It gets to the point where your Republican senator has been there since time-immemorial, is a committee chair, and even though you disagree with him on everything, you still think, "Well, what could a freshman Democrat do for me? Is this guy really that bad? I mean, he's bringing home $50 million in "free" money for a fake indoor rain-forest that no one wants... Yay, our state!"
Does explain how one of the tightest races in last year's Presidential election still went 75%-25% in the Senate race.
I feel that this is going to make a lot of us look a little less paranoid. I've been telling people for years about how bad it is, some of them have been interested, but it's so easy for people in this country to kind of roll their eyes and insist that everything will always work and everyone will play by the rules, because they wouldn't let it happen any other way.
We can use this as an example of just one of the many problems on Nov. 2, and if they end up doing a new election, how costly it is to make mistakes or use untrustworthy technologies in voting. Then segue to Florida and Ohio...
These people that claim to be fulfilling god's will are seriously messed in the head.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the attitude that's going to stop us from winning. We have a fundamentally different attitude from True Believers. We believe in good Enlightenment Principles, and they... don't. It's the difference between faith-based reality and reality-based reality.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
There's a serious divide in this country, and the only things I know are that it must be bridged, and the people on the other side of the chasm aren't going to do it. Especially when they can win (or steal) all the elections they need.
I was looking at the results map and it looks to me as if the Iowa and New Mexico votes didn't even count. Is that true?
In case you're not familiar with the mysterious ways and horrors of the Electoral College, Iowa and New Mexico only matter for bragging rights and planning the next election. There will be a huge post-mortem on the effort in all the battleground states by both parties, and of course the votes will eventually be counted and certified, it just won't matter in determining the winner. It's like this: Imagine that, with only 60% of the vote counted, one candidate already had 51%. Then even if all the rest of the 40 remaining percent went for the challenger, it wouldn't change the outcome; the winner already has 51%. So Iowa and New Mexico could have gone either way and it wouldn't have mattered to the outcome.
I heard some rumors that in Johnson County (containing Iowa City, the liberal oasis in an angry sea of red) the Republicans were (illegally) randomly challenging thousands and thousands of absentee ballots, on the strategy that ballots cast in Johnson County break at least 2-to-1 for Democrats, so challenge 'em all and let God sort 'em out. If true, that would be a Dirty Trick.
I hope to learn more in the next couple days, after I cease my self-imposed media blackout...
Just posted this on my journal in response to this comment.
Single-issue voters. God bless 'em. I listened to a woman call up NPR this morning (in Iowa, where I participated in this election), obviously a Dubya-supporter, and say, "We don't have slavery in this country because a bunch of Republicans put a stop to it!" She was completely oblivious to the fact that the party of Lincoln has since become the party of the Confederacy. She went on: "Yeah I voted my conscience. I've been voting my conscience for 35 years. It's about time people start voting their conscience rather than what's going to put food on their table or gas in their car."
So there you go. She knows she's getting screwed, and is okay with that. She - and probably a lot of others with similar views - feels that eliminating abortion, civil rights for homosexuals, and stem cell research is God's Work, and that if that calls for economic sacrifice because the Party representing that work is a bunch of crooks, so be it. She doesn't seem to question why she must sacrifice the food on her table to battle abortion, two seemingly-unrelated issues, but she's willing to. God tests us, God calls us to sacrifice, and she's answering the call.
What remains is some serious soul-searching by the rest of us. We know that abortions went down under Bill Clinton, who treated the causes of abortion, like poverty, rather than the symptom of legal abortions. I find anti-abortion single-issue voters to be hypocritical in their fervor of support for the life of the unborn, but not the life of the born. If having the baby would kill the mother, so be it. If outlawing abortions will kill teenaged-girls performing abortions with wire-coat hangars, so be it. Capital punishment, illegal war, shooting doctors who perform abortions, you name it, they're fer it. I have much more respect for those Christian evangelicals who are anti-abortion and also anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-capital punishment, anti-murder. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine comes to mind. But I feel like these Christians who are consistent in their belief of the value of human life are a dying breed. Certainly their percentage of support for a pro-war, pro-poverty, pro-capital punishment, pro-extrajudical-killing President who happens to be anti-abortion is telling.
