For reference, see: Touch and Human Sexuality. It's thick going, but one sentence in the paper jumped out at me:
I just read this paper. Now I'm sorry I posted in this thread already, so I can't use the moderator points I have to up your post. Hopefully someone will. That paper is a very good read. Very interesting. It explains a lot. Everyone should read it.
Also interesting is the link between low levels of infant/child touch in a society and high levels of violence.
Indeed, I think that's one of the most interesting aspects of it. One of its most important references on that topic, Body Pleasure And The Origins Of Violence is on the net. I just read it, as well. An equally good read.
"1) Most of the Diagnosis that attribute a illness to some chemical imbalance are speculative, and do not specify the chemical imbalance. They are more the result of a system design for the profit of your friendly neighbohood drug company."
I dare you to prove this. Is this why pharmaceuticals spend BILLIONS on research, and labs employing thousands of scientists and doctors? I'm not trying to exonerate the big fat pharmaceutical companies, but after they spend those BILLIONS, they have to make it up somehow. They're not selling sugar pills you know.
His first sentence is perfectly true. For example, take someone diagnosed with depression and prescribed an SSRI. The diagnosis was made by seeing if some set of criteria applies to the patient. Then they're given the drug. The doctor doesn't do a test for neurotransmitter levels. They pick which SSRI and what dosage to use essentially at random as far as I know. They're not picking one because, e.g. it's x times more selective for serotonin than it is for dopamine. I don't even think there's a reliable way to translate that into what effect it will have on the patient.
As for ADD, it is a proven and diagnosable disease, resulting from a lack of some chemical in the brain. The lack of the chemical makes patients brains feel like they need more activity and they become fidgety, distracted, inattentive, etc.
I think the concern is that children are being drugged just for acting like normal children. Sitting still for 8 hours a day is something people have only been doing recently. It's no surprise that children fidget. School is boring, so they're going to be easily distracted and be inattentive. The symtoms of ADD are very similar to being a normal child. There's a real disorder there, but I don't think everyone prescribed Ritalin has it.
Go take some methylphenidate, or another decent stimulant (certainly not caffeine, which just plain sucks). You'll be able to concentrate better too. It's not like it's just the cure for a disease, it will have the same affect on anyone.
The American Medical Association changed its ethical guidelines Tuesday to let doctors notify the Department of Motor Vehicles in their states of patients with medical conditions that could make them unsafe drivers.
The new policy makes public safety a priority over the confidentiality of patients with conditions such as senile dementia or alcoholism.
This is incredibly bad. I don't know what criteria the government uses to take away the license of someone who has committed no crime, but it seems that senile dementia and alcoholism either already qualify, or very well may someday.
So how about depression? Or if you're prescribed a drug that may affect your reflexes? (e.g., opiates and benzos). Manic depression maybe? Someone here was describing some dangerous driving they've done during manic episodes.
Why does alcoholism even qualify? Are alcoholics incapable of driving sober? What about other drug addicts? What about other drug users who aren't really addicts, but someone thinks they are (the drug war "all drug users are drug addicts" line). How about when your doctor does a few extra tests on your urine sample? They've already decided to throw away the doctor-patient confidentiality, it's a slippery slope after that.
The doctor not reporting your condition to anyone else (especially the government!) seems to be the most important part of the doctor-patient confidentiality.
And the fact that my post was moderated down shows the real problem with the moderation system, and why I always read at -1. I upset some religious wacko with my explanation of why I usually say nothing to religious wackos.
I love the way any time a topic like this comes on/. a bunch of bigots take the opportunity to rail against Christianity, and religion in general. Welcome to/., forum for tolerance (laugh) I'm a christian, and believe it or not, I don't go around on forums telling athiests how much they suck. If I respect your beliefs, shouldn't you respect mine?
1) Many Christians do go around telling atheists how much we suck. Many Christians do not respect our beliefs. The anger you see is largely in response to this.
2) I do not respect your beliefs. I am confident that you are wrong. I only pretend to respect your beliefs for the same reason that I constantly tolerate people saying wrong things. (misstatements of fact about a variety of topics). They won't want to hear what I have to say, if they bother to listen to it they won't believe it, and it will just start an argument that will leave both of us hating each other. I have nothing to gain, it is not my responsibility to educate other people, and there's no reason to try when the probability of failure is so high.
