The concept here is that if the NSA had done this in the United States, there would have been a court case and the courts would likely have sided with newspapers, invoking the First Amendment.

But once again since this is overseas, the government is pushing for things that would never be legal here; it is curious that they tried to pressure the British though.

We know during war things happen that would never be legal on this soil; it'd be interesting to see a full accounting of what the US gets away with, or tries to, when it is out of the reach of the Bill of Rights.

I am sure they'd talk to me like a child if I brought this up: I just don't understand the threats we face, and the countermeasures and surveillance we need to keep up with them, and that the only reason I can even talk like this is because guys like them do "what has to be done" to keep the US safe.

Whenever this sort of thing is justified, it is nearly always an external threat; and it probably overlaps with the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse they always invoke to justify kneecapping encryption.

But they always start mid-thought. They don't want to talk about why there's a nuclear arms race, or why so many people are angry at us. They just want to start with "they are," and therefore authoritarian policies and programs are justified.

We know a lot of this is about industry. It takes two to tango, though. We buy what they make.

At least there are nachos.

*THREE MONTHS!?* THREE - AND NOT ONE. You're saying like around NINETY DAYS OF SWEET SPOTIFY ACTION before I can pay Spotify to rip off artists?

Holy shit, someone grab my axe and merkin, I'm gonna climb up the nearest hill, rip off the merkin, and windmill my shit in this gleaming, numinous, glorious dawn.

THREE MONTHS. MY GOD YOU'VE LOST YOUR MINDS.

I want to see web sites stop popping up their crappy interstitial pages I have to click through to get to contact, almost all of which implore me to subscribe to their stupid e-mail lists (not happening, ever, specifically because of how they pushed).

I want to see websites stop forcing me through "OMG LOOK AT ALL OUR NEW FEATURES" slides every time I log in.

Put a lil.

A lil.

Flashing thing on the side or something. But get the fuck out of my face.

ALL autoplay bullshit must end (fuck you cnn.com. I mean fuck you for about a hundred other reasons but especially fuck you for that.)

The sheer number of browser extensions I install to try to protect what is left of my privacy and stop apeshit web developers from engaging in screen bukkake has become absurd.

This is not what the Web was supposed to be.

And *yes*, I would be fine with about 2/3rds of the damn Web collapsing for want of ad revenue if what was left was clean and user-friendly. I have reached that point.

I'M MAD PEOPLE.

A CRAZY, MAD, WILD-EYED, BIG-BOTTOMED ANARCHIST.

I WAS HERE EARLY AND YOU WILL HEAR ME.

(they will not hear me. no need to point that out.)

If you're not hysterically paranoid, you're not sane.

I'm 40 now and I can't think of a single thing from chemistry I've ever used. I can't even remember anything from the class.

Then again as a counterpoint I've never really used electronics, which I had 4 years of in high school, but I swear I think back to that class frequently when problem solving, from "split-halving" a problem to logic gates to make flowcharts and so on. Probably more than any class I had, electronics really taught me how to break down a problem and put together a solution.

I get the idea of a "core curriculum" to expose students to things, but I remain unsure as to whether things are currently makes much sense. I took chemistry, which went fairly into depth, but at the cost of not taking physics (chemistry satisfied the requirement). I'd rather have had a class which touched on each of these subjects for perhaps a quarter to half a year, spread out over two years, than a full year of chemistry, with the option to take a more in-depth science course for years three and four.

But I have to say, nothing I learned in chemistry stuck or was useful like electronics was.

I love history but I think it is taught poorly -- that's an area ripe for consolidation and fixing...social studies and English in general.

Mail from USC-ISI rcvd at 8-APR-76 1202-PST
Date: 8 APR 1976 1110-PST
Sender: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
Subject: MSGGROUP# 314 Welcome Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI)
From: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Message-ID:

Please add RMS@MIT-AI (Richard Stallman) to your MsgGroup mailing
list, or obtain a new copy form [ISI]Mailing.List;56.

Richard and Ken Harrenstien (KLH@MIT-AI) have been perusing the
MsgGroup Proceedings and have raised a number of issues that I
think are well worth discussion.

So, Welcome to MsgGroup. Enjoy. See you in the discussions,
Stef

Begin forwarded message

Mail-from: BBN-TENEXA rcvd at 22-JUL-75 0617-PDT
Date: 22 JUL 1975 0904-EDT
Sender: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
Subject: MSGGROUP# 099 The Attention Subfield in The MAILSYS Address Fields.
From: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Cc: HENDERSON, RBRACHMAN, ULMER
Message-ID:
Reference: Kirstein "The Attention Field", Msggroup #82.

Discussion of Kirstein's message of July 7.

The problem is that one MAILBOX sometimes serves a group of users
or projects. How can the messages, as they arrive, be brought to
the attention of different users? And how can they be sorted out
at a later date?

There are three ways that the current MAILSYS system can handle
this:

(1) Use the KEYWORDS field to store the appropriate keywords,
names, names of projects, or whatever.

The KEYWORDS field takes a text string as its argument. The idea
is that it will usually consist of words, separated by commas,
but this is not at all required.

          Ex: KEYWORDS: WHATZIT, WHOSIS

The KEYWORDS field can be displayed in a long-form SURVEY with
the command

          >SURVEY,(CR)
          >>KEYWORDS (CR)
          >>(CR)

If you wish to search the KEYWORDS field with a READ or SURVEY
command, you can first set up a FILTER:

          >FILTER (CR)
          >>REQUIRE KEYWORDS (CR)
          >>(CR)

Then you can perform the sort and store the selected messages in
a file with

          >READ,(CR)
          >>FILTER (CR)
          >>OUTPUT (CR)
          >>(CR)

The commands can be typed in the abbreviated mode, of course.

