Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities,' Mukasey told a crowd at the Tech Museum of Innovation last week.
Seeing how I certainly wouldn't want to fund such scum, and how it is impossible for a casual consumer to tell counterweight goods from genuine ones, I suppose this means that I'll have to download all of my IP stuff from BitTorrent from now on. Yes, I know, it might hurt the creators; but if you pay anyone, the money might find its way to the hands of terrorists, and we wouldn't want that, now would we ?
If you don't warez, the terrorists win ! Think of the children and keep those torrents seeding !
I thought the whole constitution had no application to the whole government?
After all, isn't it just a scrap of paper?
That is correct. The US Constitution, as well as any other declaration, only matters if someone is both willing and capable of enforcing it. I very much doubt that anyone can enforce anything against the US Government; therefore, the US Constitution is just a piece of paper, as far as US Government is concerned.
BTW. What's wrong with Slashdot ? The layout seems to have taken a step for the worse again.
Anonymous political speech has a long tradition in the US. Many of our founding fathers hid behind pseudonyms while writing many of what are termed 'The Federalist Papers' which laid much of the groundwork for the US Constitution.
And it appears that the current US government learned the lesson from that, and is taking steps to avoid a repetition.
It would also seem to be a good rule of thumb to assume that the system used by the most dangerous elements in society is the system that is going to be under systematic attack by the agencies most likely to have the resources to defeat it.
Dangerous from who's point of view ?
As far as the three-letter agencies are concerned, the dangerous elements are those with money, power and ambition - the Mafia, terrorists, cults, radical political organizations, etc. Pedophiles are, to put it bluntly, a bunch of perverts jerking off to sick porn in their homes and some of them occasionally rape a few people, and doing all they possibly can to stay under the radar. Sucks for the people involved, but doesn't endanger the society nor its rulers.
As far as the CIA, FBI and such are concerned, pedophiles are propably amongst the least dangerous group of people, for the simple reasons that they try to keep a low profile and can be easily blackmailed or destroyed.
At some point, pedophiles (and other bad actors) have to stick their heads above ground in order to satisfy their urges.
Actually, with child porn available from anonymous networks, they don't have to stick their heads out, just like having regular porn available from regular networks lets average people satisfy their urges without ever going out. Which, ironically, means that having such anonymous child porn sources available makes children safer, since the pedos are jacking off in their homes rather than hunting for victims near the playgrounds.
Freenet is only moderately secure because it's designed on top of Java. Let's be real folks, Freenet is only as secure as the Java it runs on. If Freenet were something written in C, which could be compiled for a cellphone or PDA, and install directly into the router itself, well yeah then I'd say it's pretty secure, but when you install Freenet on a PC, it's only as secure as the PC, and if you install Freenet on a PC on top of Java, it's only as secure as Java and the PC.
Which is almost certain more secure than C in the hands of the average programmer. Please also understand that Freenet is a research project which often releases several new builds per week. Finally, you can compile Java into native binaries, with gcj for example.
Besides, don't most cellphones already support Java, if only the micro edition ?
Voting is a privilege, not a right as some would have us believe.
How do you expect to keep any rights if you do not have even theoretical power over politicians ?
If voting isn't a right, then nothing is.
Maybe there should be a quiz to get to the polls, replete with being cast off of a cliff (Monty Python style... Holy Grail) for trying to vote w/o being informed on the issues
And by "being informed", you of course mean adhering to the viewpoints of whoever holds the poll - in other words, the party in power.
From the luxury of the "threat of starvation" you claim to see no reason to prefer it over the "threat of a bullet to the head".
Nope. I'm just as dead either way, unless I lick the boots of whoever wields this power over me. "Obey on the pain of death"; how that death is delivered is irrelevant.
I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you never experience the actual difference between the two. You might then find reason to prefer "nature's corcion" (which is lawful, predictable, and rationally tractable) from man-made coercion (which is whimsical and inevitably anti-rational).
Both forms of coercion are both natural (nature is red in tooth and claw) and man-made (someone obtaining all the sources of some needed resource and creating an artificial shortage, for example). Whether an oppressor is rational or "anti-rational" is irrelevant to those under his boots. "Lawful" has no meaning when laws can be bought by the very people the concept is being applied.