I know you don't understand, so here's some help. Take someone who's beliefs you have no respect whatsoever for. Someone who you think is thoroughly wrong in some regard. Perhaps even someone you consider insane. Perhaps even me. Think about how much you respect their beliefs that you know to be completely wrong. Well that's how much I respect yours.
I'll treat you theists with respect, but I sure don't respect your religion or your religious beliefs. I only tolerate them so that we can get along, and because you usually have redeeming qualities that far outweigh the bizarre religious ideas. And I have sympathy for you only believing what you were taught your whole life.
Why would God give us the ability to create life if he felt we shouldn't do it? Either creating life is something special for only God to do, or it's not. If it's not, then what's the problem with it? (the above sentences are not meant to imply the existance of any supreme being).
How is his having actual child porn on his computer consistant with his thinking it was somebody playing a 13yr old? If he had the 13 year old girls on his computer, that makes it more likely that he's into 13 year olds, not people playing 13 year olds. I've seen pics of older people dressing up as youngsters, I'd believe that was his thing if he had pics like that.
I'm not saying that he's not into 13 year olds, if he is into 13 year olds then kiddie porn and adults pretending to be 13 year olds may be his outlet for that.
We have little information about this case, what we do know does not rule out this possibility. We should wait for more information before drawing any conclusions.
And the child porn he does have may in fact be adults pretending to be children - this (along with drawings/cartoons) qualifies as child porn under the law (at least in some areas), as far as I know. I don't think any information was released about the exact nature of it.
Lately, however, I've seen a lot of "stupidity controls" go into place. These will allow the card companies to profit even more off the stupid.
They allow the card companies to profit off of everyone. I have an AT&T Universal card (platinum, no less) - they received a payment a *day* late (they probably received it on time, but banks like to credit payments a day late if they're received after 9am or so, no doubt this gets them around some law), so they lowered my limit to the amount I had on the card, charged me a late fee, which put me over the limit, and then charged me an over-the-limit fee. They didn't care one bit when I complained. (because, of course, I signed away all my rights in the customer agreement).
Speaking of taking responsibilty on the net, I read yesterday that former Infoseek head and now jailbird Patrick McNaughton, who was caught crossing state lines to have sex with a minor he met on the net, is going to base his case on the fact that the net chat room was some sort of fantasy zone and he thought he was meeting somebody who was "role-playing" a 13 year old girl, not a real 13 year old. This is exactly the same buck-passing that is going on here. Both the gambler guy and McNaughton made the decision to do what they did but they refuse to take responsibilty for it because it was on the net.
Why do you so thoroughly doubt his defense? Consider that the supposed 13-year-old girl *was* in fact an adult man. Why is it impossible to believe that the undercover officer may have accidentally dropped many clues as to his true age and sex? Even the way he talked would be a strong clue.
Hell, do you even expect police to act entirely honorably when they're setting someone up?
Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers),
That seems equally consistant with him thinking it was someone playing a 13 year old. It's not as if he would go along with that if he weren't in to that sort of thing.
There's plenty of room for questions about the case based on the stories in the media. How can you condemn him already without any real information?
now hopefully people can feel more secure with their credit card on line.
Why? I guess if you're worried about people's irrational feelings..
One of the most labor and resource intensive ways to get credit cards is by sniffing 40 bit SSL traffic and decrypting that. I wouldn't be surprised if it has never happened. There would be no motive for it.
In most situations, the 40 bit SSL connection will be the most secure the card number is at any point in its journey.
A more reasonable way for someone to get your credit card is by stealing a stack of carbons from their retail job. Or copying the database off of the "secure" webserver.
And even then, it doesn't matter to you. It's the bank's problem. You have laws protecting you, and will find it very easy to get the charges removed. Considering how laughably insecure credit cards are, it's obvious that the banks don't care too much.
So when doing things to aid a business, one should feel a moral responsibility towards the employees of its competetors?
Or is this just only in the case when a business is being given an unfair advantage? In that case, it's OK to hurt these people when playing by a certain set of rules? Then how do you choose these rules?
