And shouldn't the wealthy be fairly powerless to affect many people beneath them with an inverse proportion of wealth vs. control over others?
Oh, you mean like... investing in industries and institutions that employ millions of people? I suspect that the high quality nerds that work at, say, Google or Pixar or Red Hat are quite pleased that people who've earned a lot of money have turned around and pumped it into those great projects/enterprises. And all of the people that benefit from doing business with, or providing services to all of those people are probably glad that those investments continue to be made.
I'd head off to the U.K
What's stopping you, really? That you don't do anything that enough people consider valuable enough to command a paycheck that will support your standard of living while also paying the much, much higher taxes? Or, unlike the untold thousands of actually poor people that immigrate to the UK and other western European nations from all over the world, you're actually noble enough to recognize that unless you do do something particularly valuable or are willing to work two or three jobs, you're just going to be living off of the more industrious work of the smaller minority that actually breath some life into the economy and subsidize the socialized niceties you're lusting after?
You say "If I could only make enough money..." without even a hint of what makes you think that, once transplanted in the UK, you'd make more money there (to pay the higher taxes, and more still, to get over how unhappy you are that you're not making enough now). So, really, you just want to go somewhere that will give you more of someone else's money than you're getting here. I do love, though, that you're not apologetic about it: that's the real cure for it - the first step is admitting that you want me to feed you. That you're proud of that is a little baffling, but at least you're saying it out loud.
I've been taught that galaxies are really far apart from one another and the next logical step would be that collisions are rare. If you're seeing this as an explanation for anything commonplace, then your skeptic alarm should be going off.
I did I say or imply that it's common? It's not. The point is that, using the Hubble, we've been able to actually see such a collision - a real rarity - and the observed images behavior directly support the contention that there is a large component of 'dark' mass effecting things, gravitationally, while still not behaving like a normal component of the vast dust/gas clouds are part of every galaxy.
You can't pack neutrons into a space like that without having them rush away from one another.
You can't, until the incomprehensible effect of that much gravity comes into play. Neither neutrons, nor much of anything else, behave "normally" when the normal forces that govern their behavior outside of such an intense gravitational gradient are overcome by such density. Add a little more, and you've got a singularity.
Nebulae are actually hot. In some cases 100 million Kelvin hot!
You say "nebulae" as if they all behaved the same way, were formed of the same material, by the same processes, and were exposed to the same sources of nearby radiation. They're not. Some are being continually cooked by unspeakably intense radiation, and were formed while being accelerated within a hair of lightspeed during a violent explosion. Some of the molecules in those nebulae are quite juiced up indeed.
We'd be better scientists if we were better at accepting uncertainty in our lives.
Happily, we can embrace the uncertainty of what we don't know (specific mechanisms that are cooking up one nebula vs. another that isn't so toasty, for example) while still realizing that (just as we did when we all settled on the earth's spherical shape) we are actually gaining an understanding of what we see around us because we have better tools and a less mythology-driven, cave-man grade sense of why things are (or are not!).
Why? Because the recent observations of reactionless mass actually on display in front of you, in the form of colliding galaxies, are just too uncomfortably close to confirming what you don't like? Or because the Doppler effect is something you can demonstrate at any wavelength (try it with your car horn, sometime - and if you get good enough gear try it with some light), and that just annoys the hell out of you? Or because black holes and neutron stars are just too dense for your brain - which evolved without any context for grappling with things on that scale - just hates the fact that if you put enough matter in one spot with nothing fluffing it up... gravity kicks in, and that's just too annoying for you?
Also, I think I can demonstrate, if you have a moment, that the world is in fact not flat.
See, normally you'd have to visit three or four crackpot web sites to get a full sampling this sort of BS. Thanks for condensing it all into one spot so that we can be more clearly reminded of how poorly we're educating people about basic things like causality, critical thinking, and little details like basic physics.
If you can't really deal comfortably with things like the nice smooth sediment in a crater having accumulates in the millions of years AFTER an impact, then there's really no point taking any single utterance you make as anything other than Super Duper Troll Bait. Which it is, of course. 'Doh! You got me!
But this new inquiry stops short of evaluating the constitutional legitimacy of the program
Unless, when they say "Justice Department" they actually mean "Judges," then of course it "stops short" of determining the constitutionality of a program. That's what judges do. They don't always do it well, but that's what they do.
How many more areas will they need to get locked in to, before they realise how badly they've screwed themselves over?
I don't know... probably about as often as a business gets on a multi-year track of parts/maintenance from the particular company from whom they buy their forklifts, or freight elevators, or fleet or vehicles. There are all sorts of arrangements like that which don't leave businesses feeling "screwed over," as long as they have half a negotiating bone in their bodies... and you seem to be indicating that you can't negotiate with Microsoft or the thousands of VARs that integrate and support systems built around their products. Which ain't true.
if we argue based on cost, they can offer that too, but if we argue based on freedom, they're not even in the running
Depends what you mean by freedom. For a lot of people, it's the freedom to walk in to work on Monday morning knowing an upgraded desktop is waiting for you... and already knowing how to use it and the apps that run on it. Essentially, the freedom to dive right in a get your work done. The vast majority of people don't give a rat's ass about the freedom to modify their operating system and pass it along as a new distro. They just want it to do the things they want it to do. Splitting hairs over licensing concepts that are meaningless to most users (and most especially the ones that drive the pressure on their department heads to procure new systems) doesn't really put this conversation into the "freedom" arena.