(2) Use the "Attention Subfield" of the MAILSYS address fields
(TO, CC, and BCC).

As currently implemented, the MAILSYS address field has the form

          = , , ...

where

            = @ ()

which is displayed as

          Name at Host (Attn: Text String)

          Ex: Mooers at BBNA (Attn: WHATZIT)

Until now, the documentation of showed the form

  = @ (, , ... )

and the idea was (and is) that in future versions of MAILSYS,
  could be the primary user assigned to a multi-user
MAILBOX, and the names in the parentheses could be secondary
users authorized to use the MAILBOX. Whether the secondary users
should be assigned identities in the system so that MAILSYS can
parse and check them in -- at least in the local directory -- is
an interesting point for debate.

At present, the attention subfield is available for any kind of
flag. It has the advantage of being in the TO, CC, and BCC
fields, where you would normally look for an addressee, and the
disadvantage that MAILSYS can't sort on it.

In the address fields, MAILSYS will FILTER only for address lists
and will not touch the stuff inside the parentheses, whether it
consists of duly authorized names or not.

Future versions of MAILSYS will certainly have to filter and sort
on the Attention Subfields of messages.

(3) It is also possible to put the attention flag at the
beginning of the SUBJECT field, e.g.,

          Ex: SUBJECT: WHATZIT: More thoughts on the Attention Problem.

Then you can search for WHATZIT with a FILTER.

This has the advantage that the attention flag shows up on a
normal short-form SURVEY, and the disavantage that the subject
field is, perhaps, not a very logical place for an attention
flag.

I hope this clarifies matters. I have changed the on-line
documentation to reflect the system as it is now.

---Charlotte

Can someone tell me what a "cable" is? I am looking at the link in the story, and it looks like the kind of thing you'd see slowly printing off of a teletype machine in a 1970s political thriller.

What is the purpose of sending cables rather than encrypted e-mails?

Who maintains the "cable" system and what standard does it run on? Is it like old-school TTY or is it like fax or what? Do these get delivered over regular phone lines or some other network? What kind of "cables" are involved in transmitting "cables?"

I am genuinely curious.

Back in 1985 or so, I remember reading all of the anti-piracy stuff that was being put out by software companies, all of which essentially amounted to this argument:

If people pirate stuff, there won't be any monetary incentive to create, and:

* The video game industry will dry up and no one will make any more video games.

* The business software industry will dry up and no one will make any business software.

* The record industry will die and no one will make any music.

In 2011, is there any more appropriate reply than "LOL"?

At bare minimum, they need to stop making stupid arguments. "We are losing revenue which we could rightfully pocket if piracy were stopped" is far more honest here, however anyone else feels about piracy. Or "sharing." Or whatever people call it.

People need to drag out the "Don't Copy That Floppy!" stuff from the early days, and rather than laugh at how dated the pitch looks, use it as an example of how fucking stupid the argument is, as it has no basis whatsoever in reality. I seriously wonder who the affected industries think they're impressing with the "OMG piracy - the pump don't work 'cos the vandals took the handle! SOFTWARE FAMINE ICE AGE WASTELAND COMING!" argument, because this is such a laughably shit argument.

The First Amendment issues are obvious here, but I have to say, we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.

We are not three year olds. We can watch hateful, obscene, or otherwise nasty crap and we can make the decision not to be a bunch of zombies about it. Unless and until we insist that people think for themselves and be responsible for their actions, (and law should mandate it - meaning, you can't use "I watched a bunch of nasty stuff and it influenced me therefore the crime I committed isn't my fault" argument) we condemn ourselves to a kind of tyranny where government is the adult who steps in and treats us like impressionable toddlers. Freedom is contingent upon critical thinking and personal responsibility, and I am not willing to accept shackles because there are a smattering of idiots among us who are incapable of it.

The logic that we have to stop thoughtcrime because it might spread or influence people is chilling.

The United States needs to ignore the UK's demand, and the UK, if it insists, can certainly petition google to take action on this.

But unless we rely on the idea that free people in a free society can think critically, why not just invite the government into our lives completely? Why even have a free society, if we're really just animals, a few videos away from going on some kind of horrible killing spree? Why go through the pretense of insisting that human beings are capable, through independent thought and taking responsibility for their actions, of liberty?

The "categorically not allowed in the UK" bit could not, as an American, concern me less -- and should the United States attempt the same kind of argument with the UK in the future, the UK can and should ignore the United States's demands to infringe the right of people to say and read/watch what they like.

The alternative, where the government makes this decision that there's just stuff we can't watch, is scary.

My favorite is the misspelling of "retarded" in the annotation. Few things warm my heart more than that.

You know who else used a similar throttling scheme?

Nazi Germany.

Maybe what we should do is start a "Psst, do you REALLY need that Internet connection?" campaign veiled as a frugality-during-the-recession thing for all of these assholes who apparently use 5 gig a month on their Internet plans.

Just start cold calling people.

Be all up in shawtys grill like,

"Sup boo, says here y'all only use like 5 gigs of data a month."

"Well I just sometimes like to e-mail my grandson."

"Do you think that the expense of an Internet connection for a responsible senior on a fixed income is justifiable during these troubled times? Go to the library yo."

And so on.

Then we can shut these fucking companies up already about how their average customer apparently uses the Internet to write "LOL cupcakes" on Twitter every 4 days, and that represents the average Internet user.

Increasingly, I think if you found these "average Internet users," they'd be the same people who have recalibrated the taste buds of people in this country so that you can't actually get *hot* as in *spicy* food anywhere. I just picture those assholes sitting there twittering "omg this salsa is hot 8P" while scarfing down corn chips with Old El Paso "MEDIUM" salsa.

I hate those assholes. They're ruining it for everyone.