"But on the serious side, the claim of using encryption to store data on someone's hard drive worries me. Let's say the encryption gets broken. Now you might get Aunt Nedda's cookie recipes, but then again, you might get BobCo's strategic investment plan for the next 6 months as well."
Worse, if this Aunt Nedda lives in the UK, she could go to jail for 2 years for not being able to decrypt the files on her hard-drive at the request of the police.
Re:Why do you think we have the 2nd Amendment?
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 1
Presumably the "perfect" answer to these problems would be to disband the US army completely, and replace it with a requirement that every 18-45 year old must own a rifle [+ other military kit] and spend x weeks per year training with it?
That would give your country the "hardness" necessary to resist foreign invasion (either an external one, or from someone unsavoury who happens to control the federal government), while not allowing said government to easily remove anyone or any group who disagrees with them.
As you say, iraq could be a good analogy here. The iraqi people have had a government foisted upon them by another country, and are now trying to prevent their country being uttlerly controlled at the whim of an enemy. Presumably, patriots will want to make sure that the same thing can't ever happen to the USA itself. At the moment if the federal government were to become evil, they'd have enough helicopters, UCAVs, tanks, and missiles to cower the American people, just like they do in iraq. If you disbanded the US army, then that method of attacking your country would be prevented.
Of course, that would seem to make it more difficult to fight wars abroad, until you realise that the armed population could quite easily go on UN operations with the same weapons and training as US army soldiers do now. The only thing you'd lose is the ability for the USA to be taken-over by someone you dislike winning the presidency (and think about how much choice you're being given over who becomes president at the moment...)
"My survival planning: A copy of the Bible, a copy of the Koran, tarot cards, a large pentacle, a feng shui chart, and several dozen pairs of underwear."
"Isn't it funny how everyone is trying to keep VoIP unregulated, but then can't get 911 services. It's a compromise either way."
What's funny is that you can't email 112 (or 911 or 999 or whatever..)
With all this fuss about being able to call 112 from internet devices, they might at least have considered the much more reliable alternative which is just sitting there waiting to be used...
"Its not like someone is passing a law requiring this"
"Do-not-record flag" notwithstanding... how can you write that when people blatantly are passing laws requiring such things, and as someone else has noted, most definitely are running around randomly suing people.
"If you don't like it don't buy it!"
Exactly. I'll get a MythTV box if I ever need a PVR. You can bet that "the industry" will respond to my purchasing decision by falsely calling me a copyright-infringer though, for choosing something which does not restrict how I can use it.
"I wish anyone that has tried this with a Rio Carbon or more specifically the iPod mini"
Can you not "upload" data from a digital camera to the iPod over firewire? I thought that that was one of the features of an iPod, although I'd be interested if anyone actually knows how well it works.
"My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble hell.
Well, you obviously have no interest in saving yourself.
I've spent fourteen years being a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is to start firebombing.
Whatever. Management wants you gone by the end of the day.
Whoa. What kind of severance package is "management" prepared to give me? Considering the information I have about our editorial director buying pussy with company money.
Which I'm sure would interest the I.R.S., since, technically, it does constitute fraud. And some of our advertisers and rival publications might like to know about it as well. Not to mention Craig's wife.
"What do you want?"
One year's salary, with continued benefits.
That's not going to happen.
What if I throw in a little sexual harassment charge?
Against who?
Against you.
Can you prove you didn't offer to save my job if I'd let you blow me?
"The text is white on white, so it's probably really secret."
Sometimes people assume you're going to load the coloured background image -- it happens a lot on webpages too, which are unreadable until the background loads a few minutes later.
"Simply because he didn't lie doesn't mean he wasn't deceitful"
No, quite correct, the essay itself was correctly labelled. However, if he didn't lie as the essayist seems to be admitting, then the target of my question would be the people (thousands of them) who said that Michael Moore did lie throughout, and use that website as proof.
I didn't count them, but some 20-30% of the ~1500 posts to the slashdot discussion seemed to be accusing Michael Moore of outright lying, and the only evidence being offered was links to that website. Look to the general public for even more people shouting "complete crock of lies" and again, pointing to "59 deceptions" as proof.
