Lastly, Ron Paul is richer than you and me and can easily pay someone to clean out his PC every so often.
It's obvious you don't know Ron Paul very well. He's a small town obstetrician. While he probably makes more money than me, merely because he's an MD, he still isn't removed to the rarified airs of the elite.
Maybe Ron Paul (L-Texas) actually read the full text of the bill and understood that beneath it's geek-friendly title was a freedom-unfriendly law.
You may think its funny to criminalize spyware, but that's the first step down a very slippery slope. Spywares are not viruses or trojans. They only get installed via user consent. A government that has the power to criminalize spyware between a consenting user and publisher has the power to criminalize [insert any consensual activity here].
You don't outlaw mere annoyances. That's taking the power of government way too far, no matter what political stripe you are. Do we ban nose picking next? Belching at the table? Spyware may be annoying, but if it's on your system, you have only yourself to blame. If you're an admin and it's running amock on your wee 'bairns then look to your users and not to the spyware publishers.
Last I checked, it took a transaction to get spyware installed. Otherwise it wouldn't be spyware, it would be a virus. And I think we already have laws against viruses.
Granted, not being a Windows user, I've never had the experience of encountering spyware, but it seems to me that they don't just walk in the front door and install themselves when you're not looking.
Not all trademark law, but parts of it I do. When a word or symbol becomes associated in the public's mind with an entire class of product, then it should cease being a trademark. It's not just Unix, it's "aspirin", "kleenex", "jello", etc.
When a word ceases to be a proper name and becomes a noun, it should lose its trademark. Regardless of the cause. Regardles of how well you tried to protect it in the past. In the case of Unix, it has ceased to be the proper name for a specific operating system.
The problem with the Unix trademark was that it was allowed to be attached to too many products. Not only did it become a generic term, it became a generic term because AT&T/USL/Novell/OG allowed it to become generic.
Hmmm. Slavery? CHECK! Civil War? CHECK! Leaders lying to do whatever they want? CHECK! Leaders assassinated for their peaceful ways? CHECK! Governments conspiring to overthrow foreign governments and mislead their entire nation into conflict to earn a buck? CHECK!
That's not fascism. It's not me who's saying it, it's the Wikipedia article you linked to that's saying it.
If you want to go on believing that the US is sliding into fascism as opposed to one of several dozen other authoritarian regimes, feel free. But I will have to discontinue this conversation because it's obvious we are speaking in different languages.
Words mean things, and it's become obvious to me that you want words to mean whatever the hell the you want them to mean at the time.
Legal nitpicking. To quote a recently departed master of the obvious, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. In the case of OSX, not only does it strongly resemble a duck, it even has a sign around it's neck saying it is a duck! OSX has a Unix pedigree that many certified UNIX(tm) systems do not have.
I will agree that the US is moving in the wrong direction. I will agree that that direction leads to an authortarian society. However you used the word "fascist". The direction the US is moving in is not fascist. Your slogans make no difference. You are using an incorrect word for its cheap emotional value.
You completely misinterpret your slogans. You twist them to your desired meanings. The first, "everything in the State", refers to totalitarianism, which the US, despite its faults, is in no danger of becoming. You interpet "book and musket" to mean firearm owning Christians, yet the US populace has been predominantly Christian and pro-firearm ownership since long before the revolution. Have we been a fascist people for over three hundred years? Hah! And you claim last quote, "Long live death", has been uttered by Bush in some form in every one of his speeches. Funny, I can't seem to recall it at all. Please document this, because no one else has.
In summary, your use of the word "fascist" was wrong, still is wrong, and will always be wrong.
Funny, you link to a Wikipedia article on fascism, but your comment seems to indicate that you've never read it. Most people use the word unthinkingly to refer to anything they dislike to the right, in the same way they use the term "communist" to refer to anything they dislike to the left. From my reading of the article, the US is most certainly not fascist, nor are there signs of it becoming fascist. Could you please explain, in terms of the definition of fascism given by Wikipedia, why "the USA is rapidly becoming fascist"?
There's a story that a freak meteorological event three centuries ago covered parts of New England with uncanny darkness. The story goes that most people stayed home and prayed because they thought it was the end of the world. But one man hitched up with oxen and went to plow his fields.
When asked later why he went about his work, he replied, "Well if figured it was one of two things. If the Good Lord wasn't coming back then I didn't want to waste my time. But if the Good Lord was coming back, then I wanted Him to find me industrious instead of idle."