The rest of us, who might not agree that abortion should be illegal, must nevertheless find a way to bridge the gap, because these people are not going to come to us. We might not want abortion to be illegal, but very few people are actually pro-abortion. The desire to reduce the number of aborted pregnancies and increase the quality of life for both the living and the unborn could be our common ground. The grandparent is right; logic and reason have no bearing on this debate. The only appeals that can be made are to their larger sense of Christian "compassion" out of which the support for some of these causes stem.
Some of them are too far gone, like the rising numbers of Christian fascists who, like the Left Behind series "preaches", believe that the world will end with the Second Coming and Armaggedon within the next couple decades. It's hard to start a discussion on environmental issues, or deficit spending, or anything, with people who are convinced the world will end soon, and the only thing that matters is getting into Heaven when it does. The numbers of these Christian fanatics is rising, and some accounts peg them at 20 million Americans already. Very disturbing. But all evangelical Christians are not this irrational and dogmatic, and we can find common ground with them to marginalize the dangerously schizophrenic among them.
Use me =) I didn't have a referrer when I signed up, and I wasted a chance for someone. You won't decrease your chances of winning, you only increase my chances of sharing it with you... so to sweeten it for you, I'll give you an extra $5k if you win and I'm your referrer =)
So, yes, I'm a greedy whore, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. =) So let's split $200,000
Now go sign up and tell your friends! We're getting infinite odds on the best contest ever! Sign people up to register to vote if you have to, but you can't go wrong with this contest!
Supreme Court ruled a couple months ago that police could arrest you for refusing to give them your name. And of course, lying to a police officer is its own offense, so if your name really is I.P. Freely, you should definitely carry some (really good) identification...
Wow, that's a really cool site, thanks for passing it along. But you're wrong about the results.
Every permutation I could do showed Al Gore winning every recount by as slim a margin as 105 votes or as large a margin as 424 votes.
So I'll back up the original asserter's statement that "Al Gore won every recount" by your own evidence. =)
It's moot anyway, the dirty tricks of the GOP ensured that at least 50,000 black Democratic ballots were not cast; LePore's butterfly ballot cast thousands of Gore votes mistakenly for Buchanon; and the GOP illegally got the Pentagon to send it the email addresses of overseas soldiers so that any who had not voted could send absentee ballots in after the date of the election (illegally). (Greg Palast, Best Democracy Money Can Buy)
It's a testament to the strong force of progressive values that, despite all these votes missing or cast late against him, Al Gore still won the recounts.
On a complete aside, I would like to comment that no politician had any principles that day. The day that Democrat Al Gore was championing states-rights when the Florida Supreme Court ordered that recounts would continue until all votes had been recorded, and Republican W was championing a strong, central federal power by appealing to the Supreme Court to overrule Florida (which violated its own principles by agreeing to hear the case in the first place). Al Gore was trying to selectively recount certain counties because he was worried that recounting more than that might cost him the victory, whereas in fact only recounting the whole state would give him the win. And Bush was maintaining his "My brother said I won it fair and square, and he should know, since he's the one who rigged it" line and trying to stop any recount (in other words, not worried about disenfranchising any and all voters) that might take victory from him.
It should not be surprising that, in a system that rewards the desire for power with power, men who crave power over their ideals will sit at the top.
is that the Bush Administration, notorious for needlessly classifying thousands of documents more than any other previous Administration, just likes things being secret because then they have to explain less.
I stopped using Reason to try to determine the Bush Adm's motivation for its actions and switched to pure cynicism. Since then it's gotten so much easier.
From the Washington Post article entitled, 'Secrets' Perplex Panel, Classified Data Growing to Include 'Comically Irrelevant'
"The tone is set at the top," Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said.
"This administration believes the less known, the better," added the Connecticut Republican, noting sadly he was speaking of a GOP administration. "I believe the more known, the better."
