(Like the guy who got the vanity plate "NO NE" and next year, when he went to renew his registration, got billed for the last year's unpaid parking tickets on every car in the state with a missing license plate.)
The domain node.com had a similar problem.
('scuse me for spacing out the email addresses in this post, but you know bots. I don't want to cause 'em any more trouble.)
Back in the days of home-rolled sendmail configurations, system administrators often thought they knew better than the users (and were often wrong.) One thing that was common was to decide that mail addressed to a user named "user" or a site named "node" was the result of somebody reading the manual too closely and forgetting to substitute the actual user's or site's name in the mail command. And of course mail to "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" MUST be an error, right? B-) So many of them would "hotwire" their sendmail configuration files to bounce such mail, returning a helpful note about what the manual meant.
But it turns out that "node.com" is a real domain. (A very old one - dating from the days when a list of ALL the domains fit on a three-page appendix to an early book on the internet.) So these bogus sendmail configurations were interfering with its mail something fierce.
In those days the mail was handed around from site to site, too, rather than going straight to the mail server of the target over the "connected intenet". So one "helpful" sendmail configuration file could foul up mail to node.com from great swaths of sites that had no institutional connection with the hotwired one. The automatic routing protocols would find their best route, which often would happen to go through a hotwired mail server. Then a user at node.com would complain, and the sysadmin would have to contact the correspondent getting bounces, hunt down the offending site, figure out how to get in touch with the sysadmin, and talk him into getting things fixed. (Of course this wasn't helped by the sysadmin's own system bouncing his return mail... B-) )
(Of course people with the expertese to attempt such "automated helpfullness" were often running large sites that handled a lot of mail for a lot of other sites, so it only took a few of 'em to bollox things up for much of the net.)
What he eventually did was create the account "user" and configure the "vacation" program. "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" was ALWAYS on vacation. The "I'm on vacation until..." mesage was actually the explanation about how you're supposed to fill in the user's and site's name rather than make a copy of the mail command in the manual. So this hack provided the message for the entire internet.
Of course "vacation" records the sender's address and only replies once, thus breaking mail loops. It also squirrels away all the incoming mail for the vactioner's return - creating a record of how often the mistake is made.
Turns out it was not very common at all. "user" got far less than a hundred letters a year. (Or did until some web forms for signing up for mailing lists used "user" and "node.com" for the default fields. And then the account got onto some spam lists.)
By the way: Don't test it by sending mail. It was taken down during the system upgrade for Y2K. By then there were a lot of Mail Transfer Agents other than sendmail, and most sendmail configurations were automatically generated by vendor-supplied tools - which didn't try to hotwire "node.com". So when the system was moved to a non-unix box without a preinstalled "vacation" program there seemed little point in maintaining the "service".
immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays
Immature open source software is no more or less "doomed" than immature closed-source software in an enterprise environment nowadays. There have been only two changes:
- Open source software now has a chance when there's closed source competition.
- There are mature products available for some applications.
All software starts as immature and potentially improves with upgrades based on information collected when it encounters the real world. Once there's an incumbent product, a newcomer has to have a major advantage to break into the market. When a market incumbent is well established but the market is not mature to the "commodity" level, with a bunch of interchangable suppliers competing solely on price, the advantage may need to be a factor of 10 in cost/benefit.
On the other hand, if there isn't anything to do the job, the difference between doing it and not doing it is a factor of several in benefit, and competing businesses need the job done, an "immature" product that DOES do the job can break in easily. First player to try it and make it work gets a big jump on his competition.
This claim is FUD. Limiting it to open source software is double-deep FUD. It's an attempt to scare entrepenuers - and venture capitalists - away from open source projects. To the extent there's any truth in it at all, it applies equally to ALL software projects (and all innovatiove startups).
Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers
Not to be confused with the OLD breed of CIOs, which wouldn't consider open source at all.
Which open source technologies are mature enough to survive the consolidation that's coming?
And now that he's eliminated NEW projects out-of-hand, he goes after ESTABLISHED projects, and tries to take out THEIR resources by rattling the effigy of "shakeout". A "consolidation wave" that is supposedly coming.
What consolidation wave?
The problem for open source projects is, and continues to be, convincing an enterprise to try their product at all - not being displaced by a global rush to a "more mature" equivalent.
The problem for companies trying to build a business model on supporting and/or distributing open-source projects may be closer to that of a conventional business. But it seems to me there's plenty of business to go around, and it DOES go around.
What we see now is that the suits are finally catching on to the suitability of open source products for use in mission-critical applications. It is no longer courting a pink slip to adopt them, and some managers are advancing their carreers by doing so and producing corporate success. And as they do this, less clueful suits will begin to mimic them. Both the clueful and the non-clueful result in more adoption of open source products, and thus the "opening of the enterprise market" to companies making money off providing and supporting such projects.
Of course, as the herd of suits comes out to buy open source, there will be fads, resulting in far more adoption of one version of a functionality than another. And there will be well-publicised disasters, resulting in a stampeed from one to another - IMHO a far more significant factor.
But the broad adoption of open source products into enterprise should produced increased support for multiple and diverse projects, rather than a consolidation.
Unlike an open source project, a closed source product is supported by a single corporation that must make money continuously. So if some of its customers don't upgrade or switch to competing products, it is at risk of going under - and other customers using it in mission critical processes will rush to find alternatives before they find themselves hanging high-and-dry. Once alternatives are found, the revenue stream dries up, and the company folds or is absorbed
Replace a $$$$ digital oscilloscope with a cellphone??? Bullshit.
He's not talking about replacing a $$$$ digital osciloscope with a cellphone. He's talking about doing something with a cellphone that can also be done by a $$$$ digital osciloscope. Big difference. (You can do a LOT of stuff with the scope.)
Typical scam research claim trying to extract money from investors. Where is he from again? Ah, OK, now we all know...
This is Adi Shamir we're talking about. He can get all the investors he wants just by dropping his name and saying he found something lucrative to do.
The patent should never have been awarded in the first place. For one thing, mathematics should never be patentable.
The claim is that what was patented was not a mathematical algorithm. It was an cryptography system that USED a mathematical algorithm. (It's like the difference between patenting a process for building a car that happens to use a stamping press versus patenting the stamping press.)
I, too, happen to think that the patent should not have issued, because it can be argued that the cryptography system itself - and any program - is a mathematical algorithm.
However, if there is any validity to the above argument that a system consisting entirely of an algorithm could be patented if it was useful, innovative, and non-obvious, RSA would be a perfect example of such an invention.
