IN MA there has been talk of changing this, but, I have yet to hear that it changed (it may have) however it is called a "secondary offense". That means, they can ticket you for it, after pulling you over for something else. However, the police are NOT authorized to pull you over for not wearing a seat belt.
> It just makes me take a step back, fairly or not, for a moment to ask myself whether people putting their faith in a system > (or war paint that makes them immune to bullets, potions that make them invincible, herbs that can see into the future) > actually makes it effective.
Effective at what? Protecting them from bullets? Or convincing them to run fearlessly into battle?
It has been said that it is impossible to make a man understand a concept, if his lively hood depends on him not understanding it. See how much sympathy you get from a police officer who is looking to ticket you for doing 35 in a school zone at 3 am. Clearly the law is intended to protect children during the day, clearly it would be unusual to the point of worthy of investigation if any actual children were out on the street alone at 3 am... however, his job is not to understand, or make sense, its to apply the law. You were speeding.
Or my argument with the RMV rep recently. I informed them that the police have computers in their cars. If you give them a registration, they look it up to see if its valid anyway. The piece of paper is useless, as they don't even trust it when you do give it to them. She dutifully informed me that she "understood" and that there have been attempts to change the law such that you would have a couple of days to supply the documentation to law enforcement.... clearly she didn't understand that I was saying the "documentation" is itself outdated and they shouldn't even bother printing it in the first place. She totally did not get that she just told me "We have worked at and failed to update the law to only be 15 years out of date instead of 30" and yet.... she was a nice girl, and sounded like she sincerely believed she was adding something to the conversation.
How about the fact that on NPR I heard a story about some men exonerated for murders after 20 years. After mentioning a number of totally valid pieces of evidence that helped them (evidence of coached testimony, including several "drafts" of star witness testimony where he got major details wrong), they mentioned that they passed a polygraph and someone else had failed it. Never once considering that.... the polygraph is, itself, absolute bullshit technology. Yet, its presented as if it even belongs outside of novelty shops and museum displays.
Frankly, people spend much of their time on "autopilot" and tend to believe whatever they are told by an "authority figure" and generally don't think about it too much. Whether its "see we tried to fix that" or "these sticks detect bombs" or "if you don't do as we say, you will burn in hell"
However.... there are many different driving situations. I primarily drive around town. Seldom at more than 40-45 MPH. My car is low to the ground, and I have a few hundred thousand miles of driving experience. My most likely accident scenarios are minor fender scratchers.
Frankly, on my average daily commute, there are 3 places where an accident, if one happened, the seat belt would really make a huge difference. Should I wear a seatbelt? probably.
I think we need to weigh the cost vs the benefit. The cost of it is the cost that people have to pay in tickets AND extra insurance premiums as a result of getting tickets, vs the benefit... the actual cost reduction in actual accidents where it would have made a difference and wasn't being worn.
I have serious doubts as to whether this is actually an effective public policy. It sounds nice, but, really, it seems like just a gimme to the insurance companies (as usual)
> Unless you live in an environment where "everyone uses anonymity tools," using them singles you out as someone with something to > hide.
Not to say it is super common yet, but I have been shocked at how many times (with increasing frequency) I mention something about tor or vidalia to someone and found out that they know what it is and use it. I think it has caught on a lot more than is suspected because it has more mundane uses than people expect.... like HR people checking references etc.
> If you aren't supporting a dissident movement in a dictatorship or some other noble cause, or doing only work-related computing > over a VPM people will assume you are either trading warez or doing something that's in most people's List Of Evil Things, like > terrorism, organized crime, or child pornography.
I am always amused by this one. Isn't "supporting a dissident movement in a dictatorship" a pretty um... relative set of terms? From the point of view of a sitting government, a dissident movement is, well, a bunch of criminals. So "aiding a dissident movement" is aiding a criminal element... at least by someones viewpoint.
Things really start to get murky as the 'rightness' of this calls into question legal authority. If legal authority can be questioned for one aribitrary reason (dictatorship), can't it be questioned for others? (well, I don't feel the elections are well run, and the way they are run effectively limits the peoples real choices so much as to ensure that neither available choice actually represents the will of the people in a meaningful way)
In any case, while I may be on board with you, I doubt any legal entity could legitimately side with you, since calling other sitting powers into question can only lead to the inevitable questioning of local authority. That is to say, if it comes down to it, you better hope that dictator doesn't have an extradition treaty with your country, as unless that country is already an enemy, I can't see your government being able to reconcile allowing you to support crime elsewhere with wanting to punish criminals elsewhere who strike its other citizens.
As much as I liked the concept of freenet, I never found it really fast enough or reliable enough to be useful. It has some great concepts, and theories of operation. In THEORY it could even be more efficient than the web by moving the content closer to where it is desired, and making popular content more available. However, it was always slow, and often unable to find even some of its more popular nodes.
