What complete and utter unsubstantiated bullshit. First of all the novelty of an alarm system is notification of the police, who job it is to *gasp* uphold the law.
I take it you don't live in major city with high crime...
This morning I walked out to see a car window smashed. Hey at least it wasn't mine, but it has happened to me before. The problem is that you can better protect yourself with the free market than police.
I have an alarm on my house as well because if someone did break in without it, the police would come by and make a report, shrug and then leave. I've got a 0.00001% of recovering anything if I diligently harass the pawn shops.
With the alarm, there is the nice deterrent and the police can respond (I'm also like the emergency "help I'm being held hostage button combination" in case someone tries to get me to forcefully disable to alarm at gun/knife point).
So yeah... In a perfect world the law and the police are enough to dissuade any criminal, but you are a fool if you don't protect yourself. Sure a master criminal locksmith could find a way to hack my home alarm and steal my belongings but I doubt I have anything worth their time.
I'm more concerned about the crack heads and various other thieves that want to grab anything of value even if it is worthless to me (I've had someone break into my car to grab a case of CDRs).
Think of it like the script kiddies versus the master hacker... Either type of these groups aren't going to be dissuaded by laws if they don't think they are going to get caught.
If you think laws do stop all crime because of fear of punishment, I would like you to talk to my neighbors down the street who deal drugs because apparently that isn't dissuading them. (Even though we've reported them to police already!)
If yo live in a nice cozy suburb then I can see where you get this type of mentality, but when you are forced to live with criminality on a daily basis you start to realize that if the are people like these that know how to use computers, then I doubt they are going to have the same qualms either.
And yeah... I should move, but the neighborhood is nice if it weren't for the one set of neighbors and if I stick it out I might make quite a sum of money because of increasing property prices.
While the *people on board* are powerless to give in to a hijackers, all the hijackers would have to do instead is radio some ATC station and tell *them* they'll start killing passengers unless the real pilot redirects the plane.
At which point the ATC station apologizes that they aren't authorized to negotiate with terrorists and tell them they will contact the people that do. At which point, they notify Homeland security who in turn orders an F22 already in flight to prepare its air to air missiles for launch.
At which point the ATC station notifies the Airlines in question so they can start notifying the next of kin on the seating list.
Seriously... Considering the state of airfares these days, it is more likely if a terrorist did take over a plane they would order its immediate destruction.
If at all, the remote control would save lives, because they can override the pilots and have the aircraft land and hopefully get a Swat or Anti-terrorist group to storm the plane rather than their option of shooting it out of the sky.
What we should decrease is things like automobiles, electronics & other high standard of living commodities. Therefore we make it annoying for the people of North Korea to get by but it isn't possible to point to conditions of people dying due to our sanctions.
Have you studied North Korea or even reviewed the stories of people have went on their friendship tours?
Even those guided tours show that North Korea has in the little of the way of cars and luxuries.
Considering most North Koreans are lucky to have a state locked radio station with electricity (if at all) they aren't going to be making much use of computers or iPods.
The only people who could make use of iPods would be the ruling party and the Military.
Considering their ability to kidnap South Korean citizens, I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem nabbing an iPod or two.
But I agree... Starving North Korea won't solve the problem either since the military has complete control and would only promote needless suffering.
The only way to solve the Korean problem is to actually give North Koreans luxuries and bring them into the western world. You see... Most NK'ers think the rest of the world is like them and is living in poverty (but often much worse conditions).
Most people that are recovered from attempts to escape to China or sent to camps so they can't tell anyone on what they saw (even though the word is getting out).
Remember... We didn't conquer the Soviet Union with sanctions, but rather blue jeans, rock and roll, and McDonalds.
If we give the North Koreans western gadgets they'll start to realize we aren't the psychotic baddies Kim Jong Il makes us out to me.
First they'll need to have proper nutrition, proper electricity, and internet access first...
What is that I don't get is why not just publish the thing to Google or Youtube. Not only would that make it easier for everyone to view (except for those old folks who hate flash regardless of the fact it can be run on Win, OS X, and Linux without fighting over Divx, WMV, or Quicktime codecs), but it would also save them an arm and a leg with bandwidth costs.
I actually work with a few indie bands on my label. We noticed that Lavamus.com (another Russian website) had put our MP3s up for sale. Frankly we usually don't care about piracy and our stuff is all over Pirate Bay (and we think it is flattering), but when people sell our stuff for money, it is kind of lame.
