However if one obtains more than one separately watermarked versions one can identify all the places where the watermarking is distinct. He might not be able to eliminate it all. But he could make it no longer tracable to a particular source (though it might still be tracable to a group containing all the versions used).
If the government wishes to enforce against the Onion, they need to enforce against all "unauthorized, commercial or illegal" use of the seal, supportive or not.
Actually, no, they don't. The government gets to pick where they spend their law-enforcement resources and the executive branch makes the call. (Another example of this is the consistent case law declaring that the police have no obligation to protect any given individual from a crime or threat, no matter how grave or obvious in advance.)
A private individual or company has an obligation to take some action if his mark is being infringed to avoid it going public domain. But even there the requirement is not to pursue every infringer.
The closest argument to "must pursue all" is the requirement for equal protection. But even that only comes into play if there's a consistent pattern of only going after a suspect class of infringers, rather than making the pick in a way that doesn't discriminate, or discriminates only on some rational basis (such as biggest ones get the hit) with other things (like race) only present, if at all, as a side effect.
However, as a separate issue, satire is protected speech. If the seal was used in a clearly satirical way the Onion has legs to stand on. (I haven't seen the article in question yet, but given that it's the Onion it seems likely that's what they were doing.)
The problem with satire is that sometimes it looks too much like what it's satirizing and confuses people. I suspect that's what happened here - either because some functionary didn't get that it was satire, or thought others wouldn't.
In particular, putting something in the public domain currently fails because somebody else can make a trivial change - or a compendium with other material - and that changed version or collection is once again copyrighted, to the other person. Then the original authors can't make the equivalent change themselves, and end up locked out of their own code (for instance, if the change is a necessary bug fix).
To avoid this, GPL authors do not release in the public domain. Instead they keep the copyright and allow copying under a public license requiring continued similar licensing for derivative works.
If copyright on software is ever removed from the legal system the GPL stops working - but simultaneously is no longer needed. B-)
Between that and the "if you break the license you lose all right to use the code at all". It's one of the best hacks to come around.
Not to argue that the mythbusters are always wrong, but they were wrong this time. Not only does the number of mirrors count, but they must be lined along a parabolic path, must be "perfectly" flat (in this case) and as the article stated, the point of focus changes at 36 feet per hour so you have to keep the mirrors "up to date".
This is a problem if you have a small number of people trying to aim a large number of mirrors.
It's no problem at all if you have a moderate-sized army, with each soldier holding and aiming a mirror.
Judging by Archimedes' rep he wass quite capable of figuring out the signal-mirror trick with the shiny backside and the hole, which has been described at least twice n this thread, and allows dead aim in about a second.
Arthur C. Clarke has used reversed telescopes and the like in several stories (possibly inspired by the hazards of working with a big astronomical instrument in daylight.) One involved a soccer match where one central-american country's army has a section of the bleachers and foil-coated programs - and uses them to fry the ref after a bad call. Substitute a few tiers of benches along the shore and an army holding reflective shields, and that should light off ships in the harbor just fine.
Many of their conclusions are valid. They've shown that pissing on the "live" rail of a 3-rail train system will not shock you (urine stream is too fragmented by the time it hits the rail for electricity to travel)
Though I understand it works just fine on an electric fence. (Dosen't reliably fragment in the short distance.)
"flapping" is the common term for when a router's routing tables rapidly cycle between two invalid states.
Also known as "route flapping". Also applied when the routes are valid, but a router still alternately advertising a pair of routes because it keeps changing its mind about which is better.
This, by the way, is partly the result of an internet standard that isn't sufficiently prescriptive. The BGP protocol itself is well defined, but its implementation is left open. Unfortunately, it prescribes a system that has gain, delay, and negative feedback. So a naive implimentaion leads to oscilation when deployed, and something must be hacked to stop it.
Getting it to stop is a black art of coding workarounds - both to keep yourself from oscilating and to react quickly and appropriately (rather than blindly doing a full recomputation of your routing tables with each received flap) when somebody else starts flapping, so your packets keep going through despite the bad net weather.
If you get something stable among your own machines, you still have the issue of whether it stays stable when they're talking to somebody else's, or to an earlier version of your own. Avoiding breaking your own earlier stuff in a new release is difficult. Especially so since you don't necessarily know WHY your implementation is working (if nothing else, because you don't know what some of the other implementations it's successfully conversing with are up to). And testing before release is very hard, because you can easily get something that works just fine in all your lab test cases but breaks when deployed on the real net.
Since deploying a broken BGP implementation breaks, not just the routers it's deployed on, but large sections of the rest of the net, backbone providers and ISPs are very leery about buying routers from somebody without a proven BGP implementation. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem for companies trying to break into the router business: You can't get customers without a proven implementation, and you can't prove an implementation without customers.
Last I heard (by word of mouth, a couple years ago) there were only two independently-developed implementaions of BGP that had achieved this level of confidence.
Used to do contract work at an auto company's plant. The main data center's primary job was to feed test programs to an distributor testing line and collect the stats. It was located in the middle of the plant on the second floor, next to the row of test stands.
Some time after my contract had ended I visited the place and it was a total disaster.
During the model change shutdown (when most of the plant maintainence and rearrangement was done) the millwrights were welding on some cableways on the ceiling of the plant floor below. The fumes from the welding, of course, rose to the ceiling and escaped through the first hole they could find - around the big fire sprinkler pipe that went up through the floor of the computer room and into the space beneath the raised floor.
It tripped one ionization smoke alarm and sounded the warning - but nobody was around during the shutdown to hear it. Shortly thereafter it tripped a second one and the halon system went off. The computer power shut down and $10,000 worth of halon blasted into the computer room. Half of it came out through vents under the floor, throwing the raised floor panels and a decade's accumulation of fine dust (much of it byproducts of metal cutting and anealing) all over the room. And finally sounding an alarm at the guard shack.
The guards came over and found the room in disarray but no slightest sign of a fire. A couple million bucks worth of computer equipment, slated for replacement in another few months but still critical to the plant's operation, was standing there, covered with dust (likely to cause trouble for the disk drives later) but otherwise intact. So they followed procedure and reset the halon system, switching to the backup cylinder, to protect the computer in case an actual fire made it to the comp room. (Normally that's a good idea, since smouldering that sets off smoke detectors is often followed some time later by an actual fire.)
Of course the welding was still going on - just not at the moment the guard sniffed the comp room. (Welders out to lunch, pulled out due to the alarm, or having decided to come down off the ceiling for a bit after the blast of gas from above.) And they still had work to do. So of course they went back to it.
In less than an hour the situation repeated, dumping the SECOND $10,000 worth of halon on the non-fire. B-(
It amuses us europeans that you north americans think africans don't have expertise for various things north americans themselves can't use very well.
Please don't generalize from the North American MEDIA and a few of the posters on a North American WEBSITE (who in fact may not even be in North America - or who may be dupes whose main experience of the world is what they were fed by said media.)