Has it improved since I last tried it (maybe 4 years ago?). I see a lot more use in something like tor with its location hidden services than Freenet. Maybe some unholy meld of the two could work... caching front end servers that get their content from freenet, and use tor location hidden services to provide that service... but I am not sure what advantages you would get in reality, except for free data replication/recovery in case one of your front ends was taken down?
That is, unless all you want to do is publish static content for others consumption. That has its useses. However, its still very limited due to the latency and connectivity issues.
> Not to mention, of course, that for most of us, running an email server on our home computer would violate our ISP's terms of > service. Jumping from a "home" account at $30/month to a "commercial" account at $130/month is a big hit for most of us.
You can put a physical machine in colo for half that. You can go even less if you get a hosted virtual machine, potentially allowing you to even shop around jurisdictionally, even internationally. (companies do it, why shouldn't you?)
Clearly the solution is email offering ISPs that put right into their customer agreement that customer information will only be divulged as authorized by the customer or in compliance with an official court order. It seems to me that is the standard of customer privacy that people should be demanding from their ISPs, in writing, with truly motivational levels of monetary penalty for their violation.
> Better scanning, less violation of privacy, no active emitter. If true, this sounds like a > trifecta to me. I'd much rather pass through one of these than a milliwave unit.
I would rather pass though none at all. It all looks like one big barrel of privacy invading pork to me. A costly solution to an imaginary problem. That leaves us all with less privacy, to absolutely no benefit to anyone except the people with cushy TSA jobs.
If they aren't watching me, then they shouldn't have any problem being audited and transparent such as to give me assurance that they are not watching me. They should have to report to courts for oversight, get warrents, and ALL that GOOD STUFF.
I am highly suspect of anyone whose argument boils down to "trust us". I do NOT support my government engaging in activities that I wouldn't support other organizations engaging in. Echelon should be shut down, laws should be enacted to prevent anything like it from existing again, and anyone setting something like it up should go to jail. Regardless of who they claim to work for or what scary boogymen they invoke to justify their crimes.
Quite a while back, a friend of mine started working on what he called "PPS" a spec for doing a sort of transparent PGP/GnuPG. It was based on the tradeoff between doing pgp right, and getting everyone using it.
The idea was this... a pps enabled mail client will auto-generate you a key when you first set it up. It sets up the key with no password. Then, whenever you send mail, adds a "PPS" header advertising your key.
The PPS headers then provide a way for the mailers to distribute keys amongst eachother as people write and reply to email. Under his original scheme (not sure how far it got) all email between two users would be encrypted after the 3rd message.
Then if a user decides that they care about protecting their key, they can always password protect it, or generate a new one with a passphrase.
I always thought it would be a great idea to see enabled across the board.
Of course, I agree with you. However, what if your opinion is that this is EXACTLY what the other side is doing. If it wasn't for fearmongers fanning the flames of irrational panic, we wouldn't have a TSA, "mm wave" scanners, or anything like that. In fact, airport security wouldn't have hardly changed at all since the mid 1980s.
How do you fight that sort of tyranny, if its the "worst kind"?
> Most humans are not actually that off-put by the preparation of an individual animal to be eaten, or at least they certainly were not > when that was an everyday sight. In fact its the post-industrial practices of factory farming that most people would shy away from if > they saw them before every meal.
Well, its also been pointed out that, with the fall in child mortality, the death of a child is considered to be far greater of a tragedy than it ever was in the past. Kids used to die all the time (as did women in child birth). So it was far less of a shock when it happened. Now we are at the point where we have to have traffic stop in both directions for a bus to discharge kids onto a sidewalk, outside of the way of any cars.... because we can't even deal with that one or two times a year that one kid out of the millions out there happens to run out. In fact, most people can't even bear to consider how likely of a scenario this is or if it even saves a single life. As long as its a kid, and it might help, its not to be questioned.
> In fact its the post-industrial practices of factory farming that most people would shy away from if they saw them before every meal.
Meh, people can get used to anything that they see on a regular basis. This is why people are so afraid of terrorism, which is unlikely to even kill anyone that they know at any point in the rest of their life, yet don't even think twice of jumping in a car, which they do every day and probably has already killed someone they knew, and probably will again.
PTSD and depression? Video games are sledom that engrossing, and I doubt ever will be.
The emotional impact just will never really be the same as a real battle. You can get used to being shot at, or explosions going off around you. Its a whole different ball game when those shots and explostions actually take out people you know, and any one of them could be you. A virtual character dies, its a virtual character. Its not someone you spent months seeing around, working with, etc.
Simply knowing that "death" means restarting the level, or at worst, the game, blunts anything more than the most momentary of emotional impacts. However, in a real war, when someone dies, its game over. You may know that going in, but once you have seen it a few times, I have to imagine that it brings the reality home pretty hard.
