"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Schenck v. United States, March 3rd, 1919
People keep throwing around that quote from Holmes, but I doubt most of them actually know what the Schenck case was about. During World War I Charles Schenck, a Socialist, circulated a flyer to recently drafted men. The flyer, which cited the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," exhorted the men to "assert [their] opposition to the draft," which it described as a moral wrong driven by the capitalist system. The circulars proposed peaceful resistance, such as petitioning to repeal the Conscription Act.
Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act by attempting to cause insubordination in the military and to obstruct recruitment. The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's conviction was constitutional. As a result of the decision, Charles Schenck spent six months in prison.
Schenck was not falsely shouting "Fire!" in a theatre. The demonic forces of imperialism had already lit the whole world on fire, and Schenck was calling for water to put the blaze out. The compulsory education system, which I would argue also violates the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," currently threatens to keep the inferno of war burning. History classes indoctrinate students in a whitewashed jingoistic version of the US past and instill in them a deadly aggressive patriotism. Military recruiters sit in halls and lunchrooms, ready to convince our youth that the only economically viable future after they graduate is in war. Students who resist this system in a non-violent manner should be rewarded, not punished. An aim icon does not convey enough information to express a plot of any sort. It is simply a frustrated cry against the prison that is school in America. Like Schenck, this student is innocent.
Public schools should not use in school punishments for actions one takes outside of school. However, American school boards don't care much for the constitution. Administration views anyone who fights censorship and helps kids learn freely as more threatening then any violent offender. Your fried is lucky he wasn't expelled for running a proxy like I was. People concerned with these issues should get involved with peacefire.
Ultimately, the best way to prevent the demise of gaming is to make use of the democratic process.... posted letters to representatives (written on actual paper) are the best way to let politicians know your opinion
Civil disobedience and other forms of direct action are better ways of getting what we want then begging some old ignorant politicians to be nice to us. We should be defying the law and using all means necessary to demonstrate that information cannot be controlled. If stores won't sell a game to you, then you should pirate it. If law enforcement tries to track down online game distribution, we must devise and implement anonymity networks. If you are an independent game developer, you should not submit your game to the ESRB for rating. You can distribute it as shareware to bypass corporate big box store censorship. This would probably generate enough controversy that if the game was decent at all, it would be quite profitable. Consumers should boycott ESRB rated games, Tipper sticker music, and MPAA rated film. There already is a great independent music and movie industry that often does not rate its content, why not extend this to video games?
Although Rummy is just about as evil as they come and the FDA approval process is unfair, I still trust Aspartame. Aspartame itself is not a "poison that attacks nerve ends"; although its components may have some health effects in huge amounts, typical food consumption is safe. It is approximately 180 times sweeter than sugar, so diet foods and beverages only contain a small amount of it.
Approximately 10% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into methanol in the small intestine. Most of the methanol is absorbed and quickly converted into formaldehyde. Some scientists believe that the methanol cannot be a problem because: (a) there is not enough methanol absorbed to cause toxicity, (b) methanol and formaldehyde are already a by-product of human metabolism, and (c) there is more methanol in some alcoholic beverages and fruit juices than is derived from aspartame ingestion. (Wikipedia) See also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1218049 4&query_hl=2
Phenylalanine is an amino acid commonly found in foods. Approximately 50% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into phenylalanine. I can't see why this would be a bad thing. Phenylalanine is used in living organisms, including the human body, where it is an essential amino acid. Phenylalanine can also be converted into L-tyrosine, another one of the twenty protein-forming amino acids. L-tyrosine is converted into L-DOPA, which is further converted into the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. Research indicates that Phenylalanine can be an effective part of an overall program to fight chronic pain and depression in some cases, including the mood swings of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Some sources contend that it can increase energy and mental alertness. So it's a natural amino acid that can function as a CNS stimulant. It can't hurt you any more then the caffene already in the pop, as long as you don't abuse it. (Even stronger CNS stimulants like amphetamines are fairly safe as long as you use a small enough quantity of them and maintain a normal sleep cycle).
