The act of brainwashing is not coercive in itself, unless the person being brainwashed lacks the capacity to make adult decisions like any normal human being can (i.e. children or the mentally handicapped).
There are either a lot of ignorant ACs here, or just one that's really vocal.
But, in my attempt to distribute clues, I will point out that almost everything that is called 'brainwashing' does rely, in part, on diminishing the ability of someone to make decisions.
This is done in a variety of ways, with sleep and food deprivation being common, along with psychological manipulation via phobias and behavior modification techniques. (And that's just cults. Governments use outright torture.)
While in your world, I'm sure that there's no such thing as physiological manipulation, that people can stand up to the truth even after being lied to constantly and being emotionally manipulated, and Stockholm syndrome is just a crazy made up thing...I think even you have to admit that failing to feed people will cause those people to make poor decisions and often believe things they wouldn't normally.
Of course, I suspect in your universe, all that magically goes away after they eat some food. Because in your universe, where you've never had to make choices like that, everyone who has not resisted forever is a failure, and you, Mr. Perfect, would last forever in circumstances like that.
No, wait...I bet you'd trick them. That's it, isn't it? That's what you'd do.
What is coercive is the fact that most brainwashing is funded by force, i.e. government propaganda
Wow, you really have no idea how the words you've read actually work in the real universe, do you? In the actual real universe, propaganda and brainwashing are not the same thing?
And you still don't know what coercive means. Hint: The method of funding is rather unlikely to make something coercive or not. (Check out my new Kickstarter project and fund the kidnapping of wealthy people!) Taxes themselves are coercive, but the government supplying propaganda funded via taxes does not make the propaganda coercive.
See my reply to "Mr. Whirly" above. We are talking specifically about individual rights in this thread, and whether the practice violates individual rights. That is precisely why the distinction between voluntary association and coercion was brought up.
Uh, no, you can pretend this thread was about whatever you want, but in reality, here is the order of events:
1. Someone said this was entirely 'voluntary', by which they meant it wasn't a law.
2. A post responded to them by pointing out that just because something is voluntary under the law does not mean it isn't (or can't become) coercive via society
3. You then demonstrated you had no idea what the hell 'coercive social pressure' meant.
4. I point out you do not know what 'coercion' means.
5. You attempt to claim what this discussion is _really_ about is...uh, the first comment made.
I can see why, after your rather epic failure, you'd try to get the conversation on something else. The problem is, the second post, the one you replied to, was, indeed, on topic. It is perfectly reasonable to point out that, while this may not be any sort of 'law', 'law' is not the only thing that can infringe on people's freedoms, both to create art and to consume art that others have created. That is a completely appropriate follow-up comment.
It's you who went off topic, apparently taking exception to the idea that anything not demanded by law might still, nevertheless, be a bad idea.(1) But, as you were unable to come up with an actual reason to object to this idea, you grammar nazi-ed your way into stupidity.
1) I'm going to take a wild guess here: libertarian, right?
I find it hilarious they think children are desensitized to bullying.
That's hilariously stupid on so many levels. For one thing, if kids were desensitized to bullying, it wouldn't be bullying! Secondly, it's the goddamn adults who refuse to pay any attention to bullying, at least until the person being bullied snaps.
Erm, except that we already have a solution to small children watching violent video games, and it works quite well. (In fact, last I checked, it was better enforced than the similar system to keep violent movies out of the hands of kids.)
I have to question the neutrality of any article that includes something like this line: Some include cut scenes (i.e., brief movie clips supposedly designed to move the story forward) of strippers.
Really? Do they? And is the author trying to make a point about the violence of games in some sort of actual scientific manner, or is just trying to convince people games are 'bad' so threw in a line about strippers, which has nothing at all to do with violence?
And then there's this hilarious paragraph, speaking of climate change deniers: One frequently overlooked factor in this debate is the role of scientific theory. Pure empirical facts often have relatively little meaning and are seldom convincing. When those same facts fit a broader theory, especially one that has been tested in other contexts, those facts become more understandable and convincing.
Yeah, those empirical facts have no meaning at all! They only have meaning once we've invented a theories and forced the facts into it.
Please note this isn't some Wikipedia article about the scientific method, this is a scientific paper that is attempting to explain why other scientists who take issue with their 'empirical facts' should be ignored.
Pro-tip: If a 'scientist' starts explaining how the scientific method doesn't 'really' work very well for whatever they are researching...THEY ARE A CRANK.
coerce (k-ûrs) tr.v. coerced, coercing, coerces
1. To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel.
Also, you appear to think 'threats' is refering solely to physical threats. It is entirely possible for people's social status to be 'threatened', you nimrod. (Sadly not your social status, as you're an AC.)
