I'm perfectly willing to carry my passport when boarding airplanes or visiting the White House. Why?
What good does it do? Do you really think forcing everyone on a plane or touring the whitehouse to carry a little paper book with their photo and an address in it does anything meaningful?
I suspect you've fallen victim to the fallacy that identity equals intent. That if we can just somehow identify everyone, we can then refuse entrance to those who have the "evil bit" set in their profile. Reality doesn't work that way - just look at the "no fly list" - a list of people so dangerous that they can't be allowed on a plane, but so innocent that they can't even be arrested, never mind actually charged.
I've seen similar proxy blocking of bugmenot at a couple of the clients I do work for.
Seems like poor security to me - if they had their heads screwed on right, corporate security would not want their employees to be easily trackable on the internet, never know what sorts of sensitive information my leak out around the edges that way.
Totally realistic. Just a few years ago there was a big brohaha when it came out that certain mutual funds were letting certain hedge funds buy shares "after hours." Same sort of thing as was happening here, if there was good news for any of the mutual fund's major holdings, the buyer would purchase shares at the previous closing price (rather than the next day's closing price which would reflect the news).
They're fucking ID3 tags (or whatever the m4a equivalent is), nothing more, so you can strip them using your favorite tag editor. Stripping and fucking ID3 tags?
Word of mouth can really make or break a business, and when flip the bird to 10% of your customers, you'll probably end up regretting it. Unless of course your business is a monopoly, or a duopoly where both 'competitors' treat their customers equally poorly. Then you can flip the bird to 100% of your customers and still run a bloated, inefficient business.
PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.
The bad news is that nobody can tell you whether a given EULA will be enforced, given all the things on which their enforceability depends. No ways! That's GREAT NEWS... for lawyers!
But anyone can go into either of these books pick out a few passages and use them to justify to a frightened population as to why they should be killing... And oddly enough, so can the rabid people on the other sides. For example - for every islamic fundamentalist, you can find a person like those who hang out on dhimmiwatch.org who are just as willing to cherry-pick from the koran or historical events - often focusing on the exact same items that the fundamentalists do.
It's like nutjobs, regardless of their specific point of view, are always looking to distort and manipulate for the purpose of doing harm to others.
There is a lot of nonsense spoken about "impersonal corporations". Folk forget that it's actual human beings who make the "decisions of the corporation". Some of those people do good and some do evil.
Maybe they should be held to account? That's a laugh. The whole point of incorporation is to shield the owners and the management from legal liability. Add in the factor of diffusion of responsibility - the bigger the company, the less direct personal responsibility any one employee has for any one policy - and the end result is practically guaranteed to be "impersonal."
In most of Europe, companies are bound by laws implementing the EU's Data Protection Directive, which makes it clear that your data is not just another asset of the company which collects it, and that companies can only process it for the purposes for which you gave them the data. This is really the only way to make it work. As long as the legal framework is such that customer's do not own the information associated with a business transaction, businesses in the USA will be legally free to do what they want with that information.
A privacy policy isn't worth jack shit without the backing of the law. As it is now, a company can have the most positive, customer friendly privacy policy one day, and the very next day start selling customer data to the mafia with no penalty. As they say in the financial business - past performance is no guarantee of future results.
the BSD license make the end user free (to do what they want with the software)
the GNU license(s) make the actual software free (for others to use/chance it as well)
Except that's not right either. End users are the people who run the software, not write it or sell it. The GPL is about assuring that the people who run the software have the ability and the right to tweak it however they need to. Such as fixing bugs without being solely reliant on the good graces of a potentially defunct software developer.
Tivo's attitude is entirely compatible with BSD license's intent, but it isn't compatible with the GPL's intent to allow the tivo unit's user to fix bugs like DRM (yes, DRM is definitely a bug in the eyes of the user, and remember it is the user's interests the GPL protects).
You say explaining, I say redefining. You also assume that everyone agrees with RMS's explanations and redefinitions; some of us (who release code under the BSD license) don't; adding a restriction takes away "freedom" not adds to it, and the GPL3 nonsense simply underlines that way of thinking for me. Y'all got your heads stuck in the wrong place. The GPL is not about freedom for the developers - its about freedom for the end users.