We are fighting militant extremists. What does it matter what religion they are?
It's just a simple matter of differentiating them from, say, the Irish Republican Army... which, right after 9/11, realized how absurd their tactics had been, and quite using them. The Tamil Tigers aren't the ones we're worried about as threats to western societies, you know? In Africa, the sub-continent, throughout the middle east, and of course in places like Spain, German, and even recently in Toronto... it's been 100% Islamic militants on the radar screen. So that's a fairly easy demographic to refer to. We just don't seem to be having the same problem with Opus Dei, no matter how slightly creepy they are.
Are you saying that Islam necessarily breeds militant extremism? More so than other religions?
Not "necessarily so" but certainly, in this century, more so, no question.
Fundamentalists are the same the world over.
I loathe them all. But: the fundamentalist Presbys or Orthodox Jews that I know truly don't speak in terms of killing infidels, and seem pretty unlikely to do the suicide bomber in the pizza parlor routine. The Islamic flavor seems relatively unique in the death-dealing qualities. Maybe it's the promise of virgins, I don't know.
In the final analysis though, the fact that a fundamentalist who hates America happens to be Muslim has very little bearing on the problem.
True. It's what he does about it that matters. And if his way of doing something about it is to buy a round of textbooks for use in mosques, or to otherwise poison another generation. The ones who personally are willing be killed while killing are meaningful in their Muslim-ness because that can be a factor in figuring out where he is, who he talks to, where he gets his cash and weapons, etc.
Please point out one place in America where some Imam has given any sort of weekly sermon entitled "Democracy is Unislamic"
Obviously the really fun ones make more of a showing of this sort of stuff in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere in western Europe. Those video-captured mosque rants would be funny if at least a few Mohammad Atta types didn't take them to heart. But in the US, it's a little more subtle. Things like textbooks, courtesy of Wahabbists in Saudi Arabia, that find their way into US-located mosques and Islamic schools. A group in DC, responding to complaints from anonymous Muslims attending those mosques - who feared the exact demographic shift that's happened in the UK's jihaddi-ized spots - hired outside translators to review and double-check material lifted out of those mosques.
In a rather lengthy report, they outlined the the particularly ugly nature of some of the material (including, of course, the "you're living amongs the death-deserving-infidels" sentiment, and the "democracy isn't compatible with Islam" notion). It's not like this is anything new, but the temptation is to assume that it's just this small, particularly fetid group of Saudi-financed wahabbists, so not to worry. But that's what the Brits used to assume, and now they've got a real problem on their hands.
But this somewhat histrionic right wing fear that American political correctness has brought us to a place where we can not publicly criticize the outrageous is so overblown as to be damaging to your case.
Hmm. I don't think it's that we can not do it... it's that we don't do it. In the US, we're so concerned that we don't actually come out and say that we're fighting against extremist Islamic militants that we keep using the silly "war on terror" moniker, knowing that it's not accurate or even really meaningful. It's "war with crazy Muslims," but if we call it that, some people seem to worry that Al Jazeera et al will just translate it, that night, to "war with Islam," and off we go, farther into the deep end. So, we don't talk like that, and we even encourage everyone to keep repeating the "Islam means peace" mantra, and defaulting to a position of assuming that every Muslim is operating on that platform, even when they're actively preaching that Sharia law should trump the constitution, etc. It's not histrionics, it's just opening your eyes. In fact, just saying that sort of thing here (on slashdot) is pretty much an invitation to a Flamebait mod-down, which can only be coming from the people who do indeed think it's too politically incorrect to call the hate-spewers what they really are. I grow weary of the tap dancing around it, really.
I am not saying we shouldn't try to keep US companies from spamming but to think that spam will be greatly reduced because a mojority of the US has strict laws against it I think is just wishful thinking.
You know what? I'd have better luck and less stress if I was ONLY trying to filter the stock pumping spam. If the people selling fake V1@gra, fake Rolexes, and fake everything else - all of the stuff that requires you to visit a web site and present payment - were taken down, it would hugely reduce the noise level. But more importantly, it's a matter of principle. Some fights are worth it, just because it sets a more civilized tone to overtly care about it and act with justice in mind that to just put up with it and decide that it will always be part of your life.
I agree that there needs to be a protocol change or two. But there is a LOT of inertia behind good old SMTP. And I'd rather null-route every packet from Romania, and lose the occasional piece of legit mail, than give in and say that some spamming asshat who happens to live there can litter me and all of my users with his trash. *blood pressure up*
But how can a state protect you from spam when the problem is really global where the state and US laws don't always apply?
The real key is to follow the money. For spam recipients in the US, most of the pitches are for goods/services that US consumers will hopefully by talked into buying. If the businesses that will transact the money are in the US, or have ties to people in the US, that's something to go for. If the pitches are for outright fraud (say, phishing, or the sale of bogus meds), then you've got a good case to take to law enforcement in whatever country is harboring the scammers. Sure, that isn't always helpful... but recall the recent article discussing how some companies (like Microsoft) are helping to fund the local PDs as they pass that research and evidence along to those other countries. It can't hurt.
anti spam "activist"? wow, some people have really fucked up priorities. who cares?
You could say the same thing about people who breed cats, clean up highway trash, attend scifi conventions, babble on slashdot, attend soccer matches, or obsess about their particular pet Linux distro. At least this guy's passion happens to involve punishing people who cost the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity, bandwidth, and resources.