And, on top of all that, you and the other AC don't appear to know what 'persuasion' is. Hint: Coercing someone into something IS (usually) 'persuading' them. Persuasion is anything a person does aimed at causing another person to behave differently than they would without the persuasion, which can be anything from politely asking them, to bribing them, to beating them senseless and telling them the beatings will continue if they keep behaving the old way.
Now, not _all_ coercion is persuasion. Coercion can also be actual physical force making them do that thing, and that's no longer 'persuasion'. So for example, kidnapping someone and physically imprisoning in a locked room them is not 'persuading' them to not be somewhere else. But other than kidnapping, most physical force to make people do things is in form of 'I will continue to injury you until you sign this check.' (Persuasion), not 'I will puppet your arms to make you sign this check'. (Not persuasion, and also doesn't work)
And there's even a lot of persuasion in kidnapping...almost no one is imprisoned somewhere they couldn't eventually escape if left alone and given enough time. (I mean, people can break through normal walls in less than hour.) However, they have have been persuaded not to try to escape by threats of the kidnappers.
A query by date range can simply ask for rows that have columns matching that particular range. For that web crawler, it'd make perfect sense to have one column for each datum you want to record about a page at a particular time. Perhaps just headers, content. and HTTP code each time, but that's three new columns every time a page is crawled - and assuming a sufficiently-slow crawler, each row could have entirely different sets of columns!
Jesus Christ.
Please explain in what possible universe what you just described is better than a normal relational table where each row contains a timestamp, headers, content, and HTTP code. (And presumably a URL, although you left that out.)
And, no, 'a sufficiently-slow crawler' is nonsense. Firstly, the web does not actually work that way (A status is part of the headers, and the headers and the content are returned over the same connection in order. Any webcrawler that has the content has the other two, and if something it has all three, why would anything else be doing anything else?), and second, pretending we're in some sort of world where the web does work that way, if you can pass the damn URL around inside this 'sufficiently-slow crawler', you can pass around the rest of the stuff you're going to put in the the table, and third, if you really are logging three unrelated things happening at three unrelated times, uh, duh, you should put them in three tables. (Now I'm wondering if there's actually any way to get a response that is _just_ the status codes in your universe. Or do you have to pull in every record and check?)
It's not that there aren't relations, but that they aren't enforced. A web site might have had a crawl attempted, but a 404 was returned. It could still be logged by just having a missing content column for that particular timestamp, and only the 404 column filled. On later queries about content, a filter would ignore everything but 200 responses. For statistics about dead links, the HTTP code might be all that's queried. On-the-fly analysis can be done without reconfiguring the data store.
The lack of knowledge about how RDBMs work is amazing. Hint: There is nothing stopping fields from being blank in a RDBMs. (BTW, in more of my 'That is not how the web works so your examples are dumb' series, 404 errors do have content. It might make sense not to log it, but they do, indeed, have content 99% of the time.)
This is the most awesome ignorant sentence every, though, and I think I shall make it my signature: 'On-the-fly analysis can be done without reconfiguring the data store.'
Cause that's why all those RDBM people do, run around reconfiguring their databases so they can analysis things 'on the fly'.
Store a timestamped column for each event (status update, mention, visibility change). As you guessed, don't worry much about what each event is, but just store the details (much like Facebook's timeline thing). When someone tries to view a status, run a query to pull all events for the user, and run through them to determine the effective visibility privileges, the most recent status, and the number of "this person was mentioned" events. There's your answer.
As you may guess, that'd be pretty slow, but we do have the flexibility to do any kind of analysis without reconfiguring our whole database. We could think ahead a bit, though, and add to our schema for a big speed boost: Whenever a visibility change happens, the new settings are stored serialized in the event. Sure, it violates normalization, but we don't really care about that.Now, our query need not replay all of the user's events... just enough to get the last status and visibility, and any "mentioned" events. That'll at least be pretty likely constant time, regardless of how long our users have been around.
Counting all those "mentioned" events might be a needless waste of time, though... and our query (probably a MapReduce job) must still run through our cluster, and that's a fair amount o
In fact, neither is PuTTY. And it hasn't been for over a decade. All those sort of restrictions were seriously loosened in 2000.
And the PuTTY download pages does not mention any sort of export restrictions at all. It does mention that _encryption is illegal_ in various countries and thus provides a non-encrypting telnet version, but that is something completely different.
