I have always been taken aback by the argument from my fellow libertarians in favor of users fees. If there is any part of society we don't want operating on greed, it is an institution that has the ability to back up its rules with lethal force and the depravation of liberty and property. Take a good look at what the USPTO is doing today and look at what it used to do when it was paid for with tax revenues only.
I think there is a good libertarian case for why user fees are a terrible idea. I personally favor the use of consumption taxes as an alternative since they are the best of both worlds. They tie the government's revenues to the health of the society and yet they keep the government from gaining a financial incentive to disregard quality of service and ethics.
This is just being proposed because the politicians are trying to secure the welfare and poverty pimp votes. Where does this stop, huh? Why not provide them with free service from DirecTV? How about a free $30,000 car for everyone whose income is under $20,000? Why not a 2500ft^2 house on at least a half acre too?
Broadband isn't going to do anything for the working class that dialup won't. Broadband is a luxury, not an essential. Internet access itself is not essential and quite frankly I am sick of hearing these "egalitarianism for the sake of egalitarianism" arguments. I can at least understand food stamps and medicare, but this? This is just dirty politics.
And they are absolutely right that this is unfair competition. Most likely what the taxpayers will get is a shitty QoS that is supported by their tax dollars and that of the local telecom as well. Ain't that rich? They tax the local telecom so they can compete against it. So what people get is a big corporation that doesn't like competition and a government-run competitor that is too inept to compete.
And there really is nothing that is OSS that can compete against it right now. Nvu is slowly becoming usable, but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0. Tools like WYSIWYG web pager designer tools are going to be important to making OSS viable with many businesses and home users.
They can make Napalm, C4 and other explosive/incendiary devices from common chemicals now. In many ways, the common man has never had the kinds of options before that he has today to fight back. In the ME it's terribly easy for people who want to, to get automatic rifles and if they're dedicated enough, they can always park a car bomb outside the local court or police station. You know what they need for that? Fertilizer, gas and a stolen car. Be ironic, steal a cop's car. The Iranian people can fight back.
Not saying it'd be easy, but from the reports that I have seen, there are a lot in the government itself who hate the Mullahs and wouldn't really want to fight the people. Hitherto what seems to be the problem is mainly a lack of a good leader to unite those who hate their government.
The US, Europe and others trade with China because they are able to produce goods so inexpensively, but we never think of the costs to our societies. They are doing to us, in many ways, what the Brits did to them with the Opium Wars. We are addicted to cheap products and so many aren't willing to give them up to compensate for the human casualties of the commerce: the millions of Chinese who work for basically nothing, especially in prison labor camps.
It wasn't until I became a Christian that I realized that trading with countries like China isn't going to tear down their bad governments. The Chinese government is only going to get empowered because most of the Chinese "capitalists" are actually Communist Party or PLA stooges. You buy Chinese, often you are buying from a company that is tied directly or indirectly to their military, no matter what industry. Their "capitalism" is a facade put up for our deception.
If we trade with China, we are effectively legitimizing what they do to their people. If you do not believe that there is a true, firm right and wrong that transcends cultural differences then your objections to their bad treatment mean nothing. The first world nations desparately need to stop granting them pseudo legitimacy by being a PRC trading partner.
The RIAA's members can always lean heavily on their customers' consciences to go legit when they download a 128k mp3 from Kazaa, but if they buy a perfect replica of the album they have no reason to suspect that they will buy a legit copy. Almost every pirated copy that is sold is a sale that has to be totally written off. Few customers would probably even know the difference. With file sharing, there is always the hope that the user will go legit.
Americans have brought much of this on ourselves
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Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
We have created an environment that is becoming increasingly more hostile to free enterprise. The U.S. took a real beating on the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index and yet so few Americans care. Too many Americans want benefits out the ass from the government and then complain when the economy starts to take a hit.
Here's a solution: tort reform and deregulation of the work environment. Get rid of Social Security and Medicare and make employees responsible for their own medical care and retirement. With retirement accounts it is possible to come out much richer than one would get with SS. Many of the people who have no insurance and rely on medicare could afford private insurance if they give up amenities like cable tv, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food. There are also many charities that support those who can't, but a lot of people don't want be, to pull from Office Space, "like those scumbags at the welfare office" (in this case, the charity).