See the whole "Freedom to Tinker" essay, but in a nutshell its about making sure that any user who receives software can modify it to do what he needs it to do. It all started when RMS was stuck with a proprietary printer driver that had a bug - the vendor wouldn't fix the bug and he couldn't fix the bug because he didn't have the source code.
So all your arguments about which license is the most free are moot. The GPL is about maximizing the freedom of the end user, anyone else who benefits is just coming along for the ride.
Please cite references for your assertions. I already did, go back to my post where I linked to the actual debrief of Kamal - Bush cited Kamal but left out half the story. You claim, "In the entire speech there is only one questionable statement..." I've already shown there to be at a minimum TWO MORE.
IF you read the real ISG report you will see that until 1995 there is substantial evidence thet until 1995... You write the words yourself, but you don't even comprehend them. 1995 is seven years prior to 2002. Bush's speech is all about how the threat was current, not close to a decade old.
Again, the document is pure propaganda, notice how each section ends with a question about "what is iraq hiding?" That's not intelligence, that's hyperbole. It's purely designed to support the president's agenda. In 2002, Congress wasn't looking to do due diligence, it was looking for an excuse to support the executive office's agenda. Those types of reports that only told half the story were exactly the cover they needed.
My point is clear and unequivocal. The speech you posted said:
From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. That statement is completely misleading. What the defector "exposed" was the existence of those programs before 1991, not afterwards. He was also explicit that the programs ended and everything they had produced was destroyed. Bush cited the defector's reports, but left the relevant details out of his speech, that's deceptive.
U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. Note how he said "were used" - he knew they were not currently being used for production of biological weapons, so any improvements to the facilities had nothing to do with WMDs. Again, deceptive wording intended to leave the impression of imminent danger when none existed.
Furthermore, your claim to "codeword access" is again meaningless. Codeword programs are a dime a dozen, just because you had access to one program doesn't mean you had access to any relevant to the issue.
As far as the anthrax info, without going into specific classified information, here is a contemporary DOD report that was released to the public. Hey, a freakin PR website that repeats the same deception of relevancy by being off by more than a decade! Grrrreat supporting proof you got there. IF that's the quality of info fed to congress, no wonder they went along with it considering all the political hysteria Bush and Co were whipping up -- go along, get along.
I worked in the intelligence field at the time he made this speech so I know the "facts" Baloney. Don't try to pull a false appeal to authority on me. You had no need to know, you were not cleared for access, the best you might have known were no more than rumors one step above what the public hears. And if you *had* been cleared, you would not be talking about the details on slashdot.
In the entire speech there is only one questionable statement "buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium...". More baloney. For example, the entire bit about anthrax was pure deception. The referenced defector, Hussein Kamal, revealed a program that had existed prior to 1991 and was (at the time in 1994) long defunct. Furthermore, Kamal also stated that all of the anthrax from that program and all other WMDs had been destroyed at the end of the gulf war at his specific direction. This is a perfect example of Bush's half-truths and deceptions.
I'm not even going to touch your aluminum tube joke.
I dare you to read the full speech that Bush made to the UN prior to the second Iraq war. You just may realize that the press has been lying to you, or at least obfuscating the truth. I can't figure out your point. I read a speech where Bush makes deliberately misleading statements about Iraq's WMD capabilities and activities. Are you trying to say that the press has been covering up the level of his prevarications? Or are you naive enough to believe that whatever a politician says is the god's honest truth with not even a hint of dissembly?
BTW, for anyone wondering where that speech came from: It's here.
Lots of competent people don't wish to pee in a cup. A few may be light drug users that would still manage to do good work. The rest are just insulted that anybody would suggest that drugs might be in use. Sadly, the case is actually the reverse.
All the big government contractors require their regular employees to pee in a cup as a condition of employment, just as do most large employers in any business sector in the USA. However, the government itself does not require drug testing for a secret clearance, even higher level clearances just require that you be willing to take a test if questions arise and if you refuse the test, your clearance is revoked. Said questions only arise under exceptional circumstances.
