I'll just make it so that my random bias hack is temporarilly disabled when the touch sceen calibration routine is executed. That way the pollsters have a simple fix that seems reasonable. I'm sure it will be one of the first things they try if anyone complains.
Uh huh. And how is you're hacking the brains of the poll system workers that actually cause the candidates to appear in a given order in the machines? You know, the machines running the same software in different districts with different candidated from different parties listed in different ways? Machines that long after the vendor has last touched them are set up for a given polling place's configuration by the election board officials who actually deploy them. In many of the heavily democratic districts where the most conspiracy noise originates, it's heavily democrat election boards that actually set up the voting machines and the candidate listings. Look at the debacle in Maryland's primaries, where the mess with the machines was the result of really poor deployment by staffers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the equipment vendor.
Randomly-hiding errors that bias Republican in machines that are headed towards an unknown district at some point in the future? Wouldn't it be easier to implicate Elvis or aliens, or perhaps the effect of John Kerry sticking is foot squarely in his party's mouth yesterday? That's a lot more straightforward than what you're suggesting, to say the least.
Too bad these miscalibrations never seem to help Democrats get elected.
Uh huh. And, you know that they have not, how, now? For all you know it's the fact that the Republican candidate (in the example shown) has his name sort alphabetically differently than the Democrat. If similar calibration errors WERE showing up on the odd machine in areas where the Democrat DOES get elected, are you certain there'd be as much noise? How are you certain? It's all microscopic numbers of anecdotes against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of votes. Which doesn't make a single vote less important, but it puts in a little perspective.
Besides, voting irregularities that favor dems tend to be a little more in the old fashioned analog variety: like, dead people, felons, and illegal immigrants voting because you don't even have to show a freakin' ID! Or, tires being slashed on vans rented by Republicans to shuttle voters to the polls... you know, timeless stuff that was just as good decades ago as it is today. I'll put that crap up against a half a dozen (yanked out of service!) poorly behaving touch screens any day, in terms of election impact.
Right. Because there certainly aren't any career people in the intel community who happen to sit on the other side of the idealogical spectrum, right (see: Valerie Plame, etc).
You aren't, by any chance, anywhere nearly as ignorant as you're pretending to be, are you? Because as annoying as pretending to be that way is, actually being that way is much, much worse.
Well, this should make it much easier on the adminstration whenever they don't like an intelligence report. Now they can just click "Edit" and change it to what they want it to say.
Excellent lack of getting it! Try again once you understand the differences between intel, analysis thereof, and briefings for policy makers based on those two things.
Now, the larger question is, who will counter the untruths of this new department? If you think this department won't spread untruths, think of the horror you will feel when President Hillary (or someone equally as heinous to you) has control of this propaganda machine. Will you still be so blase, or do you really feel it's not an issue, as only 'the good guys' will be in power here from now on?
The press should be the ones countering untruths in the press. But they don't. If President Hillary/Obama/Pick-One actually knowingly, demonstrably spreads factual errors, that's no better than anyone else doing it. But if any deptartment in the government takes an action which produces reportable stats or fallout (traffic regulation? armed conflict? taxes? communication regulation? weather info?) and the media/blogosphere grossly distorts it - it's appropriate for the government to straighten it out. The president's spokesperson can't and shouldn't be the person to deal with everything that the DoD, or EPA, or Treasury, or FCC, or any of a hundred other agencies has to say to the public. That's totally unworkable. And to the extent that the DoD is involved in the stuff that's the most distorted by the people they're fighting, and those distortions are echoed or amplified by a partisan press - you have to be able to talk about it - and that has nothing to do with which party holds which office.
Could it possibly be that Google, with their rapidly accelerating growth into a myriad of markets attempting to leverage search success there, might just be afraid of setting a precedent which could leave teeth marks on their respective posteriors later?
You mean, like Yahoo eventually demanding that Google give Google's users the "choice" to have all searches entered at Google redirect to a Yahoo search results page? I mean, that would be a choice, after all, and it would be Evil(tm) of Google to deny that choice... and we can't ask people to alter their own three-or-so-clicks settings to do it on their own, even though they could any time they want. In fact, Google should be required to actually host Yahoo's services, just to make sure everyone's getting a fair shake.
Yeah, like that. Google needs to watch what they "request" of other businesses, because it will come back to haunt them, significantly.
Just the other day I saw a link from a Google results page that flagged the destination as being a potential malware host. Shouldn't Symantec and McAfee be demanding that Google pay them to help with that analysis? That way Google's users would have more choices about which company provided the flagging. *heh*
America seems to be steadily drifting towards Fascism, or a dictatorship at the very least.
I see. So, let's try a parallel example. Let's say that the Environmental Protection Agency has a body of regulations to factories from pumping CFCs into the atmosphere (ah! what a coincidence, they do). Now, let's say that some particularly rabid ring of bloggers, as echoed by lazy reporters who Google for informed-sounding sources, starts amplifying some meme that's directly contrary to reality. To the point where an upcoming election or pending policy decision seems strangely likely to hinge on the public's misperception of the facts because of idealogical spin and fiction from such third parties. Would you blame the EPA for engaging in some press activity to point out the actual facts of the matter?
