Constitution? What Constitution?
There's no civil liberty or Constitutional guarantee the President can't violate, as long as he mentions "protecting the nation from terrorism" while trying to justify it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html - A federal appeals court ruled today that the president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil in the absence of criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. [Oh look. It's the magic "t" word.]] The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit came in the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and designated an "enemy combatant" by President Bush. The government contends that Padilla trained at al Qaeda camps and was planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, has been held without trial in a U.S. naval brig for more than three years, and his case triggered a legal battle with vast implications for civil liberties and the fight against terrorism. Attorneys for Padilla and a host of civil liberties organizations blasted the detention as illegal and said it could lead to the military being allowed to hold anyone, from protesters to people who check out what the government considers the wrong books from the library. Federal prosecutors asserted that Bush not only had the authority to order Padilla's detention but that such power is essential to preventing attacks. In its ruling today, the 4th Circuit overturned a lower court and came down squarely on the government's side. ... Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: [Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone
Peter Trei writes: >> Ryan Lackey needs to star in an Ayman al-Zawahri produced >> video, making short-lived gurgling and whistling noises. >> Making a fast buck off an illegal war of aggression >> is a far cry from running a secure data repository >> on an oil platform. > Eric, I think you could nuance this a bit. My first comment was more a parody of Pat Robertson's ridiculous call for the US to murder the President of Venezuela. I'm sure the State Department supports my right, as a private citizen, to say silly things just like Pat. While I don't wish Ryan any misfortune, I have some difficulty seeing how taking cash from Big Brother to create modern digital infrastructure that creates a more comfortable life for Big Brother's forces, is actually a cunning scheme to undermine morale in the unecessary, unjust, outrageous, and illegal occupation of Iraq. > Ryan isn't supporting Bush's little war - the military > has plenty of comm channels for C&C which Ryan wouldn't be > allowed near. He's taking cash to provide aid and comfort for members of the military, so that they may chat with their wives and girlfriends, access really good porn, socialize online, play games, blog, video conference, and otherwise recreate, activities which are undoubtedly not encouraged on the C&C comm channels. > What he's doing is supplying US soldiers with an independent, > uncensored and unreviewed channel through which they can find > out outside views of the war, information which their superiors > won't pass down to them, and a means by which they can > pass back their own views and opinions. Frankly, I'm suprised > the brass are letting him do it. US soldiers are so brainwashed by the military whispering in their ear "you're fighting for their right to protest" every time they encounter outside views of the war, that they view themselves as beleagured noble warriors safeguarding the free speech rights of unworthy unwashed unpatriotic hippies who don't know what they're talking about, and tend to interpret criticism of the war through that filter. Joining the military is not an intelligence test, and the troops, at least at the leafy parts of the command tree, are generally not talented critical thinkers with long term political memories. So I think the "aid and comfort to the illegal occupation" aspects of Ryan's work must surely outweigh the "opposing points of view" aspects. If it didn't, would he even be allowed to do it? 1% of propaganda is lying. 99% of propaganda is context. The military controls the soldiers' context in which outside views are interpreted. Net access hardly threatens their loyalty to the cause. The Iraqi people do not wish US occupation of their homeland, and given that this was an unprovoked war of aggression, that means that occupying troops, mercenaries from private military corporations, military contractors, and Ryan Lackey, are there illegitimately. > How do you think the prison abuse photos got back to the US > media? If I remember correctly, they were souvenir photos taken by service members, sent back to their families, and accidently posted with world access on what the family members thought was a private online album. They were noticed by the press, and the effluent hit the fan. > Would you rather the soldiers rely on Stars & Stripes for info > on the changing situation back home? > If anything, what Ryan's doing advances the so-called > 'cypherpunk agenda' more than anything being done at the > ideologicaly pure but practically insignificant Sealand. I think that's an oversimplification. It's not impossible that after the HavenCo fiasco, Ryan has given up on the Cypherpunk Agenda, and is currently selling his services for cash and no questions asked. In any case, I invite Ryan, if he can take a few minutes from hauling those suitcases of cash to the bank in Dubai, to post to the list, and clarify exactly what he is trying to do. He did say at the end of the piece, that he looked forward to the military opening up additional new markets for him, I assume in places like Iran and the other four as-yet-uninvaded countries on the Neocons' list of seven. That seems to say "mercenary" more loudly than it says "Cypherpunk," so I certainly look forward to more information on the subject. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: [Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone
RAW forwards... > Wiring the War Zone > It's a typical morning at Camp Anaconda, the giant US military base 50 > miles north of Baghdad - light breeze, temperatures heading to 100 degrees, > scattered mortar fire. Ryan Lackey is getting ready for today's assignment: > installing a pair of satellite Internet connections at Camp Warhorse about > 30 miles away. Ryan Lackey needs to star in an Ayman al-Zawahri produced video, making short-lived gurgling and whistling noises. Making a fast buck off an illegal war of aggression is a far cry from running a secure data repository on an oil platform. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Paintball "Terrorist" Sentenced
I'd just like to say that the American troops who carried out Bush's illegal war in Iraq, which killled 100,000 Iraqi civilians, are war criminals, and I'd like to encourage all of AmeriKKKa's victims to capture them and bake them in pies, after forcing them to bark like dogs and poop themselves. Now, is that worth life in prison? Only in a police state. In a real democracy whose citizens are free, it's protected political speech. Too bad AmeriKKKa isn't one of those. Fuck Bush. This, by the way, in case you can't read through the inflammatory bullshit in the wireservice story, was the case of some individuals who were deemed to have engaged in a conspiracy to wage war against the US, because in addition to being Islamic, and denouncing Bush's war, they played paintball. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-terror-paintball-sentence,0,4274092.story - ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A prominent U.S.-based Islamic scholar who exhorted his followers after the Sept. 11 attacks to join the Taliban and fight U.S. troops was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison. Ali al-Timimi of Fairfax was convicted in April of soliciting others to levy war against the United States, inducing others to aid the Taliban, and inducing others to use firearms in violation of federal law. The cleric addressed the court for 10 minutes before his sentencing. "I will not admit guilt nor seek the court's mercy. I do this simply because I am innocent," al-Timimi said. The cleric addressed the court for 10 minutes before his sentencing. "I will not admit guilt nor seek the court's mercy. I do this simply because I am innocent," al-Timimi said. Prosecutors said the defendant, a native U.S. citizen who has an international following in some Muslim circles, wielded enormous influence among a group of young Muslim men in northern Virginia who played paintball games in 2000 and 2001. Authorities said they were a "Virginia jihad network" training for holy war around the globe. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The Nazification Of America ("Show Me Your Papers" - Day 1)
J.A. Terranson wrote: > We have literally allowed the Nazification to begin, and we've even > welcomed it with eager open arms - all in the name of "Fighting Terror". > Crystal clear, pure unadulterated bullshit. In anticipation of the "Guv'ment ID Needed for Everything/Can't Get ID Without Already Having ID" state, I got government ID last month, before the regulations went into effect. I did the whole house of cards. Certified birth certificate copy, voter registration, library card, passport, state ID, SS Card. Now I will have to live a quiet life flying under the radar as myself, and conduct all my nefarious schemes under invented identities. Did you know that once you get a Drivers License/State ID, it is illegal not to inform them within 10 days if your address changes? Once in the system, always in the system. The picture is also very unflattering. I am substantially taller than the lens level, and being ordered to look down at the lens makes me appear to have multiple chins. The things I put up with. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: AP For Starvation Judge
Justin writes: > She is a corpse with a heartbeat. According to a cast of characters which include a euthanasia proponent, a lawyer at the forefront of dehydration advocacy for the brain-damaged, and a doctor who thinks its morally acceptable to starve Alzheimer's patients to death. > Artificially feeding her against her wishes and/or the wishes of her > husband (whose wishes have precedence over the wishes of her parents -- > if you don't like that, get that law changed) is sick. I think we have to divide things we do for disabled people into "care" and "heroic medical measures." I consider a feeding tube to fall into the former category. That which we may do to ourselves, if we are functioning, exceeds that which we may require others to do to us if we are not. I can deny myself food, water, and air, for instance. I cannot instruct others to deny me those things if I am rendered incapable of making my own decisions. I can instruct them to deny me things like a respirator, or dialysis, of course, which is reasonable. There is no reason for the feeding tube to be removed at all. It is not valuable. It is not horribly invasive or uncomfortable. It is not going to be taken out and used on another patient. They can certainly starve and dehydrate her to death with the tube in place. In fact, leaving it in place would be a prudent thing to do, to spare her the risk of having to have a new one installed if the decision to kill her is reversed before she dies. THe only reason the tube is being removed, is because they are playing the game that "The Tube" is keeping her alive. In reality, nutrition and hydration are keeping her alive, and in fact, they are also keeping you and me alive too. Nutrition and hydration are "care," not "heroic medical measures," and while people can refuse to eat and drink themselves, they should not be able to leave advance directives demanding others deny them such things. If Terri were able to be spoon fed by an attendant, would the judge have then ordered "spoon and attendant withdrawal?" Would the papers report that "the spoon is keeping her alive artificially?" If you want to make an argument for killing the cognitively impaired, let's at least call it what it is, and not engage in political theatre over feeding tubes. > If I have a living will (in writing or by the decision of a legal proxy) > that restricts certain kinds of treatment, you're more than happy to see > doctors violate that and keep me alive as long as someone on Earth is > willing to pay? Well, I would argue that you do not have a legal right to demand others restrict your air, food, and water, unless they need to be delivered in invasive uncomfortable ways that reduce your human dignity. You are of course welcome to not breathe, drink, or eat as long as you are in charge, but you do not have the right to demand we kill you by withholding such things if you become disabled. > That is not the way any sane legal or medical system should work. I > suppose you don't believe in euthanasia either? I think euthanasia is fine if the patient is suffering horribly, has all their marbles, and has less than six months to linger from a terminal illness. Terri Schiavo meets none of these criteria. I certainly don't support the right of an adulterous spouse who swore up and down at the malpractice trial that he only wanted to care for his wife for the rest of her natural life, and who didn't mention her "wish" to not go on until 7 years after her brain injury, to have his brain-damaged wife starved and dehydrated to death solely on his say-so, absent any written indication of her wishes. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: AP For Starvation Judge
Justin writes: > If the judge's decision had been the opposite, there might be a bounty > on his head for that, too. Somehow letting someone who has lived 15 years with a significant brain injury live out the rest of their normal life span just doesn't provoke people the same way dehydrating and starving them does. > If you're saying that fundie Christians are more pathologically violent > than either the areligous or the more progressive religious, I'd agree > there. I don't believe in the existence of a supernatural, but I certainly wouldn't take water and food away from any human with a functioning brain stem, particularly when there are people to whom that person's life has meaning, and who are willing to provide them with care. The interesting political lesson here is that one stubborn judge, and his pals who band together to support him, can defy the will of the President of the United States, the Governor of the State of Florida, and a majority of both houses of Congress. Of the three equal branches of government, the unelected branch is more equal than the other two. Of course, we've known that since Marbury vs Madison. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
AP For Starvation Judge
This just in from CNN: [FBI agents have arrested a North Carolina man on suspicion of soliciting offers over the Internet to kill Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer. Richard Alan Meywes of Fairview is accused of offering $250,000 for the killing of Schiavo and another $50,000 for the "the elimination of the judge who ruled against Terri."] Given that the real problem in this case is one stubborn judge, and all the other judges sticking with him, I'm not really sure the bounty allocation cited is the best possible one. Michael Schiavo doesn't, by himself, have the power to completely thwart the wishes of the President of the United States, the Governor of the State of Florida, and an overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress. He is an insignificant pipsqueak, and were he not being backed by the judiciary, the more equal of the three equal branches of government, he would have been marginalized and ignored years ago. I wonder how much it is going to cost the taxpayers for the round the clock army this judge is going to need to protect his sorry life for the remainder of it. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The Register: Anonymity no protection for online libellers
> Mark Weston, technology law specialist at MAB Law, says the ruling was > another link in the chain of judicial authority saying that you cannot be > anonymous. If they can find out who you are, you aren't "anonymous," you are "confidential." Anonymous means no trail was created which might be examined to disclose your identity, and no individuals are in possession of that information, and might disclose it. Confidential means the information exists, but that people have promised to keep it secret, until they change their minds. There is a vast difference, for instance, between confidential HIV testing, and anonymous HIV testing. When I want to be anonymous online, I rely on technology, not peoples promises, and if this individual had been truly anonymous, he would not have been identified. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)
Zooko writes: > I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from > contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system > space. > I will miss the Mnet project! Good luck without me! Is there a network currently running? At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it. > I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that > I have thought of for Mnet. [Clippage]] Yes, well. My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as follows. We have the following useful technologies. Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search. We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these features, with varying degrees of efficiency. The killer technology amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network bandwidth. The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent "issues" in their protocols and codebase. Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating. BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers? If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code? I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes. But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like network television programming without viewers. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: End of a cypherpunk era?
Someone writes: > > I never saw this kind of thing as being central to the cypherpunk > > concept. In fact, to me it seems like the wrong direction to go. The > > point of being a cypherpunk is to live in cypherspace, the mythical land > > where online interactions dominate and we can use information theory and > > mathematics to protect ourselves. Of course, cypherspace is inevitably > > grounded in the physical world, so we have to use anonymous remailers > > and proxies to achieve our goals. This seems reasonable. It seems the path of least resistance here, is to let ones meatspace identity fly under the radar, and attract no attention to itself, while ones cypherpunkish persona is fighting injustice and sovereign state arrogance by selling really great tech to the needy and wiring large satchels of money between continents in encrypted untraceable transactions. I would think the last thing one would wish do to in order to further that goal, is to have ones meatspace identity publicly thumb its nose at the government, and make itself a target for retaliation. Loudly renouncing ones citizenship is a lot less effective in destroying the infrastructure of oppression, than anonymously telling everyone in the world how they can make a 20 megaton thermonuclear explosion working for a few years in their basement using only non-radioactive materials that can never be made illegal to own. There are two types of societies in the world. Those in which everyone has a deadly weapon that can never be take away, and against which there is no defense. And those in which everyone has an inpenetrable shield that can never be taken away, and against which no weapon is effective. Dolphins are an example of the former. Usenet is an example of the latter. Dolphins are polite, friendly, and respectful of eachother, and no group of dolphins can ever form a government to oppress the rest of them. We should try to be more like dolphins in cypherspace, while attracting as little attention to ourselves in other places. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Florida man faces bioweapon charge
RAH pastes: ... > Steven Michael Ekberg, 22, had at least 83 castor beans and other > byproducts consistent with the manufacture of ricin in his possession, the > FBI said. ... > They said they also found, in a cardboard box in Ekberg's room, glass vials > containing white granules suspected of being husk-less, chopped castor > beans, a byproduct of the manufacture of ricin. I'm confused here. Is possession of castor beans possession of ricin? Is possession of chopped castor beans possession of ricin? > He then picked up another container and stated words to the effect, "This > would make you really sick," the source allegedly told authorities. I could pick up a container of Drano, and make the same commment. Big deal. > The source told police that Ekberg had two books containing information on > how to make poisons from household chemicals and plants, according to the > affidavit. Still legal to own, as far as I know. > His mother, Theresa Ekberg, told the FBI that he has been treated for > depression, according to the affidavit. > His mother also told authorities that in the past her son had possessed > some "chemicals." > She said that on at least one occasion he showed her something he had > purchased via the Internet and expressed concern that if their cat > inadvertently ate enough of it, the cat would die, according to the > affidavit. Obviously this news story is the grand prize winner in an innuendo contest. > The FBI is still investigating who sent two letters that contained ricin in > 2003 through the U.S. postal system. Those letters contained threats and > complaints about labor regulations in the trucking industry. > In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and journalist in London, died > after a man attacked him with an umbrella that had been rigged to inject a > ricin pellet under his skin. And WTF does this have to do with the guy with the castor beans? Looks like "Ricin Theatre" has joined "Anthrax Theatre" in the armory of Weapons of Mass Deception. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The Values-Vote Myth
J.A. Terranson wrote: > The fact is that those who did not vote effectively voted for Shrub. You > are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem. Inaction > is not good enough. This would only be true if the President were elected by popular vote. In states where one candidate had a huge majority, the results would not have been changed. Also, voting is in some sense political manipulation to blame the population for the actions of their government. Everyone who votes is a co-conspirator, and the argument is made that those who don't vote have no right to dissent. Any government that requires that I vote, or the torture and war crimes are "my fault", is broken to start with. The fundamental definition of Democracy is still "Your neighbors tell you what to do." I don't tolerate my neighbors telling me what to do, particularly my neighbors in the Confederacy, which we should have let keep their Negro guest-workers and drop out of the union when the opportunity presented itself. Now they outnumber us, and we are paying for it. The only government I need is "Leave me alone, or face serious consequences." Similarly, I leave others alone. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Why you keep losing to this idiot
> I think this is the answer: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Isn't that what Democracy is all about? The 51% simpletons imposing their will on the 49% non-simpletons? Proportional representation is our friend. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
So Who Won?