Aspartic acid is an amino acid commonly found in foods. Approximately 40% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into aspartic acid. A lot of FUD has been drummed up about aspartic acid being an "excitotoxin". I really is just one of the 20 natural proteinogenic amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
"...since aspartame is broken down into these components before it is absorbed into the blood stream, aspartame in its initial form does not have the opportunity to travel to target organs, including the brain, to cause cancer." (American Cancer Society)
Why would anyone trust Best Buy with their personal data?
This is not news. I'm surprised big box electronics stores aren't aggregating, sorting, and selling personal information from computers brought in for repairs or replacement. Would anyone hand over paper copies of their private legal and financial records to someone at a retail store? Why would they do the same thing in digital form?
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web. You can read about what happened here:
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt
The public school system is used to maintain social control, not educate. No one will stand up for the free speech rights of young people, and these rights are necessary for an informed and free society. The only solution is abandon compulsory education. Kids would be better off without being forced to go. Access to public Libraries would allow them to read; (at my school "unauthorized reading material" was banned). Libraries or homes would also give us free uncensored access to the Internet. Many leaders in unions, business, and non-profits are more then willing to hold workshops and lectures for high school aged kids. Their real world experience could replace incompetent teachers. There is nothing wrong with using public resources to teach young people, but forcing kids to spend their days being coerced into memorizing minutia, and detaining or expelling anyone with the capability for independent thought, that just further perpetuates the sort of passive obedience that makes American workers and consumers so easily manipulated.
If you are interested in the history of the public relations and marketing industry and the theory behind modern advertising, you should check out the English documentary "The Century of the Self". You can find a tracker at:
...it should all be stored on a secure server, and he/she should be working on the files without ever saving any of the data to this laptop's drive, making the company liable in this case.
Let's say you use the laptop to log on to the secure server- in order to work on these files, they have to be transferred in some form to the laptop. The sensitive data will be located in Laptop's RAM, and it can be paged to a swap file on the hard disk, which an attacker can later recover if they steal the laptop or it's hard drive. Encrypting the swapfile can help mitigate this risk. Every system that can read sensitive data should be secure, be they portable or a server.
2 X Sgi o2 running IRIX 1 X Sgi Octane2 running IRIX 2 X HP PA-RISC machines running Debian 1 X Sun Ultra 20 running OpenBSD 1 X Compaq proliant (8 way SMP Xeon) running Debian 1 X Sun clone (4 way SMP UltraSPARCII) running Solaris 3 X x86 laptops used by various family members 3 X 10/100 hubs 1 X 10/100 switch 1 X D-link wifi access point 1 X Asus WL-HDD running Asus GNU/Linux 1 X Zipit running openzipit GNU/Linux 1 X KVM switch
Additionally, if you add an account for yourself, you can use scp to download a copy of Theo Van Gogh's film, Submission. He was murdered by a Moslem angry over its contents.
If anyone has a problem with my expression of free speech, they can try to hack me all they want, if they succeed, the content will be back up within a few days. Moreover, it is already available in hundreds of places (especially on p2p networks); redundancy is key to Internet content resilience. The Moslem attackers will not succeed in anything except convincing everyone else that fundamentalism is idiotic.
White or black lists are far too simplistic and prone to abuse. Naive Bayes classifiers are better, but still a hack. An asymmetric encryption system would be a far more complete solution to the problem of unsolicited mail.
