There's a difference between economic and social liberalism/conservatism. I am socially liberal and economically conservative. I don't buy this nonsense about shifting resources like Comrade Clinton is talking about, but I don't buy the moralistic bullshit that morons like Ashcroft spew, either. I am socially liberal and economically conservative.
Of course, if you take it to an extreme - like in your radical left example - you wind up with a bunch of people who think they know better than the people they're acting like. Very bizarre. The same thing happens on the right, however.
If you ignore windows ports of other GNU applications, you end up with linux having a great superiority over Windows
Huh? You can't just ignore the GNU stuff just because it's on Windows. If you're going to do that, you might as well say that if you ignore the things that were ported from UNIX to Linux, UNIX has a huge advantage.
Just because it doesn't come with Windows doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Technically, none of that other crap comes with Linux either. You just get your copy of Linux from a supplier that includes all those tools with it.
Whether or not a person believes that a word should be used in a public place because it is wrong is a function of morality.
Whether or not a word should be used in a public place because other people believe it should not be used in a public place is a function of politeness.
Therefore, telling a child that they should not use a word in public because other people believe it should not be used is a function of politeness.
Telling a child that they should not use a word in a public place because it is wrong is a function of morality.
Short of vulgarity laws existing to enforce a community's veiw of acceptable behavior, you have niether the right to be surrounded by polite people, nor the right to enforce your moral viewpoint on anyone else.
This difference of belief we have here is a function of social liberalism/conservatism. Liberals hate it when someone tries to enforce an arbitrary code of conduct on them. Conservatives want their own arbitrary code of conduct enforced on other people. To be honest, I view the conservative position as utterly idiotic. The idea that other people should presume to know what's better for me than I do when I am not afflicted by anything that would impair judgement and I'm not impacting any unwilling third party negatively is ludicrous. Obviously, society needs to protect itself to a reasonable extent, and that's when we hit laws. The argument is over just how much society needs to be saved from itself.
Your clear, concise understanding of technology issues is only undermined by the minor fact that you screwed up all of the examples that you gave. 1) The "640k" quip is a misunderstood urban legend. 2) There's nothing wrong with IPv4 which is why there is no rush to switch it out. 3) The fact that pretty much everything kept running on 1/1/00 even though most of it was never touched for an "update" suggests that maybe it wasn't a big deal after all.
On the subject of IP, the only inherent problem in IPv4 was that nobody expected us to try hooking everything including the kitchen sink - literally - to the Internet.
We see a child misbehaving in public, we morally have the responsibility to step and tell the child that they are doing wrong.
That's ridiculous. If I had children, I wouldn't trust 90% of you yahoos to "pitch in". What you and I consider "morally" acceptable are, quite possibly, light years apart. I don't give a rat's ass if a kid wanders around in public swearing and being "vulgar" and etc. etc. However, lots of other people do. Who's the one with the right to enforce their moral opinion here? If some bible thumping klan member explains to their child that it's morally wrong to say "fuck" but morally right to refer to black people as "niggers" and gay people as "faggots", do I have the moral right and obligation to go over and beat the kid in the head with my ideals which are completely opposite of that? Hardly. I may WANT to, but I don't have any RIGHT to.
And as a society, we do have the right to tell you how to raise your children. It is not just the family that raises the children, but the whole village.
Ummmmm. No.
We have the responsibility to protect your children from you, if necessary, the same way we have the responsibility to protect anyone else who needs it. We do not have the right, nor the responsibility, nor, for most of us, the inclination to tell you how to raise your children.
An excellent example of that is the recent decision that government can not, in fact, meddle in the affairs of parents who send their children to juvenile nudist camps. Of course, if they were sending them off to brothels, that would be a different story, and we would be obliged to step in and stop them because it would, in theory, be possible to show that such action is harmful.
The idea that I have either the right or the implied responsibility to assist other people in raising their children without an explicit request to do so is ridiculous.
Yeah, watching F911 will get you in the right frame of mind to watch a fantasy story.
Yea, no kidding. I guess if I watched over an hour and half of footage about all the fantastical nonsense Bush and his administration are always spitting, I'd become inured to the unrealistic world of comic books too.
