However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
If allowing gays to serve reduces overall effectiveness, they should not be allowed to serve.
But...
I'm all for merit-based decisions making. Racial, gender, religious, and sexual preferences have no place in hiring for positions where these things are not BFOQs.
Excellent. I look forward to her dismantling of the military(at least that subset of it which is geared toward goals other than the immediate defense of life) and capital punishment and so on.
Because fundamentalist Christian politicians are fond of framing political conflicts as "good vs. evil" scenarios, and in many cases they even believe this characterization themselves.
If Palin, in her Presidency, comes to see another nation as evil, and if conflicts with that nation grow to a world-changing scale, I see no reason to suppose she wouldn't have a "this is it!" moment, and consult the Bible for insight into what happens/could happen/ought to happen next.
Again, if she believes that she and her fellow faithful are going to be lifted out of the final war and into the kingdom of God, then she has little incentive to try and avert that war, doesn't she?
If she is Pentecostal, then chances are good that she believes we're in the End Times. If that is the case, then there are lots of prophecies that she might believe concerning the end of the world.
The international affairs of the state of Israel are specifically mentioned, for instance. So are things like the fiery destruction of Earthly nations. It's hardly a stretch to imagine that some would interpret a nuclear war as fulfillment of those prophecies.
I mean, if you accept the initial premise of an all powerful God, standing outside spacetime, then it's not so far a step to imagining a God who created the whole shebang in all its four dimensional glory, and then instantiated it at a point in time about six and a half thousand years ago.
This sentence is incoherent, because it talks about the creation of time (one of those 4 dimensions) at a particular moment in time.
I'm not sure that spamming equates to stealing. By running a mail exchange, or having an inbox which feeds from one, you're offering "free resources" to anyone who cares to take them in order to contact you about something.
What the spammer does is take as many of those resources as he can, because he has found a way to monetize the ability to contact people.
Rather than stealing from a store, imagine a guy stuffing his pockets with complementary ketchup packets or free individually wrapped samples of candy, with the intention of reselling them later.
In order to catch someone doing this in real life, we have to recognize him as the same guy from one ketchup-take to the next. If we want to grant anonymity in cyberspace, we lose that ability; there is simply no difference between one guy sending a million messages and a million guys sending one message each. Granting anonymity means there can't be any such thing as an "only one per person" policy on giving out free stuff.
Our solution should not be that unsolicited email is illegal, nor should it impose some arbitrary "intent" fuzzy line where sending 500 is okay but 5000 isn't, or emailing strangers to ask them for cooking advice is legal but offering them shitty pharmaceuticals isn't, or anything like that.
We simply need to drop SMTP as a communications medium, or else expand upon it, because it does not have the characteristics we want.
As far as I know, information flows out of CERN in high volume, and not in. There's no reason for CERN machines to be exposed to data contaminants from the wild.
You're got the right approach to this issue; If you want it to be hard for anonymous parties to get in touch with you, there are lots of good ways to make that happen.
If instead you want it to be hard for people who are selling stuff to contact you, but easy for people who just want to talk you into a date, then you face a technical challenge, and not even an insoluble one.
Then why isn't the burden of protecting our inboxes similarly moved to the inbox's owners? If you don't want to hear from every random person out there who thinks you might want to buy some Viagra, you can similarly choose not to use a communication system which could expose you to unsigned, unauthenticated messages.
How do you propose that an anonymous party should inform the world of his website's existence, if he's not allowed to spam anyone about it?
But for people to express in any legally rigorous way that they DO want it, they have to know in advance about its existence, which is something an anonymous party just can't get without contacting some people who might not want to hear from him....to hire a dozen people with bullhorns to spew political rhetoric around someone's house at midnight?
No, but the trivial real-space rules take care of that scenario nicely. Zoning and noise regulations are enough to keep their activities to daylight hours, and it's not clear to me that hiring a dozen soapbox preachers is particularly illegal if they observe the other laws around them.
It sounds to me like to you, the difference between anonymous communication and spam is volume. One unsolicited letter without a return address is potentially a bona fide attempt at anonymous communication, whereas a million is just a pattern of harassment. But to distinguish between these two situations requires some way for us to say "these two letters came from the same source". Insofar as that condition is granted, anonymity is weakened.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. But it is a have-the-cake/eat-the-cake problem, and we really ought to explore it before it comes to the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
You are accusing Obama of going on unrelated tangents in order to dodge the issue, by comparing him to NASCAR?
Good thing us /.ers are so well-grounded and good at metaphor, huh?
http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html
However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
If allowing gays to serve reduces overall effectiveness, they should not be allowed to serve.
But...
I'm all for merit-based decisions making. Racial, gender, religious, and sexual preferences have no place in hiring for positions where these things are not BFOQs.
Excellent. I look forward to her dismantling of the military(at least that subset of it which is geared toward goals other than the immediate defense of life) and capital punishment and so on.
Or Nedry:
http://nedry.ytmnd.com/
In 199 AD, war was beginning.
Fixed.
Because fundamentalist Christian politicians are fond of framing political conflicts as "good vs. evil" scenarios, and in many cases they even believe this characterization themselves.