As for the Apple Store, here's the deal: if you, the customer, makes it clear that you're buying electronics to export, the retailer is potentially on the hook with the Federal Government for aiding unlicensed exports of technology
Jesus Christ, the know-nothings have all come out at once.
IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO EXPORT IPHONES.
Not illegal in the slightest bit, unless you're selling to Iran or something. It is perfectly legal, under US law, to purchase an iPhone, fly to China, and sell it.
If it was illegal to sell iPhones in China it would be illegal for Apple to help make iPhones in China. You think it's somehow legal for a company to send the manufacturing blueprints of restricted tech to overseas factories? Just how stupid do you think the law is?
The 'unauthorized' stuff the article is talking about is the fact that China doesn't want people selling iPhone 5s in China. They apparently have not been certified by the Chinese equivalent of the FCC or something.
In case you are unclear about this, it is not the job of local law enforcement to enforce Chinese law.
Of course, even if it _was_ illegal to export under US law, it is also not the job of local law enforcement to enforce US export law, either! It is the job of the Bureau of Industry and Security. Local law enforcement has no authority to enforce _any_ import and export laws _at all_, as control over imports and exports are powers specifically reserved to the US government. Local police can no more arrest someone for illegally exporting something than they can arrest someone for operating an illegal radio station.
This is also pretending there is such a crime as _planning_ to export something, which I'm fairly certain there is not. Laws banning things that did not happen are basically restricted to attempted murder laws, and even that requires the attempt to actually be made. People cannot be arrested for _planning_ a crime. (Of course, what she was planning was not a crime anyway.)
That said, the woman apparently was _trespassing_, which is certainly illegal. (Whether or not the police response was reasonable is another matter.) But pretending this has something to do with export law is complete and utter nonsense.
Einstein being dead doesn't make it public domain. Einstein actually hasn't been dead long enough (70 years) to make all his works public domain. That's not until 2025.
However, the fact it's a scientific theory and never was copyrighted makes it (duh) public domain. (Yes, yes, stuff published _now_ is automatically copyrighted...but not back then.)
Except that while there are a lot of publishers abusing copyright to keep things locked down forever, O'Reilly, which publishes computer books, is publishing books that are less than 28 years old and hence would be under copyright even under the original 28 year copyright law that this country started with. No one buys 29 year old computer books.
I get the feeling they just don't want anything to do with the ensuing shitstorm that would come down from signing GPL3 code and giving it to someone else to distribute.
It would be incredibly stupid to blame MS for that. Now, of course, there will always be idiots on the anti-MS side who will blame them for anything...but, uh, those people will blame them for anything, so who the hell cares what they think? And refusing to sign binaries for a random reason looks just as bad to those people, so there is no actual way for MS to win.
In the real world, MS did not write the GPLv3, so can't possibly be blamed that the GPLv3 is incompatible with their binary signing system. (Which existed long before the GPLv3) Some people might decry the entire code signing system, which is, in fact, the reason the GPLv3 has that clause in it, and that's fine, but no one can complain that MS isn't giving out their own private signing keys, that would just be stupid and make the entire system pointless.
The real question is: Why does MS care enough to make people certify anything? Heck, MS has no reason to even know the license of the code it's signing.
In fact, legally speaking, they'd probably be better off refusing to know anything about what they were signing except what it does. The second they start trying to be the license police, they find themselves in dubious legal waters if they miss a violation. They're signing that binary code does specific, safe, things, not that someone has the right to redistribute it.
But MS using that opportunity to spread FUD about the GPLv3 and 'other similar open source licenses' and making people 'certify' they aren't using them (Instead of actually explaining what is going on, and not making people 'certify' anything, which is nonsense.) looks bad to those of us who aren't rabid anti-MS but do still remember MS's history.
Call us the 'MS-wary', and we remember this is exactly the sort of bullshit attacks on OSS that MS liked to do. MS and OSS are on fairly good terms right now, and there's generally cooperation...but this is either FUD, or it is accidentally indistinguishable from FUD, and is not acceptable, and needs to be changed.
Hey, why do they single out 'open source' licenses anyway? Surely there are commercial licenses that would have problems with signing. Somehow those are not mentioned.
No, this is not a 'helpful message'. In fact, it's extremely unhelpful, because it does not explain what the problem is, and does not explain what 'similar licenses' are. As I said, the GPLv2 is a 'similar license' to GPLv3 by almost anyone's definition, but it's fine to use.
