any posting that passes on the talkin' point that "Plame was not covert" should be modded +5 Troll
Why? Because it takes all the fun out of it for everyone? It's not very contructive for any CIA employee (aside from the usual, very visible appointees, etc) to be known to the public, even if - like Plame - they haven't been overseas in more than the number of years that make discussions of their status naughty under the 1982 IIP. Richard Armitage probably should have known better, but DID go running right to the special prosecutor when he realized what was going on, and did a mea culpa. And of course, the special prosecutor was on a fishing expedition, and decided to have more fun while he was as it. Novak agrees that it was Armitage, and that really does pretty well cover it. Someone working for the white house conversationally acknowledging the connection (mentioned by the reporter!) between a policized guy like Wilson (who was lying about his trip and his characterization of "reporting" his findings and his "mission" - utter BS) and his wife, who had already been connected to the mess by Armitage via Novak, is clumsy... but not the same as the malicious leak that the Wilsons are liking to portray (because it helps them make money to do so).
You don't need to upgrade your computer or Internet connection to get a better browser. Even on dial-up, it doesn't take an eternity to download Firefox or Opera.
You don't need to tell ME that! My point is that out there, in the wild, are people participating in the web-centric economy, spending money on lots of things, and doing so using old browsers on (probably) old, creaky machines and operating systems. They're out there, and you can ignore them, or you can sell them things if you find it profitable to do so.
Oh, come on. If you're going to grouse about something, grouse about something real! The special prosecutor in that case knew, early on, that the person who leaked that name was a rather vocal Bush critic (Dick Armitage) working at the State Department, and that no laws were broken. Libby has been convicted of saying different things at different times about what he remembers about when he recalls talking to people about something that wasn't a problem and didn't cause any problems, except for himself. She wasn't covert, the White House didn't leak her name, her husband's silly take on things has been roundly and thoroughly debunked, and he's been pointed out as lying about (or just being oily about) the whole thing from the beginning. They're both looking to make lots of money off of book and movie deals that don't seem to been too worried about mentioning who actually babbled her well-known name to Novak (and that someone, says the special prosecutor isn't looking at any legal trouble), and they're making political hay out of it, partisans that they both are. You've gotta find a different dead horse to beat, I think. Where's the corruption in this? In the craven way that the special prosecutor, who knew the whole story almost immediately, worked this in an entirely political manner?
First, you're talking gross. What's his margin on those $1600 worth of orders?
He makes about 35% markup on orders like that. As of a more recent check (some hours since I chimed in on the thread), the ancient-browser-checkouts have now grossed about $2200. We'll call that, conservatively, about $500 of profit (not counting taxes, flushing the toilets, pizza for the warehouse guys, etc).
the site must look unappealingly 1997
No, I'd say it looks more early-2005. The design is deliberately lean, spartan, and surprisingly navigable considering they have around 12,000 items. The are leveraging Froogle, affiliate marketing with feeds and hot links into products... lots of the more recent goodies. There are some nested tables in play, still... but they come back with first-page Google hits on a great deal of what they talk about and sell.
Responsiveness is huge
Yes, it is. But any latency I've had to fight was almost always due to database performance problems, usually because some session management table or other beastie had outgrown the way the indexes were built, etc. Believe me... a complete redesign for new standards is desireable, and could indeed bring in some otherwise missed sales. But it's nice to not run off the little old ladies and their credit cards, too. 10 of them today, it looks like. That's about 300 of them per month, and they do a lot of repeat business... the business has about a 45% repeat customer rate. Which might not sound great until you realize they're growing rapidly. So, don't "meh" something that's working pretty solidly, and which is very much a topic of discussion and planning at the business. My point (back to the thread, here) is that the "web designer" to said "when was the last time you even say a machine running IE5" is full of crap. I'm not just seeing them, I'm seeing them show up and spend money.
When was the last time you even saw a computer that had IE5 on it?