OK, I'll complain about some too
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Dumb Laws
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Really that website is so stupid that I can't believe they bothered to register a domain for it. I find it completely devoid of any humor. Like, Florida laws: If an elephant is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fee has to be paid just as it would for a vehicle. An example of the law instead of the actual law - I expect that this covers any animal, and was intended for horses. Having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal. Ditto the last comments.:) When having sex, only the missionary position is legal. and Oral sex is illegal. These laws, or similar ones, exist in many states. I don't know if Florida is one of them, though.
And really, the rest of the alleged FL state laws don't even seem as if they are real at all.
One of the cities listed is "Tampa Bay". That's not a city. There are numerous cities/towns in the Tampa Bay area.
Some other places.. Alaska state: It is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane. Fairbanks: It is considered an offense to feed alcoholic beverages to a moose.
These would be considered some sort of animal cruelty in most places.
Rhode Island: Coasting downhill in your car with your transmission in neutral, or with the clutch disengaged.
This is illegal in most if not all states, presumably it comes from the days of drum brakes, when brake fade while going down a long hill might actually be a concern.
and: It is considered an offense to throw pickle juice on a trolley.
Wouldn't this be considered an offense in most places?
Providence: There is not an appeals process for exemtion of property tax due to a disability or poverty.
I wasn't aware that any place would let you do this. Sounds like someone's complaint.
They do ask for submissions and corrections. I can't decide whether to submit some fake ones (they obviously do no checking for correctness, let alone plausibility or humor) or a big list of corrections just to see what they say.
the next generation of chips after Pentium should have been "Sexium" followed by Septium.
I know you're trying to be funny, but that really old joke has always annoyed me. "Hexium" comes after Pentium - "pent" and "hex" are Greek prefixes. If it's hard to remember, just think of pentagons and hexagons.
I so rarely use altavista anymore, I like google much better.
I just gave google a shot, and it's just become my new favorite. I did a few searches, and all turned up good results on the first screenful.
I used to have such good luck with altavista that I would use it all the time, and only use others when altavista completely failed me. Usually the others would fail me as well in that case. But I've noticed a steady decline in how easy it is to search the web. (It's not Altavista's fault, and I don't know why Google turned up such good results for me - maybe just random chance.) It's the way things have always been, but it used to be manageable. Any simple search just turns up far too many hits - I may have to go through dozens of screenfulls of hits, and load dozens of pages to look for what I want. Most of the hits were by accident, or are not what I want at all (e.g. I want information on something, and all I can find is people trying to sell me one). I can guess at words or phrases that will be included in the page I want, but they're just wild guesses and I'm relying on luck. It can be impossible to find certain pieces of simple information that I'm sure are out there.
Some things are nearly impossible to search for, a single letter, an acronym with multiple meanings, a product that is also a foreign word. Sometimes it's nice how altavista replaces - and / with space, sometimes you really do need to explicitly match that - or/, and then you're out of luck.
As the net grows, there will be more information on it, and it will be harder to find. I'm not sure that there's any way to solve the problem. More advanced search engines would definately help - are there even any that support regex searches?
As I understand it they still can't make the initial seizure without a court order. (ok, ok, ok, or catch you with enough drugs)
I don't know what the actual laws allow them to do, but the reality of it is that people have had cash seized simply because they were driving around with too much cash.
I've never heard of any threshold for "enough" drugs to make you subject for forfeiture. There is a whole list of crimes that being suspected of makes you subject to forfeiture. http://www.fear.org has a bunch of information about civil forfeiture.
In case you didn't know it does require a court decision to deprive a person in the US of property.
Well, not really - civil forfeiture. The government can take your property, and you have to prove that it wasn't purchased with drug profits to get it back.
But in this case, it would have been pretty unlikely that they would try that. They wouldn't have to. The FBI could easily create or invent some reason to raid the business. They gave in not because of any specific legal threat, but because the FBI is a very powerful bully.
Re:Kicked from #Perl for asking a question?
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Interface Zen
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I've never been in #perl, but it's pretty standard on IRC to get kicked for joining a channel you've never been to before and assuming that the people there want to answer your stupid questions.
You wouldn't consider it rather harsh if you had to deal with 10 people a day asking questions that they could have found the answer to on their own. It's rude, as if they think that their time is much more valuable than the people they are asking.
Most IRC channels are not there to help people. That would get very boring very fast.
Of course, postfix is not a big name yet, like sendmail, and they're already sponsored.