A message saying 'Note: The GPLv3 section X.Y prohibits redistribution of signed binaries without the signing key. As you will not receive a copy of the signing key, you cannot comply with that. Thus you will need to use a different license like the GPLv2 or the Ms-RL(1) if you wish to redistribute signed binaries. Other OSS licenses may have similar restrictions, please read them carefully. Click to continue.' is a 'helpful message'.
Saying 'Click to certify that this is not licensed under GPLv3 or similar open source licenses.' is not a helpful message, and is pretty clearly there to cause FUD.
It doesn't explain the issue, it doesn't bother to mention the problem is specific to GPLv3 and GPLv2 is fine, and it doesn't even explain things enough to let you check the GPLv2 or other licenses.
And there is no reason anyone needs to 'certify' anything, MS legally doesn't give a damn whether or not you follow the GPLv3 or not, and is no more liable for your GPL violation because they signed a program than if you compile GPL-violating binaries using their compiler.
1) Note I would have no problem with MS plugging their own OSS license as an alternative to the GPLv3, and I actually find it somewhat funny they failed to mention whether their own open source license would be a 'similar open source license'. I guess it would have looked really bad if they had mentioned the Ms-RL but not the GPLv2, and FUD was more important than reassuring their own developers that it was okay to use their own services.;)
They are distributing it to you when they give it back to you after signing.
Erm, no, they are not. That is not how signing works. They get a binary, they give you a signature back, which you then embed in the binary. They do not give you an actual binary back, that would be stupid and pointless.
At that point, the GPL3 specifies that MS must also give you the key.
And that wouldn't be true even if they gave you the binary back. MS is not magically bound by the GPL because you copied a file to them and then downloaded it back from them.
Hey, look, everyone, I can bind MS to the GPL by writing a GPL program, compiling it, putting the binary on SkyDrive, downloading a copy back, and now MS is bound to distribute the source of that binary for 7 years! Mwhahahaha!
Uh, no. Just no. If the copyright holder asks someone else to make a copy and to distribute it back to them (Or to anyone else), that copy is ipso facto legal and does not require MS agreeing to any sort of license. That is, in fact, the entire premise of what 'copyright' is...the right to authorize copies being made.
This, of course, pretending that putting a copy into a machine of someone else's and having it make a copy means that other person made the copy. This is not actually true. If MS owns a signing machine, and the way that signing machine works is to make copies, and I put something in it, I made the copy, not MS.
tl;dr: Getting a binary signed does not involve distributing copies. And even if it did, legally those copies were made by the person who put the binary in the signing machine not MS. And even if MS counted as the one making the copies, they're obviously allowed to do that upon request of the copyright holder so don't need to agree to the GPL to make copies.
.Seems awful weak to assume trains will remain safe merely because the fad is blowing up airplanes at the moment.
Erm, the fad _isn't_ blowing up airplanes. It i ssupposedly, and this is the justification for the added security, flying them into buildings.
Nor do I see a rationalization for why security would be any cheaper per passenger for a train station than it would be for an airport.
Because you cannot drive trains into buildings.
However, I believe you have entirely missed the context of the point, in that air travel doesn't include that cost in calculating airport profits, and that one item, by itself, erases any 'profit' Hartsfield might make. (And, of course, that's not the only thing Hartfield gets for free.)
The point is not that air travel has more costs than rail, the point is that air travel is entirely dependent on subsidies. For all the people complaining about subsidies of rail, air has just as many.
My view is that until someone drops the cost of the rail infrastructure itself, say to around $10 million per mile in current dollars, it will never make sense economically to balance rail and air.
First off, it might make sense to build trains even if they cost more. Air travel costs a hell of a lot more than automotive travel, and yet somehow air travel apparently makes sense.
Second, as I was just pointing out, using the cost of the California system you brought up, I pointed out that the entire system was, in actual fact, cheaper per passenger than the Hartfield expansion would be for two airports.
You can't just pretend that all rail is more expensive than all air. California, right now, is looking at a system to move 120 million people by rail that is (on paper) cheaper than expanding the current system used to move them by air.
Third, $10 million per mile is nothing. That's how much roads cost to be built. And automotive travel is cheaper than air. Trying to cleverly claim it's expensive based on 'infrastructure cost per mile', the one expense that air travel doesn't have, isn't fooling anyone. It's just as valid to point out that airplanes cost $27,000 a mile to operate and trains tend to cost about $1 a mile to operate. So, after building a mile of infrastructure, running the train or airplane just 300 times over it would make up a cost difference of $10 million. Of course, HSR rail infrastructure actually costs about $30 million, not ten, but that just changes the break even point to 1200 times.
