Furthermore, it takes a fair bit of imagination to suggest that political pressure groups are interested in educating people, instead of pushing a view through any means possible including freely misleading people. I think I'd rather get my information from a broad spectrum of sources -- the Economist, NPR Morning Edition, the NYT, News.com, the BBC, AP, Reuters, AFP, UPI, the Washington Post, factcheck.org, the news.google aggregate, thomas.loc.gov... rather than some "activist" who's trying to read a script at me in order to get a contribution to his organization. Not to mention that in terms of government power, well, I'm the sort of weirdo who reads about Stalinism, the intertwined feudal dictatorships of lord and priest, and Machiavelli, for his own enjoyment. So I'm not some bloody naive statist who's too optimistic for his own good while blithely believing politicans' -- or critics' -- press releases.
Care to send me information? Then send it in a readable format where your assertions are recorded, and with corroborating detail, for confirmation or ridicule on my own damn time. But cold-calling me to suggest that drunk drivers are really terrorists; that abortion is somehow a first-order issue which should be decided based on chants and marches, not the Constitution; or that God will forsake America if we don't down libbberal "activist" judges is only going to educate me that you're probably just another dime-a-dozen extremist.
You have a short memory, if you believe that the US did not have blemishes on its human rights record before. Furthermore, extraordinary rendition as a national policy -- that you not unreasonably criticize -- predates the current administration. You may also be unaware that there are hearings at Gitmo, which have caused prisoners to be released...
Wounded Knee? My Lai? The internment of the issei and nissei? Slavery? Segregation? The support for anti-Communist death squads in Latin America? The support for assorted anti-Communist strongmen throughout the world? The Chinese Exclusion Act? The Civil War prison camps? The tactics of the Philippine-American war?
And if you looked at other countries -- the ones active on the global stage, anyway, you'd see similar incidents throughout. Don't pretend that the US was some moral paragon that the current President threw down, or that history isn't filled with abuses worldwide.
Tolitarianism is an inevitable consequence of communism in any large-scale implementation. With enough people, you/will/ have people with substantially different intentions and abilities -- which will lead to economic distributions vastly different from what is desired.
At that point, you will have to compel transactions in order to "correct" the imbalances, and you will have to maintain the compulsion for as long as people are different. This compulsion will naturally be accompanied by prohibitions on transactions outside the system... You will in addition need to compel people to perform at all, once it is clear that you are divorcing output from rewards. And you will need a manageably small group of people doing the deciding about what to compel, of course, if you want a remotely coherent policy...
Laws and treaties, if separated from any reasonable chance of consequences of material interest to those who might violate them, are at best meaningless.
If the UN does not firmly enforce its treaties within Chinese territory, and China enforces its local laws -- which do you think will hold sway over there?
I am an american and I love my free speach, however, is it a human right? Some countries dont like to be divided, and would rather all speak with one voice with national unity.
If dissenters aren't allowed to dissent openly, how can you say anything about how the country likes to behave?
For ages, China liberally executed not only offenders but also their relatives to the third degree. Does this mean that their culture supported this, or only that those in charge had enough power to enforce this?
If I'm in a room with ten unarmed people, and I have a machine pistol and the clear willingness and ability to use it, who has the most say? I don't think it's the unarmed people, and it'd be silly to claim that they're necessarily supportive of my actions if they're only complying at gunpoint.
I dont really think that is a bad thing if you are a people/culture who is into that sort of thing.
Some cultures have historically denied education to approximately 50% of their population -- women. Is this not bad -- in both moral and practical ways? Others have wholly endorsed extreme nationalism and theories of supremacy, leading to the attempted enslavement or even extermination of other societies. Cultural approbation does not imply morality.
As far as yahoo providing information, we all know that email is NOT secure, and I dont really know the yahoo fine print atm, but im sure there is something in there about, these are our servers, and if you use them then you abide by our rules. Yahoo isnt going to let something illegal go on via there services on the american side, and laws vary by country.
