Is that the new definition of "terrorist" ? Soemone who; covertly and securely distribute inflammatory material ?
No, it's not. Clearly you didn't RTFA.
First of all, this guy was discovered accidentally -- he was arrested for what he was doing offline (allegedly plotting a bombing), not online. Second of all, what this guy did online wasn't merely post "inflammatory material" on various forums. He was actively breaking into servers to covertly host data, like videos and messages. If you go on an online forum today and post "Support the Jihad against the Western infidels!", you can't be arrested (at least in the US; I understand that the laws in the UK may have changed so that it is illegal). If you go and break into someone's server and then put your message there, then you might be in trouble.
In short, this guy isn't being arrested because he was exercising his right to free speech. What he did would have been illegal if the material he was posting had been propaganda supporting Bush's agenda.
i like the lack of being root user, although it only requires that you enter your password to do administrative tasks. i think if it were to be a true multi-user box, it should ask for an administrative password for that, one that differs from the user's password.
That is easy to do. Just do "sudo passwd" and you can set your root password. Ubuntu does not set the root password by default and prefers that you use "sudo" instead of "su" (or log in as root) to get root access. This is the security policy that Ubuntu and OS X use, and they have a webpage describing why they use it, but if you prefer the traditional root account you are free to use that.
If Google opened its pagerank, then the order of search results would be the cleverness of the webmasters to craft their webpage to exploit Google's methods, instead of actual relevence to the search involved. You'd prefer that situation?
You are effectively saying that Google is better because it uses security by obscurity. I know lots of Slashdotters, especially supporters of FOSS, believe that relying on security by obscurity is silly and pointless. I'd just like to hear what those people think of how Google handles its own code.
Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.
Not really. A unified field theory would unify the four fundamental forces of the universe -- gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force -- into one mathematical framework. Many physicists see this as the ultimate goal of physics. Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to achieve it, and string theory, despite its lack of experimental evidence, is seen by many as a candidate for becoming the "theory of everything." But Big Bang Theory, while it's very important to the work on unification, is not unification itself, and this new evidence for inflation does not (at least directly) help with unification. Also, a unified field theory, if it ever is found, will just be a set of equations. Unless you think that "God" is just a set of mathematical constructs, don't think that physics is about trying to fulfill anyone's philosophy; that's why physics is science, not religion.
I've not once had compatibility issues with OD formats, and they're also considerably smaller than their Office counterparts - about a page in Word with no special formatting was 26KB, and about 11KB as an ODT file.
This is because OpenDocument files are.zips in disguise, while their MS Office counterparts are not compressed. If you want to achieve similar sizes for Office documents, you have to zip them manually.
I may run Linux myself, but in almost everything I do on my desktop (that isn't itself Linux-related) I am interacting with non-Linux machines. I'm forever "losing out" because I can't receive MSN special features. Sure I could do webcam with what was gnomemeeting (it looks awesome) but does anyone run it? Thankfully now I have friends riding Firefox and one using Jabber (googletalk).
But yes all my friends use windows!
So will such features help Desktop Linux?
Short answer: It might "help Desktop Linux" in general, but it will fix zero interoperability issues and it will do nothing to the problems you listed.
Long answer: You need to learn a few things about network protocols, my friend. Even if SCTP, TCP or UDP had anything to do with your problems, SCTP is not implemented on Windows. Most if not all of the programs you're using use TCP or UDP, and the issues of compatibility you're experiencing have nothing to do with these protocols. The programs you mention have their own protocols that run over TCP and UDP. Seriously, go and learn how to program BSD sockets and you'll understand where TCP and UDP are in the network protocol heirarchy. Once you've done that, maybe you could help out projects like Kopete and Gaim to fix your problems.
I completely agree in that, by all moral standards, that CD should cost about $2.00, however you're forgetting the ultimate "rule" of free-market economics: charge as high a price as people are willing to pay, not what's really fair.
So tell us, how do you determine "what's really fair?" After all, it would be really unfair if someone was forced into paying more than they want, right? Well guess what? If you have to pay anything at all, that's more than you're going to want to pay. I have to ask, what is "unfair" about an agreement in which both parties are acting completely voluntarily? If you think the price of a CD is too high, here's a solution: don't buy it! Go and buy another CD. I promise, you won't starve and die. If you don't buy it, record companies will have to lower the price so that more people buy the CDs. What is "fair" in this context is so subjective that it's completely meaningless in this discussion.
Now of course, if price fixing is really going on, then that harms free markets because the consumer will no longer have competitors to turn to, which free markets depend on. But if people have decided on their own to pay for $10 CDs, so be it; obviously they think that the CDs are worth that much, so they become that valuable.
Since the record industry is doing its job, and music is still horribly overpriced, despite competition, that leaves only one possibility: the US Government isn't doing its job - looking out for US consumers and the economy as a whole, by cracking down on abuses like this.
If price fixing is going on, the record is not doing their job; price fixing is illegal. But if $10/CD is the price that consumers and record companies settled on without any shady deals behind the scenes, the only people "looking out for US consumers" are the consumers themselves. Charging as much as you can is what anyone including yourself would do. None of your potential customers would deserve special "looking out for;" that's what their brains are for.
Look, it's quite simple. You think that the latest pop star's CD is only worth $2, but it's priced at $10. You don't have to buy it; heck, you can just pretend the CD never was released and live your life as though the "unfair" price never existed. On the other hand, a substantial number of other people think that the CD is worth at least $10, so they willing go and buy it. So, who's been treated unfairly and who has been hurt by the whole debacle? No one. Slashdotters don't get to determine prices, the entire public does; you just have to cope with that.
Censorship is not simply the direct prohibiting of expression, it encompasses a much broader area of government actions, including exactly what you describe. In other words, freedom of expression can not be contingent on other behaviour, otherwise is it not free.
But the point is that murder is *not* free expression. Your "right" to murder someone because of your political beliefs and get the same sentence as someone else who murdered for other reasons is not protected by the 1st Amendment, if it's even protected at all (might be under the 8th or 14th Amendments, but I'm no constitutional scholar). What I'm saying is that hate speech is protected, provided that it's actually speech; my comments extend no further than that.