Stop tossing billions at boondoggles like welfare, corporate subsidization, "public education," the war on drugs and foreign wars like the current one in Iraq where we just piss away our money and manpower for nothing and maybe Americans will cost a lot less to hire. You have a choice: the level of government services you have today or your job tomorrow. They cannot coexst because there simply isn't enough money to support both.
American tech workers, you want to blame anyone on why you cost so much? Blame the Leviathan for imposing massive costs through outrageous taxes that go to wasteful programs and massive regulations that often make no sense. Stop voting for the Democrats and Republicans and vote for people who want the system reformed.
The big media would love to take him down personally for creating bit torrent, and the only thing stopping them is that Bit Torrent is just legitimate enough to be a hard case to sell. Enough users use it legally, that they couldn't argue it's primarily for piracy. But what if that were to change?
Bit Torrent is just a tool, it cannot do anything illegal by itself. The user must choose to do something illegal with it. Going after Cohen is no different than going after a gun maker for gun crime. The exact same arguments used against gun makers could be used against Cohen. He's not screening his users, is he? Neither are the gun makers. In both cases, some of their users are committing crimes. Different types of crimes, but either way, a legitimate tool is used for an illegitimate purpose.
In the long run, the only way to win against the forces opposed to individual liberties is to link our causes. This is the IP equivalent of what the NRA faces with guns, so it only makes sense for both camps to realize we are fighting the same ideology just in two different manifestations.
Allies, even allies that don't really understand your cause as well as you do, are important. Many of the gun owners' postings I have read on right wing boards frequently have derisive attitudes toward the **AA now and see them as the computer equivalent of "gun grabbers." It's a fitting analogy because the **AA want to be the "computer grabbers." Mandatory DRM is akin to mandatory trigger locks because either way, some bureaucrat is telling you how you must maintain and use your property.
To protect our rights we must continue to assert individual responsibility as the solution and push for solutions that go after perpetrators of crime, not their tools. That is the only way we can not only cut down on crime, but also protect people like Cohen from amoral, mercenary attorneys like those behind the **AA
It is a very vague patent that covers an entire paradigm of programming, not a specific implementation of any sort. For example, if Microsoft were to create "AspectVB" they could patent AOP programming for Visual Basic since it is a fairly specific idea. AOP however is an abstract idea that cuts across dozens of legitimate implementations.
IANAL, but I just don't see how they could actually use this patent to trash a specific implementation. They haven't gone after AspectJ so this is probably just a defensive patent anyway to make it impossible for big corporations to patent AOP in general.
So much of the criticism about blogging that I have seen seems to be embodied in LJ. Most of the real blogs I have seen that use WordPress or MovableType seem to be done by people who are at least semi-serious about what they write. Most MT users I have seen, for example, put at least a modicum of thought into what they write and it's rarely about their life unless it affects the direction of the blog or is amusing to the readers.
LJs are appropriate for people who want to help people in their lives who are far away keep up with what's going on in their life and stuff like that. They don't seem to be very useful for much else. Blogs on the other hand tend to be focused on issues like politics, coding, music, etc.
A simple process called a legislative amendment. All it would take would be for some government-lovin member of Congress to attach a rider to a piece of legislation such as an appropriations bill and all of a sudden, VoIP is covered under CALEA. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch either. They'd just call it "bring CALEA into the 21st century" and most people would just give two thumbs up and not care.
Btw, with a court order, all of those protocols you listed can be intercepted.
Emphasis on the word, try. Most of the time we end up doing it the old fashion way which is that when someone wants to illustrate a complex idea instead of using a neat little UML diagram that half the team will spend most of the meeting trying to figure out, we just draw it on a board with a marker. It's low tech, but it works.
We unfortunately bought into the whole "Rational" line of products and they have turned out to be horrible. It's had many of us pining for CVS and bugzilla.
VoIP providers will be expected to conform to CALEA. The federal government will try to get VoIP providers to make their software fully wiretapable which will do one of two things probably. It'll either put open source developers using encryption at odds with federal policy or require that we all expose ourselves online.
You know it's sad when your father, someone who spent 27 years in the U.S military and federal law enforcement looks at you dead seriously and says that generally speaking the biggest lie you'll hear from the federal government is: "we're from the government, we're hear to help you." I'll never forget my dad reading about Carnivore and realizing that his reaction to it was probably a good example of why he retired from federal law enforcement under him. How we cheered when Carnivore proved to be a failure.