Shortly after postfix was released there was a big fuss about the license - it was revokable. I think this prevented a lot of people from using it. I considered the software unusable because of this, I didn't even bother to try it out.
I just checked, and the change log says that as of postfix-19990906, the license does not carry the "controversial termination clause". I skimmed the license, and it was obviously written by a lot of lawyers, I don't know if any have decoded it yet.
It's got a really weird paragraph. Under "7. GENERAL":
If Recipient institutes patent litigation against a Contributor with respect to a patent applicable to software (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), then any patent licenses granted by that Contributor to such Recipient under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. In addition, If Recipient institutes patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Program itself (excluding combinations of the Program with other software or hardware) infringes such Recipient's patent(s), then such Recipient's rights granted under Section 2(b) shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
They define contributor as "IBM and any other entity that distributes the Program". I -think- that this doesn't matter because the agreement doesn't actually grant any patent licenses. I'm just worried about that paragraph hurting people trying to defend themselves against software patents. (especially the "including a cross-claim or counterclaim", my understanding is that this is standard in patent suits).
I'm replying to myself to point out something I just noticed that further supports my point. Bruce Perens said: Guys, I am having a real bad morning and I spoke too soon. I meant to open a discussion on a mailing list, not to be on top of Slashdot by sending one email. Everybody else on the list said it's too soon for a lawsuit.
So there we have some evidence that 1) at least once, someone has posted to a mailing list with the intent of having a discussion and not creating a news story and 2) that post is the very one that sparked this discussion.
This should at least somewhat support my point that people generally post to mailing lists with the intention of discussing something with people on the list.
Since I'm quoting Bruce Perens at the same time as criticizing someone else for quoting him, I should point out that I'm reposting his words in the exact same forum that he originally posted them in.
Why can't a series of unmanned rockets leaving turbulence all around jam this?
This would probably work against any kind of aircraft detection. There's a few problems with it that I can see. The enemy knows that something is out there, even if they don't know which target is the real one. They may then be able to determine which is the real target by its size. The unmanned rockets have to be computer-controlled to fly around in a reasonable manner so they're not obviously decoys. If they only travel in a straight line at a constant speed, and the enemy can determine their speed, position, and trajectory, they can easily determine where they were fired from.
The difference between radio/tv/newspaper and mailing lists/usenet/web discussions/IRC is the intent of the speaker/author. Someone speaking in the broadcast media probably understands that they are communicating to a large number of people, and they probably intend to reach a large number of people. Someone speaking in one of the other forums I listed probably intends only to communicate with a particular set, although perhaps a very large set, of people. They probably want to have a discussion with those people, whereas the examples you listed are all one-way communications. That's important in considering the intent of the author. Someone speaking on TV has probably given some thought to what they're about to say. Someone posting to a mailing list may have given it no more thought than a statement to a small, private group of real-life associates.
Note that I said "probably" a bunch of times. Of couse it's not possible to accurately guess the intent of the author. But it is highly likely that someone writing to a mailing list does not intend there to be news stories created about what they said. They may be OK with it, but you can't just make that assumption - there's a substantial probability that it is wrong.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said in a mailing list without consulting them first. Someone who posts to a mailing list is probably only intending to communicate with the members of that list. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
The traditional media commits all sorts of terrible offenses. I don't think that using their actions as justification is such a good idea. How do you draw the line between publishing gossip about well-known public people and some of the most grievous offenses of the media (e.g. simply lying in stories)?
Slashdot Mirror
I just read this paper. Now I'm sorry I posted in this thread already, so I can't use the moderator points I have to up your post. Hopefully someone will. That paper is a very good read. Very interesting. It explains a lot. Everyone should read it.
Also interesting is the link between low levels of infant/child touch in a society and high levels of violence.
Indeed, I think that's one of the most interesting aspects of it. One of its most important references on that topic, Body Pleasure And The Origins Of Violence is on the net. I just read it, as well. An equally good read.
I dare you to prove this. Is this why pharmaceuticals spend BILLIONS on research, and labs employing thousands of scientists and doctors? I'm not trying to exonerate the big fat pharmaceutical companies, but after they spend those BILLIONS, they have to make it up somehow. They're not selling sugar pills you know.