Indeed, and many of us have seen that website. Do you believe that its claims would stand up to the same level of scrutiny that we're applying to the original film? Every single person who references that website refers to it as "59 utter lies exposed", yet you can go through the list and see Dave Kopel admit time after time that the film was truthful and then object to changes of subject, or things he thinks should have been included, or alternative conclusions he thinks should have been reached.
That page represents the sum total of your evidence???
"In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore claims to support our troops. But in fact, he supports the enemy in Iraq--the coalition of Saddam loyalists, al Qaeda operatives, and terrorists controlled by Iran or Syria--who are united in their desire to murder Iraqis, and to destroy any possibility of democracy in Iraq."
"Software like Xplanet be affected too? I hope not."
XPlanet takes its data from university of Dundee, which uses MeteoSat. From meteosat's page, they say:
EUMETSAT is an intergovernmental organisation created through an international convention agreed by 18 European Member States: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. These States fund the EUMETSAT programmes and are the principal users of the systems. EUMETSAT also has nine Cooperating States: Slovak Republic, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Romania, the Czech Republic and Latvia.
"I guess if you call altering newspaper editorials and letters to the editor "facts". If I interview 20 people and 6 of them agree with me and I only use those 6 to support my point of view even though 14 disagreed then did I represent "fact"? The way I see it there are lies, damned lies, and Moore "documentaries"."
What I can't understand is, why is this level of critical thinking not being applied to works by people other than Michael Moore?
If the people responding to this thread applied even a tenth of their tests to a newspaper story, radio article, presidential speech, television news article, or television documentary, we'd have enough purple-faced apoplectic denunciations that you literally wouldn't be able to hear anything else. Yet an alleged bias by Michael Moore is all over any forum which will listen, discussed everywhere, while factual errors several orders of magnitude worse are left unchallenged in nearly every story you read, watch, or hear.
Not saying that your [everyone's] analysis of Michael Moore's film isn't useful, just that it would be interesting to see how other stories measured-up to the same standard of analysis...
"No offence but Americans have no idea how good they have it. Go over to China and take a look."
No offence taken, but we're not trying to be better than China. We're trying to improve the democracies in our own countries, making them more accountable, better representing the public, and generally less evil. Comparing our governments to China or Serbia or North Korea and saying "it could be worse" is rather a limp excuse for an argument.
For all we know, there are people in the Chinese version of slashdot saying "we should be lucky to have such a great democracy -- look at the Burmese to get a bit of perspective"
Being able to protest without getting shot probably isn't the best test of how good a democracy is, either -- if you can't change the government, and the current government doesn't represent you, then what good is being able to bitch about it?
"There must have been a reason," Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. "They couldn't just barge in here and chase everyone out." ~ "No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."
"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.
I hesitated, lost in my own panic.
"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.
I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen....
When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."
"Democracy isn't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than any other alternative out there."
Maybe it is, but unless you're from somewhere like Sweden or Switzerland then it's still something to aspire to, not something to imagine you're safe already having.
How does a representative democracy compare with an actual democracy? How well does the american representative democracy compare with an ideal version of that same system? Are the distortions in the US political system [campaign contributions etc.] getting so large that they have noticable effects? What effect does the diversity (or lack thereof) in the media have on the efficiency of the democratic system?
p.s.: "You should vote in respect for the people throughout the world who die fighting for their right to vote." -- I don't think those who fought for the right to vote would be honoured by voting for any of the candidates standing in the US presidential election, so unless you're standing for president yourself, I imagine such people would be quite disappointed at the number of people "going through the motions" and voting for someone who is guaranteed to fail them.
"Slashdot just broke one of the 2 rules of peacekeeping conversation, don't talk about religion or politics. They might as well start up religion.slashdot.org and flame on."
Since politics.slashdot.org has U.S. flags in all of its backgrounds, does that mean religion.slashdot.org would be full of wiccan symbols?
"Often when I've received such bounces, when the originator can be identified, they refuse to help in providing a copy of the original email, headers... to backup the allegation that they're bouncing messages from me."