Copyright law violations are a federal matter, rape and murder are a state matter. If you feel that the latter are not being enforced properly then push for reform in your state if after some investigation, you still believe it's not level. Your state may be tougher on such crime that you think, VA for example which doesn't seem that tough compared to some, has the second highest execution rate in the U.S. last I checked.
The irony of your choice, rape, is that it is so often not punished because so many young women lie about it. I know tons of girls who claim they were raped. Some even go so far as to claim that several guys have raped them because their standard of rape is being pushy, not literally forcing them to. One of the biggest problems now are how so many college age women in the U.S. will get drunk, fuck and then freak when they're sobre and cry rape. I know guys who've been caught up in that before.
If you want to blame anyone for rape laws not being enforced much, blame the young women who cry rape as a weapon against guys they don't like. The situation has gotten so bad that a friend of mine watched a number of her girlfriends get literally raped back home in New Jersey and the cops said that since they had no real injuries they wouldn't believe them. The only way to get justice back is to take all of the Tawana Brawleys and lock them up in the deepest, darkest hole in a maximum security prison, "coed" and let Bubba have some "real sweet meat" for a change.
Bah, this is the most delicious computer ever
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Gingerbread Computers!
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· Score: 4, Funny
How long before websites are targetted by the FCC and FEC under the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act. Something tells me that the nipple slip isn't the tip of the iceberg, but a cover for a general push toward censorship and the FCC will no doubt be one of the agencies that spearheads such an assault. Unbeknownst to many, the greatest attack on free speech under Bush wasn't related to terrorism or "homeland security," or even nipplegate, but the CFR bill which outright bans many forms of political speech before an election.
The FCC serves no legitimate purpose today. The best thing that could happen would be for the federal government to take back all of the frequencies and then make them availible to local ISPs to provide high quality wireless service. The applications for such would be amazing. Imagine, a combination of RSS and mp3/ogg streaming so that a college radio station in bumblefuck nowhere can be heard out in NYC, Chicago, LA, etc maybe even in London, Tokyo and other major cities around the world.
But of course, as they say, what is good for GM is good for America. Being motivated political in part by Judao-Christian morality, I have to ask in rebuttal, if GM said that sacrificing our children to Molech were good for GM, would we still be saying that GM's interests are America's?
The public has a hard enough time in most first world nations keeping the governments that are over them in check, now imagine a global bureacracy. Ever wonder why it is that so many parties are opposed to the WTO? The irony of it is that the WTO, GATT, NAFTA and other deals are opposed usually by the most rabidly capitalist groups for this very reason. It's usually the "moderates" (whatever the hell that means), "liberals" (in America) and others with no strong support of property rights that support these groups. Michael Badnarik for example, opposed our involvement in all three of those groups and probably the UN as well for those reasons.
Face it, global government exists only to serve global elites. If you think that the UN really cares about the poor and destitute, then ask why Kofi Annan and company were personally involved in the Oil for Food scandal. "Mr. America sucks because we're rich and powerful" who then turns around and dips from a food fund for poor, literally starving Iraqi children. This is the face of global government. He won't get nailed by the ICC, but private Joe Smith who shoots a civilian under questionable circumstances will be all but denied due process under the ICC.
Global government: the worst of capitalism and communism mixed together under one roof, with no accountability and ultimately no pretense of the rule of real law.
They hired Jay Allen, creator of MovableType blacklist, as project manager, but MT BL is not part of the standard distribution. It's not a standard feature, nor is there anything designed in house that provides the same functionality if God-forbid Jay Allen won't let them bundle it as a standard feature. The worst part is that it is having major problems working with MT 3.121, the latest release.
Personally I think MT needs to just scrap the entire comment system and start over again. They need to implement a MT BL like system comprehensively, they need to ban ips tied to spam bots and they need to collect the information about the spammers so that MT users can try legal challenges.
Spam bots should be not only a civil offense, but a crime to use. The way that they are used against blogs is basically on par with defacing a website and often the stuff they push is illegal for minors to view. This is why we need something like the Child Online Protection Act. With something like that we could get spammers on criminal offenses for using spam bots indiscriminately.