Why doesn't everyone just use mail clients that only accept incoming mail encrypted with the user's public key? No authentic mail would get labeled as spam, and real spamming would become too resource intensive. It would not be too difficult to make the whole encryption process totally transparent to the user. The problem is that adoption would be subject to the network effect (the service only gains value when there are many users). Since most people have little knowledge of crypto systems and wouldn't see why this would eliminate spam and protect their privacy, why not have a law the forces ISPs to provide such a service? You could even word such legislation to appear to be intended to "protect the children". We need to lobby the makers of popular mail programs (or implement this system ourselves in the OSS area), but in the end we might need to have corporations and congress force change from above.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pr o&ddlC=59 Does Unisys actually make any innovative products or provide useful services, or do they just drain money from corporations and governments run by foolish PHBs (Pointy Haired (Bosses || Bureaucrats))?
Computer hand tracking is old technology, but using it to make a functional "air guitar" is neat. Check out this paper and this video for older work in this area.
Let me rip off wikipedia again. "Intellectual: a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas."
I would say that intellectuals are people who are fascinated with ideas.
"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." --attributed to Aldous Huxley
I don't think I am more intelligent then an average person, but I do believe I try harder to keep myself informed and to find rational explanations for events in the world around me. I don't think it's too presumptuous to call myself an intellectual.
The word radical comes from late Latin radicalis meaning root. Intellectuals are often radicals because they want to find the fundamental "root" principles that underlay complex systems. When they challenge fundamental political beliefs, they become political radicals.
I've read the book and yes, some of my phrasing was copied from wikipedia. If you want to know my own opinion on it, I basically think it gives the wrong impression about human nature. We are not intrinsically good or evil. Our main drive is to survive, and our secondary goal is to help our kin survive. Sometimes our selfish side can make us do unethical things, other times we can exibit compassion.
We need to be getting rid of sex, not encouraging more, we need to be getting rid of drugs and alchole, not legalizing them.
Yep, humanity will last for a long time with no sex.
I believe legalizing drugs would decrease the number of people who use them use for several reasons. I'll be brief and just name a few.
-Money currently spent locking up people who don't harm anyone could be spent on their detox treatment and other rehab programs.
-Young people would get little thrill out of doing something that isn't forbidden, so demand for drugs would decrease.
-Drugs would be regulated and taxed, so drug dealers would no longer have enormous profits, the industry could dry up from the supply side.
Why would this system result in anything less than a horrible place to live?
You could live however you wanted in my system. If you wanted to use drugs, you could. If you didn't want to, you wouldn't have to. In the current system children are force fed certain drugs (amphetamine based stimulants to counter ADD for example) while they are banned from using other safer drugs (like cannabis).
I still fail to see how an intelligent ethical 17 year old (just to make my example conform to Establishment measures of intelligence and morality lets say a straight A student and eagle scout), is somehow better then a 19 year old who fights in gang wars and abuses hard drugs so much they never make a coherent decision. People are different! Race, age, and sexual orientation may correlate or even loosely determine certain personal characteristics, but it is still unethical to discriminate based on any of these factors.
Although Lord of the Flies isn't my favorite book, I think it further illustrates my point that both adults and minors can be irresponsible and wrong. If you thought the books was just about how irrational and primitive children are, your reading was extremely superficial. At the end of the book the kids start a forest fire, which is seen by a passing naval vessel and one of the ship's officers comes ashore and rescues the boys. This is such a good ending because it forces any rational person to consider whether or not the boys are being saved from savagery. Wasn't the children's fighting on the island just a microcosm of the whole world at war? William G. Golding's view on society is such that civilization is merely a thin layer, and that all of us are really savages underneath. If the checks and balances of civilization fall away, the real, savage nature of humans surfaces. There are certain political subplots. For example, Jack, representing fascism, was particularly relevant considering that Golding wrote the novel after the Second World War. He had the war in mind when writing, and his experiences in the navy caused him to critique the nature of man, ultimately leading him to the conclusion that man was inherently "evil" or savage.