Btw, is everyone registered to vote, by absentee ballot where possible? I only ask because, in our current situation, it might be useful information, MAYBE
I'm sorry but I had no trouble understanding all the parts you say have no explaination
Smith entered Bane by somehow hijacking the hardline or something I guess
As I said, everyone is freed. Neo didn't die... At least I don't think he did.
I appreciate your devotion to the franchise, but re-read your reply, and listen how unsure you are of everything. This is exactly what the poster was talking about when he said nothing was resolved. You've made some guesses and inferences, of which you don't sound entirely sure. If the movie had really resolved the story, none of us would have to guess.
This is the dumbest tripe I ever heard, anonymous self-flattery aside.
Sure. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. This is broadband Internet access we're talking about. NOBODY needs this. Nobody.
Horse-pucky. Nobody needs roads either. Or B-52 bombers. Individually. But as a society you and I might agree that these things come in handy in a pinch. Certainly we could not enjoy our superpower status without oads and B-52 bombers (and plenty of em), nationalized by our government b/c the cost is too large for private citizens. You think that "NOBODY" needs broadband, but as far as our national economy, and the economies of ideas, art, creativity, and social progress go, it is critical to growth. People don't call this the "Information Age" for nothing.
I bet there were people saying NOBODY needed electricity 100 years ago, when gas lamps were plentiful and water-wheels provided all the power a factory needed...
The sophistication of your lecture on the First Amendment was too much for me to follow. I'll see if one of the brighter students can dumb it down for me.
As for nationalized health care... yeah, it would be a tragedy to fall to illness or injury while traveling in Canada and be trapped in one of those death-trap, nationalized hospitals... better to be back in the States where my HMO tells me whether, when, and where I can go to get treatment. And how much it costs.
Now let me post a note congratulating myself on such a thoughtful refutation of your post, and reassuring myself that anyone who disagrees is a "commie". It's the Slashdot Way.
(a) the US government is not allowed to censor based on content*, whereas private companies are (::cough:: Akamai)
(b) not everyone can afford Internet access, but everyone can afford roads**. The ability-to-pay is represented by progressive taxation rates.
Personally, I believe nationalizing the last mile would make a lot of sense. It would give us First Amendment protections again, and reduce the digital divide a bit. Dropping a couple hundred on a computer is hard, but that and a recurring cost of $50 for broadband can be damn near impossible if you're not splitting the cost with folks around you.
*notable exceptions are of course the FCC and legally "obscene" materials, but I'd still rather take my chances with my Uncle Sam than my Uncle Rupert.
Those teenager hax0r d00ds 99.5% of the time DO NOT find any new vulnerabilities.
Don't believe the myths, yourself. Sit on Incidents for awhile. When people at the frontlines are saying, "I'm getting a lot of activity on port x, seems to be trying this against Apache/IIS/Wu, anyone else seeing it?" which eventually leads to "I was compromised sometime last night/week, found this in my logs, anyone recognize it?" which eventually leads to a security researcher rediscovering the vulnerability in the affected package. And I say "rediscovering" because obviously he wasn't the first, eh?
I agree that most of the huge Internet-worm firestorms (read: IIS/SQL worms) seem to be leisurely engineerings of previously discovered vulnerabilities with delivery packages that may have just been sitting around on the shelf. That may very well be because it's mostly amateurs that want to take over every machine, randomly, in 20 minutes. The pros are happy with a few of their choice, knowing that the less machines they knock over, the longer they have before anyone discovers what tricks they're using to get in.
As a business owner, you have much less to fear from the amateurs, protection against which ironically seems to be what most of the security tools / disclosure guidelines seem to be geared towards.
And if they're not protecting us against dedicated blackhats, let's ask ourselves how well these new disclosure guidelines will protect us from CodeRed, Nimda, and Slapper, where old vulnerabilities are used to devastating success after a patch is released. What? They won't? Not even a little bit? Hmm... that's less encouraging.
Interestingly enough, if Fox News was owned by the US Government rather than Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorporation, they couldn't very well have refused to air any advertisements critical of the FCC vote, could they? (Rupert did.)
