeping the R side of the "Drain the Swamp" campaign promise.
You do realize, don't you, that this is a civil suit and has nothing to do with legal or illegal?
You do realize, don't you, that a civil suit requires the plaintiff show that the defendant, by commission or omission, breached some legal duty?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. But if you're missing any proof that the law (statute or common) requires the defendant to behave differently than he did, your case gets tossed out, perhaps with a penalty for wasting the court's time with something that was obviously bogus.
Also: If the judge cuts off the argument after a few words, and that side loses, they get to appeal. Then if they convince the appellate judge/panel they had a valid point, the first judge gets reversed or the case handed back to be retried.
In addition to maybe having to do the whole thing over and THIS time listen, this is a BIG black mark on the judge's reputation.
(Unless they're in the Fifth Circus Court of Appeals, of course. B-) )
Why does it feel plausible that a judge would even entertain such a silly, nonsensical argument for more than a couple seconds?
Because it's his job to hear the argument, consider it, and then call bull if that's what it is. Cutting the attorney off after a few words isn't fair: He MIGHT actually have a valid point but got off to a start that sounded like bull.
Similarly, it's the lawyer's job to make arguments favorable to his client and try to get the judge to accept them. That means the lawyer is (or tries to be) an expert in making arguments sound plausible, even if they're bull.
Occasionally a judge gets suckered - great for the client of the lawyer who put it over.
Usually the judge makes the right call.
But figure he calls bull on more than half of the arguments he hears. For starters, when two lawyers are arguing opposite sides of an issue, he pretty much has to call bull on one of them.
How the hell does the fact of most calls going unanswered or ending quickly present any sort of a case for reducing the fine?
Because if the fine is low enough, paying it as a business expense and continuing the profit-making illegal operation is a viable business model.
So if he can somehow sucker a judge with such an argument, he gets to pay an affordable fine and go back to suckering grannies out of their credit card info.
Slashdot Mirror
Asking Wikipedia for bird scooter got me this
Seems to have dropped an "o", though.
It is amazing how many people don't realize that's how Trump creates leverage. Even major news anchors don't indicate they have the slightest clue. They are so consumed with being mad they can't even think.
Or the story authors and editors feeding the network talking heads don't want them to explain what Trump is doing to their audience. Explaining it would interfere with their agenda.
Two things to remember about mainstream news:
1. They get political power primarily by creating illusions in the minds of legislators. The latter are largely isolated in their capitols and disconnected from their constituents. So if the newsies can convince them their voters want something other than what they do want, they can swing their votes - both getting legislation they want and jeopardizing their opponents' reelection.
They get it secondarily by creating illusions for the population: Using social pressure and learned helplessness to change their opponents' ideas or, if they won't change, to stop them from taking action to promote their own interests.
2. The mainstream news networks are solidly in the camp of the Democratic Party establishment. This, including their deliberate lies and fabrications, was exposed by, among others, Wikileaks during the last presidential election.
The mainstream newsies lost a LOT of their power as a result. (It is especially funny that their coinage of "Fake News", an attempt to pull the teeth of attempts to expose them when they lie, was turned on them and continues to marganilize their efforts.
Things to remember about international politics at the head-of-state level:
Much of international politics is a variant of the "Game of Chicken", where two people drive cars at each other and the first to turn away loses - but if neither turns they crash. To win, you must convince your opponent you're crazy enough to go through with it.
At the head-of-state level this applies to war (brush, conventional, or nuclear) and all the "war by other means" relations (such as "trade war").
The primary example is the doctrine of "Mutual Assured Destruction", appropriately abbreviated "The MAD doctrine": The claim is "If you use WMDs on us we'll nuke you into glass. If this sterilizes the Earth, so be it. So let's settle this without resort to nuclear, biologithe groundcal, or chemical weapons." This sounds crazy. But it works. International politics switched from World Wars to conventional once Nukes and MAD were in place.
But for MAD to work the head-of-state has to LOOK both crazy enough to "push the button" AND rational enough to be willing to avoid it IF you come to a reasonable deal. Regan, for instance, was an expert at this. Trump appears to be another. (Sadly, Democrats usually aren't. It doesn't fit their ideology. This is part of why they tend to start and escalate wars.)
The diplomatic efforts based on "tickling the dragon's tail" of nuclear was was called "Brinksmanship".