So, I've got a client that runs an e-commerce site. At least a couple hundred orders per day. I did a quick dig into today's stats. So far: 4 orders from people running IE5, and one from a Netscape 4 flavor. All appeared to be on dial-up connections. A little over $1600 worth of business in those 5 orders. These are orders for non-essential items, which suggests disposable income that COULD go into a computer upgrades, broad-band connections, etc. for those shoppers, but which have not. I absolutely guarantee that my client would rather have today's business from those 5 customers than have whatever liberty may come from being able to leverage current formatting fanciness/compatibility. Their site renders just fine in every browser to date, and that $1600 is in the bank, instead of that of a CSS-ed-to-the-hilt, hipper-than-thou competitor. Someday the numbers of legacy users will drop low enough to warrant the change, but $1600 before lunchtime says today's not the day.
And yes, even if terrorists got their hands on weapons of mass destruction, every year there die more people of car accidents alone than a terrorist strike could kill.
And what's your point? That we should, therefore, give out drivers licenses to illegal aliens? That we should not care if someone ships cash from the US out to entities in the middle east that specifically SAY they'll be using it to train and fund operators that will be looking to damage the very country from which the cash was raised? Are you saying that since car accidents do indeed claim a lot of lives, that we shouldn't worry about someone floating a barge full of explosives up next to a super tanker full of LNG near a vital port? That it's not worth spending money to be able to track guys like KSM (who had several more of his 9/11-style projects in mind, and the people and cash needed to carry them out), and apprehend him, as we did? Really: just because a bad driver can, and always will, cause a fatal car accident every few minutes, you'd tell someone who had her face cooked off in the Pentagon that, really, she's not all that statistically meaningful? Or that a bar full of Australian tourists in Bali, roasted alive through someone's deliberate political act, really didn't amount to much? Can't you get your head around malice vs. accident?
Sir, people like *you*, the pushers of culture of fear together with its toxic fallout, are what I am truly afraid of.
Actually, I'm much more inclined to simply take action than to run around waiving my hands in the air over imagined or vague problems. It's completely true that the general media-born buzz surrounding ALL risks, of all flavors, is absurdly wrong (both over- and under-measuring reality, depending on the topic of the day). What are the risks of a given individual getting personally, directly killed by even a pretty good sized attack (say, a tanker car full of chlorine getting well-vaporized near a big public event... whatever)? Statistically, low, across the whole population. What is the actual impact (on the wider economy, if nothing else) of making our official position that we won't be at least trying to head off such events? What is the moral and cultural cost of saying that we equate knocking down skyscrapers full of people, for political reasons, with a bank heist?
Deep vein thrombosis isn't a risk that is produced by someone else's malice. It's a result of sitting still for too long on the wrong-shaped chair. We can argue about whether or not the chair designer (or the airline that bought the chairs) is deliberately trying to kill their passengers, but I don't think that discussion meaningfully rises to the same level as discussing groups of people whose stated objective is broad damage to our economy and the death of infidels like you and me.
On that basis, to me it'd make sense that if a War on Terror was going to be valid, surely a War on Ebola would be even moreso, since I'm guessing the number of people it's killed would be higher.
Or, based on your thinking, there's really no point having seatbelt laws.
Regardless... we're talking (in the case of militant Islamists) about people who actually come right out and SAY that they think acquiring serious WMD's is a valid and morally obligated pursuit. And that using them against western countries is not only conceivable, but a vital, because-Allah-says-so objective.
It's not like you can rethink the policies aimed at that issue later, after a dirty bomb full of cesium (or whatever's handy) has made 50 square city blocks in LA or Chicago unusuable for 20 years.
He's saying that Hollywood's version of criminal motivation and the types of people that commit them often do not line up with reality.
But he's saying it in a way that dismisses the (rather Hollywood, sometimes, actually) motivations and actions of very real criminals: organized, smart, technically astute, politically active, etc. Crimes such as those being written off as being only the domain of bad movie-quality super hackers DO take place, and really ARE about money, power, ideology, etc. So, he's wrong in implying that's not the case. Just because teams of IT-aware criminals are the real-life counterparts to some TV super hacker doesn't make that situation less real.