Look at it this way - If he shoots the guy and says, "Lollipops Rule!" he doesn't get the extra 10 years. So - the expression of the guy's love for lollipops is ok with the state, but the expression of his hate is not ok with the state. One idea - OK, another idea - NOT OK. That's censorship.
Look at it this way - suppose a powerful Democrat gets murdered at a bar. Initially it appears as though the perpetrator and the victim just got into a tussle, and that the suspect should be charged with 2nd degree murder (i.e. it was not pre-meditated). However, evidence is gathered about how the alleged murderer had mentioned great hatred for the Democratic party in the weeks preceding the killing, sending emails to friends about how the Democrats are ruining the country, etc. This indicates that the murderer may have been contemplating the crime before hand and planned it; this would get him charged with 1st degree murder and he would get a longer sentence.
Does this mean that criticism of Democrats is now censored? No. In fact, had the guy not killed anyone, he would be free to march around protesting Democrats as much as he liked.
The same is true with hate crimes. As long as you don't kill anyone, you are free to spout all the seething, stupid racism you want -- and you will not be censored.
No matter how you wiggle, the guy is being punished for holding views contrary to the wishes of the government. That is censorship.
If it's my view that I should be able to rob a bank, and I get arrested for doing it, I am "being punished for holding views contrary to the wishes of the government." Does that mean I'm being censored? No. I'm allowed to yell as loudly as I want about how I should have the right to rob banks, so long as I don't actually do it. Similarly, you have the right to be as racist as you want, so long as you don't actually kill anyone over it.
That said, I do see your point. I agree that hate crimes should be punished in the same way as any other crimes. But that my point is this: hate crime laws are not censorship, because no one is being stopped from speaking. Hate crime laws are government sponsored preaching, since they basically say "You were already bad because you killed someone, but being a racist makes you even worse." This implies that racism is wrong, and although all reasonable people agree with this, it's still a political viewpoint. Preaching? Yes. But it's at least a very big stretch to call this censorship.
Please learn your boolean operators -> AND is one, OR is another, don't forget NOT and then there are all the synonyms.
If you want to nitpick, here's the logic of my sentence: NOT("has to do with free markets" OR "has to do with property rights"). This is the logical equivalent of "has NOThing to do with free markets" AND "has NOThing to do with property rights." I don't see how my sentence was illogical. Anyway...
That is a laugh - "hate crimes" laws are all over the books. Shoot a man, get 10 years in a jail, shoot him and make a racial slur afterwards and get 20 years.
I said hate speech is protected as free speech; I didn't say anything about hate crimes. Someone might use hate speech as evidence that a crime was committed because of racism, but that's beside my point; legal things that a defendant does are often used as evidence in a trial.
hydrocarbon fuels are getting too expensive, even for them. Additionally, why would a country filled with Uranium, dependent on oil exports, use oil for power production?
Because they're filled with much more oil than uranium. What do you mean they're "dependent on oil exports?" They're the ones who are exporting oil, which would mean they would already have plenty for their needs...
Yeah, they probably want nukes too, but given we contained Mao and Stalin, who had a lot more of them and hated us as much for our "bourgeois capitalism", as the Iranians do for being the "Great Satan", it's not a big deal.
It's a big deal because it increases the likelihood of nuclear war, or at the very least, lets Iran have a much bigger stick at any future negotiating table. Sure, we averted nuclear war with the Russians, but we came pretty darn close (anyone up for a replay of the Cuban missle crisis?). That's not even mentioning the tens of thousands of lives we lost in wars that indirectly resulted from our standoff with the Russians and the Chinese in Korea and Vietnam. In short, nuclear weapons in the hands of evil people is at the very least a huge pain in the neck for the free world and at worst extremely deadly -- it's a very big deal.
He is supposed to represent the interests of each and every American citizen, whether or not they voted for him.
No, he is supposed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. That doesn't mean listening to "each and every American citizen." If you were President, and I wrote a letter saying to you that I would like a lollipop delivered to me each day at my desk, you would not have an obligation to listen to me. The President is supposed to serve the United States as a whole; if the people disagree with what he sees as the interests of the US, their job is to not elect him. If they think he should listen to "each and every American citizen," they should vote for someone they think will do that.
The west isn't usually so unabashedly blatant about the censorship that goes on here. Instead, prefering to hide behind twisted versions of ideals like free markets and property rights.
And yet you link to a story about censorship that has nothing to do with free markets or property rights? The story you linked has to do with the censorship of "hate speech" that many European countries do; this censorship is really only "alive and well" in Europe -- hate speech is protected under the 1st Amendment here in the US. Please give examples that actually relate to what you are talking about.
That said, every time we have a story about human rights in China, there's a flood of posts about "OMG!! They blurred out boobs on TV today, just like the censorship in China! We're all heading to Communism and Fascism! Say goodbye to your freedom!" Is the "free world" perfect? No. But the constant cries of the "rise of Fascism" are complete exaggerations of reality and are getting very old. China is such an extreme example of censorship compared with the US that these gratuitous "This is where we're headed" posts are really irrelevant to the topic. It would be like saying "New York raised speeding fines from $100 to $150 -- we're headed down a slippery slope" in article about prison sentences for rape and murder. Guarding your civil rights is important, but some Slashdotters need to take a break from their tin foil hats and get a reality check.
The Capitol police has apologized for the incident, so it appears that this was a result of unprepared police officers, not a policy. In any case, your right to wear a political T-shirt and march through town with it is as certain today as it has always been (in fact more so than at other times in our history).
Arrested and prosecuted for a political sign
I wish Bush wasn't so shielded from criticism, but this is more of a "it would be good for him" than "OMG he's a tyrant." It's Bush's event, and he doesn't want it being disrupted by others. Let's say you wanted to hold an anti-Bush rally, and a whole bunch of pro-Bush people flooded in with signs supporting the President; so the end result is your anti-Bush rally turns into an opportunity for Bush supporters to ridicule you. If you aren't able to say, "this is my rally, and you are disrupting it; please leave." then holding a rally will become difficult if not pointless since it will just turn into a contest of who can yell louder or whose signs are bigger. It's the same problem that you have if both people are talking simultaneously in a conversation; no one is enlightened by such a "debate." Free speech zones are put up for anyone's rally if it's big enough and they want the police to protect them, no matter what their political beliefs.