Besides, it's not a question of what kind of coercion I prefer; I prefer to be free from both.
Equally important is to learn how you can influence her hotness. Because I think you can, but only when you know her, know yourself, know what you're doing, and are very, very subtle about it. It's bloody hard, I can tell you. At least, I haven't mastered it, but occasionally it works. Or maybe she was hot to begin with, and I just managed not to screw it up, which is also important to learn.
Or you can just go with Internet pornography. It's cheaper and doesn't neccessiate being a mind-reading psychologist.
In "Earth," by David Brin, there's actually a big campaign to uncover all those secret bank accounts, and the whole situation devolves into a war against Switzerland.
It would be completely pointless to wage a war against Switzerland just to get their banking details. Simply close every border and cut them off from the rest of the world until the secrecy is lifted. Those organizations which have been hoarding money into secret accounts have thus effectively lost them, since they can't transfer the funds out of the country, and the problem has thus been solved.
Socialism would be a tad less laughable if central planning wasn't such an abysmal failure everywhere it's been tried.
Socialism is about providing free (to the recipient, paid by tax money) education, healthcare, and economic safety nets for everyone. It has been a huge success everywhere it has been tried; as a specific example, it transformed Finland from an economically abused, agricultural society which had just gone trough a civil war into one of the most prosperous countries in the world in half a century.
Communism is about the state owning everything and centrally planning the whole economy, and has been a failure everywhere. However, it is impossible to conclude at this time whether these failures habe been caused by any inherent defect in the ideology itself or the personality flaws - such as psychopathy - of the people who implemented most communist economies, as well as continued interference from the United State in its effort to oppose communism.
Libertarianism, Laissez Faire Capitalism: The greatest quality of life for the most people can be achieved by producing wealth as efficiently as possible.
Neither Libertarianism nor Laissez-Faire Capitalism are interested in efficiency. Libertarianism is an ideology that freedom takes priority over everything else, and usually also includes a strong anti-government theme. Laissez-Faire Capitalism is a believe that market forces will find the best solution to any problem, if there is no government intervention or regulation.
It should be noted that there are ideologies which combine personal freedom with socialistic economy; see Left-libertarianism and Libertarian Socialism. These ideologies generally consider private ownership of means of production and the resulting power structures no different than those of the state, and thus an anathema to freedom; there is no difference between coercing someone with threat of a bullet to the head and threat of starvation. I'm inclined to agree, altought I don't see how you could possibly keep the accumulation of wealth - and thus power - to a few individuals under control except through force, which in turn results in whoever wields that force to become the dictator instead.
It is a mistake to think that all libertarians only oppose oppression by the state; apparently some also oppose oppression by the plutocrats. It's simply that the anarcho-capitalists happen to be more vocal on Slashdot.
You don't understand correctly. Yes, they often attack those who offend them. But that isn't all; they're perfectly happy to attack unprovoked... such as in their campaign to ruin the ending of Harry Potter for all Harry Potter fans?
Posting spoilers for a book is hardly the same as causing someone to have epilectic seizures. Besides, are you sure that that attack was aimed against Potter fans rather than Rowling herself ? After all, there was that episode where people who had received a Potter book ahead of its official publication date were prohibited to speak of the plot details, which was an outrageous insult to freedom of speech and almost certainly very offensive to the generally anti-censorship/b/-tards.
here is your middle ground: a birth lottery. in this system there is no such thing as the creme of the crop. only would be mommies and daddies hoping to get a birth right by buying a lottery ticket. if you win, you get to go to parenting school, and from there, THEN you can have a baby. think you want a 2nd kid? go get another lotto ticket!
It isn't middle ground, because it has nothing to do with eugenics. It is simply a means to control population growth, and unncessary at that, because most industrial countries - the only ones in which something like this could be implemented - already have a zero or negative population growth rate.
carbon dioxide is NOT a green house gas. CO2 is a waste product of animals breathing oxygen. O2 is a waste product of plants breathing CO2. it's a symbiotic system, and if you look at the periods in the past with high CO2 figures, they also had high LIFE figures. Methane on the other hand IS a green house gas.