The prof I had for my DB class largely hates MySQL with a passion and is an Oracle partisan, but he looked one of the students in the eye and told them to basically shut up when they complained about MySQL versus Oracle. He told the whiner that they should be glad that it worked at all and that they have no right to expect any quality for something they didn't pay for. For some it was a profound statement: MySQL kinda works for you, well guess what, you haven't spent any money on it so who are you to bitch at the guys who work on it... they owe you nothing.
Products from Zend can be expected to perform very well, but not something that is free for public use. The fact that PHP is so high quality, open and free, gives it some leeway that Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation doesn't deserve. People don't have to spend several thousand dollars to setup an environment capable of hosting PHP because it's free, and all of the tools needed to run it are free.
None of this of course negates the fact that security holes in PHP are just as serious in practice as those in ASP.NET and need to be fixed ASAP. The difference is how we should perceive free software bugs versus commercial software bugs. When we actually buy a license for a commercial product, we should be able to expect something reasonably akin to top notch quality. Microsoft is getting better in that regard, but the level of quality they have delivered in the past is abysmal compared to what a commercial entity should be delivering.
By all reasonable expectations, a company like Microsoft should be delivering extremely secure products. They pay very large sums of money to hire some of the brightest minds, and they charge accordingly. Therefore the public has a right to expect extremely comprehensive testing, including OpenBSD-style line-by-line code audits for things like buffer overflows. Does it not surprise anyone that a small project like OpenBSD can find the time and manpower to do that on such a large code base for the manpower present, but Microsoft, a company with probably at least ten times the manpower for just the Windows team cannot?
Europe is so concerned about for-profit corporations keeping personal information, but not national governments. Isn't it ironic, the worst the corporations can do to you is annoy you at dinner time and be intrusive with their advertising. The worst the state can do in Europe is put you behind bars for life. Now, which is the lesser of the two evils to have keeping personal information about you?
Personally, I'd take the corporations any day over the U.S. Government. But what do I know? I'm just an American capitalist...
They'll just make it illegal to write and publish software without an engineering license. Afterall, no one but freaks does anything complicated and non-sensual for fun...
Old timers tend to not understand the concept of collaborative coding. My dad is a good example. One time he just looked at me and said that who in their right mind would right a program and NOT charge for it?
If anyone I know wants to try out Linux I can just give them the Knoppix CD and tell them that while they can't install this demo, they can install something almost identical to it. Then if they like it you can give them Mandrake, SuSE or God-forbid, Fedora. It's great and Microsoft has nothing on it right now.
Sexual freedom in Saudi Arabia Fiscal accountability in corporate America Bug-free programming in Microsoft products... Intelligence and integrity in GWB?
Have a national biometrics database connected to your SSN, name, etc.
Require every voter to submit to a comprehensive biometrics exam and tag their vote with the data. Second, anyone who accesses the system to have any interaction with the results whatsoever has to submit to a biometrics scan that gets their DNA, finger prints and retina scan as well as name and all that. Do not allow mass deletion of any data without at least five third parties and the press observing the action and recording it for public record. Finally, only allow mass deletion of data from the vote database after the election is over.
The only way that voter fraud is going to be majorly cracked down on without draconian measures is to eliminate entirely voter anonymity and to arrest anyone caught try to allow it to happen. Too often voter fraud gets pushed under the rug because politicians are afraid of shrill, reactionary activists screaming "disenfranchisement." Who who would have thought that the Democrats represent the dead or the Republicans the democratic voters who are Republicans in their heart (a la this current debacle)?
One could easily argue that mass voter fraud should be legally regarded as coup d'etat, not a low-level, insignificant crime. Seriously, voter fraud should be one of our most severe crimes once it reaches a certain level. It is attempting to overthrow an elected government by means other than armed thugs entering the parliament/congress and declaring an end to democratic government.
Look at data mining and p2p
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Digital Packrats
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Many people have what appears to be an innate love of hoarding data. I know many people who have 10-25GB of music they have downloaded illegally and don't listen to, and that's just the music they don't really listen to much or at all! Why do they have it? They just don't know.
Of course the simplest answer may be that it is the 21st century's equivalent of collecting baseball cards. The latest way for my peers and I to trade music anyway is by syncing our iPods and sending over several thousand songs at once. Maybe it's "communism card collecting..."