Think of something smaller... something painful like grabbing a hot pot handle. Knowing it might be hot is one thing. Grabbing it and being burned however, it makes a connection with that knowledge that will have you a lot more hesistant to grab pot handles without checking, far more than just being reminded that they can burn you.
The video game simply can't provide the same physical and emotional feedback as real war, and I think you will find those are what cause PTSD and depression far more than the situation itself. A video game can put you in a very realistic seeming environment, but its not an environment that can actually hurt you.
....and oops. I just showed this article to a friend who was resistant to using OTR to encrypt his IM communications, even though he had pidgin and could easily turn on OTR. Now he has seen the light and switched on OTR. Thanks UK Police!
> And because we're operating on the premise that making a profit selling the drug is unethical, they have no reason to start caring.
I am not sure that anyone is actually starting from that premise. Simply that the HUGE markup above marginal cost that can ONLY be supported and pay for new research though a patent regieme is perhaps not the best way of doing things. Perhaps leaving the search for new drugs to the people who look to profit from their sale leads to narrow interest in drug research since the cost of choosing to research the next new ED pill thats slightly better than the last to keep a patent regieme healthy vs researching drugs to fight AIDS or cancer are an externality to the firms doing the research.
This isn't to say we should prevent such research, or its somehow immoral. This is about patents. Its about how much should we give these companies a leg up for doing what they do. If their "leg up" costs too much for everyone else, even indirectly, then I think we have every right to stop handing it out.
Yes and no. That is... the full list isn't public. Anyone can put one up and choose to manually publish it somewhere or not. There are publicly available lists. However, those lists are simply the lists of bridges that someone chose to publish. Many of them are restricted such that you can only download a small portion of the list at a time, and with IP restrictions to make it more difficult to get the whole list.
Its entirely possible that many ORs exist that are not published anywhere, or are published only to a select group of people.
I actually recently applied the idea to one of my own purchases.
I have GERD, which mostly just means I keep tums around for when I don't or can't eat properly, and/or forget to take something better. Zantac works great, as does prilosec.
So I am down at the local pharmacy. I notice that I can get "zantac/ranitidine" for a whole range of prices, for the same doses. Then I look over and notice, that for HALF the price of the cheapest ranitidine, I can get.... cimetidine! I remembered the good Dr House's speech (I knew it already, but seeing it in fiction helps the info sink in and be remembered), and bought it. Wouldn't you know... just as good.
Frankly, I like the FTC 0 year patent idea. This whole race towards the next patentable drug is a HUGE distraction from looking to acutually improve care. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that some people respond batter to ranitidine than cimetidine... but how many choices for the same thing do we need?
It seems to me that research is best left to universities that can initiate research without the need for direct sales profits to come in later. So, lets remove patents and let the research dollars flow to the places that can do the research better.
> You obviously have an ax to grind with MS, and that's fine, but digging up this kind of garbage is > ridiculous. The same statements that you have made about MS can probably be made about 95% of the > Fortune 500.
I don't see how that makes it any better. The "Fortune 500" are a very small percentage of businesses out there. However, they all have the distinction of being large enough to play these sorts of games.
What is wrong with questioning the ethics of claiming your doing business in one area for the purpose of using its legal system, but not paying taxes into that same system, by claiming your profits are elsewhere?
It does seem like they are trying to game the system to get advantage. I think its entirely appropriate that we question whether such games are appropriate, or should be stopped. Regardless of who is doing them.
I am all for saying "who cares" about such a percieved violation if the amount in question is so small as to not be worth finding a solution for....however, if this one company can rack up so much of a difference just by playing this game, they it looks like the amounts are worth discussing.
Bridge servers are ORs that are not in the main directory lists. They are setup to be useful first contact nodes, and often run on port 443 or some other well used port. Since they use SSL, they make it very hard to distinguish them from every day web connections.
You have to manually find bridge nodes. They can be passed around manually, or you can go to websites that list them, though, they take steps to make it hard to get more than a few at a time.
Since anyone can setup a bridge node, its very easy for the network to continue despite blocks.
I have spent many years identifying as a libertarian socialist, or anarchist, or just libertarian. I have never really been much of a conservative....but damn... let me tell you something. I like Barry Goldwater.
When I read his statement on gays in the military ("Homosexuals have served honorably in military service since the time of the ancient Greeks" was, I believe, a pretty good approximation of a direct quote) or on why marijuana should be legalized... I realized I was reading the statements of a sane individual who could be reasoned with.
Sure, any of us may (and I know I am just as guilty as many others) go off and make sensational statements. However, the ability to be just down to earth and willing to discuss the actual issues in a rational manner is something to be looked up to and strived for.
I wish that more of the people who call themselves conservatives today were more like old Barry.
