] - The world's demand for the last many years, including in
] early 2003, was for Iraq to comply with U.N. demands to
] disarm.

I believe Israel is still holding land the UN told it to give up more than 25 years ago. I'm not saying Israel is wrong, I'm just saying this is a bullshit reason and you know it is.

] - Iraq was clearly not complying with those demands.

Ditto

] - Something had to be done, and most countries didn't have
] the balls to do it.

Most countries respect the diplomatic process, and understand, unlike Mister Bush, that you can't have what you want right now

] - We did.

Violating 230 years of Policy, and severly, if not mortally hurting NATO in the process.

Taking power into your own hands, while effective, hurts you in the long run.

] - The war was justified.

Really? Because minus the immediate threat of WMD I see no reason for a preemptive invading of another country. I have discussed this in my memestream before. All reasons given are things we either do ourselves, or ignore when our allies do because it suits us best.

] - And the world is a better place without Saddam.

The fact that you, or even the entire human population feels "the world is a better place" because something occured is never proof that what occured was fair or just or right to do.

RE: Blair Defends War Decision

] Briefly, users make connection attempts to sequences of
] closed ports. The failed connections are logged by the
] server-side packet filtering firewall and detected by a
] dæmon that monitors the firewall log file. When a
] properly formatted knock sequence, playing the role of
] the secret used in the authentication, is received,
] firewall rules are manipulated based on the information
] content of the sequence. This user-based authentication
] system is both robust, being mediated by the kernel
] firewall, and stealthy--it's not possible to detect
] whether a networked machine is listening for port knocks.
] Port knocking does not require any open ports, and it can
] be extended to transmit any type of information encoded
] in a port sequence.

This is so very very cool

Port Knocking

I'm still loving every minute of this.. This is like the technology super bowl! Let me translate this to unix geek..

] For Spirit, part of the cure has been deleting thousands of
] files from the rover's flash memory -- a type of rewritable
] electronic memory that retains information even when power
] is off. Many of the deleted files were left over from the seven
] -month flight from Florida to Mars. Onboard software was
] having difficulty managing the flash memory, triggering
] Spirit's computer to reset itself about once an hour.

Cleaning out a directory with too many files ... ON MARS!!

] Two days after the problem arose, engineers began using a
] temporary workaround of sending commands every day to put
] Spirit into an operations mode that avoided use of flash
] memory. Now, however, the computer is stable even when
] operating in the normal mode, which uses the flash
] memory.

Single user mode ... ON MARS!!!

] "To be safe, we want to reformat the flash and start
] again with a clean slate," Adler said. That reformatting
] is planned for Monday. It will erase everything stored in
] the flash file system and install a clean version of the
] flight software.

PXE/bootp Automated Installs ... ON MARS!!!!

Alright guys, now just keep the webcam working... ON MARS!!!

Update: Looking at the press images section right now is a great reminder that we got way more then a webcam over there. Hot damn. Once these things start really moving around, I'll break out the RC car jokes!

Shout with me . . . ON MARS!!

] "The Government must play a greater role in punishing
] those who conceal their identities online, particularly
] when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal
] criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected
] intellectual property right," (Lamar) Smith said at a hearing on
] the topic today.

Congress wants to make it a federal crime to lie on your domain name registration. If you do not make your real address, telephone number, and email available to everyone on earth you can be sentenced to federal prison time (in this version you'd have a sentence for another crime extended). This came up in last years legislative session as well. The thing that makes my blood boil about this is that the spin is totally wrong. The copyright people are lying through their teeth, this journalist can't see through it, and the CDT/ACLU don't understand EITHER so they are providing the wrong counterpoints, almost assuring that this will pass!

This article lets slide absolute lies like:

] Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints
] from the entertainment and software industries that much of
] their material is made available for free on Web sites whose
] owners are impossible to track down because their domain
] name registrations often contain made-up names.

No web site owner is "impossible" to track down!

DNS whois information is made available for reference. It is intended to assist communication between administrators who run networks, for security or network management related reasons. It was not designed for lawyers or police. It was also not designed with the modern spam and stalker infested internet in mind, and therefore often people fill it out with false information, especially if they aren't a business entity.

If you want to track down someone on the internet for a legal reason, you do not use the DNS whois system. That is not what the DNS whois system is for. You do a nslookup on the domain name and get the IP address. Then you use the ARIN whois system, (a completely different and totally unrelated database that used to run on the same software) which tells you what ISP an IP address has been issued to. ARIN whois is usually correct. If it is not correct you can complain to ARIN and they can check their records. Their records are always correct unless the IP addresses have been stolen (and if you're dealing with stolen IP addresses you're way past the point where DNS whois is going to help you, federal crime or not). Either way you'll get an ISP. You then go to a court and get a subpoena, and send that subpoena to the ISP, and the ISP produces contact information for the customer. This always works.