His first sentence is perfectly true. For example, take someone diagnosed with depression and prescribed an SSRI. The diagnosis was made by seeing if some set of criteria applies to the patient. Then they're given the drug. The doctor doesn't do a test for neurotransmitter levels. They pick which SSRI and what dosage to use essentially at random as far as I know. They're not picking one because, e.g. it's x times more selective for serotonin than it is for dopamine. I don't even think there's a reliable way to translate that into what effect it will have on the patient.
I think the concern is that children are being drugged just for acting like normal children. Sitting still for 8 hours a day is something people have only been doing recently. It's no surprise that children fidget. School is boring, so they're going to be easily distracted and be inattentive. The symtoms of ADD are very similar to being a normal child. There's a real disorder there, but I don't think everyone prescribed Ritalin has it.
Go take some methylphenidate, or another decent stimulant (certainly not caffeine, which just plain sucks). You'll be able to concentrate better too. It's not like it's just the cure for a disease, it will have the same affect on anyone.
Yep, it's gone now. This article says:
This is incredibly bad. I don't know what criteria the government uses to take away the license of someone who has committed no crime, but it seems that senile dementia and alcoholism either already qualify, or very well may someday.So how about depression? Or if you're prescribed a drug that may affect your reflexes? (e.g., opiates and benzos). Manic depression maybe? Someone here was describing some dangerous driving they've done during manic episodes.
Why does alcoholism even qualify? Are alcoholics incapable of driving sober? What about other drug addicts? What about other drug users who aren't really addicts, but someone thinks they are (the drug war "all drug users are drug addicts" line). How about when your doctor does a few extra tests on your urine sample? They've already decided to throw away the doctor-patient confidentiality, it's a slippery slope after that.
The doctor not reporting your condition to anyone else (especially the government!) seems to be the most important part of the doctor-patient confidentiality.
And the fact that my post was moderated down shows the real problem with the moderation system, and why I always read at -1. I upset some religious wacko with my explanation of why I usually say nothing to religious wackos.
1) Many Christians do go around telling atheists how much we suck. Many Christians do not respect our beliefs. The anger you see is largely in response to this.
2) I do not respect your beliefs. I am confident that you are wrong. I only pretend to respect your beliefs for the same reason that I constantly tolerate people saying wrong things. (misstatements of fact about a variety of topics). They won't want to hear what I have to say, if they bother to listen to it they won't believe it, and it will just start an argument that will leave both of us hating each other. I have nothing to gain, it is not my responsibility to educate other people, and there's no reason to try when the probability of failure is so high.
I know you don't understand, so here's some help. Take someone who's beliefs you have no respect whatsoever for. Someone who you think is thoroughly wrong in some regard. Perhaps even someone you consider insane. Perhaps even me. Think about how much you respect their beliefs that you know to be completely wrong. Well that's how much I respect yours.
I'll treat you theists with respect, but I sure don't respect your religion or your religious beliefs. I only tolerate them so that we can get along, and because you usually have redeeming qualities that far outweigh the bizarre religious ideas. And I have sympathy for you only believing what you were taught your whole life.
Why would God give us the ability to create life if he felt we shouldn't do it? Either creating life is something special for only God to do, or it's not. If it's not, then what's the problem with it?
(the above sentences are not meant to imply the existance of any supreme being).
I'm not saying that he's not into 13 year olds, if he is into 13 year olds then kiddie porn and adults pretending to be 13 year olds may be his outlet for that.
We have little information about this case, what we do know does not rule out this possibility. We should wait for more information before drawing any conclusions.
And the child porn he does have may in fact be adults pretending to be children - this (along with drawings/cartoons) qualifies as child porn under the law (at least in some areas), as far as I know. I don't think any information was released about the exact nature of it.
They allow the card companies to profit off of everyone. I have an AT&T Universal card (platinum, no less) - they received a payment a *day* late (they probably received it on time, but banks like to credit payments a day late if they're received after 9am or so, no doubt this gets them around some law), so they lowered my limit to the amount I had on the card, charged me a late fee, which put me over the limit, and then charged me an over-the-limit fee. They didn't care one bit when I complained. (because, of course, I signed away all my rights in the customer agreement).
Why do you so thoroughly doubt his defense? Consider that the supposed 13-year-old girl *was* in fact an adult man. Why is it impossible to believe that the undercover officer may have accidentally dropped many clues as to his true age and sex? Even the way he talked would be a strong clue.