Three years in prison for a political cartoon
This is worrisome, but not because it might be censorship. The trouble here is that A) the interrogators didn't have a sense of humor and B) (more importantly) Guantanamo Bay is in legally murky water. However, while this is an important issue and definitely something to be concerned about, it's outside the scope of this discussion as it is irrelevant to free speech, so I won't comment on it.
Grounds for concern, I hope you'll agreee, even if you don't consider it Fascism.
The first one was a non-issue, since it has nothing to do with government policy. The second said that Bush isn't willing to see critics at his rallies. While it might be good for Bush to see a little criticism every now and then, he also has the right to not listen to criticism and not see his critics, just like if I don't want you to make fun of me on my website, I don't have to let you. You are free, however, to set up your own website to make fun of me (and, at your option, prevent me from making fun of you there). The third covers a very important issue, but it has nothing to do with free speech. The writers were not arrested because they opposed Bush (in fact, their article was about Clinton), but for other reasons.
Am I concerned about the Bush administration's effect on civil liberties? Of course. But free speech is very strong in the US (more than even Europe, where people certainly don't think fascism is rising), and there is no reason to believe political censorship will arise in the US in the forseeable future.
You forgot about people who got censured and supressed for complaining about Bush's foray into Iraq "It's unamerican to criticize the president in a time of war".
No, you forgot that the people who say that are entitled to just as much free speech as opponents of the war.
The thing is that this so-called war isn't like WWII where the start, end and opponents could be clearly deliniated by declarations of war and peace treaties. This 'war on terror' has no specific start date, and not prospective end time. The civil rights that dissapear in the name of 'The War On Terror' are not likely to be recovered anytime in the forseeable future.
I agree to a certain extent. The lack of an exact end to the war makes any loss of freedoms more dangerous, since they may be applied to peace time later. That said, the war will "end" when either terrorists become basically disorganized and ineffective (almost impossible) or when Americans just get tired of fighting and don't care anymore. The latter is quite likely to happen eventually (after several years or at most decades), and such sentiments will last until the next terrorist attack.
"The enemy" is the ephemeral 'terrorist', but terrorism has been so generically defined, at times, that organizing a general strike to signal opposition to an impugned government policy could classify as 'terrorism' and thus get the organizers quietly taken into custody with no notification to anybody (other than a body count a year later) and precious little in the way of civil rights.
Terrorism has been "generically defined" in that Americans consider you a terrorist if you attack an American soldier. It's true that people who attack the US military (like the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan) are trying to defeat the military by intimidating or "terrorizing" the American public by causing tragic but militarily insignificant casualties; IMHO, that's a rather weak definition and "terrorist" should be reserved for someone attacking civilians in an attempt to intimidate a population.
That said, no one is claiming that someone who criticizes the administration is terrorist. Although I too fear terrorism being expanded beyond its definition, it's no where near being a blanket label for political opposition.
"they're terrorists, after all, not citizens.
I never said anything like that, so don't claim I defend it; under the 14th Amendment, all people under US jurisdiction have equal protection under the law -- terrorist or not.
News organizations and reporters that portray Bush in a negative light are quietly frozen out of briefings, so they learn to be silent unless 'everybody else' is also criticizing him. The result is that public debate is quietly squashed.
Even Al Jazeera is able to attend Pentagon press briefings, and Scott McClellan answers (or at least has to listen to) questions and criticism of Bush every day at the White House. There is no evidence to show that journalists unfriendly to Bush are ejected from Washington; if you think there is, show it.
Similar things can be said about criticizing large corporations that media organizations rely on for advertising revenue.
I've talked to the photo editor of a large daily who pointed to one of my images as an especially good news photo, "... But we'd never print it", because it would have promoted the viewpoint of the wrong side.
She talked to me of how one well-respected photographer's images couldn't be used because he was 'to biased' (i.e. he was with the anti-logging protestors). That day, her paper back-paged the story of a large local protest against then-current logging practices. A couple of days later, the paper printed on the front page an image that was credited to the logging company that the protests were aimed at. It was an image of a smaller pro-logging rally that the company had orginized in another city.
Without more details, it's hard for me to comment on it. If
Freedom has rarely ever been given back in any form because an electorate said, "please sir, might we have some more." It usually takes overt acts of defiance which makes this journalist all the more heroic given which society we're talking about.
A lot of people on Slashdot say this, and while I agree that it's very important to vigilantly guard civil liberties, I don't think this argument that "freedom given away 'temporarily' is impossible to get back easily" really flies. Also, the electorate usually doesn't "say" something timid like "might we have some more." It's usually a firmer "back off!" For example, look at the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed under John Adams' administration; under our modern interpretation of the 1st Amendment, the laws were clearly unconstitutional, and a lot of Americans at the time thought so too. What happened? In 1800, the electorate threw John Adams and his Federalists out of power and voted in the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson, who strongly opposed the acts. A similar episode came when Ford was kicked out when Americans voted after Watergate was exposed. The point here is that the American voters tend to tolerate relatively small transgressions on their freedoms, but if politicians take a real serious chunk, they'll let them know.
The irony is that in America, anyone who votes for the two major parties is voting for the rise of Fascism.
There is a slippery slope here, but you're turning it into a vertical cliff. The only censorship advocated by American political parties today is censorship of "obscene material" containing violence, sex, expletives, etc. While I completely agree that this ought to be covered under free speech, let's look at this honestly: this isn't political speech. Alberto Gonzales would like to could get rid of porn not because it's critical of Bush, but out of genuine (from his perspective) concern about "corrupting" children. The slope is slippery, but there is still a very significant bump that any politician wanting to do political censorship would have to overcome. However, even if political censorship is acceptable, that doesn't mean that all semblance of free speech disappears immediately. Look at many European countries, where denial of Holocaust or "hate" speech is prohibited. Such speech is banned for truly political reasons, and yet (nearly) free political discourse still survives in Europe.
Again, I think that any censorship is silly and unethical. It's both futile and unnecessary; people will always get around it, and with free speech stupid ideas will die without logical underpinnings. But freedom is not quite as fragile as you think, and you completely exaggerate the political climate in America. Saying that censoring curse words by law on TV is the "rise of Fascism" would be like pointing at someone who just got a ticket for speeding and saying that they will turn into a serial killer. Yeah, the censorship of "obscene material" is wrong, but it's not the end of the world.