Actually, I wrote the post from about 11pm to 2am (I was doing some other reading at the same time), I did plan on drawing some radical conclusions, but perhaps the lack of sleep and lack of caffeine had stultified my ability to be articulate. I did not intend to cheat the mod system. I do wonder if perhaps those who consider themselves intellectuals are more prone to radicalism? I don't necessarily mean that smart people are radical, I just wonder if there is some common motivation for being drawn to complex ideas and being drawn to socially unacceptable ideas. Both are hard things to think about, but can give you insightful answers if you bother to ask the right questions. I think that this may be what drove the academic and political actions everyone from Richard Stallman, to Albert Einstien, to Ted Kazinski, to Noam Chomsky.
Before I get into a rant, I'd like to say: What's the big deal about teens and sex anyways? In my experience, young people rather enjoy it and don't need to be protected from any predators any more then anyone else does (anyone who forces non-consensual physical activity on another, regardless of the age of the victim or the attacker, is a criminal and should be treated as such). Any consensual physical activity is a right (regardless of the age of the participants). I think adults (especially Catholic priests) are sexually frustrated and afraid that they are attracted to teens. This attraction is just a biochemical response that normal people generally have to physically fit members of the opposite gender (and sometime the same) who are old enough to be fertile. Because they are repressed and for stupid cultural reasons they want to repress the rest of us, they hide their own desires by over reacting and trying to imagine that young people are not sexual. They censor both because of personal embarrassment and because of the sense of power they get by manipulating others.
How can we label people "free" and give them the rights free-thinking people deserve if we allow them to grow up totally ensconced in conservative ideology?
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. --attributed to Thomas Jefferson
But...teaching without both free access to different points of view, and the freedom to express your own point of view, is not real education, it is only indoctrination. If children aren't given the opportunity to receive all kinds of knowledge, they accept uncritically whatever traditional "values" their parents believe in simply because their parents are close to them. When parents are given total control of where their children can spend their time, the child's intellectual development is totally at the mercy of the parent. Adults can, if they make enough of an effort, completely shape a child's world. And yet, If we were to emancipate children from the grip of their parents, most of us would immediately force them into some other state institution (public schools, most likely) which would be a violation of both the liberty of the student, and the freedom of the parent to "own" their child.
Despite legal adulthood being set at 18, the age in which we are given full human rights is for the most part not well agreed upon in America. For example, various states in the US have different and conflicting age of consent laws that allow for sexual freedom anywhere form age 14 to 18. Many young teens (junior high or middle school age) have detailed enough knowledge and a strong enough sense of responsibility that I would trust them to vote or drive cars. There are many legal adults age 18 and up that don't deserve these privileges. Age is an unfair and inconsistent measure of whether one deserves human rights or social privileges. Also, please note that when I refer to children in this post, I mean any human under that age of 18, a large portion of which are more knowledgeable then an average adult especially regarding information technology. I am not just talking about little kids.
Children in America really are an oppressed group; parents here can use coercion to force feed their kids whatever sick ideals they stand for. The United States and Somalia are the only two nations to have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nearly American seams to end up having "Faith" (false conviction in unjustified propositions) in the same God that there parents did. Funny how our respect for parents "rights" to control their kids leads to the propagation of violent and idiotic ideas like Christian fundamentalism and racis
If you want to learn how computers work from the bottom up and really see how your operating system interacts with hardware, you should check out "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective". It assumes some understanding of *nix and C, so you need to get familiar with them before or while you read CS:APP. You can't learn "programming" without learning a programming language, and although something like BASIC might be easiest, I suggest starting with C or assembler because they will give you a more complete understanding of how computers actually function. You seem to be someone who wants thorough knowledge, not just marketable skills. Once you comprehend the structure of code at a low level, you should tackle more useful techniques and algorithms. Donald Knuth's books are a must. At this point you should have a strong enough foundation to delve into more specific aspects of systems level programming, or move on to high level programming and look into learning a language that's more suited for application development like Java.
There are all kinds of electric devices you can make that look like they are straight out of an old horror movie. Jacob's ladders are quite simple to build. You can find
all the parts on ebay. If you are more ambitious, you might want to try a tesla coil.
