One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
You're completely right...but this indicates a much deeper issue than most police forces and governments are prepared to address:
You can't trace internet users.
Tor has been a military-strength proof-of-concept of this fact, but it can be seen in many other ways as well. If you route through a non-logging proxy, you will be traced to the proxy's IP, not your own. If you connect to a wireless network, you will be traced to the network gateway's IP. If you connect from a library, you will be traced to the library's IP.
ISPs, the police, and governments cling to the notion that an internet connection is like a street address - that is, it can be linked to a physical space and a specific person. As the scenarios above (and many others) demonstrate, this is completely false.
Furthermore, conducting investigations under the assupmtion that any abuse originating from an IP is the absolute responsibility of whoever legally "owns" that IP can easily make trouble for many law-abiding people. If you have a grudge against me, all you have to do is send a bomb threat using my IP address, and bingo, I'm under a federal Homeland Security investigation! Yes, there are meatspace analogs to this type of prank, but they require such advanced planning and effort that they aren't committed often at all. Using someone else's IP, however, is a fact of the internet.
There are many people who would like to preserve a system where IPs map infalliably to responsible "owners", who can be held accountable for any activity from their address. They insist on "tough love", that IP owners should be punished simply because they failed to secure their networks, or allowed someone else to use them.
While I personally think that this is a bad idea because it eliminates the potential for anonymity on the internet, the question is moot. People can't protect their networks. People allow their IPs to be used for abuse constantly (knowingly or otherwise), and this will not change. The sooner the establishment learns this, the more trouble they'll save themselves and everyone else.
Well, since you haven't said what country you live in, it's pretty hard to argue. I suggest, however, that no matter where you live, you try getting seriously involved in a political or social movement which makes life difficult for some extremely powerful entity. This may include
A) A powerful sovereign nation, most likely the one you live in (though not always)
B) A vastly wealthy and resourceful international corporation
C) A massive religious or political movement (usually the one in power in your country)
Dedicate your time - no, not your free time, like your LIFE - to disrupting business-as-usual for this entity. Of course, you should always obey the letter of the law, using only legally permitted methods to advance your movement. Watch your movement blossom, win the minds of many people everywhere, threatening the very existence of such a powerful entity.
And see how long it takes for the entity to do everything in it's power - including, believe it or not, illegal (maybe even unconstitutional) things - to neutralize you.
Hey man, forget about graphics...some of the most artistic games use none at all. Ever played an interactive-novel style game? Although some can be caveman simple ("->GET YE FLASK"), some of the writing in those things is really top-shelf.
Internet or BBS-based MUSH/MUX/MU*s (not MUDs, mind you) are often even better, as they involve the creative and often quite skilled collaboration of a bunch of writers together. I've read a few MU* logs that could be polished up and sold as a decent novel.
You jest, but the author of the best rogue-like game, ADOM, is working on a massively multiplayer version called Jade. I think there's a market of nostalgic text-based RPG players out there who would be all over this kind of thing. I've always found that as the sexiness of an online game's graphics decline, the number of jackasses decrease and the number of thoughtful, interesting roleplayers increase accordingly.
Why the omnipresent need to analogize the most straightforward things? The world may never know.
A lot of people on Slashdot are computer people, and a lot of us, including me, have to (or just want to) explain technical computer concepts to non-technical people. Most of the concepts are, as you said, pretty fucking simple, but the jargon is very intimidating and counter-intuitive to non-techies.
So, I think there's a tendency for geeks to resort to metaphor as a way of making computer-speak more cute-n-fuzzy, and some people do it so much it becomes reflexive, even in a geek forum where it's obviously inappropriate. After all, everyone here already knows the internet is a series of tubes...