There used to be lithium in several soft drinks. I don't think, however, that 7 UP was originally served specifically to mental patients as a result, and I'd imagine that it probably still is served to mental patients from time to time.
In fact, IIRC, 7-UP originally had an abominably long name that made it difficult to order when it first came out, suggesting that it was originally sold in stores, not served in asylums.
Bearing in mind that computer APIs and DNA structures are entirely unrelated, of course.... and you still get 1:1000 bugs:lines when you use the API.... and if you knew how to use the underlying functions, your apps would be smaller, faster, and much more stable... and that to learn how to do that you have to experiment, even if you burn your disk platter....
Yes, bad things can happen when you do experiments and something doesn't work like you thought it would. Christ, Newton tasted his damn chemicals. I'm sure THAT didn't do him any good. Does that mean he should have never done his experiments?
We have the insight. It's time to play. If we play carefully, we should be alright. If we goof up, oops. Chalk another failure up to science, just don't act like it's some new thing that when stuff goes wrong in the lab bad things can happen. The best way to learn how to do something right is to survive the firsthand results of doing it wrong. It's called progress. It can be painful. Deal with it.
Ah, but the spammers aren't and won't pay for their servers. They will continue to hijack other peoples machines through worms and trojans and just eat up the CPU time of the zombie machines.
sender pays stamping is a decent solution to spam, but it's not any solution to stupid lusers.
The solution to the luser problem is:
Education for the naive luser.
Network quarantine for the lazy luser
Criminal (or civil) penalties for the malicious luser.
People need to stop objecting to spam solutions based on the existance of other problems. Sender pays stamping doesn't stop viruses and trojans because it's not supposed to, other systems like firewalls, patches, and anti virus tools are supposed to. Rather than complaining that spam solutions don't solve the malware problem, we ought to be educating people on how to use these things and working on improving them.
Re:yay for legalized bribery!
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's consistent worrying about this flaming asshat's policy of blatantly handing out free kicks in the nuts to consumers on behalf of business interests that has prevented him from having a good track record on bad bills.
By all means - knock the hand wringing up a notch.
Let me take a wild guess at what might make someone say something that abysmally stupid.
You're sitting there in your faded blue pajamas because you're too damn fat for anything else. There are orangish stains up the tops of both thighs where you keep wiping your Doritos greased hands. There's a huge stain on the chest where you spilled your 60oz cherry cola from the Super Stop last night.
As your wandering along through Slashdot, you come upon my post stating my 150 pound weight. You reflect, for a moment, on those bygone days as a grade schooler when last you weighed so little, and then, in a fit of frustrated rage over your own self-inflicted morbid obesity, angrily ramble off the first thing that comes to your head.
Unfortunately, poor nutrition affects your ability to think and reason just as it does your body, and you, my friend, wound up rambling off some nonsense that suggests that mass is the determining factor in overall fitness.
Either that or you've been on the Atkins diet and developed a chronic brain disease. One or the other.
Holding weights straight out at your sides (as I recall is what this child is doing) is far more difficult than lifting them. I can lift about 140 pounds and move. I struggle to hold twenty pounds weights straight out at my sides, and I'm in fairly good shape, 22 years old, and only weigh 150 pounds.
I can only imagine the bodybuilding potential this child must have, but it begs the question: what sort of risks are associated with TOO MUCH muscle mass? I can imagine that bulking up to an extreme could eventually put a lot of stress on internal organs, the heart, etc. Anything else?
The CIA is not allowed to operate in the US, anything domestic is for the FBI, etc.
I know that, did you read the parent post?
Whenenever the CIA do almost anything, they are breaking the laws of the country in which they are working.
Which is irrelevant since we're not talking about anyone else's laws...
So, I can't really see how the CIA can have any legal power to do anything outside of the US...
As in "they're not going to get hauled in front of a Senate subcommittee when they get home".
Really, the US needs more draconian laws, which they have the legal right to enforce in other countries, that would really help things get under control. All which is needed is alot more weapons and a bigger army.
It's not that they USED the data, it's that they gave it away in an underhanded manner AND (at the very least in the case of Northwest) they betrayed their own privacy policies to do it.
Depending on the data collected, it might not have even been much of a concern if they'd have at least notified people. When an airline tells me they'll do one thing, then silently do exactly the opposite, it does not endear a whole lot of trust.