As with many others.... I am a libertarian that favors Unions.
I know they get abused, I had a friend who was a shop steward. Did the employees abuse the union to keep their jobs when they deserved to be fired? You bet they did.
However, it wasn't a one way street on the abuse. They often fought the company trying to weasel around or outright break portions of the contract. They fought the decrease of their pay and abusive changes to their working conditions. (and lost, I might add). They provided representation and support for fellow employees who felt they had been wronged.
Frankly, I see little problem with regulation of limited liability enterprises. They are granted the privilege of limited liability, its entirely right that they pay for that by accepting regulation (and taxation). Overall, I would rather not see such enterprises be unregulated.
Overall, I would rather see corperate structures changed. I would favor only granting limited liability to companies that are majority owned by their own employees (and not just a couple of fat cats), and run in a quasi-democratic fashion (with possible exceptions for very small companies etc)
> Prostitution is one of the few crimes that make a person a criminal if he/she sells something that > is normally "free". Strange, but whatever. That "industry" is so frigging shady it begs to be > regulated. But then we'd have to admit we like sex, so of course that's out of the question.
Well, what came first? The shady abusive pimp, or the law?
Unregulated illegal industries are shady by definition. I would love to see a comparison between the prostitution problems in a place like RI and places with more general prostitution laws. In RI the laws are all against running brothels or "street walking". What you do in the privacy of your home is perfectly legal there.
In some ways, that makes a lot more sense to me. WHat is the PROBLEM with prostitution? Is it the sex? Why make illegal that which can be given away for free?
The problems tend to revolve more around street walkers and the abusive relationshops that girls have with their pimps. Overall, these seem like a MUCH better fit for regulation than prohibition. Under prohibition, a bitch (what? its an industry term) is engaging in illegal activities, so they take a risk themselves going to the police about an abusive pimp. Make their end legal, and well, whens the last time you heard about a Pizza shop owner who beat his employees and they didn't report him?
But that would make sense. The law seldom does that very well. I tend to view law makers (having had a couple of conversations with them) like a group of plumbers who get called in to fix a backed up drain. They remove the flow valve from the sink, turn the water back on, and as the water flows all over the floor will look you in the eye and say "well we should give the fix time to work".
> Why? Because people a huge number of the foreclosures are going forward even though banks > themselves can't even produce the mortgage paperwork!
A friend of mine was recently telling me that he basically hired a lawyer to go over his credit report, and challenge every negative item for documentation. He was telling me that he was quite surprised at how many items they dropped from his record because the creditor didn't have documentation for their claims.
I see what you are saying. However, I think its actually quite circular thinking.
> it's harder to believe the woman who genuinely and freely enjoys doing housework if she's > internalized since childhood the expectation that housework is women's work.
I think you have a false dichotomy. Whether or not she enjoys it, is distinct from why she came to enjoy it. Yes, she may have internalized since childhood this expectation. That may be part of her basis for saying that she enjoys housework.
I wonder however, why you would deny her an opinion on her own likes and dislikes, simply because you disapprove of the values that she may have learned or how she learned them? Criticize the house she was brought up in maybe. Criticize the schools, or the society, but... to not take her statements at face value essentially is denying her an opinion.
Why bother asking her what she wants in the first place, if you are just going to reject anything she says that sounds too out of line with what you think she should want?
If your lover says "I want you to call me a dirty whore and hit me", are you going to stop, sit her down and explain why she doesn't really want to be treated like that, and its all just because of her unsupportive and dysfunctional family environment? I mean you could do that, but I garauntee she will find it quite disappointing
In fact, it was a feminist that I know who prosed this question to me:
If you have a person who actually enjoys doing housework, or even go so far as to say enjoys being dominated and kept as a slave. These people exist, they are not that hard to find.
Now lets say that person is a woman. Hell lets say she is black, and her chosen mate is a white man.
It may make people feel weird, but if the values that we hold dear are liberation, and choice. Then why can't a black woman be submissive to a white man? Because she is a woman? Because she is black? Because we think she should want something different?
I think the real problem is that labels seldom apply well to people. One group of people calling themselves feminists make a few outrageous statements about all men being rapists, and next thing you know, every feminist is seen as a man hating battle axe.
Frankly, I take maybe a pessimistic view. However, I don't really think talk of ideals changes people for the most part. Asking people to change their behavior seldom does much. However, economics kind of required women to go to work, and once they did, it was hard to argue that they couldn't do the job anymore.
Essentially, realities change, then people accept them, seldom the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
I WOULD say that too, if it were the case here.
IN MA there has been talk of changing this, but, I have yet to hear that it changed (it may have) however it is called a
"secondary offense". That means, they can ticket you for it, after pulling you over for something else. However, the police are NOT authorized to pull you over for not wearing a seat belt.