We sent them letters letting them know we don't mind that they sell as long as they give us something , they kept responding that they were protected by ROMs and there would be no compensation forthcoming. We are the furthest thing you will see from RIAA, but in general these people aren't given any money to any artist even if the artist is ok with them selling their music at those prices.
And we aren't on Allofmp3.com, but Lavamus is pretty much the same thing.
If they asked in the first place I don't think we would mind.
More old men making idiotic gestures towards a false sense of security. How long until the current "rulers" of our nation die off and a little more tech-savvy (hopefully) group moves in?
Just because you are tech savvy doesn't mean you will make moral leaders, however it will make you better able to overcome those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage.
Take Joesph Goebbels's use of radio, early television, and various other nice technology advances of the 1930's. One could argue that the NSDAP had quite a grasp on technologies and futuristic ideology's impact on the masses.
However, technology is just a tool and is not evil or good in itself but rather on the person who applies it. Right now we are just faced with a lot of idiocy.
According to the RIAA he has reinstalled Windows on his mom's computer several times and he was the one who delivered his mom's computer's hard drive to the RIAA.
If he didn't want to be served there, then he should have accepted any of the previous seven valid attempts to effect service at his house.
Hold on. If the person in question is his father... Then why do they say he is dead? Or maybe I'm just confused about someone else's father?
If my dad refused service at his house, it is kind of pointless to contact my employer about him. Shouldn't they be contacted my father's employer? I mean if he was dead, I suppose they could contact me, but why weren't they taking that as an answer?
Either way, the point of the matter is they shouldn't be servicing you if you aren't the person in question.
Speaking of FASA, if you're interested you can sign up for the Shadowrun Beta. They're only looking for 360 players, at the moment, and only ones with gold Live accounts.
As much gamers complain about "the grind", you can't have a successful MMO without one grind or another.
I take it you never played Ultima Online back in the 1998-2000 era?
Sure, you would find yourself doing repetitive tasks like chopping wood, mining, crafting, or killing certain creatures, but in general it wasn't a very kill something rinse and repeat type of game.
Mostly because of the player interaction and virtual economy. That and it wasn't that hard to become a 7xGM (what you would call a level 60 character that is maxed out) with maybe 3-4 months worth of casual play. I'd dare say you could get to be 7xGM in 2 if you macroed and played hard core.
Being such a big fan of UO kept me from being able to get into any other MMOGs since I did not like the grind and level systems.
Take away the leveling and XP and replace it with a skill system and I think you have a good game.
The very existence of a stats/skills system, I believe, means that there will be people who just try to game it as fast as they can, to up their numbers.
I'm waiting for the day for the MMORPG that doesn't show the player his skill/stats.
Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa).
I've actually had to call the Postal police (or whatever you call them) because either the postman was not delivering the mail or throwing it away. Of course I live in a major city, but my room mate found that a credit card she ordered had been tried in an ATM about 50 miles away so obviously something happened to the mail being delivered.
I'm not sure what became of it... Although, at my new residence, my mail isn't delivered with 100% accuracy.
Like a child provoking a soldier to shoot them by throwing rocks in the middle east?
Just because someone provokes you doesn't absolve you of your actions afterwards.
If I met you in a bar and called your mother funny names and you punched me in the face, and the entire thing was filmed (from the words about your mother to the fist in my face) you would still be arrested and I would still win a civil suit because you responded poorly to provocation.*
The key here is that just because you are provoked, doesn't excuse you from responding in such a way.
*Yeah there is a state in which the law actually lets you defend your honor, but lets hope I'm smart enough to not start a fight in that state.
More than anything, kids today need to learn respect for authority.
No. More than anything, kids need to respect others on an individual basis because they are a person too rather than respect because they are an authoritarian figure.
In fact kids should question authority, and respect only the person because they are their equal and that all human beings need to be respected.
When you talk of authority, you start getting into master and slave arguments.
And I for one believe men are created equal and needed to be treated equal. When you teach someone to respect authority, it usually means fear authority or see what you can get away with when they aren't looking.
If you respect someone not because you fear them, but you want to treat them with decency then you won't act like a complete jerk to your fellow man when the roles reverse.
One is the fact that kids were recording what was going on privately, i.e. these two teachers fighting. Sure one can argue it was done in public, but still.
Not only was it in public, but they are technically public servants employed by the government.
Any actions, words, or behavior you do on or off the job is and will be scrutinized.
Of course whether this is a good thing or bad thing depends on the person.
Let's see... we want to design a neural net that predicts the summed trading behavior of, oh, several tens of millions of human brains?