Of course, then there's the inverse (and in my opinion far more clever) geek tendency to use computer metaphors to describe non-computer stuff (like, the road was totally DoSed today because of construction)
I didn't mean for the story to be an endorsement of dirty campaign tricks - I tend to agree that open, honest, and inclusive discussion and debate of ideas is the ideal that we should seek in society. I saw it as a sort of meta-politicking that illustrated a lot of what was wrong with the political scene in the US. In a society where candidates stand to gain most of their support by buying billboards and TV spots showing nothing but their smiling mug and trying to convince you they're your friend, and where the government policies set for the next term are largely determined by whose telemarketers called the most people during dinner, is it such a stretch to think that the focus on such totally non-political bullshit could be manipulated? I would claim that in fact, it's happening all the time and has been the political status quo for decades.
To put it another way, I think the "vulnerability" is that the american public is so fixated on politics as some sort of popularity contest/hero worship that they're more concerned about which candidate annoys them personally and which one "seems like a good guy" than what sort of policies will result from them taking power.
The "exploit" is just someone using this dismal situation to advance their particular agenda. Yeah, it's despicable, but I think it's naive to believe that any political party or movement can have any traction or influence in this country without using this "exploit" to one degree or another. I like the idea of ethical purity, and fighting "evil" with pure "good" and all, but I think the Democratic party would be the first to argue that you have to break a few eggs to make an omlette - that's part of what I hate so much about them.
I know someone who actually got a job doing telemarketing for the Republican party - and took it as her personal mission to get as many hang-ups as possible. Sometimes she would use a really loud annoying voice, sometimes she'd act sickeningly friendly and patronizing, sometimes she'd talk non-stop over the other person as though she was a recording, and if someone was annoyed enough to say "Don't call me again, or I'm voting for the other guy!", she'd make sure they ended up on the "follow up soon" list.
She never got fired - I guess the GOP isn't particularly strict about overseeing their most obnoxious "campaigners". But I bet she persuaded far more people not to vote Republican than than any Democrat telemarketer could have!
And you spell like a trisomic babboon brain-donor.
You've got to be a troll, right? I mean, who else would chew someone out violently for bad spelling and simultaneously spell baboon wrong? Ah well, just to keep the chain of hypocrisy going, I think your post was completely iliterite!
I recommend a good book, about the state of England: "Our Culture, What's Left of It" by Theodore Dalrymple.
Whoa, wait, are you kidding, or did you really think that was a good book? I read some of it, and after the third or fourth time he blamed all the problems of the world on the poor choosing to be so damn poor and the youth being so damn rebellious - I thought to myself "does anybody really take this seriously?" I decided that probably nobody did, and he was just a stodgy old upper-crust guy who didn't like change. And on Slashdot - of all places - I find out I may be mistaken!
Seems like the author of that book would probably approve of the treatment of those kids, don't you think? After all, we've got to instill some respect for authority and the status quo in the little brats before it's too late, right?
Well, most of that was once again just a re-hashing of the libertarian platform, but towards the end you did make an interesting point, and I appreciate it. Regulating net-neutrality will mean that your ISP cannot prioritize VoIP packets over say HTTP packets.
Of course, you, the end user, can prioritize anything you want on your private equipment. If VoIP is "mission critical", just configure your router with QoS to prioritize it, so HTTP traffic doesn't clobber your phone calls. Concerned about latency? Buy a T1, a business DSL line, or some other type of connection with low latency. What ISPs would like to do (I think) is tell you "Okay, your DSL subscription allows you 100 MB of low-latency traffic for VoIP, and the rest will be high-latency." This might be nice since you wouldn't have to buy a dedicated low-latency line just for VoIP, and would be impossible if ISPs had to treat all traffic the same.
This is the only drawback that I've heard of yet, and while I agree that it's an unfortunate inconvenience, I don't think that making a mediocre improvement in VoIP quality is worth setting the internet up for potentially industry-crumbling exploitation and regulation (yes, I said regulation)/by/ monopolistic ISPs. Perhaps there are some (currently one) benefits to allowing AT&T and Bell total power over QoS, but I still don't see how they even begin to outweigh the very serious threats to both freedom of speech and the thriving electronic free markets that require a fair environment to compete properly in.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I was complaining about in the GP's post. All I'm hearing is theory, theory, theory. I/agree/ with the general principle that we should avoid allowing people who don't understand technology very well to make decisions about it. I/agree/ that "the government that governs least governs best" - at least in theory.