So who won the US election? The turd sandwich, or the giant douche? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: 100,000 Deaths in Iraq
Tyler Durden writes: > Well make 'em free even if we have to kill every last one of them, right Mr > Donald? Most AmeriKKKans are too stupid to know that when their Poodle Press talks about airstrikes against "insurgent safehouses", they really mean bombing civilian neighborhoods to scare the resistance out of the people. I wonder how many skyscrapers you'd have to fly planes into in order to kill 100,000 civilians. THe crimes of Bush et al greatly exceed the crimes of the "terrorists." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
FBI Raids Indymedia
According to http://www.indymedia.it/, the FBI seized Indymedia's servers from their host, Rackspace. > Thursday Oct 7 2004, at 6 PM, FBI issued an order to Rackspace in the US > (Indymedia's provider with offices in the US and London) to remove > physically two of our servers. The order was so short term that > Rackspace had to give away our hard drives in the UK. The servers > hosted numerous local IMCs, including italy.indymedia.org. If you find > a site is down: that might be the reason The reason why the hard drives > were taken are unknown. And at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html - The FBI has issued an order to hosting provider Rackspace in the US, ordering it to turn over two of the servers hosting the Independent Media Centre's websites in the UK, a statement from the group says. Rackspace has offices in the US and the UK. Independent Media Center, which is better known as Indymedia, was set up in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle. Rackspace complied with the FBI order, without first notifying Indymedia, and turned over Indymedia's server in the UK. This affects over 20 Indymedia sites worldwide, the group said. Indymedia said it did not know why the order had been issued as it was issued to Rackspace. Rackspace told some of the group's volunteers "they cannot provide Indymedia with any information regarding the order." ISPs have received gag orders in similar situations which prevent them from updating the parties involved on what is happening. Indymedia said a second server was taken down at Rackspace. This provided streaming radio to several radio stations, BLAG (a Linux distribution), and a handful of miscellanous things. In August the US Secret Service used a subpoena in an attempt to disrupt the New York city Independent Media Center before the Republican National COnvention by trying to get IP logs from an ISP in the US and the Netherlands. Last month the US Federal Communications Commission shut down community radio stations around the US. Two weeks ago the FBI asked Indymedia to remove a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police and IMC volunteers in Seattle were visited by the FBI on the same issue. Indymedia said the list of local media collectives affected included Ambazonia, Uruguay, Andorra, Poland, Western Massachusetts, Nice, Nantes, Lilles, Marseille (all France), Euskal Herria (Basque Country), Liege, East and West Vlaanderen, Antwerpen (all Belgium), Belgrade, Portugal, Prague, Galiza, Italy, Brazil, UK, part of the Germany site, and the global Indymedia Radio site. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Recruiting Only Smart People
Google has an austere black on white billboard ad which simply reads.
www.{first 10-digit prime found in the consecutive digits of e}.com
People arriving solve another puzzle, and then can use the answer as a
password for a website that greets them with the message...
"One thing we learned while
building Google is that it's
easier to find what you're looking
for if it comes looking for you.
What we're looking for are the
best engineers in the world. And
here you are."
Cute, except it's now being discussed on the net, and you can google
the answers. :)
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Another John Young Sighting
Tyler Durden wrote: > I propose that any 'Cypherpunk' can declare himself > to be leader and make 'official statements' at any time. Of course, others > can (and most probably will) choose to ignore the official statement, or > even declare himself to be leader and 'officially' rescind that statement > and/or issue a completely contradictory statement. This will be particularly > useful when getting (for instance) public interest to move elsewhere. Sounds like the Discordian concept that everyone is a Pope, and therefore infallible, even when they disagree with one another. Hail Eris. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Another John Young Sighting
Was that our John Young on the Daily Show, talking about being visited by FBI agents, with the title "Anarchist" under his name? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Respect for the Judiciary
I wonder if any such noises were heard during the Jim Bell trial. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0624041pump1.html - JUNE 24--While seated on the bench, an Oklahoma judge used a male enhancement pump, shaved and oiled his nether region, and pleasured himself, state officials charged yesterday in a petition to remove the jurist. ... Visitors to Thompson's Creek County courtroom reported hearing a "swooshing" sound coming from the bench, a noise the court reporter said "sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up." ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Citizen Units Must Give Names
One used to have the right to be known by any name one wished, as long as one did not do so for the purpose of committing fraud, or impersonating someone else. One certainly has an absolute right to refuse to speak to a government employee when accosted. So it is difficult to understand the Court's "reasoning" in this case. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=5473543 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that people are required to identify themselves when asked to do so by police, and rejected arguments that it violates their constitutional rights to privacy and to remain silent. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
AOL and Ellison Kiss and Make Up
You may remember back in 2000, former literary icon turned copyright pest Harlan Ellison sued AOL because people were able to access a couple of his short stories in the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.e-book, prompting AOL to block the newsgroup on its servers. This earned Ellison a Big Brother award, which he no doubt keeps next to his Hugo for ""'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," a story about slavery to punctuality and mindless conformity. At the time, I said that if Harlan would send me an address, I would be more than happy to send him money everytime I read one of his stories on the Internet for free. AOL originally got a summary judgment dismissing Harlan's claims, but Harlan appealed, and the summary judgment was partially reversed, leaving open the possibility of a trial in which AOL would have to defend its role as a "passive conduit" for Internet data. Well, it now appears the parties have reached a settlement, and a joint press release has been issued, in which Ellison opines... <<"Through this litigation, I have come to realize that AOL respects the rights of authors and artists, and has a comprehensive system for addressing the complaints of copyright holders. I would not have settled this case if I were not sure that AOL is doing what it can do to fight online piracy. Because not all Internet service providers are as responsible as AOL, and because individual acts of online piracy continue, I am glad to have called attention to the problem of online piracy through this litigation. As promised, I will be repaying every cent of the monies contributed to the KICK Internet Piracy Fund by writers and readers.">> You can read the whole blurb at... http://media.aoltimewarner.com/media/cb_press_view.cfm?release_num=55254033 Harlan still doesn't get that it was not a useful thing to get an entire newsgroup blocked over four of his stories, and that like the xeroxing of paperback books, his unhappiness is best addressed not by jackbooted persecution of copyright violators, but by making the works widely available at a reasonable price so people will not have an incentive to reproduce them by other means. Perhaps we can all donate to a fund to buy Harlan a clue. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Reverse Scamming 419ers
Roy M. Silvernail wrote: > Think of it as evolution in action. I think we've identified another applicant on the short list for Tim May's old job. :) -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Reverse Scamming 419ers
David Howe writes: > Presumably these are the Nigerians who have only $80 for food that > month, yet somehow can still afford to bulkspam thousands of inboxes > each day, process bank transactions and take part in international phone > calls. Email is free. That is why we have a spam problem. If email required 37 cent stamps, it would be no more annoying than junk snailmail. I would suspect that after initial contact is made, and a "fee" is transferred, part of that money can be used to fund the appearance of the scam, and still make a profit. > hell, if that sort of internet access and telephony is so cheap it > doesn't make a noticable dent in a $80/month income, I definitely should > move there myself! I think this sort of scamming is a very highly leveraged activity, with an occasional large payoff, like playing a slot machine with the overall odds slightly in your favor. It probably doesn't take too much before these guys are out in the street with nothing. Given the number of people worldwide currently in that situation, I probably won't behave in ways that increase it, even if the person in question is trying to pick my pocket. Visionary Philosophers should have higher moral standards than the scum of the earth. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Reverse Scamming 419ers
I visited that 419eaters site, and I must say I have really mixed feelings about what the people are doing there. It's certainly unethical for Nigerians to try and make a living by bilking foreigners with elaborate schemes that promise vast riches in return for an advance fee. But Nigeria is a very poor country, with high unemployment, where people are forced by economic circumstances to do almost anything to try and feed their families. I see no reason to be proud of reverse-scamming a Nigerian out of $80 when it might be his entire family's food money for the month. Only idiots fall for Nigerian Spam. (well, aside from that lady who worked at a bank, and sent some Nigerian $1.3 million of the bank's money) It seems to me the relationship between affluent Americans and poor Nigerians is an example of a dominant class/subordinate class structure, and in such a structure, the subordinate class has rights, and the dominant class has responsibilities. It is beneath the station of those those with the power to define, describe, and profile the world to pick the pocket of some poor black man in Africa, while encouraging him to pose for funny pictures that will be laughed at on some comfortably well off white person's web site. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Lowering the Bar for Threats
Federal Prosecutors say the conviction of Matthew Hale on charges including trying to have a federal judge killed sends an important message. But don't they always? The "plot" to kill the federal judge in this case consisted of a recorded conversation with an FBI Informant which went something like this... FBI Shill: Are we gonna exterminate the rat? Hale: I'm going to fight within the law and, but, ... if you wish to, ah, do anything, yourself, you can. Uh, right. Emboldened by their latest success in pushing the envelope, the Feebs now plan to monitor so-called "Hate Sites" more closely, and warn that under the new standards, simply publishing someone's address could be considered a murder threat. Meanwhile, a man totally unconnected with the case is under 24 hour Feeb protection because he has the same name as the aforementioned FBI Shill, and someone posted his address on the Web by mistake. Murder plotting is easy. Comedy is hard. In other threat related news, a 15 year high school freshman in Washington was questioned by the Secret Circus after a portfolio of drawings he turned in featured an armed Middle Eastern man holding an oversized Shrub head on a stick. We can all thank God he didn't publish the President's address. So apparently, if someone asks me if I plan to kill the President, and I reply that I intend to conform my behavior to all the requirements of the law, but that I wouldn't cry uncontrollably if Shrub were dropped by parachute into a mob of screaming Iraqi women with cleavers, that's apparently good for a long prison sentence these days. I wonder how long it will be until Americans get their houses pushed over with bulldozers for criticizing the government. Probably at least until after the election. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Usenet Dead. Film at 11
RAH clipped: > search tool that would scour electronic bulletin boards for millions of > "uncensored" movies and photographs and serve up "an all-you-can-eat taste > of 'the Internet gone wild!"' There used to be a service called "Boypics", which thumbnailed and decoded all of Usenet's picture newsgroups for easy Web access. I think they ultimately closed down after prosecutorial grumbling, although they were just yet another way of reading Usenet, and didn't monitor content, nor log what their users looked at. The indemnity of Usenet providers over content becomes a considerably more grey area if the Usenet content is processed to some form other than articles, even if that processing is done mechanically, without peeking at what is being processed. > Voicenet Communications executives said they didn't know users also were > using their system to access child pornography until January, when > authorities seized the computer servers that ran their "QuikVue" search > program, a lawyer for the company said. Well, of course, it shouldn't matter if they "know." I mean, everyone who has a router through which an uncensored Usenet feed passes "knows" illegal porn and warez are included. That doesn't make them "madams of the child porn bordello", to borrow a colorful phrase from the Landslide circus. > The company's attorney, Mark Sheppard, said the company had no control > over what people posted to the groups, and was no more criminally liable > for their actions than other hosts of Usenet material. It's clear that the current administration would like to corral Usenet. This is the first appearance under the tent of something which resembles the nose of a camel. > Investigators in New York pressed criminal charges against a pair of > Internet service providers in 1998 for allegedly failing to block access to > Usenet groups that contained child pornography. One firm, Buffalo-based > BuffNet, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal facilitation in > 2001 and paid a $5,000 fine. Right. That was the Dennis Vacco nonsense, when he announced that he had singlehanded stopped an "International Child POrn Ring" and that "Pedo University" was a real organization. He lost the election. When it became evident that they were going to investigate the two companies Vacco had attacked forever and cost them as much money as they could, they rolled over, which was good for them as individual corporations, but bad for the "larger picture." > "The case helped establish that when an Internet service provider becomes > aware of child pornography being on its system, it has an obligation to do > something about it," said Paul Larrabee, a spokesman for New York Attorney > General Eliot Spitzer. You should look at the policy of Giganews over child porn. They say call the FBI. They are not qualified to determine what it and is not child porn. I imagine this is true of most ISPs. I'd hate to think sysadmins would need to sit and view pictures all day trying to decide the age of the participants. > A federal judge imposed a tougher penalty on a Texas couple convicted in > 2000 of operating a service that gave subscribers passwords to overseas Web > sites containing child pornography. A judge sentenced Thomas Reedy to life > in prison. His wife, who helped run the business, got 14 years. Yes, send the owners of an age verification service to prison for life because two of their sites not located in the US were alleged to have child porn. Again, this is an example of people who were told by the best legal advice they could obtain that they weren't liable for content getting screwed over by a jury and a prosecutorial performance that belonged on the Jerry Springer show. My take on Landslide is apparently enjoying a life of its own on the Web. http://www.p-loog.info/English/ashcroft_lies.htm The feds are still grepping the Reedy's customer list by country, and trying to browbeat foreign LEAs into running around searching peoples computers and taking their children away. Aside from the UK, where pedo-bashing is a national sport, there appear to be few takers. These festivities are called "Operation Ore", by the way. And the news stories are replete with factual errors, calling everyone who had an age verification code from Landslide, a "person who paid to access child porn on the Internet," for instance. Of course, if you'll lie to start a war in Iraq, you'll probably lie about anything. > Prosecutors said that even though the couple didn't post child pornography > themselves, they knowingly facilitated access to it and shared their > profits with the Web sites responsible for the illegal material. This is the new crime the Feebs are trying to fabricate. "Paying for access to child porn." This is a step beyond even possession laws, and could be used to put people in prison for just having a subscription to an ISP or USenet provider that carries an uncensored fed, or owning an adult check
Re: US Brings Freedom of Expression to Iraq
Major Variola (ret) writes:
> What is bizarre about offering a contract? "Get your filthy hands off
> my desert xor suffer for not doing same" The US said the same (with a
> more temperate piece of real estate) to the UK, once. Apparently some
> need to be reminded that gentlemen don't occupy other countries.
> There are comments in the oral contract which remind the populace that
> they suffer for the behavior of their "leaders". Its all very obvious.