Slashdot Mirror
I have always been taken aback by the argument from my fellow libertarians in favor of users fees. If there is any part of society we don't want operating on greed, it is an institution that has the ability to back up its rules with lethal force and the depravation of liberty and property. Take a good look at what the USPTO is doing today and look at what it used to do when it was paid for with tax revenues only.
I think there is a good libertarian case for why user fees are a terrible idea. I personally favor the use of consumption taxes as an alternative since they are the best of both worlds. They tie the government's revenues to the health of the society and yet they keep the government from gaining a financial incentive to disregard quality of service and ethics.
This is just being proposed because the politicians are trying to secure the welfare and poverty pimp votes. Where does this stop, huh? Why not provide them with free service from DirecTV? How about a free $30,000 car for everyone whose income is under $20,000? Why not a 2500ft^2 house on at least a half acre too?
Broadband isn't going to do anything for the working class that dialup won't. Broadband is a luxury, not an essential. Internet access itself is not essential and quite frankly I am sick of hearing these "egalitarianism for the sake of egalitarianism" arguments. I can at least understand food stamps and medicare, but this? This is just dirty politics.
And they are absolutely right that this is unfair competition. Most likely what the taxpayers will get is a shitty QoS that is supported by their tax dollars and that of the local telecom as well. Ain't that rich? They tax the local telecom so they can compete against it. So what people get is a big corporation that doesn't like competition and a government-run competitor that is too inept to compete.
And there really is nothing that is OSS that can compete against it right now. Nvu is slowly becoming usable, but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0. Tools like WYSIWYG web pager designer tools are going to be important to making OSS viable with many businesses and home users.
They can make Napalm, C4 and other explosive/incendiary devices from common chemicals now. In many ways, the common man has never had the kinds of options before that he has today to fight back. In the ME it's terribly easy for people who want to, to get automatic rifles and if they're dedicated enough, they can always park a car bomb outside the local court or police station. You know what they need for that? Fertilizer, gas and a stolen car. Be ironic, steal a cop's car. The Iranian people can fight back.
Not saying it'd be easy, but from the reports that I have seen, there are a lot in the government itself who hate the Mullahs and wouldn't really want to fight the people. Hitherto what seems to be the problem is mainly a lack of a good leader to unite those who hate their government.
The US, Europe and others trade with China because they are able to produce goods so inexpensively, but we never think of the costs to our societies. They are doing to us, in many ways, what the Brits did to them with the Opium Wars. We are addicted to cheap products and so many aren't willing to give them up to compensate for the human casualties of the commerce: the millions of Chinese who work for basically nothing, especially in prison labor camps.
It wasn't until I became a Christian that I realized that trading with countries like China isn't going to tear down their bad governments. The Chinese government is only going to get empowered because most of the Chinese "capitalists" are actually Communist Party or PLA stooges. You buy Chinese, often you are buying from a company that is tied directly or indirectly to their military, no matter what industry. Their "capitalism" is a facade put up for our deception.
If we trade with China, we are effectively legitimizing what they do to their people. If you do not believe that there is a true, firm right and wrong that transcends cultural differences then your objections to their bad treatment mean nothing. The first world nations desparately need to stop granting them pseudo legitimacy by being a PRC trading partner.
The RIAA's members can always lean heavily on their customers' consciences to go legit when they download a 128k mp3 from Kazaa, but if they buy a perfect replica of the album they have no reason to suspect that they will buy a legit copy. Almost every pirated copy that is sold is a sale that has to be totally written off. Few customers would probably even know the difference. With file sharing, there is always the hope that the user will go legit.
We have created an environment that is becoming increasingly more hostile to free enterprise. The U.S. took a real beating on the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index and yet so few Americans care. Too many Americans want benefits out the ass from the government and then complain when the economy starts to take a hit.
Here's a solution: tort reform and deregulation of the work environment. Get rid of Social Security and Medicare and make employees responsible for their own medical care and retirement. With retirement accounts it is possible to come out much richer than one would get with SS. Many of the people who have no insurance and rely on medicare could afford private insurance if they give up amenities like cable tv, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food. There are also many charities that support those who can't, but a lot of people don't want be, to pull from Office Space, "like those scumbags at the welfare office" (in this case, the charity).