A nation that won't even tell private security officers at stores like Best Buy to leave them alone when they're harrassing them, won't stay free long.
Why do you see things through such a black and white lense? Some people don't mind if Best Buy takes steps to prevent shop-lifting, even if it's a bit of a bother sometimes. Many Slashdotters seem to think that if authorities even dare to check on whether or not you're breaking the law, whether through surveillance cameras at the Olympics, checking IDs at airports, or DRM on music, that is the end of the free world. The government can't be constantly watching because there is a danger of abuse, not because we're supposed to always presume that no one would ever violate the law when given the chance. Best Buy can't just lock you up because you look guilty, but you also cannot expect them to not do anything to prevent shoplifting.
In short, there is a lot of gray area between not letting minors buy Grand Theft Auto and totalitarian political censorship that you are completely ignoring. It's not good, but it's not fascism.
I submit patent applications as an IBM employee, and while I don't have the resources to ever bring my ideas to market, IBM can certainly bring to bear just about anything I submit that they deem worthy. But why would they ever tool a manufacturing line and build a working demo of every invention *before* having a patent covering the idea?
Let's recall why patents were set up. Patents are there so that inventors disclose their ideas to the public, and the public grants them a limited monopoly on the invention as a reward for their work. The goal is for the public as a whole to gain from patents, and the only way that will happen is if the inventor actually produces the inventions for the public. If the inventor plans on making even a penny on his invention, he will have to produce at least one working copy, which he could demonstrate for USPTO. In other words, if you're not going to build your invention, who gains from it?. The answer is, no one; the inventor just gets to prevent anyone else from using the idea now.
But there's another important reason why a demonstration model ought to be built. It would have been easy for the Wright Brothers to patent "a craft that relies on Bernoulli's principle to fly" without producing a working model. There are lots of things that "should work" but don't because the drawing board doesn't always take everything in the real world into account. Bernoulli's principle had been known for over a century before the Wright Brothers came along; it didn't mean that Bernoulli could patent an airplane. Requiring a working model would weed out things like this pseudoscientific "invention" we're discussing, and it might even prevent things like the "not operator" from getting patented, since the patent clerk might see for himself how utterly obvious and simple the invention is.
Even if someone hasn't developed a working demo yet, I can respect that they claimed the idea as their own. Why can't you? And why don't you feel that "Joe Inventor" who works in his garage for 20 years trying to find the next big thing should be allowed to make money by documenting cutting edge ideas just because he can't afford to fab circuits, develop code and burn EEPROMS?
I can respect someone's work, and that's why we have "first-to-create," not "first-to-file" in the US. They can feel free to patent it -- as soon as they show they've actually created something. I've seen lots of circuits, designs, software ideas, etc. that looked great on paper, and then failed in reality (at least on the first try).
Also, "Joe Inventor" represents a rather small group in the world of inventors. Most patents are produced by gargantuan companies (like IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Apple etc.) in enormous numbers (i.e. thousands per year), and what ends up happening (at least in the software world, and probably others too) is that "Joe Inventor" can't invent anything more because he might violate thousands of patents he's never seen before just by creating something. Big companies can at least say to each other "I'll let you use these hundred patents if you let me use your hundred patents," but individual inventors don't have that kind of clout.
Kicking it up a notch, how about IBM implementing a new chip design? We can simulate complete chip designs entirely in software. Why should they spend a billion dollars to fab the first version of the chip just so they can ship it to Washington so a patent clerk can validate its worthiness?
Again, if IBM wants to invent a new chip design, doesn't that mean it's useful? The chip should be produced if it's useful, and they can just show one chip to the clerk. If they don't want to produce it, it's clearly not useful, and therefore they shouldn't be patenting it in the first place.
becuase instead of having the transistors double, it looks like cores per chip are doubling.... so i guess moore is half right?
Well, if the cores doubled every year and the cores had more or less the same number of transistors, that would mean that the number of transistors double...
Seeing as this is a video surveillance company, it'd be hard for staff to claim a moral objection to the practice.
Okay then. My point here is that not everyone (or even necessarily a majority) of the general population shares the anti-surveillance sentiments of the majority of Slashdotters. Some people simply don't care that much about being tracked as they move about their workplace; otherwise this company wouldn't exist because A) they couldn't sell their products and B) they couldn't implant RFIDs on their employees.
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing?
It's not required. Don't like it? Don't work there. If enough people simply refuse to put up with this, no employers will use RFIDs on their employees because no one will be willing to work for them. That's what the free labor market is all about.
No... if you can't look at the source, you can't know that it's secure. Open source is great, and IMHO it produces more secure products in general; but open source isn't some magic spell that makes programs secure. Firefox, Linux, KDE, etc. all have security problems now and then. Whether or not they aren't as bad as their proprietary counterparts is debatable, but nothing is 100% secure, FOSS or not.
I agree there is a difference. Its a theoretical difference though. In the one case you are not allowed to do something, and can be punished. In the other case, you are allowed to do something, but your actions can be recorded and if considered necessary action can be taken against you.
You would be right if you left the last part off. Again, the US government is not unique in its ability to "record" your Internet activity; anybody with a packet sniffer can see what you're doing if the data is unencrypted, and most traffic is unencrypted. However, the government cannot take "necessary action" against you unless you really are doing something illegal (e.g. hacking into someone else's computer). And in the context of this discussion, reading about something on the Internet is not illegal, so the government can't arrest you for reading the Anarchist's Cookbook.
I agree that this is a slippery slope, and I myself am very worried about the NSA program, for example. But to say this is comparable to what the Chinese are doing is ludicrous. If the White House was monitoring people trying to access material put out by the Democratic party and others that was critical of the President, and then went and systematically arrested them, you'd have a point. The danger is that we head towards what you're picturing, but we aren't anywhere near there yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that the new definition of "terrorist" ? Soemone who; covertly and securely distribute inflammatory material ?
No, it's not. Clearly you didn't RTFA.
First of all, this guy was discovered accidentally -- he was arrested for what he was doing offline (allegedly plotting a bombing), not online. Second of all, what this guy did online wasn't merely post "inflammatory material" on various forums. He was actively breaking into servers to covertly host data, like videos and messages. If you go on an online forum today and post "Support the Jihad against the Western infidels!", you can't be arrested (at least in the US; I understand that the laws in the UK may have changed so that it is illegal). If you go and break into someone's server and then put your message there, then you might be in trouble.