I've been seeing untold thousands of "XXXXX wrote:" through and blocked, both. They are all coming from desktop-looking IP addresses, so it's a bot army, methinks. Today, they were from Greece, the UK, some from the US, but the largest number were from Asia. Yes, started about a week ago. That, and a flood of messages with a reply-to that always starts with "debora[h]" and a domain name that looks scraped from industrial manufacturing lists somewhere. In other words, just another day in spamland. At least it's different, and I get to get angry all over again.
It makes some sense, as a culture, to ask ourselves what sort of speech we find reasonable. That's not to be confused with what's allowed - since that's nonsense, both practically and idealogically. Of course, that hasn't stopped the political correctness crowd from attempting to move beyond condemnation and into actual banning of certain phrases - but generally only in the tiny little fiefdoms where they reign, like at schools, or county councils.
But I've got no problem with having a loud enough discussion on this sort of subject, in a broad enough context, that we arrive at a slightly altered popular notion of whether it's culturally acceptable for people to rant along certain lines. For example, we quite delightfully shout down the idiot neo-Nazis and KKK-types when they decide to hold one of their special-ed style marches through some poor picked-upon town that has no choice but to issue them a parade permit. By all means, they should have the permit, and off they go. And a counter-demonstration shouldn't be allowed to occupy a street to protest them, or shut down traffic to hang things up (unless they've got their own permit to occupy said intersection). But that doesn't mean we can't just shame them into cultural oblivion, and in most towns where such things have happened, the klansgoons end up looking like the twits they are - with no speech bans necessary. Such movements arise by being given enough social comfort to exist, and they can be squashed by being starved of the same.
Obviously, the context here is seen in the whipping up of zealots and jihaddis, and the inflammatory wackiness that fuels that mindset and the resulting carnage. Not counting direct incitement to riot or outright criminal conspiracy (which aren't and never have been protected speech), the challenge is to expose the clowns who spew this stuff, and do so in a context that shows what loons they are. If, as is so often claimed, there is a vast, silent majority of non-crazy Muslims, then the job is (since the inciters have no shame) to shame the quiet ones into mopping up their own fringe loons. This isn't done by limiting speech, it's done by showcasing it and calling it what it is. In other words, we can leave the constitution alone and still, as a culture, act to cast a harsher and less forgiving light on the mysoginists and the religious crazies that would prefer the calendar read '11/28/1006'.
I guess it just seems odd that some soccer mom would feel rude telling a jihaddist recruiter that what he preaches to impressionable young men is toxic, malicious buffoonery, but that same mom would have no problem chastising their neighbor's kid for saying something disparaging about the (to them) comic-book-villain-looking Imam whose weekly sermon is actually entitled "Democracy Is Unislamic," with a breakout session on "Death To America."
Yes, yes, mod me down. But you know this doesn't have anything to do with Newt Gingrich or freedom. It's about what we proclaim - through our silence - to be acceptable within the context of western democracy. The Germans over-reacted and made certain utterances illegal - but making the utterers feel like fools is far more effective in the long term. Rebellion against a law gets passed down through families (see Ireland), but kids embarassed by their dad's medieval rantings tend to be the last branch of the family to repeat them. Or act on them.
It would, however, be legal to start a vast company of online users who each chipped in a pittence to form the recording studio/movie studio they could run as they saw fit...
And guess what: many successful recording artists and filmakers and other talent take a chunk of their substantial earnings and do start their own record labels and film studios. And they take less experienced other artists under their wings. And then they shop around for a distributor or marketing partner that can help them get their work better represented, the better to fund more of their efforts on other fronts. And then - what a shock! - some of them realize that being a member of a trade association that's dedicated to, among other things, doing some of the lobbying and other organizational work that protects their interests and those of their signed artists turns out to not always be a bad thing.
Both the dust and the el niño effect were likely caused by global warming
No, the el niño is periodic thing that's been happening for a very, very long time, and is considered a natural coupling of the ocean and atmosphere with a predictable recurrance. Whether any larger change in global temps has anything to do with how it interacts with other weather patterns is a separate issue, and not at all clear. But it is not "caused by global warming." That's complete BS. Likewise, the dust from Africa exists because the Sahara desert has been there for 2.5 million years. Dust storms blowing out to sea are completely expected, and happen all the time. We're just now getting the regular use of imaging tools and computer models that help us to understand how readily that hot bowl of dust impacts Atlantic storms. The Sahara is as dry now as it was 13,000 years ago, but has gone through numerous huge fluxuations in wetness and vegetation unrelated to "global warming" as that phrase is now used. Unless, of course, you consider the last ice age - things were cooler, then, and the Sahara desert was much larger, drier, and dustier than it is now.
What about the 2005 hurricane season? It was also global warming that caused that.
What are you talking about? We have a hurrican season every year, and we're in the middle of a cyclic 25-30 year peak, which has been going on for thousands of years and is most likely tied to solar variation. Further, the number of storms reported in 2005 include storms that never came ashore - seen (and thus counted) by satellites that we've only recently had at our disposal. During a previous cycle (say, 100 years ago?) the dozen or so Atlantic storms that we saw stay out to sea might also have been there (or been more frequent), but they'd never have made it into the statistics that we now generate because they would have gone unobserved.
An interesting example is Anybill.com, which runs a service handling accounts payable for you. Basically, you have your company's invoices sent to their postal address, and they open them and do some data entry and document scanning. You get e-mail whenever stuff lands there, and surf to their web app to review and authorize payment of the bills (some of which get paid electronically, some by having checks sent out on your behalf, as appropriate).