Stop tossing billions at boondoggles like welfare, corporate subsidization, "public education," the war on drugs and foreign wars like the current one in Iraq where we just piss away our money and manpower for nothing and maybe Americans will cost a lot less to hire. You have a choice: the level of government services you have today or your job tomorrow. They cannot coexst because there simply isn't enough money to support both.
American tech workers, you want to blame anyone on why you cost so much? Blame the Leviathan for imposing massive costs through outrageous taxes that go to wasteful programs and massive regulations that often make no sense. Stop voting for the Democrats and Republicans and vote for people who want the system reformed.
The big media would love to take him down personally for creating bit torrent, and the only thing stopping them is that Bit Torrent is just legitimate enough to be a hard case to sell. Enough users use it legally, that they couldn't argue it's primarily for piracy. But what if that were to change?
Bit Torrent is just a tool, it cannot do anything illegal by itself. The user must choose to do something illegal with it. Going after Cohen is no different than going after a gun maker for gun crime. The exact same arguments used against gun makers could be used against Cohen. He's not screening his users, is he? Neither are the gun makers. In both cases, some of their users are committing crimes. Different types of crimes, but either way, a legitimate tool is used for an illegitimate purpose.
In the long run, the only way to win against the forces opposed to individual liberties is to link our causes. This is the IP equivalent of what the NRA faces with guns, so it only makes sense for both camps to realize we are fighting the same ideology just in two different manifestations.
Allies, even allies that don't really understand your cause as well as you do, are important. Many of the gun owners' postings I have read on right wing boards frequently have derisive attitudes toward the **AA now and see them as the computer equivalent of "gun grabbers." It's a fitting analogy because the **AA want to be the "computer grabbers." Mandatory DRM is akin to mandatory trigger locks because either way, some bureaucrat is telling you how you must maintain and use your property.
To protect our rights we must continue to assert individual responsibility as the solution and push for solutions that go after perpetrators of crime, not their tools. That is the only way we can not only cut down on crime, but also protect people like Cohen from amoral, mercenary attorneys like those behind the **AA
It is a very vague patent that covers an entire paradigm of programming, not a specific implementation of any sort. For example, if Microsoft were to create "AspectVB" they could patent AOP programming for Visual Basic since it is a fairly specific idea. AOP however is an abstract idea that cuts across dozens of legitimate implementations.
IANAL, but I just don't see how they could actually use this patent to trash a specific implementation. They haven't gone after AspectJ so this is probably just a defensive patent anyway to make it impossible for big corporations to patent AOP in general.
So much of the criticism about blogging that I have seen seems to be embodied in LJ. Most of the real blogs I have seen that use WordPress or MovableType seem to be done by people who are at least semi-serious about what they write. Most MT users I have seen, for example, put at least a modicum of thought into what they write and it's rarely about their life unless it affects the direction of the blog or is amusing to the readers.
LJs are appropriate for people who want to help people in their lives who are far away keep up with what's going on in their life and stuff like that. They don't seem to be very useful for much else. Blogs on the other hand tend to be focused on issues like politics, coding, music, etc.
A simple process called a legislative amendment. All it would take would be for some government-lovin member of Congress to attach a rider to a piece of legislation such as an appropriations bill and all of a sudden, VoIP is covered under CALEA. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch either. They'd just call it "bring CALEA into the 21st century" and most people would just give two thumbs up and not care.
Btw, with a court order, all of those protocols you listed can be intercepted.
Emphasis on the word, try. Most of the time we end up doing it the old fashion way which is that when someone wants to illustrate a complex idea instead of using a neat little UML diagram that half the team will spend most of the meeting trying to figure out, we just draw it on a board with a marker. It's low tech, but it works.
We unfortunately bought into the whole "Rational" line of products and they have turned out to be horrible. It's had many of us pining for CVS and bugzilla.
VoIP providers will be expected to conform to CALEA. The federal government will try to get VoIP providers to make their software fully wiretapable which will do one of two things probably. It'll either put open source developers using encryption at odds with federal policy or require that we all expose ourselves online.
