Our marketing guy always reminds us (the IT department), "How hard can it be to add this feature? They sent a rover to mars. Surely, this should be a snap!" I then promptly remind him of Nasa's budget (HUGE) compared to our budget (non-existant).
That gadget is actually a really good idea, but they don't have one that supports USB keyboards? Come on, man, get with the times.
Available if you e-mail them about it, but described as "Beta". Or as I read it, "There's limited demand and we're still working on them, but we'll sell you a usable one-off current prototype if you're really interested."
I use the PS/2 keyboard for the stuff I want to save, and save the roll-up USB keyboard for passwords.
Why do you need special hardware to achieve this? It should be done by the OS.
Software can only achieve what hardware will support. Pure software implementations fail under several common scenarios-- notably, power failures and kernel panics. More to the point, the original article is responses to system failures-- EG, failure of the hard drive the OS is using. How do you propose the OS preserve user data when the failure is the $%^&ing hard drive that the OS is stored on if it lacks "special hardware" -- such as additional hard drives in a RAID configuration, network storage, or... a flash-based keystroke logger.
Now, my home setup is more paranoid than most (I use my home LAN as an alpha test bed for backup services at my job), but it requires at least three near-simultaneous hardware failures before I lose even a single keystroke of my data, and in order to take out more than the past week, you pretty much need to blow up my apartment. To lose more than a month's worth of data, you have to blow up my job and my car as well. (DVD-R doesn't keep well in a car during summer, but it experimentally seems to be able to withstand at least one month baking in the trunk.)
If you've blown up my apartment, car, and job... at that point it isn't my data's well being that's my biggest concern.
We have no reason to lose a single keypress from the user.
And if you consider it important enough to spend money on, you can buy a gadget to insure exactly that. (Thanks to Dan Rutter for his reviews of this and other cool geeky toys.)
I never said it didn't. That doesn't stop some people from arguing the position... persuasively enough to convince our congresscritters to tailor the law thusly. Regardless of whether both types are wrong, I'd also agree (as the marketroids claim) there is a difference between bothering someone you doubt will be interested but hasn't said "no" yet, and bothering someone who already has said or is trying to say "no" -- but you've got your fingers in your ears to keep from hearing them say it. The marketroids may say it's the difference between right and wrong, I say it's the difference between nuisances and assholes, but there is a difference.
If it is unsolicited and sent in bulk it is spam.
Not everyone agrees that everything thus described is Spam. Furthermore, the absense of definitions for "bulk" and "unsolicited" in that would make any legal beagle's ears perk up... along with those of most marketroids, too. Anything that meets the criteria I gave will be agreed as being spam by anyone who recognizes the existance of the category. There may be other things that are Spam, but their inclusion is not universally undebated.
Religious spam is more worrying in someways, because the irrational nature of the people sending it - just ask the senders what my boss did "who would Jesus spam?".
Inadequately helpful against biblical scholars.
Et dixit eis euntes in mundum universum praedicate evangelium omni creaturae.
He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation." --Mark 16:15
More important from the perspective of making Spam illegal, religous speech-- in whatever form-- is given a higher degree of protection under US Law than ordinary speech, due to having a double whammy of first amendment protection. Since having any Spam be constitutionally protected weakens attempts to ban it (short of constitutional amendment), sensible people adjust the definition of Spam accordingly.
There are responsible mass-mailers out there. I've told my spam filter to let through the Circuit City email circulars, because I find their ads relevant to my job. (Not that I buy from there often....) Similarly, I let Omaha Steaks send me junk mail, even though I never have bought anything from them... but it's nice to dream I could afford to regularly do a hunk of my grocery shopping with them.
The responsible mailers want everyone to hear from them, but are happy to go away if you tell them to. Target doesn't want to bother people 90 miles from their closest store, because they might loose a customer before they even get a store near them... and the bulk of business is still firmly brick-and-mortar anchored. If we could drive out the scum who are just looking for short-term sucker business, rather than long term regular customers, the problem would be reasonably solvable with POP-server or Client-based blacklists, selection depending on the relative affordability of server processor power versus client side bandwidth. Alas, there's still too many suckers out there, and double that number trying to take 'em.
