Snap at the bottom, get slung into space. Snap in the middle, bottom falls down, top falls up. For the "big asteroid counterweight to tension the cable design" at least, snap at the top, whole thing lays down along the equator. Worse case scenarios look about as bad as anything else with that much energy in it.
Trying to land anyway may well have been the best option left, granted.
However, how sure are you about the no way of repairing part? The shuttle standard inventory shows some tile repair components onboard. If they aren't at least some use on the leading edges of the wings, it would be nice to know what they ARE intended for. Sprucing up a just landed shuttle before the press gets there to photograph it?
While we're at it, the later reports have included the possibility of a rescue mission using another shuttle, and the ultimate board conclusion is this is too risky, but notice, there's no breakdown of the risk assessment made available to the general public.
Obviously, a rational risk assessment would be different for a shuttle developing a problem that is an unusual, apparent fluke accident, or one that might well be developing on the rest of the fleet as well, and for a problem known about soon after launch as opposed to when there's only 3 days life support left. How did such considerations get rolled up into the blanket risk assesment made public?
Intellectual honesty is a slippery concept. If science actually implies atheism, then the intellectually honest thing to do is to tell all those 90% who disagree that by funding science with their tax dollars they are funding a cause that exists to disprove their God. It is honestly telling them that you intend to keep taking that money, because you are right, they are wrong, so to hell with their right to choose what to fund. Or do you think that less than 10% minority of free-thinkers, atheists, and agnostics pays all, or even most, of the taxes in any civilised country?
You will be honest, but as working science goes belly up in this country, we all will have paid the price for your judging 90% plus of your fellow humans as inferior to you, fit only to pay for the goals you support and to have no opinion of their own. Your "intellectual honesty" will by then likely have shown you that a democractic government is not going to have given you what you want, so it is "honest" to use an authoritarian government to compel it instead.
I'm not accusing you personally of being an authoritarian, or even particularly leaning that way, mind you, but you might be surprised at how many people start with your premises and make that step into trying to trick or coerce funding from the very people they are denigrating. Just as my religion has elements that can inspire intolerance and abuse, so does the particular philosophy of science you are quoteing. I'm not an Objectivist, but you might ask one of them to point you at the character of Dr. Robert Stadtler.
While we're at it, how many of the actual, working scientists out there do you think are atheists? Last figure I saw, it was slightly less than half - maybe your intellectual honesty demands a purge on the rest? Maybe they would refuse to sign a letter saying science implies atheism as a condition of recieving grants.
I plan to tell them that if they need advice from the ancients just to defeat the shadows/make peace with the klingons/knarfle the garthak/whatever, they should get it from a species that never invented the big-mouth-billy-bass.
It's long odds, but even long shots happen to sombody. But if it is us, and I'm one of the last surviving ancients when the young races come, I'm not wearing some dumb old robe and saying metaphysical gibberish to their equivalent of Kirk or Sheridan, no way.
Yeah, every time I hear "Three Mile Island" I think of all the people who died there, and the mutated cows and all. Please, the Russian had some accidents worth bringing fear to the heart of many, and if Youl'd mentioned Chernobl I wouldn't have blamed you for your concern, but TMI?
There's also wrong and WRONG. The claim SA made for the North Korean economy at that time were WRONG, on the level of "I'm having the alien Elvis clone's angel love child, says Bigfoot". They've made some others, like reporting disease prevalence estimates that would make the average US life exectancy 47 again if true.
Sometimes one blooper really is so big, it deserves to be a life long cautionary tale. Remember how Al Gore didn't really claim to have invented the internet, but what he did say got stretched into that? Al was all small letters wrong. If he'd said, "I personally created the first transistor, and I ran every foot of cable to each and every one of your schools and homes myself" then he'd be WRONG, on the level of Scientific American a few times in the last 10 or so years.
The probability of an encounter with ETI's during the human ace's lifetime is a. probably pretty durned low, and b. probably difficult to calculate with anything approaching precision, as we don't have a good guess for how long the species wil survive. I'm not sure if you are really visualizing just how low the probability of you tunneling through a chair is, though. If you're talking quantum tunneling, that probability is on the order of eentsy-weentsy.