-Steve
> It just makes me take a step back, fairly or not, for a moment to ask myself whether people putting their faith in a system
> (or war paint that makes them immune to bullets, potions that make them invincible, herbs that can see into the future)
> actually makes it effective.
Effective at what? Protecting them from bullets? Or convincing them to run fearlessly into battle?
It has been said that it is impossible to make a man understand a concept, if his lively hood depends on him not understanding it. See how much sympathy you get from a police officer who is looking to ticket you for doing 35 in a school zone at 3 am. Clearly the law is intended to protect children during the day, clearly it would be unusual to the point of worthy of investigation if any actual children were out on the street alone at 3 am... however, his job is not to understand, or make sense, its to apply the law. You were speeding.
Or my argument with the RMV rep recently. I informed them that the police have computers in their cars. If you give them a registration, they look it up to see if its valid anyway. The piece of paper is useless, as they don't even trust it when you do give it to them. She dutifully informed me that she "understood" and that there have been attempts to change the law such that you would have a couple of days to supply the documentation to law enforcement.... clearly she didn't understand that I was saying the "documentation" is itself outdated and they shouldn't even bother printing it in the first place. She totally did not get that she just told me "We have worked at and failed to update the law to only be 15 years out of date instead of 30" and yet.... she was a nice girl, and sounded like she sincerely believed she was adding something to the conversation.
How about the fact that on NPR I heard a story about some men exonerated for murders after 20 years. After mentioning a number of totally valid pieces of evidence that helped them (evidence of coached testimony, including several "drafts" of star witness testimony where he got major details wrong), they mentioned that they passed a polygraph and someone else had failed it. Never once considering that.... the polygraph is, itself, absolute bullshit technology. Yet, its presented as if it even belongs outside of novelty shops and museum displays.
Frankly, people spend much of their time on "autopilot" and tend to believe whatever they are told by an "authority figure" and generally don't think about it too much. Whether its "see we tried to fix that" or "these sticks detect bombs" or "if you don't do as we say, you will burn in hell"
-Steve
Up to a point I agree.
However.... there are many different driving situations. I primarily drive around town. Seldom at more than 40-45 MPH. My car is low to the ground, and I have a few hundred thousand miles of driving experience. My most likely accident scenarios are minor fender scratchers.
Frankly, on my average daily commute, there are 3 places where an accident, if one happened, the seat belt would really make a huge difference. Should I wear a seatbelt? probably.
I think we need to weigh the cost vs the benefit. The cost of it is the cost that people have to pay in tickets AND extra insurance premiums as a result of getting tickets, vs the benefit... the actual cost reduction in actual accidents where it would have made a difference and wasn't being worn.
I have serious doubts as to whether this is actually an effective public policy. It sounds nice, but, really, it seems like just a gimme to the insurance companies (as usual)
-Steve
> Unless you live in an environment where "everyone uses anonymity tools," using them singles you out as someone with something to
> hide.
Not to say it is super common yet, but I have been shocked at how many times (with increasing frequency) I mention something
about tor or vidalia to someone and found out that they know what it is and use it. I think it has caught on a lot more than is suspected because it has more mundane uses than people expect.... like HR people checking references etc.
> If you aren't supporting a dissident movement in a dictatorship or some other noble cause, or doing only work-related computing
> over a VPM people will assume you are either trading warez or doing something that's in most people's List Of Evil Things, like
> terrorism, organized crime, or child pornography.
I am always amused by this one. Isn't "supporting a dissident movement in a dictatorship" a pretty um... relative set of terms?
From the point of view of a sitting government, a dissident movement is, well, a bunch of criminals. So "aiding a dissident movement" is aiding a criminal element... at least by someones viewpoint.
Things really start to get murky as the 'rightness' of this calls into question legal authority. If legal authority can be questioned for one aribitrary reason (dictatorship), can't it be questioned for others? (well, I don't feel the elections are well run, and the way they are run effectively limits the peoples real choices so much as to ensure that neither available choice actually represents the will of the people in a meaningful way)
In any case, while I may be on board with you, I doubt any legal entity could legitimately side with you, since calling other sitting powers into question can only lead to the inevitable questioning of local authority. That is to say, if it comes down to it, you better hope that dictator doesn't have an extradition treaty with your country, as unless that country is already an enemy, I can't see your government being able to reconcile allowing you to support crime elsewhere with wanting to punish criminals elsewhere who strike its other citizens.
-Steve
As much as I liked the concept of freenet, I never found it really fast enough or reliable enough to be useful. It has some great concepts, and theories of operation. In THEORY it could even be more efficient than the web by moving the content closer to where it is desired, and making popular content more available. However, it was always slow, and often unable to find even some of its more popular nodes.