When some more-than-usually-visible blogger starts ranting about the US military killing 600,000 Iraqis, it's worth the trouble to point out - through several avenues - that not only is that information poisonously incorrect, but that the person deliberately lying is grinding a political axe.
What was the last time you heard anybody mention Al Quaeda in Iraq?
How about: every day. Al Qaeda is the single highest-profile player in the jihaddi insurgency in that country. Why not read the BBC's summary, dated today, as a refresher? Do you think that the average Iraqi is behind the large-scale slaughter of the average other Iraqi? Check in with Iran. It's not about Sunni vs. Shia, though that's how it's being portrayed. It's about destabilizing democracy and preventing a rational, world-friendly society from hatching out right next door to corrupt or outright crazy places like Iran and Syria. Iran hates the idea, and they're behind the vast majority of this. Al Qaeda's local Iraqi franchise operator (the guy that replaced the delightfully deceased - though much praised by Osama Bin Laden - Al Zarqawi, if you've been paying attention) is busy stoking the local fires, and already talking in terms of Taliban-izing the country once they kick out the infidels and kill off the traitorous election-having locals, blah blah blah. Wake up.
I don't believe because he describes it as a propoganda war about who blinks first
There are three parties being discussed, here. The group that needs to "blink first" (and to which that poster was referring) are the wackadoo jihaddis that are absolutely waging a propoganda war. They are slaughtering innocent fellow Muslims by the thousands (and US military when they can) specifically because of how it will play in the news. Not because they achieve any particular tactical advantage by having one less Shiite vegetable stand operator (or his kids) alive - but because they're trying to create an atmosphere that they hope will cause people in that part of the world to associate mayhem and death with democracy. For totally separate (read, political) reasons, much of the western news media is spinning the story in a way to make the administration or the larger effort look directly sinister. This separate agenda has the effect of helping out the jihaddis with their own agenda. Accurate information and some rational perspective can counter both sources of poisonous noise.
I'd love to see a political argument about the war in Iraq where intelligent people discuss issues rationally and with decency, rather than jumping to conclusions and name calling.
So, if you're pretty high up the food chain at DoD, and some rabid circle of bloggers has managed to get a lot of eyeballs on a completely BS piece (about flushing Korans, or Marines eating local babies, whatever), what would you do to make sure that toxic fiction like that is countered in the same arenas in which it's hatched and propogated? Do you have actual serving officers step away from their military duties and be talking heads all day, or do you let people who specialized in that sort of stuff straighten out the story in a more effective way? It can't simply be left un-countered, and some other blogger saying "oh no it isn't!" doesn't always cut it.
Isn't commercial copyright violation a criminal offense? You can do jail time for it...
IANAL, but I believe that in most cases, the RIAA/MPAA suits that most people scream so much about aren't "commercial" in the sense of selling pirated DVDs on the sidewalk (or by the millions in Asia). THOSE types of things are, I believe, indeed criminal. "Sharing" a copyrighted piece with 10,000 of your best anonymous friends is a different matter because money isn't (at least directly) normally changing hands. At least, that's my understanding of the distinction - at least as it applies to typical conversations in the slashdot entertainment-wants-to-be-free context.
Woops! Stop right there, I'm afraid. Not a given, at all. Typically such cases are not criminal proceedins, but civil suits. Very different set of stuff going on. In effect, you've got the legal representatives of the publisher, who is working on behalf of the artist that hired them to be their publisher, suing on behalf of the person claiming that someone is violating their copyright - typically by re-publising their work in a way that violates those copyrights.
So, if you're Peter Jackson, and the night before your version of "The Hobbit" is released to the theaters some jerk with a stolen preview DVD publishes your work online without your permission, you've got a civil case. Your publisher/distributor is of course the party with the experienced legal guns to pursue it (if you're Peter Jackson, you're far better off spending your time making movies, not chasing paperwork and IP addresses around). But you may ALSO have a criminal case, on the off chance that the material in question was also stolen (as in, literally taken, without permission, from the person who was holding it). Those would be two completely separate matters, with different rules of evidence, different judges/juries, etc.
Take that MPAA....and RIAA...and NSA....and every other person who wants my bits.
Um, out of curiosity, how is this any different than any other form of data storate crypto, when it comes to a civil suit over whether your box's MAC address, etc., is clearly publishing copyrighted material a thousand "friends" you've never met before? Whether you're hiding data through drive-level encryption, or doing it with an app that runs a few layers farther up the stack, you're still going to have to face a court order to divulge the contents if a judge can be reasonably convinced that you're hiding something related to the case at hand. It might be a neutral third party, as is often used, but if you refuse to let someone get to that data, it doesn't really matter which bit of tech is doing the hiding.
The bigger issue is whether a court can make you do it or not (seems to depend on the jurisdiction and the cirumstances), and if they can, what the consequences might be for you telling the judge "screw you."