In short, this guy isn't being arrested because he was exercising his right to free speech. What he did would have been illegal if the material he was posting had been propaganda supporting Bush's agenda.
i like the lack of being root user, although it only requires that you enter your password to do administrative tasks. i think if it were to be a true multi-user box, it should ask for an administrative password for that, one that differs from the user's password.
That is easy to do. Just do "sudo passwd" and you can set your root password. Ubuntu does not set the root password by default and prefers that you use "sudo" instead of "su" (or log in as root) to get root access. This is the security policy that Ubuntu and OS X use, and they have a webpage describing why they use it, but if you prefer the traditional root account you are free to use that.
If Google opened its pagerank, then the order of search results would be the cleverness of the webmasters to craft their webpage to exploit Google's methods, instead of actual relevence to the search involved. You'd prefer that situation?
You are effectively saying that Google is better because it uses security by obscurity. I know lots of Slashdotters, especially supporters of FOSS, believe that relying on security by obscurity is silly and pointless. I'd just like to hear what those people think of how Google handles its own code.
Up until now, though, there's been nothing other than mathematical proof for cosmic inflation itself- only theories that seemed impossible (matter moving at several million times the speed of light?!?!?). This gets us a step closer to a GUFTE- a grand unified field theory of everything that would be as close as science could come to describing God.
Not really. A unified field theory would unify the four fundamental forces of the universe -- gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force -- into one mathematical framework. Many physicists see this as the ultimate goal of physics. Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to achieve it, and string theory, despite its lack of experimental evidence, is seen by many as a candidate for becoming the "theory of everything." But Big Bang Theory, while it's very important to the work on unification, is not unification itself, and this new evidence for inflation does not (at least directly) help with unification. Also, a unified field theory, if it ever is found, will just be a set of equations. Unless you think that "God" is just a set of mathematical constructs, don't think that physics is about trying to fulfill anyone's philosophy; that's why physics is science, not religion.
I've not once had compatibility issues with OD formats, and they're also considerably smaller than their Office counterparts - about a page in Word with no special formatting was 26KB, and about 11KB as an ODT file.
.zips in disguise, while their MS Office counterparts are not compressed. If you want to achieve similar sizes for Office documents, you have to zip them manually.
This is because OpenDocument files are
I may run Linux myself, but in almost everything I do on my desktop (that isn't itself Linux-related) I am interacting with non-Linux machines. I'm forever "losing out" because I can't receive MSN special features. Sure I could do webcam with what was gnomemeeting (it looks awesome) but does anyone run it? Thankfully now I have friends riding Firefox and one using Jabber (googletalk).
But yes all my friends use windows!
So will such features help Desktop Linux?
Short answer: It might "help Desktop Linux" in general, but it will fix zero interoperability issues and it will do nothing to the problems you listed.
Long answer: You need to learn a few things about network protocols, my friend. Even if SCTP, TCP or UDP had anything to do with your problems, SCTP is not implemented on Windows. Most if not all of the programs you're using use TCP or UDP, and the issues of compatibility you're experiencing have nothing to do with these protocols. The programs you mention have their own protocols that run over TCP and UDP. Seriously, go and learn how to program BSD sockets and you'll understand where TCP and UDP are in the network protocol heirarchy. Once you've done that, maybe you could help out projects like Kopete and Gaim to fix your problems.
I completely agree in that, by all moral standards, that CD should cost about $2.00, however you're forgetting the ultimate "rule" of free-market economics: charge as high a price as people are willing to pay, not what's really fair.
So tell us, how do you determine "what's really fair?" After all, it would be really unfair if someone was forced into paying more than they want, right? Well guess what? If you have to pay anything at all, that's more than you're going to want to pay. I have to ask, what is "unfair" about an agreement in which both parties are acting completely voluntarily? If you think the price of a CD is too high, here's a solution: don't buy it! Go and buy another CD. I promise, you won't starve and die. If you don't buy it, record companies will have to lower the price so that more people buy the CDs. What is "fair" in this context is so subjective that it's completely meaningless in this discussion.
Now of course, if price fixing is really going on, then that harms free markets because the consumer will no longer have competitors to turn to, which free markets depend on. But if people have decided on their own to pay for $10 CDs, so be it; obviously they think that the CDs are worth that much, so they become that valuable.
Since the record industry is doing its job, and music is still horribly overpriced, despite competition, that leaves only one possibility: the US Government isn't doing its job - looking out for US consumers and the economy as a whole, by cracking down on abuses like this.
If price fixing is going on, the record is not doing their job; price fixing is illegal. But if $10/CD is the price that consumers and record companies settled on without any shady deals behind the scenes, the only people "looking out for US consumers" are the consumers themselves. Charging as much as you can is what anyone including yourself would do. None of your potential customers would deserve special "looking out for;" that's what their brains are for.
Look, it's quite simple. You think that the latest pop star's CD is only worth $2, but it's priced at $10. You don't have to buy it; heck, you can just pretend the CD never was released and live your life as though the "unfair" price never existed. On the other hand, a substantial number of other people think that the CD is worth at least $10, so they willing go and buy it. So, who's been treated unfairly and who has been hurt by the whole debacle? No one. Slashdotters don't get to determine prices, the entire public does; you just have to cope with that.
It costs any record company, on average, about $0.25 to get one CD into a retail store.
Care to share with us how you calculated that?
Censorship is not simply the direct prohibiting of expression, it encompasses a much broader area of government actions, including exactly what you describe. In other words, freedom of expression can not be contingent on other behaviour, otherwise is it not free.
But the point is that murder is *not* free expression. Your "right" to murder someone because of your political beliefs and get the same sentence as someone else who murdered for other reasons is not protected by the 1st Amendment, if it's even protected at all (might be under the 8th or 14th Amendments, but I'm no constitutional scholar). What I'm saying is that hate speech is protected, provided that it's actually speech; my comments extend no further than that.
Look at it this way - If he shoots the guy and says, "Lollipops Rule!" he doesn't get the extra 10 years. So - the expression of the guy's love for lollipops is ok with the state, but the expression of his hate is not ok with the state. One idea - OK, another idea - NOT OK. That's censorship.