Why would Microsoft, which is not distributing the Linux bootloader, be worried about the Linux bootloader license?
You are correct in that the bootloader cannot be GPLv3, because the GPLv3 does not allowed the distribution of signed-binaries that cannot be recompiled from source and signed again...but the fact is, this has _nothing_ to do with MS, which cannot possible be required to do anything at all.
MS was handed something to sign, it signed it. If there are distribution limitations on the thing signed, that is not MS's problem, because MS IS NOT DISTRIBUTING IT. There is absolutely no theory of law under which MS would be required to give up their incredibly valuable signing keys because a third party was in violation of yet another third party's license.
Now, it's certainly possible for MS to be nice and telling people that by saying 'Oh, and developers might want to check to see if the license their code is under is anything like the GPLv3 because that added restrictions on signed binaries that the developer cannot meet, as we have the keys and we sure as hell aren't giving them to random users, so the developer will be in violation of that license.'
But what MS is doing is clearly something else. There's no reason to make people 'certify' anything, especially that's it not under 'GPLv3 or similar open source licenses', which is fairly clearly worded in such a way to try to scare people away from using the GPL at all, when the GPLv2 has no such problems.
MS is using a specific issue with a specific OSS license in specific circumstances to try to scare people away from licenses 'similar' to the GPLv3.
Quick poll: Who here would assume the GPLv2 is 'similar' to the GPLv3 if you didn't read this site and didn't know 'signed binaries' was one of the big GPLv3 changes?
It's not actually a monopoly, because MS doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly in the tablet market yet. Ergo, no antitrust stuff is going to kick in...it's no more a monopoly than Apple locking down iPads is.
That said, I think it's a clear sign MS _will_ lock down the hardware as much as they can, and the only reason they've refrained from doing that on x86/x64 _for now_ is that they _do_ have a monopoly on that platform so antitrust rules would kick in if they try.
MS should not actually get any props for 'refraining' from doing something they clearly want to, but the government would slap them down for doing if they tried.
In fact, I wonder, after they sign this bootloader and Linux can boot even on locked down systems, if they aren't going to turn around and make it impossible to disable secure boot next standard revision. And they can say 'See, look, we're willing to sign anyone, so secure boot doesn't actually lock it to just us, so it's not an antitrust violation.'.
And then three years later, people are having trouble getting new bootloaders signed, and while mainstream Linux might still be fine, other, even smaller OSes like FreeBSD can't get booted, and it's a lot harder to boot off USB because of weird rules, etc, etc. They might have to put up with the current big linux distros, which they can point the DOJ to, but they can rig the game where the _next_ Linux distro, or the next OS, has a much steeper hill.
As long as you are not intentionally being offensive you can chalk messages on the sidewalk... just provide the chalk, no need for permission - this includes political views, religious views, and pretty much anything else you want.
Except this isn't even slightly what the actual code forbids: It say you can't 'Demean the race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry or age of the individual or individuals; and Create an intimidating, hostile or demeaning environment for education, university-related work, or other university-authorized activity.'
If you don't understand what that actually says, I suspect you don't know what 'demean' means. Demeans just means 'to lower'. It means to lower the value in any way, it doesn't even have to be offensive or untrue.
And that's not lowering the value the individual, as a poor reading of that sentence would imply...it's barring people from lowering the value of the race, sex, etc.
And I can only conclude by 'demeaning environment', they mean 'an environment where X is lowered in the eyes of people'.(1) Aka, that 'intent' thing just means you have to intend to change people's opinions. (Which does mean they can't get people for speaking facetiously, but that's about all the 'protection' that provides.)
So, to recap: It is against the rules to, in any way, speak negatively about any attribute any student holds hold with an intent of convincing anyone else of that. Not to 'offend' them as you seem to think...they don't even have to be there, or aware it happened.
That is the ACTUAL STATED POLICY OF THE SCHOOL.
And to make this even stupider, these attributes include creed.You know, if I attended that school, I'd be tempted to have a stated creed that school administrators ate babies, and constantly repeat that near them, hoping some day that they would, some day, tell some random person that my idea was wrong, thus putting them in violation of their own speech code.
1) A 'demeaning environment' really would be something like Saw, where you have to do horrible things to survive. However, a) that would be crazy for _speech_ to create, and b) is already covered by 'hostile' or 'intimidating' anyway. So I think my interpretation of 'a demeaning environment' meaning 'an environment where people think demeaning things' is correct.