Quite. That said, any business that sets up operations in a known-totalitarian state and which needs that government's favor to continue operating there cannot claim ignorance of the possibility of the state leveraging its power. Nor can it be said that Yahoo! is voluntarily chasing dollars while involuntarily or ignorantly cooperating; the actions are joined. They made their decisions when they chose to invest there.
That is, while there is a clear profit motive to invest there -- assuming a reasonably fair playing field and lack of catastrophe such as nationalization of foreign assets -- this profit motive does not make the moral issues vanish.
And Im sure there is money involved with china's growing econ, lots of companies want to play nice with them, so of course they will respect their culture.
There's that "culture" word again. This has nought to do with culture, and everything to do with the government's desire to maintain information control and political stability.
That does not mean, however, that there are any likely legitimate China-based users of his services -- or that a cost-benefit analysis would support preserving access for a few, if the many are causing so many problems that it's not worth the hassle in terms of spam and constant port-scans.
In this case, being able to IM a user of a closed network can be considered a 'special feature' of that closed network -- nobody else is permitted to do it.
If you regularly IM a dozen people, for instance, and they're all on the same closed network -- there's less incentive to move to somebody else's network unless you can persuade the dozen people to move over with you, or you enjoy running multiple clients or multi-protocol clients. If they're all interoperable, then the cost of moving is much less, and AOL/Y!/MSN have to consider the effects of that. Now, there may be incentives for AOL/Y!/MSN to eventually be interoperable with each other, given the sizes of each others' audiences -- but Google Talk doesn't bring a big membership to the table.
Y! opens a jabber2yahoo bridge MSN opens a jabber2msn bridge AOL opens a jabber2aol bridge.. Everybody would be happy, except for Y!, MSN and AOL.
It's not going to happen, unless Google provides a compelling reason why the much larger, closed IM communities should open their gates. The other services want users to join and stay with them, and to assist their revenue streams.
Google asking the far larger, established, commercially motivated IM networks to open up would be like a new, upstart cellular service provider asking Verizon and T-Mobile to open up their 'In'/'Mobile to Mobile' promotions. Google would gain far, far more than AOL/MSN/Y! would.
Wrong. The employee signs a contract beforehand, *including* explicitly agreeing to obligations that extend past the period of employment. It's all perfectly above-board, and the employee has nobody to blame if he signs it and then decides he doesn't want to uphold his part.
Non-disclosure regarding intellectual property agreements are standard in the industry. Non-competes also aren't unusual, where they're permitted.
If you like, you could always try to form your own company which didn't have such agreements. I don't think it'd be easy to convince VCers to back it, 'tho, not when you've made it easy for your prospective employees to backstab you.
You also only get one shot per kinetic kill vehicle; plus, they're considerably slower. The latter might be a problem if the targeted projectile's trajectory has been planned to make it harder to shoot down.
I get roughly two hundred spam a day -- that's from having the same address blithely public for over a decade. I've gotten spam in English, Korean (LOTS of it), Chinese (probably; LOTS of it), some Cyrillic-based language (in particular, there's some idiot who's occasionally sent me 100+ copies of the same Cyrillic e-mail in a row), Hebrew, German, and Spanish. Possibly other languages as well.
Off-hand, I don't remember any of it being routed through New Zealand. It's never really been on the radar AFAICT.
Now, if South Korea regularly executed people who spammed from there, it'd make a dent.
Until fairly recently, the British government seemed to think among rather similar lines regarding toleration of openly radical Islamists. That didn't stop the latter from provoking a crackdown.
Oh, it wouldn't be too shocking if there already were one -- if the technological means exists.
One aspect I wouldn't mind seeing in legislation that expand information-gathering powers would be extremely steep penalties for either the deliberate abuse of such, or significant negligence that endangers the privacy of it. The more we're forced to trust authorities, the harsher the penalties should be for violating that trust.
