Chomsky ought to know better, he was certainly an academic in the early 1970s. At any rate, the mail command dates back to 1970-71 and there is a very early RFC detailing an email system. Certainly by 1974-75 the earliest format of what we now call the mbox format was in existence, as was the transport system. This guy created an email system, but his system has nothing to do with the Unix mail system that predates it by several years, and is the progenitor of the UUCP/SMTP systems in place by the mid to late 1970s that were used to broadcast mbox-formatted emails to various organizations.
In short, this guy's email system was neither the first, nor did it have any influence on the Internet's email system. The claim is pure rubbish. For once I wish I was a subscriber because I actually did a detailed investigation of the various RFCs surrounding Unix mail and demonstrated that the guy is full of crap.
Anyone with even a brief understanding of the history of that region of Europe realizes that notions of racial purity are bunk. Now it is possible that the Roma and Jews are still sufficiently genetically distinct due to lower rates of interbreeding, but the fact is that the Hungarian people are, to put it vulgurally, mongrels. Even the ancient Huns themselves were likely a hodge podge of ethnic/racial groups from all over Eurasia, and Hungary has so many layers of occupation and invasion dating back to Classical times that while we can say the progenitor population probably spoke a Uralic mothertongue, you have a wide array of later groups; early Indo-Europeans, Turkic, Germanic, Latin, Slavic and on and on. If you want to find a population approaching a full blooded Hungarian, I suggest you go to Finland.
Considering the rather complex history of invasions and migrations through Hungary, I can't even imagine what one would qualify as a pure Hungarian. We're not talking about largely homogeneous populations like Iceland or Norway, we're talking about a country that has been the stomping ground from everyone from Central Asians to Germans to Mediterranean types. Read a history of that region. The idea that there is any kind of true full blooded "Hungarian" is daft.
In which case, a court issuing an order to provide the identity of the poster, where possible, and where it is not, at least requiring the forum owner, the domain owner and/or the hosting company to remove the offending material is the best we can hope for, because a clever enough troll is going to be all but uncatchable, no matter how severe the laws may be made, and they don't get much more severe than places like Iran, where if you say things the government doesn't like, you go to jail... or worse.
Tune in next week when they waste even more time on Lords Reform. The Coalition has become rather deft at doing anything but what it's supposed to be doing. They almost seem to view winning government the same way a Calvin viewed his sandbox.
Yes, the Speaker can moderate language and can certainly expel any MP for unparliamentary language or conduct. But an MP cannot be sued for what he says in the House, which is how Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste was fully outed even though a super injunction banned any mention of it. MPs enjoy a pretty much unlimited degree of freedom of speech, with only the rulings of the Speaker as the moderating force.
The problem here is where do you draw the line? If we all agree that creating technical means for citizens of dictatorial regimes to communicate with each other and the rest of the world is important, perhaps even critical, then at what level do you say "Okay, this is no longer desirable..." I agree that this sort of functionality can be abused, but I'm just not sure you can create this sort of line in the sand, and one side the ability to post information and claims anonymously is sacrosanct, and on the other side it is not.
And it's not as if this just began with the Internet Age. Anonymous speech has been critical to the envisioning and spread of liberty. At the same time, there is a dark side, in that anonymity has also been used to slander people. But is that different than any other form of speech, or indeed any other liberty? And does the fact that someone can use anonymity for malevolent reasons mean we have to create some sort of artificial barrier that we can never fully rationalize?
You take the good with the bad, I think. If someone is libeling someone on forums anonymously, then obviously a court is going to have the power to demand that troll's identifying information (indeed, I can't quite figure out why any new law is necessary, since courts have had the right to demand anonymous sources be identified for a long time). But there are going to be cases when the trolls are going to be use the same technology that we feel is so valuable in places like Syria, and at that point, I guess the only thing we can do is to rely upon the forum owners themselves to remove libelous posts. At some point there is going to be an identifiable person, whether it's the domain owner or the hosting company, that can be reached and forced to take down sites that are libelous in nature.
Of course, England has absolute horrible libel laws, which is why Congress has gone out of its way to make sure that clearly abusive judgments from English courts cannot be enforced in the United States to at least stop US citizens from libel shopping.
If you're not giving sites like Facebook real contact info and you're going through proxies or other anonymizers, then they won't be able to find you. As such, the most a court can ever hope to nail are the low-hanging fruit. What you might call the professional troll is so difficult to catch that in many cases you might as well call it impossible.
Not only that, but Members of Parliament have unlimited freedom of speech within the chambers. They can troll anyone they so please and no statute can be brought against them.