There are plenty of us here who are quite aware that there is no shortage of smarts among the inhabitants of Africa, and that given access to tools (and escape from restrictions and distractions) comparable to that in our socioeconomic environment they are quite as capable of developing expertese - and using it productively - as we were. And that some have already done so.
I hate the way Africans are portrayed on the Western media. Tom Delay gets convicted of "campaign finance irregularties" [...]
I hate the way Republicans get portrayed in the Western media, too.
In case you hadn't noticed, Delay hasn't been convicted of ANYTHING. He has been Indicted. (That means he convinced a grand jury that there might be enough evidence to justify actually holding a trial.)
If being indicted means he's guilty, it means Clinton was guilty when he was impeached by the House (the equivalent at that level) and they didn't need to hold the trial in the Senate that acquitted him. It also means you're guilty of anything the traffic cop says you did once he writes that ticket.
Delay was forced to step down by Republican party rules that won't let someone under indictment for a felony hold a leadership position. (If Democrats had had a similar rule for Presidents, Clinton would have had to resign and let Gore run the country when he was impeached.)
Delay's indictment was driven by a prosecutor who has a long track record of using his office to prosecute his political opponents in either party. Who had to go to multiple grand juries before he could find one that would actually indict. And who then had to go get ANOTHER indictment after it was discovered that the stuff he CLAIMED Delay did WASN'T A CRIME at the time he claimed he did it.
Meanwhile, the Western Media continues pushing their own propaganda templates: All (not just some) African leaders are corrupt. All Republicans are crooks/racists/male chauvanists. All users of peer-to-peer tools are thieves. All hackers are crackers/pirates/vandals. All rural/southern people are booze-swilling, negro-lynching, low IQ "good old boys". All legal gunowners are foaming-at-the-mouth rambos. All violent felons are just misunderstood kids who had a hard childhood. All US citizens refuse to do the jobs they USED to do for decent wages in now-long-gone unionts that "undocumented immigrants" now do for less than the minimum wage contractors are ALLOWED to pay someone who has a paper trail. And so on.
They use these templates because they sway minds and advance their political agenda. Look how they swayed your mind: You thought Delay was convicted and that his behavior was typical of Republican politicians, didn't you?
I had heard (nasty untracable rumor) that the connection between asbestos and cancer had been detected in smokers and/or without controlling for amount of tobacco smoke exposure.
Given that tobacco smoke has a plethora of known carcinogens and that an asbestos puncture both breaches barriers between the air (with its high concentration of smoke in smokers) and the live cells (or even their innards) and causes inflamation (which leads to massively increased sensitivity to carcinogens by several mechanisms), that might suggest that much - even most - of the cancer connection might be from this potentiation of tobacco carcenogenicity, and a study that controlled for tobacco use might give a better read on asbestos hazards.
Do you happen to know if such studies have been done?
Even if the brethalyzer's accuracy had been tested, so what?
Think about easter eggs and date bugs: How do you know the software works correctly on leap year day? On Sundays? On the 295th test? If the cop enters "124341+" on the keypad just before running the test?
You don't.
The output of a machine is NEVER evidence in a trial. What is evidence is the expert testimony of a human - hired by the prosecution - that the output is correct. (This has an incentive structure that encourages both fraud and rose-colored-viewing on the expert's part.)
To mount a defense the accused needs to be able to hire his OWN expert and let HIM examine the machine and identify any ways it could have made a false indication. Then you get a conviction if, and only if, the prosecution's expert is able to show that none of those occurred, so the reading is accurate.
For the defense expert to be able to do his job on a software-using system he needs access to the source. If the prosecution is able to deny him that, he has been denied - by his opponent - his due process right to challenge the evidence against him. So the evidence MUST be thrown out if he is to have a fair trial. IM(NAL)HO that's cut and dried.
Imagine if the machine was a witness. The prosecution gets to question the witness. The defense does not get to cross-examine him. See where that would lead?
How about a program that allegedly (according to a prosecution's expert witness) examines evidence and says "he's guilty" or "he's innocent"? Without a defense expert examining the code how do you know it's not:
g = "innocent"
repeat until eof
if input line == "officer O'Malley saw a rabbit"
g = "guilty"
print "he's " g
So it's:
1) open the software generally,
2) open the software to a long string of (expensive) defense expert witnesses,
3) not use the software's output if challenged, or
4) deny due process.
If they try to settle on 2) it's easy to argue that not going to 1) denys due process to the poor, since they can't take advantage of the expensive experts.
Result: No closed-software devices can be used by the procecution if challenged (unless the courts decide to deny due process).
Actually, my post was more on-topic than yours, I believe.
Depends on the topic. I was talking about effective ways to influence the government to move to our side on this matter. What topic were you on? B-)
I'm fine with other people distilling research to make it easier for a voter to grok. But it's still research, and should be done by any voter.
I think we're mostly in agreement there, coming to the same conclusions on what should be done, if sometimes for different reasons.
I'm claiming that it's the job of the partisans, who are trying to swing the electorate to their side in the battle, to do their best to present their side. So the partisans should be sure they themselves are informed - both to be sure THEY'RE working for the right guys and to make their point more effectively. (That's because truth, in addition to being "nicer", works better than lies - something even an amoral psychopath can understand and use to good purpose). That means my prescription for the partisans is the same as yours, even if derived from a different basis.
Can we agree that it's not the jobs of the partisans of one side to spend their resources making the arguments for their opponents? (If their opponents really have valid points, let them spend their own time and money to make them. If nothing else they'll do a better job of it than somebody who disagrees with their claims.)
We agree that it's the job of the voters to inform themselves.
Uninformed voting favors those with more money and name recognition instead of those who will do a better job or better represent the voter's interest.
We agree there, too.
Where we differ: I think that a partisan for one side would be irresponsible if he abandoned support from those who won't check but will vote - especially if his opponent is perfectly willing to accept such votes. I assume that the willfully-ignorant will be a significant voting block. So if the good guys abandon them the bad guys are more likely to win.
I'll post a few sites where you can do some meta-research [...]
Here's another, for campaign contributions. (Sometimes, when it's hard to tell where someone stands, you can figure it out from who is paying his bills. Follow the money.)
= = =
The main point I was trying to make, though: To win this battle we must preach to the UNconverted. Convincing people who are NOT (yet) on our side is what we need to win. Here on Slashdot the people are pretty much all on our side already. Trying to convince them of something they already believe is a waste of time and effort.
Communication only occurs if the behavior of the receiver changes. The only change we need here, and thus the only messages we need to send, is "Go out and convert the onconverted." and "Here's how..."
Politics is a game of sheep, wolves, and shepherds. Huddling in a large group with similar beliefs and behavior while bleating about your discontent is to be a sheep. Preying on such groups to their detriment and your benefit is to be a wolf. Getting the herds to move to better pastures is to be a shepherd.
I want some of us to stop being sheep and become shepherds.
I think that the only people who can answer if the move was good or bad, are the MySQL developers.