You know it's sad when your father, someone who spent 27 years in the U.S military and federal law enforcement looks at you dead seriously and says that generally speaking the biggest lie you'll hear from the federal government is: "we're from the government, we're hear to help you." I'll never forget my dad reading about Carnivore and realizing that his reaction to it was probably a good example of why he retired from federal law enforcement under him. How we cheered when Carnivore proved to be a failure.
Copyright law violations are a federal matter, rape and murder are a state matter. If you feel that the latter are not being enforced properly then push for reform in your state if after some investigation, you still believe it's not level. Your state may be tougher on such crime that you think, VA for example which doesn't seem that tough compared to some, has the second highest execution rate in the U.S. last I checked.
The irony of your choice, rape, is that it is so often not punished because so many young women lie about it. I know tons of girls who claim they were raped. Some even go so far as to claim that several guys have raped them because their standard of rape is being pushy, not literally forcing them to. One of the biggest problems now are how so many college age women in the U.S. will get drunk, fuck and then freak when they're sobre and cry rape. I know guys who've been caught up in that before.
If you want to blame anyone for rape laws not being enforced much, blame the young women who cry rape as a weapon against guys they don't like. The situation has gotten so bad that a friend of mine watched a number of her girlfriends get literally raped back home in New Jersey and the cops said that since they had no real injuries they wouldn't believe them. The only way to get justice back is to take all of the Tawana Brawleys and lock them up in the deepest, darkest hole in a maximum security prison, "coed" and let Bubba have some "real sweet meat" for a change.
This is more delicious
How long before websites are targetted by the FCC and FEC under the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act. Something tells me that the nipple slip isn't the tip of the iceberg, but a cover for a general push toward censorship and the FCC will no doubt be one of the agencies that spearheads such an assault. Unbeknownst to many, the greatest attack on free speech under Bush wasn't related to terrorism or "homeland security," or even nipplegate, but the CFR bill which outright bans many forms of political speech before an election.
The FCC serves no legitimate purpose today. The best thing that could happen would be for the federal government to take back all of the frequencies and then make them availible to local ISPs to provide high quality wireless service. The applications for such would be amazing. Imagine, a combination of RSS and mp3/ogg streaming so that a college radio station in bumblefuck nowhere can be heard out in NYC, Chicago, LA, etc maybe even in London, Tokyo and other major cities around the world.
But of course, as they say, what is good for GM is good for America. Being motivated political in part by Judao-Christian morality, I have to ask in rebuttal, if GM said that sacrificing our children to Molech were good for GM, would we still be saying that GM's interests are America's?
The public has a hard enough time in most first world nations keeping the governments that are over them in check, now imagine a global bureacracy. Ever wonder why it is that so many parties are opposed to the WTO? The irony of it is that the WTO, GATT, NAFTA and other deals are opposed usually by the most rabidly capitalist groups for this very reason. It's usually the "moderates" (whatever the hell that means), "liberals" (in America) and others with no strong support of property rights that support these groups. Michael Badnarik for example, opposed our involvement in all three of those groups and probably the UN as well for those reasons.
Face it, global government exists only to serve global elites. If you think that the UN really cares about the poor and destitute, then ask why Kofi Annan and company were personally involved in the Oil for Food scandal. "Mr. America sucks because we're rich and powerful" who then turns around and dips from a food fund for poor, literally starving Iraqi children. This is the face of global government. He won't get nailed by the ICC, but private Joe Smith who shoots a civilian under questionable circumstances will be all but denied due process under the ICC.
Global government: the worst of capitalism and communism mixed together under one roof, with no accountability and ultimately no pretense of the rule of real law.
They hired Jay Allen, creator of MovableType blacklist, as project manager, but MT BL is not part of the standard distribution. It's not a standard feature, nor is there anything designed in house that provides the same functionality if God-forbid Jay Allen won't let them bundle it as a standard feature. The worst part is that it is having major problems working with MT 3.121, the latest release.
Personally I think MT needs to just scrap the entire comment system and start over again. They need to implement a MT BL like system comprehensively, they need to ban ips tied to spam bots and they need to collect the information about the spammers so that MT users can try legal challenges.
Spam bots should be not only a civil offense, but a crime to use. The way that they are used against blogs is basically on par with defacing a website and often the stuff they push is illegal for minors to view. This is why we need something like the Child Online Protection Act. With something like that we could get spammers on criminal offenses for using spam bots indiscriminately.