Has it improved since I last tried it (maybe 4 years ago?). I see a lot more use in something like tor with its location hidden services than Freenet. Maybe some unholy meld of the two could work... caching front end servers that get their content from freenet, and use tor location hidden services to provide that service... but I am not sure what advantages you would get in reality, except for free data replication/recovery in case one of your front ends was taken down?
That is, unless all you want to do is publish static content for others consumption. That has its useses. However, its still very limited due to the latency and connectivity issues.
-Steve
> Not to mention, of course, that for most of us, running an email server on our home computer would violate our ISP's terms of
> service. Jumping from a "home" account at $30/month to a "commercial" account at $130/month is a big hit for most of us.
You can put a physical machine in colo for half that. You can go even less if you get a hosted virtual machine, potentially allowing you to even shop around jurisdictionally, even internationally. (companies do it, why shouldn't you?)
Clearly the solution is email offering ISPs that put right into their customer agreement that customer information will only be divulged as authorized by the customer or in compliance with an official court order. It seems to me that is the standard of customer privacy that people should be demanding from their ISPs, in writing, with truly motivational levels of monetary penalty for their violation.
-Steve
> Better scanning, less violation of privacy, no active emitter. If true, this sounds like a
> trifecta to me. I'd much rather pass through one of these than a milliwave unit.
I would rather pass though none at all. It all looks like one big barrel of privacy invading pork to me. A costly solution to an imaginary problem. That leaves us all with less privacy, to absolutely no benefit to anyone except the people with cushy TSA jobs.
-Steve
If they aren't watching me, then they shouldn't have any problem being audited and transparent such as to give me assurance that they are not watching me. They should have to report to courts for oversight, get warrents, and ALL that GOOD STUFF.
I am highly suspect of anyone whose argument boils down to "trust us". I do NOT support my government engaging in activities that I wouldn't support other organizations engaging in. Echelon should be shut down, laws should be enacted to prevent anything like it from existing again, and anyone setting something like it up should go to jail. Regardless of who they claim to work for or what scary boogymen they invoke to justify their crimes.
-Steve
Quite a while back, a friend of mine started working on what he called "PPS" a spec for doing a sort of transparent PGP/GnuPG. It was based on the tradeoff between doing pgp right, and getting everyone using it.
The idea was this... a pps enabled mail client will auto-generate you a key when you first set it up. It sets up the key with no password. Then, whenever you send mail, adds a "PPS" header advertising your key.
The PPS headers then provide a way for the mailers to distribute keys amongst eachother as people write and reply to email. Under his original scheme (not sure how far it got) all email between two users would be encrypted after the 3rd message.
Then if a user decides that they care about protecting their key, they can always password protect it, or generate a new one with a passphrase.
I always thought it would be a great idea to see enabled across the board.
-Steve
Of course, I agree with you. However, what if your opinion is that this is EXACTLY what the other side is doing. If it wasn't for fearmongers fanning the flames of irrational panic, we wouldn't have a TSA, "mm wave" scanners, or anything like that. In fact, airport security wouldn't have hardly changed at all since the mid 1980s.
How do you fight that sort of tyranny, if its the "worst kind"?
-Steve
> Most humans are not actually that off-put by the preparation of an individual animal to be eaten, or at least they certainly were not > when that was an everyday sight. In fact its the post-industrial practices of factory farming that most people would shy away from if > they saw them before every meal.
Well, its also been pointed out that, with the fall in child mortality, the death of a child is considered to be far greater of a tragedy than it ever was in the past. Kids used to die all the time (as did women in child birth). So it was far less of a shock when it happened. Now we are at the point where we have to have traffic stop in both directions for a bus to discharge kids onto a sidewalk, outside of the way of any cars.... because we can't even deal with that one or two times a year that one kid out of the millions out there happens to run out. In fact, most people can't even bear to consider how likely of a scenario this is or if it even saves a single life. As long as its a kid, and it might help, its not to be questioned.
> In fact its the post-industrial practices of factory farming that most people would shy away from if they saw them before every meal.
Meh, people can get used to anything that they see on a regular basis. This is why people are so afraid of terrorism, which is unlikely to even kill anyone that they know at any point in the rest of their life, yet don't even think twice of jumping in a car, which they do every day and probably has already killed someone they knew, and probably will again.
-Steve
PTSD and depression? Video games are sledom that engrossing, and I doubt ever will be.
The emotional impact just will never really be the same as a real battle. You can get used to being shot at, or explosions going off around you. Its a whole different ball game when those shots and explostions actually take out people you know, and any one of them could be you. A virtual character dies, its a virtual character. Its not someone you spent months seeing around, working with, etc.
Simply knowing that "death" means restarting the level, or at worst, the game, blunts anything more than the most momentary of emotional impacts. However, in a real war, when someone dies, its game over. You may know that going in, but once you have seen it a few times, I have to imagine that it brings the reality home pretty hard.