> Osama, bless his naif little heart, even credits the populace with being
> rational, and with controlling the leaders. Obviously he's not paid
> close enough attention, but reception is poor in the hills. Maybe he
> thinks Spain's sensitivity is typical. Maybe the weeks leading up to the
> next US Election will be extra fun. Good luck getting any reasonable
> discussion about the truce in this country.
I just grabbed a transcript of Osama's remarks and read them. He raises a
number of valid objections to US and Jewish behavior, and seems to have a
much better grasp of reality than Shrub does.
-
Osama Bin Laden's Offer For Peace
Apr 17, 2004
JUS News Desk
Editors Note: Here is the complete transcript of Osams bin Laden's latest
address as translated by BBC in which he calls for peace with European
counrries on the basis that they withdraw from the lands of the Muslims
and stop spilling Muslims blood.
We remind our viewers that the statements, opinions and points of view
expressed in this article are those of the author and shall not be deemed
to mean that they are necessarily those of Jihad Unspun, the publisher,
editor, writers, contributors or staff.
Complete Statement Of Osama Bin Laden Address to the European Countries
Praise be to Almighty God; Peace and prayers be upon our Prophet Muhammad,
his family, and companions.
This is a message to our neighbours north of the Mediterranean, containing
a reconciliation initiative as a response to their positive reactions.
Praise be to God; praise be to God; praise be to God who created heaven
and earth with justice and who allowed the oppressed to punish the
oppressor in the same way.
Peace upon those who followed the right path: In my hands there is a
message to remind you that justice is a duty towards those whom you love
and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the
opponent speaks out about them. The greatest rule of safety is justice,
and stopping injustice and aggression. It was said: Oppression kills the
oppressors and the hotbed of injustice is evil. The situation in occupied
Palestine is an example. What happened on 11 September [2001] and 11 March
{the Madrid train bombings] is your commodity that was returned to you.
It is known that security is a pressing necessity for all mankind. We do
not agree that you should monopolise it only for yourselves. Also,
vigilant people do not allow their politicians to tamper with their
security. Having said this, we would like to inform you that labelling us
and our acts as terrorism is also a description of you and of your acts.
Reaction comes at the same level as the original action. Our acts are
reaction to your own acts, which are represented by the destruction and
killing of our kinfolk in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
The act that horrified the world; that is, the killing of the old,
handicapped [Hamas spiritual leader] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, may God have
mercy on him, is sufficient evidence.
We pledge to God that we will punish America for him, God willing. Which
religion considers your killed ones innocent and our killed ones
worthless? And which principle considers your blood real blood and our
blood water? Reciprocal treatment is fair and the one who starts injustice
bears greater blame.
As for your politicians and those who have followed their path, who insist
on ignoring the real problem of occupying the entirety of Palestine and
exaggerate lies and falsification regarding our right in defence and
resistance, they do not respect themselves. They also disdain the blood
and minds of peoples. This is because their falsification increases the
shedding of your blood instead of sparing it.
Moreover, the examining of the developments that have been taking place,
in terms of killings in our countries and your countries, will make clear
an important fact; namely, that injustice is inflicted on us and on you by
your politicians, who send your sons - although you are opposed to this -
to our countries to kill and be killed.
Therefore, it is in both sides' interest to curb the plans of those who
shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and
subservience to the White House gang. We must take into consideration that
this war brings billions of dollars in profit to the major companies,
whether it be those that produce weapons or those that contribute to
reconstruction, such as the Halliburton Company, its sisters and
daughters.
Based on this, it is very clear who is the one benefitin
US Brings Freedom of Expression to Iraq
For extra credit, try to find even one mainstream newspaper in AmeriKKKa's Rah Rah "free" press in which this international wireservice story is printed. See the Neocons argue that because the story only appears in the Arab press, it can't be true. Hey, it worked with Accused Jewish War Criminal Ariel Sharon's "The Jewish people control AmeriKKKa" remarks. Somehow, I don't think beating people and bulldozing their houses and businesses every time some writing or image the US chooses to characterize as "anti-Coalition" is spotted, does much to further the US message that we are bringing "democracy" to Iraq, and that those opposed to our behavior "hate our freedoms." It's too bad an alien power can't just lift all 157,000 US troops and associated military hardware from Iraq, compact it into a cube, and drop it on the White House lawn for Shrub to explain to the AmeriKKKan people. I once said "there are no civilians in Israel, not even the babies" after the Jewish people re-elected Accused War Criminal and Egregious Human Rights Violator Ariel Sharon in an overwhelming landslide, enthusiastically supporting his defiance of International Law, and deliberate oppression of the Palestinian people. If the AmeriKKKan people re-elect George W. Bush, who has made a mockery of the UNited Nations, started a war of conquest based on deliberate lies, in violation of International Law, with complete contempt for the wishes of the world community, I don't suppose there'll be any civilians in AmeriKKKa either, and therefore, it will be impossible to label any destructive act committed against the US, either at home or abroad, as "terrorist." - KUT, Iraq (AFP) - An Iraqi has died of his wounds after US troops beat him with truncheons because he refused to remove a picture of wanted Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr from his car, police said Wednesday. The motorist was stopped late Tuesday by US troops conducting search operations on a street in the central city of Kut, Lieutenant Mohamad Abdel Abbas told AFP. After the man refused to remove al-Sadr's picture from his car, the soldiers forced him out of the vehicle and started beating him with truncheons, he said. US troops also detained from the same area five men wearing black pants and shirts, the usual attire of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militiamen and followers. Qassem Hassan, the director of Kut general hospital, identified the man as Salem Hassan, a resident of a Kut suburb. He said the man had died of wounds sustained in the beating. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: BBC: File-sharing to bypass censorship
Eugen Leitl pastes: > File-sharing to bypass censorship > By Tracey Logan > BBC Go Digital presenter > If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, > then it's possible to track it down and close it down > Ross Anderson, Cambridge University I think the problem here is that material which John Ashcroft, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson think is wicked, may not be what Ross Anderson or I think is wicked. After all, to some people Howard Stern is disgusting and obscene. To others, he is merely witty and slightly burlesque. > Prof Anderson believes those fears are overstated. He argued that web > watchdogs like the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet-based > child abuse, would provide the necessary policing functions. Well, it's good to know Professor Anderson values the opinion of an organization that won't even use the term "child pornography" to refer to the things that offend Ashcroft, Falwell, and Robertson, but demands everyone use terms like "pictures of children being abused" and "child abuse pictures." As those who flog the Sex Abuse Agenda are well aware, 90% of successful propaganda is owning the vocabulary. I am reminded of the changing of the term "statutory rape" to "child rape" a few years ago, which I am sure we will all agree is a less than accurate description of a 20 year old who has consensual sex with a streetwise 17 year old crack whore. I think Hakin Bey's suggestion that plastering pictures of naked children everywhere is a great form of political theatre has merit. All the right wing crackpots will have to hide in their homes to avoid having strokes, and the well-balanced representatives of the Forces of Reason can finally live their lives in peace and quiet. Perhaps we can have Public Service Announcements by the Coalition for a Prude-Free AmeriKKKa. "This is Timmy. This is TImmy's cock. This is Timmy's cock in Billy's mouth. Any questions?" -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Gmail as Blacknet (legally required forgetting)
Tyler Durden writes: > What the law actually states is (basically) a defaulted loan must be > forgiven after seven years. In other words, it is illegal to continue to > attempt to collect on a loan, 7 years after the default. There are different levels of illegal. The most important one is the statute of limitations on suing the individual, and converting the delinquent debt into a judgment, with which assets can be forcibly seized. This varies by state, and also varies by whether there is a contracted for amount in writing, such as a loan or mortgage, or whether the debt is an "open account", which would cover revolving charge accounts with retail establishments, and also in most states, credit cards. A typical statute of limitations for open accounts is 3 years. Contracts can go up to 10 years, depending on where you reside. You can still be sued over any debt, but you can move to dismiss if the statute of limitations has expired. The other axis of debt is "reporting", which is how long the credit bureaus and other organizations which keep files on you can tell other people about the debt. This is typically 7 years for delinquencies, and 10 years for bankruptcies and judgments. This only applies to reporting for credit purposes. Nothing is ever expunged from your credit file. The file is simply redacted according to who is requesting it. LEAs, and also in certain cases employers, can see your entire credit file from day one, with information you have contested, and an audit trail of possibly successful attempts to have it "removed." Now, as far as collection practices go, there is absolutely nothing to prevent your basic brand name credit card company with which you have a 20 year old delinquency, from offering you a financial product which includes re-affirming all or part of an old debt, even one which has been discharged through bankruptcy. For instance, they can offer you a new gold card with your charged off balance on it, forgive all the interest and fees since charge off, charge no interest, and give you 50 cents on every dollar paid off added to your credit line, and free tickets to the Super Bowl, all "PRE_APPROVED." This can do this with money you owe them, or with a delinquent account they have purchased from someone else in the marketplace. THe only restriction is that they cannot report you paid off the old debt to the credit bureaus, if it is over 7 years delinquent. In almost all cases, you're an idiot to accept such an offer, of course. So, as you see, all of this is a bit more complex than it being "illegal" to collect on anything over 7 years. They can't win a lawsuit. They can't call you at 2 AM in the morning to bitch if you send them a "cease and desist" notice. But they can certainly trade your antique debt in the debt marketplace, and anyone who buys it is free to think up all the clever ways they can invent in order to seduce you to pay it off, before selling it at an even greater discount to the next lowest level of the delinquent debt food chain. Now, occasionally, states Attorneys General get after companies who try and collect on old debts. I remember a few years ago, American Express got some flack over its practice of letting people who went through bankruptcy keep their American Express Cards if they re-affirmed the balance. It is, however, a largely unregulated industry, aside from an occasional wrist-slapping. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The Gilmore Dimissal
Bill Stewart wrote: > Marbury vs. Madison was an entertainingly kinky case, > but the ability of judges to declare laws or executive actions > Unconstitutional and therefore void is the main thing that's > made the Bill of Rights effective (to the extent it has been.) > The courts have often failed in that duty, but it's rightly theirs. > The alternative would be that the Constitution means > whatever the executive branch of government says it means, > and whatever the legislature says it means, ... I believe that the intent of the Founding Fathers was that an armed populace would be familiar with the letter of the Constitution, and tolerate no creative reinterpretation of it by any of the three branches of Guv'mint. >> As George Wallace once stated, "The country is run by thugs and >> federal judges." > He was one of the thugs, of course... He rehabiliated himself through terrible suffering, repented his racist views, and made friends with Jesse Jackson. People can change. I can still remember from back in the 60's Mike Wallace reporting with a perfectly straight face on the "Negroid Characteristics" of some monkey skull found by a archeological expedition. One of the nice things about ignorance is that it is curable. Unlike Neo-Conservatism. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
The Gilmore Dimissal
It's really getting to the point where judges don't even go through the motions of respecting the Constitution any more. All they have to do is recite the magic words that "Society's Overwhelming Interest" in protecting its children, police officers, kitty cats, or whatever, overrides whatever Constitutional issues there are. So of course, society's interest in protecting police officers allows New Orleans police to search your home or business at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. As long as the cop mumbles something about making sure he's safe. Similarly, society's interest in ensuring the safety of airline passengers allows ID to be demanded and searches, and anyways, your right to freely travel is not being impeded, because there's always Greyhound. Of course, they can stop the bus and search everyone on it at will too. These problems stem directly from the horrible mistake, many years ago in the early days of our Republic, of letting what the Constitution says be what the judiciary claims the Constitution says, as opposed to what the Constitution itself states, thus giving the Judicial branch of government absolute power over the Legislative and Executive branches. As George Wallace once stated, "The country is run by thugs and federal judges." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May observes: > Meanwhile, the "black folk" kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and > Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they > were owed a series of "entitlements." No suprise that a large fraction > of negro teens subscribe to the view that "reading be for whitey." In > fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those > who study too much, for those who break out of the "field worker" > status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc. > Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science > and math were taunted as race traitors? > "Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for > diskiminashun!!" In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs. This is no problem in a society with an explicit class system. You just assign jobs to people based on their social class, with the untouchables getting the shit-hauling and scrubbing jobs, and the more attractive jobs going to their betters. Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you "didn't do well" in school, or you "dropped out, and "you could have been successful if you had just tried harder." Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education. The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work. Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory. A well known experiment is to take some 10th graders, and divide them randomly into two groups. Send one to college, and make the others finish the remaining two years of high school. THere will be no statistically significant difference in their college performance, thus demonstrating that public schools do not teach, but merely act as filters through which only the most talented and sociable can pass. Now, minorities in this country, including almost all Asians, and quite a few blacks, have gotten with this program that "education is the way out of poverty," and have successfully turned the vicious education-based class system to their advantage, by trying to beat the dominant class at their own game, with varying degrees of success. This has required them to refrain from criticizing the system itself, because no one wins a beauty contest by having a bad attitude. I think that mentality is changing, and when you hear comments like "Reading be for whitey," what is being said is not that literacy and calculus and physics and chemistry are bad, in and of themselves, but that a system which rewards only "getting ahead by playing along" is not a arena in which these people choose to compete. Learning by doing is always vastly superior to learning by listening to someone else talk about doing. Now in a world where most jobs are not skilled people individually producing something in demand, but are the very lowest form of commoditized labor, the opportunity to screw such dissenters probably exceeds their ability to avoid being sent made to the back of the line. Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
Michael writes: > Being from Germany I would like to detest that statement. > The German law clearly defines what is hate speech. It is not an easy > task as you can see in a six month trial. It is the outcome of the trial which condemns Germany. THe length of the trial is an unimportant data point. THe law clearly defines "hate speech" as the communication of any information which might tend to cause people to be displeased with a particular religious or ethnic group, whether or not the information is true. People in Germany have been jailed under the "hate speech" laws for simply suggesting in written editorials that the Jewish people might act collectively in their own enlightened self-interest. As long as truth is no defense against "hate speech," and "hate speech" includes things which clearly don't involve anyone hating anyone else, "hnate speech" is simply a code phrase for suppressing free expression. > Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well. And I would like > to add that most of these laws were made up by the allies (read US and > Britain). Yes, the Allies have done an excellent job of redirecting German jackbooted obnoxiousness back at the German people. Do you have a point here? > There is no "ultimate" free speech as the US promises, but let's be > serious here for a moment: The US is not as free as people like to > think. The US isn't free at all. However, most US citizens support freedom to have opinions and to express them. Germans have to ask their government for permission to think. Most Germans think this is a good thing, by the way. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Singers jailed for lyrics
> A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40 > months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries of > free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech. Of course, that should be "a nation with strict laws against free speech." Crying "Hate Speech" is the last resort of people who cannot debate what is being said and convince anyone. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Humiliating the Conquered, Part II
If you think it was embarrassing for the former regime in Iraq to see their fearless leader getting a public louse inspection, just wait until Christmas, when America again demonstrates it can walk the streets of Baghdad with impunity. Yesterday, the crew of WWE Smackdown arrived in Baghdad to set up for their special Christmas broadcast of Smackdown! "Live from Baghdad." "The Smackdown crew with Steve Austin arrived yesterday in Baghdad at the 28th U.S. Military Combat Support Hospital to hand out gift packages to troops and give t-shirts to those injured." "World Wrestling Entertainment in proud to present a special edition of SmackDown! from Baghdad on Christmas night. Join the Superstars of SmackDown! as they have the honor of competing in front of Americas troops in what should be an evening filled with action, excitement and emotion." Goodness, where are the Donkey Carts of Mass Destruction when they are really needed. :) -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?