You might be confusing that with the "there are no bad things happening to anyone, and there are no bad people that kill, steal, or do anything else bad, and there are no entities or groups that mean any harm at all to western civilization in general or the US in particular, and so we should just drop any thoughts about apprehending, punishing, or preventing the actions of those non-existent people" Koolade. Since there are no bad people, let's start by sharing your personal financial data, right here, right now, OK? Obviously, nothing bad could happen since I'm just making that all up, right? Or, take a nice trip to any of hundred little spots around the world and announce your sincere desire to introduce young women into a career in IT, or perhaps even a marriage of their own choice, and lets see how you do. I mean, since I've completely fabricated the entire notion of Sharia law showing up as an actual consideration in German court proceedings, and I'm obviously mistaken about there being an entire culture that would want you to consider your wife or daughter as property, you'll have no problem setting up a girls' school just anywhere, right?
Or, you could help mop up the body parts in Algiers, from today's attacks. I mean, lighting strike. Obviously there are no terrorists doing stuff like that - so, it was probably just a propane gas explosion. And that guy with the plastic explosives in his shoes was really just trying to make his arches more comfortable on a long flight to the US. Nope! Zero need to fret about anything, obviously. Silly me! I could use some help, though, on how it is that you don't think that selling crystal meth to rural school kids is a problem. Come on, just give us a hint, OK?
Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.
terrorists
Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!
drug dealers
You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage. You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin? Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull? What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that seek to make money peddling meth to school kids, or pretend they don't exist?
child molesters
Ever met someone who had their youth stolen by someone like that? Let's find you a few thousand of them, and then you can address them, explaining how the people who did it to them don't exist, or aren't really a problem, and should be allowed to keep doing it. I'm sure you'll be persuasive.
communists
Well, you've got me there. They only killed a few hundred million people in the last century, so that's not so bad.
but in reality most of the crimes are committed out of stupidity or drug influence
I don't think that inside theft of database dumps containing hundreds of thousands credit card accounts and SSNs is done by stupid or drug-addled people. I don't think that people who systematically probe for SQL insertion vulnerabilities on transaction systems in hopes of defacing something with some politicized rant are stupid or drug-addled. I don't think that people plant stealth FTP servers to serve up kiddie pr0n from unknowing desktops are being stupid or drug-addled. You're confusing malice with stupidity, and poisoned ethics with drug dependence.
You're missing the point! I know it's a troll. I'm campaigning for newer, better, more entertaining trolling. I mean, if someone has to troll, can't they at least update their shtick? I'm just trying to help, here.
I am thinking that you are relying too much on the title of an article to imply it's meaning. Slashdot titles are limited in characters so submitters have to be as brief as possible.
OK then, how about:
Student's MySpace Rant Ruled Free Speech... or,
Probation Voided - Student's Blog Ruled OK... or,
Court: Student's Blog Rant Ugly But Legal... or,
Court Finds For Student In Fight Over Speech
etc.
I'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about the slashdot editor's obvious flame provocation.
Right! But it's not what the slashdot headline says! That's my point. There was no finding that MySpace is free speech, and that wasn't even really being discussed, per se. What the court is talking about is whether free speech is free speech... and the MySpace piece of the puzzle is really something of a red herring, and was just there to stoke flames here.
MySpeech is a communciations method. You can use it in keeping with the First Amendment, or you can use it outside of those very real bounds. Saying "MySpace is Free Speech" is like saying "the sounds coming out of your mouth are Free Speech." Well, yeah, unless they're not. As in slander, fraud, incitement, conspiracy, threats, etc.
Just tell the US government there's oil up there and see how well funded NASA becomes.
No, really. Does that little bit of sophistry have to get trotted out every time a topic like this comes up?
Let's try something else...
"Just tell Hollywood that the planet is really hot, and celebrities will donate millions of dollars and have concerts to raise money for NASA to save the bears that may or may not live there, including a really nice concert somewhere in a nice town in the Great Plains, which um... used to be under water, and later on used to be covered with ice."
There. Now that's some proper flamebait. Please practice, and get back to us, OK?