Believing in the second coming shouldn't have any effect on one's behavior towards the environment. A really good answer to your question would be, "If the Good Lord is coming back tomorrow, I want Him to find me to be a faithful steward of the Earth..."
No one's claiming Drudge is unbiased. As a muckraker/gossip, it's in his interest to be biased.
This article does have evidence. Just look at the phrasing of the editorial blurb. ""slam-dunk evidence", "they already knew", "completely overwhelming", "(as Iraq said)", "totally unsuitable". While not extemely biased, the bias is still there.
And there's there's your own Drudge evidence. If Drudge is biased because of his *pattern* of posts, then so much Slashdot be biased because of its *pattern* of stories.
Yes I am. Let's just look at the lastest episode. CBS presents forged documents as genuine. Within 24 hours they are exposed. Yet during that 24 hours the Dems were dancing and singing because they knew they had Bush by the short and curlies. This was their ticket to victory. But it was a fraud!
It doesn't matter who was at fault with those documents. What matters is that for twenty four hours the Dems screamed at everyone who dared to suggest that those docs might not be genuine. People who presented evidence were declared members of a conspiracy. And then after Rather was found out, the Dems started a whisper campaign that Rove was the author of the forgeries!
It does matter, because those screaming loudest about the lack of WMDs are planning to vote for someone who agreed with Bush on the issue. It doesn't matter what Kerry knows NOW about weapons in Iraq, because with what he knew and said THEN it's clear he would have done the same thing as Bush.
The WMDs were there. That doesn't mean that an invasion should have occured, but to pretend that Iraq posed zero threat to other nations is absurd.
It's called "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. There has been so much bullshit from the left regarding the Bush administration, that no one bothers to listen to you anymore. You blew your chance at credibility.
Re:Speak for yourself, OSX is more than there alre
on
Syllable 0.5.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have to use OSX quite a bit during the past few weeks. From listening to the Slashdot blather, I would have assumed it was several orders of magnitudes easier than KDE/GNOME with a correspondingly greater degree of flexibility and power.
Hah!
While is was a bit easier than KDE/GNOME, it certainly did not have more flexibility or power. By "a bit easier", I really mean "marginally easier". Some areas of the desktop were actually more complicated than what I was used to.
Don't mistake me for ragging on OSX. I am not. I am merely pointing out that it isn't the instinctually intuitive interface everyone declares it to be.
Why does this sound like one of those psychic predictions? You know, like when an earthquake hits and suddenly all these psychics appear out of nowhere claiming they knew all along it was going to happen.
Why did this study appear *now*, a mere few weeks after some very large hurricanes? The timing smacks of cheap scare mongering.
I suggest you go patch up your system before you learn that the hard way.
But there's nothing worthwhile to patch! Two of the available patches affect services that I am not running. The remaining patch is a local exploit. By default I am not running any services beyond ssh.
I am not saying my system is invulnerable. One guy with a flamethrower could trash my data in a heartbeat. But I'm not going to get so paranoid I'm going to worry about it.
Except that now my company has my LEGAL signature. They can sign my approval to documents that I have never seen. The can alter my contracts and agreements with them at will without my knowledge or consent. And other nasty things.
And it would stand up in a court of law!
I really don't care much if the company can read my encrypted email, since the only encrypted email I'm going to get will be from the company. But I am unwilling to give them a legally binding signet ring.
If you can't tell by my sig,it's time to increase your caffiene uptake:-)
To your original point, connecting an unpatched FreeBSD to a broadband connection is most certainly NOT the equivalent of standing up in a boat waving your arms in a thunderstorm!
As long as paper-engineers and golf-club-wielding PHBs are entrusted with decision making, I see no chance for improvement.
I hit the icing on the cake Wednesday. My company rolled out a PGP solution for Outlook. Good, right? Wrong! The policy is to write down your passphrase on a paper, give it to IT, who will then store your passphrase for safekeeping in case you lose it.
Connecting an unpatched PC to a broadband connection is pretty much the same thing.
I have to admit that I'm connected to broadband with an unpatched PC. And I still feel safe. That's because none of the three security vulnerabilies issued for my OS version affect me.
Slashdot Mirror
Lastly, Ron Paul is richer than you and me and can easily pay someone to clean out his PC every so often.
It's obvious you don't know Ron Paul very well. He's a small town obstetrician. While he probably makes more money than me, merely because he's an MD, he still isn't removed to the rarified airs of the elite.
