Perhaps you would prefer the terms "unconstitutional, felonious, and tortious" to "evil". EFF has a better track record than I do of winning these sorts of cases.
The right to anonymous press has been upheld by the supreme court at least 4 times. Talley v California, McIntyre v Ohio, Buckley v American Constitional Law Foundation, Watchtower v Stratton. Lower courts haven't always followed these rulings. Links at majors.blogspot.com. The first amendment was adopted in part in response to the Peter Zenger case, in which Zenger was busted for printing anonymous books. A jury refused to convict him. Any printer company doing this might be suable. Deep pockets, lots of lawyers, no qualified immunity. Maybe they would respond to a cease and decist request.
Yours is the most practical proposal seen here. Titanic cost 100M to make and generated about a billion in sales.
Honeymooners II - Pow right to the moon alice!
Silent Bob's Voyage to the Dark Side...
They want 100M, maybe they'll take 50M. Corporate sponsorship - the Verison Moon Rocket. National sponsorship - just tell Saudi Arabia they're bidding against Isreal. A raffle - for $100 a ticket, you might win an audition to star in a movie in which you are the first person to have sex in space with a couple hot cosmo-nauts. It starts to look pretty doable. Action figures, happy meals, residuals. Have your people call my people.
First they ignore you, then they mod you +1 Funny, then they mod you down, then you win.
The ALC website soon became a favorite target for hackers, and Russian Internet service providers frequently closed down his sites when users complained about the spamming practices.
Among those complaints came death threats; it is speculated that while many were from angered users, some may have come from the sort of loosely-organized anti-spam gangs described in the 2004 book Spam Kings.
And possibly, one followed through on the many deadly promises made over the years to Mr. Kushnir, in his Moscow apartment over the weekend. I'm not up on moscow law. Is it legal to kill spammers there? I'm not up on all US law. Is it legal to mail photos of Kushnir's body to US-based spammers?
The thing about natural monopolies is that the market interprets a monopoly as damage, and routes around it. This can take awhile, up to ten years, and be messy and complicated. The solution so far has been that they are regulated by the government.
My beef isn't so much with parent poster, who is just being descriptive, but with people who buy into that idea, and the regulators who know better but perpetuate the system.
Regulation of phone/electric/streetcar/etc monopolies dates largely from 1908 and Roosevelt. Anything that had monopolistic concentration at that time tended to get regulated, so in 2005 we are stuck with these kludges of systems.
It was the cost-plus regulated electric monopoly that resulted in US style nukes, that the non-nuke liberals protested so vigorously. The market tends not to build nukes - there are smaller decentralized more efficient ways to get things done. In 1908 economists genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. In 2005 they know better, although many voters remain rationally ignorant of how regulatory monopolies are harmful and evil.
Tom has followed up his previous post with more argument and examples (no actual cites to cases or suchlike) so at this point I don't know; it's not inconceevable that he could be right.
11: You agree to pay all costs incurred by TELUS in the collection of any delinquent charges due under this Agreement or in the enforcement of this Agreement including, without limitation, lawyers' fees. 18: You acknowledge that such general practices and limits may differ for different portions of the TELUS Internet Services and may be set at different levels for different users based upon factors that may be determined in TELUS' sole discretion. 40: You acknowledge and agree that TELUS shall not be responsible or liable to you or any third party for any suspension, restriction or termination of your account.
C'mon, bill, you've worked for a phone company, you've seen the size of their legal budgets. Did you really think they would leave themselves open to claims?
I'm puzzled how posts that are objectively wrong get modded to 5's as informative. The article referred to here is typical: we believe that speciation drives evolution,Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe. No, speciation has been widely tested and confirmed. Usually geographic speciation is easier to measure.
It is unfortunately true that evolution is sometimes taught in government schools as a dogma to be taken on faith, but any slashdot reader should be able to pick up a few books and understand the testable scientific basis, and understand how they can design and run experiments to confirm evolution.
I've got news for you: speciation is pretty much inevitable from the perspective of a creationist. Any differentiation due to information loss or separation is, starting from the premise of a fallen, decaying world.
Ok, you have speciation. Do you also have natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and each of the other characteristics of evolution? That would come in handy for dealing with reality.
As to your Intelligent Design straw-man, it's easy to disprove. Simply show that all existing structure is practically achievable through random chance, and you're done. That's a lot harder row to hoe than you assume. That's a strawman. (A strawman is like a man, but the project of design rather than evolution.) Chance is part of the process, but so is selection. Fitness is a shorthand way of referring to, that nature tends to reward organisms that do a better job of managing information about their environments. Evolution then is a process by the which the universe moves over time from being dead matter to self-awareness. Even slashdot contributes to the growing universal self-awareness. Perhaps dupes can be explained with reference to the adaptive functionality of creative redundancy of information storage and retrieval.