But there are other theories on the other side that are just as strong. You know, like "information wants to be free" or the idea that nobody, not corporations or governments, should get to control or discriminate what information is exchanged on the internet.
The point is that it's all just theory, and being a pragmatist I tend to believe that people only resort to blustering about abstractions when they don't have a solid argument based in practice. My question is this:
What/practical/ problems (as in, actual effects that would have consequences in the real world) can be reasonably forseen if the government requires ISPs to treat all internet traffic equally? I don't need to hear about the general ills of government regulation, just this particular one.
It's clear that you're a free-market advocate, and that's fine, but it seems like net neutrality is a significant and serious enough issue to warrant more than a regurgitation of a general political philosophy. The basic theme I got from your post was "it's foolish for the government to regulate the internet because competition will solve all of the problems".
I'm not saying you're wrong, exactly, just that bringing nothing to the table but a broad ideological theory isn't very helpful or convicing. If you can give some examples or scenarios of the terrible effects of a government-mandated neutrality clause, that might help shift the debate from a contest about whose ivory-tower ideology is better to what real-world solution will be best for everyone on the internet.
Unfortunately, our main man George W. Bush withdrew all US funding from foreign health clinics which advocate for or distribute birth control. So don't look to the US-of-A for any population control leadership any time soon.
trivia fact:
the term "second world country" actually refers to the members (now ex-members) of the Soviet Union. The first/second/third world terminology was popular during the cold war as a way to divide the entire planet into Us (god-fearing democracies), Them (god-hating commies), and All Those Really Poor Fuckers (most of africa, south america and the middle-east).
So, actually, I guess most of the laptops are going to the third world, though they're certainly not going to the most utterly impoverished third world areas.
It's a shame that nobody from the strong atheism camp has replied to your point, although in a way the silence is not surprising. Both religion and science share a philosophical component which is inherently faith-based.
The very idea that our perceptions and measurements are accurate (e.g. our senses aren't lying to us) - and that therefore the scientific method reflects the truth about reality - is a massive leap of faith that the scientific community takes as gospel. True scientists acknowledge this, but when you bring it up to most "scientifically minded" people, they don't have much to say. The entire scientific method and mentality is based around a leap of faith, but it's also based around denying that leaps of faith have a place in science. It's a difficult contradiction that most people feel is best to just ignore.
In short, as you said, faith in some form or another is an integral part of human existence. Some are guilty about their faith, and some embrace it. As long as everyone can stop being belligerent about pushing their particular leaps of faith (scientific AND religious) on others, we'll get along fine.
I suppose it's a waste of time to point it out on such a macho-oriented forum, but women very rarely make false accusations of rape, and really, why would they? The drama, intense fights, secondary accusations, destroyed relationships, and hatred directed at a person who claims to have been raped is very real, and very shitty to go through. And it happens the moment you make the accusation, whether or not it's true. The belief that women accuse men of rape as revenge or to protect their own reputations is ridiculous considering the trauma that such a false accusation would cause the woman.
The fallout of admitting you were raped is so stigmatized that many women who actually have been sexually assaulted remain silent about it for their whole lives.
It's a good general slogan, but I don't think it's quite nuanced enough for this issue. One could just as easily respond with "Keep your damn paws off my Internet, monopolistic execs!".
Of course the libertarian gut reaction of slashdotters says "don't trust the government! regulation = bad", which is also a very respectable general principle or slogan, but sometimes we run into scenarios where we have to choose between government regulation and monopolistic corporate regulation. I claim that although government usually operates against the interests of people, it's not as bad as a profit-seeking monopolistic mega-corp.