Whatever else you might think about Trump, realize this: As a businessman, at the CEO level, he was able to turn about a million bucks of inheritance into several billion - more than a three orders of magnitude gain - by negotiating successful deals. Any bets on whether the "game of chicken" is in his playbook?
Now he's applying this skill to international politics. Surprise! It seems to work there, too.
Bargaining includes offers, counter-offers, and threats of what will happen if a deal isn't reached. There's lots of posturing as the parties work out what their potential partners will accept, what they'll give up, and what they'll trade away for something they want more. But most of these positions are being displayed for effect, rather than as set-in-stone will-happen promises.
With all the leaks - and all the characterization of them as oncoming disasters - (thanks to the mainstream news media mentioned above), someone who believes these stories would be in a panic and not thinking straight. But it's just the discredited media operations trying to salvage their power by doubling-down. So the rest of us are not concerned.
Its already a natural landfill. Let's just continue that, it can probably hold all of our plastic waste.
If I had mod points right now I'd give that an "insightful". Oceanic trenches ARE the planet's landfill, sucking the seabottom debris under the mantle, to be melted and perhaps eventually released via volcanism.
(They'd be a GREAT place to dispose of radioactive waste if one could be sure it wouldn't get loose before being sucked under.)
If you have nothing to hide... then why are you using PGP? It is only used by criminals and the like.
Ha, ha.
But seriously. If you have nothing to hide, do all your communication with your bank, mortgage holder, broker, 401(k) administrator, and doctor solely by postcard. And take the shades off your windows.
Law-abiding people have PLENTY to hide. And they have a RIGHT to hide it. The Fourth Amendment, among other parts of the constitution, explicitly recognizes this, and the Supreme Court has issued a ruling making explicit and binding an easy-to-understand "Right to Privacy" interpretation of a combination of several pieces of the Constitution.
Hi, Microsoft shill!
That's and additional ding against him.
But the particular fraud he was charged with is falsifying the caller I.D.
This fraud would get some people to answer when they otherwise would not, wasting their time on the call they otherwise wouldn't have accepted. Damage.
The company at which I'm currently working used to do internatinal virtual meetings with Skype, before Microsoft bought it and for a short time after. They now do the meetings with Zoom.
I used to maintain a profile with LinkedIn. I haven't updated it since Microsoft bought the company.
I smell a trend.
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them.
The first amendment keeps the government from preventing speech before the fact.
It does NOT keep the government from, after the act, penalizing a crime, of which fraudulent speech was a central element, in which harm was deliberately (and improperly) caused.
Truth is an absolute defence. Fraud? Nope.
For someone who quotes Ron Paul in his sig line you show a remarkable lack of respect for private property and contract. ...
If the artist who makes a song can't dictate how i enjoy it,
But to a large extent the artist who makes a song, if he retains copyright to it, CAN dictate the conditions under which it is performed - by terms of the license to perform it.
(I recall, for instance, attending a concert that included on orchestrial piece, composed back in the Vietnam confilct era, where the composer had written a political rant, and required it be read to the audience before the piece was performed. The rant, though dated, was duly read.)
This whole cult of the founder/artist in programming, and their dictatorial whims over an OPEN SOURCE project is sickening. He was free to keep his code all to himself, but he can't c.ntrol what people do with it after he decides to share it with the world
But he CAN. By licensing it open source he IS. The license is based on retaining ownership and control - then easing PART of the control. Use it in a way that is forbidden by the license and you lose the license to use it AT ALL>
Yes, he licensed it in a way that lets others hack the joke out of the comments and republish. But he's also an authority in the organization that maintains the current mainline distribution. So he gets, in this case, to dictate how THAT distribution deals with the joke.
And that will stick: To get a fork to take over from the current mainline you'll have to contribute more and/or better maintenance of the whole library than the current organization.
Are you, and your friends, willing to spend that much of YOUR time, resouces, and talents to the project? HE is. His friends are.
They're giving us this stuff we like - in return for other things from us that they value. That includes not locking up fixed/augmented versions of it, contributing other software that THEY like, recognition of their contributions, and respect for their wishes.
So if he values having a joke - relevant to the political situations around open source publication - in the comments (where it doesn't affect the function of the software), I say let him have it, even if the open source contract doesn't require it, even if I don't agree with it. For him it's more valuable than money, and having his way encourages him to make more good software for us. For us it's LESS valuable than money. So in this free market it's a fantastic bargain.