The First Amendment would protect us from a Government-owned media source, but it is powerless against Government party line coming out of the private sector. Didn't Eisenhower warn us about the military-industrial complex? He didn't forsee that the media would become part of it, though.
You want free speech? Get a state-owned last-mile IPv6 backbone for everyone, free. Constitution will protect us from there.
Or else keep proudly serving your corporate masters. We all know they have the consumers' best interests at heart...
Are you advocating that "ordinary folks" shouldn't be able to discuss their encounters with public figures? What if they restrict their conversations to other po' folk who can't afford to sue them? I fail to see how the world would be a better place if Americans were denied the legal right to shine a light on the bullshit being shoveled by someone, especially if they have the money to bring a lawsuit.
If you've got so much money and want to shut someone up, hire a professional. I am so sick of thugs hiding behind the law. =p
I for one want normal people with all their flaws running the country. I don't care about their dark secrets, I want to know what they can do TODAY.
You might. Allegations of corruption, murder, extortion, embezzlement don't concern you? How would you recommend people choose a baby-sitter? I happen to believe, probably not uniquely, that the best indicator of future behavior is past performance. Having the law bar me from discovering what that is hardly helps me decide "what they can do TODAY", no?
Re:Taking the Idea and Running With It
on
Biofeedback Gaming
·
· Score: 1
No, it's all about the next Jedi Knight game, learning to dispatch your enemies without fear, anger, sphincter clenching, etc. because we all know where those lead...
But if he's changing his behavior based on the availability of the new data, he's vulnerable either way. Best-case scenario is everything is cryptographically secure so it's hard to just add hostile nodes, and evil Pierre will have to actually spoof the motes (might as well be destroying the crops). Easier would be to jam the data transmission. WCS would be... too easy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you hit the nail on the head, there.
It gets to the point where your Republican senator has been there since time-immemorial, is a committee chair, and even though you disagree with him on everything, you still think, "Well, what could a freshman Democrat do for me? Is this guy really that bad? I mean, he's bringing home $50 million in "free" money for a fake indoor rain-forest that no one wants... Yay, our state!"
Does explain how one of the tightest races in last year's Presidential election still went 75%-25% in the Senate race.
I feel that this is going to make a lot of us look a little less paranoid. I've been telling people for years about how bad it is, some of them have been interested, but it's so easy for people in this country to kind of roll their eyes and insist that everything will always work and everyone will play by the rules, because they wouldn't let it happen any other way.
We can use this as an example of just one of the many problems on Nov. 2, and if they end up doing a new election, how costly it is to make mistakes or use untrustworthy technologies in voting. Then segue to Florida and Ohio...
Unfortunately, that's exactly the attitude that's going to stop us from winning. We have a fundamentally different attitude from True Believers. We believe in good Enlightenment Principles, and they
From Ron Suskind's Without a Doubt,
There's a serious divide in this country, and the only things I know are that it must be bridged, and the people on the other side of the chasm aren't going to do it. Especially when they can win (or steal) all the elections they need.
I was looking at the results map and it looks to me as if the Iowa and New Mexico votes didn't even count. Is that true?
In case you're not familiar with the mysterious ways and horrors of the Electoral College, Iowa and New Mexico only matter for bragging rights and planning the next election. There will be a huge post-mortem on the effort in all the battleground states by both parties, and of course the votes will eventually be counted and certified, it just won't matter in determining the winner. It's like this: Imagine that, with only 60% of the vote counted, one candidate already had 51%. Then even if all the rest of the 40 remaining percent went for the challenger, it wouldn't change the outcome; the winner already has 51%. So Iowa and New Mexico could have gone either way and it wouldn't have mattered to the outcome.
I heard some rumors that in Johnson County (containing Iowa City, the liberal oasis in an angry sea of red) the Republicans were (illegally) randomly challenging thousands and thousands of absentee ballots, on the strategy that ballots cast in Johnson County break at least 2-to-1 for Democrats, so challenge 'em all and let God sort 'em out. If true, that would be a Dirty Trick.
I hope to learn more in the next couple days, after I cease my self-imposed media blackout...
Just posted this on my journal in response to this comment.