When a big company buys a little company the people in the little company (even the suits, let alonw the developers) normally don't have anything to say about how their stuff is used once it's acquired. If it's going to be bad for their stuff they typically find out only when it goes bad - by finding themselves transferred to something else or laid off.
An interview might let us know if it's ALREADY gone bad. But if it's OK so far they might go in with eyes shining and stay that way for months before a "Night of the Long Knives".
Having said that...
I have no reason to assume that there WOULD be a Night of the Long Knives, or even that it would be bad for OSS if there were. Maybe Oracle will support innoDB. Maybe they'll expand support. Maybe they'll drop it - in which case MySQL and/or the rest of the open source community can pick up where they left off.
As for providing a migration path into Oracle's DB product, that's just fine. It means you can tell your own suits that, if MySQL doesn't scale after your project is in production for a couple years the they can move it cleanly to Oracle. If they're not betting the farm on MySQL it should be easier to get them to let you try it in the first place. And being able to prototype with MySQL (cheap/free) with assurance you have a scalable followon means you can develop on a smaller budget, making more garage-sized projects practical. Meanwhile, if there's no migration path back OUT of Oracle it's still no worse than if your started with it in the first place.
Your advice is appropriate in general, but it's off-topic and distracting.
This guy is directly attacking an aspect of freedom - free speech. My posting above takes this as a given, and is strictly discussing how those who have determined to oppose him can do so most effectively.
Research, then vote. Get your friends to read about the candidates and issues, then vote.
Nice. But it doesn't address the proper function of elections. It is not to make rational decisions (although they often do, which is good when it happens). They are to figure out how the war will come out, so you don't have to fight it with more deadly tools.
If someone feels strongly about an issue, and convinces others to go along - regardless of whether the position is rational or irrational - they will go along. The purpose of elections is not to stop this from happening, but to let it proceed to accomplish its goals through a less destructive channel.
By advising people who have strong opinions about who should be the officeholder to advise people to do additional work, you are making them less effective at what they have already determined to do. Having them ask people to do extra work to convince themselves, when they can avoid both the work and the stress of change by ignoring the person trying to persuade them, means most will ignore him. Then he's wasted his time and effort.
This is a war - by other means.
The way for us to win it is to do the research FOR the people we're trying to convince. Then we present them with our results, and if they agree the guy's got to go, recruit them into our growing snowball.
We use truth. Not because we must. But because it works better. Since it's a war, it's up to the OTHER guy to do the arguments for HIS side of the issues. Once they're BOTH brought to the voters attention, they become aware that there's an argument going on. Then those whose minds aren't already made up will compare our propaganda to his - especially where they diverge on matters of fact. That's where building ours on truth pays off. When they check, our arguments win, on facts and on visible logic running from them. (The credibility we gain there also leads to increased respect for our decision-making process and thus our opinions.)
Please don't "just vote". Don't try to convince your friends to "just vote". It dilutes the votes of people who actually know what they're voting for and skews the vote in favor of superficial whims. If you don't know a candidate or issue while in the voting booth, it's too late; leave the entry blank, please.
This is good advice to an individual voter. But it's noise for the election process. If he makes a random choice it cancels out. If he votes for a member of his preferred party he's accepting the party's endorsement that the candidate is a team player on their team: (That's a poor move for his own interests, but it still models how he'd behave if it came to a war, so it's just fine for the election process.) Ditto if he votes on name recognition: He just sold his vote to the guy with the biggest advertising budget or the operators of the mass media he views. That's a problem for those trying to swing public opinion - but (unfortunately) still a good model of the civil war.
Leaving it blank when you don't know or don't care gives power to people who do know or do care. Sometimes that's in your interest. Often it's not. Because they vote in THEIR interest, which may be opposed to yours. (Of course if you don't know that, you could as easily help them and hurt yourself as the other way around. THAT's why you shouldn't vote when you don't know or care.)
But that's advice to individual voters. This thread is advice to the committed, who DO know and DO care, on how to effectively advance their cause.
get out and vote. And not just for the big elections every four years. Vote in your Congressional elections. Vote in your state elections. Vote for your local councilmembers.
Good.
Spread the word and get your friend to vote. Don' be afraid to use that fancy gaming machine to write a fickin' letter now and then.
Better.
You are one vote.
Your letter to your congresscritter may be counted by him as some multiple of one vote - the inverse of the fraction who believe as you do but don't write letters.
But the critical part is to convince others to vote, and write letters, and convince still others. Then you are multiplied, not by a constant, but by a rising exponential.
Research this guy. If he's working against an aspect of freedom that is one you value highly, he's probably done the same for other aspects that are valued by others. Dig them out. List them. Use them to convince others that the guy is a menace to THEM.
If you're talking in person, draw them out about what they do, and tell them how this guy is bad for it.
If you're writing letters, give them a list. They'll mostly ignore the ones that aren't a big issue for themselves and zero in on the ones that affect them. So you can write letters and let them filter, rather than trying to figure out in advance what will bug any particular person.
Once you've got them convinced, try to recruit them to help convince others.
Find his political opponent. Volunteer to help with his campaign. He'll need money - but he'll need warm bodies even more - to stuff letters, walk precincts, talk to people, staff booths. Help out and you not only help get rid of the crank, but you get the ear of the guy you're helping. Keep HIM aware of why you were so opposed to his opponent, so he doesn't make the same mistake.
The subject is not whether the right or left wing extremists include more, or more prolific, murderous fruitcakes. The subject was whether you're more likely to get assaulted for voicing a dissenting opinion by a red-state or blue-state man-on-the-street.
However, now that you've waved a couple red herrings, let's give them a sniff...
The Klan, the OKC Bombing, abortion clinic bombings, etc have nothing to do with the Right Wing, by your logic then?
I'll see your OKC and abortion clinic bombings with the Unibomber. Then I'll raise you the greens with their tree spikers, bombers, and SUV dealer arsonists. And I could go on.
They've been at this for a long time, too. The violence you see now is nothing compared to the Vietanm era. Riots in the streets. Smashing, torching, and bombing of "establishment" targets - industry, banks, university research institutions such as those in Madsion and Ann Arbor. (I happened to work odd hours at one of the bombed buildings at the time. If I hadn't stayed home sick as a dog that night I might have been injured or killed.) The Unibomber was just following a well-established tradition.
As for the Klan:
Prior to the Civil War the south was ruled by a tiny oligarchy. It consisted of plantation owners and rich businessmen - primarily those profiting frmm the plantations by distributing their products and manufacturing or selling their supplies.
Even of the whites they represented a tiny fraction. They bulk were workers, sharecroppers, poor farmers, and the like. Many of the latter, like both the free blacks and the slaves, were not allowed to vote. (But they WERE subject to conscription to hunt for escaped slaves.)
The Republican party began as a party of abolitionism and civil rights for workers and the poor. They passed some of the first civil rights laws - despite an attack on one of their senators, ON THE SENATE FLOOR, that left him crippled for life. The Republicans elected their first president and were able to get more of their programs through. So the Civil War began, as a reaction - especially by the oligarchy - to this "Yankee Meddling". And the president declared the slaves to be freed during the war.