Will their be a timed meter for juvenile viewing of the local Chinese television coverage of that huge propoganda magnet when the time comes? Yes, yes, twiddling your thumbs on a game console for three hours isn't the same as watching large, barbarian Scandinavians cream your countrymen in the shotput... because at least the game console gives your thumbs some exercise.
But what does it mean for international satellite operators when they need help with their space birds? Will they use a system designed for U.S.'s DARPA?
I don't know... what does it mean when an Airbus passenger jet needs help with a bad engine? That systems being built by the US to service their own flying hardware should also be set up to fix other countries'/consortiums' hardware? Would something designed by the European space entities/ventures be designed specifically to service both their stuff and everyone else's? Why is this question even being asked in this context? Oh, right... because it's flamebait, and that generates chit-chat, like this.
Fundamentally, I don't even see why I'm still stuck paying a phone bill at all. I don't pay an email bill or a filesharing bill.
So, you were hoping that people would know how to reach you by dialing your IP address, perhaps? Who do you think maintains the ability to route calls, from both VoIP and 'analog' networks/carriers, to the number that's assigned to you? Should they be doing that as charity? Do you pay for the IP address you're using? A phone number is pretty much the same thing, only static. I'm guessing your home IP address is probably dynamic, as far as that goes.
Ever use your VoIP service to call a local business that's on POTS? Who do you think bridges that connection, the tooth fairy? And if you've got a technical solution for that process that doesn't cost anything or use any infrastructure, why aren't you sharing that with the rest of the billions of people with hard phone numbers?
At what point does it make sense to "make your own power"?
Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power? South Carolina can experience some grid-pummeling weather, sometimes. If Google plans on having that facility up 24x7, there will be a small fleet of diesel generators and a small ocean of fuel sitting right there to keep it afloat in a pinch. Especially when what they're really up to isn't growing for more search, but growing to host web-based business apps and other stuff that they'll be telling people they can really depend on.
Now, just because you CAN run off your own power doesn't mean you want to do it for long, since it's very maintenance intensive.
It took millenia and several international conventions and harsh laws to tell everyone to freakin' let go... and as we see in the recent cases in Iraq, they still don't.
Mind you, I have very little patience for the Shia/Sunni nonsense. However: you seem to be missing the point. Neither side HAS "given up." Germany gave up. Japan gave up. Iran hasn't, for example, given up on whatever it's trying to accomplish by providing money, training, and weapons for the conflict they're helping to perpetuate in Iraq. It's still a conflict because it's still a conflict that someone wants to keep going. It's not done, with one party just hurting innocents to make a point... the hurting of innocents is the point that the aggressive parties are pursuing. To wit, just like a cat doesn't have any moral qualms about torturing and (possibly) killing a mouse because that just seems like the natural state of things, one sect of Islam that considers the others (to say nothing of westerners!) to be sub-human (like a mouse is sub-cat) is just doing what their world view asks of them when they slaughter apostates, blah blah blah. Your cat does NOT kill mice because it's hungry. It kills because it can, and because it likes to stay in practice. Mice DO "give up" in front of a cat, and then get tortured and killed anyway. I've seen it with my own eyes, plenty of times.
Your mistake, in your analogy, is presuming that cat-to-cat dominance fights are the same as people-to-people dominance fights. But the sort of human conflicts you seem to suggest cats would avoid aren't the issue... most religious wars include the very specific pronounciation of the enemy as being not equals or deserving of any human-grade respect. See the militant extremists who cite the very act of voting in a democratic election as signing your own death warrant (because it's un-Islamic, and you've become one with the baser, western animals, yadda yadda yadda). Dehumanizing your enemy (making them into the mice you're happy to toy with and kill, if you're a cat) is the oldest trick in the book. And it is the oldest trick in the book because by assigning non-humanity to your opponents, the more primitive (cat-like) tools in your toolbox become available to you.