[Example - superstrong tether: SpyDerMan] Power Glove Beaming Power Extracting oxygen from lunar regolith Robotic Moon lander *uninformative, interesting* *entries must be postmarked by 7/23 to qualify for free ipod drawing*
Well, the part of do not call that I didn't understand, here in indiana, one of the 5 states in question, is that they aren't just bloacking telemarketers; they are also blocking people who I want calling me, people with whom I have an existing business relationship, like, say, my bank.
So I wanted off. Went to the AG's home page, no way to do it online. i.e. their page is broken. So I called the number, 1-888-834-9969. After waiting on hold for a human, I asked to be taken off the list. The guy asked a bunch of personal questions, entered some data, and said "ok, now you're on the list." I explained that I had called to get OFF the list, and asked to speak to a supervisor. Long waiting on hold. Woman comes on, asks a bunch of personal questions, says "ok, now you're on the list." I explained that I had called to get OFF the list, and had asked to speak to a supervisor. Long waiting on hold.
A guy who calls himself Bo Barnhouse comes on. Says he can't take me off the list. Says he is an employee of the Attorney General, but has no supervisor and never reports to any one. Won't give out the address of where he is, other than in bloomington. Long periods on hold.
Gives me a number for the AG's office, 1-800-382-5516, and admits no one's answering that phone right now. Refuses to give any useful info or figure out how to get off the list.
My current position is now that the FTA -should- pre-empt Indiana's broken system, if it has been authorized to do so by congress. My next step will be to look up and try to figure out if "Bo Barnhouse" is a real person -often in talking to telemarketer types I've been given fake names. Everyone I spoke to there was polite and courteous, just didn't care that their system is broken, and weren't willing to forward my concerns to anyone who might give a damn.
A stem that blocks too many calls is as useless as an over-eager spam filter. If I didn't want any calls, I could just unplug my phone.
Perhaps, mr skeptic, I can interest you in the Sono Bono Daylight Savings extension act (SBDSea.)
The act will extend daylight savings time year round.
Gee, I could use my mod points to mod parent down, or respond. Tough choice.
http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/CF015A63-6B 69-4EED-A34B6F4035C8BE0E/104/263/
(Link to book on how to beat ticket. See also http://freedomlaw.com./ )
Driving is a privilege.
What happens in court involves your rights.
There is also a right to travel, although it not absolute.
A little study can arm you against the system. Drown them in paperwork with discovery requests.
Demand a jury trial. I happen to live in a state where the right to trial by jury - for anything - is in the state constitution. (Slight overstatement for nonlawyers.)
Ask nicely that your case be dismissed, and if not spend an hour politely asking the cop questions on the stand. If 8 people a day do this, the system grinds to a halt. Pretty soon they start dismissing your cases when they see you coming.
Think of it as a seminar in due process. Have fun, bring coffee and donuts. Not to be construed as legal advice until your check clears.
While you're at it, if you ever have car problems, just chuck the damn thing and buy a new one! Cars are so cheap nowadays, it's more cost-efficient to buy a new car than to fix your current one, what with car virii and over-priced, shitty mechanics and whatnot.
This works for me. I buy a $500 car about once a year, for cash. Last friday when I thought the transmission went out, I was ready to walk away with no hard feelings. Turned out to be the axle, fixable for $235. If it "crashes" or "burns", or, more likely, gets towed away by the auto pirates, i'm not over a barrel.
Similarly, it makes more sense to buy a new toaster from walmart for $10 than to take the 1950s-era toaster for repair.
The average consumer drives a computer that's at least 2 years old. $400 to replace it, and hand down the old one to cousin timmy or to www.virtualscavengers.com, is reasonable. I'm spending ~ 400/yr on broadband, might as well get a machine that can handle it. This one's a $100 P2. Sometime this year I'll upgrade to a $25 P3. I run firefox, norton, spybot, adaware, and date a geek who can fixxor it if i catch some malware.
Nagasaki was a center for Japanese christians, who were a persecuted minority during the war. They hoped the americans would come and rescue them.
New Mexico quickly surrendered after the first bomb was dropped, but the bombing of Nevada continued for another generation. John Wayne is one of many americans who was killed by the bombs.
From the wiki: "Also, like, dust devils are not tornados, because they aren't. Dust devils are primarilly dust, while tornado are primarilly not."