Look at it this way - suppose a powerful Democrat gets murdered at a bar. Initially it appears as though the perpetrator and the victim just got into a tussle, and that the suspect should be charged with 2nd degree murder (i.e. it was not pre-meditated). However, evidence is gathered about how the alleged murderer had mentioned great hatred for the Democratic party in the weeks preceding the killing, sending emails to friends about how the Democrats are ruining the country, etc. This indicates that the murderer may have been contemplating the crime before hand and planned it; this would get him charged with 1st degree murder and he would get a longer sentence.
Does this mean that criticism of Democrats is now censored? No. In fact, had the guy not killed anyone, he would be free to march around protesting Democrats as much as he liked.
The same is true with hate crimes. As long as you don't kill anyone, you are free to spout all the seething, stupid racism you want -- and you will not be censored.
No matter how you wiggle, the guy is being punished for holding views contrary to the wishes of the government. That is censorship.
If it's my view that I should be able to rob a bank, and I get arrested for doing it, I am "being punished for holding views contrary to the wishes of the government." Does that mean I'm being censored? No. I'm allowed to yell as loudly as I want about how I should have the right to rob banks, so long as I don't actually do it. Similarly, you have the right to be as racist as you want, so long as you don't actually kill anyone over it.
That said, I do see your point. I agree that hate crimes should be punished in the same way as any other crimes. But that my point is this: hate crime laws are not censorship, because no one is being stopped from speaking. Hate crime laws are government sponsored preaching, since they basically say "You were already bad because you killed someone, but being a racist makes you even worse." This implies that racism is wrong, and although all reasonable people agree with this, it's still a political viewpoint. Preaching? Yes. But it's at least a very big stretch to call this censorship.
Please learn your boolean operators -> AND is one, OR is another, don't forget NOT and then there are all the synonyms.
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If you want to nitpick, here's the logic of my sentence: NOT("has to do with free markets" OR "has to do with property rights"). This is the logical equivalent of "has NOThing to do with free markets" AND "has NOThing to do with property rights." I don't see how my sentence was illogical. Anyway
That is a laugh - "hate crimes" laws are all over the books. Shoot a man, get 10 years in a jail, shoot him and make a racial slur afterwards and get 20 years.
I said hate speech is protected as free speech; I didn't say anything about hate crimes. Someone might use hate speech as evidence that a crime was committed because of racism, but that's beside my point; legal things that a defendant does are often used as evidence in a trial.
hydrocarbon fuels are getting too expensive, even for them. Additionally, why would a country filled with Uranium, dependent on oil exports, use oil for power production?
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Because they're filled with much more oil than uranium. What do you mean they're "dependent on oil exports?" They're the ones who are exporting oil, which would mean they would already have plenty for their needs
Yeah, they probably want nukes too, but given we contained Mao and Stalin, who had a lot more of them and hated us as much for our "bourgeois capitalism", as the Iranians do for being the "Great Satan", it's not a big deal.
It's a big deal because it increases the likelihood of nuclear war, or at the very least, lets Iran have a much bigger stick at any future negotiating table. Sure, we averted nuclear war with the Russians, but we came pretty darn close (anyone up for a replay of the Cuban missle crisis?). That's not even mentioning the tens of thousands of lives we lost in wars that indirectly resulted from our standoff with the Russians and the Chinese in Korea and Vietnam. In short, nuclear weapons in the hands of evil people is at the very least a huge pain in the neck for the free world and at worst extremely deadly -- it's a very big deal.
He is supposed to represent the interests of each and every American citizen, whether or not they voted for him.
No, he is supposed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. That doesn't mean listening to "each and every American citizen." If you were President, and I wrote a letter saying to you that I would like a lollipop delivered to me each day at my desk, you would not have an obligation to listen to me. The President is supposed to serve the United States as a whole; if the people disagree with what he sees as the interests of the US, their job is to not elect him. If they think he should listen to "each and every American citizen," they should vote for someone they think will do that.
The west isn't usually so unabashedly blatant about the censorship that goes on here. Instead, prefering to hide behind twisted versions of ideals like free markets and property rights.
And yet you link to a story about censorship that has nothing to do with free markets or property rights? The story you linked has to do with the censorship of "hate speech" that many European countries do; this censorship is really only "alive and well" in Europe -- hate speech is protected under the 1st Amendment here in the US. Please give examples that actually relate to what you are talking about.
That said, every time we have a story about human rights in China, there's a flood of posts about "OMG!! They blurred out boobs on TV today, just like the censorship in China! We're all heading to Communism and Fascism! Say goodbye to your freedom!" Is the "free world" perfect? No. But the constant cries of the "rise of Fascism" are complete exaggerations of reality and are getting very old. China is such an extreme example of censorship compared with the US that these gratuitous "This is where we're headed" posts are really irrelevant to the topic. It would be like saying "New York raised speeding fines from $100 to $150 -- we're headed down a slippery slope" in article about prison sentences for rape and murder. Guarding your civil rights is important, but some Slashdotters need to take a break from their tin foil hats and get a reality check.
But what I would be more interested in is out of all these switchers, what's the ratio that switch to Linux compared to Windows?
Steve Ballmer says that 25% of Unix boxes disappearing are replaced with Windows (the rest are presumably replaced by Linux).
Software Development:
... it's evil.
When Microsoft does it
When RMS does it, it's for the good of the world.
The point here is that technology is rarely if ever inherently wrong; it just depends on who uses it and what they use it for.
Arrested for a political T-shirt
The Capitol police has apologized for the incident, so it appears that this was a result of unprepared police officers, not a policy. In any case, your right to wear a political T-shirt and march through town with it is as certain today as it has always been (in fact more so than at other times in our history).
Arrested and prosecuted for a political sign
I wish Bush wasn't so shielded from criticism, but this is more of a "it would be good for him" than "OMG he's a tyrant." It's Bush's event, and he doesn't want it being disrupted by others. Let's say you wanted to hold an anti-Bush rally, and a whole bunch of pro-Bush people flooded in with signs supporting the President; so the end result is your anti-Bush rally turns into an opportunity for Bush supporters to ridicule you. If you aren't able to say, "this is my rally, and you are disrupting it; please leave." then holding a rally will become difficult if not pointless since it will just turn into a contest of who can yell louder or whose signs are bigger. It's the same problem that you have if both people are talking simultaneously in a conversation; no one is enlightened by such a "debate." Free speech zones are put up for anyone's rally if it's big enough and they want the police to protect them, no matter what their political beliefs.
