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Comment Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score 1) 391

by Toandeaf (#25951943) Attached to: Censorship By Glut
There is a difference between Conservatives and Classical Liberals. Classical Liberals highly valued education and disagreed with each other quite openly. The connection you are making between the two would be more convincing if conservative celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter did not coordinate their messages so thoroughly. Why is it that after major political events they describe them with the same wording? I agree that hate speech laws are often supported by Liberals, for which I am ashamed of them, but I do not agree that they do not value dissent. What is the origin of the joke: "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat"?

Comment Re:Lower-wattage bulbs (Score 1) 391

by Toandeaf (#25951767) Attached to: Censorship By Glut
I haven't been trolled recently so I'll bite. While I have no knowledge of any studies about how informed different voters are about the issues involved in elections, I have to disagree with the claim that Republicans are better educated. In fact, Democrats comprise a greater part of the college educated segment of the population. Isn't this why we are always accused (in many cases quite justly) of educational elitism? I thought this was why Republican candidates try to fit the everyman image while Democrats make much of their educational background.
Businesses

Submission + - Bad bosses may damage your heart (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Inconsiderate bosses not only make work stressful, they may also increase the risk of heart disease for their employees, experts believe.

A Swedish team found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men.

And the effect may be cumulative — the risk went up the longer an employee worked for the same company.
Robotics

Submission + - Military robots more ethical than human soldiers (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
SpaceAdmiral
SpaceAdmiral writes: "Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, believes that military robots could behave more ethically on the battlefield than human soldiers. It may seem strange to think of automated killing machines as ethical, but, as Dr. Arkin notes, they can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear."
Privacy

Submission + - A replacement for the current approach to privacy (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
CurtMonash
CurtMonash writes: "There are two fundamental approaches to insuring sufficient privacy against the over-inquisitive. One is to focus on keeping information secret. But governments all over the world are making that impossible, by (for example) monitoring email, maintaining web surfing logs, and tapping into the same electronic transaction data that credit card marketers use. So I think we need to fall back on the second option: Assume information will get out, but erect the strongest possible barriers against its misuse. As I see it, there are four fundamental legal principles to electronic freedom (other than on copyright matters, so you may want to add a fifth for those):
  • Reading and writing should be unrestricted, with only the narrowest of exceptions. While it may not be possible to win every battle about pictures, videos, and the like, there's no reason to tolerate the slightest censorship when what's being censored is simply words.
  • "State of mind" evidence inferred from — for example — logs of search or surfing behavior should be inadmissible in legal proceedings, investigations, and hiring decisions. Whether it's your interest in Islam, pornography, or the untraceable disposal of corpses, what you look into shouldn't get you into trouble.
  • All uses of data that are not explicitly permitted to government must be forbidden. Given how many gray areas get created by technological advancement, a catch-all rule like this seems crucial.
  • All government programs that use data should be disclosed, with only the narrowest of security exceptions.

If you supported either Barack Obama or Ron Paul, I'd hope you agree with most or all of that. If you do agree, then there are two practical things you can do to help these policies along. One is political advocacy. The simplest form of that right now would be via the suggestion page at www.change.gov. The second is to offer ideas on a thorny issue of systems design. If we pass rules saying government must only use information in certain ways, how do we know that they are being obeyed? That auditing challenge seems extremely non-trivial."
The Internet

Submission + - The Pirate Bay vs. Italy, the worse is yet to come (kingofgng.com)

Submitted by
KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: "As widely reported in the news, the preventive seizure (call it "censorship", "block", or whatever) of the access to The Pirate Bay from the Italian territory has finally been revoked by a decree of Bergamo Court. Called upon by the Bay admins' lawyers, the Reexamination Judges have reconsidered the legitimacy of the previous ruling of the Court, deciding that the seizure was essentially illegal.