There may be some clearance levels that do require drug testing up front, but I've not needed them so haven't had to decide if it was worth the pay or not. I can't say what non-clearance related testing the military forces on its own people either.
I'm not defending this bullshit, but seriously, would you rather live in China, Venezuela, or Russia?
My country good or bad, but my country. I believe the quote you are reaching for is, "My country, right or wrong!"
Except, that's not the whole story. The actual quotation is really: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Carl Schurz
Surely, if the EULA doesn't allow plugins then the software itself shouldn't support them? The fact that it does makes a nonsense of all this. The onus is on MS to disable the functionality that allowed this to happen, not to send the lawyers in. Too bad 'the lawyers' aren't so sensible. It's the same reasoning used to make deep linking illegal - even though there is a technical means of preventing it, you still get the lawyers and judges who think the laws of man ought to supercede the laws of physics.
I remember walking through a parking lot in college in 1996 and listening to a couple guys talk about how they would touch their files to make late homeworks appear as if they were done on time. I went to school with a guy who wrote a self-modifying homework assignment. He figured out that the TAs were using a home-grown automatic compilation and test system that relied on the student provided makefile. So his makefile used touch to put the timestamps back and then rewrote the makefile to remove evidence of invoking touch, and then of course touched the new makefile back in time too. Apparently he got away with it many times as he was never busted but perpetually late turning in assignments.
While you are quite right that the effects of merely being charged with certain crimes can be almost as bad as being convicted, you are a long way away from supporting your original claim:
A data forensicist can recognize an encrypted container on the basis of its structure. (Some people have recommended to you TrueCrypt in hidden volume mode. This is bogus. I'll explain that if you want.)
There are no such thing as one-sided facts. Bingo!!! Now you know why I put the word in quotes.
Your snide remarks shows you to just as one-sided as you are accusing me to be. Lol! Sure it does. All my snideness does is show that I'm confident in your ignorance, nothing more. You dhimmi-wannabes are all the same, if I've heard your deliberately one-sided spiel once I've heard it a thousand times. Cue the protestations of not recognizing yourself.
The people that orchestrated the war in Iraq were not doing it out of any fear of job security. That all depends on your definition of "job security." After reading many of the position papers at www.newamericancentury.org - homebase of the neo-cons - I've come to the conclusion that these guys have a very simple philosophy. They think that with the rise of china and other world powers, the USA will be in decline for most of the rest of this century. Believing that decline to be inevitable, they want to "get while the getting is good." They don't really seem to care how screwed up they leave things in the long run, because they believe that in the long run the USA is screwed anyways.
They went to war because they thought they could win easily, and it would be a good idea. They were wrong, on a number of levels, but that doesn't mean they're happy about or moreover intended the current situation over there, and to imply anything else, like I said, is pretty ridiculous. For them, going over the top now was the best way to, "get while the getting is good," regardless of the ultimate consquences. And in keeping with that attitude they don't seem all that broken up about the state of things now. More so that they've lost political credibility than that they've really damaged the USA's credibility both domestic and foreign.
ICBW, but I perceived his post as plain, good irony. Irony of the kind that flies by your head and you don't typically notice. Sadly, I am pretty sure the poster has zero understanding of the concept. Most of the time, the guys accusing the rest of us of being ignorant of history are doing so because they've been spoon-fed a handful of one-sided "facts" -- completely without context -- and lack the aptitude or the moral courage, to actually follow their own advice. There will always be people who prefer to believe that, "the Russians do not love their children too."
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What good does it do? Do you really think forcing everyone on a plane or touring the whitehouse to carry a little paper book with their photo and an address in it does anything meaningful?
I suspect you've fallen victim to the fallacy that identity equals intent. That if we can just somehow identify everyone, we can then refuse entrance to those who have the "evil bit" set in their profile. Reality doesn't work that way - just look at the "no fly list" - a list of people so dangerous that they can't be allowed on a plane, but so innocent that they can't even be arrested, never mind actually charged.
I've seen similar proxy blocking of bugmenot at a couple of the clients I do work for.
Seems like poor security to me - if they had their heads screwed on right, corporate security would not want their employees to be easily trackable on the internet, never know what sorts of sensitive information my leak out around the edges that way.