Slashdot Mirror
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Schenck v. United States, March 3rd, 1919
People keep throwing around that quote from Holmes, but I doubt most of them actually know what the Schenck case was about. During World War I Charles Schenck, a Socialist, circulated a flyer to recently drafted men. The flyer, which cited the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," exhorted the men to "assert [their] opposition to the draft," which it described as a moral wrong driven by the capitalist system. The circulars proposed peaceful resistance, such as petitioning to repeal the Conscription Act.
Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act by attempting to cause insubordination in the military and to obstruct recruitment. The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's conviction was constitutional. As a result of the decision, Charles Schenck spent six months in prison.
Schenck was not falsely shouting "Fire!" in a theatre. The demonic forces of imperialism had already lit the whole world on fire, and Schenck was calling for water to put the blaze out. The compulsory education system, which I would argue also violates the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," currently threatens to keep the inferno of war burning. History classes indoctrinate students in a whitewashed jingoistic version of the US past and instill in them a deadly aggressive patriotism. Military recruiters sit in halls and lunchrooms, ready to convince our youth that the only economically viable future after they graduate is in war. Students who resist this system in a non-violent manner should be rewarded, not punished. An aim icon does not convey enough information to express a plot of any sort. It is simply a frustrated cry against the prison that is school in America. Like Schenck, this student is innocent.
Public schools should not use in school punishments for actions one takes outside of school. However, American school boards don't care much for the constitution. Administration views anyone who fights censorship and helps kids learn freely as more threatening then any violent offender. Your fried is lucky he wasn't expelled for running a proxy like I was. People concerned with these issues should get involved with peacefire.
Ultimately, the best way to prevent the demise of gaming is to make use of the democratic process. ... posted letters to representatives (written on actual paper) are the best way to let politicians know your opinion
Civil disobedience and other forms of direct action are better ways of getting what we want then begging some old ignorant politicians to be nice to us. We should be defying the law and using all means necessary to demonstrate that information cannot be controlled. If stores won't sell a game to you, then you should pirate it. If law enforcement tries to track down online game distribution, we must devise and implement anonymity networks. If you are an independent game developer, you should not submit your game to the ESRB for rating. You can distribute it as shareware to bypass corporate big box store censorship. This would probably generate enough controversy that if the game was decent at all, it would be quite profitable. Consumers should boycott ESRB rated games, Tipper sticker music, and MPAA rated film. There already is a great independent music and movie industry that often does not rate its content, why not extend this to video games?
Although Rummy is just about as evil as they come and the FDA approval process is unfair, I still trust Aspartame. Aspartame itself is not a "poison that attacks nerve ends"; although its components may have some health effects in huge amounts, typical food consumption is safe. It is approximately 180 times sweeter than sugar, so diet foods and beverages only contain a small amount of it.
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1218049 4&query_hl=2
a 05.html/
Approximately 10% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into methanol in the small intestine. Most of the methanol is absorbed and quickly converted into formaldehyde. Some scientists believe that the methanol cannot be a problem because: (a) there is not enough methanol absorbed to cause toxicity, (b) methanol and formaldehyde are already a by-product of human metabolism, and (c) there is more methanol in some alcoholic beverages and fruit juices than is derived from aspartame ingestion. (Wikipedia)
See also: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Phenylalanine is an amino acid commonly found in foods. Approximately 50% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into phenylalanine. I can't see why this would be a bad thing. Phenylalanine is used in living organisms, including the human body, where it is an essential amino acid. Phenylalanine can also be converted into L-tyrosine, another one of the twenty protein-forming amino acids. L-tyrosine is converted into L-DOPA, which is further converted into the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine. Research indicates that Phenylalanine can be an effective part of an overall program to fight chronic pain and depression in some cases, including the mood swings of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Some sources contend that it can increase energy and mental alertness. So it's a natural amino acid that can function as a CNS stimulant. It can't hurt you any more then the caffene already in the pop, as long as you don't abuse it. (Even stronger CNS stimulants like amphetamines are fairly safe as long as you use a small enough quantity of them and maintain a normal sleep cycle).