The war deposed the oligarchy - and temporarily blocked the old officials from holding office (as former rebels). The first elections went to their opposition. After a few years the old officials were again allowed to vote and hold office. But after the assasination of that first Republican president his successor (and congress) abandoned the south.
The oligarchy founded the Klan (which has, ever since, prided themselves on being composed of rich businessmen). And the Klan began a campaign of terror and voter intimidation agasint both the freedmen and the workers/sharecroppers/poor farmers of all races. The latter appealed to the Fed for armed help and were turned down. (Later the Posse Comitatus act was passed to ban the use of the US army for domestic law enforcement - primarily to keep it from being used to supervise elections in the former Confederacy.)
In short order the oligarchy's candidates began winning elections. And they used every bit of power they regained to nail down their control. With local law enforcement manned by Klansmen the election process became corrupted and the terrorists could be assured of no trouble from the law. Filling judge slots with Klansmen meant no appeal to legal process. Control of legislatures enabled a plethora of new laws to nail down permanent control: Grandfather clauses and literacy tests to disenfranchise the freedmen and the workers/sharecroppers/small farmers. Segregation, to keep them from organizing together and deny them education. A host of other "Jim Crow" laws to establish tiered classes of citizenship. And of course "gun control", to disarm them and prevent resistance to terrorism and overthrow of the oligarchy by force.
(US gun restriction laws started in these Jim Crow laws. Even the term "saturday night spe
Many of your points have some solid grounding. But here's one that proves you're parroting propaganda rather than speaking from experience:
Just ask the guy who was against the Iraq war in a red state; just because it's not written into the law but enforced by your neighbours (who'll beat you up for wearing anti-bush t-shirts), it's still censorship.
You'll generally NOT get beaten up for speaking out against the right-wing in a "red" state (or wearing a T-shirt to do it for you). But just try saying anything anti-PC in a "blue" one!
In general the American Pluralist ("red state") ideology still believes in free speech - often to the "defend to the death your right to be wrong" level. (But they're usually quite willing to argue right back.) The Liberal ("blue state") ideology, on the other hand, believes in free speech only as long as you agree with them, and has quite the track record of using both violence (assault, theft, vandalism, arson, bombing,...) and law ("hate speech", "campaign finance reform") to suppress their opponents.
It's not that cut and dried, of course. There are some hotheadded nutcases - and splinter nutgroups - in every culture. But when it comes to quantity of violence, or institutionalization of violence, against political opponents, nothing else is in the same ballpark as the left wing.
However, this is all academic. It's easy enough to set up your own root servers and just peer into the ICANN ones, append all.com,.net,.org,.info,.biz,.etc entries found there with.us, and go from there.
That doesn't work. The joker gets played when you try to "go on from there".
The first time the ICANN and the UN separately assign "new-domain.com" to different customers, both new customers are broken.
When they assign the same block of IP numbers to two different customers they break, not just the namespace, but the routing tables. At that point the ISPs MUST cut the net apart (in at least that IP range) to insure packets get through.
And heaven help innovation if they both assign, say, the same new port number to different services or the same new protocol number to different protocols. B-(
The point of the ICANN is NOT to run the root servers.
The point is that certain identifiers on the internet ("Assigned Names and Numbers") must be unique. (The root servers just publish their decisions on the domain namespace.)
Assigning unique identifiers pretty much requires a singular authority to make the indivisible transactions. A hierarchy has been established so some of the large, busy namespaces can be divvied up into chunks that can be administered separately. But somebody has to administer the bottom-layer chunk and right now that's whatever contractor is deligated by ICANN (Network Solutions Inc.). And while multiple registrars are allowed to hand out names in some chunks of the namespace (such as.com) they all have to go to a common server to process the transaction: Again that's run by ICANN's contractor.
Even if you tried to solve this distributed update problem with something like a byzantine generals algorithm, somebody has to decide who are the members of the authoritative set of byzantine generals. Oops! Back to square one.
My regime would do that! Also bring back... dueling code (hand to hand weapons only)
So in your society the body-beautiful jocks will be able to get away with anything and the weaker, less coordinated, and handicapped better knuckle under, or be challenged to a duel they can neve win.
No, thanks.
Challenged party gets to chose weapons. ANY weapon that doesn't do colateral damage to third parties.
Sniper rifles.
Shotguns.
Two hotdogs, one injected with samonella, one with yogurt culture.
Chalenger does NOT get to call the game.
Try to bring back dueling on your "no firearms" terms and you'll find out one thing about dueling with firearms: When a tyrant imposes his will in such a manner, no challenge is necessary.
---
"Colonists win the toss! English army has to wear read suits and can only shoot when lined up in rows. Colonists get to wear brown-and-green and shoot from behind trees."
Because the Supreme Court ruled that (despite their claims and history of defending them by passively-resisting all the way to jail) the free press clause of the First Amendment does NOT give journalists a privilege to refuse to reveal their sources when that is demanded by the legal system.
That can be fixed by a constitutional amendment to clarify the issue. Or it can be fixed by a law to explicitly grant such a privilege.
A law may be less stable (since it's subject to easy revision and relatively easy overturning). But it's a LOT easier and quicker to get into effect.
Also: You can use a law to debug the wording, then promote it to an amendment if courts find something in the constitution to trump it while it's still just a law.
But such a law will serve as a statement of congress' intent that their OTHER laws shouldn't be interpreted to mean journalists must reveal sources unless the other law explicitly says so. (It can also serve as a statement that CONGRESS intepreted the First to mean what the reporters claim). Making laws to implement the constitutional guarantees in particular situations - as long as they don't REDUCE the extent of the guarantees to less than the Framers' clear intent - is within the powers of the Congress.
With such a law in place the courts may back off, making the amendment unnecessary.
(Or the Supremes might decide the right of litigants to due process of law trumps a shield law. In that case promotion to an amendment will be necessary.)
... and that publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical in print or electronic form;...
So does that mean that bloggers are "journalists" if their blog updates on a periodic schedule?
That Matt Drudge is not a "covered person"?
I don't think, after the Monica Mess (just for starters), that there's any question whether Matt qualifies as a journalist or The Drudge Report as a journal, despite its aperiodicity.
Then there's the folks at Little Green Footballs, Powerline, and Free Republic that caught CBS and Rather with the forged documents. (Powerline is clearly a journal of opinion, while Free Republic is essentially a large-C Conservative Slashdot.)
I think these names need to be brought into the congressional debate on this bill - to get some congresscritters on record about their intent, and to set up court future court tests on whether the exclusion of bloggers is constitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
However if one obtains more than one separately watermarked versions one can identify all the places where the watermarking is distinct. He might not be able to eliminate it all. But he could make it no longer tracable to a particular source (though it might still be tracable to a group containing all the versions used).
If the government wishes to enforce against the Onion, they need to enforce against all "unauthorized, commercial or illegal" use of the seal, supportive or not.