Whether or not you believe in the inherent justice of the free market, I don't think anyone can claim that a monopolistic (or duopolistic) corporation can be coerced to play fairly. There are, however, certain (admittedly very flawed) provisions for coercing and overseeing government. You know, things like voting. It's depressing to have to trust the government to handle this issue for us, but until we have a truly decentralized, civilian/small-business maintained internet, there doesn't seem to be a better option.
And my point is that poverty-stricken people (or any people who are unable to care for a child) should not be having children, and anything that results from that lack of planning is their own damn fault.
Something to remember is that in the zany United States of America, it's very possible for a middle class or even rich person to become utterly destitute through no fault of their own. A violent shift in the job market, a serious medical emergency or a major fire/flood in which the insurance company screws you over (happens all the time), getting sued into the ground by the RIAA...these are things that can happen to anyone, and they'd leave anyone incapable of adequately supporting their kids.
So, if poverty is not a valid excuse, and anyone can easily become impoverished through no fault of their own, does that mean nobody's fit to raise kids?
Assuming that your browser is exclusively for displaying and navigating pages on the World Wide Web, then yes, the "http://" is redundant. However, as browsers (especially IE) are intergrated more and more into the general operating system, they are expanding to handle all sort of different protocols. Even some of the first browsers were capable of navigating FTP sites (a totally separate protocol), but they were displayed as hyperlinked pages, just like you'd see on the WWW. Difference was, you were using the FTP protocol, and probably wanted to know that. Another example is HTTPS - it looks the same to the user, but it's a different protocol, and one that the user definitely wants to have control and awareness of. Hell, you can even navigate your own local filesystem as a pseudo-web page by typing file:// in most browsers.
I think that most people have agreed that the web browser is a simple, non-threatening, intuitive computer interface, and I think it's good when that interface is expanded to handle different protocols.
It's like those Barbies that got shipped out with G.I. Joe voice boxes a few years ago.
Actually, it would be pretty awesome if it was like those dolls, because that would mean that the Barbie Liberation Front (BLF) had somehow swapped a bunch of screener DVDs with "subversive" versions before they were sent out. And hey, I guess it's possible (though unlikely) that some disgruntled anti-DRM employee did decide to throw a monkeywrench into the gears...it's happened before.
If I were going to do something like this deliberately though, I'd take it over the top - like insert an opening error screen which complains "This DVD media has not been registered with your retinal print. In order to view it, please submit a DNA sample and a government background check to the MPAA. You will be given a code good for a one-time viewing of this media. Thank you for your cooperation."
If i own a nightclub, and charge people for admittance, and some of those people sell drugs and stolen goods, I have the defence that i didn't know they were doing that sort of thing on my property, they were supposed just to be coming to dance.
Actually, it's interesting that you bring up that analogy. In fact, thanks to the 2003 PROTECT Act, club/venue owners in the US can now be held not only financially, but criminally responsible for illegal activity that occurs in their venues, whether or not they are aware of it. The law is designed to be targetted against raves, and has come under fire from the ACLU for its abuse potential by law enforcement.
It's always a tough call, trying to decide how far one can expect the owner/maintainer of a resource to go in order to prevent abuse of the resource, and when it's effectively out of their hands, and therefore the responsibility of society/government.
WiFi... those are two very important things to have in an access point. That's the most wireless quality fidelity (WiFi) you can get. But it won't sound like this without the TK421 modification. That'll up it another 4 or 5... quads per....channel. But that's technical talk, that doesn't concern you. We do that here in the store, very low price.
I'm sure the reason the general public is concerned is that it seems like a "breach of ethics" or as we say in the rural US, it "ain't raight". However, I think the reason it created waves in the scientific community is that researchers are expected to remain as distant as possible from their experiments as possible, in an effort to keep their observations as objective as possible. You can't do good science if your personal emotions and ego are wrapped up too tightly with the experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
You're completely right...but this indicates a much deeper issue than most police forces and governments are prepared to address:
You can't trace internet users.