Oldest first display shows one of the usual morons got in a few seconds ahead. However, for the Second Post (and beating most of the FP twits), it's of respectable quality... regardless of any allegations of karma whoring motives.
Nah. The equivalent of the drivers test for a reproductive license would just be too messy to administer... though the learner's permit phase might be fun.
No, no... the idea is to have some sort of exam before people become parents besides the practical test.
("Insert tab A in slot B....")
Bujold's various mentions of Beta Colony in her Vorkosigan space opera series show some of the ups and downs of such a system, EG: the Betan in-joke "Mind you, it's a great place to raise kids!" (The unspoken catch-- it's bloody hard to get permission to have them.)
Or a better question is, what is unsolicited email, and when does it become the stuff we hate, SPAM.
It is pretty much unargued something is spam when it is for commercial purposes, the headers provide misleading information such as inaccurate/mispelled Subject: and/or From: fields, and while you've tried to find one the sender doesn't provide a working and effective means to say "Stop Bugging Me!!!"
There's arguement as to whether political or religious messages can be Spam; and whether it is automatically Spam if you haven't asked for it, or only becomes Spam once you try to tell the sender to stop. For political/religious messages, the US 1st Amendment gives such senders more protection here, and the rates of response versus revulsion will probably limit the use for such (as Dean demonstrated by mistake). For the latter, I'd say such situations are why the law can make distinctions between civil offenses, misdemeanors, and felonies when defining something as a crime.
I think it would do wonders for our country if misspellings in commercial messages were made a crime. =)
Do not fall for their promises of freedom from spam. It will do nothing but erode further the real freedoms that the Internet has created for the global community.
But if China was running the Internet, we really COULD get spammers taken out and shot.
Decisions, decisions...
...is ineffective against a well designed human.
on
ID Theft Made Easy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My prefered secret question is usually "Pick a number from one to ten", although I will occasionally use the classic "Feathers or Lead?"
Either way, the secret answer is a 25 digit prime that I'm fond of for no particular reason. Good luck.
At least we can all rest safely knowing that there's no way "bad guys" could utilize the same provisions to listen in on personal conversations over IP!
So, which are we again, that good guys or the bad guys?
In other news, my girlfriend has decided to dump me and announced she is going to date my best friend all on the same day to make it a special occasion! Oh the joy.
Right around the DS9 finale: been there, done that, and to add injury to insult it off all three of us had been living in the same apartment; she moved out of my bedroom into his (having kept her own for the closet space). After weighing that I live in a death penalty state, and after a modest period of consideration, I decided to let them live, and went apartment hunting. Time wounds all heels. So, I still look cheerfully forward to ceremoniously dancing on their graves when the happy event finally rolls around....
Although Ido not have a background in mathematics (I have an AA in Photography) I was easily able to rebuild Ezekiel's private key via his public key and one of his encrypted messages. Of course I am above-average in intelligence, but PGP is supposedly unbreakable!
As the United States has known since its founding, all cryptographic algorithms (even the one-time pad) are vulnerable to attack via divine revelation, even in the absense of the ciphertext itself. Those able to take advantage of this regularly are a pearl without price in the intelligence community.
Your services have immense potential value for your country in the hunt for terrorists like Osama Bin Laden. If you'd like a circular describing opportunities for employment with the NSA, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one.
If you click the link, it wipes your hard drive and somehow sets your computer on fire.
You need to read the Warhol worm whitepaper again; you want clicking the link to install a rootkit and start it both running and concealing a piece of your virus code, turning it into an encrypted peer-to-peer bot for a while, and perhaps spending 3 minutes every few hourse sending out the stealth spam. You don't blow up the computer until after a certain minimum time operation in infectious mode, and then only probabilistically; say, ten days running safe-but-dirty, then a chance at detruction 25% each time it starts up, and 10% for each day of uptime after that.
As far as how to kill the machine, you'd want to code to detect any hardware with flashable firmware (possibly by lookup in a net distributed database operated by your Warhol worm), and reflash everything using an MP3 of William Shatner singing "Mr. Tambourine Man".