Actually, no, they don't. The government gets to pick where they spend their law-enforcement resources and the executive branch makes the call. (Another example of this is the consistent case law declaring that the police have no obligation to protect any given individual from a crime or threat, no matter how grave or obvious in advance.)
A private individual or company has an obligation to take some action if his mark is being infringed to avoid it going public domain. But even there the requirement is not to pursue every infringer.
The closest argument to "must pursue all" is the requirement for equal protection. But even that only comes into play if there's a consistent pattern of only going after a suspect class of infringers, rather than making the pick in a way that doesn't discriminate, or discriminates only on some rational basis (such as biggest ones get the hit) with other things (like race) only present, if at all, as a side effect.
However, as a separate issue, satire is protected speech. If the seal was used in a clearly satirical way the Onion has legs to stand on. (I haven't seen the article in question yet, but given that it's the Onion it seems likely that's what they were doing.)
The problem with satire is that sometimes it looks too much like what it's satirizing and confuses people. I suspect that's what happened here - either because some functionary didn't get that it was satire, or thought others wouldn't.
In particular, putting something in the public domain currently fails because somebody else can make a trivial change - or a compendium with other material - and that changed version or collection is once again copyrighted, to the other person. Then the original authors can't make the equivalent change themselves, and end up locked out of their own code (for instance, if the change is a necessary bug fix).
To avoid this, GPL authors do not release in the public domain. Instead they keep the copyright and allow copying under a public license requiring continued similar licensing for derivative works.
If copyright on software is ever removed from the legal system the GPL stops working - but simultaneously is no longer needed. B-)
Between that and the "if you break the license you lose all right to use the code at all". It's one of the best hacks to come around.
Not to argue that the mythbusters are always wrong, but they were wrong this time. Not only does the number of mirrors count, but they must be lined along a parabolic path, must be "perfectly" flat (in this case) and as the article stated, the point of focus changes at 36 feet per hour so you have to keep the mirrors "up to date".
This is a problem if you have a small number of people trying to aim a large number of mirrors.
It's no problem at all if you have a moderate-sized army, with each soldier holding and aiming a mirror.
Judging by Archimedes' rep he wass quite capable of figuring out the signal-mirror trick with the shiny backside and the hole, which has been described at least twice n this thread, and allows dead aim in about a second.
Arthur C. Clarke has used reversed telescopes and the like in several stories (possibly inspired by the hazards of working with a big astronomical instrument in daylight.) One involved a soccer match where one central-american country's army has a section of the bleachers and foil-coated programs - and uses them to fry the ref after a bad call. Substitute a few tiers of benches along the shore and an army holding reflective shields, and that should light off ships in the harbor just fine.
Many of their conclusions are valid. They've shown that pissing on the "live" rail of a 3-rail train system will not shock you (urine stream is too fragmented by the time it hits the rail for electricity to travel)
Though I understand it works just fine on an electric fence. (Dosen't reliably fragment in the short distance.)
"flapping" is the common term for when a router's routing tables rapidly cycle between two invalid states.
Also known as "route flapping". Also applied when the routes are valid, but a router still alternately advertising a pair of routes because it keeps changing its mind about which is better.
This, by the way, is partly the result of an internet standard that isn't sufficiently prescriptive. The BGP protocol itself is well defined, but its implementation is left open. Unfortunately, it prescribes a system that has gain, delay, and negative feedback. So a naive implimentaion leads to oscilation when deployed, and something must be hacked to stop it.
Getting it to stop is a black art of coding workarounds - both to keep yourself from oscilating and to react quickly and appropriately (rather than blindly doing a full recomputation of your routing tables with each received flap) when somebody else starts flapping, so your packets keep going through despite the bad net weather.
If you get something stable among your own machines, you still have the issue of whether it stays stable when they're talking to somebody else's, or to an earlier version of your own. Avoiding breaking your own earlier stuff in a new release is difficult. Especially so since you don't necessarily know WHY your implementation is working (if nothing else, because you don't know what some of the other implementations it's successfully conversing with are up to). And testing before release is very hard, because you can easily get something that works just fine in all your lab test cases but breaks when deployed on the real net.
Since deploying a broken BGP implementation breaks, not just the routers it's deployed on, but large sections of the rest of the net, backbone providers and ISPs are very leery about buying routers from somebody without a proven BGP implementation. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem for companies trying to break into the router business: You can't get customers without a proven implementation, and you can't prove an implementation without customers.
Last I heard (by word of mouth, a couple years ago) there were only two independently-developed implementaions of BGP that had achieved this level of confidence.
Used to do contract work at an auto company's plant. The main data center's primary job was to feed test programs to an distributor testing line and collect the stats. It was located in the middle of the plant on the second floor, next to the row of test stands.
Some time after my contract had ended I visited the place and it was a total disaster.
During the model change shutdown (when most of the plant maintainence and rearrangement was done) the millwrights were welding on some cableways on the ceiling of the plant floor below. The fumes from the welding, of course, rose to the ceiling and escaped through the first hole they could find - around the big fire sprinkler pipe that went up through the floor of the computer room and into the space beneath the raised floor.
It tripped one ionization smoke alarm and sounded the warning - but nobody was around during the shutdown to hear it. Shortly thereafter it tripped a second one and the halon system went off. The computer power shut down and $10,000 worth of halon blasted into the computer room. Half of it came out through vents under the floor, throwing the raised floor panels and a decade's accumulation of fine dust (much of it byproducts of metal cutting and anealing) all over the room. And finally sounding an alarm at the guard shack.
The guards came over and found the room in disarray but no slightest sign of a fire. A couple million bucks worth of computer equipment, slated for replacement in another few months but still critical to the plant's operation, was standing there, covered with dust (likely to cause trouble for the disk drives later) but otherwise intact. So they followed procedure and reset the halon system, switching to the backup cylinder, to protect the computer in case an actual fire made it to the comp room. (Normally that's a good idea, since smouldering that sets off smoke detectors is often followed some time later by an actual fire.)
Of course the welding was still going on - just not at the moment the guard sniffed the comp room. (Welders out to lunch, pulled out due to the alarm, or having decided to come down off the ceiling for a bit after the blast of gas from above.) And they still had work to do. So of course they went back to it.
In less than an hour the situation repeated, dumping the SECOND $10,000 worth of halon on the non-fire. B-(
It amuses us europeans that you north americans think africans don't have expertise for various things north americans themselves can't use very well.
Please don't generalize from the North American MEDIA and a few of the posters on a North American WEBSITE (who in fact may not even be in North America - or who may be dupes whose main experience of the world is what they were fed by said media.)
There are plenty of us here who are quite aware that there is no shortage of smarts among the inhabitants of Africa, and that given access to tools (and escape from restrictions and distractions) comparable to that in our socioeconomic environment they are quite as capable of developing expertese - and using it productively - as we were. And that some have already done so.
Delay hasn't been convicted of ANYTHING. He has been Indicted. (That means he convinced a grand jury [...]