James A. Donald wrote: > Well if there is no legitimate authority, then state of nature applies. > Give him the justice that Mussolini and Ceasescu got. Hang him by his > feet from a lamp post in central Baghdad for his victims to use as > pinata Bear in mind that we could probably find plenty of victims of the Bush administration who would be willing to provide this variety of justice to America's dictator and a couple dozen of his closest Neocon advisors. Invading a country, and then turning its leader over to his political enemies for a quick show trial and execution, while singing the "tried by his own people" propaganda tune, hardly qualifies as justice. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Silly Linux Kernel Bug
Eric Tully writes: > I've heard that argument before (last time I heard it was a problem with > a PGP implementation) and I never understand what people are trying to > prove when they say it. Let me simplify. I found it startling that a Redmond-level bug was in a mature open-source project, the result of many years of hard work and evolution, deemed "Ready for the Enterprise." This isn't a slap at Open Source. It's just mild bemusement. > Are you saying that the Open Source model isn't as good as proprietary > "we'll-fix-it-if-we-feel-like-it" models? Are you saying that Open > Source isn't the promised land like you were... um, promised? Are you > saying that Open Source model shouldn't be used for anything that > concerns security? I honestly don't know what you're getting at. Well, let's see. I think Open Source is better than the Closed Source proprietary "It's not a bug, it's a feature" model. I've never been promised anything by Open Source, so it's certainly not the second thing.. While I wouldn't say Open Source should not be used for secure code, there seems to be a bit of overconfidence in this area, particular in the lack of realization that Open Source clones of rock solid pieces of software like PGP and SSH are probably exploitable and buggy when they are first released. But all in all, I think Open Source is an excellent idea, as long as one does not have unrealistic expectations. I wouldn't use Open Source to run an artificial heart, but for most of the things it is used for, it is probably quite satisfactory. > So Open Source is not a perfect solution. In its defense: > - you had the opportunity to hire a team of 50 to examine the code > - the solution was made known to you > - you can reject this solution and write your own if you prefer > none of which would have been true if this were proprietary code. Quite true. > There's so many good things about this model - it seems silly to argue > that Open Souce doesn't live up to the unrealistic hype that the guys on > Slashdot promised you. I have not been promised anything by the "guys on Slashdot." I simply found the error amusing. Let's not get our blood pressure in an uproar simply because virtually every Linux system in the world was just discovered to have a user readable/writable kernel. It will be fixed, and life will move on. This is a dumb coding error. Not a referendum in the eyes of God on the worthiness of the Open Source movement. Chill. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Silly Linux Kernel Bug
As reported today on Slashdot, in linux kernels prior to 2.4.23, it is possible to map the kernel into user space with brk(), since apparently no one ever bothered to check that the argument passed was in the lower 3 gig of the address space. This is almost as funny as early linux kernels in which the LDT was user writable. In any case, the patch is to stick the following check in do_brk() in /mm/mmap.c if ((addr + len) > TASK_SIZE || (addr + len) < addr) return -EINVAL; This is of course a serious bug, since anyone on a vulnerable machine has access to kernel memory by writing a terse no-brainer C program, of which I will not give an example, because enough people on the Internet hate me already. :) An interesting occurrence, because it demonstrates that massive numbers of open source participants auditing the code aren't sufficient to ferret out every giant coding blunder. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Airplane Comedy
http://www.tshirthell.com/shirts/tshirt.php?sku=a102 I'd love to see John Gilmore wear this on his next airline flight. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Jews Go Nuclear
Major Variola wrote: > You put nukes in subs to avoid getting them blown up > esp. by a first strike. You mean like the Jews blew up the Iranian nuclear reactor? > So whoever nukes Israel had best do so without a > piece of real estate associated with it, because the sub > nukes will persist. Even if the ground-based intel > the subs might have relied on for targeting is smoking slag. What make your think Israel will have to be nuked in order to respond with its own nukes? I should think anything that threatens Israel's existence as a racist apartheid human rights violating state in perpetual contempt for the will of the international community would serve as a sufficient excuse for War Criminal Sharon to launch a nuclear attack. After which, of course, AmeriKKKa's Neocon Dictator, George W. Bush, would call a press conference to deliver the usual "Israel has a right to defend itself" line, and order his UN ambassador to veto all security council resolutions critical of Israel. The EU would be critical, the Jews would call them anti-Semites, and the US Congress would fall all over itself to suport the action, fleeing in terror to avoid becoming targets of AmeriKKKan jewish voters, and Zionist pressure groups. In other words, business as usual. > Yet another advantage to being a unlocalized organization. > Or working out of an untouchable like Saudi arabia. Saudi Arabia is hardly untouchable. It is simply not at the top of the list. The Neocons plan for all the Arab dominos to fall eventually. AmeriKKKa needs to purge itself of external influence on its government through covert non-foreign policy channels, especially by "Orientals." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Jews Go Nuclear
Yes, I truncated the URL http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1061381,00.html > So much for non-proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction", right? > > http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,10613 > > - > > Israel deploys nuclear arms in submarines > Peter Beaumont in London and Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem > Sunday October 12, 2003 > The Observer > > Israeli and American officials have admitted collaborating to deploy > US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in > Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines, giving the Middle East's only > nuclear power the ability to strike at any of its Arab neighbours. > > ... > > -- > Eric Michael Cordian 0+ > O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division > "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Jews Go Nuclear
So much for non-proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction", right? http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,10613 - Israel deploys nuclear arms in submarines Peter Beaumont in London and Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem Sunday October 12, 2003 The Observer Israeli and American officials have admitted collaborating to deploy US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines, giving the Middle East's only nuclear power the ability to strike at any of its Arab neighbours. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: NSA Turns To Commercial Software For Encryption (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
David Howe writes: > I doubt the NSA need, trust or want anyone else's actual software for EC Nonetheless, it's an indication that they don't think RSA has much of a future. So now they have a public key cryptosystem with smaller key lengths, and a more obtuse one-way function that can't be understood by Joe Schmo. We shall see what this portends. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: base conversion
Sarad AV writes: > If we are to convert a k-bit integer n to a base b > number,it takes us O(log n) if the base b is a power > of 2. > eg. converting (1)base to base 16 > 0001 > ^^ > 1F in hex. > using a look up table. > Is there an algorithm with time complexity O(log n) > which allows such conversion to base b ,when b is not > a power of 2? The algorithm you describe is linear, not log. Complexity measures are a function of the size of the input data set in bits. In general, a large integer M will require an input around N = LOG2(M) bits to represent. A linear algorithm will take twice as long to process a 2 megabyte integer, as it takes to process a 1 megabyte integer. You ask whether there are linear algorithms for arbitrary precision base conversion. I seem to recall that Schonhage showed how to do base conversion with an FTT along with his well-known fast multiplication algorithm. So my guess would be that there are no known linear arbitrary precision base conversion algorithms, but probably something O(n log(n))-ish as the best currently achievable. As usual, Google is your friend. I think near-linear reciprocals, nth roots, and base conversions are covered in "Pi and the AGM" by the Borweins. My copy is packed in a box somewhere, so I can't check. Perhaps you can find the book at your local university library. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: [cdr] MRS. MARIAM ABACHA
MRS. MARIAM ABACHA writes: > IT IS WITH HEART FULL OF HOPE THAT I WRITE TO SEEK YOUR HELP IN THE > CONTEXT BELOW.I AM MRS, MARIAM ABACHA (WIDOW) THE WIFE OF FORMER HEAD OF > STATE OF NIGERIA, GENERAL SANI ABACHA WHO'S SUDDEN DEATH OCCURRED ON THE > 8TH OF JUNE, 1998. AS A RESULT OF CARDIAC ARREST WHILE STILL IN > GOVERNMENT. > I GOT YOUR EMAIL CONTACT FROM ONE OF THE MY FAMILY FRIEND A DIRECTOR, > WITH THE NIGERIA CHEMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.stm - A new study of more than 65 countries published in the UK's New Scientist magazine suggests that the happiest people in the world live in Nigeria. [Spending millions sent to them by Nigerian banking scam victims, no doubt. Har.]] -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Democracy and Freedom
Freedom is the ability to conduct ones affairs, and pursue ones goals, without interference from government. Democracy is the right of the government to impose the will of 51% of your neighbors on you by force every time the neighbors don't like what you are doing. I am constantly surprised and amazed that there are people on this list who think democracy and freedom are the same thing. The ideal government is dictatorship, under the ideal dictator. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Another Cypherpunks Investigation?
Tim writes: > My comment is that this "Professor Rat," whose posts I have not seen > for as long as lne.com has been my feed, is probably in some real > difficulty. His posts are very direct threats, not veiled in any of the > vague, political "politicians ought to be given a fair trial and then > hanged" or even the "I hope Washington is nuked" sorts. "Professor Rat" goes to his own folder in my Procmail script. I occasionally skim it, but mostly I just delete it when it expands to many megabytes. I hope this isn't going to be another one of those cases where some federal judge reads list messages completely out of context, and concludes that some plot is afoot to blow up the federal government. Perhaps Professor Rat is a federal agent hoping to bait some list member into publicly cheering when he criticizes high-ranking public officials. Or perhaps Professor Rat just made the mistake of playing Paintball on the weekends while subscribed to the Cypherpunks list. > (One rule of thumb I use is to never, ever use actual names of > burrowcrats. Except for a few at the top, I don't even make any effort > to remember the names. It's hard to be charged with making a direct, > credible threat when no specific person is either named or alluded to.) Allusions work, like "the coke-snorting C student who drove his car drunk into somebody's hedge." I wouldn't necessarily leap to the conclusion Professor Rat lives in Australia. Perhaps he just has has a shell there. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Attention Sheeple
Saw this while browsing the Web this morning. I loved it. http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/donahue/donahue2.html - Want to See the World Implode by Jim Donahue I'd like to see some real hell unleashed in the upcoming year. I want a briefcase full of weaponized toxins to explode in front of the New York Stock Exchange. I want to see political assassinations take place all over Amerika, melee assassinations, live on television during a press conference. I want power outages to roll their way through the countryside, from Boston to D.C. to Miami to Dallas to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Seattle and back again. I want the economy to collapse into a pile of green ashes. I want 401(k) plans and IRAs and mutual fund investments to disappear. I want the twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches to go up in flames. I want new laws, more laws, bigger laws. I want laws that prohibit smoking in public, in private, on the high seas, and on the moon. I want drug laws that will put a high school student in the electric chair for smoking a joint. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Cathedra and the Bizarre: Why Free Stuff is Good
Tim Philosophizes:
> All of the interesting languages now generating a lot of buzz, and
> substantial communities, are essentially "free." Or non-profit, or open
> source, or whatever one wishes to call them. Some examples:
I believe "Free" to be very different than "Open Source", particularly
open source under viral licensing agreements like the GPL.
My perfect example of free software is the quadratic formula. I don't
have to pay anyone to use it. I may use it for any purpose whatsoever,
including commercial applications. Using it does not obligate me in any
way, or legally encumber any product which includes it. The knowlege of
it is so widespread that were it to be lost, someone would quickly
reconstruct it and spread it around again.
IT has lots of free things. Most computer science is free. I don't have
to mail Andrew Tanenbaum a check if I write an OS, even if I use his book
to design it. Knuth's books are free. etc...
I'm a big fan of free. Free works. Free is like Pandora's box. Once
opened, the stuff cannot be put back in. Ever.
I am less of a fan of schemes like the GPL, which seek to impose a set of
contagious terms on anything touched by the knowlege.
> But "free" arises for some reasons which are readily-understandable to
> Hayekians and Randians and those interested in markets and capitalism:
> * the creators are anticipating rewards _other_ than salaries from
> employers, e.g.,
True scientific inquiry is always driven purely by intellectual curiosity.
Salary is just how you eat and pay the bills. Understanding the essential
nature of apparently complex things is its own reward.
> -- fame ("Yes, I am Guido")
"Yes, I am Paracelsus. Would you believe I've been cooking this large vat
of feces for 6 months?"
> -- job opportunities ("I wrote Digital Datawhaque, the leading open
> source frobbolizer")
"I showed the correspondence between Tarot Trumps and Paths on the Tree of
Life."
> -- publish or perish
"I wrote the Copronomicon."
> -- simple pleasure or some mission (applies to several Cypherpunks
> projects...)
"We must stop discrimination against Druids."
Of course my point here is that with minor exceptions, most really great
innovations are unappreciated by the public, and may in fact go
unappreciated by all but a very small number of people working in ones
subspecialty at the time they are announced.
So I think the non-tangible rewards from employers argument for innovation
fails. Smart people do innovative things because of their intrinsic
coolness, even if no one else in the world can appreciate them.
> The large communities, and probable large adoptions by corporations
> later, are in the free stuff areas. I don't even think the important
> defining characteristic is that the thing be "open source." The
> important thing is "free." Free as in no hassles, no licenses, play
> around, copy it for your friends, write about it without fears of being
> contacted by lawyers, and so on. Free. Unencumbered.
> (Yeah, there are various kinds of licenses having to do with whether
> products based on the freebie can be sold for profit.
If you can't do whatever you like with it, it's not free. Period.
> Just the obvious one: any digital money system needs to be free, or
> open source, to be widely adopted by our kind of people.
Secure anonymous digital money will never win out over easy to use,
good buddies with Homeland Security systems like Paypal in the wide
adoption Olympics.
This is a dead horse that continues to be beaten on this list.
> Had David Chaum, a man I respect a great deal, freely published and
> distributed his ideas, he would likely today have a lot more fame and
> fortune.
Chaum's ideas were the JPEG Arithmetic Coding of the digital money spec.
They suffered from two faults. One, they had legal restrictions. Two,
other things that were almost as good didn't have legal restrictions.
If Chaum wanted fame and fortune, he should have started eBay.
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: "Terror Reading"
Tim wrote: > Even the owner of my ISP is narcing me out. > Read what he wrote recently to a Net.Nazi who wanted my speech limited: > "I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of > being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws. We > have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They > have chosen to watch but not act. Please feel free to notify me if he > does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I > will immediately inform the authorities." > Thank You > Don Frederickson (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz) Every police state is enabled by the actions of thousands of little peons (like Don Frederickson here), who insert themselves into things that are none of their business, in order that they may feel that they are important in the new scheme of things. Indeed, baggage screeners, librarians, and operators of small mom and pop ISPs do more damage to individual freedom than the uniformed jackboots do. I am reminded of that scene in Roman Polanski's movie in which the hero staggers out of the apartment where he has been hiding, and is pursued out the building by a middle-aged woman screaming - "Stop him, He's a Jew!" Replace suspected Jew by Terrorist, Child Molester, Drug Dealer, or Money Launderer, and you basically have the current climate for neighbor on neighbor snooping here in AmeriKKKa. Indeed, the hallmark of the Neocon climate of fear we current live under is the successful exportation of the technology of critic silencing formerly found only in areas such as Holocaust Promotion or the Sex Abuse Agenda to every facet of our everyday lives. The new rule for personal political speech seems to be - "Don't tip your hand until you have the firepower to defend yourself." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
President Terminator
In response to a question about whether she would favor a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, a Fox Fake News Channel bimbo responded, "I want a Constitutional amendment so Arnold can be President." Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has characterized Arnold as having "done more to further the cause of Holocaust awareness than almost any other Hollywood star." Rabbi Hier also points out that Arnold makes regular substantial constributions to the Wiesenthal Center, and has raised millions for the Holocaust Memorial Trust in Los Angeles. So how exactly, one might ask, does Arnold's view of America's Manifest Destiny to rule the world and his unconditional love of the Jewish people and Israel differ from Bush's view of America's Manifest Destiny to rule the world and his unconditional love of the Jewish people and Israel. Or the view of any other major Neocon? Watch for this President Arnold movement to gather steam. Who knows, once the naturally born restriction on Presidents is removed, Ariel Sharon could be the US President after Arnold, bringing the Neoconservative nonsense full circle. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Year in Jail for Web Links
An anarchist has been sentenced to a year in jail for having links to explosives information on his Web site. AmeriKKKa is further fucking the First Amendment by restricting whom he may associate with in the future, and what views he may espouse. As is usual in most criminal cases today, the defendent was forced to plea bargain to avoid the threat of worse charges if he went to trial. http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/05/anarchist.prison.ap/index.html - LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A federal judge sentenced a man to a year in prison Monday for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson sentenced Sherman Austin to more than the prosecutor had recommended under a plea bargain. Austin, 20, pleaded guilty in February to distributing information related to explosives. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Trouble at HavenCo?