Why does he need to provide the evidence, and not you? This is the old saw about not being able to prove a universal negative, which sounds really rational, and which some people still think is a great logical principle, until you consider the real problem in logic lies deeper.
Let's say I assume "God exists" as an axiom. From that and other axioms, I reason to theorems. If you assume "God does not exist", as an axiom, then I can disprove it only if you also state some of the theorems that it leads you to. (Axioms can only be disproved by showing they result in logical contradictions in the attendant theorems).
If you hold that "God does not exist" is a theorem, instead, then you should be willing to show how you derive that theorem. Ah, but when I ask you to prove the theorem "God does not exist", you invoke the rule against requiring proof instead of providing it.
So, either you are holding non-existance as a matter of faith (an axiom), or you hold it as a special class of things, a theorem that is underivable. With that, you leave the realm of logic.
As an option, you may hold that your contention is neither a theorem nor an axiom, but of course that also means you have left the realm of logic (somewhat faster this time).
Now, where did the part about not being able to prove a universal negation apply? I can't prove anything at all logically, if I don't know whether it is an axiom or a theorem, because the two require different means to disprove. Until you are prepared to put the thing into one of the two mutually exclusive and all encompassing classes, I simply can't use logic on it, whatever it is.
Who's the one trying to get a free pass here? You're jumping ahead to step 3 or 4 or so, and asking me to begin with applying that special rule, but you've simply hand waved your way past those earlier steps of classifying the contention (step 1), listing your other axioms (step 2) and if it is a theorem, of you deriving it (step ~3), and if you go back and do these steps instead, your special rule is actually not needed, superfluous, and quite possibly a mistake to ever use.
It's interesting that you use the classic Dr. Sagan example of the invisible dragon in the garage. Note that Occam's Razor is how most of us disprove that one, not by invoking the rule agaisnt requiring proof of universal negatations. In fact, Dr. Sagan fell back on Occam when the rule itself proved less than universally effective interior to his own presentation.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the people who keep claiming that science mandates atheism are genuinely stupid. Not because they are necessarily wrong, but because they think that telling 90% of taxpayers "My science exists to prove your religion wrong, now give my science more money", will get their causes support, instead of a mob of peasants with pitchforks.
How dumb is it, when you are part of a self confessed minority of less than 10%, to think that that 90% plus majority is going to continue funding the free exchange of your ideas, defending your right to speak, and respecting the same process of sciene you respect, while you tell them it exists to prove them wrong, foolish, or at best misguided?
Not a lawyer either, but...
There's a legal doctrine called latches, which involves waiting too long to complain in the hopes of increasing damages awarded. From what I've seen, the default period for that is six years, and apparently, there are grounds for sometimes claiming the doctrine applies earlier than that six years.
The first question this raises is "Does a disclaimer such as the one you propose help or hurt a claim made by the company that posts it, to apply latches earlier than the default time as a defense? (Or does it neither help nor hurt?)"
Knowing just a bit about law, the next question is probably "Are there cases where the six year default is considered too short and if so, how would this disclaimer impact them?"
Asimov's three laws might well produce the kind of behavior seen in Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids" where little black robots won't let humans do anything even slightly dangerous ("I think I'll go mountain climbing today, Jeeves!" - "Can't let you risk that sir, how about a nice game of chess?" - "Oh, and that iced tea is enough caffine for today Sir!"). The first in this series is the novella "With Folded Hands".
Newton's three laws aren't the three laws of thermodynamics, but of motion.
"Eando" Binder was actually brothers Earl and Otto Binder. {E and O, get it?). Most of what the brothers wrote appeared in comic books of the time, but Adam Link is consdered a classic by some.
Re:grassroots campaign to end spam
on
The Year In Tech Law
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is, spam only requires half a percent of the most cluelss or so to bite, and it's working. Fixing that CAN be that hard to do.