Just a thought, but how do you know the bounce came from them? Following the same line of reasoning, someone could be forging an email claiming to be from a clueless virus-scanner, disguised as a bounce in response to someone who forged an email?
The only reasonable answer is to reply with someone else's name in the from field to the alleged autoreponder about the alleged spammer, so that you start a whole new conversation betweeen two machines completely unrelated to any of the previous accusations...
Re:No anti-virus software? Then stay off the net!
on
Am I a Spam Zombie?
·
· Score: 1
"If you have a Windows 98 machine with no anti-virus software, then stay off of the Internet. Period."
Why? Surely it would be more secure than a fully-patched WindowsXP machine?
(Assuming you use well-designed browser and applications, Win98 doesn't have a lot of things to exploit w.r.t. the internet, compared to 2000/XP, which use LSASS, Windows Messenger, RPC, NetBios, file and print server, etc.
"Back when people were writing viruses for Amigas, the Amiga *was* the dominant platform in the home computer market (at least here in Europe), and that's what matters. This is not true for Macs."
Of course...:
1982: A program called Elk Cloner, written for Apple II systems, is credited with being the first computer virus to appear "in the wild"--that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created.
"I see no reason why the drivers cannot be binary just like on Windows. There needs to be a pragmatic approach to this"
nVidia makes binary drivers for your video card in the same way that Microsoft makes binary drivers ["Windows"] for PCs. Apparently, graphics cards have more power than CPUs, which means that the bulk of your computer is operating in non-Free mode, running software which you can't control, can't verify, and can only use if the company which completely controls your graphics card is graceful enough to let you do so.
Already, you have to enter into a lengthy legal agreement with nVidia to use your computer with graphical capabilities. This legal agreement can change at any time, and in short there's nothing you can do about it if they decide they're going to force you to do something in return for the legal right to operate your graphics card. Similarly, you can't do anything about it if nVidia decide to insert code onto your computer which restricts how you can use it, or otherwise prevents you from doing something you want to do.
Free Software authors are very much advocating the pragmatic approach in this matter, the difference being that the best solution is not to completely depend on one company, submit to any of their wishes, and give them veto control on whether your computer is able to use all of its hardware.
* One company as in, if you have a nVidia graphics card. Obviously you can pay again to replace your hardware, but it's hardly relevant to a discussion on getting an nVidia graphics card to work.
Slashdot Mirror
"But on the serious side, the claim of using encryption to store data on someone's hard drive worries me. Let's say the encryption gets broken. Now you might get Aunt Nedda's cookie recipes, but then again, you might get BobCo's strategic investment plan for the next 6 months as well."
Worse, if this Aunt Nedda lives in the UK, she could go to jail for 2 years for not being able to decrypt the files on her hard-drive at the request of the police.
Presumably the "perfect" answer to these problems would be to disband the US army completely, and replace it with a requirement that every 18-45 year old must own a rifle [+ other military kit] and spend x weeks per year training with it?
That would give your country the "hardness" necessary to resist foreign invasion (either an external one, or from someone unsavoury who happens to control the federal government), while not allowing said government to easily remove anyone or any group who disagrees with them.
As you say, iraq could be a good analogy here. The iraqi people have had a government foisted upon them by another country, and are now trying to prevent their country being uttlerly controlled at the whim of an enemy. Presumably, patriots will want to make sure that the same thing can't ever happen to the USA itself. At the moment if the federal government were to become evil, they'd have enough helicopters, UCAVs, tanks, and missiles to cower the American people, just like they do in iraq. If you disbanded the US army, then that method of attacking your country would be prevented.
Of course, that would seem to make it more difficult to fight wars abroad, until you realise that the armed population could quite easily go on UN operations with the same weapons and training as US army soldiers do now. The only thing you'd lose is the ability for the USA to be taken-over by someone you dislike winning the presidency (and think about how much choice you're being given over who becomes president at the moment...)
"My survival planning: A copy of the Bible, a copy of the Koran, tarot cards, a large pentacle, a feng shui chart, and several dozen pairs of underwear."
So how far have you got with Doom3?
"Isn't it funny how everyone is trying to keep VoIP unregulated, but then can't get 911 services. It's a compromise either way."