Some sample differences: Bush hasn't nationalized his country's only real industry (in Chavez's case, oil) and started using it as a subsidized way to prop up leftist politicians in other countries. Bush hasn't issued edicts about what percentage of music broadcast in Venezuela has to be of a certain type or origin. He doesn't shut down journalists for speaking out against him, or imprison opposing political candidates. He doesn't issue statements saying that his "brothers" in Iran will get his undying support as they build, traffic in, and sell weapons throughout the middle east. He doesn't support people like the reccently losing Mexican candidate who, despite demonstrably losing an election, is now saying that rebellion is in order. He doesn't buy temporary favor from poor people by doling out food when the cameras are watching, but completely neglect the most crime-ridden, murderous, corrupt thug culture in the region. Do you actually pay attention to what this guy stands for, and does?
Hmm. get fedora, or Centos: "yum update". erm.. that's it.
You're missing my point. Ubuntu is often pointed to as the common man's distro, an easy one to live with... the one that should be able to woo Windows users. The thread's about upgrade difficulties (the very thing that, when MS causes it, produces a giant/. flamefest), and one user's example of how easy it was for him to do the upgrade involved a world-class ugly command line. When Windows users see that sort of exchange about how "easy" it is to avoid "nightmare" upgrades - on the user-friendliest-distro! - you can see why it's sometimes a little off-putting.
All of this talk about average desktop users finding such things in some way mysterious or intimidating is nonsense. My grandma uses more complex command lines in her gingerbread recipe.
There may be a state it is illegal in, but as near as I can tell it's often just professional ethics. If you can find an actual legal citation to back up your claim that it's illegal to copy these keys, please feel free to post it.
You're typing a lot of characters in an effort to deliberately miss the real point. Whether or not you can find yourself a tidy legal citation, if you can point to someone's demonstrated intent (say, to break into things that they have no reasonable-man-test right to access... whether it's your house or your commuter flight), slicing and dicing semantics over the analogy is foolish. You're saying that a chop shop is no different than a regular auto body shop? It's the same sort of analogy. A reasonable person stepping back and looking at the situation can immediately see the reality of it, and doesn't need to head off into a sideline discussion of how accurate an anlogy is in order to admit that the thrust of the argument is dead on.
If we could pay the artist a buck a song, that would be honorable. If we could pay the artist $5 for a CD, that would be even more honorable.
Why would that be honorable? It's not what the artist, whom you seem to say you respect, has asked. The person who you want to entertain you has made the business decision to let a publisher handle the mountains of tasks unrelated to actually creating music on their behalf. Some artists do not seek out such deals, and some do. There are plenty of musicians who are happy to do business directly with you - why don't you limit your consumption of music to that created by artists that make business arrangements of which you approve? THAT would be honorable. Saying that you admire a musician and are willing to buy their music, but that you don't admire their business decisions and thus you're going rip them off to help them... seems odd to express that sentiment and use the word "honorable" in the same sentance, don't you think?
Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song. So, yeah.
Christianity, in particular, is one which abhors moral relativism yet you chose to make childish straw-man attacks upon it.
Not at all. Actually, a religion that expressly preaches that everyone is worthy of equal treatment and respect, regardless of their actions, is practicing the very heights of moral relativism. But whether or not such "leave it up to God to decide who's a sinner" sentiments run stronger in one sect or another, the real issue is the underlying view of the world that shapes the religion's foundation. The irony's delicious, really. Saying that Christianity is a movement that "abhors moral relativism" - even as, by its very nature, it demands that its follower build their world view on mixed premises and willing suspension of what their senses tell them... well, that's a moral built on a fantasy and lies. Rational ethics and moral clarity do not rise up from institutional shams like that. And to the extent that a believer isn't smart enough or well educated enough to know that they're trading reality for their belief system, then that person (not me!) is the one that is child-like.
The traditions, peer pressure, and history of cultural entities like Christianity are undeniable. But the only reason they persist is because - for more modern, better informed societies - they've shifted focus away from pretending to explain how the world (and ourselves) actually work, and towards, instead, some vaguely defined intangibles and the magical realm of what you'll be up to after you die. There's no straw man, there - it just is what it is.
Reality is relative - but maybe thats what you are really arguing against.
If reality were relative, you wouldn't be able to make simple statements describing it, now, would you?
I am reacting to the general notion that there is no such thing as a clear-cut, objectively held, and reason-powered take on anything. Disregarding sophomoric semanticists who will still find some reason (the PHIL-101 equivalent of autoeroticism) to debate that 2 + 2 doesn't always = 4, there simply are basic facts about the reality of the universe that allow us to derive some basic philosphoical propositions that hold up pretty well to most any attack.
Where those idealogical pillars fail is in the minds of the people who won't digest the reality of the nature of the universe. People who think that gravity is just God pushing things together because he loves us (and from there, they derive their loopy voting decisions) are, basically, loons. People who anthropomorphize our planet into a big round babe named Gaia who considers herself to be infested with an annoying primate parasite and who uses hurricanes to wash out her underwear are, basically, loons.
