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12.4.06
What's in a name
From Mirriam Webster:
il·le·gal
Pronunciation: (")i(l)-'lE-g&l
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Medieval Latin; Middle French illegal, from Medieval Latin illegalis, from Latin in- + legalis legal
: not according to or authorized by law : UNLAWFUL, ILLICIT;
im·mi·grant
Pronunciation: 'i-mi-gr&nt
Function: noun
: one that immigrates : as a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence
I believe the issue to be with the first word, rather than the second.
10.3.06
Common Sense
It's odd how sometimes it takes something so incredibly stupid that to ponder it would cause blood to shoot out of your nose to point out to yourself that you've never seen something in a certain way. To me, Common Sense has always been a immutible guide as to whether one will be able to actually survive by oneself out in the scary "real world".
I've known people with 'book sense' that were completely clueless and could actually be scammed by the whole "heads I win, tails you lose" deal. To me, common sense was the one quality that you could use in an argument, or proof, or whatever and just point to it and say "see?!". It required no definitions, no qualifiers, no quantitative states. It was the one thing that leveled the playing field.
My perception has had a severe corrective jolt.
After a particular political conversation recently, I realized that the notion of common sense is perhaps the most relativistic quality of human nature. Consider this thought experiment (or if you're brave, actually try this): Go up to a random person on the street and ask them something about civil rights. Affirmative action as applied to college applicants is usually a good test bed for raw data. You'll get as many answers saying that 'common sense dictates that's it's clearly unfair, promoting a bias that it's intended to alleviate' as you will that 'common sense dicates that it's clearly fair, promoting equal chance for entrance to college for all'.
Here's where the relativism comes in. A third party observer to these two viewpoints sees that they are contradictory. However, suppose this third party observer has clairvoyant powers, and can see all of the experiences the two people have had in their life that influence their perception of this topic. The outcome is that both of them are right.
For those keeping score, Schrodinger's Cat just slipped into a non-Euclidian hyperspace of order pi. Consequently, the cat is hungry.
So now the question is begged "What exactly is Common Sense?" How common does something have to be to be included in common sense? Is common sense something that immutable (i.e. 1+1=2 in a sufficiently described numerical system)? Or is common sense just a construct that humans have created as a psychological defense mechanism to ensure that their viewpoints are justified, and keep themselves from going completely bonkers?
Don't think about that too much or you might rip a hole in space-time.
13.2.06
When is an Internet Connection... Part II
While I can't help but think that forcing people to send e-mail through a mandatory server is a set-up for the recent provisions in the Patriot Act, I can see the reasoning behind it. Your average every-day user doesn't know how to clean viruses off their computers. You know, the viruses that get out there and start spewing spam to every fathomable reach of the net. It may seem that to combat these users, ignorant of their roles in the global problem of spam, the easiest thing to do is simply to filter the broadcast port.
However, I am not one of those users, I know how to take care of my computer, and I don't want someone else sending my mail for me thankyouverymuch.
I called today to get my wonderful BellSouth account deactivated. I figured it'd be an easy process, and it was for the most part. There were 2 things that caught me, however.
1) I was asked the standard "Why are you leaving us" question, but with a twist. The operator asked if I was leaving due to recent policy changes (I assumed she must mean the recent addition of the filtering of port 25).
2) When I answered that yes, I was leaving due to their restrictions on accessing the internet, they offered me the same class of service at a discount.
When I picked my jaw off the floor I declined the offer. Now, for those of you outside of the "Bell Monopoly" (consider yourselves lucky) you must understand that the 'Bell never never takes a profit hit. Perhaps they're losing more business from filtering the internet than they thought they would.
Still, the philisophical problems I see from ISP's restricting access to the Internet scares me. Right now, it's port 25, under the guise of spam control. What if they wanted to block other ports, perhaps ones used for gaming? Would they offer plans to charge for opening those ports back up? There's no law currently that says they can't. What about if they don't like a particular political group? They could simply filter all traffic to a specific website. We've already seen that beginning to happen in China. Even though it's just one port, if the program is successful, and people stand for it, what will the next step be?
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