The prof I had for my DB class largely hates MySQL with a passion and is an Oracle partisan, but he looked one of the students in the eye and told them to basically shut up when they complained about MySQL versus Oracle. He told the whiner that they should be glad that it worked at all and that they have no right to expect any quality for something they didn't pay for. For some it was a profound statement: MySQL kinda works for you, well guess what, you haven't spent any money on it so who are you to bitch at the guys who work on it... they owe you nothing.
Products from Zend can be expected to perform very well, but not something that is free for public use. The fact that PHP is so high quality, open and free, gives it some leeway that Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation doesn't deserve. People don't have to spend several thousand dollars to setup an environment capable of hosting PHP because it's free, and all of the tools needed to run it are free.
None of this of course negates the fact that security holes in PHP are just as serious in practice as those in ASP.NET and need to be fixed ASAP. The difference is how we should perceive free software bugs versus commercial software bugs. When we actually buy a license for a commercial product, we should be able to expect something reasonably akin to top notch quality. Microsoft is getting better in that regard, but the level of quality they have delivered in the past is abysmal compared to what a commercial entity should be delivering.
By all reasonable expectations, a company like Microsoft should be delivering extremely secure products. They pay very large sums of money to hire some of the brightest minds, and they charge accordingly. Therefore the public has a right to expect extremely comprehensive testing, including OpenBSD-style line-by-line code audits for things like buffer overflows. Does it not surprise anyone that a small project like OpenBSD can find the time and manpower to do that on such a large code base for the manpower present, but Microsoft, a company with probably at least ten times the manpower for just the Windows team cannot?
Europe is so concerned about for-profit corporations keeping personal information, but not national governments. Isn't it ironic, the worst the corporations can do to you is annoy you at dinner time and be intrusive with their advertising. The worst the state can do in Europe is put you behind bars for life. Now, which is the lesser of the two evils to have keeping personal information about you?
Personally, I'd take the corporations any day over the U.S. Government. But what do I know? I'm just an American capitalist...
They'll just make it illegal to write and publish software without an engineering license. Afterall, no one but freaks does anything complicated and non-sensual for fun...
Old timers tend to not understand the concept of collaborative coding. My dad is a good example. One time he just looked at me and said that who in their right mind would right a program and NOT charge for it?
If anyone I know wants to try out Linux I can just give them the Knoppix CD and tell them that while they can't install this demo, they can install something almost identical to it. Then if they like it you can give them Mandrake, SuSE or God-forbid, Fedora. It's great and Microsoft has nothing on it right now.
Isn't that like.....
Sexual freedom in Saudi Arabia
Fiscal accountability in corporate America
Bug-free programming in Microsoft products...
Intelligence and integrity in GWB?
Have a national biometrics database connected to your SSN, name, etc.
Require every voter to submit to a comprehensive biometrics exam and tag their vote with the data. Second, anyone who accesses the system to have any interaction with the results whatsoever has to submit to a biometrics scan that gets their DNA, finger prints and retina scan as well as name and all that. Do not allow mass deletion of any data without at least five third parties and the press observing the action and recording it for public record. Finally, only allow mass deletion of data from the vote database after the election is over.
The only way that voter fraud is going to be majorly cracked down on without draconian measures is to eliminate entirely voter anonymity and to arrest anyone caught try to allow it to happen. Too often voter fraud gets pushed under the rug because politicians are afraid of shrill, reactionary activists screaming "disenfranchisement." Who who would have thought that the Democrats represent the dead or the Republicans the democratic voters who are Republicans in their heart (a la this current debacle)?
One could easily argue that mass voter fraud should be legally regarded as coup d'etat, not a low-level, insignificant crime. Seriously, voter fraud should be one of our most severe crimes once it reaches a certain level. It is attempting to overthrow an elected government by means other than armed thugs entering the parliament/congress and declaring an end to democratic government.
Many people have what appears to be an innate love of hoarding data. I know many people who have 10-25GB of music they have downloaded illegally and don't listen to, and that's just the music they don't really listen to much or at all! Why do they have it? They just don't know.
Of course the simplest answer may be that it is the 21st century's equivalent of collecting baseball cards. The latest way for my peers and I to trade music anyway is by syncing our iPods and sending over several thousand songs at once. Maybe it's "communism card collecting..."