A task like getting 80% of your local high school graduates to go on to college or trade school, or like getting a 50% reduction in the highway fatality rate by getting the worst 10% of drivers off the road, is a lot easier than getting the word to that last, clueless 1/2%, just because you can miss a half % or so completely, and still succeed, but here it's that last 1/2% that you have to find and convince instead, and nothinge else counts.
The SR-71 (R/S-71) was an all black aircraft, hence blackbird. The YF-12A variant, often just called the A-12 or F-12, wasn't black, but usually got a two tone silver gray and smoke gray paint job. Operational fighters always get an agressive nickname, like falcon, by the time they go to full production. That's two reasons why the "Blackbird" is really only for the recon version.
Neat plane anyways.
When SCO first mentioned Linus in a press release, I wondered why. At that point, SCO didn't seem to be claiming all of Linux, and making it personal regarding Linus seemed poorly planned at best. SCO seemed to be alienating someone who might have ended up being a witness for either side, and was very likely to be called by someone before the case was all over.
It looked really stupid if there was any possibility they might have called Linus to the stand themselves, but why give him enough grief that he might volunteer to testify on IBM's behalf, unless SCO was sure that he would end up opposed anyway?
But, if SCO has believed that their code was in the very oldest versions of the kernel, then it got there by act of Linus himself. If they've been acting on that assumption all along, then they also have been expecting from the start to have to claim things that would alienate the Linux community all along.
This doesn't really dispel the alternate possibility that SCO is just deliberately out to wreck Linux even if they can't profit financially by it (except maybe under the table), for those who want to believe that, but it does support the idea that SCO has acted on a consistent premise, rather than just whipping up a new claim from thin air each time they need another press release.
Why isn't this on the cover of Newsweek?
on
More E-Voting SNAFUs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's good that this is being reported on Wired, but now that the situation has escalated to a company actually clearly violating federal election laws (uncertified software), employing former felons in information sensitive positions, and meeting each and every one of the tests to show method, motive and opportunity to commit election fraud, why isn't this making the front page of the NY Times and Post the same day? Why isn't CNN already reporting on this? Where's USA today? Where's Peter Jennings?
The DOD standard for wiping a hard disk that has held "secret" grade info involves an appropriate screwdriver, and a power sander applied to all magnetic surfaces until the oxide coat is polished away to bare aluminum.
Even "Confidential" requires a cross cut shredder built to certain standards to destroy. The most common reason for confidential classification is the document contains personal information, such as SSNs. It's common for military units to read a briefing statement that explains what a SSN is being asked for each and every time it is mentioned, and to warn service members when it is optional to provide one.
"It is your option not to provide your SSN for this insurance document. The Department of the Army may have difficulty tracking the issued policy, and it may delay your designated heirs receiving benifits if you elect not to do so".
Can you imagine if the average doctor's office took it this seriously?
UserLinux can't possibly be the first distro to drop one of the two environments, can it? There are Linux distros that fit in 10 Mb (Dragon Linux, for one), or even on a pair of floppies, and others that come on 4 CDs. Surely somewhere in that range is a distro that decided to include only one of the two, KDE or Gnome?
ISPs can voluntarity give out the info, but they may violate promises of privacy made to the service user if they do. They oould also face lawsuits from other corporations if they give out such info selectively and their choice of who to give it to in any way reflects their own financial interests. (I.e. AOL respecting all requests related to Time-Warner, but not from other's alledging infringment, would be engaging in practices that might violate antitrust).
Once it becomes an ISPs choice, they also lose the defense of complying with the court, which was protecting them from many lawsuits.
The user's strategy is clear. Get a small ISP, so if you need to sue them, they can't afford a billion dollar legal team. Get one that has a privacy clause in their contract. Read it carefully.
I'll bet that one of the two future predictions actually comes true. You get three guess which, and any that the company chosen is ranked earlier in alphabetical order don't count.
A lot, indeed most of the rights and financial perks assocated with marriage are really about producing children. They are just typically referred to as marriage related because they evolved in a society that believed children should only result from marriage.
With the major reason (from a legislative POV) for children being a next generation large enough to keep society running, artificial reproduction is irrelevant, and will stay irrelevant until the technology reaches a level where cloned kids (or whatever) start making up a significant part of the workforce that has to pay for such benefits as social security for their elders.