Tor has been a military-strength proof-of-concept of this fact, but it can be seen in many other ways as well. If you route through a non-logging proxy, you will be traced to the proxy's IP, not your own. If you connect to a wireless network, you will be traced to the network gateway's IP. If you connect from a library, you will be traced to the library's IP.
ISPs, the police, and governments cling to the notion that an internet connection is like a street address - that is, it can be linked to a physical space and a specific person. As the scenarios above (and many others) demonstrate, this is completely false.
Furthermore, conducting investigations under the assupmtion that any abuse originating from an IP is the absolute responsibility of whoever legally "owns" that IP can easily make trouble for many law-abiding people. If you have a grudge against me, all you have to do is send a bomb threat using my IP address, and bingo, I'm under a federal Homeland Security investigation! Yes, there are meatspace analogs to this type of prank, but they require such advanced planning and effort that they aren't committed often at all. Using someone else's IP, however, is a fact of the internet.
There are many people who would like to preserve a system where IPs map infalliably to responsible "owners", who can be held accountable for any activity from their address. They insist on "tough love", that IP owners should be punished simply because they failed to secure their networks, or allowed someone else to use them.
While I personally think that this is a bad idea because it eliminates the potential for anonymity on the internet, the question is moot. People can't protect their networks. People allow their IPs to be used for abuse constantly (knowingly or otherwise), and this will not change. The sooner the establishment learns this, the more trouble they'll save themselves and everyone else.
Well, since you haven't said what country you live in, it's pretty hard to argue. I suggest, however, that no matter where you live, you try getting seriously involved in a political or social movement which makes life difficult for some extremely powerful entity. This may include
A) A powerful sovereign nation, most likely the one you live in (though not always)
B) A vastly wealthy and resourceful international corporation
C) A massive religious or political movement (usually the one in power in your country)
Dedicate your time - no, not your free time, like your LIFE - to disrupting business-as-usual for this entity. Of course, you should always obey the letter of the law, using only legally permitted methods to advance your movement. Watch your movement blossom, win the minds of many people everywhere, threatening the very existence of such a powerful entity.
And see how long it takes for the entity to do everything in it's power - including, believe it or not, illegal (maybe even unconstitutional) things - to neutralize you.
Try it, for real. I think you'd learn a lot.
Hey man, forget about graphics...some of the most artistic games use none at all. Ever played an interactive-novel style game? Although some can be caveman simple ("->GET YE FLASK"), some of the writing in those things is really top-shelf.
Internet or BBS-based MUSH/MUX/MU*s (not MUDs, mind you) are often even better, as they involve the creative and often quite skilled collaboration of a bunch of writers together. I've read a few MU* logs that could be polished up and sold as a decent novel.
I wonder if nethack can be coded to an MMORPG ;-)
You jest, but the author of the best rogue-like game, ADOM, is working on a massively multiplayer version called Jade. I think there's a market of nostalgic text-based RPG players out there who would be all over this kind of thing. I've always found that as the sexiness of an online game's graphics decline, the number of jackasses decrease and the number of thoughtful, interesting roleplayers increase accordingly.
Why the omnipresent need to analogize the most straightforward things? The world may never know.
A lot of people on Slashdot are computer people, and a lot of us, including me, have to (or just want to) explain technical computer concepts to non-technical people. Most of the concepts are, as you said, pretty fucking simple, but the jargon is very intimidating and counter-intuitive to non-techies.
So, I think there's a tendency for geeks to resort to metaphor as a way of making computer-speak more cute-n-fuzzy, and some people do it so much it becomes reflexive, even in a geek forum where it's obviously inappropriate. After all, everyone here already knows the internet is a series of tubes...