An anonymous sender writes: > Rely on math, not humans. What if all things computable are computable in polynomial time? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Year in Jail for Web Links
Duncan Frissell opines: > You can't protect people from cowardice. Jim Bell plead the first time. > Michael Milkin plead. Bill Gates plead. Various Arabs plead recently. > If you plead you can't be acquitted unless you can convince a judge to let > you withdraw your plea tough. Courage. The problem here is that if you have a family and assets and responsibility and something resembling a future, you cannot afford to be the 1 in 100 who refuses to plea bargain, because the government has the vast amount of money it saved itself not taking the other 99 cases to trial with which to screw you and make an example out of you to anyone else who may stupidly think they can defy the system. Thus, the problem of plea bargains can only be solved by eliminating plea bargaining itself. It cannot be solved by individuals caught in the system demonstrating "courage." It's one of those Prisoner's Dillema-ish situations. The demonstration to the Sheeple that one cannot break the system, one can only break oneself against the system. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Hackers Bypass 4th Amendment
OK - Here's a really dumb decision which shows how willing the courts are to shred the Constitution. Just to make sure that Puritans don't have to worry that someone, somewhere, is looking at a picture of someone under 18, and touching themselves improperly. http://news.com.com/2100-1029_3-5058835.html Apparently, criminals can break into your home, and look for evidence of illegal activity and thoughtcrime, and if they find it or even plant it themselves, they can give it to the police, not be prosecuted for breaking in, and it can be used as evidence against you. No problem with obtaining those pesky search warrants from the handy rotary tear-off dispenser in the Judge's chambers any more. No indeed. - Judges OK evidence from hacker vigilante By Lisa M. Bowman Staff Writer, CNET News.com August 1, 2003, 10:22 AM PT [Comments in [] are mine. -emc] A federal appeals panel ruled this week that the government did not violate search and seizure laws when it used evidence that a hacker gathered to establish a child pornography case. The opinion reverses a lower court ruling in which a U.S. District Court judge in Virginia suppressed the evidence, saying the government had violated a defendant's rights. The decision stems from a case in which a hacker uploaded a file to a child porn newsgroup that made it possible to track who downloaded files from the service. The uploaded file contained the SubSeven virus, which the hacker used to remotely search people's computers for porn. [Notice how the claims by the "hacker" are reported as fact here. For all we know, the hacker could have broken into the computer, and planted the alleged child porn himself. Once the hacker had access, the PC was no longer under the exclusive control of the owner, and I don't see how he could be prosecuted for anything on it. It's not like these child porn crusaders don't lie. Mike Echols lied about child porn for years, and through the posting of his list of the personal information of those he falsely claimed were child pornographers on yet another Web hosting service, by the remnants of his sham organization, he continues to lie from beyond the grave. History has proven that Lying Feminist Cunts and Religious Nutballs will do anything to silence their critics, including planting porn on their computers. How dumb and naive can the courts be?] The hacker then played the role of a cybervigilante, sending anonymous tips to law enforcement officials that alerted them to child porn files the hacker had found on people's PCs. [Again, the files the hacker "claimed" to have found on peoples PCs, but which in reality, could have been planted because the hacker didn't like the subject's public comments about Vigilante Hackers, Bon-Bon Munching Holsteins, and other loathesome creatures.] The attorneys for one of the men nabbed in the hacker's sting sued, saying that the hacker was acting as an agent of the government and therefore needed a warrant before conducting a search of someone's computer. A federal court judge ruled that the government had indeed violated the man's Fourth Amendment rights protecting him from unreasonable search and seizure. [This certainly seems to be the correct interpretation of the law.] However, an appellate panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision because, among other things, most of the major exchanges between law enforcement and the hacker took place after he had searched the man's computer. As a result, the judges said, the government had not established a relationship with the hacker prior to his search that would have made him an agent of the government. "In order to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, therefore, the government must do more than passively accept or acquiesce in a private party's search efforts," the judges wrote. "Rather there must be some degree of government participation in the private search." However, the appellate judges warned that law enforcement "operated close to the line" in the case. [This is clearly bullshit. We are now privatizing illegal searching, as long as the vigilante group doesn't run to the police until after they break into your home and discover/plant evidence? Someone needs to confiscate these judges' crack pipes.] -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Dead Body Theatre
Tim May wrote: > This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the concept of > "privilege" is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions the liberals use to > vaguely imply that success in life is due to "privilege." Much as conservatives refer to everyone who can see through their propaganda better than Joe Sixpack as "The Elite." Variations include "The Hollywood Elite", "The University Elite", etc. Conservatives fear anyone with a longer memory and better critical thinking skills than your average dumbass American hayseed, programmed in the Guv'ment School, with his 9th grade reading and his 4th grade math. > Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second Iraq War, nothing > that happens there has anything substantive to do with economic success > and "money, power" for anyone I know. Our "money, power" comes from > work, investments, high tech, etc. It comes from work. Back when I was but a tiny Thaumaturge, home ownership was within the reach of virtually everyone in AmeriKKKa. An entire household full of people could be supported on the income of a single adult working virtually any full time job. Leasure time and recreation were abundant. The Sheeple were happy sheep. Fast forward to today, where a barely comfortable living requires every adult member of a household to work somewhere over full time at some sort of skilled occupation, one paycheck away from the street. It's the time-honored algorithm for optimizing the speed of an assembly line. You speed up the line until the error rate becomes unacceptable, and then back off by epsilon. If the workers are wheezing, with their tongues hanging dangerously close to the gears, who cares. There are hungry people standing in line to replace anyone who can't take it. Apply this algorithm to macroeconomic variables, during a loud propaganda campaign promoting "productivity," and you have essentially what was done to the US economy starting with the ascension of the Conservatives to power in 1980. The US spent the Soviet Union into bankrupcy, and rebuilt a military force that can threaten any nation in the world, not because of Manifest Destiny, but by working its citizens harder than any other decent nation was willing to do. Citizens too dumb to understand that economic control of a population is not morally superior to control at the point of a gun. And through the miracle of Fractional Reserve Banking, while the Proles toiled, a small privileged segment of the population became fabulously wealthy during the same period, for doing, as Anne Robinson would say, "Absolutely Nothing." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Dead Body Theatre
Sarad writes: > May be the information provided by the informant was > wrong and it ended up that a 14 year kid along with 3 > iraqi adults got killed and in order to prevent > further outrage among iraqi's,the white house decided > on playing its cards to its advantage.They didn't > confirm their DNA test as yet-funny. If it turns out that Shrub killed two ordinary Iraqis, claimed they were Saddam's sons, and then had army morticians make them up to resemble Saddam's sons, he will be laughed out of office. I've always said that you have to talk to people in the language they understand, and that the only language the American people understand is dead Americans. Indeed, Bush makes a mockery of the UN, and launches a war of aggression against Iraq, based on a Weapons of Mass Destruction soap opera conducted in the media, and the American people approve. American soldiers set up check points, and fire at families in cars trying to flee to safer areas, blowing the heads off babies, and the American people approve. Bush slaughters thousands of Iraqis on his way to Baghdad, who are only trying to defend their country again outside invaders, and the American people approve. The Iraqis resist by killing a couple Americans a day for a few weeks, and Bush's approval rating drops 2 points a day. Almost half the American public say going to Iraq wasn't worth the cost. Americans are finally being talked to in the language they understand. If the Iraqis kill 5 American soldiers a day for 2 months, it will cost Bush the election. If they manage a mass hosing, comparable to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Saudi Arabia, Bush will be impeached. If they should manage to kill a few tens of thousands of American soldiers out of the 147,000 currently serving in Iraq, mobs of angry American parents will attack and burn the White House to the ground, and feed Shrub and his entire family feet first into a compost shredder. Again, it's just a matter of talking to people in the only language they understand. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: Dead Body Theatre
Steve Schear writes: > Here, here! This change, if widely adopted, would go a long way toward > reducing war casualties. Perhaps we may even become as smart as some > Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being > that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in > determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, > etc. While the replacement of the US/Iraq war with Shrub and Saddam in a barbed wire steel cage on Pay Per View with Vince McMahon announcing is an appealing idea, I think it is a bit premature to leap to the conclusion that this is the road map the US is following. The logic behind sparing heads of state, even though they are technically in the military chain of command, has to do with their utility during post-war reconstruction, and not incurring the eternal hate of the conquered enemy's civilian population. That is why the US spared Emperor Hirohito when reorganizing Japan, for instance. The ability of the US to fight low-casuality war has transformed war into an art akin to corporate raiding. It permits the US to invade any country, destroy the military infrastructure at little or no cost in American lives, and leave the country's proles and natural resources undamaged to be exploited by their new Imperialist masters. If in the end it can be claimed that the people are better off than they were before, even if their previous misfortune was due entirely to US economic sanctions, then it can be declared that the war was "Justified." Of course, this just demonstrates that power is ultimately wielded by the people with the best weapons, even as those same people lull the rest of the world into thinking there is something called "international law," while they arm themselves to the teeth. Fortunately, there has never been a weapons system in the history of the world that ultimately didn't cost less to destroy than it did to manufacture. Force is always beaten by force plus brains, and I am sure the other nations of the world are looking at the US and madly seeking to construct a credible deterrent. The window of absolute US military superiority will last 2-3 years at best. "What the world really needs is a fifty dollar weapon that sinks aircraft carriers" isn't just a witty .sigfile quote. North Korea really has the right idea here. The US threatens sanctions, they respond - "Our nuclear missiles can hit any target in the US. Sanctions are an act of war." The US threatens a blockade, they respond - "Our nuclear missiles can hit any target in the US. Blockades are an act of war." This is really the correct method of dealing with the US, and nations like Iraq are stupid to keep capitulating in the expectation that it will postphone an already decided upon attack. The United Nations should know better than to be continuously baited into playing this game as well. The point is, of course, that this isn't some new kind of war where the Bush family fights the Hussein family to spare civilians on both sides. This is George W. Bush thinking his security is so impenetrable that he can send his soldiers to kill the opposition leader's family, and drag their bodies around in front of cameras, without having to worry in the slightest that he or his family will experience retaliation in kind. Of course, to paraphrase Doctor Who, the word "impenetrable" sounds far too much like the word "unsinkable." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Dead Body Theatre
I just noticed all news channels on the boob tube are showing endless repetitions of what the US alleges are the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons. We all know how easy it is to make realistic fake pictures now that everything is digital, so I was thinking what a cool hack it would be to Photoshop some similar pictures of the Bush daughters, and post them on the Internet for everyone to enjoy. Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be an excellent political statement. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber censors Gilmore'semail
> I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight > delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on > his shoulder. The other 300 people on the plane had their flight delayed by the actions of the carrier, not by the actions of Gilmore. You are falling for the usual mental trap here of viewing authority as some sort of inviolate physical law, and transferring responsibilty onto the victim for "making them do it." You should watch that in the future. I mean, a 1 inch button, for Christ's sake. They must have had to use a magnifying glass to read the slogan. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Senators from Utah being Southern
Tim wrote: > Let me remind folks that I am areligious...I no more believe in a god > or goddess or afertlife or supernatural things than I believe in the > Easter Bunny. I view all religions as cults of magical belief. There are two ways of modeling the Universe. One can build it from lots of copies of the null set, or one can take the undifferentiated whole, and subdivide it into countless fragments in equilibrium with each other in various complex ways. Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method of modeling, created for people who can't do the math, and who have never bothered to wonder why all the choirs of angels form such neat little arrays. God is the thing you have before you start chopping it up. God is the abstraction that has everything in the universe as a possible instance. Archangels are chunks of a coarse partition of God. We are chunks of a fine partition of God. > Having said this, all of the Mormons I have known have been unusually > honest, forthright, and hard-working. I worked with a fair number of > them at Intel, and they were solid contributors. And the Mormons are > doing well financially, here in the U.S. and abroad. Mormons make perfect employees. They are always bathed, well-dressed, hard-working, self-reliant, well-educated, respectful of your authority, and they hardly ever mention that after they die, they hope to rule over other planets in physical bodies, and have a wonderful sex life. Then again, they'll put their teenage children in a mental institution in a heartbeat for defying them, or acting gay. Mormons are the true Stepford citizen units. Perfect on the outside, dangerous on the inside. > He was a hell of a lot more interesting than JC, that's for sure. I > recommend "The Prophecy," the wonderful movie with Christopher Walken > as the angel Gabriel. The Nephilim are a fun bunch. > As such beings and such deities are fanciful, I am more interested in > the psychological state that allowed a 7th-century merchant to write > such a book. The whole universe is inside you, Grasshopper. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
(Bald) Weenies at Amnesty International
Turns out the scumbags at Amnesty International have decided to call for the Canadian government to investigate and charge Ernst Zundel for not kowtowing to the official version of "The Holocaust(tm)" as promulgated by the ADL. Zundel has been sitting in jail in Canada after being booted out of the US at the behest of the Neocons in the state department for missing an imigration hearing that was never scheduled. Canada is trying to deport him to Germany, as a "national security threat," where he may be persecuted under German anti-free speech laws. Amnesty has also issued a statement saying that it is their policy that they will "not adopt people imprisoned for 'hate speech' as prisoners of conscience." Well, that certainly covers a lot of territory, doesn't it. Figuring out what country and what group of people try to get all criticism of their conduct labeled as "hate speech" will be left as an exercise for the reader. http://www.nationalpost.com/national/story.html?id=3F1AC4C7-2AF0-4552-99FC-6419965CFC78 -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
"Closer Together Than Average" Primes Discovered
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5483833.htm And in amazing math discovery news... - ... Dan Goldston, a math professor at SJSU, has solved an important problem in number theory relating to prime numbers. ... Mathematicians described the advance -- announced at a conference in Germany -- as the most important breakthrough in the field in decades. ... Can you always find prime numbers that may not be twins, but that are much closer together than average? Taking into account, of course, the fact that the bigger numbers get, the sparser primes become. Working with Cem Yalcin Yildirim of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Goldston was finally able to say yes. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: COWed news networks not showing Baghdad market dead
James A. Donald wrote: > Baathism is not Islamic government, though Saddam, Bush, and > "Bin Laden" are all trying to obscure the fact -- Baathism is > a western ideology -- a mixture of communism and Nazism. It's interesting that the US is waging war against one of the most secular nations in the Middle East, with a "Coalition of Willing" allies many of whom still stone people to death for heresy. American ReportWhores are constantly moaning over how Saddam isn't really religious, and only invokes the symbols of religion to communicate with his people, as if this were a bad thing. One might wonder if the Neocon supporters of the Bush/Sharon plan for regional domination have more in common with those who stone heretics than with those who advocate separation of church and state. There's an interesting article in the New York Times (l/p=cpunx/cpunx) in which we are treated to the smug remarks of a couple of US snipers who ride on top of armored vehicles, and pick off anyone who appears to be a threat as the US makes its way to Baghdad, in pursuit of its illegal war of aggression that the world seems powerless to stop. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/29/international/worldspecial/29HALT.html Let me quote a few of their comments, as it gives new meaning to the term "World Arrogance," and illustrates why we should "Support Our Troops(tm)" only if they are on their way to the gallows via an international tribunal, along with their Commander in Chief. - ... They said Iraqi fighters had often mixed in with civilians from nearby villages, jumping out of houses and cars to shoot at them, and then often running away. The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterized as ill trained and cowardly. "We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people." ... But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down. "I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way." ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort
Declan writes: > Interesting, but mostly insanely wrong. Written by someone who is a > hardcore leftist, it seems, and heavily slanted. I know the folks at > FCF, and they're not mass murderers, racists, xenophobes, or guilty > of the other allegations the author makes. Hmmm. I read through the text at the specified URL, and got the distinct impression that the FCF was not being accused of being mass murderers, racists, or xenophobes, but rather of supporting and having links to various political figures to which that description might apply. Are there specific facts on that Web page that you believe to be in error? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Boycotting the Unwilling
J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but the US will happily throw Americans in prison
> > for refusing to do business with Israel, because Congress has made it
> > illegal to support any boycott of the Beanie-Headed Land Grabbers.