Think of something smaller... something painful like grabbing a hot pot handle. Knowing it might be hot is one thing. Grabbing it and being burned however, it makes a connection with that knowledge that will have you a lot more hesistant to grab pot handles without checking, far more than just being reminded that they can burn you.
The video game simply can't provide the same physical and emotional feedback as real war, and I think you will find those are what cause PTSD and depression far more than the situation itself. A video game can put you in a very realistic seeming environment, but its not an environment that can actually hurt you.
-Steve
....and oops. I just showed this article to a friend who was resistant to using OTR to encrypt his IM communications, even though he had pidgin and could easily turn on OTR. Now he has seen the light and switched on OTR. Thanks UK Police!
-Steve
> And because we're operating on the premise that making a profit selling the drug is unethical, they have no reason to start caring.
I am not sure that anyone is actually starting from that premise. Simply that the HUGE markup above marginal cost that can ONLY be supported and pay for new research though a patent regieme is perhaps not the best way of doing things. Perhaps leaving the search for new drugs to the people who look to profit from their sale leads to narrow interest in drug research since the cost of choosing to research the next new ED pill thats slightly better than the last to keep a patent regieme healthy vs researching drugs to fight AIDS or cancer are an externality to the firms doing the research.
This isn't to say we should prevent such research, or its somehow immoral. This is about patents. Its about how much should we give these companies a leg up for doing what they do. If their "leg up" costs too much for everyone else, even indirectly, then I think we have every right to stop handing it out.
-Steve
Yes and no. That is... the full list isn't public. Anyone can put one up and choose to manually publish it somewhere or not. There are publicly available lists. However, those lists are simply the lists of bridges that someone chose to publish. Many of them are restricted such that you can only download a small portion of the list at a time, and with IP restrictions to make it more difficult to get the whole list.
Its entirely possible that many ORs exist that are not published anywhere, or are published only to a select group of people.
I actually recently applied the idea to one of my own purchases.
I have GERD, which mostly just means I keep tums around for when I don't or can't eat properly, and/or forget to take something better. Zantac works great, as does prilosec.
So I am down at the local pharmacy. I notice that I can get "zantac/ranitidine" for a whole range of prices, for the same doses. Then I look over and notice, that for HALF the price of the cheapest ranitidine, I can get.... cimetidine! I remembered the good Dr House's speech (I knew it already, but seeing it in fiction helps the info sink in and be remembered), and bought it. Wouldn't you know... just as good.
Frankly, I like the FTC 0 year patent idea. This whole race towards the next patentable drug is a HUGE distraction from looking to acutually improve care. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that some people respond batter to ranitidine than cimetidine... but how many choices for the same thing do we need?
It seems to me that research is best left to universities that can initiate research without the need for direct sales profits to come in later. So, lets remove patents and let the research dollars flow to the places that can do the research better.
-Steve
> You obviously have an ax to grind with MS, and that's fine, but digging up this kind of garbage is
> ridiculous. The same statements that you have made about MS can probably be made about 95% of the
> Fortune 500.
I don't see how that makes it any better. The "Fortune 500" are a very small percentage of businesses out there. However, they all have the distinction of being large enough to play these sorts of games.
What is wrong with questioning the ethics of claiming your doing business in one area for the purpose of using its legal system, but not paying taxes into that same system, by claiming your profits are elsewhere?
It does seem like they are trying to game the system to get advantage. I think its entirely appropriate that we question whether such games are appropriate, or should be stopped. Regardless of who is doing them.
I am all for saying "who cares" about such a percieved violation if the amount in question is so small as to not be worth finding a solution for....however, if this one company can rack up so much of a difference just by playing this game, they it looks like the amounts are worth discussing.
-Steve
There is only one flaw here: Bridge servers.
Bridge servers are ORs that are not in the main directory lists. They are setup to be useful first contact nodes, and often run on port 443 or some other well used port. Since they use SSL, they make it very hard to distinguish them from every day web connections.
You have to manually find bridge nodes. They can be passed around manually, or you can go to websites that list them, though, they take steps to make it hard to get more than a few at a time.
Since anyone can setup a bridge node, its very easy for the network to continue despite blocks.
Could you please sign here to acknowledge this receipt, and here, for my receipt for your receipt.
Thank you!
I have spent many years identifying as a libertarian socialist, or anarchist, or just libertarian. I have never really been much of a conservative....but damn... let me tell you something. I like Barry Goldwater.
When I read his statement on gays in the military ("Homosexuals have served honorably in military service since the time of the ancient Greeks" was, I believe, a pretty good approximation of a direct quote) or on why marijuana should be legalized... I realized I was reading the statements of a sane individual who could be reasoned with.
Sure, any of us may (and I know I am just as guilty as many others) go off and make sensational statements. However, the ability to be just down to earth and willing to discuss the actual issues in a rational manner is something to be looked up to and strived for.