..."
Make that "That means THE PROSECUTOR convinced
I hate the way Africans are portrayed on the Western media. Tom Delay gets convicted of "campaign finance irregularties" [...]
I hate the way Republicans get portrayed in the Western media, too.
In case you hadn't noticed, Delay hasn't been convicted of ANYTHING. He has been Indicted. (That means he convinced a grand jury that there might be enough evidence to justify actually holding a trial.)
If being indicted means he's guilty, it means Clinton was guilty when he was impeached by the House (the equivalent at that level) and they didn't need to hold the trial in the Senate that acquitted him. It also means you're guilty of anything the traffic cop says you did once he writes that ticket.
Delay was forced to step down by Republican party rules that won't let someone under indictment for a felony hold a leadership position. (If Democrats had had a similar rule for Presidents, Clinton would have had to resign and let Gore run the country when he was impeached.)
Delay's indictment was driven by a prosecutor who has a long track record of using his office to prosecute his political opponents in either party. Who had to go to multiple grand juries before he could find one that would actually indict. And who then had to go get ANOTHER indictment after it was discovered that the stuff he CLAIMED Delay did WASN'T A CRIME at the time he claimed he did it.
Meanwhile, the Western Media continues pushing their own propaganda templates: All (not just some) African leaders are corrupt. All Republicans are crooks/racists/male chauvanists. All users of peer-to-peer tools are thieves. All hackers are crackers/pirates/vandals. All rural/southern people are booze-swilling, negro-lynching, low IQ "good old boys". All legal gunowners are foaming-at-the-mouth rambos. All violent felons are just misunderstood kids who had a hard childhood. All US citizens refuse to do the jobs they USED to do for decent wages in now-long-gone unionts that "undocumented immigrants" now do for less than the minimum wage contractors are ALLOWED to pay someone who has a paper trail. And so on.
They use these templates because they sway minds and advance their political agenda. Look how they swayed your mind: You thought Delay was convicted and that his behavior was typical of Republican politicians, didn't you?
geomon:
You seem up on the research.
I had heard (nasty untracable rumor) that the connection between asbestos and cancer had been detected in smokers and/or without controlling for amount of tobacco smoke exposure.
Given that tobacco smoke has a plethora of known carcinogens and that an asbestos puncture both breaches barriers between the air (with its high concentration of smoke in smokers) and the live cells (or even their innards) and causes inflamation (which leads to massively increased sensitivity to carcinogens by several mechanisms), that might suggest that much - even most - of the cancer connection might be from this potentiation of tobacco carcenogenicity, and a study that controlled for tobacco use might give a better read on asbestos hazards.
Do you happen to know if such studies have been done?
Even if the brethalyzer's accuracy had been tested, so what?
Think about easter eggs and date bugs: How do you know the software works correctly on leap year day? On Sundays? On the 295th test? If the cop enters "124341+" on the keypad just before running the test?
You don't.
The output of a machine is NEVER evidence in a trial. What is evidence is the expert testimony of a human - hired by the prosecution - that the output is correct. (This has an incentive structure that encourages both fraud and rose-colored-viewing on the expert's part.)
To mount a defense the accused needs to be able to hire his OWN expert and let HIM examine the machine and identify any ways it could have made a false indication. Then you get a conviction if, and only if, the prosecution's expert is able to show that none of those occurred, so the reading is accurate.
For the defense expert to be able to do his job on a software-using system he needs access to the source. If the prosecution is able to deny him that, he has been denied - by his opponent - his due process right to challenge the evidence against him. So the evidence MUST be thrown out if he is to have a fair trial. IM(NAL)HO that's cut and dried.
Imagine if the machine was a witness. The prosecution gets to question the witness. The defense does not get to cross-examine him. See where that would lead?
How about a program that allegedly (according to a prosecution's expert witness) examines evidence and says "he's guilty" or "he's innocent"? Without a defense expert examining the code how do you know it's not:
g = "innocent"
repeat until eof
if input line == "officer O'Malley saw a rabbit"
g = "guilty"
print "he's " g
So it's:
1) open the software generally,
2) open the software to a long string of (expensive) defense expert witnesses,
3) not use the software's output if challenged, or
4) deny due process.
If they try to settle on 2) it's easy to argue that not going to 1) denys due process to the poor, since they can't take advantage of the expensive experts.
Result: No closed-software devices can be used by the procecution if challenged (unless the courts decide to deny due process).
I don't know if it is the same Judge Edward Harrington, but from this article it appears that he was appointed by Ted Kennedy.
Teddy couldn't have appointed him to a federal appellate judgeship (though he could have suggested it to his brother John F.).
I further wager that the judge concerned was appointed/nominated by a Republican.
District Judge Edward Harrington.
I haven't been able to find who appointed him...
Actually, my post was more on-topic than yours, I believe.
Depends on the topic. I was talking about effective ways to influence the government to move to our side on this matter. What topic were you on? B-)
I'm fine with other people distilling research to make it easier for a voter to grok. But it's still research, and should be done by any voter.
I think we're mostly in agreement there, coming to the same conclusions on what should be done, if sometimes for different reasons.
I'm claiming that it's the job of the partisans, who are trying to swing the electorate to their side in the battle, to do their best to present their side. So the partisans should be sure they themselves are informed - both to be sure THEY'RE working for the right guys and to make their point more effectively. (That's because truth, in addition to being "nicer", works better than lies - something even an amoral psychopath can understand and use to good purpose). That means my prescription for the partisans is the same as yours, even if derived from a different basis.
Can we agree that it's not the jobs of the partisans of one side to spend their resources making the arguments for their opponents? (If their opponents really have valid points, let them spend their own time and money to make them. If nothing else they'll do a better job of it than somebody who disagrees with their claims.)
We agree that it's the job of the voters to inform themselves.
Uninformed voting favors those with more money and name recognition instead of those who will do a better job or better represent the voter's interest.
We agree there, too.
Where we differ: I think that a partisan for one side would be irresponsible if he abandoned support from those who won't check but will vote - especially if his opponent is perfectly willing to accept such votes. I assume that the willfully-ignorant will be a significant voting block. So if the good guys abandon them the bad guys are more likely to win.
I'll post a few sites where you can do some meta-research [...]
Here's another, for campaign contributions. (Sometimes, when it's hard to tell where someone stands, you can figure it out from who is paying his bills. Follow the money.)
= = =
The main point I was trying to make, though: To win this battle we must preach to the UNconverted. Convincing people who are NOT (yet) on our side is what we need to win. Here on Slashdot the people are pretty much all on our side already. Trying to convince them of something they already believe is a waste of time and effort.
Communication only occurs if the behavior of the receiver changes. The only change we need here, and thus the only messages we need to send, is "Go out and convert the onconverted." and "Here's how..."
Politics is a game of sheep, wolves, and shepherds. Huddling in a large group with similar beliefs and behavior while bleating about your discontent is to be a sheep. Preying on such groups to their detriment and your benefit is to be a wolf. Getting the herds to move to better pastures is to be a shepherd.