Single-issue voters. God bless 'em. I listened to a woman call up NPR this morning (in Iowa, where I participated in this election), obviously a Dubya-supporter, and say, "We don't have slavery in this country because a bunch of Republicans put a stop to it!" She was completely oblivious to the fact that the party of Lincoln has since become the party of the Confederacy. She went on: "Yeah I voted my conscience. I've been voting my conscience for 35 years. It's about time people start voting their conscience rather than what's going to put food on their table or gas in their car."
So there you go. She knows she's getting screwed, and is okay with that. She - and probably a lot of others with similar views - feels that eliminating abortion, civil rights for homosexuals, and stem cell research is God's Work, and that if that calls for economic sacrifice because the Party representing that work is a bunch of crooks, so be it. She doesn't seem to question why she must sacrifice the food on her table to battle abortion, two seemingly-unrelated issues, but she's willing to. God tests us, God calls us to sacrifice, and she's answering the call.
What remains is some serious soul-searching by the rest of us. We know that abortions went down under Bill Clinton, who treated the causes of abortion, like poverty, rather than the symptom of legal abortions. I find anti-abortion single-issue voters to be hypocritical in their fervor of support for the life of the unborn, but not the life of the born. If having the baby would kill the mother, so be it. If outlawing abortions will kill teenaged-girls performing abortions with wire-coat hangars, so be it. Capital punishment, illegal war, shooting doctors who perform abortions, you name it, they're fer it. I have much more respect for those Christian evangelicals who are anti-abortion and also anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-capital punishment, anti-murder. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine comes to mind. But I feel like these Christians who are consistent in their belief of the value of human life are a dying breed. Certainly their percentage of support for a pro-war, pro-poverty, pro-capital punishment, pro-extrajudical-killing President who happens to be anti-abortion is telling.
The rest of us, who might not agree that abortion should be illegal, must nevertheless find a way to bridge the gap, because these people are not going to come to us. We might not want abortion to be illegal, but very few people are actually pro-abortion. The desire to reduce the number of aborted pregnancies and increase the quality of life for both the living and the unborn could be our common ground. The grandparent is right; logic and reason have no bearing on this debate. The only appeals that can be made are to their larger sense of Christian "compassion" out of which the support for some of these causes stem.
Some of them are too far gone, like the rising numbers of Christian fascists who, like the Left Behind series "preaches", believe that the world will end with the Second Coming and Armaggedon within the next couple decades. It's hard to start a discussion on environmental issues, or deficit spending, or anything, with people who are convinced the world will end soon, and the only thing that matters is getting into Heaven when it does. The numbers of these Christian fanatics is rising, and some accounts peg them at 20 million Americans already. Very disturbing. But all evangelical Christians are not this irrational and dogmatic, and we can find common ground with them to marginalize the dangerously schizophrenic among them.
I just hope we can do it in four years.
"The most powerful and successful country in the world is further to the right than the rest of the world."
I fear that one of your two assumptions will have to change soon. I was hoping it would be the latter, but now it will probably be the former.
...no more torture chambers and rape rooms...
I can't believe no one has pointed this out yet.
The tyrant will soon be gone.
Hear, hear.
Use me =) I didn't have a referrer when I signed up, and I wasted a chance for someone. You won't decrease your chances of winning, you only increase my chances of sharing it with you... so to sweeten it for you, I'll give you an extra $5k if you win and I'm your referrer =)
So, yes, I'm a greedy whore, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. =) So let's split $200,000
Now go sign up and tell your friends! We're getting infinite odds on the best contest ever! Sign people up to register to vote if you have to, but you can't go wrong with this contest!
cheers,
schlach
Supreme Court ruled a couple months ago that police could arrest you for refusing to give them your name. And of course, lying to a police officer is its own offense, so if your name really is I.P. Freely, you should definitely carry some (really good) identification...
Wow, that's a really cool site, thanks for passing it along. But you're wrong about the results.
Every permutation I could do showed Al Gore winning every recount by as slim a margin as 105 votes or as large a margin as 424 votes.