This sort of service-economy stuff is popping up in lots of little corners. If you're an office-less operation (say, a consulting group that work from the road or from your home[s]), it's pretty appealing. But yes, you've got to really trust all the players. But it does (gaa!) help you to "concentrate on your core competancies," assuming that dealing with the physical paperwork of billpaying isn't one of them.
I still call a motion picture a "film", even if it's shot on digital.
Back in the stone age, when I was taking RTVF classes at UMD, one of my intro classes discussed the technical history of filmaking (including the actual, physical film stock and cameras), and such terms as "movies," "talkies," etc.
When a student asked the prof which term ("movie" vs. "film") was more appropriate, he said, "A film is a movie you don't understand."
How many teenagers do you know that set up and run phishing sites by themselves?
Actually, if you read some of the phishing come-ons, even allowing for English not being the native language of the author, there's a certain adolescent simplicity to a lot of them. Many of the attempts I've seen were clearly made by unsophisticated minds - they reek of script-kiddieness.
That means prioritizing, say, software piracy over, say, security holes.
So, elect local and state officials that will put enough budget behind your law enforcement agencies to make such support irrelevent. I doubt that will have much impact on where most of the phishing originates, though, which is overseas. By the way, if you think for a moment that companies like Motorola or General Motors or Ford or Taser don't have just as much of sell-to, but also be-generous-and-supportive-to relationship with city, county, and state cops, you're really missing the larger picture.
But while GM may sell a lot of Impalas to county PDs, there aren't a lot of people running around saying to themselves, "I don't know - I may not buy a car, especially a Chevy, because I hear that you can get your credit rating wrecked and your bank account emptied if you use one a lot." Microsoft (just like Apple, BTW, though Apple's letting MS do the work, here) has a vested interest in hunting down the people that use popular computer/network-based communications methods to try to rip people off. A clever phishing scheme might just as easily impact that mythological Ubunto-using Grandma or all those Mac-using soccer moms as it would someone checking their G-Mail account from a Windows box. MS, just like all of us, has an interest in shutting these clowns down. But they have the resources to present a solid case to (in the cited example) Turkish police. Not something that your local county PD could possibly put together without a huge boost in funding.
So, vote for people who back more funding. Or, take up any offer by anyone that helps to put the hammer on these jerks. Or, ideally, both. At the state level, it's either higher taxes, or reduced spending in other areas, or outside help. Or some less uncomfortable combination of the three. There's no free lunch, and there's no free international prosecution of Turkish scam artists after your mom's checking account.
Where are the details in regard to the suspension of all physics during the event? Wouldn't he have noticed?
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you! You've forgotten that God is benevolent and all-loving (um, other than the whole drowning the entire human race except for the small, incestuous family that would completely repopulate the entire planet in a short stack of centuries, including, presumably, ethnic Chinese, Africans, etc) and that in the interests of setting Noah and his family/breeding-stock back on the right path, would have magically made them unaware that their entire pulminary systems, and the metabolic behavior of all of the critters on his boat, were also being changed along with all the other laws of physics. I mean, considering the biomass that would have to have been on that boat (in order to repopulate, say, just the insects that are peculiar only to Tasmania - to say nothing of how they got back TO Tasmania) would have swamped the boat anyway.
Say... it occurs to me that if God could do all that, why didn't he just set up a simple parting-of-the-waters trick around a sort of game preserve in the middle of the flood? It can't be because Moses could figure out a water-parting trick that God hadn't already thought of...
You know what? I'm thinking that some of this may have been just made up and told as fables. Crazy notion, but there are these little hints here and there.
Yes... all instant messages are e-mails just like all Canadians are French... riiiiiiight
And your pointless concern about semantics, in this case, mitigates the defendant's active pursuit of jumping a 13-year-old's bones how, exactly?
Who cares whether the "e-mail" involved landed on the virutal 13-year-old's computer via SMTP, POP3, IM, FTP, or HTTP? The judge did the right thing. Using a poor analogy to try to make the perp somehow less of a creep is... creepy, all by itself.
Gee, do you think you could use a German accent when saying that? It's more sinister sounding that way.
Listen, I was at the U of MD in the early 1980's. We weren't allowed to enter the undergrad library without showing our ID. This was to cut down on book theft, and left things like the bathrooms for use by the students (instead of the general public). Do you have a gym membership? Do you think, in a German accent, "your papers, please" whenever you present your ID at that facility? Students pay a lot of tuition to have their school's libraries and other services available to them. Different schools have different policies, but expecting the students to show that they are students is completely reasonable.
A lot of schools also have problems with non-students wandering into dorms, locker rooms, and other spots where some parent may pitch a fit if their 18-year-old freshman daughter was approached by someone who wasn't supposed to be on the campus, or in that building, etc. Typically, the policy is, then: if a campus cop asks you for your student ID while you're in a facility set aside for students, you show it to them. Refusing to, and making a big stink about it isn't helpful, obviously - and just tells the cops that whatever motivated them to think you wouldn't have your school was in fact correct. Of course, if they ask you to leave, and you refuse, you're not helping matters, either. The taser bit wasn't necessary, but neither was telling the cops to pound sand when you don't have the campus's ID to show you're allowed in that building.
Slashdot Mirror
And shouldn't the wealthy be fairly powerless to affect many people beneath them with an inverse proportion of wealth vs. control over others?