Suppose a terrorist simply types phony emails simply to lead authorities into "dead ends" thus wasting time and resources?
Suppose another terrorist, knowing that an email is likely to be intercepted, decides to write false information using "stolen" identity?
Then he's potentially tipping his hand as a person of interest. A large part of the problem is identifying who's possibly interesting enough to investigate further; doing stupid stunts like that would set off some flags.
Let this be known: Terrorists are not stupid.
Ah, generalities. Would you not call Richard Reid an idiot? How about the original "we want our deposit on the Ryder truck" WTC bombers? Or the occasional suicide bomber who somehow fails to kill *anyone* but himself?
Heck, they even managed to smuggle or manufacture weapons under our noses in Iraq! Remember that we have more than 100,000 eyes over there.
Remember that Iraq -- and many other conflict zones -- has been awash in cheap Kalashnikovs and RPG-7s for years, courtesy of the Soviet Bloc. In many parts of the world, it's probably easier to find an AK-47 or one of its descendants, an RPG, a mortar round, maybe even a Strela or variant thereof than it is a well-trained doctor.
You're either naive or joking if you're suggesting that the foreign presence could disarm Iraq.
This month's loss of 14 marines in just one blast was a real shock! The marines were using a reinforced tank - one of the best in our entire fleet. This expensive machine was no match for the explosive they used.
Uh, they were in an amphibious troop carrier, not a tank. Tanks normally don't have carry fourteen people, unless they're riding on the outside -- a rather dangerous thing to do in a combat zone. Troop carriers are normally not nearly as armored as tanks.
Oh, and "best", for an AFV, does not merely mean "hardest to damage". We could build a Maus-like tank, with modern armor, and it'd be friggin' tough to kill -- but it'd be a stupidly expensive, slow, unmanueverable, bridge-wreckingly heavy, fuel-hungry and probably just as unmaintainable as the original.
They could even engineer a DDoS attack. The possibilities are endless. The best way to avoid all the problems is to figure out why a person would hate us so much to the extent of sacrificing their life. To me, this is simple. Let's just mind our own business and leave others to mind their own.
Naive, or joking. It's silly to assume that everybody follows the Golden Rule.
One thing people should learn from history is that much of it has included a battle of ideas -- and some people have always been ruthless enough to seek victory by attempting to kill or drive off those who hold different ideas.
It'd be slightly odd for a government to hide a decryption method for a system important to its own citizens -- after all, a government that figured out how to decode RSA-based methods should consider the risk that hostile governments might also know. If their nation's banking systems and so forth are using a protocol that isn't secure, that's a national security risk.
However, if there's somebody who a government suspects might be a person of interest, and that somebody starts using encryption after such proposed legislation, it might be considered grounds to continue spending resources on that person.
It might also interest the authorities to see who starts encrypting their network traffic after passage of the original bill. Until it's default behavior inside e-mail clients and webmail services, it probably won't be THAT common among people who aren't particularly touchy about their privacy.
Your argument is the equivalent of saying that police shouldn't bother carrying handguns, because criminals would be wearing body armor. That's bogus rhetoric. Fact is, many "bad guys" get caught in various ways because they're NOT methodical masterminds.
You'd be better off arguing not along the lines that "if it isn't perfect, it shouldn't be done" -- which would suggest that you shouldn't bother investigating homicides, because SOME killers are smart and lucky enough to get away -- but about the net effects including precedents.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a "right" exists only in your imagination.
Furthermore, it takes a fair bit of imagination to suggest that political pressure groups are interested in educating people, instead of pushing a view through any means possible including freely misleading people. I think I'd rather get my information from a broad spectrum of sources -- the Economist, NPR Morning Edition, the NYT, News.com, the BBC, AP, Reuters, AFP, UPI, the Washington Post, factcheck.org, the news.google aggregate, thomas.loc.gov... rather than some "activist" who's trying to read a script at me in order to get a contribution to his organization. Not to mention that in terms of government power, well, I'm the sort of weirdo who reads about Stalinism, the intertwined feudal dictatorships of lord and priest, and Machiavelli, for his own enjoyment. So I'm not some bloody naive statist who's too optimistic for his own good while blithely believing politicans' -- or critics' -- press releases.