I hate to say this, but you give the human race too much credit. Those tens of millions of human brains tend to think in herds. Often to the chagrin of the hand full of people who sell short and make a profit.
Playing the stock market is like out running hungry grizzly bears. You don't need to faster than the bear (the market) but you do need to be faster any one else with you (the other investors).
While the idea of stock picking algorithms is neat; market history suggest it won't work a a way to predict performance.
I sort of thought up how one would basically create such a program. You couldn't simply write one but you would have to "evolve" it.
First take a computer program and have it randomly pick One million criteria from Google news. Then based off that criteria, randomly pick and choose a stock to buy or sell. Now repeat a few billion times. Then kill off the programs that fail to "virtually" make any money (you would not be able to make money off this for a while).
Then duplicate the programs that "made" money and then have each of the billion program have code to modify the criteria and or subtract or add how many criteria you are going to look at on Google. (I mean we don't know if the optimal information the program has to look at is less or more)
So rinse, repeat, and eventually after a few hundred trillion instances you will eventually evolve a program that can look at the information on Google and decide what stocks to pick.
However... My idea will take a very expensive super computer and a direct connection to Google data center so I think the only people who would pull this off would be Google themselves...
Lets see now.. democratically deciding a definition? hmm...
To be fair, all definitions are democratically decided even if no one votes on them.
If tomorrow everyone on the earth decided to call what we use to call the color blue as the color red... Then tomorrow the sky would be red.
If tomorrow everyone decided that a yard (or meter or what have you) is not 3 feet but now four and we adjusted all our documentation and measurement tools to reflect this then it would be so.
Heck... We could even call the Antarctic hot and the Sahara cold as long as we all agreed that the term hot meant one would "burn" to death of hypothermia and you would "freeze" to death of heat exhaustion.
Really... Definitions themselves do not imply or detail facts.
Calling something a moon or a planet does not change its behavior or physical properties, but it does change how we as humans relate to said objects and property behaviors.
Of course we don't go around changing things willy nilly because it is hard to get everyone to agree all at the same time. Although... Come to think of it... Since we are not all speaking English on this world of ours, we might not be really agreeing as much as we think.
Sometimes terms in other languages used for the same object or property, doesn't have the same exact meaning as another languages word for the same thing.
? If no one but the original poster holds responsibility for the content -- even when it's known to be false and defamatory -- the opportunities for intentional, unfettered smear campaigns would seem to be enormous.
I suppose the best solution is to play the game in reverse.
Either make it so that regardless of claims that no matter how bad the libel, that your image won't change. Or perhaps use your own methods to call the source into question.
The problem of society that sees false information as negative towards their image is not the false information but the current image. That may not make sense until you call into question the validity of popular opinion.
If you set about a campaign to make someone look like they eat babies, and the public believes the anonymous source and tarnishes the targets image, then the target should be in a position to make it so that his reputation wouldn't change regardless if he really was eating babies.
I don't know if that made sense... And to pull this off is rather complex, but if if I were a politician of high importance and I saw on the news tomorrow that a source was saying that I eat babies. I would counter with a non-denial that babies are too high in fat and bad for your health without actually denying that I eat babies.
And that if I did eat babies, it would be unpatriotic to question such a practice and those who cut and run want to given the enemy an advantage by letting morals get in the way on the war on terror.
Of course, I am not a politician.
However, I would also point out, even if you do sue for libel and win, the damage is done and you still loose. Information war is a nasty business.
In reality, if you have no reputation to begin with then you won't be a target. Which is why you need other people for replaceable figure heads which you can simply use as human PR shields and replace them as they get tarnished.
No I haven't been planning a career as CEO, President for Life, or cult leader... Why do you ask?
I know this was a non-serious response to your serious question, but the point of the matter is that even with the ability to sue people for libel, it is pointless when you are a target of a concerted and organized group. The best defense is to put yourself into situations where your reputation does not matter and you can do things unilaterally without the need for anyone else's approval.
Slashdot Mirror
Violent games like Half Life or Resident Evil never make me feel like that though.
I take it you've never had to kill any zombies in real life have you?
Trust me. It is not as glamorous or bloody as the games make it out to be.
What complete and utter unsubstantiated bullshit. First of all the novelty of an alarm system is notification of the police, who job it is to *gasp* uphold the law.
I take it you don't live in major city with high crime...
This morning I walked out to see a car window smashed. Hey at least it wasn't mine, but it has happened to me before. The problem is that you can better protect yourself with the free market than police.