Aspartic acid is an amino acid commonly found in foods. Approximately 40% of aspartame (by mass) is broken down into aspartic acid. A lot of FUD has been drummed up about aspartic acid being an "excitotoxin". I really is just one of the 20 natural proteinogenic amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
"...since aspartame is broken down into these components before it is absorbed into the blood stream, aspartame in its initial form does not have the opportunity to travel to target organs, including the brain, to cause cancer." (American Cancer Society)
Animal studies HAVE found aspartame to be cancer causing, but no major human study has. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/265559_sod
Are these guys sure that "Captain Copyright" doesn't infringe on the "Captain Planet" copyright?
You can't hold a copyright on a two word phrase. This would fall under trademark law, not copyright law.
Why would anyone trust Best Buy with their personal data?
This is not news. I'm surprised big box electronics stores aren't aggregating, sorting, and selling personal information from computers brought in for repairs or replacement. Would anyone hand over paper copies of their private legal and financial records to someone at a retail store? Why would they do the same thing in digital form?
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web. You can read about what happened here:
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt
The public school system is used to maintain social control, not educate. No one will stand up for the free speech rights of young people, and these rights are necessary for an informed and free society. The only solution is abandon compulsory education. Kids would be better off without being forced to go. Access to public Libraries would allow them to read; (at my school "unauthorized reading material" was banned). Libraries or homes would also give us free uncensored access to the Internet. Many leaders in unions, business, and non-profits are more then willing to hold workshops and lectures for high school aged kids. Their real world experience could replace incompetent teachers. There is nothing wrong with using public resources to teach young people, but forcing kids to spend their days being coerced into memorizing minutia, and detaining or expelling anyone with the capability for independent thought, that just further perpetuates the sort of passive obedience that makes American workers and consumers so easily manipulated.
Quicktime is openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free. Vlc plays this particular quicktime trailer quite nicely.
Why not just run the OS from a non-writable medium like a CD? Knoppix is much more economical then a commericial solution like deepfreeze.
If you are interested in the history of the public relations and marketing industry and the theory behind modern advertising, you should check out the English documentary "The Century of the Self". You can find a tracker at:
? TorrentID=911
http://www.chomskytorrents.org/TorrentDetails.php
Freudian psychology has had more of an influence on advertisers then real science.
Let's say you use the laptop to log on to the secure server- in order to work on these files, they have to be transferred in some form to the laptop. The sensitive data will be located in Laptop's RAM, and it can be paged to a swap file on the hard disk, which an attacker can later recover if they steal the laptop or it's hard drive. Encrypting the swapfile can help mitigate this risk. Every system that can read sensitive data should be secure, be they portable or a server.
2 X Sgi o2 running IRIX
1 X Sgi Octane2 running IRIX
2 X HP PA-RISC machines running Debian
1 X Sun Ultra 20 running OpenBSD
1 X Compaq proliant (8 way SMP Xeon) running Debian
1 X Sun clone (4 way SMP UltraSPARCII) running Solaris
3 X x86 laptops used by various family members
3 X 10/100 hubs
1 X 10/100 switch
1 X D-link wifi access point
1 X Asus WL-HDD running Asus GNU/Linux
1 X Zipit running openzipit GNU/Linux
1 X KVM switch
And yes, this is set up in my parent's basement!
My web site hosts one of the more offensive cartoons made in response to the rioters.
. jpg
http://unixclan.no-ip.org/~the1/muhammaddevareaux
Additionally, if you add an account for yourself, you can use scp to download a copy of Theo Van Gogh's film, Submission. He was murdered by a Moslem angry over its contents.
http://unixclan.net/
If anyone has a problem with my expression of free speech, they can try to hack me all they want, if they succeed, the content will be back up within a few days. Moreover, it is already available in hundreds of places (especially on p2p networks); redundancy is key to Internet content resilience. The Moslem attackers will not succeed in anything except convincing everyone else that fundamentalism is idiotic.