Let me be absolutely clear about this. Requiring people to keep accurate dns whois records has absolutely nothing at all to do with being able to track down domain holders on the internet. You can always do that today. Forcing people to keep accurate dns whois records is about being able to track down domain holders on the internet without court authorization. We should not allow that.

What really pisses me off here is that no one on "our side of the fence" in this debate is making that point. We're going to loose this one if the discussion isn't forced back into the realm of reality. If this is about people committing crimes on internet sites that can't be tracked down by any means, we'll be passing laws based on a complete fantasy.

Kids, this is exactly how bad law happens.

Congress Eyes Idiotic Whois Crackdown

] ] Iraq remained a very dangerous place in terms of WMD
]
] ] capabilities, even though we found no large stockpiles
] of
] ] weapons.

Come on. This is like saying My living room rug is a very dangerous place in terms of high-voltage-shock-death-from-static-electricity even though it hasn't happened yet.

Not only did Key not find large stockpiles, he found no stockpiles, let alone those stock piles that were supposely able to be launched on 45 minutes notice, which Bush harped on.

Face the facts: Bush Lied on the biggest reason for war. Saying after the fact "Well its still ok because, [Saddam | Iraq] was [BLANK] doesn't change the fact that Bush lied, that [BLANK] is not justification for starting a preemptive/protective war, and that there are countless examples of where the US turn a blind eye to [BLANK] in other countries where it suits us best.

RE: FOXNews.com Transcript: Interview with David Kay, February 1, 2004

] So far it has largely been used by US intelligence
] agencies to analyse the huge amount of information
] collected as part of the war on terror.
]
] "The government and international security agencies have
] a desire to find, track and sometimes arrest people,"

If this quote doesn't scare the hell out of you something is wrong. A desire to find and track people.... and sometimes arrest them. Why the hell do you need to find anyone in the world and be able to track them unless you have an active and justified investigation of them? And its scary how no one is reacting to this drastic change in policy for protection of the fatherland... sorry I meant homeland.

Just as the Iraqi Survey Groups goals changed (WMD to evidence of WMD to evidence of WMD related programs), so has the governments stance on how it will use info to "protect" us. (General info, no unique identifiers for a person to CAPSII to Ability to track everyone, but trust us, we won't abuse it)

DARPA funding to track people on Internet

janelane wrote:
] ] However, a majority of those polled -- 54 percent -- said
] ] they do not believe Bush deliberately misled the country
] ] on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, while 43
] ] percent said they believe there was deception.
]
] Forehead SMACK!

Still when 43 pecent of the country says "I feel you lied to us" in regards to the main reason we went to war in Iraq, thats a big number.

So, if nearly half the country thinks Bush lied to us, why did we go to war again?

1- Used WMD against his own people (yeah the ones we gave him, and unless a WMD was made after 1994, it is no longer of weapons grade)
2- Crimes against Humanities (3 words: Pol Pot: Cambodia)
3-Terrorists (Oh you mean the Saudi nationals we trained and gave a bunch of RPGs to?)
3- No women's rights (Saudia Arabia, anything Arab thats not Turkey or Jordan)
4- No democratic elections (Like the "President" who wears a generals uniform siezed power in Pakistan)
5- Tried to assassinate GH Bush. (Hello? Castro? Exploding Cigars. I saw them when I was in DC)

So show me a good reason for going into Iraq? Show me a good reason for breaking 230 years of Diplomatic presidence. Oh yeah, I pumped it into my car this morning.

RE: CNN.com - Kerry leads Bush in new poll - Feb. 2, 2004

} Baker is convinced Paxil is what killed her daughter, and that's
} what she'll tell a U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel meeting
} this week in Bethesda, Md.

This is what we get for marketing drugs directly to the public on TV. "Ask your doctor about [blank]" indeed.

If I have any problems I'll listen to what my doctor tells me I need, seeing as how he's the one with the 12 years of med school.

TIME.com: Prescription For Suicide? -- Feb. 09, 2004

] We strongly encourage the state of Georgia to incorporate
] the entirety of the AAAS benchmarks. A complete science
] education is essential to scientific literacy and to our
] state's economy.

Please sign! Save Georgia from itself! First the Ten Commandments, now this...what part of "separation of church and state" DOESN'T FREAKING APPLY?!!

Georgia Science Education Petition

] A vulnerability that involves the cross-domain security
] model of Internet Explorer. The cross domain security
] model of Internet Explorer keeps windows of different
] domains from sharing information. This vulnerability
] could result in the execution of script in the Local
] Machine zone. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker
] would have to host a malicious Web site that contained a
] Web page designed to exploit the vulnerability and then
] persuade a user to view the Web page.

About damn time. This critical bug (their classification) took nearly 3 months to fix. 3 monthes to modify a stupid printing function. Why are these guys number 1 again? It sure aint the customer service

Microsoft finally patches IE URL Parse bug