Oh, you mean like... investing in industries and institutions that employ millions of people? I suspect that the high quality nerds that work at, say, Google or Pixar or Red Hat are quite pleased that people who've earned a lot of money have turned around and pumped it into those great projects/enterprises. And all of the people that benefit from doing business with, or providing services to all of those people are probably glad that those investments continue to be made.
I'd head off to the U.K
What's stopping you, really? That you don't do anything that enough people consider valuable enough to command a paycheck that will support your standard of living while also paying the much, much higher taxes? Or, unlike the untold thousands of actually poor people that immigrate to the UK and other western European nations from all over the world, you're actually noble enough to recognize that unless you do do something particularly valuable or are willing to work two or three jobs, you're just going to be living off of the more industrious work of the smaller minority that actually breath some life into the economy and subsidize the socialized niceties you're lusting after?
You say "If I could only make enough money..." without even a hint of what makes you think that, once transplanted in the UK, you'd make more money there (to pay the higher taxes, and more still, to get over how unhappy you are that you're not making enough now). So, really, you just want to go somewhere that will give you more of someone else's money than you're getting here. I do love, though, that you're not apologetic about it: that's the real cure for it - the first step is admitting that you want me to feed you. That you're proud of that is a little baffling, but at least you're saying it out loud.
I've been taught that galaxies are really far apart from one another and the next logical step would be that collisions are rare. If you're seeing this as an explanation for anything commonplace, then your skeptic alarm should be going off.
I did I say or imply that it's common? It's not. The point is that, using the Hubble, we've been able to actually see such a collision - a real rarity - and the observed images behavior directly support the contention that there is a large component of 'dark' mass effecting things, gravitationally, while still not behaving like a normal component of the vast dust/gas clouds are part of every galaxy.
You can't pack neutrons into a space like that without having them rush away from one another.
You can't, until the incomprehensible effect of that much gravity comes into play. Neither neutrons, nor much of anything else, behave "normally" when the normal forces that govern their behavior outside of such an intense gravitational gradient are overcome by such density. Add a little more, and you've got a singularity. Nebulae are actually hot. In some cases 100 million Kelvin hot!
You say "nebulae" as if they all behaved the same way, were formed of the same material, by the same processes, and were exposed to the same sources of nearby radiation. They're not. Some are being continually cooked by unspeakably intense radiation, and were formed while being accelerated within a hair of lightspeed during a violent explosion. Some of the molecules in those nebulae are quite juiced up indeed.
We'd be better scientists if we were better at accepting uncertainty in our lives.
Happily, we can embrace the uncertainty of what we don't know (specific mechanisms that are cooking up one nebula vs. another that isn't so toasty, for example) while still realizing that (just as we did when we all settled on the earth's spherical shape) we are actually gaining an understanding of what we see around us because we have better tools and a less mythology-driven, cave-man grade sense of why things are (or are not!).
Might as well add unicorns in there.
Why? Because the recent observations of reactionless mass actually on display in front of you, in the form of colliding galaxies, are just too uncomfortably close to confirming what you don't like? Or because the Doppler effect is something you can demonstrate at any wavelength (try it with your car horn, sometime - and if you get good enough gear try it with some light), and that just annoys the hell out of you? Or because black holes and neutron stars are just too dense for your brain - which evolved without any context for grappling with things on that scale - just hates the fact that if you put enough matter in one spot with nothing fluffing it up... gravity kicks in, and that's just too annoying for you?
Also, I think I can demonstrate, if you have a moment, that the world is in fact not flat.
See, normally you'd have to visit three or four crackpot web sites to get a full sampling this sort of BS. Thanks for condensing it all into one spot so that we can be more clearly reminded of how poorly we're educating people about basic things like causality, critical thinking, and little details like basic physics.
If you can't really deal comfortably with things like the nice smooth sediment in a crater having accumulates in the millions of years AFTER an impact, then there's really no point taking any single utterance you make as anything other than Super Duper Troll Bait. Which it is, of course. 'Doh! You got me!
But this new inquiry stops short of evaluating the constitutional legitimacy of the program
Unless, when they say "Justice Department" they actually mean "Judges," then of course it "stops short" of determining the constitutionality of a program. That's what judges do. They don't always do it well, but that's what they do.
How many more areas will they need to get locked in to, before they realise how badly they've screwed themselves over?
I don't know... probably about as often as a business gets on a multi-year track of parts/maintenance from the particular company from whom they buy their forklifts, or freight elevators, or fleet or vehicles. There are all sorts of arrangements like that which don't leave businesses feeling "screwed over," as long as they have half a negotiating bone in their bodies... and you seem to be indicating that you can't negotiate with Microsoft or the thousands of VARs that integrate and support systems built around their products. Which ain't true.
if we argue based on cost, they can offer that too, but if we argue based on freedom, they're not even in the running
Depends what you mean by freedom. For a lot of people, it's the freedom to walk in to work on Monday morning knowing an upgraded desktop is waiting for you... and already knowing how to use it and the apps that run on it. Essentially, the freedom to dive right in a get your work done. The vast majority of people don't give a rat's ass about the freedom to modify their operating system and pass it along as a new distro. They just want it to do the things they want it to do. Splitting hairs over licensing concepts that are meaningless to most users (and most especially the ones that drive the pressure on their department heads to procure new systems) doesn't really put this conversation into the "freedom" arena.
Just write to me at... oh, wait, it expired. OK, just did a new one. Shoot me a note at... damn. Hold on. OK, ready. Hit me at... damn! Never mind.