Of course, then there's the inverse (and in my opinion far more clever) geek tendency to use computer metaphors to describe non-computer stuff (like, the road was totally DoSed today because of construction)
I didn't mean for the story to be an endorsement of dirty campaign tricks - I tend to agree that open, honest, and inclusive discussion and debate of ideas is the ideal that we should seek in society. I saw it as a sort of meta-politicking that illustrated a lot of what was wrong with the political scene in the US. In a society where candidates stand to gain most of their support by buying billboards and TV spots showing nothing but their smiling mug and trying to convince you they're your friend, and where the government policies set for the next term are largely determined by whose telemarketers called the most people during dinner, is it such a stretch to think that the focus on such totally non-political bullshit could be manipulated? I would claim that in fact, it's happening all the time and has been the political status quo for decades.
To put it another way, I think the "vulnerability" is that the american public is so fixated on politics as some sort of popularity contest/hero worship that they're more concerned about which candidate annoys them personally and which one "seems like a good guy" than what sort of policies will result from them taking power.
The "exploit" is just someone using this dismal situation to advance their particular agenda. Yeah, it's despicable, but I think it's naive to believe that any political party or movement can have any traction or influence in this country without using this "exploit" to one degree or another. I like the idea of ethical purity, and fighting "evil" with pure "good" and all, but I think the Democratic party would be the first to argue that you have to break a few eggs to make an omlette - that's part of what I hate so much about them.
I know someone who actually got a job doing telemarketing for the Republican party - and took it as her personal mission to get as many hang-ups as possible. Sometimes she would use a really loud annoying voice, sometimes she'd act sickeningly friendly and patronizing, sometimes she'd talk non-stop over the other person as though she was a recording, and if someone was annoyed enough to say "Don't call me again, or I'm voting for the other guy!", she'd make sure they ended up on the "follow up soon" list.
She never got fired - I guess the GOP isn't particularly strict about overseeing their most obnoxious "campaigners". But I bet she persuaded far more people not to vote Republican than than any Democrat telemarketer could have!
And you spell like a trisomic babboon brain-donor.
You've got to be a troll, right? I mean, who else would chew someone out violently for bad spelling and simultaneously spell baboon wrong? Ah well, just to keep the chain of hypocrisy going, I think your post was completely iliterite!
I recommend a good book, about the state of England: "Our Culture, What's Left of It" by Theodore Dalrymple.
Whoa, wait, are you kidding, or did you really think that was a good book? I read some of it, and after the third or fourth time he blamed all the problems of the world on the poor choosing to be so damn poor and the youth being so damn rebellious - I thought to myself "does anybody really take this seriously?" I decided that probably nobody did, and he was just a stodgy old upper-crust guy who didn't like change. And on Slashdot - of all places - I find out I may be mistaken!
Seems like the author of that book would probably approve of the treatment of those kids, don't you think? After all, we've got to instill some respect for authority and the status quo in the little brats before it's too late, right?
Well, most of that was once again just a re-hashing of the libertarian platform, but towards the end you did make an interesting point, and I appreciate it. Regulating net-neutrality will mean that your ISP cannot prioritize VoIP packets over say HTTP packets.
/by/ monopolistic ISPs. Perhaps there are some (currently one) benefits to allowing AT&T and Bell total power over QoS, but I still don't see how they even begin to outweigh the very serious threats to both freedom of speech and the thriving electronic free markets that require a fair environment to compete properly in.
Of course, you, the end user, can prioritize anything you want on your private equipment. If VoIP is "mission critical", just configure your router with QoS to prioritize it, so HTTP traffic doesn't clobber your phone calls. Concerned about latency? Buy a T1, a business DSL line, or some other type of connection with low latency. What ISPs would like to do (I think) is tell you "Okay, your DSL subscription allows you 100 MB of low-latency traffic for VoIP, and the rest will be high-latency." This might be nice since you wouldn't have to buy a dedicated low-latency line just for VoIP, and would be impossible if ISPs had to treat all traffic the same.
This is the only drawback that I've heard of yet, and while I agree that it's an unfortunate inconvenience, I don't think that making a mediocre improvement in VoIP quality is worth setting the internet up for potentially industry-crumbling exploitation and regulation (yes, I said regulation)
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I was complaining about in the GP's post. All I'm hearing is theory, theory, theory. I /agree/ with the general principle that we should avoid allowing people who don't understand technology very well to make decisions about it. I /agree/ that "the government that governs least governs best" - at least in theory.