This does leave the processor and RAM intact. I don't think you could kill the RAM, no matter what. For killing the processor, you could try to have your Flash code end with a piece of assembly that tries as simple as possible a loop, to try and cause enough localized overheating to melt one of the registers... but I don't know if that would work. It might be easier on motherboards with jumperless overclocking (overclock beofrehand to raise temp). I don't think I'd bother killing the CPU, though.... after all, anyone you catch is probably going to get rid of the machine after hearing that the motherboard, CD burner, and the hard drive are hopelessly dead. Salvage by local PC shops might start driving down the prices for quality 2nd hand CPU chips noticably. =)
Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:
"May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing armour-plating which no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable, and therefore invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty's Ministers, attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it for a million tumtums."
After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a million tumtums.
"And here," said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from another pocket, "are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, which will pierce that armour. Your Majesty's Royal Brother, the Emperor of Bang, is anxious to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty's throne and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is one million tumtums."
Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into still another pocket, remarking:
"The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted by my peculiar method of treating the armour plates with a new -"
The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach.
"Search this man," he said, "and report how many pockets he has."
"Forty-three, Sire," said the Great Head Factotum, completing the scrutiny.
"May it please your Majesty," cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, "one of them contains tobacco."
"Hold him up by the ankles and shake him," said the King; "then give him a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree issue declaring ingenuity a capital offence."
So is that four million tumtums he's at, or five? Things haven't changed that much since Bitter Bierce was around.... except maybe that there's a lot more people with pockets.
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't trademark holders required to defend their trademarks or risk losing them? (like what happened with "Aspirin")
Exactly; trademarks which become generics because they were not defended lose their protection under trademark law.
If Jared's lawyer has enough chutzpah, he might try claiming that the wretched quality of the electronic versions of Scrabble that Hasbro has produced constitutes de facto neglect of their trademark. Not that I think any judge would consider this arguement for as much as a minute, but it might be worth the try-- at least Hasbro might think about improving their software.
Scrabble is trademarked. While I am not a lawyer, even a layman of modest understanding can see that by having used the variation on the trademark, Jared has placed his legal fight and any prospects for continuing his site's operations in a deep hole. Preventing this sort of thing is one of the primary purposes of trademark law. The fact that Jared has steadily lost money (with donations not even covering bandwidth bills) will probably keep Hasbro from having their lawyers crush him into a bloody pulp, but won't save him from a light flogging.
On the bright side for Jared, SlashDot seems to have unintentionally gotten him to temporarily comply with the takedown request....
That article, and its arguements against tolerating homosexuality are made within the context of a church (the LDS, in this case), and the laws to which he refers specifically church laws. Which is fine, so far as it goes. (He's not discussing it as part of my church, so it's not my problem.)
On the other hand, he has held his opposition in more secular contexts, too. Homophobia seems an inappropriate characterization, as he at least portrays the appearance of a rational arguement for his position, as opposed to unreasoning fear. It would seem fair, however, to characterize his position as discriminatory against practicing homosexuals.
If the state did away with marriages, and made them purely a religious institution, then Gays would have all the rights the state could possibly have the ability to grant (within the limits set by the first amendment) - but the Churches would prevent them from getting "Married" - so both sides "win".
Actually, proposing that to them really pisses off religious reich types. As near as I can tell between the frothing at the mouth, they object because first they lose their "special status" that the state recognizes for their blessings (never mind that they can still get the secular part of the status and benefits under a different name), and second because they can't stop homosexuals from joining churches which have no problem blessing gay marriages (like the (l)unitarians) and then saying "Yay! We're married!"
Worst of both worlds as far as the extreme social right is concerned.
Credit card companies don't ask for signatures, even in the case of fraud. It's not worth their time and money.
Actually, I have seen such requests. I worked for six years at a restarant; from 12-3, AM and PM, the place was a frantic madhouse. (How bad? I went into IT and dropped almost twenty percent off my blood pressure.)
During the peak times, we stopped asking people to sign credit card slips, and just handed them their copy blank. If asked about it, we would explain to them (while talking to the next customer and screaming at the line cooks-- if you couldn't multitask, you didn't survive day one) that the extra six seconds per person for a signature just weren't worth the time, when we were sending a hundred people an hour past the register, and it was "all digital anyway".