We are fighting militant extremists. What does it matter what religion they are?
It's just a simple matter of differentiating them from, say, the Irish Republican Army... which, right after 9/11, realized how absurd their tactics had been, and quite using them. The Tamil Tigers aren't the ones we're worried about as threats to western societies, you know? In Africa, the sub-continent, throughout the middle east, and of course in places like Spain, German, and even recently in Toronto... it's been 100% Islamic militants on the radar screen. So that's a fairly easy demographic to refer to. We just don't seem to be having the same problem with Opus Dei, no matter how slightly creepy they are.
Are you saying that Islam necessarily breeds militant extremism? More so than other religions?
Not "necessarily so" but certainly, in this century, more so, no question.
Fundamentalists are the same the world over.
I loathe them all. But: the fundamentalist Presbys or Orthodox Jews that I know truly don't speak in terms of killing infidels, and seem pretty unlikely to do the suicide bomber in the pizza parlor routine. The Islamic flavor seems relatively unique in the death-dealing qualities. Maybe it's the promise of virgins, I don't know.
In the final analysis though, the fact that a fundamentalist who hates America happens to be Muslim has very little bearing on the problem.
True. It's what he does about it that matters. And if his way of doing something about it is to buy a round of textbooks for use in mosques, or to otherwise poison another generation. The ones who personally are willing be killed while killing are meaningful in their Muslim-ness because that can be a factor in figuring out where he is, who he talks to, where he gets his cash and weapons, etc.
Please point out one place in America where some Imam has given any sort of weekly sermon entitled "Democracy is Unislamic"
Obviously the really fun ones make more of a showing of this sort of stuff in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere in western Europe. Those video-captured mosque rants would be funny if at least a few Mohammad Atta types didn't take them to heart. But in the US, it's a little more subtle. Things like textbooks, courtesy of Wahabbists in Saudi Arabia, that find their way into US-located mosques and Islamic schools. A group in DC, responding to complaints from anonymous Muslims attending those mosques - who feared the exact demographic shift that's happened in the UK's jihaddi-ized spots - hired outside translators to review and double-check material lifted out of those mosques.
In a rather lengthy report, they outlined the the particularly ugly nature of some of the material (including, of course, the "you're living amongs the death-deserving-infidels" sentiment, and the "democracy isn't compatible with Islam" notion). It's not like this is anything new, but the temptation is to assume that it's just this small, particularly fetid group of Saudi-financed wahabbists, so not to worry. But that's what the Brits used to assume, and now they've got a real problem on their hands.
But this somewhat histrionic right wing fear that American political correctness has brought us to a place where we can not publicly criticize the outrageous is so overblown as to be damaging to your case.
Hmm. I don't think it's that we can not do it... it's that we don't do it. In the US, we're so concerned that we don't actually come out and say that we're fighting against extremist Islamic militants that we keep using the silly "war on terror" moniker, knowing that it's not accurate or even really meaningful. It's "war with crazy Muslims," but if we call it that, some people seem to worry that Al Jazeera et al will just translate it, that night, to "war with Islam," and off we go, farther into the deep end. So, we don't talk like that, and we even encourage everyone to keep repeating the "Islam means peace" mantra, and defaulting to a position of assuming that every Muslim is operating on that platform, even when they're actively preaching that Sharia law should trump the constitution, etc. It's not histrionics, it's just opening your eyes. In fact, just saying that sort of thing here (on slashdot) is pretty much an invitation to a Flamebait mod-down, which can only be coming from the people who do indeed think it's too politically incorrect to call the hate-spewers what they really are. I grow weary of the tap dancing around it, really.
I am not saying we shouldn't try to keep US companies from spamming but to think that spam will be greatly reduced because a mojority of the US has strict laws against it I think is just wishful thinking.
You know what? I'd have better luck and less stress if I was ONLY trying to filter the stock pumping spam. If the people selling fake V1@gra, fake Rolexes, and fake everything else - all of the stuff that requires you to visit a web site and present payment - were taken down, it would hugely reduce the noise level. But more importantly, it's a matter of principle. Some fights are worth it, just because it sets a more civilized tone to overtly care about it and act with justice in mind that to just put up with it and decide that it will always be part of your life.
I agree that there needs to be a protocol change or two. But there is a LOT of inertia behind good old SMTP. And I'd rather null-route every packet from Romania, and lose the occasional piece of legit mail, than give in and say that some spamming asshat who happens to live there can litter me and all of my users with his trash. *blood pressure up*
You can read the first paragraph of the paper at Nature
Nah. You had me at "quantum vortex cores."
But how can a state protect you from spam when the problem is really global where the state and US laws don't always apply?
The real key is to follow the money. For spam recipients in the US, most of the pitches are for goods/services that US consumers will hopefully by talked into buying. If the businesses that will transact the money are in the US, or have ties to people in the US, that's something to go for. If the pitches are for outright fraud (say, phishing, or the sale of bogus meds), then you've got a good case to take to law enforcement in whatever country is harboring the scammers. Sure, that isn't always helpful... but recall the recent article discussing how some companies (like Microsoft) are helping to fund the local PDs as they pass that research and evidence along to those other countries. It can't hurt.
anti spam "activist"? wow, some people have really fucked up priorities. who cares?
You could say the same thing about people who breed cats, clean up highway trash, attend scifi conventions, babble on slashdot, attend soccer matches, or obsess about their particular pet Linux distro. At least this guy's passion happens to involve punishing people who cost the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity, bandwidth, and resources.