/practical/ problems (as in, actual effects that would have consequences in the real world) can be reasonably forseen if the government requires ISPs to treat all internet traffic equally? I don't need to hear about the general ills of government regulation, just this particular one.
But there are other theories on the other side that are just as strong. You know, like "information wants to be free" or the idea that nobody, not corporations or governments, should get to control or discriminate what information is exchanged on the internet.
The point is that it's all just theory, and being a pragmatist I tend to believe that people only resort to blustering about abstractions when they don't have a solid argument based in practice. My question is this:
What
It's clear that you're a free-market advocate, and that's fine, but it seems like net neutrality is a significant and serious enough issue to warrant more than a regurgitation of a general political philosophy. The basic theme I got from your post was "it's foolish for the government to regulate the internet because competition will solve all of the problems".
I'm not saying you're wrong, exactly, just that bringing nothing to the table but a broad ideological theory isn't very helpful or convicing. If you can give some examples or scenarios of the terrible effects of a government-mandated neutrality clause, that might help shift the debate from a contest about whose ivory-tower ideology is better to what real-world solution will be best for everyone on the internet.
Unfortunately, our main man George W. Bush withdrew all US funding from foreign health clinics which advocate for or distribute birth control. So don't look to the US-of-A for any population control leadership any time soon.
trivia fact: the term "second world country" actually refers to the members (now ex-members) of the Soviet Union. The first/second/third world terminology was popular during the cold war as a way to divide the entire planet into Us (god-fearing democracies), Them (god-hating commies), and All Those Really Poor Fuckers (most of africa, south america and the middle-east). So, actually, I guess most of the laptops are going to the third world, though they're certainly not going to the most utterly impoverished third world areas.
It's a shame that nobody from the strong atheism camp has replied to your point, although in a way the silence is not surprising. Both religion and science share a philosophical component which is inherently faith-based.
The very idea that our perceptions and measurements are accurate (e.g. our senses aren't lying to us) - and that therefore the scientific method reflects the truth about reality - is a massive leap of faith that the scientific community takes as gospel. True scientists acknowledge this, but when you bring it up to most "scientifically minded" people, they don't have much to say. The entire scientific method and mentality is based around a leap of faith, but it's also based around denying that leaps of faith have a place in science. It's a difficult contradiction that most people feel is best to just ignore.
In short, as you said, faith in some form or another is an integral part of human existence. Some are guilty about their faith, and some embrace it. As long as everyone can stop being belligerent about pushing their particular leaps of faith (scientific AND religious) on others, we'll get along fine.
I suppose it's a waste of time to point it out on such a macho-oriented forum, but women very rarely make false accusations of rape, and really, why would they? The drama, intense fights, secondary accusations, destroyed relationships, and hatred directed at a person who claims to have been raped is very real, and very shitty to go through. And it happens the moment you make the accusation, whether or not it's true. The belief that women accuse men of rape as revenge or to protect their own reputations is ridiculous considering the trauma that such a false accusation would cause the woman.
The fallout of admitting you were raped is so stigmatized that many women who actually have been sexually assaulted remain silent about it for their whole lives.
Keep your damn paws off my Internet, politicos!
It's a good general slogan, but I don't think it's quite nuanced enough for this issue. One could just as easily respond with "Keep your damn paws off my Internet, monopolistic execs!".
Of course the libertarian gut reaction of slashdotters says "don't trust the government! regulation = bad", which is also a very respectable general principle or slogan, but sometimes we run into scenarios where we have to choose between government regulation and monopolistic corporate regulation. I claim that although government usually operates against the interests of people, it's not as bad as a profit-seeking monopolistic mega-corp.