But those are the easy ones to spot. It's the more rational people who take on just a bit of that stuff (these are the people with mixed premises) because it allows them to cling to some childhood warm-and-fuzzy that they felt when hearing some myth - they're really the dangerous ones. Just like the "if we only just loved everyone" people who cannot personally imagine being actively sociopathic, and so they build a world view that doesn't take sociopaths properly into account. Ignorance (willing or otherwise) of some basic laws of physics, and of the higher-order biological/evolutionary pressures that give rise to complex and confounding human behavior results in all sorts of larger-scale, cultural ills (like, religion - in general - and violent zealots in particular).
People who say that reality depends on how you look at it are just making excuses, or feeling a little lazy. If you look at reality as not involving your death if you don't use your brakes to avoid an oncoming freight train, then you're in for a very rude correction to your perspective. Thus we evolve only the more apparently benign sorts of delusions (the kind that don't have most of us stepping off of cliffs), and real, objective digestion of actual reality (which doesn't care what you think about it, one way or the other) pretty well sets in. And the macro-craziness is thus reserved for what people imagine will happen to them after they die. That sort of "magical thinking" (72 virgins, living forever, etc) can cause illogical behavior if you really take it to heart, obviously. A more subtle form of that kicks in when the while-you're-still-here consequences of your actions are kept from really impacting you. Just like when you're a kid and your parents insulate you from most bad things, people who - for example - have their government feed them whether they're actually doing anything, themselves, to support their existence... well, they'll have a rather different take on the nature of the universe. But somewhere deep inside they know exactly what's going on, and building their daily lives around non-reality means they have to say that it's all relative, lest they have to call it what it actually is. And through that little crack creeps most of the evil that we, as a species, have to fight. Lack of consequence demands waking hypocrisy and moral relativism. And presto, a decapa-jihaddi's world view is just as "valid" as FDR's, or Ghandi's, or yours.
Can I take a joke? Sure. I'm quite the smart-aleck, actually. But people who - no matter how jokily - are still trying to make the point that A is not A... they're a plague, and I feel obligated to say something.
Let me guess - you're gonna buy a new PC when Vista ships, because upgrading your old XP machine wouldn't be as cool, right? That does seem to be the logic of your position.
No, my position is simply that it's NOT a no-brainer to spend close to a billion dollars to fix the HST. That's not to say it isn't worth something to do so, but there are other programs that arguably could make better use of the budget and possibly not even risk the lives of the crew that would have to go fix it.
NASA's budget is limited. If you're going to talk in terms of the DoD spending more, you should also talk in terms of the vastly more than that that we absurdly spend on all sorts of entitlement programs, or rebuilding houses that keep getting washed away by floods, or that we don't raise in taxes because of undocumented workers - there's plenty to pick from. Just be careful about singling out the DoD... they are an enormous spender on orbital technologies, and the very companies that NASA turns to for much of what it buys has the expertise it has because of what the D0D spends (including in its operations surround the Middle East) on things flying around in space.
The government (in my opinion) shouldn't be so quick to abandon a multi-million dollar piece of equipment just because of the cost of upkeep
Never mind whether the device is technilogically past its prime (and, BTW, we do have new hardware scheduled to go up - better than Hubble). But consider this: in just the last few years, the average cost per shuttle flight has gone down to a mere $750 million dollars. Per flight.
Don't you think that newer toys should be seriously considered, over servicing the old ones? That's a lot of money to spend, and lives to risk, without covering newer ground. Yes, there's plenty of new stuff for Hubble to look at... but there's plenty of new stuff for newer, better equipment to look at, too.
our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enought to get most of what science discovers using the HST. He'd rather have "feet on the ground"... maybe it is time we went back to the true promise of space exploration - getting mankind out into the Galaxy. There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself
Well, which is it? He's dumb if he's not, himself, able to process the cosmological coolness of seeing dark matter findings in a galaxy (since, you know, ALL of his political opponents totally get that... why, just the other day Barak Obama was talking about how poor urban people in Chicago would really benefit from a better understanding of non-interacting massive particle clouds.. NOT!)? But it's maybe smart to get people fired back up about the space program by having actual humans that they can mentally relate to doing interesting things? Smart, just not smart enough for anyone in the administration to in any way appreciate?
Come on, now. It's about getting the public to embrace it - something besides pop culture thugs and celebrity jocks having tantrums over their million-dollar paychecks. Personally, I can evoke a sense of adventure when I see the data from the Mars rovers properly, and dramatically rendered and set to some music... but it's a stretch that you sure don't have to make when there's someone telling you what it feels like to flip over a rock on Mars and look at what got washed up there a million years ago. A kid standing in his backyard with binoculars looking at the moon will get a lot more passion knowing that a cool group of people are working there right now than he will hearing about how a burst of x-rays was gravity lensed a little more than we thought it was, which makes that white paper from that PhD he read last week, like, totally bogus, dude.
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I'll just make it so that my random bias hack is temporarilly disabled when the touch sceen calibration routine is executed. That way the pollsters have a simple fix that seems reasonable. I'm sure it will be one of the first things they try if anyone complains.