I've been seeing untold thousands of "XXXXX wrote:" through and blocked, both. They are all coming from desktop-looking IP addresses, so it's a bot army, methinks. Today, they were from Greece, the UK, some from the US, but the largest number were from Asia. Yes, started about a week ago. That, and a flood of messages with a reply-to that always starts with "debora[h]" and a domain name that looks scraped from industrial manufacturing lists somewhere. In other words, just another day in spamland. At least it's different, and I get to get angry all over again.
It makes some sense, as a culture, to ask ourselves what sort of speech we find reasonable. That's not to be confused with what's allowed - since that's nonsense, both practically and idealogically. Of course, that hasn't stopped the political correctness crowd from attempting to move beyond condemnation and into actual banning of certain phrases - but generally only in the tiny little fiefdoms where they reign, like at schools, or county councils.
But I've got no problem with having a loud enough discussion on this sort of subject, in a broad enough context, that we arrive at a slightly altered popular notion of whether it's culturally acceptable for people to rant along certain lines. For example, we quite delightfully shout down the idiot neo-Nazis and KKK-types when they decide to hold one of their special-ed style marches through some poor picked-upon town that has no choice but to issue them a parade permit. By all means, they should have the permit, and off they go. And a counter-demonstration shouldn't be allowed to occupy a street to protest them, or shut down traffic to hang things up (unless they've got their own permit to occupy said intersection). But that doesn't mean we can't just shame them into cultural oblivion, and in most towns where such things have happened, the klansgoons end up looking like the twits they are - with no speech bans necessary. Such movements arise by being given enough social comfort to exist, and they can be squashed by being starved of the same.
Obviously, the context here is seen in the whipping up of zealots and jihaddis, and the inflammatory wackiness that fuels that mindset and the resulting carnage. Not counting direct incitement to riot or outright criminal conspiracy (which aren't and never have been protected speech), the challenge is to expose the clowns who spew this stuff, and do so in a context that shows what loons they are. If, as is so often claimed, there is a vast, silent majority of non-crazy Muslims, then the job is (since the inciters have no shame) to shame the quiet ones into mopping up their own fringe loons. This isn't done by limiting speech, it's done by showcasing it and calling it what it is. In other words, we can leave the constitution alone and still, as a culture, act to cast a harsher and less forgiving light on the mysoginists and the religious crazies that would prefer the calendar read '11/28/1006'.
I guess it just seems odd that some soccer mom would feel rude telling a jihaddist recruiter that what he preaches to impressionable young men is toxic, malicious buffoonery, but that same mom would have no problem chastising their neighbor's kid for saying something disparaging about the (to them) comic-book-villain-looking Imam whose weekly sermon is actually entitled "Democracy Is Unislamic," with a breakout session on "Death To America."
Yes, yes, mod me down. But you know this doesn't have anything to do with Newt Gingrich or freedom. It's about what we proclaim - through our silence - to be acceptable within the context of western democracy. The Germans over-reacted and made certain utterances illegal - but making the utterers feel like fools is far more effective in the long term. Rebellion against a law gets passed down through families (see Ireland), but kids embarassed by their dad's medieval rantings tend to be the last branch of the family to repeat them. Or act on them.
It would, however, be legal to start a vast company of online users who each chipped in a pittence to form the recording studio/movie studio they could run as they saw fit...
And guess what: many successful recording artists and filmakers and other talent take a chunk of their substantial earnings and do start their own record labels and film studios. And they take less experienced other artists under their wings. And then they shop around for a distributor or marketing partner that can help them get their work better represented, the better to fund more of their efforts on other fronts. And then - what a shock! - some of them realize that being a member of a trade association that's dedicated to, among other things, doing some of the lobbying and other organizational work that protects their interests and those of their signed artists turns out to not always be a bad thing.
Both the dust and the el niño effect were likely caused by global warming
No, the el niño is periodic thing that's been happening for a very, very long time, and is considered a natural coupling of the ocean and atmosphere with a predictable recurrance. Whether any larger change in global temps has anything to do with how it interacts with other weather patterns is a separate issue, and not at all clear. But it is not "caused by global warming." That's complete BS. Likewise, the dust from Africa exists because the Sahara desert has been there for 2.5 million years. Dust storms blowing out to sea are completely expected, and happen all the time. We're just now getting the regular use of imaging tools and computer models that help us to understand how readily that hot bowl of dust impacts Atlantic storms. The Sahara is as dry now as it was 13,000 years ago, but has gone through numerous huge fluxuations in wetness and vegetation unrelated to "global warming" as that phrase is now used. Unless, of course, you consider the last ice age - things were cooler, then, and the Sahara desert was much larger, drier, and dustier than it is now.
What about the 2005 hurricane season? It was also global warming that caused that.
What are you talking about? We have a hurrican season every year, and we're in the middle of a cyclic 25-30 year peak, which has been going on for thousands of years and is most likely tied to solar variation. Further, the number of storms reported in 2005 include storms that never came ashore - seen (and thus counted) by satellites that we've only recently had at our disposal. During a previous cycle (say, 100 years ago?) the dozen or so Atlantic storms that we saw stay out to sea might also have been there (or been more frequent), but they'd never have made it into the statistics that we now generate because they would have gone unobserved.
Take a deep breath, how about.