A "greenhouse gas" is one which lets visible light but not infrared light through, thus causing the "greenhouse effect". The origin of the gas is irrelevant for determining whether it is or is not a greenhouse gas. And carbon dioxide is.
(Yes, I know that "anonymi" is not the correct plural. Yes, I know that "anonymous" is not spelled "anonymus". If the plural of "mouse" is "mice", perhaps the plural of "anonymous" is "anonymic"?)
"Anonymous", being an adjective, has no plural. If it's used as noun, as in the name of this group or groups, I suggest just going with "Anonymous's".
Smoke doesn't go up. Hot air does. Since smoke and hot air are both produced by a fire, the latter usually carries the former with it; however, the amount of energy, and thus hot air, produced by a cigarette is pathetic, so the smoke will most likely simply ride the ambient currents after the first few seconds.
The smell isn't the smoke.
Perception of smell is caused by the nose reacting to chemical substances. In order for you to smell a cigarette, chemicals emitted from that cigarette must enter your nose. If you're smelling tobacco smoke, you're breathing tobacco smoke. In other words, the smell is the smoke, for all practical purposes.
Not because I mean them ill-will, but because the more miserable I can make the job, (a) the higher turnover will be (thus causing problems for the management because of the effort required to hire new people and the lost productivity due to training and ramp-up time) and (b) the more money people demand in order to do it (thus causing problems for management).
Telemarketing is already miserable enough that no one will do it for any price longer than they absolutely have to. If you're reduced to working in that "industry", you aren't in any position to make demands, you take whatever is offered and hope it will get you food. Consequently, the turnover is already the maximum it will be: the rate at which people find other, more prestigious and enjoyable jobs, such as cleaning toilets or hand-combing through someone else's garbage for lost possessions.
And there is no training involved in telemarketing. You call, read through a script, and if you get a sell, fill in a simple form.
If call centers suck so bad, why do people take the jobs ?
Because the alternative is starvation. As someone who has had to do telemarketing (only for two weeks, thank heavens), I can't imagine any less pressing reason anyone would do it.
In the USA, the government used to sterilize people! Eugenics had gone a long ways towards being acceptable and normal in the 'civilized' world.
Yes. It was. So were slavery, torture, public executions, the divine right of kings, and other such atrocities. That a practice is "normal" - especially a practice which makes self-declared "cream of society" feel superior over unwashed masses - is hardly any indication of the desirability of said practice.
Eugenics was practiced and gaining popularity all over the world until the extreme distortion and abuse of those ideas by the Nazis linked the two together and guilt by association caused Eugenics to fall out of favor.
Nazis didn't distort or abuse eugenics, they simply applied the idea to its logical conclusion: in order to better the race, you need to make sure that only the desirable people breed. Furthermore, since we have already established that we don't want certain kinds of people around, we can as well simply kill them and make sure they can't taint the gene pool or consume resources any more.
One could argue that the entire Nazi ideology is built on eugenics, and an inevitable conclusion from them.
Is it not possible that there is some middle ground? Should we be completely dismissing it?
There is no middle ground. Either you may use force to keep someone else for reproducing because you think they're unfit, or you may not. There is no third alternative.
People always say "think of the children", but apparently those same children become worthless and can have any horrible thing done to them once they grow up.
Yes; if there's a good chance you'll have a child with a genetic problem you shouldn't be allowed to have children.
This gets us to the fascinating debate about what qualifies as a genetic problem. Does getting fat easily count ? Hyperactivity ? Asperger's syndrome ? And does this only count the problems you actually have, or the ones you could possibly pass on to your descendants ?
No one is free from genetic problems. Every person carries some sort of harmful mutations in their genes. Even if they didn't, some combinations of perfectly ordinary genes are simply not going to work very well together.
That's what a reasonable person would do without force of law.
No, a reasonable person would conclude that demanding perfection in an imperfect world is unreasonable. Furthermore, he would also remember what became of every previous eugenetics program in history, and snip this one in the bud.
Otherwise you get what we have now; people using the government to rob other's at gun point to pay for their health care.
And this is worse than using the government to forcibly sterilize others at gunpoint ?
We shouldn't be 100% logical, but for some reason it seems ok to be 100% emotional.