Uh huh. And how is you're hacking the brains of the poll system workers that actually cause the candidates to appear in a given order in the machines? You know, the machines running the same software in different districts with different candidated from different parties listed in different ways? Machines that long after the vendor has last touched them are set up for a given polling place's configuration by the election board officials who actually deploy them. In many of the heavily democratic districts where the most conspiracy noise originates, it's heavily democrat election boards that actually set up the voting machines and the candidate listings. Look at the debacle in Maryland's primaries, where the mess with the machines was the result of really poor deployment by staffers that had nothing whatsoever to do with the equipment vendor.
Randomly-hiding errors that bias Republican in machines that are headed towards an unknown district at some point in the future? Wouldn't it be easier to implicate Elvis or aliens, or perhaps the effect of John Kerry sticking is foot squarely in his party's mouth yesterday? That's a lot more straightforward than what you're suggesting, to say the least.
Too bad these miscalibrations never seem to help Democrats get elected.
Uh huh. And, you know that they have not, how, now? For all you know it's the fact that the Republican candidate (in the example shown) has his name sort alphabetically differently than the Democrat. If similar calibration errors WERE showing up on the odd machine in areas where the Democrat DOES get elected, are you certain there'd be as much noise? How are you certain? It's all microscopic numbers of anecdotes against the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of votes. Which doesn't make a single vote less important, but it puts in a little perspective.
Besides, voting irregularities that favor dems tend to be a little more in the old fashioned analog variety: like, dead people, felons, and illegal immigrants voting because you don't even have to show a freakin' ID! Or, tires being slashed on vans rented by Republicans to shuttle voters to the polls... you know, timeless stuff that was just as good decades ago as it is today. I'll put that crap up against a half a dozen (yanked out of service!) poorly behaving touch screens any day, in terms of election impact.
Makes you wonder who is editing this stuff.
Right. Because there certainly aren't any career people in the intel community who happen to sit on the other side of the idealogical spectrum, right (see: Valerie Plame, etc).
You aren't, by any chance, anywhere nearly as ignorant as you're pretending to be, are you? Because as annoying as pretending to be that way is, actually being that way is much, much worse.
Well, this should make it much easier on the adminstration whenever they don't like an intelligence report. Now they can just click "Edit" and change it to what they want it to say.
Excellent lack of getting it! Try again once you understand the differences between intel, analysis thereof, and briefings for policy makers based on those two things.
Now, the larger question is, who will counter the untruths of this new department? If you think this department won't spread untruths, think of the horror you will feel when President Hillary (or someone equally as heinous to you) has control of this propaganda machine. Will you still be so blase, or do you really feel it's not an issue, as only 'the good guys' will be in power here from now on?
The press should be the ones countering untruths in the press. But they don't. If President Hillary/Obama/Pick-One actually knowingly, demonstrably spreads factual errors, that's no better than anyone else doing it. But if any deptartment in the government takes an action which produces reportable stats or fallout (traffic regulation? armed conflict? taxes? communication regulation? weather info?) and the media/blogosphere grossly distorts it - it's appropriate for the government to straighten it out. The president's spokesperson can't and shouldn't be the person to deal with everything that the DoD, or EPA, or Treasury, or FCC, or any of a hundred other agencies has to say to the public. That's totally unworkable. And to the extent that the DoD is involved in the stuff that's the most distorted by the people they're fighting, and those distortions are echoed or amplified by a partisan press - you have to be able to talk about it - and that has nothing to do with which party holds which office.
Could it possibly be that Google, with their rapidly accelerating growth into a myriad of markets attempting to leverage search success there, might just be afraid of setting a precedent which could leave teeth marks on their respective posteriors later?
You mean, like Yahoo eventually demanding that Google give Google's users the "choice" to have all searches entered at Google redirect to a Yahoo search results page? I mean, that would be a choice, after all, and it would be Evil(tm) of Google to deny that choice... and we can't ask people to alter their own three-or-so-clicks settings to do it on their own, even though they could any time they want. In fact, Google should be required to actually host Yahoo's services, just to make sure everyone's getting a fair shake.
Yeah, like that. Google needs to watch what they "request" of other businesses, because it will come back to haunt them, significantly.
Just the other day I saw a link from a Google results page that flagged the destination as being a potential malware host. Shouldn't Symantec and McAfee be demanding that Google pay them to help with that analysis? That way Google's users would have more choices about which company provided the flagging. *heh*
America seems to be steadily drifting towards Fascism, or a dictatorship at the very least.
I see. So, let's try a parallel example. Let's say that the Environmental Protection Agency has a body of regulations to factories from pumping CFCs into the atmosphere (ah! what a coincidence, they do). Now, let's say that some particularly rabid ring of bloggers, as echoed by lazy reporters who Google for informed-sounding sources, starts amplifying some meme that's directly contrary to reality. To the point where an upcoming election or pending policy decision seems strangely likely to hinge on the public's misperception of the facts because of idealogical spin and fiction from such third parties. Would you blame the EPA for engaging in some press activity to point out the actual facts of the matter?
When some more-than-usually-visible blogger starts ranting about the US military killing 600,000 Iraqis, it's worth the trouble to point out - through several avenues - that not only is that information poisonously incorrect, but that the person deliberately lying is grinding a political axe.