I want some of us to stop being sheep and become shepherds.
I think that the only people who can answer if the move was good or bad, are the MySQL developers.
When a big company buys a little company the people in the little company (even the suits, let alonw the developers) normally don't have anything to say about how their stuff is used once it's acquired. If it's going to be bad for their stuff they typically find out only when it goes bad - by finding themselves transferred to something else or laid off.
An interview might let us know if it's ALREADY gone bad. But if it's OK so far they might go in with eyes shining and stay that way for months before a "Night of the Long Knives".
Having said that...
I have no reason to assume that there WOULD be a Night of the Long Knives, or even that it would be bad for OSS if there were. Maybe Oracle will support innoDB. Maybe they'll expand support. Maybe they'll drop it - in which case MySQL and/or the rest of the open source community can pick up where they left off.
As for providing a migration path into Oracle's DB product, that's just fine. It means you can tell your own suits that, if MySQL doesn't scale after your project is in production for a couple years the they can move it cleanly to Oracle. If they're not betting the farm on MySQL it should be easier to get them to let you try it in the first place. And being able to prototype with MySQL (cheap/free) with assurance you have a scalable followon means you can develop on a smaller budget, making more garage-sized projects practical. Meanwhile, if there's no migration path back OUT of Oracle it's still no worse than if your started with it in the first place.
Your advice is appropriate in general, but it's off-topic and distracting.
This guy is directly attacking an aspect of freedom - free speech. My posting above takes this as a given, and is strictly discussing how those who have determined to oppose him can do so most effectively.
Research, then vote. Get your friends to read about the candidates and issues, then vote.
Nice. But it doesn't address the proper function of elections. It is not to make rational decisions (although they often do, which is good when it happens). They are to figure out how the war will come out, so you don't have to fight it with more deadly tools.
If someone feels strongly about an issue, and convinces others to go along - regardless of whether the position is rational or irrational - they will go along. The purpose of elections is not to stop this from happening, but to let it proceed to accomplish its goals through a less destructive channel.
By advising people who have strong opinions about who should be the officeholder to advise people to do additional work, you are making them less effective at what they have already determined to do. Having them ask people to do extra work to convince themselves, when they can avoid both the work and the stress of change by ignoring the person trying to persuade them, means most will ignore him. Then he's wasted his time and effort.
This is a war - by other means.
The way for us to win it is to do the research FOR the people we're trying to convince. Then we present them with our results, and if they agree the guy's got to go, recruit them into our growing snowball.
We use truth. Not because we must. But because it works better. Since it's a war, it's up to the OTHER guy to do the arguments for HIS side of the issues. Once they're BOTH brought to the voters attention, they become aware that there's an argument going on. Then those whose minds aren't already made up will compare our propaganda to his - especially where they diverge on matters of fact. That's where building ours on truth pays off. When they check, our arguments win, on facts and on visible logic running from them. (The credibility we gain there also leads to increased respect for our decision-making process and thus our opinions.)
Please don't "just vote". Don't try to convince your friends to "just vote". It dilutes the votes of people who actually know what they're voting for and skews the vote in favor of superficial whims. If you don't know a candidate or issue while in the voting booth, it's too late; leave the entry blank, please.
This is good advice to an individual voter. But it's noise for the election process. If he makes a random choice it cancels out. If he votes for a member of his preferred party he's accepting the party's endorsement that the candidate is a team player on their team: (That's a poor move for his own interests, but it still models how he'd behave if it came to a war, so it's just fine for the election process.) Ditto if he votes on name recognition: He just sold his vote to the guy with the biggest advertising budget or the operators of the mass media he views. That's a problem for those trying to swing public opinion - but (unfortunately) still a good model of the civil war.
Leaving it blank when you don't know or don't care gives power to people who do know or do care. Sometimes that's in your interest. Often it's not. Because they vote in THEIR interest, which may be opposed to yours. (Of course if you don't know that, you could as easily help them and hurt yourself as the other way around. THAT's why you shouldn't vote when you don't know or care.)
But that's advice to individual voters. This thread is advice to the committed, who DO know and DO care, on how to effectively advance their cause.
get out and vote. And not just for the big elections every four years. Vote in your Congressional elections. Vote in your state elections. Vote for your local councilmembers.
Good.
Spread the word and get your friend to vote. Don' be afraid to use that fancy gaming machine to write a fickin' letter now and then.
Better.
You are one vote.
Your letter to your congresscritter may be counted by him as some multiple of one vote - the inverse of the fraction who believe as you do but don't write letters.
But the critical part is to convince others to vote, and write letters, and convince still others. Then you are multiplied, not by a constant, but by a rising exponential.
Research this guy. If he's working against an aspect of freedom that is one you value highly, he's probably done the same for other aspects that are valued by others. Dig them out. List them. Use them to convince others that the guy is a menace to THEM.
If you're talking in person, draw them out about what they do, and tell them how this guy is bad for it.
If you're writing letters, give them a list. They'll mostly ignore the ones that aren't a big issue for themselves and zero in on the ones that affect them. So you can write letters and let them filter, rather than trying to figure out in advance what will bug any particular person.
Once you've got them convinced, try to recruit them to help convince others.
Find his political opponent. Volunteer to help with his campaign. He'll need money - but he'll need warm bodies even more - to stuff letters, walk precincts, talk to people, staff booths. Help out and you not only help get rid of the crank, but you get the ear of the guy you're helping. Keep HIM aware of why you were so opposed to his opponent, so he doesn't make the same mistake.
The subject is not whether the right or left wing extremists include more, or more prolific, murderous fruitcakes. The subject was whether you're more likely to get assaulted for voicing a dissenting opinion by a red-state or blue-state man-on-the-street.
However, now that you've waved a couple red herrings, let's give them a sniff...
The Klan, the OKC Bombing, abortion clinic bombings, etc have nothing to do with the Right Wing, by your logic then?
I'll see your OKC and abortion clinic bombings with the Unibomber. Then I'll raise you the greens with their tree spikers, bombers, and SUV dealer arsonists. And I could go on.
They've been at this for a long time, too. The violence you see now is nothing compared to the Vietanm era. Riots in the streets. Smashing, torching, and bombing of "establishment" targets - industry, banks, university research institutions such as those in Madsion and Ann Arbor. (I happened to work odd hours at one of the bombed buildings at the time. If I hadn't stayed home sick as a dog that night I might have been injured or killed.) The Unibomber was just following a well-established tradition.
As for the Klan:
Prior to the Civil War the south was ruled by a tiny oligarchy. It consisted of plantation owners and rich businessmen - primarily those profiting frmm the plantations by distributing their products and manufacturing or selling their supplies.
Even of the whites they represented a tiny fraction. They bulk were workers, sharecroppers, poor farmers, and the like. Many of the latter, like both the free blacks and the slaves, were not allowed to vote. (But they WERE subject to conscription to hunt for escaped slaves.)