We had two disputed charges in the six years I was there. One was when someone who ordered the same thing two days in a row (well, nights-- just after the bars closed), and thought the second was a duplicate charge; the second really was a stolen card. Both times, the store just absorbed the loss rather than produce the unsigned slip-- I think the owner told the CC company those two slips had been lost. Total loss in six years: $13.09. Increase in possible peak customer volume: about 15%. Worth it? Hell, yeah!
Don't see how putting another dime into the pocket of that homophobe (Card) is something that I'd want to do, no matter how good the movie was.
I believe R.K. Milholland, who writes Something Positive, has been addressing that issue in
somerecentcomicstrips. I'd mod him insightful, but mod points don't seem to work off slashdot for some reason....
As far as Card's stated views, he makes a better case than most religious zealots as for why gay marriage is a bad idea from a sociological standpoint. He's at least willing to argue from a sociology standpoint, which while not as rock solid a science as physics, are at least an improvement over "Thuh Bible saiyz so."
Not that his argument is convincing. I think several of his assertions in the (typical) article I noted are made with insuficient justification (EG: "Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization") or just plain wrong ("Calling a homosexual contract 'marriage' [...] will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization"). I think he is right to be concerned about the continued impact of some earlier social changes from the early to mid-20th century. The changes that have weakened "the family" over the last 50 years, that have led to the symptomatic high divorce rates and working single parents, have in turn caused major problem on a lot of levels, and that the present situation has Major Problems. Unfortunately, he sees allowing gays to marry as yet another step towards doom, instead of potentially increasing the number and variety of stable model family units for children to imprint off of, in the event that they are in a disfuntional family.
He also doesn't get that by prohibiting gays from marrying, it artificially and unjustly creates a legal discrimination of heterosexual non-reporoductive partnerships versus homosexual non-reproductive partnerships. Of course, his reference to Plessy versus Fergesson
when condemning judicial activism in his followup shows he's closer to a legal idiot than a legal scholar-- that case upheld the law as legislated all the way.
His worry for society is well placed, but his fears have the wrong target. Frankly, most of this attention deficit generation seems to lack the long-term focus and the ability to compromise that seems necessary for maintaining a stable partnership. The problem is further compounded by the last several decades' economic strains on the family; now, two working parents seems all but required. The present situation is dangerous, but trying to force the clock back will trigger disaster; though it has risks, further change offers hope.
As for his wrtiting, Card isn't worth buying in hardcover (except perhaps Ender's Game itself), but I've still picked up some of his more recent books in paperback after checking them out from the local library. As for the movie... I'll wait for the reviews.
...he's attempting to convert me from Judaism to Scientology. 20 minutes. At home, with my Christian wife, who by all standards should be a lot less convincing than this Scientologist, the same conversion would take about 2 minutes.
Yeah, but she can shorten the process of conversion by taking her clothes off.
If you buy a book or CD you can do essentially anything you like with it for personal use in the privacy of your own home.
...except rip the song "Blue Moon" off it onto your computer, or put it on your iPod, or mix your own CD of songs with the world "Blue" in the title....
All of which are personal copies. For that, you need fair use, which is being eroded.
The GPL is a license for making copies under certain conditions; but book, CD, or GPL software, each gives you the right to put it on a shelf and do nothing but admire it... which seems to be what the corporate masters are aiming for. =)
The historically inclined may compare the attitude of copyright holders in the late 1700's and early 1800's to the development of public libraries to the present situation if they wish for amusing parallels....
Slashdot Mirror
Also remind him that it still didn't ship bug-free.
Available if you e-mail them about it, but described as "Beta". Or as I read it, "There's limited demand and we're still working on them, but we'll sell you a usable one-off current prototype if you're really interested."
I use the PS/2 keyboard for the stuff I want to save, and save the roll-up USB keyboard for passwords.
Software can only achieve what hardware will support. Pure software implementations fail under several common scenarios-- notably, power failures and kernel panics. More to the point, the original article is responses to system failures-- EG, failure of the hard drive the OS is using. How do you propose the OS preserve user data when the failure is the $%^&ing hard drive that the OS is stored on if it lacks "special hardware" -- such as additional hard drives in a RAID configuration, network storage, or... a flash-based keystroke logger.