Maybe Ron Paul (L-Texas) actually read the full text of the bill and understood that beneath it's geek-friendly title was a freedom-unfriendly law.
You may think its funny to criminalize spyware, but that's the first step down a very slippery slope. Spywares are not viruses or trojans. They only get installed via user consent. A government that has the power to criminalize spyware between a consenting user and publisher has the power to criminalize [insert any consensual activity here].
You don't outlaw mere annoyances. That's taking the power of government way too far, no matter what political stripe you are. Do we ban nose picking next? Belching at the table? Spyware may be annoying, but if it's on your system, you have only yourself to blame. If you're an admin and it's running amock on your wee 'bairns then look to your users and not to the spyware publishers.
Actually it was none of the above. It was an adherence to principles. Something rare these days.
Last I checked, it took a transaction to get spyware installed. Otherwise it wouldn't be spyware, it would be a virus. And I think we already have laws against viruses.
Granted, not being a Windows user, I've never had the experience of encountering spyware, but it seems to me that they don't just walk in the front door and install themselves when you're not looking.
Not all trademark law, but parts of it I do. When a word or symbol becomes associated in the public's mind with an entire class of product, then it should cease being a trademark. It's not just Unix, it's "aspirin", "kleenex", "jello", etc.
When a word ceases to be a proper name and becomes a noun, it should lose its trademark. Regardless of the cause. Regardles of how well you tried to protect it in the past. In the case of Unix, it has ceased to be the proper name for a specific operating system.
The problem with the Unix trademark was that it was allowed to be attached to too many products. Not only did it become a generic term, it became a generic term because AT&T/USL/Novell/OG allowed it to become generic.
Hmmm. Slavery? CHECK! Civil War? CHECK! Leaders lying to do whatever they want? CHECK! Leaders assassinated for their peaceful ways? CHECK! Governments conspiring to overthrow foreign governments and mislead their entire nation into conflict to earn a buck? CHECK!
That's not fascism. It's not me who's saying it, it's the Wikipedia article you linked to that's saying it.
If you want to go on believing that the US is sliding into fascism as opposed to one of several dozen other authoritarian regimes, feel free. But I will have to discontinue this conversation because it's obvious we are speaking in different languages.
Words mean things, and it's become obvious to me that you want words to mean whatever the hell the you want them to mean at the time.
Except it's being made by Anhauser-Busch. So it would be more on the order of a lead brick wrapped in a slice of crabapple.
I once made a double espresso imperial stout. A wonderful beer for breakfast. "Hair of the dog" and a wakeup call all in one glass :-)
Legal nitpicking. To quote a recently departed master of the obvious, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. In the case of OSX, not only does it strongly resemble a duck, it even has a sign around it's neck saying it is a duck! OSX has a Unix pedigree that many certified UNIX(tm) systems do not have.
I will agree that the US is moving in the wrong direction. I will agree that that direction leads to an authortarian society. However you used the word "fascist". The direction the US is moving in is not fascist. Your slogans make no difference. You are using an incorrect word for its cheap emotional value.
You completely misinterpret your slogans. You twist them to your desired meanings. The first, "everything in the State", refers to totalitarianism, which the US, despite its faults, is in no danger of becoming. You interpet "book and musket" to mean firearm owning Christians, yet the US populace has been predominantly Christian and pro-firearm ownership since long before the revolution. Have we been a fascist people for over three hundred years? Hah! And you claim last quote, "Long live death", has been uttered by Bush in some form in every one of his speeches. Funny, I can't seem to recall it at all. Please document this, because no one else has.
In summary, your use of the word "fascist" was wrong, still is wrong, and will always be wrong.
Funny, you link to a Wikipedia article on fascism, but your comment seems to indicate that you've never read it. Most people use the word unthinkingly to refer to anything they dislike to the right, in the same way they use the term "communist" to refer to anything they dislike to the left. From my reading of the article, the US is most certainly not fascist, nor are there signs of it becoming fascist. Could you please explain, in terms of the definition of fascism given by Wikipedia, why "the USA is rapidly becoming fascist"?
There's a story that a freak meteorological event three centuries ago covered parts of New England with uncanny darkness. The story goes that most people stayed home and prayed because they thought it was the end of the world. But one man hitched up with oxen and went to plow his fields.
When asked later why he went about his work, he replied, "Well if figured it was one of two things. If the Good Lord wasn't coming back then I didn't want to waste my time. But if the Good Lord was coming back, then I wanted Him to find me industrious instead of idle."