Here's another analogy that should make it even clearer:
A bank puts its customers' deposits in a bushel basked behind a non-armor plate-glass window and closes for the night. A thief comes by, breaks the glass with a hammer, grabs the money, and runs.
Who's to blame?
- The bank?
- The thief?
- The manufacturer of the hammer?
- The manufacturer of the plate glass window?
- The car dealership selling the luxury car the thief wanted?
It's pretty obvious to me:
- The thief, for breaking in and stealing the money, and
- The bank, for not exercising due dilligence in protecting its depositors' money.
The same with the hospital, which has an obligation to exercise due dilligence in protecting its patients' health and the infrastructure which directly affects the provision of its medical treatments.
Yes the student was at fault, too. But it's a big wide world out there. With something like five billion people in it and a significant fraction of them having network access, there are plenty of bad and/or irresponsible people with a network presence.
This constitutes a threat as pervasive as weather, or disease. It's up to people who run institutions like banks and hospitals to take this into account. They must take reasonable precautions to protect the health - physical or financial - of the people who have entrusted it to their care.
Microsoft software is NOT rated for life-critical applications and its security flaws are well known. What the HELL was a hospital doing putting life-critical information on it, or letting it share a network with life-critical systems AND the rest of the internet?
I don't know about the rest of you. But just as I wouldn't deposit my money at a bank that leaves it sitting behind a plate-glass window overnight, I'm not going to schedule any medical procedures at a hospital that let this happen, then gave no visible sign of accepting any responsibility for the failure, blaming it entirely on the intruder.
We can expect the US Government not to meddle with the 'net as much as they didn't mess with wikipedia entries...
That wasn't the GOVERNMENT messing with the wikipedia entries (as a government action). That was some INDIVIDUAL POLITICIANS and/or their staff messing with the wikipedia entries.
Meanwhile the reason you have an essentially unregulated and untaxed internet is that some FCC commissioners, over more than a decade, have had a bee up their butts about keeping the government's hands off the internet to let it develop on its own - and who have fought battles with other branches of govermnet (notably the courts) to keep THEIR hands off this "noble experiment".
Here in the Washington, DC area, they are considering a tied road system where you would have the option of paying more to travel in lanes with less traffic.
Closer. But the premium lanes are still doing "best effort" delivery.
Here's one closer yet:
Think of what they're building as a multi-lane highway - with railroad tracks down the lanes. Each house gets a multi-lane driveway with a couple sidings running up the lanes.
Driveway/sidings come in several standard lane counts. Theaters, arenas, and factories have very wide ones, houses narrower ones (but still plenty wide), businesses, restaurants, and so on have something in between. The wider the driveway, the more you pay (in taxes or "driveway rent" to the "road company").
You can runs trains, cars, motorcycles, trolleys, people-movers, delivery busses, computerized delivery carts, you-name-it, on the pavement or the rails.
There's a fancy computerized signaling system telling every car which lanes it can use. Lots of switches tied in with it (and signaling BACK from the trains and such), so rail vehicles can be switched around as easily as cars make lane changes.
You've got two ways to use the road:
- You can pay a small toll and schedule a non-stop run or a scheduled stream of them (if there's capacity for it). The computers controlling the signaling system moves all the other traffic out of your way when it's your slot. If you got your reservation your trip is guaranteed. No stops, no traffic jams (for you), limited number and duration of red lights, getting you to your destination when promised.
- You can pay nothing (besides your flat-rate driveway rental) and use it like a regular road. Usually you get through. Sometimes there's a traffic jam and it takes a long while, or you have to make a detour. Once in a while it's so bad you give up and go back home. Big point: You have to guess how long the trip will take, and whether it's possible.
With this road in place you call a restaurant to cater your big party: The restaurant schedules a set of reserved road slots, cooks up the courses in his central professional kitchen, puts each on a little automated cart, and the cart brings it to your house: fresh, piping hot, and just in time to be served. Course after course, just on time, guaranteed to make it.
Meanwhile, the lane the caterer's carts were using is being used by lots of other traffic, mostly flat-rate, take-your-chances-with-traffic-jams traffic, whenever there wasn't a scheduled cart/train/bus/limousine/whatever using it.
THAT's the combined system.
What's the alternative?
You build a road AND a railroad. Separately. Each with its own infrastructure. This costs a LOT more than building one system, so its total capacity is smaller for a given investment. But even worse: Cars only get to use the road, trains only get to use the railroad - cars can't run down the rails when there are no trains in sight. So much of the capacity is unused.
Maybe you rented a siding from the railroad company. If so, you only get their trains. You don't get catered parties unless you buy them from the railroad company. Your local restaurant might try that stunt using waters on motorcycles - but he can't guarantee the main course won't be caught in a traffic jam while the soup gets cold. Some shippers might use trains to haul containers cross-country and transfer them to truck beds - but once they're on the trucks they're back in the traffic jams.
THAT's the "no favorites" scenario some posters keep whining for.
The problem is that some internet services, like streaming audio and video or VoIP, REQUIRE guaranteed bandwidth, limits on packet latency, and/or delivery reliability ("Quality of Service" (QoS)). Others (like file transfer) don't - "best effort" is good enough. If you want to serve both on the same net and do a good job of it, you have to give some packets preference over others.
You seem to think that reducing carbon emissions is free.
In fact we're talking about trillions of dollars of costs per decade - some estimates go higher than a trillion per year FOREVER - to implement just the Kyoto Treaty's reductions. Yet these reductions are expected to produce only a fraction of a percent reduction in the expected warming. How much MORE would it cost to bring it to a halt?
So the cost is high. Like perhaps starting a global depression that would put the 1930s to shame, decimate the human population, AND deplete the funds that otherwise would have been used on the research to find alternative energy sources AND determine whether the threat is even real, and better ways to counter it if it is.
But what's the benefit?
The claimed benefit is eliminating a rise in the global average temperature of a tad over a couple degrees C - call it five degrees F. Maybe. If the models are right. (And some other models - which say all global warming is really doing is holding off an ice age for about four more centuries - are wrong.)
So IF those models are right, agriculture might move a couple hundred miles north over a century or two (even if crop breeding stops COLD). And the next waves of building move coastal cities a little inland as the seas rise a few inches over a couple centuries.
Unless some OTHER scare models that just came out in the last year or two are closer, in which case Europe gets a long-term cold snap and agriculture moves toward the equator instead of the poles.