I have an alarm on my house as well because if someone did break in without it, the police would come by and make a report, shrug and then leave. I've got a 0.00001% of recovering anything if I diligently harass the pawn shops.
With the alarm, there is the nice deterrent and the police can respond (I'm also like the emergency "help I'm being held hostage button combination" in case someone tries to get me to forcefully disable to alarm at gun/knife point).
So yeah... In a perfect world the law and the police are enough to dissuade any criminal, but you are a fool if you don't protect yourself. Sure a master criminal locksmith could find a way to hack my home alarm and steal my belongings but I doubt I have anything worth their time.
I'm more concerned about the crack heads and various other thieves that want to grab anything of value even if it is worthless to me (I've had someone break into my car to grab a case of CDRs).
Think of it like the script kiddies versus the master hacker... Either type of these groups aren't going to be dissuaded by laws if they don't think they are going to get caught.
If you think laws do stop all crime because of fear of punishment, I would like you to talk to my neighbors down the street who deal drugs because apparently that isn't dissuading them. (Even though we've reported them to police already!)
If yo live in a nice cozy suburb then I can see where you get this type of mentality, but when you are forced to live with criminality on a daily basis you start to realize that if the are people like these that know how to use computers, then I doubt they are going to have the same qualms either.
And yeah... I should move, but the neighborhood is nice if it weren't for the one set of neighbors and if I stick it out I might make quite a sum of money because of increasing property prices.
While the *people on board* are powerless to give in to a hijackers, all the hijackers would have to do instead is radio some ATC station and tell *them* they'll start killing passengers unless the real pilot redirects the plane.
At which point the ATC station apologizes that they aren't authorized to negotiate with terrorists and tell them they will contact the people that do. At which point, they notify Homeland security who in turn orders an F22 already in flight to prepare its air to air missiles for launch.
At which point the ATC station notifies the Airlines in question so they can start notifying the next of kin on the seating list.
Seriously... Considering the state of airfares these days, it is more likely if a terrorist did take over a plane they would order its immediate destruction.
If at all, the remote control would save lives, because they can override the pilots and have the aircraft land and hopefully get a Swat or Anti-terrorist group to storm the plane rather than their option of shooting it out of the sky.
What we should decrease is things like automobiles, electronics & other high standard of living commodities. Therefore we make it annoying for the people of North Korea to get by but it isn't possible to point to conditions of people dying due to our sanctions.
Have you studied North Korea or even reviewed the stories of people have went on their friendship tours?
Even those guided tours show that North Korea has in the little of the way of cars and luxuries.
Considering most North Koreans are lucky to have a state locked radio station with electricity (if at all) they aren't going to be making much use of computers or iPods.
The only people who could make use of iPods would be the ruling party and the Military.
Considering their ability to kidnap South Korean citizens, I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem nabbing an iPod or two.
But I agree... Starving North Korea won't solve the problem either since the military has complete control and would only promote needless suffering.
The only way to solve the Korean problem is to actually give North Koreans luxuries and bring them into the western world. You see... Most NK'ers think the rest of the world is like them and is living in poverty (but often much worse conditions).
Most people that are recovered from attempts to escape to China or sent to camps so they can't tell anyone on what they saw (even though the word is getting out).
Remember... We didn't conquer the Soviet Union with sanctions, but rather blue jeans, rock and roll, and McDonalds.
If we give the North Koreans western gadgets they'll start to realize we aren't the psychotic baddies Kim Jong Il makes us out to me.
First they'll need to have proper nutrition, proper electricity, and internet access first...
What is that I don't get is why not just publish the thing to Google or Youtube. Not only would that make it easier for everyone to view (except for those old folks who hate flash regardless of the fact it can be run on Win, OS X, and Linux without fighting over Divx, WMV, or Quicktime codecs), but it would also save them an arm and a leg with bandwidth costs.
Because they refused to take it.
I actually work with a few indie bands on my label. We noticed that Lavamus.com (another Russian website) had put our MP3s up for sale. Frankly we usually don't care about piracy and our stuff is all over Pirate Bay (and we think it is flattering), but when people sell our stuff for money, it is kind of lame.
We sent them letters letting them know we don't mind that they sell as long as they give us something , they kept responding that they were protected by ROMs and there would be no compensation forthcoming. We are the furthest thing you will see from RIAA, but in general these people aren't given any money to any artist even if the artist is ok with them selling their music at those prices.
And we aren't on Allofmp3.com, but Lavamus is pretty much the same thing.
If they asked in the first place I don't think we would mind.
Can anyone, umm, translate that paragraph into everyday english?