Here's a complete sentence you lumbering, trogolodytic, slope-skulled, grunting moron:
Not a single one of them would have been saved by the PATRIOT act even if it was 500 times more draconian than it is, because the CIA already had the legal power to neutralize the guilty parties in those cases before PATRIOT passed.
So, your theory here, I suppose, is that people who don't get caught because nobody can locate them when the authorities already have the legal power to arrest or kill them, would magically appear in broad daylight on the town square if we passed enough unnecessarily Draconian laws giving them... more legal powers that they didn't need to make an arrest or launch a raid? Good theory. Might I just say that I'm glad you're not the one in charge of guarding us?
You make it sound (intentional or not) like this was done as part of an investigation. This data, however, was provided as part of a screening tool test. Grabbing needed information to investigate a crime that has already occurred seems acceptable. Grabbing personal information to make people into unwitting, unwilling guinea pigs is not.
Welcome to the United States, where any random citizen is an enemy of the state.
It's much more convenient that way. All that actual investigating and charging with real crimes and such is so much WORK. It's just so much easier to declare people enemy combatants and have jack booted thugs drag them off in the night.
Besides, little Sarah, Agent Bob's daughter, thought it was GREAT FUN hooking up electrodes to the enemy combatants' nutsack when she got to sit in on the interrogation of one of these "terrorists-who-we-can't-actually-pin-with-a-crime " on take your daughter to work day.
Sadly, the fact that little Sarah was privvy to this information without the proper security clearance made her an enemy comabtant, and Agent Johnson was ordered to.... deal with her.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between economic and social liberalism/conservatism. I am socially liberal and economically conservative. I don't buy this nonsense about shifting resources like Comrade Clinton is talking about, but I don't buy the moralistic bullshit that morons like Ashcroft spew, either. I am socially liberal and economically conservative.
Of course, if you take it to an extreme - like in your radical left example - you wind up with a bunch of people who think they know better than the people they're acting like. Very bizarre. The same thing happens on the right, however.
If you ignore windows ports of other GNU applications, you end up with linux having a great superiority over Windows
Huh? You can't just ignore the GNU stuff just because it's on Windows. If you're going to do that, you might as well say that if you ignore the things that were ported from UNIX to Linux, UNIX has a huge advantage.
Just because it doesn't come with Windows doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Technically, none of that other crap comes with Linux either. You just get your copy of Linux from a supplier that includes all those tools with it.
Whether or not a person believes that a word should be used in a public place because it is wrong is a function of morality.
Whether or not a word should be used in a public place because other people believe it should not be used in a public place is a function of politeness.
Therefore, telling a child that they should not use a word in public because other people believe it should not be used is a function of politeness.
Telling a child that they should not use a word in a public place because it is wrong is a function of morality.
Short of vulgarity laws existing to enforce a community's veiw of acceptable behavior, you have niether the right to be surrounded by polite people, nor the right to enforce your moral viewpoint on anyone else.
This difference of belief we have here is a function of social liberalism/conservatism. Liberals hate it when someone tries to enforce an arbitrary code of conduct on them. Conservatives want their own arbitrary code of conduct enforced on other people. To be honest, I view the conservative position as utterly idiotic. The idea that other people should presume to know what's better for me than I do when I am not afflicted by anything that would impair judgement and I'm not impacting any unwilling third party negatively is ludicrous. Obviously, society needs to protect itself to a reasonable extent, and that's when we hit laws. The argument is over just how much society needs to be saved from itself.
Your clear, concise understanding of technology issues is only undermined by the minor fact that you screwed up all of the examples that you gave. 1) The "640k" quip is a misunderstood urban legend. 2) There's nothing wrong with IPv4 which is why there is no rush to switch it out. 3) The fact that pretty much everything kept running on 1/1/00 even though most of it was never touched for an "update" suggests that maybe it wasn't a big deal after all.
On the subject of IP, the only inherent problem in IPv4 was that nobody expected us to try hooking everything including the kitchen sink - literally - to the Internet.
We see a child misbehaving in public, we morally have the responsibility to step and tell the child that they are doing wrong.