Seems to me that with the models pointing every which way we need to do some more work to figure out what is actually going on, before crying that the sky is falling, the polar ice caps are melting, and throwing so much money at it that there's too little left for even subsistence existence.
Meanwhile, if it turns out there really IS a problem, there are a number of ways to deal with it short of totally curtailing humanity's emissions of carbon.
Like parking a sunshade / solar (or array of them) in orbits around the gravitational dip between the earth and sun, producing as much reduction in solar input as necessary to drop the temperature to any amount desired.
Or seeding the oceans to encourage the plankton to suck down atmospheric CO2 and sequester it in deep water - for several times longer than it takes to burn all the economically - useful fossil fuel.
Just to name two.
IMHO:
- the costs are VERY high,
- lower cost alternatives exist IF any action is needed,
- action isn't needed for decades to centuries,
- the benefits are low (even if the real situation approaches some of the worst-case scenarios)
- and the "problem" is too little understood to be worth throwing money at it (except to understand it better) today, or even to know which way to push.
The methods whereby CO2 heats up a planet are fairly well understood, and no one with a sane state of mind can deny that humanity has made things worse.
Change "made things worse" to "increased the effect" and I'd agree.
But there is a question open as to whether increasing the CO2 is making things "worse".
Some scientists have done work indicating that the Earth WAS headed back into an ice age, and would have been well on its way - at an accellerating rate - but for the effect of human CO2 emissions - starting at the beginnings of agriculture, at what WOULD have been the peak of the interglacial.
Their models indicate that human influence held the temperature nearly constant until the start of the industrial age, then began raising it.
But they ALSO indicate that (depending on the rate of carbon emission), the peak could be expected to be only a couple degrees C above the preindustrial plateau - about the amount we SHOULD be colder than it right now - and that (again depending on the rate of carbon emission) after 400 years or so, as the economically-recoverable fossil fuels are exhausted, the global temperature will crash back onto the ice-age-bound curve over a few decades - a curve that would have the "should be" temperature about twice as far below that of today, and falling much more rapidly. (Changing the assumed rate of carbon emission would change the height and width of the "hump" - possibly leveling it out and delaying the crash out to something like 600 years in the future. But it wouldn't eliminate it.)
By this model we should be in an ice age NOW, with permanent snow cover over much more of the continental masses, evolving into glacers and expanded ice caps.
If this is accurate, or even close, wouldn't you agree that the phrase for humanity's effect so far is "made things better"?
" So, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?"
I lived through the '60s. It was a LOT worse then than it is now.
One big difference: Civil rights for Black folk (or lack thereof). The LAWS were in place but not ENFORCED. Things had been quiet while the first generation went through school (after the previous round of troubles got them in - under federal escort), but as they got to college/job/voting/fighting age they found the doors closed - to jobs, to housing, to voting.
Then a few assasinations and acquittals of cops precipitated riots that literally burned cities. Like the Rodney King thing, but much bigger, and all over the country.
This led to real reforms - in voting, hiring, and housing sales. (And to a welfare system and public school "reforms" that ended up with their victims destroying their OWN families and culture. They're worse off now. But it's not because of institutional barriers any more.)
Another big difference at about the same time: The draft. It avoided a massive reprise of the Great Depression by "Channeling" the Baby Boomers into government-preferred occupational paths via the threat of literally enslaving them for two years and hauling them off to a jungle war.
That was enough to cause escalating major riots - filling the streets - including a march on Washington literally surrounding and besieging the pentagon, multiple bombings of research institutions, more riots, smashing and burning of banks and facilities of other corporations seen as complicit in the war/draft (chemical companies, universities, corporations making military equipment, the monopoly phone company {which collected a war tax}, and so on.)
And it also resulted in lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, dumping a Democratic president for a Republican, ending the war, and ending the draft. And the shooting of college students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. (Just days after a similar incident at Jackson State - a black college - that you rarely hear about.)
With real reform for the carrot and gunfire into crowds for the stick, the "revolution" moved from the ammo box to the ballot box.
The two formerly oppressed classes (blacks and military-age youth) are now no longer oppressed - at least not to anywhere NEAR the extent they were then. Education is available to those with the will to pursue it. Jobs are open to all comers who have acquired the necessary education and credentials to hold them. The military is voluntary, so college age youth are no longer enslaved. Lynchings of "uppity" blacks are no longer prevalent. And so on.
And the current standard of living, even in the inner cities, is far above that prevalent in the '60s.
What has to happen, in order for some kind of revolution, is that the daily grind for most people has to become such a losing proposition that they would rather march around in the streets instead of go to work that day.
We are SO far from that it's hysterical.
And one of the reasons leftist direct-action revolutionaries (as opposed to those who push for their changes through electoral politics and propaganda) get nowhere is that one of their tactics is to TRY to make things WORSE to "radicalize" the population, in the hopes of precipitating the sort of situation you're describing. But the general population has caught on to this tactic, and rightly ascribes the problems to the actions of the "revolutionaries", not to the government's reaction trying to suppress these crimes.
Considering the current backbone provider backlash against VOIP, Vonage (and others like them) could have a very short business life.
Then again, considering the current customer backlash (including potential legal action) against ISPs that interfere with the traffic from particular applications - including ESPECIALLY relatively low-volume streams like those involved in VoIP, this could as easily go the other way.
It also defines an applicant as someone who meets ALL the qualifications listed. This has the implication that if you miss on just one, an HR department can't consider you.
Drop out of college in the '70s just short of a degree to pursue your consulting practice or carreer (when a 4-year degree was considered a handicap) and work yourself up into a 6-figure income and a position in the top of your field by hopping between consulting and salaried positions for 30 years as you became one of the people that invented the technologies the colleges are just now trying to figure out how to teach? You better have a rep good enough to support yourself as a consultant or in startups from now on. Because starting in a few months you won't be considered for a salaried position at ANY company of over 50 (unless your contacts there can hammer the HR department to put "or equivalent experience" after the masters degree requirement.)
The one good thing that MIGHT come out of this is that it will force HR departments of large companies to cut back on the practice of over-demanding.
This is university-educated drone's welfare and hi-tek job export program.
Perhaps you'd suggest napalm or white phosphorus instead?
One of the versions of napalm used in Vietnam includes finely divided white phosphorus in the formulation.
Military claimed they only used napalm for destroying bridges and material. The inclusion of white phosphorus led many to doubt that, because of this effect: If someone splashed with napalm managed to jump into nearby water to put it out, the white phosphorus would make it re-ignite when they came up.