May I suggest that they simply fork libc...
You're welcome to suggest it. I suggest anyone considering such a thing reject the proposal, or only continue using and developing on the un-forked version.
Contributors to open source projects (ESPECIALY the seminal projects and the pioneers like Stallman) are giving us their work. But it's not for free. They still expect to be paid - but in things far more valuable than money.
Removing this joke is stealing part of Stallman's pay for his work. And it's a piece of his pay that he values enough to raise a stink about it.
For thousands of years the prescription of essentially every moral code has been "pay the worker what you promised". Example: "... the labourer is worthy of his hire." (Luke 10:7, King James Version).
Let's not succumb to the censor's tactic of punishing people who don't totally conform to the current group-think prescription by stealing their stuff - starting with those things they value the most, and with those most connected to denying them free speech.
Assuming that this hypothetical cycle looks anything like a sine cycle ...
Also: Assuming it looks like a sine the middle is where the rate of change is the greatest.
This is one of the Milankovich cycles, which have been known and studied (by people other than Milankovitch) since at least 1941 and part of any reasonable long-term computer-supported climatic model since such were practical.
What's new here is they found physical evidence to validate the connection between this cycle and climate, and push the connection back from 50 million to 215 million years.
= = = =
I wonder how this ties in with another work not long ago.
Notice, in the Orbital Forcing wikipedia article, the shape of the Vostok Petit data graphs of temperature during the interglacials: A sharp spike (typically to a bit warmer than we are now), followed immediately by a ramp back into the next ice age. Notice, also, how the latest one deviates: Its trendline levels out, with the temperature hanging in there rather than taking the usual dive.
A couple years back there was an article in Scientific American (NOT a hotbed of "climate-change deniers", but more of a marching band in the anthropogenic climate change parade). The authors had compared their computations of the expected effect of the Milankovitch cycles to the climate record available at the time and got a nice match, ending with exactly that deviation.
Then they tried attributing the deviation to greenhouse warming from human fossil carbon burning and cranked out a good match to the deviation: The rise of humans corresponded to a remarkable levelling of the temperature curve, which "should have been" bending down in an accelerating dive into the next ice age. (This sounds to me like a feedback process you'd expect: Colder winters, more fuel burning, making the next winters milder. With the rise of human population roughly tracking the accelerating curve into the ice age, the net result might be level enough for this feedback to become an effective regulator as people went from a few plains apes to populous farming and metalworking civilizations.)
The "level" period extended roughly to the industrial revolution (mod some "short-term" tweaks like the mideival warm period), after which the temperature went up a bit. (What you'd expect from the extra coal and oil burning.) So then they projected forward, with a range of assumptions on the rate of burning of fossil carbon and the amount of fossil carbon reserves.
What they got was not the "hockey stick" diverging into a Venus-like planet. Instead they got a rise (that looks like that at the start), followed by a crash back onto the if-humans-hadn't-happened ice-age-descent curve when the economically-useful-for-fuel fossil carbon runs out. That comes in approximately 400 years, though the time, and the height of the temperature peak, vary substantially with how fast the carbon gets burned (and how much it turns out there is).
Maybe you could give back the rest of the US to its native people while you're at it.
Too late. We've interbred. Now they're us and we're them.
Granted it's double-plus-ungood for the USER to think he's talking to a particular far end when he's actually talking to something else, and that this is, indeed, much of the POINT of the TLS/SSL layer.
But I seem to recall that some tools for evading governmental censorship/surveillance firewalls (such as the Great Firewall of China) relied on creating encrypted tunnels that SEEMED, to a pipe-tapping observer, to be normal encrypted traffic to a service, such as Google or Amazon, which the state-level actor would be loath to block. These tools exist specifically to "evade restrictions and blocks that can be imposed at [among other places] the TLS/SSL layer".
Does this pair of moves by Google and Amazon break any such tools?
Once all of it's read, will that spell the end of the world?
(Reminds me of a "news item" in the daily newszine of the "Chicon II" World Science Fiction Convention: ~The filksingers finally finished singing "Nine Billion Names of God on the Wall" and the stars started going out.~)
Oops. Pointed the link to the search, not the document.