What's funny is that you can't email 112 (or 911 or 999 or whatever..)
With all this fuss about being able to call 112 from internet devices, they might at least have considered the much more reliable alternative which is just sitting there waiting to be used...
"Its not like someone is passing a law requiring this"
"Do-not-record flag" notwithstanding... how can you write that when people blatantly are passing laws requiring such things, and as someone else has noted, most definitely are running around randomly suing people.
"If you don't like it don't buy it!"
Exactly. I'll get a MythTV box if I ever need a PVR. You can bet that "the industry" will respond to my purchasing decision by falsely calling me a copyright-infringer though, for choosing something which does not restrict how I can use it.
"I wish anyone that has tried this with a Rio Carbon or more specifically the iPod mini"
Can you not "upload" data from a digital camera to the iPod over firewire? I thought that that was one of the features of an iPod, although I'd be interested if anyone actually knows how well it works.
"Its their content. Its their business how they license that content to you."
I'm glad that most people don't take your attitude to business.
"This is my land. You should be lucky I'm allowing you to farm it."
Feudalism was replaced about 500-600 years ago. We're not about to bring it back in the realm of entertainment.
"The text is white on white, so it's probably really secret."
Sometimes people assume you're going to load the coloured background image -- it happens a lot on webpages too, which are unreadable until the background loads a few minutes later.
"His dissent from the mainstream economic consensus will appear later this month"
So we know what the New York Times thinks of him then...
"Simply because he didn't lie doesn't mean he wasn't deceitful"
No, quite correct, the essay itself was correctly labelled. However, if he didn't lie as the essayist seems to be admitting, then the target of my question would be the people (thousands of them) who said that Michael Moore did lie throughout, and use that website as proof.
I didn't count them, but some 20-30% of the ~1500 posts to the slashdot discussion seemed to be accusing Michael Moore of outright lying, and the only evidence being offered was links to that website. Look to the general public for even more people shouting "complete crock of lies" and again, pointing to "59 deceptions" as proof.
Indeed, and many of us have seen that website. Do you believe that its claims would stand up to the same level of scrutiny that we're applying to the original film? Every single person who references that website refers to it as "59 utter lies exposed", yet you can go through the list and see Dave Kopel admit time after time that the film was truthful and then object to changes of subject, or things he thinks should have been included, or alternative conclusions he thinks should have been reached.
That page represents the sum total of your evidence???
So... obvious propoganda is bad?
XPlanet takes its data from university of Dundee, which uses MeteoSat. From meteosat's page, they say:
"Which is why we shouldn't elect Kerry"
Voila.
You've looked at 2 candidates, and haven't yet found the least evil choice. Time to continue searching.
"Micheal Moore's movie has a lot of irrefutable facts. He spins them to suit his agenda"
Quick poll: is that better or worse than having incorrect facts (e.g. WMD in Iraq) and spinning them to suit your agenda?
"I guess if you call altering newspaper editorials and letters to the editor "facts". If I interview 20 people and 6 of them agree with me and I only use those 6 to support my point of view even though 14 disagreed then did I represent "fact"? The way I see it there are lies, damned lies, and Moore "documentaries"."
What I can't understand is, why is this level of critical thinking not being applied to works by people other than Michael Moore?
If the people responding to this thread applied even a tenth of their tests to a newspaper story, radio article, presidential speech, television news article, or television documentary, we'd have enough purple-faced apoplectic denunciations that you literally wouldn't be able to hear anything else. Yet an alleged bias by Michael Moore is all over any forum which will listen, discussed everywhere, while factual errors several orders of magnitude worse are left unchallenged in nearly every story you read, watch, or hear.
Not saying that your [everyone's] analysis of Michael Moore's film isn't useful, just that it would be interesting to see how other stories measured-up to the same standard of analysis...
"No offence but Americans have no idea how good they have it. Go over to China and take a look."
No offence taken, but we're not trying to be better than China. We're trying to improve the democracies in our own countries, making them more accountable, better representing the public, and generally less evil. Comparing our governments to China or Serbia or North Korea and saying "it could be worse" is rather a limp excuse for an argument.