That pretty much nails it eh? Perhaps homeland security will increase spending or mars research to combat the dust devil menace. Mars - that's no moon.
One of my lifelong goals is to live simply, on a large plot of undeveloped land somewhere.
You might enjoy http://raccooncreek.blogspot.com./ We have the land, are moving a barn to it, still haven't worked out all the energy use solutions. www.f4.ca/text/possumliving.htm is a free online book about simple living. I didn't realize it was also a movie. http://www.newday.com/films/Possum_Living.html
Seriously, a phonics monkey for every student. OK, I don't watch South Park, so I don't know what a phonics monkey is. But we have the technology to make robot monkeys that are like pets that teach - one to one individualized instruction.
Schools might remain important for their prison-like functions, but education could be handled by the monkeys.
One of my first (and last) computer jobs was at the U of Delaware's Office of Computer-Based Instruction. We had this crazy idea that computers could learn how to teach. The lesson plans we came up with were I guess mostly boring, but the tools - stuff like email, chat rooms, notesfiles, user-friendly interfaces, touchscreens, etc., were revolutionary. It's been fun to watch the internet grow up out of those toolsets, but disappointing how little the technology has been used to replace schooling. Bring on the phonics monkeys, I say.
As a test pilot program, give a phonics monkey/ebook to every girl in iraq. Even if it means an extra billion embezzled by Halliburton.
Second best idea - give entry visas to asian, indian, russian scientists, who agree to teach, at their current rate of pay (typically around $5K/yr.)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's this http://www.vanfirm.com/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit.ht m grandma.
See, it's another dupe.
It's actually all written by one person, but you don't find that out til the last chapter.
http://worldofwonder.net/archives/2005/Jul/26/snap _cap.wow
via boing-boing, pic of lolibots awaiting shipping.
Perhaps you would prefer the terms "unconstitutional, felonious, and tortious" to "evil". EFF has a better track record than I do of winning these sorts of cases.
The right to anonymous press has been upheld by the supreme court at least 4 times.
Talley v California, McIntyre v Ohio, Buckley v American Constitional Law Foundation, Watchtower v Stratton. Lower courts haven't always followed these rulings.
Links at majors.blogspot.com. The first amendment was adopted in part in response to the Peter Zenger case, in which Zenger was busted for printing anonymous books.
A jury refused to convict him.
Any printer company doing this might be suable.
Deep pockets, lots of lawyers, no qualified immunity. Maybe they would respond to a cease and decist request.
Yours is the most practical proposal seen here.
Titanic cost 100M to make and generated about a billion in sales.
Honeymooners II - Pow right to the moon alice!
Silent Bob's Voyage to the Dark Side...
They want 100M, maybe they'll take 50M.
Corporate sponsorship - the Verison Moon Rocket.
National sponsorship - just tell Saudi Arabia they're bidding against Isreal.
A raffle - for $100 a ticket, you might win an audition to star in a movie in which you are the first person to have sex in space with a couple hot cosmo-nauts.
It starts to look pretty doable.
Action figures, happy meals, residuals.
Have your people call my people.
First they ignore you, then they mod you +1 Funny, then they mod you down, then you win.
The ALC website soon became a favorite target for hackers, and Russian Internet service providers frequently closed down his sites when users complained about the spamming practices.
Among those complaints came death threats; it is speculated that while many were from angered users, some may have come from the sort of loosely-organized anti-spam gangs described in the 2004 book Spam Kings.
And possibly, one followed through on the many deadly promises made over the years to Mr. Kushnir, in his Moscow apartment over the weekend.
I'm not up on moscow law. Is it legal to kill spammers there?
I'm not up on all US law. Is it legal to mail photos of Kushnir's body to US-based spammers?
The thing about natural monopolies is that the market interprets a monopoly as damage, and routes around it. This can take awhile, up to ten years, and be messy and complicated.
The solution so far has been that they are regulated by the government.
My beef isn't so much with parent poster, who is just being descriptive, but with people who buy into that idea, and the regulators who know better but perpetuate the system.
Regulation of phone/electric/streetcar/etc monopolies dates largely from 1908 and Roosevelt.
Anything that had monopolistic concentration at that time tended to get regulated, so in 2005 we are stuck with these kludges of systems.
It was the cost-plus regulated electric monopoly
that resulted in US style nukes, that the non-nuke liberals protested so vigorously. The market tends not to build nukes - there are smaller decentralized more efficient ways to get things done.