An interesting example is Anybill.com, which runs a service handling accounts payable for you. Basically, you have your company's invoices sent to their postal address, and they open them and do some data entry and document scanning. You get e-mail whenever stuff lands there, and surf to their web app to review and authorize payment of the bills (some of which get paid electronically, some by having checks sent out on your behalf, as appropriate).
This sort of service-economy stuff is popping up in lots of little corners. If you're an office-less operation (say, a consulting group that work from the road or from your home[s]), it's pretty appealing. But yes, you've got to really trust all the players. But it does (gaa!) help you to "concentrate on your core competancies," assuming that dealing with the physical paperwork of billpaying isn't one of them.
I still call a motion picture a "film", even if it's shot on digital.
Back in the stone age, when I was taking RTVF classes at UMD, one of my intro classes discussed the technical history of filmaking (including the actual, physical film stock and cameras), and such terms as "movies," "talkies," etc.
When a student asked the prof which term ("movie" vs. "film") was more appropriate, he said, "A film is a movie you don't understand."
How many teenagers do you know that set up and run phishing sites by themselves?
Actually, if you read some of the phishing come-ons, even allowing for English not being the native language of the author, there's a certain adolescent simplicity to a lot of them. Many of the attempts I've seen were clearly made by unsophisticated minds - they reek of script-kiddieness.
That means prioritizing, say, software piracy over, say, security holes.
So, elect local and state officials that will put enough budget behind your law enforcement agencies to make such support irrelevent. I doubt that will have much impact on where most of the phishing originates, though, which is overseas. By the way, if you think for a moment that companies like Motorola or General Motors or Ford or Taser don't have just as much of sell-to, but also be-generous-and-supportive-to relationship with city, county, and state cops, you're really missing the larger picture.
But while GM may sell a lot of Impalas to county PDs, there aren't a lot of people running around saying to themselves, "I don't know - I may not buy a car, especially a Chevy, because I hear that you can get your credit rating wrecked and your bank account emptied if you use one a lot." Microsoft (just like Apple, BTW, though Apple's letting MS do the work, here) has a vested interest in hunting down the people that use popular computer/network-based communications methods to try to rip people off. A clever phishing scheme might just as easily impact that mythological Ubunto-using Grandma or all those Mac-using soccer moms as it would someone checking their G-Mail account from a Windows box. MS, just like all of us, has an interest in shutting these clowns down. But they have the resources to present a solid case to (in the cited example) Turkish police. Not something that your local county PD could possibly put together without a huge boost in funding.
So, vote for people who back more funding. Or, take up any offer by anyone that helps to put the hammer on these jerks. Or, ideally, both. At the state level, it's either higher taxes, or reduced spending in other areas, or outside help. Or some less uncomfortable combination of the three. There's no free lunch, and there's no free international prosecution of Turkish scam artists after your mom's checking account.
Where are the details in regard to the suspension of all physics during the event? Wouldn't he have noticed?
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you! You've forgotten that God is benevolent and all-loving (um, other than the whole drowning the entire human race except for the small, incestuous family that would completely repopulate the entire planet in a short stack of centuries, including, presumably, ethnic Chinese, Africans, etc) and that in the interests of setting Noah and his family/breeding-stock back on the right path, would have magically made them unaware that their entire pulminary systems, and the metabolic behavior of all of the critters on his boat, were also being changed along with all the other laws of physics. I mean, considering the biomass that would have to have been on that boat (in order to repopulate, say, just the insects that are peculiar only to Tasmania - to say nothing of how they got back TO Tasmania) would have swamped the boat anyway.
Say... it occurs to me that if God could do all that, why didn't he just set up a simple parting-of-the-waters trick around a sort of game preserve in the middle of the flood? It can't be because Moses could figure out a water-parting trick that God hadn't already thought of...
You know what? I'm thinking that some of this may have been just made up and told as fables. Crazy notion, but there are these little hints here and there.
Yes... all instant messages are e-mails just like all Canadians are French... riiiiiiight
And your pointless concern about semantics, in this case, mitigates the defendant's active pursuit of jumping a 13-year-old's bones how, exactly?
Who cares whether the "e-mail" involved landed on the virutal 13-year-old's computer via SMTP, POP3, IM, FTP, or HTTP? The judge did the right thing. Using a poor analogy to try to make the perp somehow less of a creep is... creepy, all by itself.
Papers, please.
Gee, do you think you could use a German accent when saying that? It's more sinister sounding that way.
Listen, I was at the U of MD in the early 1980's. We weren't allowed to enter the undergrad library without showing our ID. This was to cut down on book theft, and left things like the bathrooms for use by the students (instead of the general public). Do you have a gym membership? Do you think, in a German accent, "your papers, please" whenever you present your ID at that facility? Students pay a lot of tuition to have their school's libraries and other services available to them. Different schools have different policies, but expecting the students to show that they are students is completely reasonable.
A lot of schools also have problems with non-students wandering into dorms, locker rooms, and other spots where some parent may pitch a fit if their 18-year-old freshman daughter was approached by someone who wasn't supposed to be on the campus, or in that building, etc. Typically, the policy is, then: if a campus cop asks you for your student ID while you're in a facility set aside for students, you show it to them. Refusing to, and making a big stink about it isn't helpful, obviously - and just tells the cops that whatever motivated them to think you wouldn't have your school was in fact correct. Of course, if they ask you to leave, and you refuse, you're not helping matters, either. The taser bit wasn't necessary, but neither was telling the cops to pound sand when you don't have the campus's ID to show you're allowed in that building.