Three years in prison for a political cartoon
This is worrisome, but not because it might be censorship. The trouble here is that A) the interrogators didn't have a sense of humor and B) (more importantly) Guantanamo Bay is in legally murky water. However, while this is an important issue and definitely something to be concerned about, it's outside the scope of this discussion as it is irrelevant to free speech, so I won't comment on it.
Grounds for concern, I hope you'll agreee, even if you don't consider it Fascism.
The first one was a non-issue, since it has nothing to do with government policy. The second said that Bush isn't willing to see critics at his rallies. While it might be good for Bush to see a little criticism every now and then, he also has the right to not listen to criticism and not see his critics, just like if I don't want you to make fun of me on my website, I don't have to let you. You are free, however, to set up your own website to make fun of me (and, at your option, prevent me from making fun of you there). The third covers a very important issue, but it has nothing to do with free speech. The writers were not arrested because they opposed Bush (in fact, their article was about Clinton), but for other reasons.
Am I concerned about the Bush administration's effect on civil liberties? Of course. But free speech is very strong in the US (more than even Europe, where people certainly don't think fascism is rising), and there is no reason to believe political censorship will arise in the US in the forseeable future.
You forgot about people who got censured and supressed for complaining about Bush's foray into Iraq "It's unamerican to criticize the president in a time of war".
No, you forgot that the people who say that are entitled to just as much free speech as opponents of the war.
The thing is that this so-called war isn't like WWII where the start, end and opponents could be clearly deliniated by declarations of war and peace treaties. This 'war on terror' has no specific start date, and not prospective end time. The civil rights that dissapear in the name of 'The War On Terror' are not likely to be recovered anytime in the forseeable future.
I agree to a certain extent. The lack of an exact end to the war makes any loss of freedoms more dangerous, since they may be applied to peace time later. That said, the war will "end" when either terrorists become basically disorganized and ineffective (almost impossible) or when Americans just get tired of fighting and don't care anymore. The latter is quite likely to happen eventually (after several years or at most decades), and such sentiments will last until the next terrorist attack.
"The enemy" is the ephemeral 'terrorist', but terrorism has been so generically defined, at times, that organizing a general strike to signal opposition to an impugned government policy could classify as 'terrorism' and thus get the organizers quietly taken into custody with no notification to anybody (other than a body count a year later) and precious little in the way of civil rights.
Terrorism has been "generically defined" in that Americans consider you a terrorist if you attack an American soldier. It's true that people who attack the US military (like the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan) are trying to defeat the military by intimidating or "terrorizing" the American public by causing tragic but militarily insignificant casualties; IMHO, that's a rather weak definition and "terrorist" should be reserved for someone attacking civilians in an attempt to intimidate a population.
That said, no one is claiming that someone who criticizes the administration is terrorist. Although I too fear terrorism being expanded beyond its definition, it's no where near being a blanket label for political opposition.
"they're terrorists, after all, not citizens.
I never said anything like that, so don't claim I defend it; under the 14th Amendment, all people under US jurisdiction have equal protection under the law -- terrorist or not.
News organizations and reporters that portray Bush in a negative light are quietly frozen out of briefings, so they learn to be silent unless 'everybody else' is also criticizing him. The result is that public debate is quietly squashed.
Even Al Jazeera is able to attend Pentagon press briefings, and Scott McClellan answers (or at least has to listen to) questions and criticism of Bush every day at the White House. There is no evidence to show that journalists unfriendly to Bush are ejected from Washington; if you think there is, show it.
Similar things can be said about criticizing large corporations that media organizations rely on for advertising revenue.
I've talked to the photo editor of a large daily who pointed to one of my images as an especially good news photo, "... But we'd never print it", because it would have promoted the viewpoint of the wrong side.
She talked to me of how one well-respected photographer's images couldn't be used because he was 'to biased' (i.e. he was with the anti-logging protestors). That day, her paper back-paged the story of a large local protest against then-current logging practices. A couple of days later, the paper printed on the front page an image that was credited to the logging company that the protests were aimed at. It was an image of a smaller pro-logging rally that the company had orginized in another city.
Without more details, it's hard for me to comment on it. If
Freedom has rarely ever been given back in any form because an electorate said, "please sir, might we have some more." It usually takes overt acts of defiance which makes this journalist all the more heroic given which society we're talking about.
A lot of people on Slashdot say this, and while I agree that it's very important to vigilantly guard civil liberties, I don't think this argument that "freedom given away 'temporarily' is impossible to get back easily" really flies. Also, the electorate usually doesn't "say" something timid like "might we have some more." It's usually a firmer "back off!" For example, look at the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed under John Adams' administration; under our modern interpretation of the 1st Amendment, the laws were clearly unconstitutional, and a lot of Americans at the time thought so too. What happened? In 1800, the electorate threw John Adams and his Federalists out of power and voted in the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson, who strongly opposed the acts. A similar episode came when Ford was kicked out when Americans voted after Watergate was exposed. The point here is that the American voters tend to tolerate relatively small transgressions on their freedoms, but if politicians take a real serious chunk, they'll let them know.
The irony is that in America, anyone who votes for the two major parties is voting for the rise of Fascism.
There is a slippery slope here, but you're turning it into a vertical cliff. The only censorship advocated by American political parties today is censorship of "obscene material" containing violence, sex, expletives, etc. While I completely agree that this ought to be covered under free speech, let's look at this honestly: this isn't political speech. Alberto Gonzales would like to could get rid of porn not because it's critical of Bush, but out of genuine (from his perspective) concern about "corrupting" children. The slope is slippery, but there is still a very significant bump that any politician wanting to do political censorship would have to overcome. However, even if political censorship is acceptable, that doesn't mean that all semblance of free speech disappears immediately. Look at many European countries, where denial of Holocaust or "hate" speech is prohibited. Such speech is banned for truly political reasons, and yet (nearly) free political discourse still survives in Europe.