Totally realistic. Just a few years ago there was a big brohaha when it came out that certain mutual funds were letting certain hedge funds buy shares "after hours." Same sort of thing as was happening here, if there was good news for any of the mutual fund's major holdings, the buyer would purchase shares at the previous closing price (rather than the next day's closing price which would reflect the news).
Man, you need to get out more.
PS - once traffic shaping has been turned on, look for Time Warner to start soliciting companies like Google/youtube to 'sponsor' speed zones on TW's network.
It's like nutjobs, regardless of their specific point of view, are always looking to distort and manipulate for the purpose of doing harm to others.
Maybe they should be held to account? That's a laugh. The whole point of incorporation is to shield the owners and the management from legal liability. Add in the factor of diffusion of responsibility - the bigger the company, the less direct personal responsibility any one employee has for any one policy - and the end result is practically guaranteed to be "impersonal." In most of Europe, companies are bound by laws implementing the EU's Data Protection Directive, which makes it clear that your data is not just another asset of the company which collects it, and that companies can only process it for the purposes for which you gave them the data. This is really the only way to make it work. As long as the legal framework is such that customer's do not own the information associated with a business transaction, businesses in the USA will be legally free to do what they want with that information.
A privacy policy isn't worth jack shit without the backing of the law. As it is now, a company can have the most positive, customer friendly privacy policy one day, and the very next day start selling customer data to the mafia with no penalty. As they say in the financial business - past performance is no guarantee of future results.
- the BSD license make the end user free (to do what they want with the software)
- the GNU license(s) make the actual software free (for others to use/chance it as well)
Except that's not right either. End users are the people who run the software, not write it or sell it. The GPL is about assuring that the people who run the software have the ability and the right to tweak it however they need to. Such as fixing bugs without being solely reliant on the good graces of a potentially defunct software developer.Tivo's attitude is entirely compatible with BSD license's intent, but it isn't compatible with the GPL's intent to allow the tivo unit's user to fix bugs like DRM (yes, DRM is definitely a bug in the eyes of the user, and remember it is the user's interests the GPL protects).
The GPL is not about freedom for the developers -
its about freedom for the end users.
See the whole "Freedom to Tinker" essay, but in a nutshell its about making sure that any user who receives software can modify it to do what he needs it to do. It all started when RMS was stuck with a proprietary printer driver that had a bug - the vendor wouldn't fix the bug and he couldn't fix the bug because he didn't have the source code.
So all your arguments about which license is the most free are moot. The GPL is about maximizing the freedom of the end user, anyone else who benefits is just coming along for the ride.
My point is clear and unequivocal. The speech you posted said: From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. That statement is completely misleading. What the defector "exposed" was the existence of those programs before 1991, not afterwards. He was also explicit that the programs ended and everything they had produced was destroyed. Bush cited the defector's reports, but left the relevant details out of his speech, that's deceptive. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. Note how he said "were used" - he knew they were not currently being used for production of biological weapons, so any improvements to the facilities had nothing to do with WMDs. Again, deceptive wording intended to leave the impression of imminent danger when none existed.
Furthermore, your claim to "codeword access" is again meaningless. Codeword programs are a dime a dozen, just because you had access to one program doesn't mean you had access to any relevant to the issue.
I'm not even going to touch your aluminum tube joke.
BTW, for anyone wondering where that speech came from: It's here.
All the big government contractors require their regular employees to pee in a cup as a condition of employment, just as do most large employers in any business sector in the USA. However, the government itself does not require drug testing for a secret clearance, even higher level clearances just require that you be willing to take a test if questions arise and if you refuse the test, your clearance is revoked. Said questions only arise under exceptional circumstances.
There may be some clearance levels that do require drug testing up front, but I've not needed them so haven't had to decide if it was worth the pay or not. I can't say what non-clearance related testing the military forces on its own people either.
My country good or bad, but my country. I believe the quote you are reaching for is, "My country, right or wrong!"
Except, that's not the whole story. The actual quotation is really:
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."
--Carl Schurz
... that read "parallelize" as "paralyze" I thought the title of this article was "Next Windows to Get Mediocre Redesign."