In the old days people had a way of dealing with people like the RIAA execs. They grabbed them, stripped them, beat them, coated them in tar and feathers.
As I understand it:
The tar, of course, was heated so it could be poured. This made it hot enough to burn them sufficiently that their skin fall off not long after. Unless, of course, they were lit off. Then the feathers served as wicks for the torch.
Tarring and feathering looks (in our sanitized history books) like extreme ridicule. But it was really death by torture.
It was the North American colonial version of the the modern African practice of "neclacing" - execution by hanging a tire around a person's torso, adding a bit of kerosene to get it started with rubber's slow burn, then letting them loose to struggle and run about as the toxic fumes and heat kills them, slowly and painfully.
In other words they made a public example of them to discourage other similar-thinking assholes from doing the same thing.
Yes, burning them alive, or covering them with a strong adhesive, hot enough to give them an all-over blister, so the skin comes off with it later, would definitely discourage similar behavior in others.
These days, with extreme medical treatment in a burn unit, some of them might even survive long enough to tell others what a bad idea it is to get people mad enough to do this to them.
Are we too civilized for that today?
I sure hope so.
It seems a bit extreme, even for RIAA execs.
There's a feedback system. Virus affects it...
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
The human body [...] has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store [...]
Now [...] put it into an environment [with lots of food available]. What do you expect will happen?
And how does this explain identical twins, raised together, one of whom is obese - always when only the obese one has antibodies for a member of a particular family of viruses?
The human body has a feedback mechanism to keep the mature fat cells at a particular per-cell fat content. If they're less than that full, they emit a chemical messenger to turn up hunger. Without that feedback mechanism, even a tiny error in the amount of hunger would result in the cells either emptying out or filling to the max they could hold.
There is another mechanism to make the right number of fat cells go to the mature stage. This is modulated by such things as the regularity of meals, especially during childhood. The remaining proto-fat cells just sit there (perhaps as spares for later.) Once the cells are mature they last a very long time, and anything that causes them to empty out below their setpoint causes the person they're in to become ravenous, and put the weight back on.
I've seen other descriptions of this research a couple months back. What it indicates is that infections by certain viruses cause ALL the fat cells to mature.
Once that happens the person becomes obese. Any weight loss results in hunger that causes the weight to be regained.
Easy availability of food has nothing to do with it - if there's enough to avoid starvation there's enough to eat the little bit extra that causes weight to ramp up.
Ditto availability of high-fat "empty-calorie" fast food versus balanced diets with small portions of "heathy" fare. If he eats too little to keep the fat cells at setpoint the victim feels like he's starving. So he'll chow down on seconds of the soup and salad for as many weeks as necessary to get his fat cells back to "full".
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
= = = =
Note that the headline is misleading. It isn't OBESITY that's contagious. By the time a victim is obese the virus is apparently long gone. The victim is now immune to re-infection with the same strain (either for life or for a while) and no longer contagious.
Like polio, this is "a bad cold" with after-effects. In polio's case the recovering victim's immune system attacks their motor nerves' mylen sheaths. With this syndrome some as yet undiscovered virus-precipitated mechanism results in the fat cells all going mature, after which the now-recovered victim begins to put on weight.
(Especially when some readers are snatching moments to participate online rather than deep-reading and considering several posts in a thread's history. Of course for people who aren't native speakers of your language and regional dialect, forget it.)
Without strong govt you will be ruled by monopolies.
Without governmnet you would not have corporations.
Their very existence is a creation of government - the birthing of a pseudo-person, with a subset of the rights and privileges of a human, and the rasising of a wall between the actions of that pseudo-person and drains on the pocketbooks of those who invest in it and control its actions from liability suits by those its actions harm.
Unlike actual human beings, corporations themselves do not have first amendment rights. Only their investors, officers, and employees have those. The corporation itself - and employees of it when acting or speaking for it - only have privileges granted by the government, and these are revokable by governmental laws and rules. (This is why, for instance, there are weeks of "silent period" before each quarterly report, when it is a crime for the corporate "insiders" - officers and employees with internal knowlege - are forbidden to comment on the company's business.)
If congress wishes to ban corporations from hiring lobbyists and directing employees to speak to congressmen on the company's behalf, as I understand it they are welcome to do so. The corporation would then be dependent on the voluntary lobbying of the investors and employees.
So far Congress has apparently not seen fit to attempt this. Whether this is a wise move to avoid creating another set of unintended consequences (as corporate officials find devious ways to speak out on the company dime), an unwillingness to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, or both, is unclear.
It happens in the US. On a daily basis. You want access to the Pentagon press conferences? You better not publish that picture of a flag-draped coffin.
Call me when the papers that print a picture of a flag-draped coffin are visited by a special-ops team that smashes the press and interns or kills the staff.
The airline industry is a private corporation, not a federally run operation.
So is the phone company. So what?
The airlines are "common carriers" and receive major subsidies from the government (in the form of airports and air traffic control, just to name two). As part of being common carriers they are limited in their ability to arbitrarily refuse passengers. They must treat all comers equally.
It wasn't so long ago in the US that newspapers and radio were radically and obviously partisan (W R Hearst anyone? How about Rupert Murdoch?).
Papers were partisan then. Papers are still partisan. Papers were partisan centuries ago. Papers have been partisan since there were papers.
The constitutional mandate for a free press was installed by a group that included (at least) one publisher of a very partisan paper.
The benefit of a free press is that ANY partisin viewpoint can get published, rather than ONLY those that agree with the partisan position of a limited number of powerful people.
= = = =
As you point out, a free press isn't shortcircuited by buying placement for a story. (That actually increases it, both by getting another viewpoint out and supporting the publishers operation, reducing the risk it will fold.)
What WOULD shortcircuit the free press would be to pay (or intimidate) publishers to NOT run a competing story - or do it to enough of them that the story gets suppressed.
Slashdot Mirror
(Like the guy who got the vanity plate "NO NE" and next year, when he went to renew his registration, got billed for the last year's unpaid parking tickets on every car in the state with a missing license plate.)
..." mesage was actually the explanation about how you're supposed to fill in the user's and site's name rather than make a copy of the mail command in the manual. So this hack provided the message for the entire internet.
The domain node.com had a similar problem.
('scuse me for spacing out the email addresses in this post, but you know bots. I don't want to cause 'em any more trouble.)
Back in the days of home-rolled sendmail configurations, system administrators often thought they knew better than the users (and were often wrong.) One thing that was common was to decide that mail addressed to a user named "user" or a site named "node" was the result of somebody reading the manual too closely and forgetting to substitute the actual user's or site's name in the mail command. And of course mail to "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" MUST be an error, right? B-) So many of them would "hotwire" their sendmail configuration files to bounce such mail, returning a helpful note about what the manual meant.