White or black lists are far too simplistic and prone to abuse. Naive Bayes classifiers are better, but still a hack. An asymmetric encryption system would be a far more complete solution to the problem of unsolicited mail.
Why doesn't everyone just use mail clients that only accept incoming mail encrypted with the user's public key? No authentic mail would get labeled as spam, and real spamming would become too resource intensive. It would not be too difficult to make the whole encryption process totally transparent to the user. The problem is that adoption would be subject to the network effect (the service only gains value when there are many users). Since most people have little knowledge of crypto systems and wouldn't see why this would eliminate spam and protect their privacy, why not have a law the forces ISPs to provide such a service? You could even word such legislation to appear to be intended to "protect the children". We need to lobby the makers of popular mail programs (or implement this system ourselves in the OSS area), but in the end we might need to have corporations and congress force change from above.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pr o&ddlC=59
Does Unisys actually make any innovative products or provide useful services, or do they just drain money from corporations and governments run by foolish PHBs (Pointy Haired (Bosses || Bureaucrats))?
Computer hand tracking is old technology, but using it to make a functional "air guitar" is neat. Check out this paper and this video for older work in this area.
Let me rip off wikipedia again.
"Intellectual: a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas."
I would say that intellectuals are people who are fascinated with ideas.
"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
--attributed to Aldous Huxley
I don't think I am more intelligent then an average person, but I do believe I try harder to keep myself informed and to find rational explanations for events in the world around me. I don't think it's too presumptuous to call myself an intellectual.
The word radical comes from late Latin radicalis meaning root. Intellectuals are often radicals because they want to find the fundamental "root" principles that underlay complex systems. When they challenge fundamental political beliefs, they become political radicals.
I've read the book and yes, some of my phrasing was copied from wikipedia. If you want to know my own opinion on it, I basically think it gives the wrong impression about human nature. We are not intrinsically good or evil. Our main drive is to survive, and our secondary goal is to help our kin survive. Sometimes our selfish side can make us do unethical things, other times we can exibit compassion.
Yep, humanity will last for a long time with no sex.
I believe legalizing drugs would decrease the number of people who use them use for several reasons. I'll be brief and just name a few.
-Money currently spent locking up people who don't harm anyone could be spent on their detox treatment and other rehab programs.
-Young people would get little thrill out of doing something that isn't forbidden, so demand for drugs would decrease.
-Drugs would be regulated and taxed, so drug dealers would no longer have enormous profits, the industry could dry up from the supply side.
Why would this system result in anything less than a horrible place to live?
You could live however you wanted in my system. If you wanted to use drugs, you could. If you didn't want to, you wouldn't have to. In the current system children are force fed certain drugs (amphetamine based stimulants to counter ADD for example) while they are banned from using other safer drugs (like cannabis).
I still fail to see how an intelligent ethical 17 year old (just to make my example conform to Establishment measures of intelligence and morality lets say a straight A student and eagle scout), is somehow better then a 19 year old who fights in gang wars and abuses hard drugs so much they never make a coherent decision. People are different! Race, age, and sexual orientation may correlate or even loosely determine certain personal characteristics, but it is still unethical to discriminate based on any of these factors.