Finland's taxes are high, but then again by most measures it is a country that uses those taxes to fund a very comprehensive social benefits system.
Ireland, on the other hand, is a basket case economy that became attractive in no small part by funding its low corporate taxes by irresponsible borrowing, which now means the rest of the Eurozone has to bail it out.
By most American measures, Finland is an overtaxed Socialist wasteland, and Ireland's low corporate rates make it a responsible government.
Amen. The sole defense of tools like VB6 and MS-Access is that I could rapidly prototype. I'd never make an end product out of them, but for working concepts they work well.
I just love it when some fucktard makes an objection like this without considering a very old and active field called... wait for it... comparative anatomy. You know, that field of research where you can take partial remains, sometimes very minimal remains, and reconstruct the organism from them. Not just paleontologists and taxonomists use it either. It's used in criminal forensics as well. But you're right, some anonymous idiot on/. must know more than the scientists.
No where did I ever argue any theory was 100% right? And if the opposition is actually scientific, then that's a good thing. But when it's some fucking moron on/. talking about liberals vs. conservatives and acting like that has fuck all to do with science (other than perhaps studying the behaviors of ideologically frozen politicos), then yes, I'd say stupidity probably enters the equation somewhere.
The reason to state it is to point out the stupidity of trying to insist science you don't like is just some opposing political/ideological claim. If the science is right or wrong it is because of the data, not because one is conservative or liberal.
You do realize the universe doesn't give a flying fuck about liberal vs conservative, your way of life or the price of tea in China. This idiotic obsession with trying to turn any science you don't like into some ideological position is bizarre. Not everyone in this world is motivated by simplistic dogmatic positions.
And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?
No fucking kidding? How long has Linux been used in commercial operations? How long has it been put on embedded and dedicated platforms? Hell, how long has friggin' BSD and Emacs been around? Fuck, you'd think Open Source had been invented yesterday.
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Chomsky ought to know better, he was certainly an academic in the early 1970s. At any rate, the mail command dates back to 1970-71 and there is a very early RFC detailing an email system. Certainly by 1974-75 the earliest format of what we now call the mbox format was in existence, as was the transport system. This guy created an email system, but his system has nothing to do with the Unix mail system that predates it by several years, and is the progenitor of the UUCP/SMTP systems in place by the mid to late 1970s that were used to broadcast mbox-formatted emails to various organizations.
In short, this guy's email system was neither the first, nor did it have any influence on the Internet's email system. The claim is pure rubbish. For once I wish I was a subscriber because I actually did a detailed investigation of the various RFCs surrounding Unix mail and demonstrated that the guy is full of crap.
Anyone with even a brief understanding of the history of that region of Europe realizes that notions of racial purity are bunk. Now it is possible that the Roma and Jews are still sufficiently genetically distinct due to lower rates of interbreeding, but the fact is that the Hungarian people are, to put it vulgurally, mongrels. Even the ancient Huns themselves were likely a hodge podge of ethnic/racial groups from all over Eurasia, and Hungary has so many layers of occupation and invasion dating back to Classical times that while we can say the progenitor population probably spoke a Uralic mothertongue, you have a wide array of later groups; early Indo-Europeans, Turkic, Germanic, Latin, Slavic and on and on. If you want to find a population approaching a full blooded Hungarian, I suggest you go to Finland.
Considering the rather complex history of invasions and migrations through Hungary, I can't even imagine what one would qualify as a pure Hungarian. We're not talking about largely homogeneous populations like Iceland or Norway, we're talking about a country that has been the stomping ground from everyone from Central Asians to Germans to Mediterranean types. Read a history of that region. The idea that there is any kind of true full blooded "Hungarian" is daft.
In which case, a court issuing an order to provide the identity of the poster, where possible, and where it is not, at least requiring the forum owner, the domain owner and/or the hosting company to remove the offending material is the best we can hope for, because a clever enough troll is going to be all but uncatchable, no matter how severe the laws may be made, and they don't get much more severe than places like Iran, where if you say things the government doesn't like, you go to jail... or worse.
Tune in next week when they waste even more time on Lords Reform. The Coalition has become rather deft at doing anything but what it's supposed to be doing. They almost seem to view winning government the same way a Calvin viewed his sandbox.
Yes, the Speaker can moderate language and can certainly expel any MP for unparliamentary language or conduct. But an MP cannot be sued for what he says in the House, which is how Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste was fully outed even though a super injunction banned any mention of it. MPs enjoy a pretty much unlimited degree of freedom of speech, with only the rulings of the Speaker as the moderating force.