In 1908 economists genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. In 2005 they know better, although many voters remain rationally ignorant of how regulatory monopolies are harmful and evil.
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid= 2222&dekey=McKinney+v.+University+of+Guelph&gwp=8& curtab=2222_1&linktext=McKinney%20v.%20University% 20of%20Guelph
this wikipedia entry discusses cases saying the canadian free speech clause limits government, not private parties.
Tom has followed up his previous post with more argument and examples (no actual cites to cases or suchlike) so at this point I don't know; it's not inconceevable that he could be right.
Parent post is currently modded +4, interesting, for values of interesting that include "wrong" and "completely missed the point."
A contract is a contract, but only between Ferengi. - Rule of acquisition #17.
1:TELUS reserves the right to amend this Agreement at its sole discretion, at any time.
http://www.mytelus.com/internet/policies/TISAA.do
11: You agree to pay all costs incurred by TELUS in the collection of any delinquent charges due under this Agreement or in the enforcement of this Agreement including, without limitation, lawyers' fees.
18: You acknowledge that such general practices and limits may differ for different portions of the TELUS Internet Services and may be set at different levels for different users based upon factors that may be determined in TELUS' sole discretion.
40: You acknowledge and agree that TELUS shall not be responsible or liable to you or any third party for any suspension, restriction or termination of your account.
C'mon, bill, you've worked for a phone company, you've seen the size of their legal budgets.
Did you really think they would leave themselves open to claims?
Bullshit -> Did the contract these people agreed to in order to get service mention "oh by the way, we censor websites that we don't like?
Yes. Phrased differently. If I'm wrong, please post link to the contract. No isp will contract such that every website is reachable 24/7.
I'm puzzled how posts that are objectively wrong get modded to 5's as informative.
The article referred to here is typical: we believe that speciation drives evolution,Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
No, speciation has been widely tested and confirmed. Usually geographic speciation is easier to measure.
It is unfortunately true that evolution is sometimes taught in government schools as a dogma to be taken on faith, but any slashdot reader should be able to pick up a few books and understand the testable scientific basis, and understand how they can design and run experiments to confirm evolution.
I've got news for you: speciation is pretty much inevitable from the perspective of a creationist. Any differentiation due to information loss or separation is, starting from the premise of a fallen, decaying world.
Ok, you have speciation. Do you also have natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and each of the other characteristics of evolution? That would come in handy for dealing with reality.
As to your Intelligent Design straw-man, it's easy to disprove. Simply show that all existing structure is practically achievable through random chance, and you're done. That's a lot harder row to hoe than you assume.
That's a strawman. (A strawman is like a man, but the project of design rather than evolution.)
Chance is part of the process, but so is selection. Fitness is a shorthand way of referring to, that nature tends to reward organisms that do a better job of managing information about their environments. Evolution then is a process by the which the universe moves over time from being dead matter to self-awareness. Even slashdot contributes to the growing universal self-awareness. Perhaps dupes can be explained with reference to the adaptive functionality of creative redundancy of information storage and retrieval.
[Example - superstrong tether: SpyDerMan]
Power Glove
Beaming Power
Extracting oxygen from lunar regolith
Robotic Moon lander
*uninformative, interesting*
*entries must be postmarked by 7/23 to qualify for free ipod drawing*
OOP there it is.
OOP there it is....
OOP
OOP
Well, the part of do not call that I didn't understand, here in indiana, one of the 5 states in question, is that they aren't just bloacking telemarketers; they are also blocking people who I want calling me, people with whom I have an existing business relationship, like, say, my bank.
So I wanted off. Went to the AG's home page, no way to do it online. i.e. their page is broken.
So I called the number, 1-888-834-9969.
After waiting on hold for a human, I asked to be taken off the list. The guy asked a bunch of personal questions, entered some data, and said "ok, now you're on the list." I explained that I had called to get OFF the list, and asked to speak to a supervisor. Long waiting on hold.
Woman comes on, asks a bunch of personal questions, says "ok, now you're on the list."
I explained that I had called to get OFF the list, and had asked to speak to a supervisor. Long waiting on hold.
A guy who calls himself Bo Barnhouse comes on.
Says he can't take me off the list. Says he is an employee of the Attorney General, but has no supervisor and never reports to any one. Won't give out the address of where he is, other than in bloomington. Long periods on hold.
Gives me a number for the AG's office, 1-800-382-5516, and admits no one's answering that phone right now. Refuses to give any useful info or figure out how to get off the list.