Whether or not you believe in the inherent justice of the free market, I don't think anyone can claim that a monopolistic (or duopolistic) corporation can be coerced to play fairly. There are, however, certain (admittedly very flawed) provisions for coercing and overseeing government. You know, things like voting. It's depressing to have to trust the government to handle this issue for us, but until we have a truly decentralized, civilian/small-business maintained internet, there doesn't seem to be a better option.
redundant RAID arrays
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but that's pretty funny.
And my point is that poverty-stricken people (or any people who are unable to care for a child) should not be having children, and anything that results from that lack of planning is their own damn fault.
Something to remember is that in the zany United States of America, it's very possible for a middle class or even rich person to become utterly destitute through no fault of their own. A violent shift in the job market, a serious medical emergency or a major fire/flood in which the insurance company screws you over (happens all the time), getting sued into the ground by the RIAA...these are things that can happen to anyone, and they'd leave anyone incapable of adequately supporting their kids.
So, if poverty is not a valid excuse, and anyone can easily become impoverished through no fault of their own, does that mean nobody's fit to raise kids?
the lack of translation of acronymns in WoW.
:)
Well, it's good to see you're doing your part to combat this problem.
Assuming that your browser is exclusively for displaying and navigating pages on the World Wide Web, then yes, the "http://" is redundant. However, as browsers (especially IE) are intergrated more and more into the general operating system, they are expanding to handle all sort of different protocols. Even some of the first browsers were capable of navigating FTP sites (a totally separate protocol), but they were displayed as hyperlinked pages, just like you'd see on the WWW. Difference was, you were using the FTP protocol, and probably wanted to know that. Another example is HTTPS - it looks the same to the user, but it's a different protocol, and one that the user definitely wants to have control and awareness of. Hell, you can even navigate your own local filesystem as a pseudo-web page by typing file:// in most browsers.
I think that most people have agreed that the web browser is a simple, non-threatening, intuitive computer interface, and I think it's good when that interface is expanded to handle different protocols.
It's like those Barbies that got shipped out with G.I. Joe voice boxes a few years ago.
Actually, it would be pretty awesome if it was like those dolls, because that would mean that the Barbie Liberation Front (BLF) had somehow swapped a bunch of screener DVDs with "subversive" versions before they were sent out. And hey, I guess it's possible (though unlikely) that some disgruntled anti-DRM employee did decide to throw a monkeywrench into the gears...it's happened before.
If I were going to do something like this deliberately though, I'd take it over the top - like insert an opening error screen which complains "This DVD media has not been registered with your retinal print. In order to view it, please submit a DNA sample and a government background check to the MPAA. You will be given a code good for a one-time viewing of this media. Thank you for your cooperation."
If i own a nightclub, and charge people for admittance, and some of those people sell drugs and stolen goods, I have the defence that i didn't know they were doing that sort of thing on my property, they were supposed just to be coming to dance.
Actually, it's interesting that you bring up that analogy. In fact, thanks to the 2003 PROTECT Act, club/venue owners in the US can now be held not only financially, but criminally responsible for illegal activity that occurs in their venues, whether or not they are aware of it. The law is designed to be targetted against raves, and has come under fire from the ACLU for its abuse potential by law enforcement.
It's always a tough call, trying to decide how far one can expect the owner/maintainer of a resource to go in order to prevent abuse of the resource, and when it's effectively out of their hands, and therefore the responsibility of society/government.
WiFi... those are two very important things to have in an access point. That's the most wireless quality fidelity (WiFi) you can get. But it won't sound like this without the TK421 modification. That'll up it another 4 or 5... quads per....channel. But that's technical talk, that doesn't concern you. We do that here in the store, very low price.
I'm sure the reason the general public is concerned is that it seems like a "breach of ethics" or as we say in the rural US, it "ain't raight". However, I think the reason it created waves in the scientific community is that researchers are expected to remain as distant as possible from their experiments as possible, in an effort to keep their observations as objective as possible. You can't do good science if your personal emotions and ego are wrapped up too tightly with the experiment.