Slashdot Mirror

I disagree, they are public spaces.

See this article regarding justification for smoking bans: http://trib.com/news/opinion/blogs/byer/why-restaurants-and-bars-are-public-places/article_ae80681f-3098-5b53-be02-ebb145b95b8b.html

Does this logic of public places apply to movie theatres, or are those lawyers just really too good to impose a fine on someone?

See this article regarding justification for smoking bans: http://trib.com/news/opinion/blogs/byer/why-restaurants-and-bars-are-public-places/article_ae80681f-3098-5b53-be02-ebb145b95b8b.html

The author of that article is a moron. The proposed ordinance it discusses defines "public places" for the purpose of that specific ordinance. It does not change their status as a private place for every other consideration except the smoking ban that the ordinance proposes.

I disagree, they are public spaces.

See this article regarding justification for smoking bans: http://trib.com/news/opinion/blogs/byer/why-restaurants-and-bars-are-public-places/article_ae80681f-3098-5b53-be02-ebb145b95b8b.html

and also misinformed about the right to privacy in the USA (which doesn't afford anyone in public the right not to be photographed.)

Restaurants are private property, not public space. Public vs private refers to the who owns the place, not how many people happen to be around you.

they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.

and bats...don't forget the bats: http://trib.com/news/updates/wind-turbine-pressure-change-kills-bats-research-may-help-prevent/article_24b620cf-9e69-58e1-b638-32499d9ef11f.html

Looks like they can even bypass the pigs.

The stores are already fucking with me over membership cards and overpriced beef.

Overpriced beef? Seriously? Ignoring the fact that beef is as miraculously cheap as it is thanks to our industrial food production (not hard to find a hamburger for less that $1) yes there has been a recent increase in beef prices. Beef consumption in the US has increased by 25% since 1998 while the number of cattle peaked in 1996 at about 103 million head and is about 98 million now. So yeah, beef prices have gone up because demand has gone up (along with our waistlines) while supply has remained roughly constant.

Eat a vegetable or chicken or pork instead. I like a good steak too but I can live without it most of the time and so can you.

I agree about the membership cards. I don't actually bother getting one because my local megamart is so eager to give me one they scan a new one every time I visit so I get all the benefits with no privacy issues.

The problem is, that there is already judicial precedence on the issue.

Kendrick, Teri, et al. v. American Amusement Machine Association (docket no. 00-3643)
Appeal: Cert. denied, Oct. 29, 2001.

Issues: Does an Indianapolis, Ind., law against minors playing violent video games in video parlors violate the First Amendment?

Summary: The ordinance forbids any operator of five or more video-game machines in one place to allow a minor unaccompanied by a parent, guardian, or other custodian to use "an amusement machine that is harmful to minors," requires appropriate warning signs, and requires that such machines be separated by a partition from the other machines in the location and that their viewing areas be concealed from persons who are on the other side of the partition. The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ordinance does violate the rights of those under 18 years of age. Judge Posner wrote the decision.

Decision: In denying the appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court makes no ruling on the merits of the law or the challenge to it. It merely means that the case could not get the minimum vote of four justices needed to hear the appeal. It also means that all similar laws in the jurisdiction of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals are void under that court's ruling.

Also check here http://www.constitutioncenter.org/education/ForEdu cators/DiscussionStarters/BanningViolentVideoGames .shtml

and here http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /walsh.html

So this is nothing new people. Ever since the ID brought us a world where we could literally kill and watch Nazi's die (even before that really). This has been an ongoing debate.

The one thing you MUST realize is that this is not a bill being pushed by the Right-Wing Conservative Nut Jobs (granted they aren't really all against it), this is being pushed by DEMOCRATS. You want to know who hates freedom of speech? Hillary Clinton, after the Columbine murders ordered the surgeon general to find a link between school shooting tragedies and Quake. He found no conclusive link, but that didn't stop her, Lieberman, and the rest of the gang from going hog wild trying to censor video games. I lean left politically, but you can bet your ass I don't agree with censorship.

Do what I did, I joined the EFF http://www.eff.org/ and joined the ACLU http://www.aclu.org/

I visited several protester sites, and several of them claimed that their goal was to "shut down" the conventions. Given that they were out to deny someone's rights and disrupt their meeting, some sort of separation was warranted. Maybe not as extreme, but something needed to be done to stop those who were out to "shut down" the peaceable assembly of those who did not share their opinions.

I have no problem with protests, except when they are trying to disrupt or silence someone else's speech or event.

here's some kute gnomes http://w3.trib.com/~librac/large.html

aren't the code kde developers european anyways living in countries where things like 'academy' are spelt with a 'k' naturally.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Thomas Jefferson's famous quote about separation of church and state has been quite misused, so much so that most Americans believe that those words are actually in the constitution. The quote was in response to a church association asking then President Jefferson for support and assurance regarding their religious persecution that they were suffering. This was because the Danbury Baptist Association were Baptists in a Congretationalist state. They were constantly persecuted for that. They were obviously concerned about that and Jefferson reassured them that the federal government could not write any laws to govern their church.

"Establishing a religion" was in response to the Church of England and all the different political churches that these same people had fled from before the foundation of America. This is not to say that we can't pray in school or say the pledge. This means that we can not say that the U.S.A. is now an atheistic country by law, just like we can't say that every man is to be a Baptist or a Congregationalist. That would be the establishment of a religion. The religion of atheism.

When you buy a book, you don't expect to have a law enforcement agent searching through the store's records at some later date to see what books you have purchased. Such an action offends America's sense of privacy. It smacks of a police state.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

I was suprised to see it wasn't available with Cygwin yet, but it is available separately (Cygwin.dll is a POSIX api that runs under Windows, and the whole Cygwin system is a shell environment consisting of lots of programs that have been compiled to use Cygwin.dll - check it out if you use Windows at all; it's very easy to install).

Anyway, you can get what is called "NT Emacs" from one of these mirrors. Note you will need a Microsoft compiler to build it; it has not yet been configured to build under gcc for Windows - if you don't have MSVC, then get one of the binary packages.

This is the NT Emacs FAQ.

Despite that it is called "NT Emacs" it is reported to work on non-NT versions of Windows.

Here is a helpful installation guide.

Here is a Google search for "NT Emacs" that turns up a lot of helpful pages.

NT Emacs by default runs the Windows command interpreter when you run shells within it. If you use Cygwin, here is how you run bash as a shell under NT Emacs.

After getting all nostalgic about emacs in my post below, I thought I'd give my old friend another try. But right now I'm doing Windows work, and I was suprised to find Cygwin doesn't provide emacs; a little search turned up the above. I haven't actually even downloaded it yet, but I'm about to. I run Linux too (Debian PPC & Slackware) but this way I can use it for my current work.

some of us want the republic that we were promised back in civics, oh and in those founding documents

America's system of democratic pluralism grew naturally out of two provision of the First Amendment: the right of the people to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Democratic pluralism recognizes that people of similar interests naturally flock together. People will thus present their case to the government as part of a group rather than as individuals. The system of political parties, which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, is a manifestation of this process.

The system is only broken in so far as people do not participate and thus abandon the field to those who do.

People are willing to humiliate themselves on national TV for $500k, and backstab, lie, and suffer insect-infested open sores for a shot at $1G.

So I have not doubt that many will get into a hacking contest, trying to win $10k, where the downside is just vague concerns of abstract concepts being threatened in the future.
-----
D. Fischer