Care to send me information? Then send it in a readable format where your assertions are recorded, and with corroborating detail, for confirmation or ridicule on my own damn time. But cold-calling me to suggest that drunk drivers are really terrorists; that abortion is somehow a first-order issue which should be decided based on chants and marches, not the Constitution; or that God will forsake America if we don't down libbberal "activist" judges is only going to educate me that you're probably just another dime-a-dozen extremist.
Apple doesn't own the towers. He who operates the cellular networks has a fair bit of say over what phones get service.
You have a short memory, if you believe that the US did not have blemishes on its human rights record before. Furthermore, extraordinary rendition as a national policy -- that you not unreasonably criticize -- predates the current administration. You may also be unaware that there are hearings at Gitmo, which have caused prisoners to be released...
Wounded Knee? My Lai? The internment of the issei and nissei? Slavery? Segregation? The support for anti-Communist death squads in Latin America? The support for assorted anti-Communist strongmen throughout the world? The Chinese Exclusion Act? The Civil War prison camps? The tactics of the Philippine-American war?
And if you looked at other countries -- the ones active on the global stage, anyway, you'd see similar incidents throughout. Don't pretend that the US was some moral paragon that the current President threw down, or that history isn't filled with abuses worldwide.
Tolitarianism is an inevitable consequence of communism in any large-scale implementation. With enough people, you /will/ have people with substantially different intentions and abilities -- which will lead to economic distributions vastly different from what is desired.
At that point, you will have to compel transactions in order to "correct" the imbalances, and you will have to maintain the compulsion for as long as people are different. This compulsion will naturally be accompanied by prohibitions on transactions outside the system... You will in addition need to compel people to perform at all, once it is clear that you are divorcing output from rewards. And you will need a manageably small group of people doing the deciding about what to compel, of course, if you want a remotely coherent policy...
"Ink on a page".
Laws and treaties, if separated from any reasonable chance of consequences of material interest to those who might violate them, are at best meaningless.
If the UN does not firmly enforce its treaties within Chinese territory, and China enforces its local laws -- which do you think will hold sway over there?
I am an american and I love my free speach, however, is it a human right? Some countries dont like to be divided, and would rather all speak with one voice with national unity.
If dissenters aren't allowed to dissent openly, how can you say anything about how the country likes to behave?
For ages, China liberally executed not only offenders but also their relatives to the third degree. Does this mean that their culture supported this, or only that those in charge had enough power to enforce this?
If I'm in a room with ten unarmed people, and I have a machine pistol and the clear willingness and ability to use it, who has the most say? I don't think it's the unarmed people, and it'd be silly to claim that they're necessarily supportive of my actions if they're only complying at gunpoint.
I dont really think that is a bad thing if you are a people/culture who is into that sort of thing.
Some cultures have historically denied education to approximately 50% of their population -- women. Is this not bad -- in both moral and practical ways? Others have wholly endorsed extreme nationalism and theories of supremacy, leading to the attempted enslavement or even extermination of other societies. Cultural approbation does not imply morality.
As far as yahoo providing information, we all know that email is NOT secure, and I dont really know the yahoo fine print atm, but im sure there is something in there about, these are our servers, and if you use them then you abide by our rules. Yahoo isnt going to let something illegal go on via there services on the american side, and laws vary by country.
Quite. That said, any business that sets up operations in a known-totalitarian state and which needs that government's favor to continue operating there cannot claim ignorance of the possibility of the state leveraging its power. Nor can it be said that Yahoo! is voluntarily chasing dollars while involuntarily or ignorantly cooperating; the actions are joined. They made their decisions when they chose to invest there.