My current position is now that the FTA -should- pre-empt Indiana's broken system, if it has been authorized to do so by congress. My next step will be to look up and try to figure out if "Bo Barnhouse" is a real person -often in talking to telemarketer types I've been given fake names.
Everyone I spoke to there was polite and courteous, just didn't care that their system is broken, and weren't willing to forward my concerns to anyone who might give a damn.
A stem that blocks too many calls is as useless as an over-eager spam filter. If I didn't want any calls, I could just unplug my phone.
Perhaps, mr skeptic, I can interest you in the Sono Bono Daylight Savings extension act (SBDSea.)
The act will extend daylight savings time year round.
Gee, I could use my mod points to mod parent down, or respond. Tough choice. http://www.nolo.com/resource.cfm/catID/CF015A63-6B 69-4EED-A34B6F4035C8BE0E/104/263/
(Link to book on how to beat ticket. See also http://freedomlaw.com./ )
Driving is a privilege.
What happens in court involves your rights.
There is also a right to travel, although it not absolute.
A little study can arm you against the system. Drown them in paperwork with discovery requests.
Demand a jury trial. I happen to live in a state where the right to trial by jury - for anything - is in the state constitution. (Slight overstatement for nonlawyers.)
Ask nicely that your case be dismissed, and if not spend an hour politely asking the cop questions on the stand. If 8 people a day do this, the system grinds to a halt. Pretty soon they start dismissing your cases when they see you coming.
Think of it as a seminar in due process. Have fun, bring coffee and donuts. Not to be construed as legal advice until your check clears.
Free peltier with rebate.
*informative, stupid*
Short version of parent: "That's no moon!"
While you're at it, if you ever have car problems, just chuck the damn thing and buy a new one! Cars are so cheap nowadays, it's more cost-efficient to buy a new car than to fix your current one, what with car virii and over-priced, shitty mechanics and whatnot.
This works for me. I buy a $500 car about once a year, for cash. Last friday when I thought the transmission went out, I was ready to walk away with no hard feelings. Turned out to be the axle, fixable for $235. If it "crashes" or "burns", or, more likely, gets towed away by the auto pirates, i'm not over a barrel.
Similarly, it makes more sense to buy a new toaster from walmart for $10 than to take the 1950s-era toaster for repair.
The average consumer drives a computer that's at least 2 years old. $400 to replace it, and hand down the old one to cousin timmy or to www.virtualscavengers.com, is reasonable. I'm spending ~ 400/yr on broadband, might as well get a machine that can handle it. This one's a $100 P2. Sometime this year I'll upgrade to a $25 P3.
I run firefox, norton, spybot, adaware, and date a geek who can fixxor it if i catch some malware.
Nagasaki was a center for Japanese christians, who were a persecuted minority during the war. They hoped the americans would come and rescue them.
New Mexico quickly surrendered after the first bomb was dropped, but the bombing of Nevada continued for another generation. John Wayne is one of many americans who was killed by the bombs.
*insighfully informative flamebait*
From the wiki:
"Also, like, dust devils are not tornados, because they aren't. Dust devils are primarilly dust, while tornado are primarilly not."
That pretty much nails it eh?
Perhaps homeland security will increase spending or mars research to combat the dust devil menace.
Mars - that's no moon.
One of my lifelong goals is to live simply, on a large plot of undeveloped land somewhere.
You might enjoy http://raccooncreek.blogspot.com./
We have the land, are moving a barn to it, still haven't worked out all the energy use solutions.
www.f4.ca/text/possumliving.htm is a free online book about simple living.
I didn't realize it was also a movie.
http://www.newday.com/films/Possum_Living.html
- informative, offtopic -
Seriously, a phonics monkey for every student.
OK, I don't watch South Park, so I don't know what a phonics monkey is. But we have the technology to make robot monkeys that are like pets that teach - one to one individualized instruction.
Schools might remain important for their prison-like functions, but education could be handled by the monkeys.
One of my first (and last) computer jobs was at the U of Delaware's Office of Computer-Based Instruction. We had this crazy idea that computers could learn how to teach. The lesson plans we came up with were I guess mostly boring, but the tools -
stuff like email, chat rooms, notesfiles, user-friendly interfaces, touchscreens, etc., were revolutionary. It's been fun to watch the internet grow up out of those toolsets, but disappointing how little the technology has been used to replace schooling. Bring on the phonics monkeys, I say.
As a test pilot program, give a phonics monkey/ebook to every girl in iraq. Even if it means an extra billion embezzled by Halliburton.
Second best idea - give entry visas to asian, indian, russian scientists, who agree to teach, at their current rate of pay (typically around $5K/yr.)