Slashdot Mirror
any posting that passes on the talkin' point that "Plame was not covert" should be modded +5 Troll
Why? Because it takes all the fun out of it for everyone? It's not very contructive for any CIA employee (aside from the usual, very visible appointees, etc) to be known to the public, even if - like Plame - they haven't been overseas in more than the number of years that make discussions of their status naughty under the 1982 IIP. Richard Armitage probably should have known better, but DID go running right to the special prosecutor when he realized what was going on, and did a mea culpa. And of course, the special prosecutor was on a fishing expedition, and decided to have more fun while he was as it. Novak agrees that it was Armitage, and that really does pretty well cover it. Someone working for the white house conversationally acknowledging the connection (mentioned by the reporter!) between a policized guy like Wilson (who was lying about his trip and his characterization of "reporting" his findings and his "mission" - utter BS) and his wife, who had already been connected to the mess by Armitage via Novak, is clumsy... but not the same as the malicious leak that the Wilsons are liking to portray (because it helps them make money to do so).
You don't need to upgrade your computer or Internet connection to get a better browser. Even on dial-up, it doesn't take an eternity to download Firefox or Opera.
You don't need to tell ME that! My point is that out there, in the wild, are people participating in the web-centric economy, spending money on lots of things, and doing so using old browsers on (probably) old, creaky machines and operating systems. They're out there, and you can ignore them, or you can sell them things if you find it profitable to do so.
lying about Plame
Oh, come on. If you're going to grouse about something, grouse about something real! The special prosecutor in that case knew, early on, that the person who leaked that name was a rather vocal Bush critic (Dick Armitage) working at the State Department, and that no laws were broken. Libby has been convicted of saying different things at different times about what he remembers about when he recalls talking to people about something that wasn't a problem and didn't cause any problems, except for himself. She wasn't covert, the White House didn't leak her name, her husband's silly take on things has been roundly and thoroughly debunked, and he's been pointed out as lying about (or just being oily about) the whole thing from the beginning. They're both looking to make lots of money off of book and movie deals that don't seem to been too worried about mentioning who actually babbled her well-known name to Novak (and that someone, says the special prosecutor isn't looking at any legal trouble), and they're making political hay out of it, partisans that they both are. You've gotta find a different dead horse to beat, I think. Where's the corruption in this? In the craven way that the special prosecutor, who knew the whole story almost immediately, worked this in an entirely political manner?
First, you're talking gross. What's his margin on those $1600 worth of orders?
He makes about 35% markup on orders like that. As of a more recent check (some hours since I chimed in on the thread), the ancient-browser-checkouts have now grossed about $2200. We'll call that, conservatively, about $500 of profit (not counting taxes, flushing the toilets, pizza for the warehouse guys, etc).
the site must look unappealingly 1997
No, I'd say it looks more early-2005. The design is deliberately lean, spartan, and surprisingly navigable considering they have around 12,000 items. The are leveraging Froogle, affiliate marketing with feeds and hot links into products... lots of the more recent goodies. There are some nested tables in play, still... but they come back with first-page Google hits on a great deal of what they talk about and sell.
Responsiveness is huge
Yes, it is. But any latency I've had to fight was almost always due to database performance problems, usually because some session management table or other beastie had outgrown the way the indexes were built, etc. Believe me... a complete redesign for new standards is desireable, and could indeed bring in some otherwise missed sales. But it's nice to not run off the little old ladies and their credit cards, too. 10 of them today, it looks like. That's about 300 of them per month, and they do a lot of repeat business... the business has about a 45% repeat customer rate. Which might not sound great until you realize they're growing rapidly. So, don't "meh" something that's working pretty solidly, and which is very much a topic of discussion and planning at the business. My point (back to the thread, here) is that the "web designer" to said "when was the last time you even say a machine running IE5" is full of crap. I'm not just seeing them, I'm seeing them show up and spend money.
When was the last time you even saw a computer that had IE5 on it?
So, I've got a client that runs an e-commerce site. At least a couple hundred orders per day. I did a quick dig into today's stats. So far: 4 orders from people running IE5, and one from a Netscape 4 flavor. All appeared to be on dial-up connections. A little over $1600 worth of business in those 5 orders. These are orders for non-essential items, which suggests disposable income that COULD go into a computer upgrades, broad-band connections, etc. for those shoppers, but which have not. I absolutely guarantee that my client would rather have today's business from those 5 customers than have whatever liberty may come from being able to leverage current formatting fanciness/compatibility. Their site renders just fine in every browser to date, and that $1600 is in the bank, instead of that of a CSS-ed-to-the-hilt, hipper-than-thou competitor. Someday the numbers of legacy users will drop low enough to warrant the change, but $1600 before lunchtime says today's not the day.