That is, while there is a clear profit motive to invest there -- assuming a reasonably fair playing field and lack of catastrophe such as nationalization of foreign assets -- this profit motive does not make the moral issues vanish.
And Im sure there is money involved with china's growing econ, lots of companies want to play nice with them, so of course they will respect their culture.
There's that "culture" word again. This has nought to do with culture, and everything to do with the government's desire to maintain information control and political stability.
Freedom of speech does not imply the right to force anybody else to listen.
You're free to spew whatever packets you like. I'm free to discard them for whatever reason I choose.
That does not mean, however, that there are any likely legitimate China-based users of his services -- or that a cost-benefit analysis would support preserving access for a few, if the many are causing so many problems that it's not worth the hassle in terms of spam and constant port-scans.
That's not where "most of their workers" are. -1 Troll, I'd say, for massively exaggerating outsourcing and the scale of foreign investment in China.
In this case, being able to IM a user of a closed network can be considered a 'special feature' of that closed network -- nobody else is permitted to do it.
If you regularly IM a dozen people, for instance, and they're all on the same closed network -- there's less incentive to move to somebody else's network unless you can persuade the dozen people to move over with you, or you enjoy running multiple clients or multi-protocol clients. If they're all interoperable, then the cost of moving is much less, and AOL/Y!/MSN have to consider the effects of that. Now, there may be incentives for AOL/Y!/MSN to eventually be interoperable with each other, given the sizes of each others' audiences -- but Google Talk doesn't bring a big membership to the table.
Y! opens a jabber2yahoo bridge
MSN opens a jabber2msn bridge
AOL opens a jabber2aol bridge
Everybody would be happy, except for Y!, MSN and AOL.
It's not going to happen, unless Google provides a compelling reason why the much larger, closed IM communities should open their gates. The other services want users to join and stay with them, and to assist their revenue streams.
Google asking the far larger, established, commercially motivated IM networks to open up would be like a new, upstart cellular service provider asking Verizon and T-Mobile to open up their 'In'/'Mobile to Mobile' promotions. Google would gain far, far more than AOL/MSN/Y! would.
Wrong. The employee signs a contract beforehand, *including* explicitly agreeing to obligations that extend past the period of employment. It's all perfectly above-board, and the employee has nobody to blame if he signs it and then decides he doesn't want to uphold his part.
Non-disclosure regarding intellectual property agreements are standard in the industry. Non-competes also aren't unusual, where they're permitted.
If you like, you could always try to form your own company which didn't have such agreements. I don't think it'd be easy to convince VCers to back it, 'tho, not when you've made it easy for your prospective employees to backstab you.
It's easier to keep the mirror clean and highly reflective inside the laser, than outside and on a battlefield.
You also only get one shot per kinetic kill vehicle; plus, they're considerably slower. The latter might be a problem if the targeted projectile's trajectory has been planned to make it harder to shoot down.
Area defense = defense of a whole area. It doesn't mean that it's firing massively wide beams designed to fry whole areas (well, volumes) of space.
...or how fast they can fry an egg, or burst into flame.
I wonder how much of an effect it'd have, 'tho.
I get roughly two hundred spam a day -- that's from having the same address blithely public for over a decade. I've gotten spam in English, Korean (LOTS of it), Chinese (probably; LOTS of it), some Cyrillic-based language (in particular, there's some idiot who's occasionally sent me 100+ copies of the same Cyrillic e-mail in a row), Hebrew, German, and Spanish. Possibly other languages as well.
Off-hand, I don't remember any of it being routed through New Zealand. It's never really been on the radar AFAICT.
Now, if South Korea regularly executed people who spammed from there, it'd make a dent.
Until fairly recently, the British government seemed to think among rather similar lines regarding toleration of openly radical Islamists. That didn't stop the latter from provoking a crackdown.