That's ridiculous. If I had children, I wouldn't trust 90% of you yahoos to "pitch in". What you and I consider "morally" acceptable are, quite possibly, light years apart. I don't give a rat's ass if a kid wanders around in public swearing and being "vulgar" and etc. etc. However, lots of other people do. Who's the one with the right to enforce their moral opinion here? If some bible thumping klan member explains to their child that it's morally wrong to say "fuck" but morally right to refer to black people as "niggers" and gay people as "faggots", do I have the moral right and obligation to go over and beat the kid in the head with my ideals which are completely opposite of that? Hardly. I may WANT to, but I don't have any RIGHT to.
And as a society, we do have the right to tell you how to raise your children. It is not just the family that raises the children, but the whole village.
Ummmmm. No.
We have the responsibility to protect your children from you, if necessary, the same way we have the responsibility to protect anyone else who needs it. We do not have the right, nor the responsibility, nor, for most of us, the inclination to tell you how to raise your children.
An excellent example of that is the recent decision that government can not, in fact, meddle in the affairs of parents who send their children to juvenile nudist camps. Of course, if they were sending them off to brothels, that would be a different story, and we would be obliged to step in and stop them because it would, in theory, be possible to show that such action is harmful.
The idea that I have either the right or the implied responsibility to assist other people in raising their children without an explicit request to do so is ridiculous.
To us outsiders, all of you that are into politics live in a state of delusion.
That's okay. It goes well with the state of apathy we perceive in you.
Holy crap, people! I was just slinging mud at the mud slinger! I kind thought it would just get modded away for crying out loud.
I can't believe you folks are sitting here debating the moderations on my comment... it's SPIDER MAN! C'mon, geeks! COMIC BOOKS!
We have MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DEBATE!
Like Spider Man gettin' some with Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy at the same time....
Yeah, watching F911 will get you in the right frame of mind to watch a fantasy story.
Yea, no kidding. I guess if I watched over an hour and half of footage about all the fantastical nonsense Bush and his administration are always spitting, I'd become inured to the unrealistic world of comic books too.
Oh wait... you meant.... never mind.
You know you really have something going for you when a single application in your product line helps defines it own genre of exploits:
Or, at the very least, less money.
Plus, the Microsoft programmers will come out of the same school of hacking as their clueless boss, and then get our jobs.
So, at the very least, MUCH less money.
There used to be lithium in several soft drinks. I don't think, however, that 7 UP was originally served specifically to mental patients as a result, and I'd imagine that it probably still is served to mental patients from time to time.
In fact, IIRC, 7-UP originally had an abominably long name that made it difficult to order when it first came out, suggesting that it was originally sold in stores, not served in asylums.
Bearing in mind that computer APIs and DNA structures are entirely unrelated, of course.... and you still get 1:1000 bugs:lines when you use the API.... and if you knew how to use the underlying functions, your apps would be smaller, faster, and much more stable... and that to learn how to do that you have to experiment, even if you burn your disk platter....
Yes, bad things can happen when you do experiments and something doesn't work like you thought it would. Christ, Newton tasted his damn chemicals. I'm sure THAT didn't do him any good. Does that mean he should have never done his experiments?
We have the insight. It's time to play. If we play carefully, we should be alright. If we goof up, oops. Chalk another failure up to science, just don't act like it's some new thing that when stuff goes wrong in the lab bad things can happen. The best way to learn how to do something right is to survive the firsthand results of doing it wrong. It's called progress. It can be painful. Deal with it.
Ah, but the spammers aren't and won't pay for their servers. They will continue to hijack other peoples machines through worms and trojans and just eat up the CPU time of the zombie machines.
sender pays stamping is a decent solution to spam, but it's not any solution to stupid lusers.
The solution to the luser problem is:
People need to stop objecting to spam solutions based on the existance of other problems. Sender pays stamping doesn't stop viruses and trojans because it's not supposed to, other systems like firewalls, patches, and anti virus tools are supposed to. Rather than complaining that spam solutions don't solve the malware problem, we ought to be educating people on how to use these things and working on improving them.
It's consistent worrying about this flaming asshat's policy of blatantly handing out free kicks in the nuts to consumers on behalf of business interests that has prevented him from having a good track record on bad bills.