Alternately, 'demeaning environment' might mean one where people say demeaning things, but that's even stupider: You are barred from saying demeaning things, but only if you're intending to create an environment where people are saying demeaning things. OTOH, if no one is saying demeaning things, feel free to say demeaning things. Huh?
The origins of speech codes on campus made some amount of sense, in that they were based in restricting harassment. It is not acceptable to follow people around calling them racial slurs, just like it's not acceptable to follow people around doing the chicken dance.
It is perfectly permissible for the government to restrict harassment even if said harassment is done via speech. In fact, it does restrict that. There are actual legal remedies to harassment in the real world, and it's entirely reasonable for a university to make rules duplicating those laws so they can punish students there or kick them out of the school, instead of requiring a restraining order and the legal system.
Incidentally, if you ever seen anyone defending the speech codes on campus, they seem to be defending the original intent. They run around defending the idea it is not acceptable for students to go around harassing people.
The problem with speech codes is that everyone seemed to have immediately forgotten the original premise, and decided that speech codes weren't to stop to the problem of people being harassed, it was to stop people being offended.
AND THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME.
Harassment is when someone makes repeated legal-but-annoying actions directed non-consensually at a specific other person, with none of it individually doing any real harm, but cumulatively it causing enough that it rises to something we've decided to stop. And indeed, the government, and government institutions, can stop that.
But the government has absolutely no ability to stop being from being offended, or the right to punish people who do offend other people. Offending people is a constitutional right.
And while it might have possibly been understandable confusion between 'harassing someone' and 'deliberately offending someone' (Hint: Harassment has to happen more than once, at the very least.), at this point speech codes have clearly slipped off the deep end and are now attempting to ban stuff that is just sorta vaguely offensive to some random person, somewhere.
It is not possible to accidentally harass someone. Nor is not possible to say something to someone and harass someone else. Nor is it possible to be giving a speech and have someone walk up and be harassed. Reading a book near someone else cannot be harassment.
Nothing without a specific person that is not specifically impacted, on purpose, can be harassment.
I didn't recall "hope" being a good investment strategy. Point is that they'll turn a profit even without that boost from visitors, property values, etc.
No. Because there are _ongoing_ subsidies in addition to building subsidies.
For example, the TSA. The Federal government is operating security at airports _at no cost_ to the airport. Assuming that security costs at least $2 a person, that's an unreported cost of $240 million a year, which more than wipes out any 'profits' at Hartsfield. And that's just one completely random example, and a totally unrealistic cost per person.
Airports do not turn profits. Period. They are nowhere near turning profits. They are giant pits of money that we throw more money in.
Airports, like all infrastructure, make society money solely by increased tax revenue from the result of the infrastructure.
While with high speed rail, one hopes that the income that these governments get from these sources will more than counter the revenue gap and the money lost from road systems, airports, and associated property which are somewhat less used now.
That is the premise under which all infrastructure is built.
And as I note, you could have built several major airports serving most of the urban areas rather than a couple larger than the current world record.
And those cost much, much more, in addition to causing all sorts of logistics problems with ATC. Airports do not scale well in the 'build more of them' direction, which is something that has become more and more clear with increasing urban sprawl. Airports (Over a certain size, not tiny county airports) have almost fixed cost in security, and baggage, and maintenance. Reducing the airport by two thirds might reduce the cost by only one third. Doubling it might increase costs by 30%. There is a reason we end up with giant airports.
Also, in the specific case of Atlanta...there's nowhere to build another airport. You could go south or west, but making a smaller airport even farther away from the city is not actually helpful. Skip over the city proper and try to build one on the north or east side...even in this recession, the cost of property would be astronomical, unless you went an hour north of town. (Atlanta was actually pretty damn lucky where it was able to build its airport. Visitors are often astonished it's _inside_ our perimeter road. It's just annoying to get to because it is _so_ big, but the solution wasn't 'We should have built two smaller airports in the same space'...that makes no sense.)
There are things rail is suited for. Rail allows much smaller stations, it allows almost no security, it allows shorter trips, it allows stations _within_ cities instead of fifteen minutes outside.
OTOH, it's much slower, both because it's actually slower, and because it often is somewhat indirect.
So no one is saying we should stop using air travel. What people are saying is that considering the massive imbalance in passenger rail vs. air, it's probably time to expand rail some.
And part of that is we need to stop hypocritically ignoring the _massive_ subsidies in air while bleating about them in rail.