See the first edition of _Computer Lib/Dream Machines"_ (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
(Note that the printed version of the book was two half-books, like an Ace Double, which you flipped over to read one vs. the other. In the above PDF link you read the _Dream Machines_ half - which is where you find the Hypertext stuff - by starting at the first page and flipping pages forward, the _Computer Lib_ half - which is mostly about what-it-is-a-computer - by starting at the last page and flipping pages backward.)
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks.
Which term, along with "Hypertext", several others, and much of the vision of a web of interconnected online documents, had been coined and promoted by Ted Nelson, many years before. See the first edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974), for an early treatment of the ideas, and _Literary Machines_ for a more developed one.
His (ill-fated) Project Xanadu was, by that time, funded and working round-the-clock to try to put together a world electronic library - with substantially more functionality (including an attempt to provide an acceptable emulation of or substitute for everything you can do with paper publications), when Tim's work hit the net and created the World Wide Web.
Xanadu deviated from the WWW design in a number of ways, including:
- "fine-grained links" (where a link end points to a particular range of a target, rather than a whole page or a point within it {unless you want that to be the target}),
- bi-directional links (you can inquire what links are inbound to where you are reading and follow them backward)
- avoidance of the "Library of Alexandra" / broken link problem by distributed database techniques.
and I could go on.
But they had bitten off a BIG problem, and the WWW, with its non-proprietary servers filled an immediate need with an immediately usable solution.
Definitions of words change over time.
You can accept this, or you can keep holding on to an older definition that the vast majority will never know the history of and not accept.
Definitions of words happen by the way they are used. Words can have multiple meanings - even mutually-contradictory ones.
There is no either/or to accepting this vs. striving to promote one meaning over another - especially an older meaning vs. a pejorative corruption - or at least bring to more public attention the existence of the preferred meaning.
It's not tilting at windmills, either. Language doesn't change once and stop. It KEEPS changing. Older meanings often reappear. Newer corruptions fade or become unpopular, to the point that uttering a sentence using the word that way can bring strong reaction from listeners. If all was lost once an undesired meaning was the commonest usage, the politically-correct speech movement would be a bunch of curmudgeons, not something between a major religion and a thriving industry. (And why should THOSE guys be the only ones that get to hack the language? Especially our own term for ourselves?)
I am a hacker in the MIT / Steven Levy sense, and have been recognized as one by a number of the people he wrote about, for a quarter century. (Unlike "(computer) guru", which is never properly self-awarded but only valid if applied by others who are competent to recognize the skill level, a person can legitimately claim to be a hacker without such recognition. But it's nice to have, and relevant to this post.)
My personal definition for hacker is "Someone who can use skill and persistence as a substitute for adequate tools." (You need them at the start of any new tech, or aspect of it. Somebody has to build the tools, after all.) I don't claim this is how other hackers all use it. (See the jargon file.) But it seems close enough for communication.
A close friend of half my life (RIP, Mary) once claimed that "hacker" was also a long preexisting Yiddish term, meaning "someone who makes furniture with an axe" - simultaneously carrying both the same meaning as mine and the question "Is he a dufus to NOT use better tools?", in humorous juxtaposition.
The popular misuse of "(computer) hacker" for "(computer) cracker" (one who breaks into systems), "(computer) pirate" (one who misappropriates data, software, "content", etc. and distributes it) or "(compiter) vandal" (one who alters or destroys information and/or system functionality), has always been, to us, a misuse. In the early days (before distribution of cracking tools enabled "script-kiddies") it took hacker skills to do cracking, piracy, or vandalism. But saying "hacker" when you meant "cracker", "pirate", or "vandal" was akin to saying "sailor" when you meant "(sea) pirate", "cowboy" when you meant "cattle rustler", "painter" when you meant "graffiti tagger", and so on. In each case the bad actor was a member of a larger set, but using the name of the larger set for the malicious actors defamed a whole class of people for the misdeeds of a handful among them.
The origin of this misuse has long been a puzzle to us. In one of the previous rounds of this, another hacker came to the conclusion that it went something like this:
1) In the relevant period, computer operations in business were just expanding from accounting number-crunching to more functions in businesses and similar organizations. "IT" wasn't yet a term, let alone a C-suite position. The need for data security against early crackers and vandals, and the threat of piracy, was just coming into management's attention.