Hell, do you even expect police to act entirely honorably when they're setting someone up?
Just because Patrick McNaughton "thought" he was only meeting somebody playing a 13 year old (which I doubt because he had child porn on his computers),
That seems equally consistant with him thinking it was someone playing a 13 year old. It's not as if he would go along with that if he weren't in to that sort of thing.
There's plenty of room for questions about the case based on the stories in the media. How can you condemn him already without any real information?
Why? I guess if you're worried about people's irrational feelings..
One of the most labor and resource intensive ways to get credit cards is by sniffing 40 bit SSL traffic and decrypting that. I wouldn't be surprised if it has never happened. There would be no motive for it.
In most situations, the 40 bit SSL connection will be the most secure the card number is at any point in its journey.
A more reasonable way for someone to get your credit card is by stealing a stack of carbons from their retail job. Or copying the database off of the "secure" webserver.
And even then, it doesn't matter to you. It's the bank's problem. You have laws protecting you, and will find it very easy to get the charges removed. Considering how laughably insecure credit cards are, it's obvious that the banks don't care too much.
So when doing things to aid a business, one should feel a moral responsibility towards the employees of its competetors?
Or is this just only in the case when a business is being given an unfair advantage? In that case, it's OK to hurt these people when playing by a certain set of rules? Then how do you choose these rules?
Really that website is so stupid that I can't believe they bothered to register a domain for it.
:)
I find it completely devoid of any humor.
Like, Florida laws:
If an elephant is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fee has to be paid just as it would for a vehicle.
An example of the law instead of the actual law - I expect that this covers any animal, and was intended for horses.
Having sexual relations with a porcupine is illegal.
Ditto the last comments.
When having sex, only the missionary position is legal.
and
Oral sex is illegal.
These laws, or similar ones, exist in many states. I don't know if Florida is one of them, though.
And really, the rest of the alleged FL state laws don't even seem as if they are real at all.
One of the cities listed is "Tampa Bay". That's not a city. There are numerous cities/towns in the Tampa Bay area.
Some other places..
Alaska state:
It is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.
Fairbanks:
It is considered an offense to feed alcoholic beverages to a moose.
These would be considered some sort of animal cruelty in most places.
Rhode Island:
Coasting downhill in your car with your transmission in neutral, or with the clutch disengaged.
This is illegal in most if not all states, presumably it comes from the days of drum brakes, when brake fade while going down a long hill might actually be a concern.
and:
It is considered an offense to throw pickle juice on a trolley.
Wouldn't this be considered an offense in most places?
Providence:
There is not an appeals process for exemtion of property tax due to a disability or poverty.
I wasn't aware that any place would let you do this. Sounds like someone's complaint.
They do ask for submissions and corrections. I can't decide whether to submit some fake ones (they obviously do no checking for correctness, let alone plausibility or humor) or a big list of corrections just to see what they say.
Where I'm from, everyone has heard of pentiums, pentagons, and hexagons.
I know you're trying to be funny, but that really old joke has always annoyed me. "Hexium" comes after Pentium - "pent" and "hex" are Greek prefixes. If it's hard to remember, just think of pentagons and hexagons.
I just gave google a shot, and it's just become my new favorite. I did a few searches, and all turned up good results on the first screenful.
I used to have such good luck with altavista that I would use it all the time, and only use others when altavista completely failed me. Usually the others would fail me as well in that case. But I've noticed a steady decline in how easy it is to search the web. (It's not Altavista's fault, and I don't know why Google turned up such good results for me - maybe just random chance.) It's the way things have always been, but it used to be manageable. Any simple search just turns up far too many hits - I may have to go through dozens of screenfulls of hits, and load dozens of pages to look for what I want. Most of the hits were by accident, or are not what I want at all (e.g. I want information on something, and all I can find is people trying to sell me one). I can guess at words or phrases that will be included in the page I want, but they're just wild guesses and I'm relying on luck. It can be impossible to find certain pieces of simple information that I'm sure are out there.
Some things are nearly impossible to search for, a single letter, an acronym with multiple meanings, a product that is also a foreign word. Sometimes it's nice how altavista replaces - and / with space, sometimes you really do need to explicitly match that - or /, and then you're out of luck.