By all means - knock the hand wringing up a notch.
And you base this brilliant observation on.......?
I think you need to step away from the Captain Kangaroo reruns my little anonymous friend.
Let me take a wild guess at what might make someone say something that abysmally stupid.
You're sitting there in your faded blue pajamas because you're too damn fat for anything else. There are orangish stains up the tops of both thighs where you keep wiping your Doritos greased hands. There's a huge stain on the chest where you spilled your 60oz cherry cola from the Super Stop last night.
As your wandering along through Slashdot, you come upon my post stating my 150 pound weight. You reflect, for a moment, on those bygone days as a grade schooler when last you weighed so little, and then, in a fit of frustrated rage over your own self-inflicted morbid obesity, angrily ramble off the first thing that comes to your head.
Unfortunately, poor nutrition affects your ability to think and reason just as it does your body, and you, my friend, wound up rambling off some nonsense that suggests that mass is the determining factor in overall fitness.
Either that or you've been on the Atkins diet and developed a chronic brain disease. One or the other.
Holding weights straight out at your sides (as I recall is what this child is doing) is far more difficult than lifting them. I can lift about 140 pounds and move. I struggle to hold twenty pounds weights straight out at my sides, and I'm in fairly good shape, 22 years old, and only weigh 150 pounds.
I can only imagine the bodybuilding potential this child must have, but it begs the question: what sort of risks are associated with TOO MUCH muscle mass? I can imagine that bulking up to an extreme could eventually put a lot of stress on internal organs, the heart, etc. Anything else?
The CIA is not allowed to operate in the US, anything domestic is for the FBI, etc.
I know that, did you read the parent post?
Whenenever the CIA do almost anything, they are breaking the laws of the country in which they are working.
Which is irrelevant since we're not talking about anyone else's laws...
So, I can't really see how the CIA can have any legal power to do anything outside of the US...
As in "they're not going to get hauled in front of a Senate subcommittee when they get home".
Really, the US needs more draconian laws, which they have the legal right to enforce in other countries, that would really help things get under control. All which is needed is alot more weapons and a bigger army.
Justficiation for that proposal?
It's not that they USED the data, it's that they gave it away in an underhanded manner AND (at the very least in the case of Northwest) they betrayed their own privacy policies to do it.
Depending on the data collected, it might not have even been much of a concern if they'd have at least notified people. When an airline tells me they'll do one thing, then silently do exactly the opposite, it does not endear a whole lot of trust.
Here's a complete sentence you lumbering, trogolodytic, slope-skulled, grunting moron:
Not a single one of them would have been saved by the PATRIOT act even if it was 500 times more draconian than it is, because the CIA already had the legal power to neutralize the guilty parties in those cases before PATRIOT passed.
So, your theory here, I suppose, is that people who don't get caught because nobody can locate them when the authorities already have the legal power to arrest or kill them, would magically appear in broad daylight on the town square if we passed enough unnecessarily Draconian laws giving them... more legal powers that they didn't need to make an arrest or launch a raid? Good theory. Might I just say that I'm glad you're not the one in charge of guarding us?
You make it sound (intentional or not) like this was done as part of an investigation. This data, however, was provided as part of a screening tool test. Grabbing needed information to investigate a crime that has already occurred seems acceptable. Grabbing personal information to make people into unwitting, unwilling guinea pigs is not.
Welcome to the United States, where any random citizen is an enemy of the state.
It's much more convenient that way. All that actual investigating and charging with real crimes and such is so much WORK. It's just so much easier to declare people enemy combatants and have jack booted thugs drag them off in the night.
Besides, little Sarah, Agent Bob's daughter, thought it was GREAT FUN hooking up electrodes to the enemy combatants' nutsack when she got to sit in on the interrogation of one of these "terrorists-who-we-can't-actually-pin-with-a-crime " on take your daughter to work day.
Sadly, the fact that little Sarah was privvy to this information without the proper security clearance made her an enemy comabtant, and Agent Johnson was ordered to.... deal with her.
I'd also like a crack at it (no pun intended) if you'd be so kind. Sounds like a rather fascinating piece of software.
You do realize, I suppose, that you can just hover the mouse on the link and look at the status bar if that concerns you?