Now, my home setup is more paranoid than most (I use my home LAN as an alpha test bed for backup services at my job), but it requires at least three near-simultaneous hardware failures before I lose even a single keystroke of my data, and in order to take out more than the past week, you pretty much need to blow up my apartment. To lose more than a month's worth of data, you have to blow up my job and my car as well. (DVD-R doesn't keep well in a car during summer, but it experimentally seems to be able to withstand at least one month baking in the trunk.)
If you've blown up my apartment, car, and job... at that point it isn't my data's well being that's my biggest concern.
Or possibly a lot smaller after being relocated to /dev/null, as several people have suggested...
And if you consider it important enough to spend money on, you can buy a gadget to insure exactly that. (Thanks to Dan Rutter for his reviews of this and other cool geeky toys.)
I never said it didn't. That doesn't stop some people from arguing the position... persuasively enough to convince our congresscritters to tailor the law thusly. Regardless of whether both types are wrong, I'd also agree (as the marketroids claim) there is a difference between bothering someone you doubt will be interested but hasn't said "no" yet, and bothering someone who already has said or is trying to say "no" -- but you've got your fingers in your ears to keep from hearing them say it. The marketroids may say it's the difference between right and wrong, I say it's the difference between nuisances and assholes, but there is a difference.
If it is unsolicited and sent in bulk it is spam.
Not everyone agrees that everything thus described is Spam. Furthermore, the absense of definitions for "bulk" and "unsolicited" in that would make any legal beagle's ears perk up... along with those of most marketroids, too. Anything that meets the criteria I gave will be agreed as being spam by anyone who recognizes the existance of the category. There may be other things that are Spam, but their inclusion is not universally undebated.
Religious spam is more worrying in someways, because the irrational nature of the people sending it - just ask the senders what my boss did "who would Jesus spam?".
Inadequately helpful against biblical scholars.
Other citations are easy to find. Not to mention your question doesn't help for the stuff coming from the Young Men's Reformed Cultist of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth Association. =)More important from the perspective of making Spam illegal, religous speech-- in whatever form-- is given a higher degree of protection under US Law than ordinary speech, due to having a double whammy of first amendment protection. Since having any Spam be constitutionally protected weakens attempts to ban it (short of constitutional amendment), sensible people adjust the definition of Spam accordingly.
There are responsible mass-mailers out there. I've told my spam filter to let through the Circuit City email circulars, because I find their ads relevant to my job. (Not that I buy from there often....) Similarly, I let Omaha Steaks send me junk mail, even though I never have bought anything from them... but it's nice to dream I could afford to regularly do a hunk of my grocery shopping with them.
The responsible mailers want everyone to hear from them, but are happy to go away if you tell them to. Target doesn't want to bother people 90 miles from their closest store, because they might loose a customer before they even get a store near them... and the bulk of business is still firmly brick-and-mortar anchored. If we could drive out the scum who are just looking for short-term sucker business, rather than long term regular customers, the problem would be reasonably solvable with POP-server or Client-based blacklists, selection depending on the relative affordability of server processor power versus client side bandwidth. Alas, there's still too many suckers out there, and double that number trying to take 'em.
Oldest first display shows one of the usual morons got in a few seconds ahead. However, for the Second Post (and beating most of the FP twits), it's of respectable quality... regardless of any allegations of karma whoring motives.
No, no... the idea is to have some sort of exam before people become parents besides the practical test. ("Insert tab A in slot B....")
Bujold's various mentions of Beta Colony in her Vorkosigan space opera series show some of the ups and downs of such a system, EG: the Betan in-joke "Mind you, it's a great place to raise kids!" (The unspoken catch-- it's bloody hard to get permission to have them.)It is pretty much unargued something is spam when it is for commercial purposes, the headers provide misleading information such as inaccurate/mispelled Subject: and/or From: fields, and while you've tried to find one the sender doesn't provide a working and effective means to say "Stop Bugging Me!!!"
There's arguement as to whether political or religious messages can be Spam; and whether it is automatically Spam if you haven't asked for it, or only becomes Spam once you try to tell the sender to stop. For political/religious messages, the US 1st Amendment gives such senders more protection here, and the rates of response versus revulsion will probably limit the use for such (as Dean demonstrated by mistake). For the latter, I'd say such situations are why the law can make distinctions between civil offenses, misdemeanors, and felonies when defining something as a crime.