As the net grows, there will be more information on it, and it will be harder to find. I'm not sure that there's any way to solve the problem. More advanced search engines would definately help - are there even any that support regex searches?
Wow, that's quite an error message! Over 200 words, and at no point did it give out any information about the actual problem.
And the sad thing is, that's the way things are going. Longer, more confusing error messages, with less information.
I don't know what the actual laws allow them to do, but the reality of it is that people have had cash seized simply because they were driving around with too much cash.
I've never heard of any threshold for "enough" drugs to make you subject for forfeiture. There is a whole list of crimes that being suspected of makes you subject to forfeiture. http://www.fear.org has a bunch of information about civil forfeiture.
Well, not really - civil forfeiture. The government can take your property, and you have to prove that it wasn't purchased with drug profits to get it back.
But in this case, it would have been pretty unlikely that they would try that. They wouldn't have to. The FBI could easily create or invent some reason to raid the business. They gave in not because of any specific legal threat, but because the FBI is a very powerful bully.
I've never been in #perl, but it's pretty standard on IRC to get kicked for joining a channel you've never been to before and assuming that the people there want to answer your stupid questions.
You wouldn't consider it rather harsh if you had to deal with 10 people a day asking questions that they could have found the answer to on their own. It's rude, as if they think that their time is much more valuable than the people they are asking.
Most IRC channels are not there to help people. That would get very boring very fast.
Shortly after postfix was released there was a big fuss about the license - it was revokable. I think this prevented a lot of people from using it. I considered the software unusable because of this, I didn't even bother to try it out.
I just checked, and the change log says that as of postfix-19990906, the license does not carry the "controversial termination clause". I skimmed the license, and it was obviously written by a lot of lawyers, I don't know if any have decoded it yet.
It's got a really weird paragraph. Under "7. GENERAL":
They define contributor as "IBM and any other entity that distributes the Program". I -think- that this doesn't matter because the agreement doesn't actually grant any patent licenses. I'm just worried about that paragraph hurting people trying to defend themselves against software patents. (especially the "including a cross-claim or counterclaim", my understanding is that this is standard in patent suits).
So there we have some evidence that 1) at least once, someone has posted to a mailing list with the intent of having a discussion and not creating a news story and 2) that post is the very one that sparked this discussion.
This should at least somewhat support my point that people generally post to mailing lists with the intention of discussing something with people on the list.
Since I'm quoting Bruce Perens at the same time as criticizing someone else for quoting him, I should point out that I'm reposting his words in the exact same forum that he originally posted them in.
This would probably work against any kind of aircraft detection. There's a few problems with it that I can see. The enemy knows that something is out there, even if they don't know which target is the real one. They may then be able to determine which is the real target by its size. The unmanned rockets have to be computer-controlled to fly around in a reasonable manner so they're not obviously decoys. If they only travel in a straight line at a constant speed, and the enemy can determine their speed, position, and trajectory, they can easily determine where they were fired from.
The difference between radio/tv/newspaper and mailing lists/usenet/web discussions/IRC is the intent of the speaker/author. Someone speaking in the broadcast media probably understands that they are communicating to a large number of people, and they probably intend to reach a large number of people. Someone speaking in one of the other forums I listed probably intends only to communicate with a particular set, although perhaps a very large set, of people. They probably want to have a discussion with those people, whereas the examples you listed are all one-way communications. That's important in considering the intent of the author. Someone speaking on TV has probably given some thought to what they're about to say. Someone posting to a mailing list may have given it no more thought than a statement to a small, private group of real-life associates.
Note that I said "probably" a bunch of times. Of couse it's not possible to accurately guess the intent of the author. But it is highly likely that someone writing to a mailing list does not intend there to be news stories created about what they said. They may be OK with it, but you can't just make that assumption - there's a substantial probability that it is wrong.
It's wrong to make a news article out of something someone said in a mailing list without consulting them first. Someone who posts to a mailing list is probably only intending to communicate with the members of that list. If you want to widely redistribute what they've said, you should check with them first. That's just courtesy for other people.
The traditional media commits all sorts of terrible offenses. I don't think that using their actions as justification is such a good idea. How do you draw the line between publishing gossip about well-known public people and some of the most grievous offenses of the media (e.g. simply lying in stories)?