For all we know, there are people in the Chinese version of slashdot saying "we should be lucky to have such a great democracy -- look at the Burmese to get a bit of perspective"
Being able to protest without getting shot probably isn't the best test of how good a democracy is, either -- if you can't change the government, and the current government doesn't represent you, then what good is being able to bitch about it?
"There must have been a reason," Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. "They couldn't just barge in here and chase everyone out." ~ "No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."
...
"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.
I hesitated, lost in my own panic.
"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.
I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.
When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."
- Patriot Raid, Jason Halperin, April 2003.
"Democracy isn't perfect, but it sure as hell is better than any other alternative out there."
Maybe it is, but unless you're from somewhere like Sweden or Switzerland then it's still something to aspire to, not something to imagine you're safe already having.
How does a representative democracy compare with an actual democracy? How well does the american representative democracy compare with an ideal version of that same system? Are the distortions in the US political system [campaign contributions etc.] getting so large that they have noticable effects? What effect does the diversity (or lack thereof) in the media have on the efficiency of the democratic system?
p.s.: "You should vote in respect for the people throughout the world who die fighting for their right to vote." -- I don't think those who fought for the right to vote would be honoured by voting for any of the candidates standing in the US presidential election, so unless you're standing for president yourself, I imagine such people would be quite disappointed at the number of people "going through the motions" and voting for someone who is guaranteed to fail them.
"Slashdot just broke one of the 2 rules of peacekeeping conversation, don't talk about religion or politics. They might as well start up religion.slashdot.org and flame on."
Since politics.slashdot.org has U.S. flags in all of its backgrounds, does that mean religion.slashdot.org would be full of wiccan symbols?
Mr Glaser,
Could you stop emailing me?
Thanks.
"Often when I've received such bounces, when the originator can be identified, they refuse to help in providing a copy of the original email, headers... to backup the allegation that they're bouncing messages from me. "
Just a thought, but how do you know the bounce came from them? Following the same line of reasoning, someone could be forging an email claiming to be from a clueless virus-scanner, disguised as a bounce in response to someone who forged an email?
The only reasonable answer is to reply with someone else's name in the from field to the alleged autoreponder about the alleged spammer, so that you start a whole new conversation betweeen two machines completely unrelated to any of the previous accusations...
"If you have a Windows 98 machine with no anti-virus software, then stay off of the Internet. Period."
Why? Surely it would be more secure than a fully-patched WindowsXP machine?
(Assuming you use well-designed browser and applications, Win98 doesn't have a lot of things to exploit w.r.t. the internet, compared to 2000/XP, which use LSASS, Windows Messenger, RPC, NetBios, file and print server, etc.
"Back when people were writing viruses for Amigas, the Amiga *was* the dominant platform in the home computer market (at least here in Europe), and that's what matters. This is not true for Macs."
Of course...:
1982: A program called Elk Cloner, written for Apple II systems, is credited with being the first computer virus to appear "in the wild"--that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created.
Notable viruses and worms
"I see no reason why the drivers cannot be binary just like on Windows. There needs to be a pragmatic approach to this"
nVidia makes binary drivers for your video card in the same way that Microsoft makes binary drivers ["Windows"] for PCs. Apparently, graphics cards have more power than CPUs, which means that the bulk of your computer is operating in non-Free mode, running software which you can't control, can't verify, and can only use if the company which completely controls your graphics card is graceful enough to let you do so.
Already, you have to enter into a lengthy legal agreement with nVidia to use your computer with graphical capabilities. This legal agreement can change at any time, and in short there's nothing you can do about it if they decide they're going to force you to do something in return for the legal right to operate your graphics card. Similarly, you can't do anything about it if nVidia decide to insert code onto your computer which restricts how you can use it, or otherwise prevents you from doing something you want to do.
Free Software authors are very much advocating the pragmatic approach in this matter, the difference being that the best solution is not to completely depend on one company, submit to any of their wishes, and give them veto control on whether your computer is able to use all of its hardware.
* One company as in, if you have a nVidia graphics card. Obviously you can pay again to replace your hardware, but it's hardly relevant to a discussion on getting an nVidia graphics card to work.