I think it would do wonders for our country if misspellings in commercial messages were made a crime. =)
But if China was running the Internet, we really COULD get spammers taken out and shot.
Decisions, decisions...
My prefered secret question is usually "Pick a number from one to ten", although I will occasionally use the classic "Feathers or Lead?"
Either way, the secret answer is a 25 digit prime that I'm fond of for no particular reason. Good luck.
So, which are we again, that good guys or the bad guys?
Right around the DS9 finale: been there, done that, and to add injury to insult it off all three of us had been living in the same apartment; she moved out of my bedroom into his (having kept her own for the closet space). After weighing that I live in a death penalty state, and after a modest period of consideration, I decided to let them live, and went apartment hunting. Time wounds all heels. So, I still look cheerfully forward to ceremoniously dancing on their graves when the happy event finally rolls around....
As the United States has known since its founding, all cryptographic algorithms (even the one-time pad) are vulnerable to attack via divine revelation, even in the absense of the ciphertext itself. Those able to take advantage of this regularly are a pearl without price in the intelligence community.
Your services have immense potential value for your country in the hunt for terrorists like Osama Bin Laden. If you'd like a circular describing opportunities for employment with the NSA, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one.
You need to read the Warhol worm whitepaper again; you want clicking the link to install a rootkit and start it both running and concealing a piece of your virus code, turning it into an encrypted peer-to-peer bot for a while, and perhaps spending 3 minutes every few hourse sending out the stealth spam. You don't blow up the computer until after a certain minimum time operation in infectious mode, and then only probabilistically; say, ten days running safe-but-dirty, then a chance at detruction 25% each time it starts up, and 10% for each day of uptime after that.
As far as how to kill the machine, you'd want to code to detect any hardware with flashable firmware (possibly by lookup in a net distributed database operated by your Warhol worm), and reflash everything using an MP3 of William Shatner singing "Mr. Tambourine Man".
This does leave the processor and RAM intact. I don't think you could kill the RAM, no matter what. For killing the processor, you could try to have your Flash code end with a piece of assembly that tries as simple as possible a loop, to try and cause enough localized overheating to melt one of the registers... but I don't know if that would work. It might be easier on motherboards with jumperless overclocking (overclock beofrehand to raise temp). I don't think I'd bother killing the CPU, though.... after all, anyone you catch is probably going to get rid of the machine after hearing that the motherboard, CD burner, and the hard drive are hopelessly dead. Salvage by local PC shops might start driving down the prices for quality 2nd hand CPU chips noticably. =)
So is that four million tumtums he's at, or five? Things haven't changed that much since Bitter Bierce was around.... except maybe that there's a lot more people with pockets.
You should have given up and sent the notice to them via return receipt registered mail, and let them panic about it.
Exactly; trademarks which become generics because they were not defended lose their protection under trademark law.
If Jared's lawyer has enough chutzpah, he might try claiming that the wretched quality of the electronic versions of Scrabble that Hasbro has produced constitutes de facto neglect of their trademark. Not that I think any judge would consider this arguement for as much as a minute, but it might be worth the try-- at least Hasbro might think about improving their software.
Scrabble is trademarked. While I am not a lawyer, even a layman of modest understanding can see that by having used the variation on the trademark, Jared has placed his legal fight and any prospects for continuing his site's operations in a deep hole. Preventing this sort of thing is one of the primary purposes of trademark law. The fact that Jared has steadily lost money (with donations not even covering bandwidth bills) will probably keep Hasbro from having their lawyers crush him into a bloody pulp, but won't save him from a light flogging.
On the bright side for Jared, SlashDot seems to have unintentionally gotten him to temporarily comply with the takedown request....
That article, and its arguements against tolerating homosexuality are made within the context of a church (the LDS, in this case), and the laws to which he refers specifically church laws. Which is fine, so far as it goes. (He's not discussing it as part of my church, so it's not my problem.)
On the other hand, he has held his opposition in more secular contexts, too. Homophobia seems an inappropriate characterization, as he at least portrays the appearance of a rational arguement for his position, as opposed to unreasoning fear. It would seem fair, however, to characterize his position as discriminatory against practicing homosexuals.