Many, almost anyone have rushed to crow for TPB and the P2P in general, clearly having no clues on the fact that a new storm is about to appear on the horizon, a storm even more dangerous of the simple block of a single website, potentially capable of making, if possible, more tightening and unfair the yet absurd law against file sharing effective in Italy. Story here"
United States

Submission + - Obama Releases Documentary on Financial Crisis (barackobama.com)

Submitted by otakuj462
otakuj462 writes: The Obama 2008 campaign has released a 13-minute long documentary on YouTube which cites John McCain's direct involvement with Charles Keating and the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan in the 1980's. Would anyone care to respond?
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's Let-Them-Eat-Cake SEC Filing

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "As a proposed $700B financial bailout prompted tens of thousands of fed-up taxpayers to sign a petition to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson complaining that 'the wealthiest people...in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all,' Microsoft quietly informed the SEC it was adopting a new executive officer incentive plan that calls for diverting a percentage of Microsoft's operating income to a special pool to allow an extra $20,000,000 a year to be put in a participating exec's pocket."
The Media

Submission + - Research: Press Harder On Obama Than McCain

Submitted by Kozar_The_Malignant
Kozar_The_Malignant writes: A report to appear in the November issue of Scientific American shows that "despite popular accounts, researchers found that Barack Obama got more negative press coverage than John McCain did in the early summer." According to the report, "This past summer, just as the view that journalists were going softer on Barack Obama than on John McCain was becoming widely accepted, CMPA issued a report showing that 72 percent of the statements in TV news reports about Obama in late spring and early summer were negative, whereas 57 percent of the statements about McCain were negative." This flies in the face of Republican contentions that the media is soft on Obama and is a fine example of the "Ideology Trumps Facts" story on Slashdot the other day. Somehow I doubt that Bill O'Reilly will be reporting this story.
Space

Submission + - French Scientist to SETI: "Something is Here& (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Adam Korbitz
Adam Korbitz writes: "It's cool here in Paris, but things got hot at the SETI symposium that wrapped up this week at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris , sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics. The presentation by Alain Labeque of the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, took an unexpected and shocking turn. Labeque told his assembled colleagues they should examine UFO sightings for clues as to how to design the SETI experiment.

A few of Labeque's European and Russian colleagues appeared intrigued by the suggested plan and challenged Labeque to clarify several points. In reference to the wealth of unexplained UFO sightings, Labeque concluded, "Something is here."

Later in the day, another European scientist — Jean-Pierre Rospars of France — suggested at the end of his presentation on SETI and terrestrial biological evolution: "Possible ET presence in our environment should not be neglected. It may be partly accessible to our limited means of investigation."

More info here.

"
Networking

Submission + - Internet Filtering Lobby ? 1

Submitted by
mbone
mbone writes: "Wired Blog's David Kravets reports on a new Lobbying effort called Arts & Labs. This lobby has as members AT&T, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America. Their web site says "network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file-trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers."

Does it seem that this is an attempt to make P2P seem like spam and other malware, or is it just me ?"
The Courts

Submission + - David Kernell Guilty of Not Being an HP Exec?

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "As far as we know, David Kernell, the University of Tennessee student suspected of hacking into VP-wannabe Sarah Palin's e-mail account, didn't do anything near the scale of HP's pretexting efforts that yielded the private records of its directors, employees and journalists. Nor did he order physical surveillance of Palin. Or seek to obtain her father's or spouse's records. Or hatch plans to infiltrate the governor's office with stooges. Or go through her trash. Or eavesdrop on her instant messaging. Or bug her e-mail. So why did the HP execs and investigators get off scott-free (or with a 96-hours-of-community-service slap-on-the-wrist), while Kernell is having FBI agents raid his apartment? We've seen that money walks. Will Kernell?"
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Accuses Beckerman of 'Vexatious Litigation (wired.com)

Submitted by IceDiver
IceDiver writes:

The Recording Industry Association of America is declaring attorney-blogger Ray Beckerman a "vexatious" litigator and is seeking unspecified monetary sanctions to punish him in his defense of a New York woman accused of making copyrighted music available on the Kazaa file sharing system. The RIAA said Beckerman, one of the nation's few attorneys who defends accused file sharers, "has maintained an anti-recording industry blog during the course of this case and has consistently posted virtually every one of his baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass plaintiffs," the RIAA wrote (.pdf) in court briefs. "Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions.",

Beckerman is accused, among other things, of "providing false and misleading information and for unreasonably and vexatiously multiplying and prolonging this litigation."

How can they expect anyone to believe this crap?

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