Although Lord of the Flies isn't my favorite book, I think it further illustrates my point that both adults and minors can be irresponsible and wrong. If you thought the books was just about how irrational and primitive children are, your reading was extremely superficial. At the end of the book the kids start a forest fire, which is seen by a passing naval vessel and one of the ship's officers comes ashore and rescues the boys. This is such a good ending because it forces any rational person to consider whether or not the boys are being saved from savagery. Wasn't the children's fighting on the island just a microcosm of the whole world at war? William G. Golding's view on society is such that civilization is merely a thin layer, and that all of us are really savages underneath. If the checks and balances of civilization fall away, the real, savage nature of humans surfaces. There are certain political subplots. For example, Jack, representing fascism, was particularly relevant considering that Golding wrote the novel after the Second World War. He had the war in mind when writing, and his experiences in the navy caused him to critique the nature of man, ultimately leading him to the conclusion that man was inherently "evil" or savage.
Actually, I wrote the post from about 11pm to 2am (I was doing some other reading at the same time), I did plan on drawing some radical conclusions, but perhaps the lack of sleep and lack of caffeine had stultified my ability to be articulate. I did not intend to cheat the mod system. I do wonder if perhaps those who consider themselves intellectuals are more prone to radicalism? I don't necessarily mean that smart people are radical, I just wonder if there is some common motivation for being drawn to complex ideas and being drawn to socially unacceptable ideas. Both are hard things to think about, but can give you insightful answers if you bother to ask the right questions. I think that this may be what drove the academic and political actions everyone from Richard Stallman, to Albert Einstien, to Ted Kazinski, to Noam Chomsky.
How can we label people "free" and give them the rights free-thinking people deserve if we allow them to grow up totally ensconced in conservative ideology?
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. --attributed to Thomas Jefferson
But...teaching without both free access to different points of view, and the freedom to express your own point of view, is not real education, it is only indoctrination. If children aren't given the opportunity to receive all kinds of knowledge, they accept uncritically whatever traditional "values" their parents believe in simply because their parents are close to them. When parents are given total control of where their children can spend their time, the child's intellectual development is totally at the mercy of the parent. Adults can, if they make enough of an effort, completely shape a child's world. And yet, If we were to emancipate children from the grip of their parents, most of us would immediately force them into some other state institution (public schools, most likely) which would be a violation of both the liberty of the student, and the freedom of the parent to "own" their child.
Despite legal adulthood being set at 18, the age in which we are given full human rights is for the most part not well agreed upon in America. For example, various states in the US have different and conflicting age of consent laws that allow for sexual freedom anywhere form age 14 to 18. Many young teens (junior high or middle school age) have detailed enough knowledge and a strong enough sense of responsibility that I would trust them to vote or drive cars. There are many legal adults age 18 and up that don't deserve these privileges. Age is an unfair and inconsistent measure of whether one deserves human rights or social privileges. Also, please note that when I refer to children in this post, I mean any human under that age of 18, a large portion of which are more knowledgeable then an average adult especially regarding information technology. I am not just talking about little kids.
Children in America really are an oppressed group; parents here can use coercion to force feed their kids whatever sick ideals they stand for. The United States and Somalia are the only two nations to have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nearly American seams to end up having "Faith" (false conviction in unjustified propositions) in the same God that there parents did. Funny how our respect for parents "rights" to control their kids leads to the propagation of violent and idiotic ideas like Christian fundamentalism and racis
If you want to learn how computers work from the bottom up and really see how your operating system interacts with hardware, you should check out "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective". It assumes some understanding of *nix and C, so you need to get familiar with them before or while you read CS:APP. You can't learn "programming" without learning a programming language, and although something like BASIC might be easiest, I suggest starting with C or assembler because they will give you a more complete understanding of how computers actually function. You seem to be someone who wants thorough knowledge, not just marketable skills. Once you comprehend the structure of code at a low level, you should tackle more useful techniques and algorithms. Donald Knuth's books are a must. At this point you should have a strong enough foundation to delve into more specific aspects of systems level programming, or move on to high level programming and look into learning a language that's more suited for application development like Java.
There are all kinds of electric devices you can make that look like they are straight out of an old horror movie. Jacob's ladders are quite simple to build. You can find all the parts on ebay. If you are more ambitious, you might want to try a tesla coil.
He does.
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/pat.gif