Then there's privacy issues. The society can tell that a gay couple can't naturally reproduce without having to run tests on them, but to determine (for legal purposes) that a heterosexual couple is infertile would require forcing them to disclose the results of medical tests, or even to take those tests. The more non-reproductive couples benefitting from the supposed advantages of marriage, the more pressure it puts on the society to instead violate privacy, as part of a new strategy of only extending those benefits to genuine reproducers.
Of course, this could lead to a system where a gay couple raising a child counted as reproducers and got benefits, while one that wasn't didn't. In the same way, the system could be changed so that potential reproduction would't count for any advantages, just actual reproduction. This would be a form of more equal rights, and might even be a good idea, but it means far, far more than just changing the marriage laws.
Genetic parentage would be irrelevant, just who was paying to get the offspring into the world and raise it to the point where it contributes to society. There are some ethical advantages to that principle, but it creates strange changes in a lot of laws, not just marriage.
Picture a first time home buyer. Under such a system, they can only get Federal income tax credit if they wait until they already have a child (or at least one of them is bearing one), before they buy the house. The IRS could have a rule that you have to get pregnant or adopt in the same year if you want to get a first time home buyer's deduction that year. Now society is penalizing planning ahead to prepare a nuturing environment, for many reproducers.
Or what about the legal status of a couple (or single parent, for that matter) whose sole minor offspring commits a major crime and so appears unlikely to ever become a contributer to society. He goes to prison at 15, and they lose their housing write off unless they get another offspring. (and we have better than usual cause to think just maybe they shouldn't be the ones raising kids) Parents whose sole child has just died at age 7 may find they can't afford their existing lifestyle unless they adopt or become foster parents within the year (and the foster home system, already deeply flawed, gains more financial pressure to pick bad foster parents who are just in it for the money).
Personally, I'll support marriage for just about anybody who claims to want it, with maybe a few exemptions for things such as incestuous unions, with incest defined by relationships close enough for there to be genetic consequences. (Heck, let's take the arguement to an extreme. If a group of wife swappers wants to set up a system to make sure all their collective kids get college, let's say go for it. If all the wives of that guy in Utah gave adult consent, fine, let's call that a marriage too).
Now, how do you make the changes in society to allow it without imposing some serious burdens on the more conventional majority of reproducers, and thus shooting ourselves in our collective feet when we get old enough to collect Social Security, or a young healthy population to fight a war, or whatever comes up that we need a few million not too disfunctional young people?
Proportionality is unlikely at best. Let's take some typical numbers for a pension fund looting operation. 1,000 employees lose their retirement funds. The have to work an average of 5 extra years (to retire later when social security for them is higher and this is merely to reduce, not eliminate the damage done). That's 5,000 years of life they collectively lost, the equivalent of murdering 64 healthy, newborn infants with a normal projected lifespan of 78 years.
Now some people would argue that not being able to retire on schedule is not the same as actually losing those years of their lives. You could adjust this if you like, to reflect the time they would have still spent watching TV, brushing their teeth and such, but it still looks like some real losses at absolute best.
Those 1,000 people all enjoy a reduced standard of living despite their extra years of work. Social securty doesn't pay all that well, and on aveerage only about 1/3 of a prvate pension. Couple that with having to work through their declining years, and their actual life expectancy drops, by an estimated 2.8 years (that's based on Provident Life's current actuarial tables, which break down mortality by income level). That in turn works out to the equivalent of murdering only about 36 heathy newborn infants. Many of these deaths will be the result of poorer medical care and diet.
I'd argue for both the above losses being applicable, for total damages equal to about 1 real murder/10 people screwed in a pension fund ripoff. Worldcom, for example, with 15,000 people given the shaft in one of their pension fund raids (if memory serves), would therefore be guilty of the equivalent of 1,500 premeditated murders. (And that's just one of the crimes in a series). If you want proportional here, think Nuremburg v 2.0. Anything less is coddling the criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course! Wasn't the motto of the first annual obfuscated Perl competition "Every contestant a winner"? :)
Snap at the bottom, get slung into space. Snap in the middle, bottom falls down, top falls up. For the "big asteroid counterweight to tension the cable design" at least, snap at the top, whole thing lays down along the equator. Worse case scenarios look about as bad as anything else with that much energy in it.