And yes, even if terrorists got their hands on weapons of mass destruction, every year there die more people of car accidents alone than a terrorist strike could kill.
And what's your point? That we should, therefore, give out drivers licenses to illegal aliens? That we should not care if someone ships cash from the US out to entities in the middle east that specifically SAY they'll be using it to train and fund operators that will be looking to damage the very country from which the cash was raised? Are you saying that since car accidents do indeed claim a lot of lives, that we shouldn't worry about someone floating a barge full of explosives up next to a super tanker full of LNG near a vital port? That it's not worth spending money to be able to track guys like KSM (who had several more of his 9/11-style projects in mind, and the people and cash needed to carry them out), and apprehend him, as we did? Really: just because a bad driver can, and always will, cause a fatal car accident every few minutes, you'd tell someone who had her face cooked off in the Pentagon that, really, she's not all that statistically meaningful? Or that a bar full of Australian tourists in Bali, roasted alive through someone's deliberate political act, really didn't amount to much? Can't you get your head around malice vs. accident?
Sir, people like *you*, the pushers of culture of fear together with its toxic fallout, are what I am truly afraid of.
Actually, I'm much more inclined to simply take action than to run around waiving my hands in the air over imagined or vague problems. It's completely true that the general media-born buzz surrounding ALL risks, of all flavors, is absurdly wrong (both over- and under-measuring reality, depending on the topic of the day). What are the risks of a given individual getting personally, directly killed by even a pretty good sized attack (say, a tanker car full of chlorine getting well-vaporized near a big public event... whatever)? Statistically, low, across the whole population. What is the actual impact (on the wider economy, if nothing else) of making our official position that we won't be at least trying to head off such events? What is the moral and cultural cost of saying that we equate knocking down skyscrapers full of people, for political reasons, with a bank heist?
Deep vein thrombosis isn't a risk that is produced by someone else's malice. It's a result of sitting still for too long on the wrong-shaped chair. We can argue about whether or not the chair designer (or the airline that bought the chairs) is deliberately trying to kill their passengers, but I don't think that discussion meaningfully rises to the same level as discussing groups of people whose stated objective is broad damage to our economy and the death of infidels like you and me.
On that basis, to me it'd make sense that if a War on Terror was going to be valid, surely a War on Ebola would be even moreso, since I'm guessing the number of people it's killed would be higher.
Or, based on your thinking, there's really no point having seatbelt laws.
Regardless... we're talking (in the case of militant Islamists) about people who actually come right out and SAY that they think acquiring serious WMD's is a valid and morally obligated pursuit. And that using them against western countries is not only conceivable, but a vital, because-Allah-says-so objective.
It's not like you can rethink the policies aimed at that issue later, after a dirty bomb full of cesium (or whatever's handy) has made 50 square city blocks in LA or Chicago unusuable for 20 years.
He's saying that Hollywood's version of criminal motivation and the types of people that commit them often do not line up with reality.
But he's saying it in a way that dismisses the (rather Hollywood, sometimes, actually) motivations and actions of very real criminals: organized, smart, technically astute, politically active, etc. Crimes such as those being written off as being only the domain of bad movie-quality super hackers DO take place, and really ARE about money, power, ideology, etc. So, he's wrong in implying that's not the case. Just because teams of IT-aware criminals are the real-life counterparts to some TV super hacker doesn't make that situation less real.
Guess you had a big glass of the Koolade.