Be thankful for that, otherwise your attempt to equate taxes to armed robbery would be laughed at, especially when it was made in the Internet which was invented and initially built by the US Government using those same tax funds.
Without knowing the exact impact of these bots on WoW's operational costs, you can't definitively say Blizzard isn't suffering damage. Increased, unplanned resource consumption do equal increased operational costs. Proving that Blizzard is incurring increased costs as a result of many players running this bot will be easy if it's true that bot-running players consume more resources than they would ordinarily without using a bot. That's key.
By this logic, people who actually play WoW - as opposed to merely paying for an account and never using it - are causing Blizzard damage. After all, they consume resoures in the servers and thus increase operational costs.
If the average bot-running player still consumes roughly the same amount of resources as the heavy players, it would be hard to argue that the increased costs are an actual damage. I suggest that heavy players are the threshold and not the casual gamer because Blizzard had already calculated the expected cost of serving heavy players well before the first subscriber went online.
I suggest that the limit is whatever Blizzard sold. If they sold unlimited play-time per month, then anything less than or equal to that is fair game.
This whole thing is starting to resemble the ISP's claims that people who paid for unlimited always-on Internet connection are being unreasonable to except "unlimited" to actually mean "unlimited". Same shit, different speaker: it's okay to sell people unlimited playtime/bandwidth, but woe be to the unreasonable person who actually excepts to receive what he paid for.
While you are absolutely correct that science is based on faith we do not have any other belief system that comes close to the usefullness of science.
Of course we do. The believe that some actions are morally better than others is unprovable - indeed, from a strictly material perspective meaningless, because "morally better" cannot be expressed in terms of laws of physics - yet it is absolutely neccessary for us to live in a society, which in turn is a prerequisite for having culture and science in the first place.
Earth would become a 9mm diameter black hole, still orbited by the moon, ISS, and other existing satellites.
A 9mm diameter black hole has a surface area of about 254 square centimeters, or 0.025 square meters. Assuming that matter falls inward at the escape velocity from Earth's surface, 11 km/s, it takes about 0.0000023 seconds to consume one cubic meter of material. Since Earth's volume is approximately 1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000 cubic meters, and each year has 31,536,000 seconds, it would take 35,000,000,000,000 - thirty-five thousand billion - years for this hole to consume the Earth.
Of course this is all ignoring the fact that the hole wouldn't be this large to begin with, but would start at sub-atomic scale, so in reality it would take much longer. Still, this particular doomsday scenario is inane.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing how I certainly wouldn't want to fund such scum, and how it is impossible for a casual consumer to tell counterweight goods from genuine ones, I suppose this means that I'll have to download all of my IP stuff from BitTorrent from now on. Yes, I know, it might hurt the creators; but if you pay anyone, the money might find its way to the hands of terrorists, and we wouldn't want that, now would we ?
If you don't warez, the terrorists win ! Think of the children and keep those torrents seeding !
That is correct. The US Constitution, as well as any other declaration, only matters if someone is both willing and capable of enforcing it. I very much doubt that anyone can enforce anything against the US Government; therefore, the US Constitution is just a piece of paper, as far as US Government is concerned.
BTW. What's wrong with Slashdot ? The layout seems to have taken a step for the worse again.
And it appears that the current US government learned the lesson from that, and is taking steps to avoid a repetition.
Dangerous from who's point of view ?
As far as the three-letter agencies are concerned, the dangerous elements are those with money, power and ambition - the Mafia, terrorists, cults, radical political organizations, etc. Pedophiles are, to put it bluntly, a bunch of perverts jerking off to sick porn in their homes and some of them occasionally rape a few people, and doing all they possibly can to stay under the radar. Sucks for the people involved, but doesn't endanger the society nor its rulers.
As far as the CIA, FBI and such are concerned, pedophiles are propably amongst the least dangerous group of people, for the simple reasons that they try to keep a low profile and can be easily blackmailed or destroyed.
Actually, with child porn available from anonymous networks, they don't have to stick their heads out, just like having regular porn available from regular networks lets average people satisfy their urges without ever going out. Which, ironically, means that having such anonymous child porn sources available makes children safer, since the pedos are jacking off in their homes rather than hunting for victims near the playgrounds.
Weird, eh ?