Amtrak received a billion dollars [wikipedia.org] in subsidies last fiscal year.
That is correct, I was wrong. OTOH, we weren't really talking about Amtrak, I was just trying to to point out the irrational dislike of rail. So I like the fact it points out that cruise lines (Which are not actually a form of 'transport' at all.) got $8 billion in 2010. (Also, Amtrak is only 31 years old, not 40.)
And per passenger-mile, it's subsidies are an order of magnitude larger than they are for air travel.
Except somehow, when talking about airplane subsidies, somehow the TSA gets entirely left out, and the _repeated_ airline bailouts get left out, and even the cost of airport construction gets left out... You know, that $9 billion dollars I was talking about? Not inclu
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The act of brainwashing is not coercive in itself, unless the person being brainwashed lacks the capacity to make adult decisions like any normal human being can (i.e. children or the mentally handicapped).
There are either a lot of ignorant ACs here, or just one that's really vocal.
But, in my attempt to distribute clues, I will point out that almost everything that is called 'brainwashing' does rely, in part, on diminishing the ability of someone to make decisions.
This is done in a variety of ways, with sleep and food deprivation being common, along with psychological manipulation via phobias and behavior modification techniques. (And that's just cults. Governments use outright torture.)
While in your world, I'm sure that there's no such thing as physiological manipulation, that people can stand up to the truth even after being lied to constantly and being emotionally manipulated, and Stockholm syndrome is just a crazy made up thing...I think even you have to admit that failing to feed people will cause those people to make poor decisions and often believe things they wouldn't normally.
Of course, I suspect in your universe, all that magically goes away after they eat some food. Because in your universe, where you've never had to make choices like that, everyone who has not resisted forever is a failure, and you, Mr. Perfect, would last forever in circumstances like that.
No, wait...I bet you'd trick them. That's it, isn't it? That's what you'd do.
What is coercive is the fact that most brainwashing is funded by force, i.e. government propaganda
Wow, you really have no idea how the words you've read actually work in the real universe, do you? In the actual real universe, propaganda and brainwashing are not the same thing?
And you still don't know what coercive means. Hint: The method of funding is rather unlikely to make something coercive or not. (Check out my new Kickstarter project and fund the kidnapping of wealthy people!) Taxes themselves are coercive, but the government supplying propaganda funded via taxes does not make the propaganda coercive.
See my reply to "Mr. Whirly" above. We are talking specifically about individual rights in this thread, and whether the practice violates individual rights. That is precisely why the distinction between voluntary association and coercion was brought up.
Uh, no, you can pretend this thread was about whatever you want, but in reality, here is the order of events:
1. Someone said this was entirely 'voluntary', by which they meant it wasn't a law.
2. A post responded to them by pointing out that just because something is voluntary under the law does not mean it isn't (or can't become) coercive via society
3. You then demonstrated you had no idea what the hell 'coercive social pressure' meant.
4. I point out you do not know what 'coercion' means.
5. You attempt to claim what this discussion is _really_ about is...uh, the first comment made.
I can see why, after your rather epic failure, you'd try to get the conversation on something else. The problem is, the second post, the one you replied to, was, indeed, on topic. It is perfectly reasonable to point out that, while this may not be any sort of 'law', 'law' is not the only thing that can infringe on people's freedoms, both to create art and to consume art that others have created. That is a completely appropriate follow-up comment.
It's you who went off topic, apparently taking exception to the idea that anything not demanded by law might still, nevertheless, be a bad idea.(1) But, as you were unable to come up with an actual reason to object to this idea, you grammar nazi-ed your way into stupidity.
1) I'm going to take a wild guess here: libertarian, right?
I find it hilarious they think children are desensitized to bullying.
That's hilariously stupid on so many levels. For one thing, if kids were desensitized to bullying, it wouldn't be bullying! Secondly, it's the goddamn adults who refuse to pay any attention to bullying, at least until the person being bullied snaps.
Erm, except that we already have a solution to small children watching violent video games, and it works quite well. (In fact, last I checked, it was better enforced than the similar system to keep violent movies out of the hands of kids.)
I have to question the neutrality of any article that includes something like this line: Some include cut scenes (i.e., brief movie clips supposedly designed to move the story forward) of strippers.
Really? Do they? And is the author trying to make a point about the violence of games in some sort of actual scientific manner, or is just trying to convince people games are 'bad' so threw in a line about strippers, which has nothing at all to do with violence?