I wish that more of the people who call themselves conservatives today were more like old Barry.
-Steve
As with many others.... I am a libertarian that favors Unions.
I know they get abused, I had a friend who was a shop steward. Did the employees abuse the union to keep their jobs when they deserved to be fired? You bet they did.
However, it wasn't a one way street on the abuse. They often fought the company trying to weasel around or outright break portions of the contract. They fought the decrease of their pay and abusive changes to their working conditions. (and lost, I might add). They provided representation and support for fellow employees who felt they had been wronged.
Frankly, I see little problem with regulation of limited liability enterprises. They are granted the privilege of limited liability, its entirely right that they pay for that by accepting regulation (and taxation). Overall, I would rather not see such enterprises be unregulated.
Overall, I would rather see corperate structures changed. I would favor only granting limited liability to companies that are majority owned by their own employees (and not just a couple of fat cats), and run in a quasi-democratic fashion (with possible exceptions for very small companies etc)
THEN, let the free market do its thing.
-Steve
> Prostitution is one of the few crimes that make a person a criminal if he/she sells something that
> is normally "free". Strange, but whatever. That "industry" is so frigging shady it begs to be
> regulated. But then we'd have to admit we like sex, so of course that's out of the question.
Well, what came first? The shady abusive pimp, or the law?
Unregulated illegal industries are shady by definition. I would love to see a comparison between the prostitution problems in a place like RI and places with more general prostitution laws. In RI the laws are all against running brothels or "street walking". What you do in the privacy of your home is perfectly legal there.
In some ways, that makes a lot more sense to me. WHat is the PROBLEM with prostitution? Is it the sex? Why make illegal that which can be given away for free?
The problems tend to revolve more around street walkers and the abusive relationshops that girls have with their pimps. Overall, these seem like a MUCH better fit for regulation than prohibition. Under prohibition, a bitch (what? its an industry term) is engaging in illegal activities, so they take a risk themselves going to the police about an abusive pimp. Make their end legal, and well, whens the last time you heard about a Pizza shop owner who beat his employees and they didn't report him?
But that would make sense. The law seldom does that very well. I tend to view law makers (having had a couple of conversations with them) like a group of plumbers who get called in to fix a backed up drain. They remove the flow valve from the sink, turn the water back on, and as the water flows all over the floor will look you in the eye and say "well we should give the fix time to work".
-Steve
> Why? Because people a huge number of the foreclosures are going forward even though banks
> themselves can't even produce the mortgage paperwork!
A friend of mine was recently telling me that he basically hired a lawyer to go over his credit report, and challenge every negative item for documentation. He was telling me that he was quite surprised at how many items they dropped from his record because the creditor didn't have documentation for their claims.
Very sloppy.
-Steve
I see what you are saying. However, I think its actually quite circular thinking.
> it's harder to believe the woman who genuinely and freely enjoys doing housework if she's
> internalized since childhood the expectation that housework is women's work.
I think you have a false dichotomy. Whether or not she enjoys it, is distinct from why she came to enjoy it. Yes, she may have internalized since childhood this expectation. That may be part of her basis for saying that she enjoys housework.
I wonder however, why you would deny her an opinion on her own likes and dislikes, simply because you disapprove of the values that she may have learned or how she learned them? Criticize the house she was brought up in maybe. Criticize the schools, or the society, but... to not take her statements at face value essentially is denying her an opinion.
Why bother asking her what she wants in the first place, if you are just going to reject anything she says that sounds too out of line with what you think she should want?
If your lover says "I want you to call me a dirty whore and hit me", are you going to stop, sit her down and explain why she doesn't really want to be treated like that, and its all just because of her unsupportive and dysfunctional family environment? I mean you could do that, but I garauntee she will find it quite disappointing
-Steve
In fact, it was a feminist that I know who prosed this question to me:
If you have a person who actually enjoys doing housework, or even go so far as to say enjoys being dominated and kept as a slave. These people exist, they are not that hard to find.
Now lets say that person is a woman. Hell lets say she is black, and her chosen mate is a white man.
It may make people feel weird, but if the values that we hold dear are liberation, and choice. Then why can't a black woman be submissive to a white man? Because she is a woman? Because she is black? Because we think she should want something different?
I think the real problem is that labels seldom apply well to people. One group of people calling themselves feminists make a few outrageous statements about all men being rapists, and next thing you know, every feminist is seen as a man hating battle axe.
Frankly, I take maybe a pessimistic view. However, I don't really think talk of ideals changes people for the most part. Asking people to change their behavior seldom does much. However, economics kind of required women to go to work, and once they did, it was hard to argue that they couldn't do the job anymore.
Essentially, realities change, then people accept them, seldom the other way around.
-Steve