But it turns out that "node.com" is a real domain. (A very old one - dating from the days when a list of ALL the domains fit on a three-page appendix to an early book on the internet.) So these bogus sendmail configurations were interfering with its mail something fierce.
In those days the mail was handed around from site to site, too, rather than going straight to the mail server of the target over the "connected intenet". So one "helpful" sendmail configuration file could foul up mail to node.com from great swaths of sites that had no institutional connection with the hotwired one. The automatic routing protocols would find their best route, which often would happen to go through a hotwired mail server. Then a user at node.com would complain, and the sysadmin would have to contact the correspondent getting bounces, hunt down the offending site, figure out how to get in touch with the sysadmin, and talk him into getting things fixed. (Of course this wasn't helped by the sysadmin's own system bouncing his return mail... B-) )
(Of course people with the expertese to attempt such "automated helpfullness" were often running large sites that handled a lot of mail for a lot of other sites, so it only took a few of 'em to bollox things up for much of the net.)
What he eventually did was create the account "user" and configure the "vacation" program. "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" was ALWAYS on vacation. The "I'm on vacation until
Of course "vacation" records the sender's address and only replies once, thus breaking mail loops. It also squirrels away all the incoming mail for the vactioner's return - creating a record of how often the mistake is made.
Turns out it was not very common at all. "user" got far less than a hundred letters a year. (Or did until some web forms for signing up for mailing lists used "user" and "node.com" for the default fields. And then the account got onto some spam lists.)
By the way: Don't test it by sending mail. It was taken down during the system upgrade for Y2K. By then there were a lot of Mail Transfer Agents other than sendmail, and most sendmail configurations were automatically generated by vendor-supplied tools - which didn't try to hotwire "node.com". So when the system was moved to a non-unix box without a preinstalled "vacation" program there seemed little point in maintaining the "service".
immature open source software is doomed in an enterprise environment nowadays
Immature open source software is no more or less "doomed" than immature closed-source software in an enterprise environment nowadays. There have been only two changes:
- Open source software now has a chance when there's closed source competition.
- There are mature products available for some applications.
All software starts as immature and potentially improves with upgrades based on information collected when it encounters the real world. Once there's an incumbent product, a newcomer has to have a major advantage to break into the market. When a market incumbent is well established but the market is not mature to the "commodity" level, with a bunch of interchangable suppliers competing solely on price, the advantage may need to be a factor of 10 in cost/benefit.
On the other hand, if there isn't anything to do the job, the difference between doing it and not doing it is a factor of several in benefit, and competing businesses need the job done, an "immature" product that DOES do the job can break in easily. First player to try it and make it work gets a big jump on his competition.
This claim is FUD. Limiting it to open source software is double-deep FUD. It's an attempt to scare entrepenuers - and venture capitalists - away from open source projects. To the extent there's any truth in it at all, it applies equally to ALL software projects (and all innovatiove startups).
Open-source startups and relative newcomers must target a new breed of CIOs, which Graf dubs chief process innovation officers
Not to be confused with the OLD breed of CIOs, which wouldn't consider open source at all.
Which open source technologies are mature enough to survive the consolidation that's coming?
And now that he's eliminated NEW projects out-of-hand, he goes after ESTABLISHED projects, and tries to take out THEIR resources by rattling the effigy of "shakeout". A "consolidation wave" that is supposedly coming.
What consolidation wave?
The problem for open source projects is, and continues to be, convincing an enterprise to try their product at all - not being displaced by a global rush to a "more mature" equivalent.
The problem for companies trying to build a business model on supporting and/or distributing open-source projects may be closer to that of a conventional business. But it seems to me there's plenty of business to go around, and it DOES go around.
What we see now is that the suits are finally catching on to the suitability of open source products for use in mission-critical applications. It is no longer courting a pink slip to adopt them, and some managers are advancing their carreers by doing so and producing corporate success. And as they do this, less clueful suits will begin to mimic them. Both the clueful and the non-clueful result in more adoption of open source products, and thus the "opening of the enterprise market" to companies making money off providing and supporting such projects.
Of course, as the herd of suits comes out to buy open source, there will be fads, resulting in far more adoption of one version of a functionality than another. And there will be well-publicised disasters, resulting in a stampeed from one to another - IMHO a far more significant factor.
But the broad adoption of open source products into enterprise should produced increased support for multiple and diverse projects, rather than a consolidation.
Unlike an open source project, a closed source product is supported by a single corporation that must make money continuously. So if some of its customers don't upgrade or switch to competing products, it is at risk of going under - and other customers using it in mission critical processes will rush to find alternatives before they find themselves hanging high-and-dry. Once alternatives are found, the revenue stream dries up, and the company folds or is absorbed
Replace a $$$$ digital oscilloscope with a cellphone??? Bullshit.
He's not talking about replacing a $$$$ digital osciloscope with a cellphone. He's talking about doing something with a cellphone that can also be done by a $$$$ digital osciloscope. Big difference. (You can do a LOT of stuff with the scope.)
Typical scam research claim trying to extract money from investors. Where is he from again? Ah, OK, now we all know...
This is Adi Shamir we're talking about. He can get all the investors he wants just by dropping his name and saying he found something lucrative to do.
The patent should never have been awarded in the first place. For one thing, mathematics should never be patentable.
The claim is that what was patented was not a mathematical algorithm. It was an cryptography system that USED a mathematical algorithm. (It's like the difference between patenting a process for building a car that happens to use a stamping press versus patenting the stamping press.)
I, too, happen to think that the patent should not have issued, because it can be argued that the cryptography system itself - and any program - is a mathematical algorithm.
However, if there is any validity to the above argument that a system consisting entirely of an algorithm could be patented if it was useful, innovative, and non-obvious, RSA would be a perfect example of such an invention.
Hear hear. There's plenty of fault to go around.
Here's another analogy that should make it even clearer:
A bank puts its customers' deposits in a bushel basked behind a non-armor plate-glass window and closes for the night. A thief comes by, breaks the glass with a hammer, grabs the money, and runs.
Who's to blame?
- The bank?
- The thief?
- The manufacturer of the hammer?
- The manufacturer of the plate glass window?
- The car dealership selling the luxury car the thief wanted?
It's pretty obvious to me:
- The thief, for breaking in and stealing the money, and
- The bank, for not exercising due dilligence in protecting its depositors' money.