Again, I think that any censorship is silly and unethical. It's both futile and unnecessary; people will always get around it, and with free speech stupid ideas will die without logical underpinnings. But freedom is not quite as fragile as you think, and you completely exaggerate the political climate in America. Saying that censoring curse words by law on TV is the "rise of Fascism" would be like pointing at someone who just got a ticket for speeding and saying that they will turn into a serial killer. Yeah, the censorship of "obscene material" is wrong, but it's not the end of the world.
A nation that won't even tell private security officers at stores like Best Buy to leave them alone when they're harrassing them, won't stay free long.
Why do you see things through such a black and white lense? Some people don't mind if Best Buy takes steps to prevent shop-lifting, even if it's a bit of a bother sometimes. Many Slashdotters seem to think that if authorities even dare to check on whether or not you're breaking the law, whether through surveillance cameras at the Olympics, checking IDs at airports, or DRM on music, that is the end of the free world. The government can't be constantly watching because there is a danger of abuse, not because we're supposed to always presume that no one would ever violate the law when given the chance. Best Buy can't just lock you up because you look guilty, but you also cannot expect them to not do anything to prevent shoplifting.
In short, there is a lot of gray area between not letting minors buy Grand Theft Auto and totalitarian political censorship that you are completely ignoring. It's not good, but it's not fascism.
I submit patent applications as an IBM employee, and while I don't have the resources to ever bring my ideas to market, IBM can certainly bring to bear just about anything I submit that they deem worthy. But why would they ever tool a manufacturing line and build a working demo of every invention *before* having a patent covering the idea?
Let's recall why patents were set up. Patents are there so that inventors disclose their ideas to the public, and the public grants them a limited monopoly on the invention as a reward for their work. The goal is for the public as a whole to gain from patents, and the only way that will happen is if the inventor actually produces the inventions for the public. If the inventor plans on making even a penny on his invention, he will have to produce at least one working copy, which he could demonstrate for USPTO. In other words, if you're not going to build your invention, who gains from it?. The answer is, no one; the inventor just gets to prevent anyone else from using the idea now.
But there's another important reason why a demonstration model ought to be built. It would have been easy for the Wright Brothers to patent "a craft that relies on Bernoulli's principle to fly" without producing a working model. There are lots of things that "should work" but don't because the drawing board doesn't always take everything in the real world into account. Bernoulli's principle had been known for over a century before the Wright Brothers came along; it didn't mean that Bernoulli could patent an airplane. Requiring a working model would weed out things like this pseudoscientific "invention" we're discussing, and it might even prevent things like the "not operator" from getting patented, since the patent clerk might see for himself how utterly obvious and simple the invention is.
Even if someone hasn't developed a working demo yet, I can respect that they claimed the idea as their own. Why can't you? And why don't you feel that "Joe Inventor" who works in his garage for 20 years trying to find the next big thing should be allowed to make money by documenting cutting edge ideas just because he can't afford to fab circuits, develop code and burn EEPROMS?
I can respect someone's work, and that's why we have "first-to-create," not "first-to-file" in the US. They can feel free to patent it -- as soon as they show they've actually created something. I've seen lots of circuits, designs, software ideas, etc. that looked great on paper, and then failed in reality (at least on the first try).
Also, "Joe Inventor" represents a rather small group in the world of inventors. Most patents are produced by gargantuan companies (like IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Apple etc.) in enormous numbers (i.e. thousands per year), and what ends up happening (at least in the software world, and probably others too) is that "Joe Inventor" can't invent anything more because he might violate thousands of patents he's never seen before just by creating something. Big companies can at least say to each other "I'll let you use these hundred patents if you let me use your hundred patents," but individual inventors don't have that kind of clout.
Kicking it up a notch, how about IBM implementing a new chip design? We can simulate complete chip designs entirely in software. Why should they spend a billion dollars to fab the first version of the chip just so they can ship it to Washington so a patent clerk can validate its worthiness?
Again, if IBM wants to invent a new chip design, doesn't that mean it's useful? The chip should be produced if it's useful, and they can just show one chip to the clerk. If they don't want to produce it, it's clearly not useful, and therefore they shouldn't be patenting it in the first place.
becuase instead of having the transistors double, it looks like cores per chip are doubling.... so i guess moore is half right?
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Well, if the cores doubled every year and the cores had more or less the same number of transistors, that would mean that the number of transistors double
Seeing as this is a video surveillance company, it'd be hard for staff to claim a moral objection to the practice.
Okay then. My point here is that not everyone (or even necessarily a majority) of the general population shares the anti-surveillance sentiments of the majority of Slashdotters. Some people simply don't care that much about being tracked as they move about their workplace; otherwise this company wouldn't exist because A) they couldn't sell their products and B) they couldn't implant RFIDs on their employees.
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing?
It's not required. Don't like it? Don't work there. If enough people simply refuse to put up with this, no employers will use RFIDs on their employees because no one will be willing to work for them. That's what the free labor market is all about.
If I can't look at the source.. it ain't secure.
... if you can't look at the source, you can't know that it's secure. Open source is great, and IMHO it produces more secure products in general; but open source isn't some magic spell that makes programs secure. Firefox, Linux, KDE, etc. all have security problems now and then. Whether or not they aren't as bad as their proprietary counterparts is debatable, but nothing is 100% secure, FOSS or not.
No
I agree there is a difference. Its a theoretical difference though. In the one case you are not allowed to do something, and can be punished. In the other case, you are allowed to do something, but your actions can be recorded and if considered necessary action can be taken against you.
You would be right if you left the last part off. Again, the US government is not unique in its ability to "record" your Internet activity; anybody with a packet sniffer can see what you're doing if the data is unencrypted, and most traffic is unencrypted. However, the government cannot take "necessary action" against you unless you really are doing something illegal (e.g. hacking into someone else's computer). And in the context of this discussion, reading about something on the Internet is not illegal, so the government can't arrest you for reading the Anarchist's Cookbook.
I agree that this is a slippery slope, and I myself am very worried about the NSA program, for example. But to say this is comparable to what the Chinese are doing is ludicrous. If the White House was monitoring people trying to access material put out by the Democratic party and others that was critical of the President, and then went and systematically arrested them, you'd have a point. The danger is that we head towards what you're picturing, but we aren't anywhere near there yet.