> Hrmmm.. Got a citation for this one? As far out in the land of the clueless
> Shrub may in fact be, I have yet to see anything that declares Israel a
> protected class. Of course, I could have missed it...
> I'd really like to see a citation if you can find one.
Not only is there legislation against US companies boycotting Israel, but
apparently, the Jews even have their own Office of Anti-Boycott Compliance
(OAC) within the US Department of Commerce.
Here are the results of some Googling.
-
COMPANY : L'OREAL
After being fined $1.4 million by the US in 1995 for writing a letter to
the Arab League claiming that they had stopped production in Israel, they
have been engaged in actively courting Israel with investments and
large-scale commerce.
The American Jewish Congress has expressed "keen satisfaction that L'Oreal
has become a warm friend of Israel"
[Or at the very least, they are toadying lest another $1.4 million be
picked from their pockets. -emc]
-
In 1977, Congress prohibited U.S. companies from cooperating with the Arab
boycott. When President Carter signed the law, he said the "issue goes to
the very heart of free trade among nations" and that it was designed to
"end the divisive effects on American life of foreign boycotts aimed at
Jewish members of our society."
-
http://www.bxa.doc.gov/AntiboycottCompliance/OACRequirements.html
What do the Laws Prohibit?
Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under
the EAR includes:
"*" Agreements to refuse or actual refusal to do business with or in
Israel or with blacklisted companies.
"*" Agreements to discriminate or actual discrimination against other
persons based on race, religion, sex, national origin or nationality.
"*" Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about
business relationships with or in Israel or with blacklisted
companies.
"*" Agreements to furnish or actual furnishing of information about
the race, religion, sex, or national origin of another person.
"*" Implementing letters of credit containing prohibited boycott terms
or conditions.
The TRA does not "prohibit" conduct, but denies tax benefits
("penalizes") for certain types of boycott-related agreements.
What Must Be Reported?
The EAR requires U.S. persons to report quarterly requests they have
received to take certain actions to comply with, further, or support
an unsanctioned foreign boycott.
The TRA requires taxpayers to report "operations" in, with, or related
to a boycotting country or its nationals and requests received to
participate in or cooperate with an international boycott. The
Treasury Department publishes a quarterly list of "boycotting
countries."
How To Report:
EAR reports are filed quarterly on form BIS 621-P for single requests
or BIS 6051-P for multiple requests available from the Department of
Commerces Office of Antiboycott Compliance (OAC) in Washington, D.C.
To obtain these forms, telephone OACs Reports Processing Unit at (202)
482-2448. TRA reports are filed with tax returns on IRS Form 5713.
This form is available from local IRS offices.
Penalties:
The EAR prescribe the penalties for violations of the Antiboycott
Regulations as well as export control violations. These can include:
Criminal:
"*" The penalties imposed for each "knowing" violation can be a fine
of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved,
whichever is greater, and imprisonment of up to five years. During
periods when the EAR are continued in effect by an Executive Order
issued pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act,
the criminal penalties for each "willful" violation can be a fine of
up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to ten years.
Administrative:
For each violation of the EAR any or all of the following may be
imposed:
"*" General denial of export privileges;
"*" The imposition of fines of up to $12,000 See Footnote Below [INS:
:INS] per violation; and/or
"*" Exclusion from practice.
Boycott agreements under the TRA involve the denial of all or part of
the foreign tax benefits discussed ab
Boycotting the Unwilling
Wired News has an article on a US company refusing to honor winning eBay bids from Canadians because Canada doesn't support Shrub's war for Oil, Regional Hegemony, and a Greater Israel. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the US will happily throw Americans in prison for refusing to do business with Israel, because Congress has made it illegal to support any boycott of the Beanie-Headed Land Grabbers. Seems like a bit of a double standard to me. http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,58190,00.html - VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- On eBay, the highest bid wins -- unless the item on sale is a laser printer from CompAtlanta and the bidder happens to be Canadian. That's what a tax consultant discovered last week when he tried to buy a printer over eBay, but was refused by the vendor when it was iscovered he lived in Vancouver. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Libertarian Party expresses "concern" over war -- but does not
Declan writes: > Eric's statement was hyperbole, designed to provoke. My own view is > that the Libertarian Party is being unfortunately wishy-washy when it > comes to the war on Iraq. We've had this discussion many times before on this list. People who know nothing about Libertarians see a word which appears to share the first few letters with "Liberty", and leap to the obvious but incorrect conclusion. Not only are real Libertarians not cuddly and likable, they are not even liked by other Libertarians. > It correctly said that troops should not be blamed for politicians' > choices, but it pointedly declined to say: "This is an unjust war. Libertarians and Unitarians have a lot in common. There are plenty of jokes about the moral wishy-washiness of Unitarians, such as the one about them living by "The Ten Suggestions," or the one about a Unitarian hate crime consisting of burning a question mark on someone's lawn. Almost all of them apply equally well to Libertarians. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Libertarian Party expresses "concern" over war -- but does not
Libertarians are people who think the only legitimate use of state force is to protect them from their slaves. It is unlikely that people who don't oppose the death penalty, nor the "right" of parents to beat their minor children at will, will care particularly about Shrub kicking the crap out of some disarmed third world country to steal its oil and advance the cause of the Jews. >WASHINGTON, DC - Statement by Geoffrey Neale, national chairman of the >Libertarian Party, in response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq: >On behalf of the Libertarian Party, I wish to express our deep concern >for the U.S. troops currently engaged in war in Iraq, and urge the >government to end the conflict quickly and with as few casualties as >possible. This is like opposing gassing, but expressing support for the gas chamber operators. Bush is a criminal. The war is a war of aggression in violation of international law, and the troops are criminals carrying out illegal orders. So let's drop the "support for the troops" canard. No doubt Bush wishes to do away with absolute national sovereignty the same way he did away with the UN. >Though it is difficult for Americans who have never fought in battle to >imagine a soldier's fear and bravery, it is easy to imagine the anguish >that every family will feel for their sons and daughters who never >return. It's unlikely the American cowards will sustain any casualties, aside from friendly fire accidents. Iraq is disarmed, and generations behind in weaponry. Any suggestion that the country poses a threat is merely propaganda to make our soldiers look less like pussies kicking the shit out of a one-armed man. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Fwd: Informer alert: War begins in Iraq
Stuart writes: > War has been declared against Iraq by the US President George Bush. > Initial air strikes have been launched on Baghdad, which the US said > were targeted at senior Iraqi leaders. British forces have not yet > been involved and the order to begin a ground war has not been given. May thousands of AmeriKKKan troops die painfully, along with their handlers on the East Coast, as a deterrent to future illegal wars of aggression. May the world recognize that the UN can perform no other function than to crawl on its hands and knees to kiss AmeriKKKa's ass, and cease to take it seriously. May the anti-war movement paralyze AmeriKKKa with demonstrations and work stoppages, and cause consequences of significance to the economy and standard of living of the world's war-monger. May the AmeriKKKan people cease to send their tax dollars to the Racist Apartheid Zionist Entity, where they are spent to kill Palestinian children with AmeriKKKan weapons, and run over peace activists multiple times with AmeriKKKan bulldozers, and then attack and teargas the memorial service. May Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush be forced to face their victims in an international court of law, and be tried and sentenced appropriately. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
The Mechanics of Skyscraper Collapse
Tim Wrote: > With no chance for evacuation, and with a one-fifth of a mile high > building toppling sideways, fatalities might have reached 30,000 or > more. I'm not a structural engineer, but given that lateral structural strength is likely only a fraction of vertical structural strength, it doesn't seem to me that a tower like the WTC can do anything but collapse downwards. One would think that when you began to tip it, it would fall apart long before you got the center of gravity where it didn't lie over the base. Can a skyscraper really tip over intact, and flatten a distance on the ground equal to its height? Perhaps John Young could leap in here with a professional opinion. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: I for one am glad that...
Keith Ray wrote: > When did the UN Security Council pass a resolution rescinding the use of > force? Earlier resolutions only declared a cease-fire contingent on Iraq > complying with all current and future resolutions. The behavior of the world community under US pressure is much like the behavior of a niave computer chess program, which when faced with an unwinnable position, begins sacrificing all its pieces, because each such sacrifice pushes disaster just slightly beyond its lookahead threshhold. Faced with Bush the Elder bombing Iraqi civilians fleeing Kuwait along his "Highway of Death", including children in carseats, the UN approved a cease-fire with language in it the US wanted. The UN approved 1441 because it delayed a US threatened war. etc. etc. ad nauseum. The end result of all this is that the US does what it intended to do in the first place, namely invade Iraq, control its oil, scare other states in the region shitless, and remove something a bunch of Beanie-Headed Land Grabbers view as a security threat to God's Chosen People. However, due to all the capitulation the US has forced from other nations, and the UN, who are too stupid to see that they are simply being used as a fig leaf for naked US aggression, the resulting military action has the illusion of having been given some sort of imprimatur by the world community. Saddam should have told Bush to fuck himself when he suggested the propaganda inspectors go back into Iraq, especially since the previous team did nothing but engage in espionage under cover of the UN while they were there, and provide targeting information to the CIA which permitted the US to bomb almost all of Iraq's industrial infrastructure, none of which had anything to do with weapons manufacturing. The UN security council should have told Bush to go fuck himself, when he tried to trick them into a resolution they all believed would not authorize a war, which the US would later claim did. The UN has proved itself irrelevant, but not for inaction against Saddam. It has proved itself irrelevant for repeatedly knucking under to the United States, and allowing itself to be manipulated. This is a war between the US and Iraq, planned by the US and Israel for 11 years, with an pre-existing agenda, and the UN is merely being employed as Bush's merkin. > As far as dragging the nation to war, 70% of the American people are > behind him. That's probably 30% against the war on principle, 20% for the war on principle, and 50% who think it's a sin against God to not agree with authority. If Bush opposed a war, you'd probably find 80% in favor of that position. Polls are meaningless if you don't subtract the sheep. > Which article/amendment of the constitution states that the winner of > the popular vote wins the election? Article 2, Section 1 and the 12th > amendment seem to be pretty clear on the subject. Regardless of your > opinion of the 2000 elections, Bush *IS* the president and has been > given authorization to use force both by Congress and the UN. Since Congress has now abdicated its control over how war is declared, other nations have a legitimate reason to worry about a country that picks a random crackpot every 4 years that most of the people know little about, hands him the keys to the biggest arsenal in the world with no oversight, and lets him do anything as long as he isn't getting his cock sucked by the junior staff. The fallout from this war is that every other nation in the world, including our former allies, is going to want a credible deterent against the day when AmeriKKKa decides to bomb them. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Israel Honors Saint Goldstein
One of the greatest heros of the Isareli people is Saint Baruch Goldstein, the New York doctor who gunned down over two dozen Palestinians as they knelt in prayer. As Susan Cohen, perennial Usenet apologist for Israel is fond of saying, "If only we had a thousand Baruch Goldsteins." Goldstein was also famous for the comment that a million Arabs were not worth one Jewish fingernail. Well, it seems that there was a small altercation at Israel's latest celebration at Goldstein's tomb. A couple of teenagers engaged in a bit of political theatre, with one wearing an Ariel Shraon mask, and the other pointing a toy gun at him. Just like in the United States, where one can not wear an anti-Bush t-shirt to school without being browbeaten by the Secret Service, the teens were immediately arrested and hauled off to jail. Such wonderful people. Let's give them some more US taxpayer dollars to commit more human rights abuses with. http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ArticlePage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article%5El2096&enZone=Politics&enVersion=0&; - Hebron Police arrested two seventeen-year-old youths who last night staged a mock execution of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a Purim eve ceremony in Kiryat Arba marking nine years since the death of Baruch Goldstein. At the ceremony, one of the youths wore a mask in Sharon's image while the other held a gun and knife to his head. Participants at the ceremony, including adults, called out, "Sharon, your day has come." ... Police officials said the two youths would be charged with counts of sedition and incitement. ... The Kiryat Arba ceremony has been held annually since 1994, when Goldstein opened fire in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs and murdered 29 Muslim worshippers inside. ... One of the most outspoken participants at the ceremony was far-right extremist Michael Ben-Horin, Maariv reported. "Dr. Goldstein saved many people and did an important, great act," Ben-Horin said. [Notice that Jewish terrorists are always referred to in the press as "extremists", while Arab terrorists are referred to as "terrorists." The last time a mainstream US paper used the word "terrorist" after the word "Jewish", three people lost their jobs. Yet we are told that there is no Israeli influence on the US media, and to suggest so is anti-Semitic. -emc] ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: I for one am glad that...
Tyler Durden wrote: > Our leader understands the dynamics of peace. As he said last night, "we are > a peaceful people", and he understands that in order to secure peace, we > need to aggressively defend the cause of peace, throughout the globe, by any > means necessary. The US is one of many nations. Since the inception of the United Nations, and International Law, a nation may go to war only if it is attacked or in iminent danger of being attacked by another nation. The US is a signatory of the UN charter, and is consequently bound by it as if it were law. Military actions taken because of a perceived future threat to world peace can only be authorized by the UN Security Council. One can well imagine the chaos that would ensue if every nation that perceived some other nation as a potential future threat ran around waging pre-emptive strikes and wars of aggression. > Likewise with American freedom. Terrorists and evil-doers throughout the > world hate our freedoms, and think day and night about destroying them. A great deal of the world hates the behavior of World Arrogance (The US) and World Zionism (Israel). Israel is in material breach of somewhere between 30 and 60 UN security council resolutions, depending on how forgiving one is in interpreting the language. That doesn't even count the many vetos by the US of resolutions unanimously approved, and designed to hold Israel accountable for its abysmal human rights records, and its history of disingenuous hidden agenda negotiations. Foreign nationals do not hate our "freedom." If the US traded with all, and avoided foreign entanglements, the lifestyle of Americans would be of little concern to our current enemies. So-called terrorists hate not our freedom, but our meddling. > That is why our leader, George W. Bush, understands that in order to > protect our freedoms, special precautions are necessary. George W. Bush is a raving lunatic, barking at the moon, lying through his teeth, and dragging the nation into another Bush family war. > Of course, in order to secure our freedom, all citizens must actively > support our government's efforts to secure this freedom. Anyone who > does not obviously support American freedom is clearly opposed to it and > must be stopped, or he will help our enemies take away our freedom. More Freedom = Less Government. I support maximal freedom. > Both peace and freedom are in our leaders' strong fist, who protects both > for us. Any attempt to pry open this clenched fist must be met with the most > extreme forms of resistance imaginable. Think of George W. Bush kind of like > your elder brother: he watches out for you and fights off bullies that try > to hurt you. But if you criticize your elder brother, then there can be no > hope for you: you are basically helping the enemy. Can I have some of what you've been smoking? > Let us as responsible citizens of this free and peaceful nation pledge > ourselves in the fight against evil. May God help us in our fight. The US is the foremost international bully in the world today, pursuing an agenda of globalization on its own terms, during a brief period in which it enjoys complete and total military superiority. World government may be inevitable at some time in the future, but it would be idiotic to permit that world government to grow from the coalition of Bible Spewing Jesus Christers, and their "Neo-Conservative" handlers that currently have their greedy paws on America's military machine. Justice in the Middle East would be Sharon, Netanyahu, and two generations of the Bush family hanging in downtown Baghdad. After a fair trial and due process at the hands of the International Community, of course. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Where are the heros?