Which is almost certain more secure than C in the hands of the average programmer. Please also understand that Freenet is a research project which often releases several new builds per week. Finally, you can compile Java into native binaries, with gcj for example.
Besides, don't most cellphones already support Java, if only the micro edition ?
If nothing loads, then how do you know what's in the network ?
How do you expect to keep any rights if you do not have even theoretical power over politicians ?
If voting isn't a right, then nothing is.
And by "being informed", you of course mean adhering to the viewpoints of whoever holds the poll - in other words, the party in power.
Nope. I'm just as dead either way, unless I lick the boots of whoever wields this power over me. "Obey on the pain of death"; how that death is delivered is irrelevant.
Both forms of coercion are both natural (nature is red in tooth and claw) and man-made (someone obtaining all the sources of some needed resource and creating an artificial shortage, for example). Whether an oppressor is rational or "anti-rational" is irrelevant to those under his boots. "Lawful" has no meaning when laws can be bought by the very people the concept is being applied.
Besides, it's not a question of what kind of coercion I prefer; I prefer to be free from both.
Or you can just go with Internet pornography. It's cheaper and doesn't neccessiate being a mind-reading psychologist.
Holy slave trade, Batman !
It would be completely pointless to wage a war against Switzerland just to get their banking details. Simply close every border and cut them off from the rest of the world until the secrecy is lifted. Those organizations which have been hoarding money into secret accounts have thus effectively lost them, since they can't transfer the funds out of the country, and the problem has thus been solved.
Socialism is about providing free (to the recipient, paid by tax money) education, healthcare, and economic safety nets for everyone. It has been a huge success everywhere it has been tried; as a specific example, it transformed Finland from an economically abused, agricultural society which had just gone trough a civil war into one of the most prosperous countries in the world in half a century.
Communism is about the state owning everything and centrally planning the whole economy, and has been a failure everywhere. However, it is impossible to conclude at this time whether these failures habe been caused by any inherent defect in the ideology itself or the personality flaws - such as psychopathy - of the people who implemented most communist economies, as well as continued interference from the United State in its effort to oppose communism.
Neither Libertarianism nor Laissez-Faire Capitalism are interested in efficiency. Libertarianism is an ideology that freedom takes priority over everything else, and usually also includes a strong anti-government theme. Laissez-Faire Capitalism is a believe that market forces will find the best solution to any problem, if there is no government intervention or regulation.
It should be noted that there are ideologies which combine personal freedom with socialistic economy; see Left-libertarianism and Libertarian Socialism. These ideologies generally consider private ownership of means of production and the resulting power structures no different than those of the state, and thus an anathema to freedom; there is no difference between coercing someone with threat of a bullet to the head and threat of starvation. I'm inclined to agree, altought I don't see how you could possibly keep the accumulation of wealth - and thus power - to a few individuals under control except through force, which in turn results in whoever wields that force to become the dictator instead.
It is a mistake to think that all libertarians only oppose oppression by the state; apparently some also oppose oppression by the plutocrats. It's simply that the anarcho-capitalists happen to be more vocal on Slashdot.
Posting spoilers for a book is hardly the same as causing someone to have epilectic seizures. Besides, are you sure that that attack was aimed against Potter fans rather than Rowling herself ? After all, there was that episode where people who had received a Potter book ahead of its official publication date were prohibited to speak of the plot details, which was an outrageous insult to freedom of speech and almost certainly very offensive to the generally anti-censorship /b/-tards.
It isn't middle ground, because it has nothing to do with eugenics. It is simply a means to control population growth, and unncessary at that, because most industrial countries - the only ones in which something like this could be implemented - already have a zero or negative population growth rate.
A "greenhouse gas" is one which lets visible light but not infrared light through, thus causing the "greenhouse effect". The origin of the gas is irrelevant for determining whether it is or is not a greenhouse gas. And carbon dioxide is.
"Anonymous", being an adjective, has no plural. If it's used as noun, as in the name of this group or groups, I suggest just going with "Anonymous's".
Smoke doesn't go up. Hot air does. Since smoke and hot air are both produced by a fire, the latter usually carries the former with it; however, the amount of energy, and thus hot air, produced by a cigarette is pathetic, so the smoke will most likely simply ride the ambient currents after the first few seconds.