Trying to land anyway may well have been the best option left, granted.
However, how sure are you about the no way of repairing part? The shuttle standard inventory shows some tile repair components onboard. If they aren't at least some use on the leading edges of the wings, it would be nice to know what they ARE intended for. Sprucing up a just landed shuttle before the press gets there to photograph it?
While we're at it, the later reports have included the possibility of a rescue mission using another shuttle, and the ultimate board conclusion is this is too risky, but notice, there's no breakdown of the risk assessment made available to the general public.
Obviously, a rational risk assessment would be different for a shuttle developing a problem that is an unusual, apparent fluke accident, or one that might well be developing on the rest of the fleet as well, and for a problem known about soon after launch as opposed to when there's only 3 days life support left. How did such considerations get rolled up into the blanket risk assesment made public?
Intellectual honesty is a slippery concept. If science actually implies atheism, then the intellectually honest thing to do is to tell all those 90% who disagree that by funding science with their tax dollars they are funding a cause that exists to disprove their God. It is honestly telling them that you intend to keep taking that money, because you are right, they are wrong, so to hell with their right to choose what to fund. Or do you think that less than 10% minority of free-thinkers, atheists, and agnostics pays all, or even most, of the taxes in any civilised country?
You will be honest, but as working science goes belly up in this country, we all will have paid the price for your judging 90% plus of your fellow humans as inferior to you, fit only to pay for the goals you support and to have no opinion of their own. Your "intellectual honesty" will by then likely have shown you that a democractic government is not going to have given you what you want, so it is "honest" to use an authoritarian government to compel it instead.
I'm not accusing you personally of being an authoritarian, or even particularly leaning that way, mind you, but you might be surprised at how many people start with your premises and make that step into trying to trick or coerce funding from the very people they are denigrating. Just as my religion has elements that can inspire intolerance and abuse, so does the particular philosophy of science you are quoteing. I'm not an Objectivist, but you might ask one of them to point you at the character of Dr. Robert Stadtler.
While we're at it, how many of the actual, working scientists out there do you think are atheists? Last figure I saw, it was slightly less than half - maybe your intellectual honesty demands a purge on the rest? Maybe they would refuse to sign a letter saying science implies atheism as a condition of recieving grants.
I plan to tell them that if they need advice from the ancients just to defeat the shadows/make peace with the klingons/knarfle the garthak/whatever, they should get it from a species that never invented the big-mouth-billy-bass.
It's long odds, but even long shots happen to sombody. But if it is us, and I'm one of the last surviving ancients when the young races come, I'm not wearing some dumb old robe and saying metaphysical gibberish to their equivalent of Kirk or Sheridan, no way.
Yeah, every time I hear "Three Mile Island" I think of all the people who died there, and the mutated cows and all. Please, the Russian had some accidents worth bringing fear to the heart of many, and if Youl'd mentioned Chernobl I wouldn't have blamed you for your concern, but TMI?
There's also wrong and WRONG. The claim SA made for the North Korean economy at that time were WRONG, on the level of "I'm having the alien Elvis clone's angel love child, says Bigfoot". They've made some others, like reporting disease prevalence estimates that would make the average US life exectancy 47 again if true.
Sometimes one blooper really is so big, it deserves to be a life long cautionary tale. Remember how Al Gore didn't really claim to have invented the internet, but what he did say got stretched into that? Al was all small letters wrong. If he'd said, "I personally created the first transistor, and I ran every foot of cable to each and every one of your schools and homes myself" then he'd be WRONG, on the level of Scientific American a few times in the last 10 or so years.
The probability of an encounter with ETI's during the human ace's lifetime is a. probably pretty durned low, and b. probably difficult to calculate with anything approaching precision, as we don't have a good guess for how long the species wil survive. I'm not sure if you are really visualizing just how low the probability of you tunneling through a chair is, though. If you're talking quantum tunneling, that probability is on the order of eentsy-weentsy.