A. Melon wrote: > Let us pray ernestly that a hero will rise up to slay the evil Texas > mutant destroying our country and world peace. Eventually, brute force will meet force and brains, and be vanquished. Bullies are always amazed when they encounter the kinds of weapons that enlightened minds can produce. Rather than repeat myself and write all new stuff, allow me to quote the comments I made here sometime after the first Iraq war, conducted by Bush the Elder, father of Shrub the Lunatic. - What the world needs now is not another mass killing of Iraqis by the United States government. What the world really needs now is a fifty dollar weapon that sinks aircraft carriers. The universe does not view the lives of Americans as more valuable than the lives of people murdered by Americans. Unfortunately, for all the braying Americans do about freedom, Americans can never be truly happy unless someone is telling them what to do, or they are telling someone else what to do, or they are bombing someone for not doing what they have told them to do. The only thing Americans understand is dead Americans. The only thing. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
The Register Libels Declan
Just when you think journalism can't get any stranger. I was watching some right wing scumbag on MSNBC today, spewing forth about how all homeless people should be rounded up and sent to prison and mental hospitals. His name is Michael Savage, and he is apparently what we get now that Phil Donahue is considered too liberal to be on TV any more. Well, Savage, whose real name is Michael Alan Weiner, got a less than glowing writeup in the Register for his MSNBC performance. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/29754.html Midway through this well-deserved Savage-bashing, (or is that Weiner bashing,) who should be mentioned but everyone's favorite intrepid reporter, and in less than glowing terms. The Register opines about The Savage Weiner: Michael Savage is the last person I would ever have compared to Declan McCullagh. Fortunately for Declan, he's "lavishly paid", and doesn't have a last name easily confused with a body part. Some consolation, I suppose. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
Sunder writes: > Should war in the Gulf commence, the Pentagon proposes to take > radical new steps in media relations - 'unauthorised' journalists will be > shot at. Speaking on The Sunday Show on Ireland's RTE1 last sunday veteran > war reporter Kate Adie said she had been warned by a senior Pentagon > official that uplinks, i.e. TV broadcasts or satellite phones, that are > detected by US aircraft are likely to be fired on. This is nothing new. Radio and TV stations and other "unauthorized" sources of information are always first on the target list whenever the US starts a war. I think the Pentagon spokeshomo put it this way. "Propaganda outlets ARE military targets." Propaganda being anything not released by the Pentagon, of course. Have you seen this lovely new media room in Qatar that Hollywood is building as a set for Iraq war briefings? <"In front of the stage, two 70-inch projection screens and five 50-inch plasma screens will flash maps, graphics and crystal-clear video images of war-zone action. In the background will hang a soft-focus elongated map of the world, as if to imply that the entire globe is united behind the United States.> <"I like to achieve a level of detail that makes it difficult to distinguish a set from reality," Mr. Allison recently told the Times Union newspaper in Albany, N.Y.> http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/gtnews/TGAM/20030312/UTVTVM -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Monocultures, Choice, and "Access to Food Must Be Equal!"
Tim Writes: > Access to Food Must Be Equal! > The Bush Administration is proposing radical changes in the way food > has been purchased by Americans for the past hundred years. > Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter is floating the idea of a > "voucher" system for groceries which would allow families to make > their food and beverage purchases at any supermarket, regardless of > location. Allowing this kind of choice would destroy the system which > has made America so competitive today! A favorite theme of mine, although I usually phrase it as "What if the Teachers Union Ran Your Local Grocery Store?" Obvious features of the system. Stores are funded by property taxes. You may of course choose to shop at a "Private Store," but you will still have to pay the same amount to your local community store, whether you pick up food from it or not. Store employees would of course be rude and obnoxious, because customer discontent no longer affects their job security. Customers who complain can be suspended from shopping, and as they starve to death in the streets, ridiculed for their "poor choices." Your good standing with the store would of course be checked everytime you applied for a job, or credit. The stores would be filthy, the food spoiled, and you would have to shop during particular hours. Any suggestion that food dollars be distributed to eaters in the form of vouchers would be met with horror stories about community stores, which have to meet everyone's shopping needs, failing as a consequence, destroying nutrition for all but the wealthy. The Grocer's Union would spend lots of your tax dollars, collected in the form of union dues, lobbying for less rights for eaters, and near police state powers for grocery employees. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
AmeriKKKa Tortures Detainees to Death
I'd really like to see FOX News do a poll on who is more dangerous to world peace, Bush or Saddam. Here's a lovely story from this morning's news, on how the US is treating its prisoners of war in Afghanistan. Hopefully, this will encourage AmeriKKKa's victims to treat US POWs with similar kindness. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=38 - America admits suspects died in interrogations By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 07 March 2003 American military officials acknowledged yesterday that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had been killed while under interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul - reviving concerns that the US is resorting to torture in its treatment of Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qa'ida operatives. A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide", contradicting earlier accounts that one had died of a heart attack and the other from a pulmonary embolism. The men's death certificates, made public earlier this week, showed that one captive, known only as Dilawar, 22, from the Khost region, died from "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" while another captive, Mullah Habibullah, 30, suffered from blood clot in the lung that was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury". US officials previously admitted using "stress and duress" on prisoners including sleep deprivation, denial of medication for battle injuries, forcing them to stand or kneel for hours on end with hoods on, subjecting them to loud noises and sudden flashes of light and engaging in culturally humiliating practices such as having them kicked by female officers. While the US claims this still constitutes "humane" treatment, human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have denounced it as torture as defined by international treaty. The US has also come under heavy criticism for its reported policy of handing suspects over to countries such as Jordan, Egypt or Morocco, where torture techniques are an established part of the security apparatus. Legally, Human Rights Watch says, there is no distinction between using torture directly and subcontracting it out. Some American politicians have argued that torture could be justified in this case if it helped prevent terror attacks on US citizens. Jonathan Turley, a prominent law professor at George Washington University, countered that embracing torture would be "suicide for a nation once viewed as the very embodiment of human rights". Torture is part of a long list of concerns about the Bush administration's respect for international law, after the extrajudicial killing of al-Qa'ida suspects by an unmanned drone in Yemen and the the indefinite detention of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a number of whom have committed or attempted to commit suicide. President Bush appeared to encourage extra-judicial solutions in his State of the Union address in January when he talked of al-Qa'ida members being arrested or meeting "a different fate". "Let's put this way," he said in a tone that appalled many, "they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Who Owns the News
James A. Donald wrote: > You are making all this crap up. Each of the stories I cited was reported by multiple news outlets. The Donahue story alone had 12 hits on Google News. One would hardly make up a story about a court of appeals decision. > Liberals cannot succeed in talk shows because they hate and despise > their audience. You know, I think "conservative" is one of the nicest-sounding terms ever invented for "backward prude." With the rise of conservativism, it's a toss-up as to whether we'll hit the stupidity singularity or the technological singularity first. I long for the good old days when nonsense was preceeded by a disclaimer, Pat Buchanan wasn't allowed near decent people, and talking to the dead wasn't considered mainstream. > He was getting about one quarter the audience of the > competion. The nightmare scenario that MSNBC was so alarmed > by was that no one was watching him vomit hatred over his > audience. Donahue was doing no worse than other crap on MSNBC which wasn't cancelled, and Donahue's ratings had recently risen. > Sure the press is biased, but there is plenty of stuff that is > very far from pro Israel, even on channels that are openly pro > Israel, such as Fox. Let me know when the first station puts the logo "JINSA" under Richard Perle and the rest of the pundits we are supposed to think are randomly picked objective commentators on the Middle East. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Press Coverage, Snarky Media Personalities, and War
Tim May wrote: > P.S. I plan to make strong efforts to stop my new address from being > harvested by spammers, such as using "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" in > Usenet posts. I hope this works. > --Tim, [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'm pretty sure, based on my spam volume, that spammers grep Cypherpunks for email addresses. So you're probably already hosed. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Who Owns the News
Adam Back writes: > Look at this shit on fox news, look how they bias the question and > mis-represent the issue. FOX recently fired two reporters after they refused to change the facts of a news story. Fox said to them, "We paid $13 billion for these stations, and we'll tell you what the news is." In a unanimous decision, the 2nd District Court of Appeals overturned a $425,000 jury award to another FOX reporter who was fired after refusing to alter the facts of a story. THe judge ruled FOX had a right to lie, deceive, and mislead. MSNBC just fired Phil Donahue after a marketing report outlined a "nightmare scenario" in which MSNBC was perceived as giving a forum to anti-war sentiment while all other networks were engaged in patriotic flag-waving. MSNBC has now hired Jesse Ventura and Michael Savage, in order to try and compete with FOX on its own level. When CNN tried to cover the Palestinian side of the Mideast Conflict, Israel threatened to drop CNN and pick up FOX instead. CNN caved instantly. All CNN copy is now required to be reviewed by upper management in Atlanta before broadcast, and anything that isn't pro-Israel is killed. FOX's star ratings performer is of course Bill O'Reilly, a former schoolteacher and Asshole Douche of the first magnitude. Americans want "Rah Rah" reporting. America is Great. Our war is noble. God is on our side. Anyone who opposes us is evil. We've pretty much gotten to the point where the only places real news can be found in America these days is on Indymedia and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A sad situation for a country with an alleged "free press." I guess markets control the press even better than government ownership does. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Say Bush is Nuts, Go to Jail
http://santafenewmexican.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2144&dept_id=415763&newsid=7071930&PAG=461&rfi=9 - ... According to Andrew J. O'Connor, 40, a former Santa Fe public defender, two city police officers removed him from the school's library about 9 p.m. Thursday while he was using a computer. "They Mirandized me, handcuffed me and took me to the police station where two Secret Service agents from Albuquerque interrogated me for hours," O'Connor said. ... While he was at the library, O'Connor said he had a conversation with a woman wearing a button that read, "No war with Iraq." "We talked with each other about that, and I said I think Bush is ... out of control," O'Connor said. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Why Spammers Should Be SLOWLY Tortured to Death
It seems some spammer has decided to use my email address as his return address, and I am now getting his bounce messages. From: Prinz Harvey L <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: tour vegas From: Piper J A <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: just in time etc etc etc Am I uniquely blessed with this problem, or is this some new way for spammers to ensure they are hated even more than serial child molesters and terrorists. I think this really crosses the line into blatant illegality, and is a racheting up of spammer scumminess way beyond simply trying to evade filters with P'E'N'I'S and gratuitous HTML in the middle of suspicious words. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Weizmann Institute Sets "Guinness Record"
The Weizmann Institute has done it again. Written yet another press release, that is. I wasn't even aware Guinness had a record for the smallest biological computing device. Have the Guinness people even heard of the Weizmann people? One wonders. In any case, they claim that two spoonfuls of their latest goo is a 600 TeraOP DNA computer. I'll be more impressed when they port Linux. Har. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030224-045551-7398r - REHOVAT, Israel, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- The latest entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for smallest biological computing device is a microscopic gadget composed of DNA and enzymes that not only reads DNA for data but uses it as fuel. Israeli scientists reported Monday that just two spoonfuls could hold up to 30 million billion of such molecular computers, which could perform about 660 trillion operations per second -- nearly 20 times as many as Japan's Earth Simulator, the most powerful supercomputer now active. "The long-term goal is to eventually create autonomous, programmable molecular computing devices that can operate in vivo, eventually inside the human body, and function as 'doctors in a cell,'" researcher Ehud Shapiro, a computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, told United Press International. By detecting biochemical anomalies, the micro-computers could consult "their programmed medical knowledge to direct the synthesis and delivery of biomolecules that serve as drugs," Shapiro explained. DNA stores both information -- in the form of the genetic code in humans -- and energy. "Nature uses DNA for information storage, but does not exploit it as an energy supply," Shapiro said. The new device is an advance on a computer made of DNA previously announced by Shapiro and colleagues about a year ago. The device's input, output and "software" are composed of DNA molecules, while the hardware is made of naturally occurring enzymes that can manipulate DNA. When mixed together in a solution, the hardware and software work together, with the enzyme regulating the input according to rules encoded on the software molecule. All computers need energy, and the research team's previous DNA computer used a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the biochemical whose high-energy phosphate bonds are used by all cells as their standard fuel. In findings appearing online Feb. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists said the enzymes regulating the input molecules can use the energy released to drive calculations. "Our experiments demonstrate for the first time that we may use a DNA molecule as an input for computation, and at the same time fuel this computation by the energy stored in the very same molecule," Shapiro said. "Such combination, although theoretically conceivable, is practically impossible with conventional electronic computers." The computer requires very little energy, the scientists said. For example, even the hypothetical spoonful releases less than 25 millionths of a watt as heat. Moreover, the new computer is 50 times faster than before. "I would say this is a proof of concept," said IBM researcher Charles Bennett in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. "I think there's a long way to go from doing a particular computation like they propose here to making a general purpose molecular computer that's fast enough and reliable enough and energetically cheap enough to be useful." Shapiro admitted that the work remains at a very basic stage, but added the researchers hope to create even more powerful devices and perhaps create DNA computers that can work in living cells. "The main hurdle, which will take a decade or so to overcome, is science's inability to synthesize 'designer enzymes,'" Shapiro said. "Science does not know how to create enzymes that meet our needs." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
One Man Against the World
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/main.html - One Man Against the World --- A great, civilized nation democratically elected a fanatic demagogue, who preached war. Actually, he did not really receive the majority of votes, but, somehow, his ascent to power was arranged nevertheless. --- Soon after assuming power, he manipulated a dramatic incident in order to tighten his grip upon the country and prepare for attack on smaller nations. An immense propaganda machine turned "enemies" into devils, the incarnation of evil. --- The call for war enabled him to unite the whole people behind him, to silence all opposition, gradually abridge human rights, overcome the economic crisis and embark upon a voyage towards world dominion. --- He loved being photographed in uniform, walking along lines of soldiers, pretending to be a great military leader --- I mean, of course, Adolf Hitler. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Citibank Tries to Suppress ATM Hacks
Declan McCullagh wrote: > This is an interesting case, but it's not as if Citigroup is trying > to stifle academic research for the sake of stifling academic research -- > the Cambridge folks were retained as (presumably paid) defense experts > in the case. This is not to defend the prospect of a gag order, of course -- > all that I'm saying is that they ran no risk of gagging until after they > volunteered to be experts, as I understand it. What I find odd about this case, is that previously published work done independently of the court case can be gagged from further dissemination if one recites it in court as an expert witness. Is this some fluke of UK law? I can't imagine such a thing happening here in the US. Once the cat is out of the bag, it's out. > The other interesting thing to note is why Citigroup permitted one > card to make $80K of withdrawals from one account (which was allegedly > closed at the time anyway) in a weekend. The answer seems to be almost > certainly a malicious insider in their South African franchise. This is pretty common. There are times when bank computers are unable to access customer accounts, and rather than incur customer badwill, banks will let ATM transactions go through. The risk is small, since most people will be honest, and they really don't know when these small windows of unlimited withdrawal occur. I remember some guy in Oregon a few years back, who ran around and emptied ATMs of $350k during such an event. Of course he was dumb and got caught, and the bank got their money back. So large withdrawals in and of themselves, on overlimit or cancelled cards, are not a priori proof of insider shenanigans, although in this case, that's probably what happened. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless
Bill Stewart wrote:
> He was a Puerto Rican whose native language was Spanish (he was bilingual),
> but his name was something like Fred Mueller, so he failed the
> Spanish-Surnamed definition used by the bureaucrats.