Actually, proposing that to them really pisses off religious reich types. As near as I can tell between the frothing at the mouth, they object because first they lose their "special status" that the state recognizes for their blessings (never mind that they can still get the secular part of the status and benefits under a different name), and second because they can't stop homosexuals from joining churches which have no problem blessing gay marriages (like the (l)unitarians) and then saying "Yay! We're married!"
Worst of both worlds as far as the extreme social right is concerned.
Actually, I have seen such requests. I worked for six years at a restarant; from 12-3, AM and PM, the place was a frantic madhouse. (How bad? I went into IT and dropped almost twenty percent off my blood pressure.)
During the peak times, we stopped asking people to sign credit card slips, and just handed them their copy blank. If asked about it, we would explain to them (while talking to the next customer and screaming at the line cooks-- if you couldn't multitask, you didn't survive day one) that the extra six seconds per person for a signature just weren't worth the time, when we were sending a hundred people an hour past the register, and it was "all digital anyway".
We had two disputed charges in the six years I was there. One was when someone who ordered the same thing two days in a row (well, nights-- just after the bars closed), and thought the second was a duplicate charge; the second really was a stolen card. Both times, the store just absorbed the loss rather than produce the unsigned slip-- I think the owner told the CC company those two slips had been lost. Total loss in six years: $13.09. Increase in possible peak customer volume: about 15%. Worth it? Hell, yeah!
I believe R.K. Milholland, who writes Something Positive, has been addressing that issue in some recent comic strips. I'd mod him insightful, but mod points don't seem to work off slashdot for some reason....
As far as Card's stated views, he makes a better case than most religious zealots as for why gay marriage is a bad idea from a sociological standpoint. He's at least willing to argue from a sociology standpoint, which while not as rock solid a science as physics, are at least an improvement over "Thuh Bible saiyz so."
Not that his argument is convincing. I think several of his assertions in the (typical) article I noted are made with insuficient justification (EG: "Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization") or just plain wrong ("Calling a homosexual contract 'marriage' [...] will not make it contribute in any meaningful way to the propagation of civilization"). I think he is right to be concerned about the continued impact of some earlier social changes from the early to mid-20th century. The changes that have weakened "the family" over the last 50 years, that have led to the symptomatic high divorce rates and working single parents, have in turn caused major problem on a lot of levels, and that the present situation has Major Problems. Unfortunately, he sees allowing gays to marry as yet another step towards doom, instead of potentially increasing the number and variety of stable model family units for children to imprint off of, in the event that they are in a disfuntional family.
He also doesn't get that by prohibiting gays from marrying, it artificially and unjustly creates a legal discrimination of heterosexual non-reporoductive partnerships versus homosexual non-reproductive partnerships. Of course, his reference to Plessy versus Fergesson when condemning judicial activism in his followup shows he's closer to a legal idiot than a legal scholar-- that case upheld the law as legislated all the way.
His worry for society is well placed, but his fears have the wrong target. Frankly, most of this attention deficit generation seems to lack the long-term focus and the ability to compromise that seems necessary for maintaining a stable partnership. The problem is further compounded by the last several decades' economic strains on the family; now, two working parents seems all but required. The present situation is dangerous, but trying to force the clock back will trigger disaster; though it has risks, further change offers hope.
As for his wrtiting, Card isn't worth buying in hardcover (except perhaps Ender's Game itself), but I've still picked up some of his more recent books in paperback after checking them out from the local library. As for the movie... I'll wait for the reviews.
Yeah, but she can shorten the process of conversion by taking her clothes off.
"Come to bed, dear..."
"Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad!"
They'd call you a a suppressive person, and report you to their superiors for a taste of whatever they're calling "fair game" these days.
All of which are personal copies. For that, you need fair use, which is being eroded.
The GPL is a license for making copies under certain conditions; but book, CD, or GPL software, each gives you the right to put it on a shelf and do nothing but admire it... which seems to be what the corporate masters are aiming for. =)
The historically inclined may compare the attitude of copyright holders in the late 1700's and early 1800's to the development of public libraries to the present situation if they wish for amusing parallels....