Why does he need to provide the evidence, and not you? This is the old saw about not being able to prove a universal negative, which sounds really rational, and which some people still think is a great logical principle, until you consider the real problem in logic lies deeper.
Let's say I assume "God exists" as an axiom. From that and other axioms, I reason to theorems. If you assume "God does not exist", as an axiom, then I can disprove it only if you also state some of the theorems that it leads you to. (Axioms can only be disproved by showing they result in logical contradictions in the attendant theorems).
If you hold that "God does not exist" is a theorem, instead, then you should be willing to show how you derive that theorem. Ah, but when I ask you to prove the theorem "God does not exist", you invoke the rule against requiring proof instead of providing it.
So, either you are holding non-existance as a matter of faith (an axiom), or you hold it as a special class of things, a theorem that is underivable. With that, you leave the realm of logic.
As an option, you may hold that your contention is neither a theorem nor an axiom, but of course that also means you have left the realm of logic (somewhat faster this time).
Now, where did the part about not being able to prove a universal negation apply? I can't prove anything at all logically, if I don't know whether it is an axiom or a theorem, because the two require different means to disprove. Until you are prepared to put the thing into one of the two mutually exclusive and all encompassing classes, I simply can't use logic on it, whatever it is.
Who's the one trying to get a free pass here? You're jumping ahead to step 3 or 4 or so, and asking me to begin with applying that special rule, but you've simply hand waved your way past those earlier steps of classifying the contention (step 1), listing your other axioms (step 2) and if it is a theorem, of you deriving it (step ~3), and if you go back and do these steps instead, your special rule is actually not needed, superfluous, and quite possibly a mistake to ever use.
It's interesting that you use the classic Dr. Sagan example of the invisible dragon in the garage. Note that Occam's Razor is how most of us disprove that one, not by invoking the rule agaisnt requiring proof of universal negatations. In fact, Dr. Sagan fell back on Occam when the rule itself proved less than universally effective interior to his own presentation.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the people who keep claiming that science mandates atheism are genuinely stupid. Not because they are necessarily wrong, but because they think that telling 90% of taxpayers "My science exists to prove your religion wrong, now give my science more money", will get their causes support, instead of a mob of peasants with pitchforks.
How dumb is it, when you are part of a self confessed minority of less than 10%, to think that that 90% plus majority is going to continue funding the free exchange of your ideas, defending your right to speak, and respecting the same process of sciene you respect, while you tell them it exists to prove them wrong, foolish, or at best misguided?
Not a lawyer either, but...
There's a legal doctrine called latches, which involves waiting too long to complain in the hopes of increasing damages awarded. From what I've seen, the default period for that is six years, and apparently, there are grounds for sometimes claiming the doctrine applies earlier than that six years.
The first question this raises is "Does a disclaimer such as the one you propose help or hurt a claim made by the company that posts it, to apply latches earlier than the default time as a defense? (Or does it neither help nor hurt?)"
Knowing just a bit about law, the next question is probably "Are there cases where the six year default is considered too short and if so, how would this disclaimer impact them?"
Asimov's three laws might well produce the kind of behavior seen in Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids" where little black robots won't let humans do anything even slightly dangerous ("I think I'll go mountain climbing today, Jeeves!" - "Can't let you risk that sir, how about a nice game of chess?" - "Oh, and that iced tea is enough caffine for today Sir!"). The first in this series is the novella "With Folded Hands".
Newton's three laws aren't the three laws of thermodynamics, but of motion.
"Eando" Binder was actually brothers Earl and Otto Binder. {E and O, get it?). Most of what the brothers wrote appeared in comic books of the time, but Adam Link is consdered a classic by some.
The problem is, spam only requires half a percent of the most cluelss or so to bite, and it's working. Fixing that CAN be that hard to do.