You might be confusing that with the "there are no bad things happening to anyone, and there are no bad people that kill, steal, or do anything else bad, and there are no entities or groups that mean any harm at all to western civilization in general or the US in particular, and so we should just drop any thoughts about apprehending, punishing, or preventing the actions of those non-existent people" Koolade. Since there are no bad people, let's start by sharing your personal financial data, right here, right now, OK? Obviously, nothing bad could happen since I'm just making that all up, right? Or, take a nice trip to any of hundred little spots around the world and announce your sincere desire to introduce young women into a career in IT, or perhaps even a marriage of their own choice, and lets see how you do. I mean, since I've completely fabricated the entire notion of Sharia law showing up as an actual consideration in German court proceedings, and I'm obviously mistaken about there being an entire culture that would want you to consider your wife or daughter as property, you'll have no problem setting up a girls' school just anywhere, right?
Or, you could help mop up the body parts in Algiers, from today's attacks. I mean, lighting strike. Obviously there are no terrorists doing stuff like that - so, it was probably just a propane gas explosion. And that guy with the plastic explosives in his shoes was really just trying to make his arches more comfortable on a long flight to the US. Nope! Zero need to fret about anything, obviously. Silly me! I could use some help, though, on how it is that you don't think that selling crystal meth to rural school kids is a problem. Come on, just give us a hint, OK?
Hackers
Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.
terrorists
Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!
drug dealers
You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage. You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin? Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull? What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that seek to make money peddling meth to school kids, or pretend they don't exist?
child molesters
Ever met someone who had their youth stolen by someone like that? Let's find you a few thousand of them, and then you can address them, explaining how the people who did it to them don't exist, or aren't really a problem, and should be allowed to keep doing it. I'm sure you'll be persuasive.
communists
Well, you've got me there. They only killed a few hundred million people in the last century, so that's not so bad.
but in reality most of the crimes are committed out of stupidity or drug influence
I don't think that inside theft of database dumps containing hundreds of thousands credit card accounts and SSNs is done by stupid or drug-addled people. I don't think that people who systematically probe for SQL insertion vulnerabilities on transaction systems in hopes of defacing something with some politicized rant are stupid or drug-addled. I don't think that people plant stealth FTP servers to serve up kiddie pr0n from unknowing desktops are being stupid or drug-addled. You're confusing malice with stupidity, and poisoned ethics with drug dependence.
YHBT YHL (badly)
You're missing the point! I know it's a troll. I'm campaigning for newer, better, more entertaining trolling. I mean, if someone has to troll, can't they at least update their shtick? I'm just trying to help, here.
I am thinking that you are relying too much on the title of an article to imply it's meaning. Slashdot titles are limited in characters so submitters have to be as brief as possible.
... or,
... or,
... or,
OK then, how about:
Student's MySpace Rant Ruled Free Speech
Probation Voided - Student's Blog Ruled OK
Court: Student's Blog Rant Ugly But Legal
Court Finds For Student In Fight Over Speech
etc.
I'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about the slashdot editor's obvious flame provocation.
I think that's exactly what the case said.
Right! But it's not what the slashdot headline says! That's my point. There was no finding that MySpace is free speech, and that wasn't even really being discussed, per se. What the court is talking about is whether free speech is free speech... and the MySpace piece of the puzzle is really something of a red herring, and was just there to stoke flames here.
MySpeech is a communciations method. You can use it in keeping with the First Amendment, or you can use it outside of those very real bounds. Saying "MySpace is Free Speech" is like saying "the sounds coming out of your mouth are Free Speech." Well, yeah, unless they're not. As in slander, fraud, incitement, conspiracy, threats, etc.
Just tell the US government there's oil up there and see how well funded NASA becomes.
No, really. Does that little bit of sophistry have to get trotted out every time a topic like this comes up?
Let's try something else...
"Just tell Hollywood that the planet is really hot, and celebrities will donate millions of dollars and have concerts to raise money for NASA to save the bears that may or may not live there, including a really nice concert somewhere in a nice town in the Great Plains, which um... used to be under water, and later on used to be covered with ice."
There. Now that's some proper flamebait. Please practice, and get back to us, OK?
I know. I know. I started out saying something about "their rules...", backspaced, and you know how it goes. Fscking submit vs. preview!
Will their be a timed meter for juvenile viewing of the local Chinese television coverage of that huge propoganda magnet when the time comes? Yes, yes, twiddling your thumbs on a game console for three hours isn't the same as watching large, barbarian Scandinavians cream your countrymen in the shotput... because at least the game console gives your thumbs some exercise.