What was the last time you heard anybody mention Al Quaeda in Iraq?
How about: every day. Al Qaeda is the single highest-profile player in the jihaddi insurgency in that country. Why not read the BBC's summary, dated today, as a refresher? Do you think that the average Iraqi is behind the large-scale slaughter of the average other Iraqi? Check in with Iran. It's not about Sunni vs. Shia, though that's how it's being portrayed. It's about destabilizing democracy and preventing a rational, world-friendly society from hatching out right next door to corrupt or outright crazy places like Iran and Syria. Iran hates the idea, and they're behind the vast majority of this. Al Qaeda's local Iraqi franchise operator (the guy that replaced the delightfully deceased - though much praised by Osama Bin Laden - Al Zarqawi, if you've been paying attention) is busy stoking the local fires, and already talking in terms of Taliban-izing the country once they kick out the infidels and kill off the traitorous election-having locals, blah blah blah. Wake up.
I don't believe because he describes it as a propoganda war about who blinks first
There are three parties being discussed, here. The group that needs to "blink first" (and to which that poster was referring) are the wackadoo jihaddis that are absolutely waging a propoganda war. They are slaughtering innocent fellow Muslims by the thousands (and US military when they can) specifically because of how it will play in the news. Not because they achieve any particular tactical advantage by having one less Shiite vegetable stand operator (or his kids) alive - but because they're trying to create an atmosphere that they hope will cause people in that part of the world to associate mayhem and death with democracy. For totally separate (read, political) reasons, much of the western news media is spinning the story in a way to make the administration or the larger effort look directly sinister. This separate agenda has the effect of helping out the jihaddis with their own agenda. Accurate information and some rational perspective can counter both sources of poisonous noise.
I'd love to see a political argument about the war in Iraq where intelligent people discuss issues rationally and with decency, rather than jumping to conclusions and name calling.
So, if you're pretty high up the food chain at DoD, and some rabid circle of bloggers has managed to get a lot of eyeballs on a completely BS piece (about flushing Korans, or Marines eating local babies, whatever), what would you do to make sure that toxic fiction like that is countered in the same arenas in which it's hatched and propogated? Do you have actual serving officers step away from their military duties and be talking heads all day, or do you let people who specialized in that sort of stuff straighten out the story in a more effective way? It can't simply be left un-countered, and some other blogger saying "oh no it isn't!" doesn't always cut it.
Isn't commercial copyright violation a criminal offense? You can do jail time for it...
IANAL, but I believe that in most cases, the RIAA/MPAA suits that most people scream so much about aren't "commercial" in the sense of selling pirated DVDs on the sidewalk (or by the millions in Asia). THOSE types of things are, I believe, indeed criminal. "Sharing" a copyrighted piece with 10,000 of your best anonymous friends is a different matter because money isn't (at least directly) normally changing hands. At least, that's my understanding of the distinction - at least as it applies to typical conversations in the slashdot entertainment-wants-to-be-free context.
Given that:
The *IAA are pressing criminal charges.
Woops! Stop right there, I'm afraid. Not a given, at all. Typically such cases are not criminal proceedins, but civil suits. Very different set of stuff going on. In effect, you've got the legal representatives of the publisher, who is working on behalf of the artist that hired them to be their publisher, suing on behalf of the person claiming that someone is violating their copyright - typically by re-publising their work in a way that violates those copyrights.
So, if you're Peter Jackson, and the night before your version of "The Hobbit" is released to the theaters some jerk with a stolen preview DVD publishes your work online without your permission, you've got a civil case. Your publisher/distributor is of course the party with the experienced legal guns to pursue it (if you're Peter Jackson, you're far better off spending your time making movies, not chasing paperwork and IP addresses around). But you may ALSO have a criminal case, on the off chance that the material in question was also stolen (as in, literally taken, without permission, from the person who was holding it). Those would be two completely separate matters, with different rules of evidence, different judges/juries, etc.
Take that MPAA....and RIAA...and NSA....and every other person who wants my bits.
Um, out of curiosity, how is this any different than any other form of data storate crypto, when it comes to a civil suit over whether your box's MAC address, etc., is clearly publishing copyrighted material a thousand "friends" you've never met before? Whether you're hiding data through drive-level encryption, or doing it with an app that runs a few layers farther up the stack, you're still going to have to face a court order to divulge the contents if a judge can be reasonably convinced that you're hiding something related to the case at hand. It might be a neutral third party, as is often used, but if you refuse to let someone get to that data, it doesn't really matter which bit of tech is doing the hiding.
The bigger issue is whether a court can make you do it or not (seems to depend on the jurisdiction and the cirumstances), and if they can, what the consequences might be for you telling the judge "screw you."