The problem here is where do you draw the line? If we all agree that creating technical means for citizens of dictatorial regimes to communicate with each other and the rest of the world is important, perhaps even critical, then at what level do you say "Okay, this is no longer desirable..." I agree that this sort of functionality can be abused, but I'm just not sure you can create this sort of line in the sand, and one side the ability to post information and claims anonymously is sacrosanct, and on the other side it is not.
And it's not as if this just began with the Internet Age. Anonymous speech has been critical to the envisioning and spread of liberty. At the same time, there is a dark side, in that anonymity has also been used to slander people. But is that different than any other form of speech, or indeed any other liberty? And does the fact that someone can use anonymity for malevolent reasons mean we have to create some sort of artificial barrier that we can never fully rationalize?
You take the good with the bad, I think. If someone is libeling someone on forums anonymously, then obviously a court is going to have the power to demand that troll's identifying information (indeed, I can't quite figure out why any new law is necessary, since courts have had the right to demand anonymous sources be identified for a long time). But there are going to be cases when the trolls are going to be use the same technology that we feel is so valuable in places like Syria, and at that point, I guess the only thing we can do is to rely upon the forum owners themselves to remove libelous posts. At some point there is going to be an identifiable person, whether it's the domain owner or the hosting company, that can be reached and forced to take down sites that are libelous in nature.
Of course, England has absolute horrible libel laws, which is why Congress has gone out of its way to make sure that clearly abusive judgments from English courts cannot be enforced in the United States to at least stop US citizens from libel shopping.
If you're not giving sites like Facebook real contact info and you're going through proxies or other anonymizers, then they won't be able to find you. As such, the most a court can ever hope to nail are the low-hanging fruit. What you might call the professional troll is so difficult to catch that in many cases you might as well call it impossible.
Not only that, but Members of Parliament have unlimited freedom of speech within the chambers. They can troll anyone they so please and no statute can be brought against them.
Hypocrisy, thy name is a Member of Parliament.
Best read up on ERVs. Horizontal gene transfer through viruses or directly between bacteria has been going on for billions of years.
Like the robber barons he seeks to soothe his conscience by tossing money around at good causes.
Finland's taxes are high, but then again by most measures it is a country that uses those taxes to fund a very comprehensive social benefits system.
Ireland, on the other hand, is a basket case economy that became attractive in no small part by funding its low corporate taxes by irresponsible borrowing, which now means the rest of the Eurozone has to bail it out.
By most American measures, Finland is an overtaxed Socialist wasteland, and Ireland's low corporate rates make it a responsible government.
Microsoft pushed top posting in its subpar email products. 'Nuf said.
Screw status codes. There should be a rifle pointed at the head of every legislator who votes on one of these sorts of measures.
If you think Windows firewall is as good as up tables, you don't know very much about up tables.
Amen. The sole defense of tools like VB6 and MS-Access is that I could rapidly prototype. I'd never make an end product out of them, but for working concepts they work well.
Lots of deranged Libduhtarian types on /.
I just love it when some fucktard makes an objection like this without considering a very old and active field called... wait for it... comparative anatomy. You know, that field of research where you can take partial remains, sometimes very minimal remains, and reconstruct the organism from them. Not just paleontologists and taxonomists use it either. It's used in criminal forensics as well. But you're right, some anonymous idiot on /. must know more than the scientists.
I love it when people just pull statistics out of their asses and run with them.
No where did I ever argue any theory was 100% right? And if the opposition is actually scientific, then that's a good thing. But when it's some fucking moron on /. talking about liberals vs. conservatives and acting like that has fuck all to do with science (other than perhaps studying the behaviors of ideologically frozen politicos), then yes, I'd say stupidity probably enters the equation somewhere.
Actually with Spain now saying there needs to be tighter Eurozone integration, it looks like Germany will finally take over Europe.
The reason to state it is to point out the stupidity of trying to insist science you don't like is just some opposing political/ideological claim. If the science is right or wrong it is because of the data, not because one is conservative or liberal.
You do realize the universe doesn't give a flying fuck about liberal vs conservative, your way of life or the price of tea in China. This idiotic obsession with trying to turn any science you don't like into some ideological position is bizarre. Not everyone in this world is motivated by simplistic dogmatic positions.
And how is declaring "engineering solutions will be found" not just simply passing the buck to the future?
I'm unclear what your accusation means. If I retrain myself from beating you to death with a baseball bat, does that represent a denial of evolution.
No fucking kidding? How long has Linux been used in commercial operations? How long has it been put on embedded and dedicated platforms? Hell, how long has friggin' BSD and Emacs been around? Fuck, you'd think Open Source had been invented yesterday.