But what does it mean for international satellite operators when they need help with their space birds? Will they use a system designed for U.S.'s DARPA?
I don't know... what does it mean when an Airbus passenger jet needs help with a bad engine? That systems being built by the US to service their own flying hardware should also be set up to fix other countries'/consortiums' hardware? Would something designed by the European space entities/ventures be designed specifically to service both their stuff and everyone else's? Why is this question even being asked in this context? Oh, right... because it's flamebait, and that generates chit-chat, like this.
Fundamentally, I don't even see why I'm still stuck paying a phone bill at all. I don't pay an email bill or a filesharing bill.
So, you were hoping that people would know how to reach you by dialing your IP address, perhaps? Who do you think maintains the ability to route calls, from both VoIP and 'analog' networks/carriers, to the number that's assigned to you? Should they be doing that as charity? Do you pay for the IP address you're using? A phone number is pretty much the same thing, only static. I'm guessing your home IP address is probably dynamic, as far as that goes.
Ever use your VoIP service to call a local business that's on POTS? Who do you think bridges that connection, the tooth fairy? And if you've got a technical solution for that process that doesn't cost anything or use any infrastructure, why aren't you sharing that with the rest of the billions of people with hard phone numbers?
Seems inevitable that google would tackle that problem at some point, at the rate they're scaling.
I agree. I'd be surprised if they didn't actually end up selling power to the grid, for that matter. With small text ads, of course.
At what point does it make sense to "make your own power"?
Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power? South Carolina can experience some grid-pummeling weather, sometimes. If Google plans on having that facility up 24x7, there will be a small fleet of diesel generators and a small ocean of fuel sitting right there to keep it afloat in a pinch. Especially when what they're really up to isn't growing for more search, but growing to host web-based business apps and other stuff that they'll be telling people they can really depend on.
Now, just because you CAN run off your own power doesn't mean you want to do it for long, since it's very maintenance intensive.
If the killers in uniform were anywhere to the left of Richard Nixon, Bush would be at war with them now.
You mean, like we're at war with Venezuela? Or at war with France? Or at war with Cuba? Or at war with China?
Perhaps you need to reboot your invective engine and start over.
It took millenia and several international conventions and harsh laws to tell everyone to freakin' let go... and as we see in the recent cases in Iraq, they still don't.
Mind you, I have very little patience for the Shia/Sunni nonsense. However: you seem to be missing the point. Neither side HAS "given up." Germany gave up. Japan gave up. Iran hasn't, for example, given up on whatever it's trying to accomplish by providing money, training, and weapons for the conflict they're helping to perpetuate in Iraq. It's still a conflict because it's still a conflict that someone wants to keep going. It's not done, with one party just hurting innocents to make a point... the hurting of innocents is the point that the aggressive parties are pursuing. To wit, just like a cat doesn't have any moral qualms about torturing and (possibly) killing a mouse because that just seems like the natural state of things, one sect of Islam that considers the others (to say nothing of westerners!) to be sub-human (like a mouse is sub-cat) is just doing what their world view asks of them when they slaughter apostates, blah blah blah. Your cat does NOT kill mice because it's hungry. It kills because it can, and because it likes to stay in practice. Mice DO "give up" in front of a cat, and then get tortured and killed anyway. I've seen it with my own eyes, plenty of times.
Your mistake, in your analogy, is presuming that cat-to-cat dominance fights are the same as people-to-people dominance fights. But the sort of human conflicts you seem to suggest cats would avoid aren't the issue... most religious wars include the very specific pronounciation of the enemy as being not equals or deserving of any human-grade respect. See the militant extremists who cite the very act of voting in a democratic election as signing your own death warrant (because it's un-Islamic, and you've become one with the baser, western animals, yadda yadda yadda). Dehumanizing your enemy (making them into the mice you're happy to toy with and kill, if you're a cat) is the oldest trick in the book. And it is the oldest trick in the book because by assigning non-humanity to your opponents, the more primitive (cat-like) tools in your toolbox become available to you.