The same with the hospital, which has an obligation to exercise due dilligence in protecting its patients' health and the infrastructure which directly affects the provision of its medical treatments.
Yes the student was at fault, too. But it's a big wide world out there. With something like five billion people in it and a significant fraction of them having network access, there are plenty of bad and/or irresponsible people with a network presence.
This constitutes a threat as pervasive as weather, or disease. It's up to people who run institutions like banks and hospitals to take this into account. They must take reasonable precautions to protect the health - physical or financial - of the people who have entrusted it to their care.
Microsoft software is NOT rated for life-critical applications and its security flaws are well known. What the HELL was a hospital doing putting life-critical information on it, or letting it share a network with life-critical systems AND the rest of the internet?
I don't know about the rest of you. But just as I wouldn't deposit my money at a bank that leaves it sitting behind a plate-glass window overnight, I'm not going to schedule any medical procedures at a hospital that let this happen, then gave no visible sign of accepting any responsibility for the failure, blaming it entirely on the intruder.
We can expect the US Government not to meddle with the 'net as much as they didn't mess with wikipedia entries...
That wasn't the GOVERNMENT messing with the wikipedia entries (as a government action). That was some INDIVIDUAL POLITICIANS and/or their staff messing with the wikipedia entries.
Meanwhile the reason you have an essentially unregulated and untaxed internet is that some FCC commissioners, over more than a decade, have had a bee up their butts about keeping the government's hands off the internet to let it develop on its own - and who have fought battles with other branches of govermnet (notably the courts) to keep THEIR hands off this "noble experiment".
Here in the Washington, DC area, they are considering a tied road system where you would have the option of paying more to travel in lanes with less traffic.
Closer. But the premium lanes are still doing "best effort" delivery.
Here's one closer yet:
Think of what they're building as a multi-lane highway - with railroad tracks down the lanes. Each house gets a multi-lane driveway with a couple sidings running up the lanes.
Driveway/sidings come in several standard lane counts. Theaters, arenas, and factories have very wide ones, houses narrower ones (but still plenty wide), businesses, restaurants, and so on have something in between. The wider the driveway, the more you pay (in taxes or "driveway rent" to the "road company").
You can runs trains, cars, motorcycles, trolleys, people-movers, delivery busses, computerized delivery carts, you-name-it, on the pavement or the rails.
There's a fancy computerized signaling system telling every car which lanes it can use. Lots of switches tied in with it (and signaling BACK from the trains and such), so rail vehicles can be switched around as easily as cars make lane changes.
You've got two ways to use the road:
- You can pay a small toll and schedule a non-stop run or a scheduled stream of them (if there's capacity for it). The computers controlling the signaling system moves all the other traffic out of your way when it's your slot. If you got your reservation your trip is guaranteed. No stops, no traffic jams (for you), limited number and duration of red lights, getting you to your destination when promised.
- You can pay nothing (besides your flat-rate driveway rental) and use it like a regular road. Usually you get through. Sometimes there's a traffic jam and it takes a long while, or you have to make a detour. Once in a while it's so bad you give up and go back home. Big point: You have to guess how long the trip will take, and whether it's possible.
With this road in place you call a restaurant to cater your big party: The restaurant schedules a set of reserved road slots, cooks up the courses in his central professional kitchen, puts each on a little automated cart, and the cart brings it to your house: fresh, piping hot, and just in time to be served. Course after course, just on time, guaranteed to make it.
Meanwhile, the lane the caterer's carts were using is being used by lots of other traffic, mostly flat-rate, take-your-chances-with-traffic-jams traffic, whenever there wasn't a scheduled cart/train/bus/limousine/whatever using it.
THAT's the combined system.
What's the alternative?
You build a road AND a railroad. Separately. Each with its own infrastructure. This costs a LOT more than building one system, so its total capacity is smaller for a given investment. But even worse: Cars only get to use the road, trains only get to use the railroad - cars can't run down the rails when there are no trains in sight. So much of the capacity is unused.
Maybe you rented a siding from the railroad company. If so, you only get their trains. You don't get catered parties unless you buy them from the railroad company. Your local restaurant might try that stunt using waters on motorcycles - but he can't guarantee the main course won't be caught in a traffic jam while the soup gets cold. Some shippers might use trains to haul containers cross-country and transfer them to truck beds - but once they're on the trucks they're back in the traffic jams.
THAT's the "no favorites" scenario some posters keep whining for.
The problem is that some internet services, like streaming audio and video or VoIP, REQUIRE guaranteed bandwidth, limits on packet latency, and/or delivery reliability ("Quality of Service" (QoS)). Others (like file transfer) don't - "best effort" is good enough. If you want to serve both on the same net and do a good job of it, you have to give some packets preference over others.
If some packets ar
You seem to think that reducing carbon emissions is free.
In fact we're talking about trillions of dollars of costs per decade - some estimates go higher than a trillion per year FOREVER - to implement just the Kyoto Treaty's reductions. Yet these reductions are expected to produce only a fraction of a percent reduction in the expected warming. How much MORE would it cost to bring it to a halt?
So the cost is high. Like perhaps starting a global depression that would put the 1930s to shame, decimate the human population, AND deplete the funds that otherwise would have been used on the research to find alternative energy sources AND determine whether the threat is even real, and better ways to counter it if it is.
But what's the benefit?
The claimed benefit is eliminating a rise in the global average temperature of a tad over a couple degrees C - call it five degrees F. Maybe. If the models are right. (And some other models - which say all global warming is really doing is holding off an ice age for about four more centuries - are wrong.)
So IF those models are right, agriculture might move a couple hundred miles north over a century or two (even if crop breeding stops COLD). And the next waves of building move coastal cities a little inland as the seas rise a few inches over a couple centuries.
Unless some OTHER scare models that just came out in the last year or two are closer, in which case Europe gets a long-term cold snap and agriculture moves toward the equator instead of the poles.
Seems to me that with the models pointing every which way we need to do some more work to figure out what is actually going on, before crying that the sky is falling, the polar ice caps are melting, and throwing so much money at it that there's too little left for even subsistence existence.
Meanwhile, if it turns out there really IS a problem, there are a number of ways to deal with it short of totally curtailing humanity's emissions of carbon.
Like parking a sunshade / solar (or array of them) in orbits around the gravitational dip between the earth and sun, producing as much reduction in solar input as necessary to drop the temperature to any amount desired.