The Republican party began as a party of abolitionism and civil rights for workers and the poor. They passed some of the first civil rights laws - despite an attack on one of their senators, ON THE SENATE FLOOR, that left him crippled for life. The Republicans elected their first president and were able to get more of their programs through. So the Civil War began, as a reaction - especially by the oligarchy - to this "Yankee Meddling". And the president declared the slaves to be freed during the war.
The war deposed the oligarchy - and temporarily blocked the old officials from holding office (as former rebels). The first elections went to their opposition. After a few years the old officials were again allowed to vote and hold office. But after the assasination of that first Republican president his successor (and congress) abandoned the south.
The oligarchy founded the Klan (which has, ever since, prided themselves on being composed of rich businessmen). And the Klan began a campaign of terror and voter intimidation agasint both the freedmen and the workers/sharecroppers/poor farmers of all races. The latter appealed to the Fed for armed help and were turned down. (Later the Posse Comitatus act was passed to ban the use of the US army for domestic law enforcement - primarily to keep it from being used to supervise elections in the former Confederacy.)
In short order the oligarchy's candidates began winning elections. And they used every bit of power they regained to nail down their control. With local law enforcement manned by Klansmen the election process became corrupted and the terrorists could be assured of no trouble from the law. Filling judge slots with Klansmen meant no appeal to legal process. Control of legislatures enabled a plethora of new laws to nail down permanent control: Grandfather clauses and literacy tests to disenfranchise the freedmen and the workers/sharecroppers/small farmers. Segregation, to keep them from organizing together and deny them education. A host of other "Jim Crow" laws to establish tiered classes of citizenship. And of course "gun control", to disarm them and prevent resistance to terrorism and overthrow of the oligarchy by force.
(US gun restriction laws started in these Jim Crow laws. Even the term "saturday night spe
Many of your points have some solid grounding. But here's one that proves you're parroting propaganda rather than speaking from experience:
...) and law ("hate speech", "campaign finance reform") to suppress their opponents.
Just ask the guy who was against the Iraq war in a red state; just because it's not written into the law but enforced by your neighbours (who'll beat you up for wearing anti-bush t-shirts), it's still censorship.
You'll generally NOT get beaten up for speaking out against the right-wing in a "red" state (or wearing a T-shirt to do it for you). But just try saying anything anti-PC in a "blue" one!
In general the American Pluralist ("red state") ideology still believes in free speech - often to the "defend to the death your right to be wrong" level. (But they're usually quite willing to argue right back.) The Liberal ("blue state") ideology, on the other hand, believes in free speech only as long as you agree with them, and has quite the track record of using both violence (assault, theft, vandalism, arson, bombing,
It's not that cut and dried, of course. There are some hotheadded nutcases - and splinter nutgroups - in every culture. But when it comes to quantity of violence, or institutionalization of violence, against political opponents, nothing else is in the same ballpark as the left wing.
However, this is all academic. It's easy enough to set up your own root servers and just peer into the ICANN ones, append all .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .etc entries found there with .us, and go from there.
.com) they all have to go to a common server to process the transaction: Again that's run by ICANN's contractor.
That doesn't work. The joker gets played when you try to "go on from there".
The first time the ICANN and the UN separately assign "new-domain.com" to different customers, both new customers are broken.
When they assign the same block of IP numbers to two different customers they break, not just the namespace, but the routing tables. At that point the ISPs MUST cut the net apart (in at least that IP range) to insure packets get through.
And heaven help innovation if they both assign, say, the same new port number to different services or the same new protocol number to different protocols. B-(
The point of the ICANN is NOT to run the root servers.
The point is that certain identifiers on the internet ("Assigned Names and Numbers") must be unique. (The root servers just publish their decisions on the domain namespace.)
Assigning unique identifiers pretty much requires a singular authority to make the indivisible transactions. A hierarchy has been established so some of the large, busy namespaces can be divvied up into chunks that can be administered separately. But somebody has to administer the bottom-layer chunk and right now that's whatever contractor is deligated by ICANN (Network Solutions Inc.). And while multiple registrars are allowed to hand out names in some chunks of the namespace (such as
Even if you tried to solve this distributed update problem with something like a byzantine generals algorithm, somebody has to decide who are the members of the authoritative set of byzantine generals. Oops! Back to square one.
My regime would do that! Also bring back ... dueling code (hand to hand weapons only)
So in your society the body-beautiful jocks will be able to get away with anything and the weaker, less coordinated, and handicapped better knuckle under, or be challenged to a duel they can neve win.
No, thanks.
Challenged party gets to chose weapons. ANY weapon that doesn't do colateral damage to third parties.
Sniper rifles.
Shotguns.
Two hotdogs, one injected with samonella, one with yogurt culture.
Chalenger does NOT get to call the game.
Try to bring back dueling on your "no firearms" terms and you'll find out one thing about dueling with firearms: When a tyrant imposes his will in such a manner, no challenge is necessary.
---
"Colonists win the toss! English army has to wear read suits and can only shoot when lined up in rows. Colonists get to wear brown-and-green and shoot from behind trees."
Hearty agreement.
Why do we need a definition, or a 'shield' law?
Because the Supreme Court ruled that (despite their claims and history of defending them by passively-resisting all the way to jail) the free press clause of the First Amendment does NOT give journalists a privilege to refuse to reveal their sources when that is demanded by the legal system.
That can be fixed by a constitutional amendment to clarify the issue. Or it can be fixed by a law to explicitly grant such a privilege.
A law may be less stable (since it's subject to easy revision and relatively easy overturning). But it's a LOT easier and quicker to get into effect.
Also: You can use a law to debug the wording, then promote it to an amendment if courts find something in the constitution to trump it while it's still just a law.
But such a law will serve as a statement of congress' intent that their OTHER laws shouldn't be interpreted to mean journalists must reveal sources unless the other law explicitly says so. (It can also serve as a statement that CONGRESS intepreted the First to mean what the reporters claim). Making laws to implement the constitutional guarantees in particular situations - as long as they don't REDUCE the extent of the guarantees to less than the Framers' clear intent - is within the powers of the Congress.
With such a law in place the courts may back off, making the amendment unnecessary.
(Or the Supremes might decide the right of litigants to due process of law trumps a shield law. In that case promotion to an amendment will be necessary.)
... and that publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical in print or electronic form; ...
So does that mean that bloggers are "journalists" if their blog updates on a periodic schedule?
That Matt Drudge is not a "covered person"?
I don't think, after the Monica Mess (just for starters), that there's any question whether Matt qualifies as a journalist or The Drudge Report as a journal, despite its aperiodicity.
Then there's the folks at Little Green Footballs, Powerline, and Free Republic that caught CBS and Rather with the forged documents. (Powerline is clearly a journal of opinion, while Free Republic is essentially a large-C Conservative Slashdot.)
I think these names need to be brought into the congressional debate on this bill - to get some congresscritters on record about their intent, and to set up court future court tests on whether the exclusion of bloggers is constitutional.