This reminds me of a black acquaintance of mine whose last name was
"Garcia." This entitled her to double-dip into both the black and
Hispanic coffers of affirmative action.
She was greatly in demand by employers desparate to "balance the
equation." ("Think Like a Dinosaur" springs to mind)
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Citibank Tries to Suppress ATM Hacks
Two Cambridge University researchers, Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski, have devised a way to hack the hardware security modules used in ATMs and Point of Sale terminals, in order to recover a PIN in 15 tries. These sealed units read the strip on the card, do something with the account number using single DES, and get the PIN. The idea is that someone tapping the wire between the card reader/keypad and the computer will not see the user's credit card info in readable form. Now this gets even more interesting. There is a lawsuit in the UK over a South African couple who experienced 190 fradulent Diner's Club charges totaling $80k in the UK while they were in South Africa. The bank is trying to make them pay the bill, claiming the credit card system is foolproof and cannot be hacked. Bond is testifying at the trial, and Citibank wants a gag order over the ATM vulnerability issue. Ross Anderson has written the court, opposing the gag order. For your further reading enjoyment. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,899796,00.asp http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/21/1045638471679.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2130897,00.html -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
eBay's Patriotism
There's an interesting story on the home page of http://www.haaretzdaily.com/ disclosing eBay's policy of giving all information they have on a user to any guvment-appearing person who asks for it. It's well known that eBay ruminates over what fraud could do to its reputation, and employs a slew of former prosecutors and ex-LEA types to be on the constant lookout for it. Nonetheless, it's somewhat stunning to see eBay's policy articulated in print, in somewhat less disingenuous terms than are articulated in the "I Agree" link one clicks when registering with the site. It's probably not a bright idea to login to eBay when just browsing items. - ... One fax to eBay from a lawman - police investigator, NSA, FBI or CIA employee, National Park ranger - and eBay sends back the user's full name, email address, home address, mailing address, home telephone number, name of company where seller is employed and user nickname. What's more, eBay will send the history of items he has browsed, feedbacks received, bids he has made, prices he has paid, and even messages sent in the site's various discussion groups. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The Train Wreck is Proceeding Nicely
Tim Wrote: > I predicted the Shuttle program would never succeed. I never expected > cities on either body, because there was no economic reason to have > them. (I used to hear the stuff about growing ultra-pure crystals in > space, but I had seen Wacker's CZ crystal pullers, and I knew that > $50K/pound into orbit wasn't going to compete with crystal pullers the > size of a basketball court. I knew by 1980 that the Space Shuttle and > Space Station would be doing g-job "effects of zero-g on ant colonies" > crappy science.) I think the shuttle program is a good example of why future prediction is like spontaneous symmetry breaking. Invented in the late 1960's, it could have been built anytime thereafter, or not at all. It flew in 1981. The next one could fly in a year or two, or the fleet could be junked. The space plane could be flying now, if the tanks didn't require a complete redesign from composite to aluminum. It could have gotten funded to be finished, instead of put into storage. Maybe in 10 years, someone will do it, like the shuttle. Maybe they won't. Maybe another group will do something similar. Maybe no one will care. > I saw by 1978 our buildings in Santa Clara linked by lasers, and our > designs being sent up to Oregon on the then-fastest modems, and I saw > us leasing channels on satellites, so I knew networking would be big. It's interesting that none of the famous SF writers of the 50's saw networking in our future. Yet in retrospect, it's obvious it had to happen. I saw Stan Ovshinsky on CNN yesterday demonstrating a slew of working hydrogen power devices. Will Bush jumpstart the Hydrogen Economy? It's anyone's guess. I wouldn't try to fit "when" into a 20 year window. > I haven't listed all of my _wrong_ predictions, as they are harder to > remember than is saying what I thought about each of the issues you > raised. I suppose I expected more use of ultra high level languages > (some call it AI) instead of the low-level C and C++ we've seen so much > of. And I suppose I expected VR to come on stronger than it has. C abstracts hardware just enough that it miminizes the total effort required to port itself plus Unux. It is free, and because it is on everything, people use it to write applications as well. PL1G could have filled the same niche easily. Again, something that could have gone either way, but once done, was cast in concrete for all eternity. Then there are the technologies that had to get jumpstarted by something other than their obvious application. Flat panel displays got jumpstarted by computers, not by television, their obvious application, because flat panel TVs could never have supported the high initial cost. Now they're cheap, and will replace CRTs for everything. Compact Flash got jumpstarted by digital cameras, and now as the price comes down, will replace floppy/floptical media in computers across the board. Other examples are numerous. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: The Train Wreck is Proceeding Nicely
Neil Johnson wrote: > However, for you new subscribers, I'd like to point out Tim's record for > predicting the coming revolution. > April 1995 > Tim predicts the coming revolution as a result of the bombing of the Murrah > Federal building in Oklahoma City. > December 1999 > Tim predicts the coming revolution due to the "Y2K bug". Being a futurist is a unrewarding profession. Bright futurists don't predict the future. They look at what's possible, what's probable, and what's desirable. You have to realize that predicting the future is really about predicting human behavior. In the 1950's, futurists engaged in endless speculation about what we would do with all our leisure time in the 1990's. In reality, life today is even more of a competition between citizen-units to see who will take the least amount of money to work themselves into an early grave. I really have given up on predicting. Things happen if they are possible, and if people do them. If people don't do them, they don't happen. Far be it from me to decide what people will do, or what technology people will invent. I can predict what I will do. I can't predict what anyone else will do. Back when I harbored the delusion that I could predict things, I predicted quite a bit. I predicted that PL/I and APL would obsolete the need for all other computer languages. I looked at a development version of VisiCalc running on an Apple II, and said - "I hope you guys didn't spend a lot of time on this" - and predicted no one would buy "a computer simulation of a ledger sheet." I predicted that someday, all computers would be Lisp Machines. I predicted Ethernet would be a failure, because collision detection seemed a really unclean way of arbitrating a communications medium. I predicted Sparc would not become a dominant architecture. I predicted the 5th Generation project under Admiral Bobby Inman would in fact produce a machine as smart as a man. I predicted we'd have cities on the moon and Mars by now. I predicted Networking would never beat the bandwidth of a 9-track tape in a Fedex pouch. I predicted only Geeks would have their own computers. Well, you get the idea. As I cruise into crotchety middle-aged engineering, mathematical, and metaphysical wizardhood, I can only say I have been completely cured of the urge to predict anything. "Predicting the future is like teaching a pig to sing. You'll never do it, it's a frustrating experience, and it's not much fun for the pig either." Advice Tim and other prognosticators should take to heart. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
ADL Calls Protests "anti-Israel"
The Anti Defamation League has apparently decided to call the anti-war movement "anti-Israel." http://www.adl.org/Israel/israel_protest_calendar.asp "The prospect of war against Iraq and the crisis in the Middle East have led to a continuation of large rallies against Israel across the United States in 2003." Gee - I didn't realize that the large throng of people marching down the street carrying signs reading "No Blood for Oil", "War is Terrorism", and "Impeach Bush" were conducting an anti-Israel demonstration. Note that the Feb 15th "Stop the War" March in NY is listed at the very top of their alleged "anti-Israel" demonstration page. If the Zionists don't tone down their rhetoric, the terms "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Israel" may end up as generic terms referring to all people who support freedom and human rights. What an embarrassment that would be. It would be hard to argue that support of freedom and human rights is a bad thing, although the ADL probably has big enough balls to try. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The practical reason the U.S. is starting a war
John Young posts: > From: V > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 14:01:47 -0500 > Subject: Racism is Not Fashionable > The terminology "inner city welfare mutants" demonstrates that this > abstract is intended only for a certain segment of the people who read > your page. I always found your page a refreshing alternative to other > news sources. > Any valid arguments Tim May presented are negated by his blatant > racism. I always read your page as being critical of stupidity. Your > credibility has suffered severely with me due to such blatant racism > being expressed in the aforementioned. Exactly when were people living in the inner city or people recieving welfare benefits upgraded to a "race." Clearly, I've missed an announcement somewhere. Darn. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Crypto anarchy now more than ever
Tim Wrote: > When I was accused of planting a bomb to blow up President Clinton, I > told them to "prove it." This sounds like an interesting story. Would you care to elaborate? > Orwell had their number. And the technological powers have made the > ever-expanding power grab more and more enticing, all in the name of > "protecting the homeland." There are two fundamental holes in our form of government that need to be plugged. The first is that the country has absolutely no protection against electing a lunatic to the presidency. Whomever the Sheeple toss into office is given control of the nuclear arsenal, the military, and foreign policy for four years. The Congress runs away scared of being called disloyal if they don't support him, and he may piss off and bully every other country in the world for any deranged reason, use military force on any whim, and faces impeachment only if he is caught in his workplace with an barely legal intern hoovering his zipper area. The second is that we have absolutely no protection against some area of government developing a critical mass of people having divided loyalties to some foreign power or ideology. The current combination of George W. Bush, the messianic nutjob who claims his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ, and the critical mass of "Likudniks" who drive US Middle East policy, and have convinced Mad George that he is fighting on the side of God to save Judeo-Christian civilization itself, are what is driving this idiotic American crusade to steal the world's oil reserves, impose Pax Americana on the world, and create a Greater Israel. George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, the Mental Patient and the War Criminal, driving American policy into the 21st Century. And while thermonuclear incineration of Washington DC and Tel Aviv is probably overkill in terms of correcting the problem, it would be nice to have some Constitutional mechanism for dealing with presidential insanity, and an administration topheavy with people who put the welfare of an overfunded offshore US military base mascarading as a nation ahead of what is best for the American people and the rest of the world. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Tyler Durden Wrote: > Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and > I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways > some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some > are just plain old great physicsts). Well, of course I meant that the theory is the wrong approach, not that the people working on it were unskilled craftsmen. Skilled craftsmen can, of course, build both outhouses and palaces. > I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's "structure of > Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, > that those of us who sit on "this" side of a revolution not only often > disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually > science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was > physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most > respected colleagues were working on it). I'd agree with Feynman on this one. > >Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a > >neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N. I see no evidence that > >the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like. > >If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a > >theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap > >over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold. > I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a > mathematical physicist. One of the fundamental notions of a manifold, is that any two points possess disjoint neighborhoods, no matter how close together the two points are, said neighborhoods containing an infinity of other points. Spacetime does not possess this property, because its only points are the intersections of the world lines of real and virtual elementary particles. Space and time are a statistical aggregate of this interaction of particles, and the notion that there is something "between" its discrete points is an illusion we only percieve at large scales. > If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling > when it was developed), Kaluza and Klein forshadowed the modern idea that the internal symmetries of gauge fields were in reality full-fledged dimensions, as three dimensions of space and one of time were for the gravitational field. They did this by showing that general relativity in five dimensions correctly explained both gravity and electromagnetism. They missed the important point that if the extra dimension were closed and microscopic in size, that observers would still see a 3+1 dimensional universe. > you'll understand that string > theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological > structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. > Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never "unfolded" and > are only "visible" at Planck scales. Yes, if one allows the SU(3) symmetry of the strong force, the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism, and the SU(2) of the weak force, to be real dimensions, in addition to three dimensions of space and one of time, one gets a 10 dimensional theory. Throwing in one more dimension so that all variations on the theory can be abstracted into a single all-encompassing theory gives 11 dimensions. We assume all but 4 of them are compactified. But this is more of an "internal symmetries are real dimensions too" issue, than a string issue. There's really nothing that stops you from having these microscopic dimensions, and still working with particles instead of strings. This does nothing about the issue I discussed earlier, about the universe being non-manifold-like at Planck scale, and manifold properties being statistical aggregates of particles interacting in a frothy manner. > >Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism > >were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate > >electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric > >part of a non-symmetric metric tensor. Einstein found inventing the math > >to do this "friggin' hard." It was also "friggin' wrong." > Uh, but the fact that it was "wrong" doesn't make Einstein a "moron". (And > also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying > that a Picasso painting is "wrong", if you are a Kuhn true believer!) Again, bad things happen to good people, and moronic theories happen to smart scientists. The theories scientists invent after the thing that makes them world-renowned are frequently worthless. Science, after all, generally tries lots of things that don't work before tripping over the thing that does. > >Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string > >theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the > >standard model predict the oppo
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Tyler Durden opines: > Yo! Superstring theory is only "continuous math" because the proper > mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics > has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the > needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing "everything", it will > be apparent that Ed Witten was right: "Superstrings is really 21st century > physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century". In other > words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard. Perhaps it is so "friggin' hard" because you are trying to do the equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals. Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N. I see no evidence that the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like. If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold. Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric part of a non-symmetric metric tensor. Einstein found inventing the math to do this "friggin' hard." It was also "friggin' wrong." > As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, > though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done > by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent "Universe in a Nutshell"...as some > Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very > close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory. I didn't say it was dead. I said it was a "dead end." Whether something will ever produce something of value is orthogonal to whether lots of people will work on it, and peer-review boxloads of eachother's papers. > "The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the > big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will > live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to > spacetime dynamics." > I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones > I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the standard model predict the opposite. Make me something that levitates, or transmutes, or forks off child universes, or generates traversable wormholes, or takes pictures of particles that can only exist if the universe is made up of strings. That will impress me. Protestations as to what the Priesthood of Tenured String Magicians and Popular Coffee Table Book Authors believes or doesn't believe will merely prompt derisive laughing. > Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General > Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate. Strings are little more than a trick to evade particle interactions being dimensionless points in space time. It's like saying that gravity can be combined with quantum mechanics if all particles are tiny wiggling plastic bags full of Jello, so small that they only appear pointlike to an ordinary observer. Fuzz out the charge and mass of a particle, and some infinities go away. The measure of the usefulness of a new theory is the increment in predictive power over the prior way of thinking about it. Not how many pages you can cover with indecipherable equations that are "Friggin' Hard." > Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General > Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to > Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to > Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident". I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to appeal to "nonhuman civilizations" in search of profundity. Special relativity follows from the Lorentz Transformations, which follow from almost any clueful research into electromagnetism. General relativity is a simple extension in which Lorentz invariance is a local instead of a global property, and gravity and accelerated frames are locally indistinguishable. The notion that it is even remotely likely that a civilization, at the point where it knows about only two forces and has not yet discovered quantum mechanics, would invent superstring theory and then derive general relativity from it, is wishful thinking of the highest order. > Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield > interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are > ferociously ma