Maybe you need to reverse the polarity on your web browser?
More old men making idiotic gestures towards a false sense of security. How long until the current "rulers" of our nation die off and a little more tech-savvy (hopefully) group moves in?
Just because you are tech savvy doesn't mean you will make moral leaders, however it will make you better able to overcome those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage.
Take Joesph Goebbels's use of radio, early television, and various other nice technology advances of the 1930's. One could argue that the NSDAP had quite a grasp on technologies and futuristic ideology's impact on the masses.
However, technology is just a tool and is not evil or good in itself but rather on the person who applies it. Right now we are just faced with a lot of idiocy.
According to the RIAA he has reinstalled Windows on his mom's computer several times and he was the one who delivered his mom's computer's hard drive to the RIAA.
Ah! So Best Buy and UPS are complicit too?!
If he didn't want to be served there, then he should have accepted any of the previous seven valid attempts to effect service at his house.
Hold on. If the person in question is his father... Then why do they say he is dead? Or maybe I'm just confused about someone else's father?
If my dad refused service at his house, it is kind of pointless to contact my employer about him. Shouldn't they be contacted my father's employer? I mean if he was dead, I suppose they could contact me, but why weren't they taking that as an answer?
Either way, the point of the matter is they shouldn't be servicing you if you aren't the person in question.
Speaking of FASA, if you're interested you can sign up for the Shadowrun Beta. They're only looking for 360 players, at the moment, and only ones with gold Live accounts.
Apparently they aren't looking very hard.
what will creep out of such a relation ???
An angel with devil's horns and a taste for not being evil while still overcharging for the service?
As much gamers complain about "the grind", you can't have a successful MMO without one grind or another.
I take it you never played Ultima Online back in the 1998-2000 era?
Sure, you would find yourself doing repetitive tasks like chopping wood, mining, crafting, or killing certain creatures, but in general it wasn't a very kill something rinse and repeat type of game.
Mostly because of the player interaction and virtual economy. That and it wasn't that hard to become a 7xGM (what you would call a level 60 character that is maxed out) with maybe 3-4 months worth of casual play. I'd dare say you could get to be 7xGM in 2 if you macroed and played hard core.
Being such a big fan of UO kept me from being able to get into any other MMOGs since I did not like the grind and level systems.
Take away the leveling and XP and replace it with a skill system and I think you have a good game.
The very existence of a stats/skills system, I believe, means that there will be people who just try to game it as fast as they can, to up their numbers.
I'm waiting for the day for the MMORPG that doesn't show the player his skill/stats.
Snail mail would be private if it got to the desired recipient 100% of the time. About 1/2 of my mail ends up in a neighbor's mailbox (and vice versa).
I've actually had to call the Postal police (or whatever you call them) because either the postman was not delivering the mail or throwing it away. Of course I live in a major city, but my room mate found that a credit card she ordered had been tried in an ATM about 50 miles away so obviously something happened to the mail being delivered.
I'm not sure what became of it... Although, at my new residence, my mail isn't delivered with 100% accuracy.
Praise for the kids for provoking a teacher?
Like a child provoking a soldier to shoot them by throwing rocks in the middle east?
Just because someone provokes you doesn't absolve you of your actions afterwards.
If I met you in a bar and called your mother funny names and you punched me in the face, and the entire thing was filmed (from the words about your mother to the fist in my face) you would still be arrested and I would still win a civil suit because you responded poorly to provocation.*
The key here is that just because you are provoked, doesn't excuse you from responding in such a way.
*Yeah there is a state in which the law actually lets you defend your honor, but lets hope I'm smart enough to not start a fight in that state.
More than anything, kids today need to learn respect for authority.
No. More than anything, kids need to respect others on an individual basis because they are a person too rather than respect because they are an authoritarian figure.
In fact kids should question authority, and respect only the person because they are their equal and that all human beings need to be respected.
When you talk of authority, you start getting into master and slave arguments.
And I for one believe men are created equal and needed to be treated equal. When you teach someone to respect authority, it usually means fear authority or see what you can get away with when they aren't looking.
If you respect someone not because you fear them, but you want to treat them with decency then you won't act like a complete jerk to your fellow man when the roles reverse.
One is the fact that kids were recording what was going on privately, i.e. these two teachers fighting. Sure one can argue it was done in public, but still.
Not only was it in public, but they are technically public servants employed by the government.
Any actions, words, or behavior you do on or off the job is and will be scrutinized.
Of course whether this is a good thing or bad thing depends on the person.