A task like getting 80% of your local high school graduates to go on to college or trade school, or like getting a 50% reduction in the highway fatality rate by getting the worst 10% of drivers off the road, is a lot easier than getting the word to that last, clueless 1/2%, just because you can miss a half % or so completely, and still succeed, but here it's that last 1/2% that you have to find and convince instead, and nothinge else counts.
"The future of Linux has a better chance of being affected by the second coming of Cthulhu."
Probably true, but name something that doesn't.
The SR-71 (R/S-71) was an all black aircraft, hence blackbird. The YF-12A variant, often just called the A-12 or F-12, wasn't black, but usually got a two tone silver gray and smoke gray paint job. Operational fighters always get an agressive nickname, like falcon, by the time they go to full production. That's two reasons why the "Blackbird" is really only for the recon version.
Neat plane anyways.
When SCO first mentioned Linus in a press release, I wondered why. At that point, SCO didn't seem to be claiming all of Linux, and making it personal regarding Linus seemed poorly planned at best. SCO seemed to be alienating someone who might have ended up being a witness for either side, and was very likely to be called by someone before the case was all over.
It looked really stupid if there was any possibility they might have called Linus to the stand themselves, but why give him enough grief that he might volunteer to testify on IBM's behalf, unless SCO was sure that he would end up opposed anyway?
But, if SCO has believed that their code was in the very oldest versions of the kernel, then it got there by act of Linus himself. If they've been acting on that assumption all along, then they also have been expecting from the start to have to claim things that would alienate the Linux community all along.
This doesn't really dispel the alternate possibility that SCO is just deliberately out to wreck Linux even if they can't profit financially by it (except maybe under the table), for those who want to believe that, but it does support the idea that SCO has acted on a consistent premise, rather than just whipping up a new claim from thin air each time they need another press release.
It's good that this is being reported on Wired, but now that the situation has escalated to a company actually clearly violating federal election laws (uncertified software), employing former felons in information sensitive positions, and meeting each and every one of the tests to show method, motive and opportunity to commit election fraud, why isn't this making the front page of the NY Times and Post the same day? Why isn't CNN already reporting on this? Where's USA today? Where's Peter Jennings?
The DOD standard for wiping a hard disk that has held "secret" grade info involves an appropriate screwdriver, and a power sander applied to all magnetic surfaces until the oxide coat is polished away to bare aluminum.
Even "Confidential" requires a cross cut shredder built to certain standards to destroy. The most common reason for confidential classification is the document contains personal information, such as SSNs. It's common for military units to read a briefing statement that explains what a SSN is being asked for each and every time it is mentioned, and to warn service members when it is optional to provide one.
"It is your option not to provide your SSN for this insurance document. The Department of the Army may have difficulty tracking the issued policy, and it may delay your designated heirs receiving benifits if you elect not to do so".
Can you imagine if the average doctor's office took it this seriously?
UserLinux can't possibly be the first distro to drop one of the two environments, can it? There are Linux distros that fit in 10 Mb (Dragon Linux, for one), or even on a pair of floppies, and others that come on 4 CDs. Surely somewhere in that range is a distro that decided to include only one of the two, KDE or Gnome?
ISPs can voluntarity give out the info, but they may violate promises of privacy made to the service user if they do. They oould also face lawsuits from other corporations if they give out such info selectively and their choice of who to give it to in any way reflects their own financial interests. (I.e. AOL respecting all requests related to Time-Warner, but not from other's alledging infringment, would be engaging in practices that might violate antitrust).
Once it becomes an ISPs choice, they also lose the defense of complying with the court, which was protecting them from many lawsuits.
The user's strategy is clear. Get a small ISP, so if you need to sue them, they can't afford a billion dollar legal team. Get one that has a privacy clause in their contract. Read it carefully.
I'll bet that one of the two future predictions actually comes true. You get three guess which, and any that the company chosen is ranked earlier in alphabetical order don't count.
A lot, indeed most of the rights and financial perks assocated with marriage are really about producing children. They are just typically referred to as marriage related because they evolved in a society that believed children should only result from marriage.