So I'll back up the original asserter's statement that "Al Gore won every recount" by your own evidence. =)
It's moot anyway, the dirty tricks of the GOP ensured that at least 50,000 black Democratic ballots were not cast; LePore's butterfly ballot cast thousands of Gore votes mistakenly for Buchanon; and the GOP illegally got the Pentagon to send it the email addresses of overseas soldiers so that any who had not voted could send absentee ballots in after the date of the election (illegally). (Greg Palast, Best Democracy Money Can Buy )
It's a testament to the strong force of progressive values that, despite all these votes missing or cast late against him, Al Gore still won the recounts.
On a complete aside, I would like to comment that no politician had any principles that day. The day that Democrat Al Gore was championing states-rights when the Florida Supreme Court ordered that recounts would continue until all votes had been recorded, and Republican W was championing a strong, central federal power by appealing to the Supreme Court to overrule Florida (which violated its own principles by agreeing to hear the case in the first place). Al Gore was trying to selectively recount certain counties because he was worried that recounting more than that might cost him the victory, whereas in fact only recounting the whole state would give him the win. And Bush was maintaining his "My brother said I won it fair and square, and he should know, since he's the one who rigged it" line and trying to stop any recount (in other words, not worried about disenfranchising any and all voters) that might take victory from him.
It should not be surprising that, in a system that rewards the desire for power with power, men who crave power over their ideals will sit at the top.
is that the Bush Administration, notorious for needlessly classifying thousands of documents more than any other previous Administration, just likes things being secret because then they have to explain less.
I stopped using Reason to try to determine the Bush Adm's motivation for its actions and switched to pure cynicism. Since then it's gotten so much easier.
From the Washington Post article entitled, 'Secrets' Perplex Panel, Classified Data Growing to Include 'Comically Irrelevant'
"The tone is set at the top," Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said.
"This administration believes the less known, the better," added the Connecticut Republican, noting sadly he was speaking of a GOP administration. "I believe the more known, the better."
Btw, is everyone registered to vote, by absentee ballot where possible? I only ask because, in our current situation, it might be useful information, MAYBE
isn't that like saying my dirt is contaminated with diamonds?
No, totally wrong -- it's like saying my baking soda is contaminated with heroin. =p
I'm sorry but I had no trouble understanding all the parts you say have no explaination
Smith entered Bane by somehow hijacking the hardline or something I guess
As I said, everyone is freed. Neo didn't die... At least I don't think he did.
I appreciate your devotion to the franchise, but re-read your reply, and listen how unsure you are of everything. This is exactly what the poster was talking about when he said nothing was resolved. You've made some guesses and inferences, of which you don't sound entirely sure. If the movie had really resolved the story, none of us would have to guess.
And that should be the real issue here, not legal quibblings about whether or not he was properly terminated.
my two cents.
This is the dumbest tripe I ever heard, anonymous self-flattery aside.
Sure. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. This is broadband Internet access we're talking about. NOBODY needs this. Nobody.
Horse-pucky. Nobody needs roads either. Or B-52 bombers. Individually. But as a society you and I might agree that these things come in handy in a pinch. Certainly we could not enjoy our superpower status without oads and B-52 bombers (and plenty of em), nationalized by our government b/c the cost is too large for private citizens. You think that "NOBODY" needs broadband, but as far as our national economy, and the economies of ideas, art, creativity, and social progress go, it is critical to growth. People don't call this the "Information Age" for nothing.
I bet there were people saying NOBODY needed electricity 100 years ago, when gas lamps were plentiful and water-wheels provided all the power a factory needed...
The sophistication of your lecture on the First Amendment was too much for me to follow. I'll see if one of the brighter students can dumb it down for me.
As for nationalized health care... yeah, it would be a tragedy to fall to illness or injury while traveling in Canada and be trapped in one of those death-trap, nationalized hospitals... better to be back in the States where my HMO tells me whether, when, and where I can go to get treatment. And how much it costs.
Now let me post a note congratulating myself on such a thoughtful refutation of your post, and reassuring myself that anyone who disagrees is a "commie". It's the Slashdot Way.