So is Bush. Sort of torpedoes your point
Some sample differences: Bush hasn't nationalized his country's only real industry (in Chavez's case, oil) and started using it as a subsidized way to prop up leftist politicians in other countries. Bush hasn't issued edicts about what percentage of music broadcast in Venezuela has to be of a certain type or origin. He doesn't shut down journalists for speaking out against him, or imprison opposing political candidates. He doesn't issue statements saying that his "brothers" in Iran will get his undying support as they build, traffic in, and sell weapons throughout the middle east. He doesn't support people like the reccently losing Mexican candidate who, despite demonstrably losing an election, is now saying that rebellion is in order. He doesn't buy temporary favor from poor people by doling out food when the cameras are watching, but completely neglect the most crime-ridden, murderous, corrupt thug culture in the region. Do you actually pay attention to what this guy stands for, and does?
Hmm. get fedora, or Centos: "yum update". erm.. that's it.
... the one that should be able to woo Windows users. The thread's about upgrade difficulties (the very thing that, when MS causes it, produces a giant /. flamefest), and one user's example of how easy it was for him to do the upgrade involved a world-class ugly command line. When Windows users see that sort of exchange about how "easy" it is to avoid "nightmare" upgrades - on the user-friendliest-distro! - you can see why it's sometimes a little off-putting.
You're missing my point. Ubuntu is often pointed to as the common man's distro, an easy one to live with
After all, most of them don't realize that key upgrades in Linux land can be as simple as
/etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`)
via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/"
All of this talk about average desktop users finding such things in some way mysterious or intimidating is nonsense. My grandma uses more complex command lines in her gingerbread recipe.
There may be a state it is illegal in, but as near as I can tell it's often just professional ethics. If you can find an actual legal citation to back up your claim that it's illegal to copy these keys, please feel free to post it.
You're typing a lot of characters in an effort to deliberately miss the real point. Whether or not you can find yourself a tidy legal citation, if you can point to someone's demonstrated intent (say, to break into things that they have no reasonable-man-test right to access... whether it's your house or your commuter flight), slicing and dicing semantics over the analogy is foolish. You're saying that a chop shop is no different than a regular auto body shop? It's the same sort of analogy. A reasonable person stepping back and looking at the situation can immediately see the reality of it, and doesn't need to head off into a sideline discussion of how accurate an anlogy is in order to admit that the thrust of the argument is dead on.
If we could pay the artist a buck a song, that would be honorable. If we could pay the artist $5 for a CD, that would be even more honorable.
... seems odd to express that sentiment and use the word "honorable" in the same sentance, don't you think?
Why would that be honorable? It's not what the artist, whom you seem to say you respect, has asked. The person who you want to entertain you has made the business decision to let a publisher handle the mountains of tasks unrelated to actually creating music on their behalf. Some artists do not seek out such deals, and some do. There are plenty of musicians who are happy to do business directly with you - why don't you limit your consumption of music to that created by artists that make business arrangements of which you approve? THAT would be honorable. Saying that you admire a musician and are willing to buy their music, but that you don't admire their business decisions and thus you're going rip them off to help them
Man, what a total lack of personal honor.
Don't forget that you're in the middle of an entire thread that's focused on the art and science of being too cheap to pay an artist a buck for a song. So, yeah.
Christianity, in particular, is one which abhors moral relativism yet you chose to make childish straw-man attacks upon it.
Not at all. Actually, a religion that expressly preaches that everyone is worthy of equal treatment and respect, regardless of their actions, is practicing the very heights of moral relativism. But whether or not such "leave it up to God to decide who's a sinner" sentiments run stronger in one sect or another, the real issue is the underlying view of the world that shapes the religion's foundation. The irony's delicious, really. Saying that Christianity is a movement that "abhors moral relativism" - even as, by its very nature, it demands that its follower build their world view on mixed premises and willing suspension of what their senses tell them... well, that's a moral built on a fantasy and lies. Rational ethics and moral clarity do not rise up from institutional shams like that. And to the extent that a believer isn't smart enough or well educated enough to know that they're trading reality for their belief system, then that person (not me!) is the one that is child-like.
The traditions, peer pressure, and history of cultural entities like Christianity are undeniable. But the only reason they persist is because - for more modern, better informed societies - they've shifted focus away from pretending to explain how the world (and ourselves) actually work, and towards, instead, some vaguely defined intangibles and the magical realm of what you'll be up to after you die. There's no straw man, there - it just is what it is.
... if you try too hard to use it in a complicated way, it just cuts your head off, and saves us from having to hear about it.
Reality is relative - but maybe thats what you are really arguing against.
If reality were relative, you wouldn't be able to make simple statements describing it, now, would you?
I am reacting to the general notion that there is no such thing as a clear-cut, objectively held, and reason-powered take on anything. Disregarding sophomoric semanticists who will still find some reason (the PHIL-101 equivalent of autoeroticism) to debate that 2 + 2 doesn't always = 4, there simply are basic facts about the reality of the universe that allow us to derive some basic philosphoical propositions that hold up pretty well to most any attack.
Where those idealogical pillars fail is in the minds of the people who won't digest the reality of the nature of the universe. People who think that gravity is just God pushing things together because he loves us (and from there, they derive their loopy voting decisions) are, basically, loons. People who anthropomorphize our planet into a big round babe named Gaia who considers herself to be infested with an annoying primate parasite and who uses hurricanes to wash out her underwear are, basically, loons.