Perception of smell is caused by the nose reacting to chemical substances. In order for you to smell a cigarette, chemicals emitted from that cigarette must enter your nose. If you're smelling tobacco smoke, you're breathing tobacco smoke. In other words, the smell is the smoke, for all practical purposes.
Telemarketing is already miserable enough that no one will do it for any price longer than they absolutely have to. If you're reduced to working in that "industry", you aren't in any position to make demands, you take whatever is offered and hope it will get you food. Consequently, the turnover is already the maximum it will be: the rate at which people find other, more prestigious and enjoyable jobs, such as cleaning toilets or hand-combing through someone else's garbage for lost possessions.
And there is no training involved in telemarketing. You call, read through a script, and if you get a sell, fill in a simple form.
Because the alternative is starvation. As someone who has had to do telemarketing (only for two weeks, thank heavens), I can't imagine any less pressing reason anyone would do it.
I just felt a disturbance on the InterWebs, like Rule 34 had just been invoked. Something terrible must have come into being.
Yes. It was. So were slavery, torture, public executions, the divine right of kings, and other such atrocities. That a practice is "normal" - especially a practice which makes self-declared "cream of society" feel superior over unwashed masses - is hardly any indication of the desirability of said practice.
Nazis didn't distort or abuse eugenics, they simply applied the idea to its logical conclusion: in order to better the race, you need to make sure that only the desirable people breed. Furthermore, since we have already established that we don't want certain kinds of people around, we can as well simply kill them and make sure they can't taint the gene pool or consume resources any more.
One could argue that the entire Nazi ideology is built on eugenics, and an inevitable conclusion from them.
There is no middle ground. Either you may use force to keep someone else for reproducing because you think they're unfit, or you may not. There is no third alternative.
People always say "think of the children", but apparently those same children become worthless and can have any horrible thing done to them once they grow up.
This gets us to the fascinating debate about what qualifies as a genetic problem. Does getting fat easily count ? Hyperactivity ? Asperger's syndrome ? And does this only count the problems you actually have, or the ones you could possibly pass on to your descendants ?
No one is free from genetic problems. Every person carries some sort of harmful mutations in their genes. Even if they didn't, some combinations of perfectly ordinary genes are simply not going to work very well together.
No, a reasonable person would conclude that demanding perfection in an imperfect world is unreasonable. Furthermore, he would also remember what became of every previous eugenetics program in history, and snip this one in the bud.
And this is worse than using the government to forcibly sterilize others at gunpoint ?
Be thankful for that, otherwise your attempt to equate taxes to armed robbery would be laughed at, especially when it was made in the Internet which was invented and initially built by the US Government using those same tax funds.
By this logic, people who actually play WoW - as opposed to merely paying for an account and never using it - are causing Blizzard damage. After all, they consume resoures in the servers and thus increase operational costs.
I suggest that the limit is whatever Blizzard sold. If they sold unlimited play-time per month, then anything less than or equal to that is fair game.
This whole thing is starting to resemble the ISP's claims that people who paid for unlimited always-on Internet connection are being unreasonable to except "unlimited" to actually mean "unlimited". Same shit, different speaker: it's okay to sell people unlimited playtime/bandwidth, but woe be to the unreasonable person who actually excepts to receive what he paid for.
Of course we do. The believe that some actions are morally better than others is unprovable - indeed, from a strictly material perspective meaningless, because "morally better" cannot be expressed in terms of laws of physics - yet it is absolutely neccessary for us to live in a society, which in turn is a prerequisite for having culture and science in the first place.
A 9mm diameter black hole has a surface area of about 254 square centimeters, or 0.025 square meters. Assuming that matter falls inward at the escape velocity from Earth's surface, 11 km/s, it takes about 0.0000023 seconds to consume one cubic meter of material. Since Earth's volume is approximately 1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000 cubic meters, and each year has 31,536,000 seconds, it would take 35,000,000,000,000 - thirty-five thousand billion - years for this hole to consume the Earth.
Of course this is all ignoring the fact that the hole wouldn't be this large to begin with, but would start at sub-atomic scale, so in reality it would take much longer. Still, this particular doomsday scenario is inane.