Believing in the second coming shouldn't have any effect on one's behavior towards the environment. A really good answer to your question would be, "If the Good Lord is coming back tomorrow, I want Him to find me to be a faithful steward of the Earth..."
I don't know if I'm representative because I'm older than the RIAA's target audience, but here's goes:
0% Unauthorized P2P
0% iTunes/eMusic
0% CCL
90% Own CDs
10% Demo tracks and other free sources (but not CCL)
No one's claiming Drudge is unbiased. As a muckraker/gossip, it's in his interest to be biased.
This article does have evidence. Just look at the phrasing of the editorial blurb. ""slam-dunk evidence", "they already knew", "completely overwhelming", "(as Iraq said)", "totally unsuitable". While not extemely biased, the bias is still there.
And there's there's your own Drudge evidence. If Drudge is biased because of his *pattern* of posts, then so much Slashdot be biased because of its *pattern* of stories.
You can't fucking be serious.
Yes I am. Let's just look at the lastest episode. CBS presents forged documents as genuine. Within 24 hours they are exposed. Yet during that 24 hours the Dems were dancing and singing because they knew they had Bush by the short and curlies. This was their ticket to victory. But it was a fraud!
It doesn't matter who was at fault with those documents. What matters is that for twenty four hours the Dems screamed at everyone who dared to suggest that those docs might not be genuine. People who presented evidence were declared members of a conspiracy. And then after Rather was found out, the Dems started a whisper campaign that Rove was the author of the forgeries!
You guys have no credibility!
There are facts and then there are biased and slanted presentations of facts. That you do not know the difference is sad.
It does matter, because those screaming loudest about the lack of WMDs are planning to vote for someone who agreed with Bush on the issue. It doesn't matter what Kerry knows NOW about weapons in Iraq, because with what he knew and said THEN it's clear he would have done the same thing as Bush.
The WMDs were there. That doesn't mean that an invasion should have occured, but to pretend that Iraq posed zero threat to other nations is absurd.
It's called "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. There has been so much bullshit from the left regarding the Bush administration, that no one bothers to listen to you anymore. You blew your chance at credibility.
I have to use OSX quite a bit during the past few weeks. From listening to the Slashdot blather, I would have assumed it was several orders of magnitudes easier than KDE/GNOME with a correspondingly greater degree of flexibility and power.
Hah!
While is was a bit easier than KDE/GNOME, it certainly did not have more flexibility or power. By "a bit easier", I really mean "marginally easier". Some areas of the desktop were actually more complicated than what I was used to.
Don't mistake me for ragging on OSX. I am not. I am merely pointing out that it isn't the instinctually intuitive interface everyone declares it to be.
Why does this sound like one of those psychic predictions? You know, like when an earthquake hits and suddenly all these psychics appear out of nowhere claiming they knew all along it was going to happen.
Why did this study appear *now*, a mere few weeks after some very large hurricanes? The timing smacks of cheap scare mongering.
I suggest you go patch up your system before you learn that the hard way.
But there's nothing worthwhile to patch! Two of the available patches affect services that I am not running. The remaining patch is a local exploit. By default I am not running any services beyond ssh.
I am not saying my system is invulnerable. One guy with a flamethrower could trash my data in a heartbeat. But I'm not going to get so paranoid I'm going to worry about it.
Except that now my company has my LEGAL signature. They can sign my approval to documents that I have never seen. The can alter my contracts and agreements with them at will without my knowledge or consent. And other nasty things.
And it would stand up in a court of law!
I really don't care much if the company can read my encrypted email, since the only encrypted email I'm going to get will be from the company. But I am unwilling to give them a legally binding signet ring.
What are you using? OpenBSD?
:-)
If you can't tell by my sig,it's time to increase your caffiene uptake
To your original point, connecting an unpatched FreeBSD to a broadband connection is most certainly NOT the equivalent of standing up in a boat waving your arms in a thunderstorm!
As long as paper-engineers and golf-club-wielding PHBs are entrusted with decision making, I see no chance for improvement.
I hit the icing on the cake Wednesday. My company rolled out a PGP solution for Outlook. Good, right? Wrong! The policy is to write down your passphrase on a paper, give it to IT, who will then store your passphrase for safekeeping in case you lose it.
!!!
Connecting an unpatched PC to a broadband connection is pretty much the same thing.
I have to admit that I'm connected to broadband with an unpatched PC. And I still feel safe. That's because none of the three security vulnerabilies issued for my OS version affect me.
PC != Windows