Or seeding the oceans to encourage the plankton to suck down atmospheric CO2 and sequester it in deep water - for several times longer than it takes to burn all the economically - useful fossil fuel.
Just to name two.
IMHO:
- the costs are VERY high,
- lower cost alternatives exist IF any action is needed,
- action isn't needed for decades to centuries,
- the benefits are low (even if the real situation approaches some of the worst-case scenarios)
- and the "problem" is too little understood to be worth throwing money at it (except to understand it better) today, or even to know which way to push.
The methods whereby CO2 heats up a planet are fairly well understood, and no one with a sane state of mind can deny that humanity has made things worse.
Change "made things worse" to "increased the effect" and I'd agree.
But there is a question open as to whether increasing the CO2 is making things "worse".
Some scientists have done work indicating that the Earth WAS headed back into an ice age, and would have been well on its way - at an accellerating rate - but for the effect of human CO2 emissions - starting at the beginnings of agriculture, at what WOULD have been the peak of the interglacial.
Their models indicate that human influence held the temperature nearly constant until the start of the industrial age, then began raising it.
But they ALSO indicate that (depending on the rate of carbon emission), the peak could be expected to be only a couple degrees C above the preindustrial plateau - about the amount we SHOULD be colder than it right now - and that (again depending on the rate of carbon emission) after 400 years or so, as the economically-recoverable fossil fuels are exhausted, the global temperature will crash back onto the ice-age-bound curve over a few decades - a curve that would have the "should be" temperature about twice as far below that of today, and falling much more rapidly. (Changing the assumed rate of carbon emission would change the height and width of the "hump" - possibly leveling it out and delaying the crash out to something like 600 years in the future. But it wouldn't eliminate it.)
By this model we should be in an ice age NOW, with permanent snow cover over much more of the continental masses, evolving into glacers and expanded ice caps.
If this is accurate, or even close, wouldn't you agree that the phrase for humanity's effect so far is "made things better"?
" So, how bad does it have to get before we revolt?"
I lived through the '60s. It was a LOT worse then than it is now.
One big difference: Civil rights for Black folk (or lack thereof). The LAWS were in place but not ENFORCED. Things had been quiet while the first generation went through school (after the previous round of troubles got them in - under federal escort), but as they got to college/job/voting/fighting age they found the doors closed - to jobs, to housing, to voting.
Then a few assasinations and acquittals of cops precipitated riots that literally burned cities. Like the Rodney King thing, but much bigger, and all over the country.
This led to real reforms - in voting, hiring, and housing sales. (And to a welfare system and public school "reforms" that ended up with their victims destroying their OWN families and culture. They're worse off now. But it's not because of institutional barriers any more.)
Another big difference at about the same time: The draft. It avoided a massive reprise of the Great Depression by "Channeling" the Baby Boomers into government-preferred occupational paths via the threat of literally enslaving them for two years and hauling them off to a jungle war.
That was enough to cause escalating major riots - filling the streets - including a march on Washington literally surrounding and besieging the pentagon, multiple bombings of research institutions, more riots, smashing and burning of banks and facilities of other corporations seen as complicit in the war/draft (chemical companies, universities, corporations making military equipment, the monopoly phone company {which collected a war tax}, and so on.)
And it also resulted in lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, dumping a Democratic president for a Republican, ending the war, and ending the draft. And the shooting of college students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. (Just days after a similar incident at Jackson State - a black college - that you rarely hear about.)
With real reform for the carrot and gunfire into crowds for the stick, the "revolution" moved from the ammo box to the ballot box.
The two formerly oppressed classes (blacks and military-age youth) are now no longer oppressed - at least not to anywhere NEAR the extent they were then. Education is available to those with the will to pursue it. Jobs are open to all comers who have acquired the necessary education and credentials to hold them. The military is voluntary, so college age youth are no longer enslaved. Lynchings of "uppity" blacks are no longer prevalent. And so on.
And the current standard of living, even in the inner cities, is far above that prevalent in the '60s.
What has to happen, in order for some kind of revolution, is that the daily grind for most people has to become such a losing proposition that they would rather march around in the streets instead of go to work that day.
We are SO far from that it's hysterical.
And one of the reasons leftist direct-action revolutionaries (as opposed to those who push for their changes through electoral politics and propaganda) get nowhere is that one of their tactics is to TRY to make things WORSE to "radicalize" the population, in the hopes of precipitating the sort of situation you're describing. But the general population has caught on to this tactic, and rightly ascribes the problems to the actions of the "revolutionaries", not to the government's reaction trying to suppress these crimes.
Mouse over the foot (on appropriate browsers) and you get a popup label saying "It's funny. Laugh."
Considering the current backbone provider backlash against VOIP, Vonage (and others like them) could have a very short business life.
Then again, considering the current customer backlash (including potential legal action) against ISPs that interfere with the traffic from particular applications - including ESPECIALLY relatively low-volume streams like those involved in VoIP, this could as easily go the other way.
Interesting times.
It also defines an applicant as someone who meets ALL the qualifications listed. This has the implication that if you miss on just one, an HR department can't consider you.
Drop out of college in the '70s just short of a degree to pursue your consulting practice or carreer (when a 4-year degree was considered a handicap) and work yourself up into a 6-figure income and a position in the top of your field by hopping between consulting and salaried positions for 30 years as you became one of the people that invented the technologies the colleges are just now trying to figure out how to teach? You better have a rep good enough to support yourself as a consultant or in startups from now on. Because starting in a few months you won't be considered for a salaried position at ANY company of over 50 (unless your contacts there can hammer the HR department to put "or equivalent experience" after the masters degree requirement.)
The one good thing that MIGHT come out of this is that it will force HR departments of large companies to cut back on the practice of over-demanding.
This is university-educated drone's welfare and hi-tek job export program.
Oops. Blew the link.
Try this.
but... How do we know the fraud detection software isn't fraudulent? :D
That's exactly the question that will come up in court if it's ever used.
(As another poster has already mentioned in the []blackbox software[] subthread.)
I wonder if/when it will be used on the Oswald-with-gun photo that many (apparently starting with Oswald) claim was faked.
The photo appears at the start of this wikipedia article on Lee Harvey Oswald.
(Of course the article is the subject to disputes of its own. B-) )
Perhaps you'd suggest napalm or white phosphorus instead?
One of the versions of napalm used in Vietnam includes finely divided white phosphorus in the formulation.
Military claimed they only used napalm for destroying bridges and material. The inclusion of white phosphorus led many to doubt that, because of this effect: If someone splashed with napalm managed to jump into nearby water to put it out, the white phosphorus would make it re-ignite when they came up.