But those are the easy ones to spot. It's the more rational people who take on just a bit of that stuff (these are the people with mixed premises) because it allows them to cling to some childhood warm-and-fuzzy that they felt when hearing some myth - they're really the dangerous ones. Just like the "if we only just loved everyone" people who cannot personally imagine being actively sociopathic, and so they build a world view that doesn't take sociopaths properly into account. Ignorance (willing or otherwise) of some basic laws of physics, and of the higher-order biological/evolutionary pressures that give rise to complex and confounding human behavior results in all sorts of larger-scale, cultural ills (like, religion - in general - and violent zealots in particular).
People who say that reality depends on how you look at it are just making excuses, or feeling a little lazy. If you look at reality as not involving your death if you don't use your brakes to avoid an oncoming freight train, then you're in for a very rude correction to your perspective. Thus we evolve only the more apparently benign sorts of delusions (the kind that don't have most of us stepping off of cliffs), and real, objective digestion of actual reality (which doesn't care what you think about it, one way or the other) pretty well sets in. And the macro-craziness is thus reserved for what people imagine will happen to them after they die. That sort of "magical thinking" (72 virgins, living forever, etc) can cause illogical behavior if you really take it to heart, obviously. A more subtle form of that kicks in when the while-you're-still-here consequences of your actions are kept from really impacting you. Just like when you're a kid and your parents insulate you from most bad things, people who - for example - have their government feed them whether they're actually doing anything, themselves, to support their existence... well, they'll have a rather different take on the nature of the universe. But somewhere deep inside they know exactly what's going on, and building their daily lives around non-reality means they have to say that it's all relative, lest they have to call it what it actually is. And through that little crack creeps most of the evil that we, as a species, have to fight. Lack of consequence demands waking hypocrisy and moral relativism. And presto, a decapa-jihaddi's world view is just as "valid" as FDR's, or Ghandi's, or yours.
Can I take a joke? Sure. I'm quite the smart-aleck, actually. But people who - no matter how jokily - are still trying to make the point that A is not A... they're a plague, and I feel obligated to say something.
Let me guess - you're gonna buy a new PC when Vista ships, because upgrading your old XP machine wouldn't be as cool, right? That does seem to be the logic of your position.
No, my position is simply that it's NOT a no-brainer to spend close to a billion dollars to fix the HST. That's not to say it isn't worth something to do so, but there are other programs that arguably could make better use of the budget and possibly not even risk the lives of the crew that would have to go fix it.
NASA's budget is limited. If you're going to talk in terms of the DoD spending more, you should also talk in terms of the vastly more than that that we absurdly spend on all sorts of entitlement programs, or rebuilding houses that keep getting washed away by floods, or that we don't raise in taxes because of undocumented workers - there's plenty to pick from. Just be careful about singling out the DoD... they are an enormous spender on orbital technologies, and the very companies that NASA turns to for much of what it buys has the expertise it has because of what the D0D spends (including in its operations surround the Middle East) on things flying around in space.
The government (in my opinion) shouldn't be so quick to abandon a multi-million dollar piece of equipment just because of the cost of upkeep
... but there's plenty of new stuff for newer, better equipment to look at, too.
Never mind whether the device is technilogically past its prime (and, BTW, we do have new hardware scheduled to go up - better than Hubble). But consider this: in just the last few years, the average cost per shuttle flight has gone down to a mere $750 million dollars. Per flight.
Don't you think that newer toys should be seriously considered, over servicing the old ones? That's a lot of money to spend, and lives to risk, without covering newer ground. Yes, there's plenty of new stuff for Hubble to look at
our current president is (seemingly) not quite sharp enought to get most of what science discovers using the HST. He'd rather have "feet on the ground" ... maybe it is time we went back to the true promise of space exploration - getting mankind out into the Galaxy. There is a certain attraction to the notion of manned space exploration versus robotic/remote methods. Certainly a kind of heroic appeal to the act itself
... why, just the other day Barak Obama was talking about how poor urban people in Chicago would really benefit from a better understanding of non-interacting massive particle clouds.. NOT!)? But it's maybe smart to get people fired back up about the space program by having actual humans that they can mentally relate to doing interesting things? Smart, just not smart enough for anyone in the administration to in any way appreciate?
Well, which is it? He's dumb if he's not, himself, able to process the cosmological coolness of seeing dark matter findings in a galaxy (since, you know, ALL of his political opponents totally get that
Come on, now. It's about getting the public to embrace it - something besides pop culture thugs and celebrity jocks having tantrums over their million-dollar paychecks. Personally, I can evoke a sense of adventure when I see the data from the Mars rovers properly, and dramatically rendered and set to some music... but it's a stretch that you sure don't have to make when there's someone telling you what it feels like to flip over a rock on Mars and look at what got washed up there a million years ago. A kid standing in his backyard with binoculars looking at the moon will get a lot more passion knowing that a cool group of people are working there right now than he will hearing about how a burst of x-rays was gravity lensed a little more than we thought it was, which makes that white paper from that PhD he read last week, like, totally bogus, dude.