Let's see... we want to design a neural net that predicts the summed trading behavior of, oh, several tens of millions of human brains?
I hate to say this, but you give the human race too much credit. Those tens of millions of human brains tend to think in herds. Often to the chagrin of the hand full of people who sell short and make a profit.
Playing the stock market is like out running hungry grizzly bears. You don't need to faster than the bear (the market) but you do need to be faster any one else with you (the other investors).
While the idea of stock picking algorithms is neat; market history suggest it won't work a a way to predict performance.
I sort of thought up how one would basically create such a program. You couldn't simply write one but you would have to "evolve" it.
First take a computer program and have it randomly pick One million criteria from Google news. Then based off that criteria, randomly pick and choose a stock to buy or sell. Now repeat a few billion times. Then kill off the programs that fail to "virtually" make any money (you would not be able to make money off this for a while).
Then duplicate the programs that "made" money and then have each of the billion program have code to modify the criteria and or subtract or add how many criteria you are going to look at on Google. (I mean we don't know if the optimal information the program has to look at is less or more)
So rinse, repeat, and eventually after a few hundred trillion instances you will eventually evolve a program that can look at the information on Google and decide what stocks to pick.
However... My idea will take a very expensive super computer and a direct connection to Google data center so I think the only people who would pull this off would be Google themselves...
Hey wait a minute!
Perhaps there is code to not work if it detects the User Agent for anything other than FF2.0?
If I say that whatever everyone else calls blue is in fact called red, then I made a definition.
Fair enough.
But if you disagree with the everyone else in the world, then you risk them defining you as insane.
Although, without insanity, life would be very boring.
Lets see now.. democratically deciding a definition? hmm...
To be fair, all definitions are democratically decided even if no one votes on them.
If tomorrow everyone on the earth decided to call what we use to call the color blue as the color red... Then tomorrow the sky would be red.
If tomorrow everyone decided that a yard (or meter or what have you) is not 3 feet but now four and we adjusted all our documentation and measurement tools to reflect this then it would be so.
Heck... We could even call the Antarctic hot and the Sahara cold as long as we all agreed that the term hot meant one would "burn" to death of hypothermia and you would "freeze" to death of heat exhaustion.
Really... Definitions themselves do not imply or detail facts.
Calling something a moon or a planet does not change its behavior or physical properties, but it does change how we as humans relate to said objects and property behaviors.
Of course we don't go around changing things willy nilly because it is hard to get everyone to agree all at the same time. Although... Come to think of it... Since we are not all speaking English on this world of ours, we might not be really agreeing as much as we think.
Sometimes terms in other languages used for the same object or property, doesn't have the same exact meaning as another languages word for the same thing.
They thought she looked pretty so they went and bought some condoms and dug up her grave.
Yeah, the last thing anyone would want would be to get a dead girl pregnant.
? If no one but the original poster holds responsibility for the content -- even when it's known to be false and defamatory -- the opportunities for intentional, unfettered smear campaigns would seem to be enormous.
I suppose the best solution is to play the game in reverse.
Either make it so that regardless of claims that no matter how bad the libel, that your image won't change. Or perhaps use your own methods to call the source into question.
The problem of society that sees false information as negative towards their image is not the false information but the current image. That may not make sense until you call into question the validity of popular opinion.
If you set about a campaign to make someone look like they eat babies, and the public believes the anonymous source and tarnishes the targets image, then the target should be in a position to make it so that his reputation wouldn't change regardless if he really was eating babies.
I don't know if that made sense... And to pull this off is rather complex, but if if I were a politician of high importance and I saw on the news tomorrow that a source was saying that I eat babies. I would counter with a non-denial that babies are too high in fat and bad for your health without actually denying that I eat babies.
And that if I did eat babies, it would be unpatriotic to question such a practice and those who cut and run want to given the enemy an advantage by letting morals get in the way on the war on terror.
Of course, I am not a politician.
However, I would also point out, even if you do sue for libel and win, the damage is done and you still loose. Information war is a nasty business.
In reality, if you have no reputation to begin with then you won't be a target. Which is why you need other people for replaceable figure heads which you can simply use as human PR shields and replace them as they get tarnished.
No I haven't been planning a career as CEO, President for Life, or cult leader... Why do you ask?
I know this was a non-serious response to your serious question, but the point of the matter is that even with the ability to sue people for libel, it is pointless when you are a target of a concerted and organized group. The best defense is to put yourself into situations where your reputation does not matter and you can do things unilaterally without the need for anyone else's approval.