In the old days people had a way of dealing with people like the RIAA execs. They grabbed them, stripped them, beat them, coated them in tar and feathers.
As I understand it:
The tar, of course, was heated so it could be poured. This made it hot enough to burn them sufficiently that their skin fall off not long after. Unless, of course, they were lit off. Then the feathers served as wicks for the torch.
Tarring and feathering looks (in our sanitized history books) like extreme ridicule. But it was really death by torture.
It was the North American colonial version of the the modern African practice of "neclacing" - execution by hanging a tire around a person's torso, adding a bit of kerosene to get it started with rubber's slow burn, then letting them loose to struggle and run about as the toxic fumes and heat kills them, slowly and painfully.
In other words they made a public example of them to discourage other similar-thinking assholes from doing the same thing.
Yes, burning them alive, or covering them with a strong adhesive, hot enough to give them an all-over blister, so the skin comes off with it later, would definitely discourage similar behavior in others.
These days, with extreme medical treatment in a burn unit, some of them might even survive long enough to tell others what a bad idea it is to get people mad enough to do this to them.
Are we too civilized for that today?
I sure hope so.
It seems a bit extreme, even for RIAA execs.
The human body [...] has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store [...]
Now [...] put it into an environment [with lots of food available]. What do you expect will happen?
And how does this explain identical twins, raised together, one of whom is obese - always when only the obese one has antibodies for a member of a particular family of viruses?
The human body has a feedback mechanism to keep the mature fat cells at a particular per-cell fat content. If they're less than that full, they emit a chemical messenger to turn up hunger. Without that feedback mechanism, even a tiny error in the amount of hunger would result in the cells either emptying out or filling to the max they could hold.
There is another mechanism to make the right number of fat cells go to the mature stage. This is modulated by such things as the regularity of meals, especially during childhood. The remaining proto-fat cells just sit there (perhaps as spares for later.) Once the cells are mature they last a very long time, and anything that causes them to empty out below their setpoint causes the person they're in to become ravenous, and put the weight back on.
I've seen other descriptions of this research a couple months back. What it indicates is that infections by certain viruses cause ALL the fat cells to mature.
Once that happens the person becomes obese. Any weight loss results in hunger that causes the weight to be regained.
Easy availability of food has nothing to do with it - if there's enough to avoid starvation there's enough to eat the little bit extra that causes weight to ramp up.
Ditto availability of high-fat "empty-calorie" fast food versus balanced diets with small portions of "heathy" fare. If he eats too little to keep the fat cells at setpoint the victim feels like he's starving. So he'll chow down on seconds of the soup and salad for as many weeks as necessary to get his fat cells back to "full".
Lack of self-control has essentially nothing to do with it. With near-superhuman self-control an obese person might substitute external feedback (i.e. from a scale) for the internal signals and control his weight that way. But that means ignoring continuous gnawing hunger - forever.
= = = =
Note that the headline is misleading. It isn't OBESITY that's contagious. By the time a victim is obese the virus is apparently long gone. The victim is now immune to re-infection with the same strain (either for life or for a while) and no longer contagious.
Like polio, this is "a bad cold" with after-effects. In polio's case the recovering victim's immune system attacks their motor nerves' mylen sheaths. With this syndrome some as yet undiscovered virus-precipitated mechanism results in the fat cells all going mature, after which the now-recovered victim begins to put on weight.
Subtle doesn't work reliably in straight text.
(Especially when some readers are snatching moments to participate online rather than deep-reading and considering several posts in a thread's history. Of course for people who aren't native speakers of your language and regional dialect, forget it.)
That's why emoticons were invented. B-)
Without strong govt you will be ruled by monopolies.
Without governmnet you would not have corporations.
Their very existence is a creation of government - the birthing of a pseudo-person, with a subset of the rights and privileges of a human, and the rasising of a wall between the actions of that pseudo-person and drains on the pocketbooks of those who invest in it and control its actions from liability suits by those its actions harm.
Unlike actual human beings, corporations themselves do not have first amendment rights. Only their investors, officers, and employees have those. The corporation itself - and employees of it when acting or speaking for it - only have privileges granted by the government, and these are revokable by governmental laws and rules. (This is why, for instance, there are weeks of "silent period" before each quarterly report, when it is a crime for the corporate "insiders" - officers and employees with internal knowlege - are forbidden to comment on the company's business.)
If congress wishes to ban corporations from hiring lobbyists and directing employees to speak to congressmen on the company's behalf, as I understand it they are welcome to do so. The corporation would then be dependent on the voluntary lobbying of the investors and employees.
So far Congress has apparently not seen fit to attempt this. Whether this is a wise move to avoid creating another set of unintended consequences (as corporate officials find devious ways to speak out on the company dime), an unwillingness to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, or both, is unclear.
Then why isn't the government cracking down on their use of no fly lists?
Maybe becasue the government provides the list and mandates its use?
It's a blatant form of discrimination against people who have not been convicted or even charged with any crimes.
Yep.
But it's GOVERNMENT discrimination against people who have not been convicted or even charged with any crime.
The government isn't quite byzantine enough to prosecute the airlines for following their orders.
It happens in the US. On a daily basis. You want access to the Pentagon press conferences? You better not publish that picture of a flag-draped coffin.
Call me when the papers that print a picture of a flag-draped coffin are visited by a special-ops team that smashes the press and interns or kills the staff.
The airline industry is a private corporation, not a federally run operation.
So is the phone company. So what?
The airlines are "common carriers" and receive major subsidies from the government (in the form of airports and air traffic control, just to name two). As part of being common carriers they are limited in their ability to arbitrarily refuse passengers. They must treat all comers equally.
A nit:
It wasn't so long ago in the US that newspapers and radio were radically and obviously partisan (W R Hearst anyone? How about Rupert Murdoch?).
Papers were partisan then. Papers are still partisan. Papers were partisan centuries ago. Papers have been partisan since there were papers.
The constitutional mandate for a free press was installed by a group that included (at least) one publisher of a very partisan paper.
The benefit of a free press is that ANY partisin viewpoint can get published, rather than ONLY those that agree with the partisan position of a limited number of powerful people.
= = = =
As you point out, a free press isn't shortcircuited by buying placement for a story. (That actually increases it, both by getting another viewpoint out and supporting the publishers operation, reducing the risk it will fold.)
What WOULD shortcircuit the free press would be to pay (or intimidate) publishers to NOT run a competing story - or do it to enough of them that the story gets suppressed.