Oh, it wouldn't be too shocking if there already were one -- if the technological means exists.
One aspect I wouldn't mind seeing in legislation that expand information-gathering powers would be extremely steep penalties for either the deliberate abuse of such, or significant negligence that endangers the privacy of it. The more we're forced to trust authorities, the harsher the penalties should be for violating that trust.
Suppose a terrorist simply types phony emails simply to lead authorities into "dead ends" thus wasting time and resources?
Suppose another terrorist, knowing that an email is likely to be intercepted, decides to write false information using "stolen" identity?
Then he's potentially tipping his hand as a person of interest. A large part of the problem is identifying who's possibly interesting enough to investigate further; doing stupid stunts like that would set off some flags.
Let this be known: Terrorists are not stupid.
Ah, generalities. Would you not call Richard Reid an idiot? How about the original "we want our deposit on the Ryder truck" WTC bombers? Or the occasional suicide bomber who somehow fails to kill *anyone* but himself?
Heck, they even managed to smuggle or manufacture weapons under our noses in Iraq! Remember that we have more than 100,000 eyes over there.
Remember that Iraq -- and many other conflict zones -- has been awash in cheap Kalashnikovs and RPG-7s for years, courtesy of the Soviet Bloc. In many parts of the world, it's probably easier to find an AK-47 or one of its descendants, an RPG, a mortar round, maybe even a Strela or variant thereof than it is a well-trained doctor.
You're either naive or joking if you're suggesting that the foreign presence could disarm Iraq.
This month's loss of 14 marines in just one blast was a real shock! The marines were using a reinforced tank - one of the best in our entire fleet. This expensive machine was no match for the explosive they used.
Uh, they were in an amphibious troop carrier, not a tank. Tanks normally don't have carry fourteen people, unless they're riding on the outside -- a rather dangerous thing to do in a combat zone. Troop carriers are normally not nearly as armored as tanks.
Oh, and "best", for an AFV, does not merely mean "hardest to damage". We could build a Maus-like tank, with modern armor, and it'd be friggin' tough to kill -- but it'd be a stupidly expensive, slow, unmanueverable, bridge-wreckingly heavy, fuel-hungry and probably just as unmaintainable as the original.
They could even engineer a DDoS attack. The possibilities are endless. The best way to avoid all the problems is to figure out why a person would hate us so much to the extent of sacrificing their life. To me, this is simple. Let's just mind our own business and leave others to mind their own.
Naive, or joking. It's silly to assume that everybody follows the Golden Rule.
One thing people should learn from history is that much of it has included a battle of ideas -- and some people have always been ruthless enough to seek victory by attempting to kill or drive off those who hold different ideas.
It'd be slightly odd for a government to hide a decryption method for a system important to its own citizens -- after all, a government that figured out how to decode RSA-based methods should consider the risk that hostile governments might also know. If their nation's banking systems and so forth are using a protocol that isn't secure, that's a national security risk.
However, if there's somebody who a government suspects might be a person of interest, and that somebody starts using encryption after such proposed legislation, it might be considered grounds to continue spending resources on that person.
It might also interest the authorities to see who starts encrypting their network traffic after passage of the original bill. Until it's default behavior inside e-mail clients and webmail services, it probably won't be THAT common among people who aren't particularly touchy about their privacy.
Your argument is the equivalent of saying that police shouldn't bother carrying handguns, because criminals would be wearing body armor. That's bogus rhetoric. Fact is, many "bad guys" get caught in various ways because they're NOT methodical masterminds.
You'd be better off arguing not along the lines that "if it isn't perfect, it shouldn't be done" -- which would suggest that you shouldn't bother investigating homicides, because SOME killers are smart and lucky enough to get away -- but about the net effects including precedents.
Cutting NASA funding? No, it's been increasing -- if slowly.
Graph on budget
It is true, however, that priorities have been shifting away from the shuttle program.