With the major reason (from a legislative POV) for children being a next generation large enough to keep society running, artificial reproduction is irrelevant, and will stay irrelevant until the technology reaches a level where cloned kids (or whatever) start making up a significant part of the workforce that has to pay for such benefits as social security for their elders.
Then there's privacy issues. The society can tell that a gay couple can't naturally reproduce without having to run tests on them, but to determine (for legal purposes) that a heterosexual couple is infertile would require forcing them to disclose the results of medical tests, or even to take those tests. The more non-reproductive couples benefitting from the supposed advantages of marriage, the more pressure it puts on the society to instead violate privacy, as part of a new strategy of only extending those benefits to genuine reproducers.
Of course, this could lead to a system where a gay couple raising a child counted as reproducers and got benefits, while one that wasn't didn't. In the same way, the system could be changed so that potential reproduction would't count for any advantages, just actual reproduction. This would be a form of more equal rights, and might even be a good idea, but it means far, far more than just changing the marriage laws.
Genetic parentage would be irrelevant, just who was paying to get the offspring into the world and raise it to the point where it contributes to society. There are some ethical advantages to that principle, but it creates strange changes in a lot of laws, not just marriage.
Picture a first time home buyer. Under such a system, they can only get Federal income tax credit if they wait until they already have a child (or at least one of them is bearing one), before they buy the house. The IRS could have a rule that you have to get pregnant or adopt in the same year if you want to get a first time home buyer's deduction that year. Now society is penalizing planning ahead to prepare a nuturing environment, for many reproducers.
Or what about the legal status of a couple (or single parent, for that matter) whose sole minor offspring commits a major crime and so appears unlikely to ever become a contributer to society. He goes to prison at 15, and they lose their housing write off unless they get another offspring. (and we have better than usual cause to think just maybe they shouldn't be the ones raising kids) Parents whose sole child has just died at age 7 may find they can't afford their existing lifestyle unless they adopt or become foster parents within the year (and the foster home system, already deeply flawed, gains more financial pressure to pick bad foster parents who are just in it for the money).
Personally, I'll support marriage for just about anybody who claims to want it, with maybe a few exemptions for things such as incestuous unions, with incest defined by relationships close enough for there to be genetic consequences. (Heck, let's take the arguement to an extreme. If a group of wife swappers wants to set up a system to make sure all their collective kids get college, let's say go for it. If all the wives of that guy in Utah gave adult consent, fine, let's call that a marriage too).
Now, how do you make the changes in society to allow it without imposing some serious burdens on the more conventional majority of reproducers, and thus shooting ourselves in our collective feet when we get old enough to collect Social Security, or a young healthy population to fight a war, or whatever comes up that we need a few million not too disfunctional young people?
Proportionality is unlikely at best. Let's take some typical numbers for a pension fund looting operation. 1,000 employees lose their retirement funds. The have to work an average of 5 extra years (to retire later when social security for them is higher and this is merely to reduce, not eliminate the damage done). That's 5,000 years of life they collectively lost, the equivalent of murdering 64 healthy, newborn infants with a normal projected lifespan of 78 years.
Now some people would argue that not being able to retire on schedule is not the same as actually losing those years of their lives. You could adjust this if you like, to reflect the time they would have still spent watching TV, brushing their teeth and such, but it still looks like some real losses at absolute best.
Those 1,000 people all enjoy a reduced standard of living despite their extra years of work. Social securty doesn't pay all that well, and on aveerage only about 1/3 of a prvate pension. Couple that with having to work through their declining years, and their actual life expectancy drops, by an estimated 2.8 years (that's based on Provident Life's current actuarial tables, which break down mortality by income level). That in turn works out to the equivalent of murdering only about 36 heathy newborn infants. Many of these deaths will be the result of poorer medical care and diet.
I'd argue for both the above losses being applicable, for total damages equal to about 1 real murder/10 people screwed in a pension fund ripoff. Worldcom, for example, with 15,000 people given the shaft in one of their pension fund raids (if memory serves), would therefore be guilty of the equivalent of 1,500 premeditated murders. (And that's just one of the crimes in a series). If you want proportional here, think Nuremburg v 2.0. Anything less is coddling the criminals.