If Palin, in her Presidency, comes to see another nation as evil, and if conflicts with that nation grow to a world-changing scale, I see no reason to suppose she wouldn't have a "this is it!" moment, and consult the Bible for insight into what happens/could happen/ought to happen next.
Again, if she believes that she and her fellow faithful are going to be lifted out of the final war and into the kingdom of God, then she has little incentive to try and avert that war, doesn't she?
I'm not making shit up.
If she is Pentecostal, then chances are good that she believes we're in the End Times. If that is the case, then there are lots of prophecies that she might believe concerning the end of the world.
The international affairs of the state of Israel are specifically mentioned, for instance. So are things like the fiery destruction of Earthly nations. It's hardly a stretch to imagine that some would interpret a nuclear war as fulfillment of those prophecies.
This is something she has claimed before, but she spent the vast majority of her life attending Assemblies of God.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jCeGgS4vbVt6qpxTpahCgGn_R-dQD92VOKVG0
She might be less shy with the nukes than she would otherwise if she doesn't expect to be on Earth when they land.
I want someone who knows, right down to her balls, that if she helps start an apocalypse, she's going to fry on Earth with the rest of us.
As far as I know, she's a Pentecostal, and they are by and large pretty gung-ho about the Apocalypse.
*knock knock*
*raid*
"You've been Secret SERVED, bitch!"
Holy shit. How you believe we originated really matters on whether you should have control of nuclear codes?
Maybe not, but if she's getting the launch codes, I sure as hell care about whether she is counting on the Rapture.
If it's free software, the user has the right to modify the software to not include an EULA.
I know more muslims than you do, despite not having asked how many you actually know
Man oh man, it must be Bald Assertion Sunday!
I mean, if you accept the initial premise of an all powerful God, standing outside spacetime, then it's not so far a step to imagining a God who created the whole shebang in all its four dimensional glory, and then instantiated it at a point in time about six and a half thousand years ago.
This sentence is incoherent, because it talks about the creation of time (one of those 4 dimensions) at a particular moment in time.
Isn't it hilarious how we're all jumping into the thread to talk about how funny the thread is?
We are so funny!
Information flows both in and out of a star.
Theoretically, information from our universe should never be able to penetrate the event horizon to the interior of a white hole.
I'm not sure that spamming equates to stealing. By running a mail exchange, or having an inbox which feeds from one, you're offering "free resources" to anyone who cares to take them in order to contact you about something.
What the spammer does is take as many of those resources as he can, because he has found a way to monetize the ability to contact people.
Rather than stealing from a store, imagine a guy stuffing his pockets with complementary ketchup packets or free individually wrapped samples of candy, with the intention of reselling them later.
In order to catch someone doing this in real life, we have to recognize him as the same guy from one ketchup-take to the next. If we want to grant anonymity in cyberspace, we lose that ability; there is simply no difference between one guy sending a million messages and a million guys sending one message each. Granting anonymity means there can't be any such thing as an "only one per person" policy on giving out free stuff.
I agree entirely.
Our solution should not be that unsolicited email is illegal, nor should it impose some arbitrary "intent" fuzzy line where sending 500 is okay but 5000 isn't, or emailing strangers to ask them for cooking advice is legal but offering them shitty pharmaceuticals isn't, or anything like that.
We simply need to drop SMTP as a communications medium, or else expand upon it, because it does not have the characteristics we want.
He was committing fraud
Then we don't need anti-spam legislation to put him away, do we smart guy!
None that can survive a low-level reformat.
As far as I know, information flows out of CERN in high volume, and not in. There's no reason for CERN machines to be exposed to data contaminants from the wild.
You're got the right approach to this issue; If you want it to be hard for anonymous parties to get in touch with you, there are lots of good ways to make that happen.
If instead you want it to be hard for people who are selling stuff to contact you, but easy for people who just want to talk you into a date, then you face a technical challenge, and not even an insoluble one.
Then why isn't the burden of protecting our inboxes similarly moved to the inbox's owners? If you don't want to hear from every random person out there who thinks you might want to buy some Viagra, you can similarly choose not to use a communication system which could expose you to unsigned, unauthenticated messages.
How do you propose that an anonymous party should inform the world of his website's existence, if he's not allowed to spam anyone about it?
But for people to express in any legally rigorous way that they DO want it, they have to know in advance about its existence, which is something an anonymous party just can't get without contacting some people who might not want to hear from him. ...to hire a dozen people with bullhorns to spew political rhetoric around someone's house at midnight?
No, but the trivial real-space rules take care of that scenario nicely. Zoning and noise regulations are enough to keep their activities to daylight hours, and it's not clear to me that hiring a dozen soapbox preachers is particularly illegal if they observe the other laws around them.
It sounds to me like to you, the difference between anonymous communication and spam is volume. One unsolicited letter without a return address is potentially a bona fide attempt at anonymous communication, whereas a million is just a pattern of harassment. But to distinguish between these two situations requires some way for us to say "these two letters came from the same source". Insofar as that condition is granted, anonymity is weakened.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. But it is a have-the-cake/eat-the-cake problem, and we really ought to explore it before it comes to the courts.