2) One of the earliest self-styled "computer security experts" gave a presentation at a large business conference, attended by many CEOs (and other C-suite denizens). In it he consistently misused "hacker" for crackers/vandals/pirates, much to the confusion of the hackers and other information tech trench-workers in attendance. This was the first exposure of the upper-management types to
Afterwards, if they don't like your payment offer, what can they do? They could sue you - and you could pay the judgement in cash :)
They sue you. You cite the legal tender laws. They lose.
The law, as I understand it, is this:
- You agree to a purchase denominated in dollars.
- They deliver on their side, creating a debt on your side.
- You offer payment in Federal Reserve Notes.
- They either:
1) Accept the payment, settling the debt.
2) Refuse the payment. The debt is cancelled because they refused to accept payment in Federal Reserve Notes.
This we settled (with some governmental violence against people who didn't want to accept FRNs) about a century ago, when FRNs were first introduced. Lots of people who expected payment in real gold and silver coins, made of amounts of valuable metal approximating their face value, or paper notes giving a government promise of on-demand exchange for the equivalent value in silver, didn't want to take bank-generated paper money backed by nothing but the government's promise to make people accept it. So the Federal Government had to force a bunch of people to accept it until they gave up and played along.
The Federal Government has a strong incentive to keep enforcing the rule. Otherwise the system (which lets them skirt constitutional prohibitions and print fiat currency by proxy) falls apart, along with the economy built around it.
AAARGH! The copy/paste buffer had the WRONG QUOTE in it and I missed it. (As the system says: I "should have used the preview button".) Trying again:
ORLY?
From the viewpoint of the Liberty Caucus, the ones resigning are the problem, not some ethical, backbone-unimpaired, heroes of political sanity.
Getting them to resign ahead of the primaries and leave the voters with the choice of their successors, rather than getting the voters to kick them out at great expense and get stuck with some maybe-better-than-the-devil-you-know alternative whose only tested qualification is that he can win the primary (as the Rs got stuck with Trump), is keeping the R side of the "Drain the Swamp" campaign promise.
You do realize, don't you, that this is a civil suit and has nothing to do with legal or illegal?
ORLY?
From the viewpoint of the Liberty Caucus, the ones resigning are the problem, not some ethical, backbone-unimpaired, heroes of political sanity.
Getting them to resign ahead of the primaries and leave the voters with the choice of their successors, rather than getting the voters to kick them out at great expense and get stuck with some maybe-better-than-the-devil-you-know alternative whose only tested qualification is that he can win the primary (as the Rs got stuck with Trump), is keeping the R side of the "Drain the Swamp" campaign promise.
You do realize, don't you, that this is a civil suit and has nothing to do with legal or illegal?
You do realize, don't you, that a civil suit requires the plaintiff show that the defendant, by commission or omission, breached some legal duty?
Sure you can sue anybody for anything. But if you're missing any proof that the law (statute or common) requires the defendant to behave differently than he did, your case gets tossed out, perhaps with a penalty for wasting the court's time with something that was obviously bogus.
Also: If the judge cuts off the argument after a few words, and that side loses, they get to appeal. Then if they convince the appellate judge/panel they had a valid point, the first judge gets reversed or the case handed back to be retried.
In addition to maybe having to do the whole thing over and THIS time listen, this is a BIG black mark on the judge's reputation.
(Unless they're in the Fifth Circus Court of Appeals, of course. B-) )
Why does it feel plausible that a judge would even entertain such a silly, nonsensical argument for more than a couple seconds?
Because it's his job to hear the argument, consider it, and then call bull if that's what it is. Cutting the attorney off after a few words isn't fair: He MIGHT actually have a valid point but got off to a start that sounded like bull.
Similarly, it's the lawyer's job to make arguments favorable to his client and try to get the judge to accept them. That means the lawyer is (or tries to be) an expert in making arguments sound plausible, even if they're bull.
Occasionally a judge gets suckered - great for the client of the lawyer who put it over.
Usually the judge makes the right call.
But figure he calls bull on more than half of the arguments he hears. For starters, when two lawyers are arguing opposite sides of an issue, he pretty much has to call bull on one of them.
How the hell does the fact of most calls going unanswered or ending quickly present any sort of a case for reducing the fine?
Because if the fine is low enough, paying it as a business expense and continuing the profit-making illegal operation is a viable business model.
So if he can somehow sucker a judge with such an argument, he gets to pay an affordable fine and go back to suckering grannies out of their credit card info.