The difference is,
(a) the US government is not allowed to censor based on content*, whereas private companies are (::cough:: Akamai)
(b) not everyone can afford Internet access, but everyone can afford roads**. The ability-to-pay is represented by progressive taxation rates.
Personally, I believe nationalizing the last mile would make a lot of sense. It would give us First Amendment protections again, and reduce the digital divide a bit. Dropping a couple hundred on a computer is hard, but that and a recurring cost of $50 for broadband can be damn near impossible if you're not splitting the cost with folks around you.
*notable exceptions are of course the FCC and legally "obscene" materials, but I'd still rather take my chances with my Uncle Sam than my Uncle Rupert.
**not if they're riding the bus, smart ass.
Those teenager hax0r d00ds 99.5% of the time DO NOT find any new vulnerabilities.
Don't believe the myths, yourself. Sit on Incidents for awhile. When people at the frontlines are saying, "I'm getting a lot of activity on port x, seems to be trying this against Apache/IIS/Wu, anyone else seeing it?" which eventually leads to "I was compromised sometime last night/week, found this in my logs, anyone recognize it?" which eventually leads to a security researcher rediscovering the vulnerability in the affected package. And I say "rediscovering" because obviously he wasn't the first, eh?
I agree that most of the huge Internet-worm firestorms (read: IIS/SQL worms) seem to be leisurely engineerings of previously discovered vulnerabilities with delivery packages that may have just been sitting around on the shelf. That may very well be because it's mostly amateurs that want to take over every machine, randomly, in 20 minutes. The pros are happy with a few of their choice, knowing that the less machines they knock over, the longer they have before anyone discovers what tricks they're using to get in.
As a business owner, you have much less to fear from the amateurs, protection against which ironically seems to be what most of the security tools / disclosure guidelines seem to be geared towards.
And if they're not protecting us against dedicated blackhats, let's ask ourselves how well these new disclosure guidelines will protect us from CodeRed, Nimda, and Slapper, where old vulnerabilities are used to devastating success after a patch is released. What? They won't? Not even a little bit? Hmm... that's less encouraging.
Interestingly enough, if Fox News was owned by the US Government rather than Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorporation, they couldn't very well have refused to air any advertisements critical of the FCC vote, could they? (Rupert did.)
The First Amendment would protect us from a Government-owned media source, but it is powerless against Government party line coming out of the private sector. Didn't Eisenhower warn us about the military-industrial complex? He didn't forsee that the media would become part of it, though.
You want free speech? Get a state-owned last-mile IPv6 backbone for everyone, free. Constitution will protect us from there.
Or else keep proudly serving your corporate masters. We all know they have the consumers' best interests at heart...
haha =)
Are you advocating that "ordinary folks" shouldn't be able to discuss their encounters with public figures? What if they restrict their conversations to other po' folk who can't afford to sue them? I fail to see how the world would be a better place if Americans were denied the legal right to shine a light on the bullshit being shoveled by someone, especially if they have the money to bring a lawsuit.
If you've got so much money and want to shut someone up, hire a professional. I am so sick of thugs hiding behind the law. =p
I for one want normal people with all their flaws running the country. I don't care about their dark secrets, I want to know what they can do TODAY.
You might. Allegations of corruption, murder, extortion, embezzlement don't concern you? How would you recommend people choose a baby-sitter? I happen to believe, probably not uniquely, that the best indicator of future behavior is past performance. Having the law bar me from discovering what that is hardly helps me decide "what they can do TODAY", no?
I used a similar hypothesis in proving my own immortality...
I think, therefore I think I am.
No, it's all about the next Jedi Knight game, learning to dispatch your enemies without fear, anger, sphincter clenching, etc. because we all know where those lead...
At first, probably.
... too easy.
But if he's changing his behavior based on the availability of the new data, he's vulnerable either way. Best-case scenario is everything is cryptographically secure so it's hard to just add hostile nodes, and evil Pierre will have to actually spoof the motes (might as well be destroying the crops). Easier would be to jam the data transmission. WCS would be
This is hilarious. A first for Slashdot: the high-brow flame war.
Let those suits tell us we're a bunch of unsophisticated cretins now. =p