And then there's this hilarious paragraph, speaking of climate change deniers: One frequently overlooked factor in this debate is the role of scientific theory. Pure empirical facts often have relatively little meaning and are seldom convincing. When those same facts fit a broader theory, especially one that has been tested in other contexts, those facts become more understandable and convincing.
Yeah, those empirical facts have no meaning at all! They only have meaning once we've invented a theories and forced the facts into it.
Please note this isn't some Wikipedia article about the scientific method, this is a scientific paper that is attempting to explain why other scientists who take issue with their 'empirical facts' should be ignored.
Pro-tip: If a 'scientist' starts explaining how the scientific method doesn't 'really' work very well for whatever they are researching...THEY ARE A CRANK.
coerce (k-ûrs) tr.v. coerced, coercing, coerces
1. To force to act or think in a certain way by use of pressure, threats, or intimidation; compel.
Also, you appear to think 'threats' is refering solely to physical threats. It is entirely possible for people's social status to be 'threatened', you nimrod. (Sadly not your social status, as you're an AC.)
Everyone isn't an idiot read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion#Social
And, on top of all that, you and the other AC don't appear to know what 'persuasion' is. Hint: Coercing someone into something IS (usually) 'persuading' them. Persuasion is anything a person does aimed at causing another person to behave differently than they would without the persuasion, which can be anything from politely asking them, to bribing them, to beating them senseless and telling them the beatings will continue if they keep behaving the old way.
Now, not _all_ coercion is persuasion. Coercion can also be actual physical force making them do that thing, and that's no longer 'persuasion'. So for example, kidnapping someone and physically imprisoning in a locked room them is not 'persuading' them to not be somewhere else. But other than kidnapping, most physical force to make people do things is in form of 'I will continue to injury you until you sign this check.' (Persuasion), not 'I will puppet your arms to make you sign this check'. (Not persuasion, and also doesn't work)
And there's even a lot of persuasion in kidnapping...almost no one is imprisoned somewhere they couldn't eventually escape if left alone and given enough time. (I mean, people can break through normal walls in less than hour.) However, they have have been persuaded not to try to escape by threats of the kidnappers.
A query by date range can simply ask for rows that have columns matching that particular range. For that web crawler, it'd make perfect sense to have one column for each datum you want to record about a page at a particular time. Perhaps just headers, content. and HTTP code each time, but that's three new columns every time a page is crawled - and assuming a sufficiently-slow crawler, each row could have entirely different sets of columns!
Jesus Christ.
Please explain in what possible universe what you just described is better than a normal relational table where each row contains a timestamp, headers, content, and HTTP code. (And presumably a URL, although you left that out.)
And, no, 'a sufficiently-slow crawler' is nonsense. Firstly, the web does not actually work that way (A status is part of the headers, and the headers and the content are returned over the same connection in order. Any webcrawler that has the content has the other two, and if something it has all three, why would anything else be doing anything else?), and second, pretending we're in some sort of world where the web does work that way, if you can pass the damn URL around inside this 'sufficiently-slow crawler', you can pass around the rest of the stuff you're going to put in the the table, and third, if you really are logging three unrelated things happening at three unrelated times, uh, duh, you should put them in three tables. (Now I'm wondering if there's actually any way to get a response that is _just_ the status codes in your universe. Or do you have to pull in every record and check?)
It's not that there aren't relations, but that they aren't enforced. A web site might have had a crawl attempted, but a 404 was returned. It could still be logged by just having a missing content column for that particular timestamp, and only the 404 column filled. On later queries about content, a filter would ignore everything but 200 responses. For statistics about dead links, the HTTP code might be all that's queried. On-the-fly analysis can be done without reconfiguring the data store.
The lack of knowledge about how RDBMs work is amazing. Hint: There is nothing stopping fields from being blank in a RDBMs. (BTW, in more of my 'That is not how the web works so your examples are dumb' series, 404 errors do have content. It might make sense not to log it, but they do, indeed, have content 99% of the time.)
This is the most awesome ignorant sentence every, though, and I think I shall make it my signature: 'On-the-fly analysis can be done without reconfiguring the data store.'
Cause that's why all those RDBM people do, run around reconfiguring their databases so they can analysis things 'on the fly'.
Store a timestamped column for each event (status update, mention, visibility change). As you guessed, don't worry much about what each event is, but just store the details (much like Facebook's timeline thing). When someone tries to view a status, run a query to pull all events for the user, and run through them to determine the effective visibility privileges, the most recent status, and the number of "this person was mentioned" events. There's your answer.
As you may guess, that'd be pretty slow, but we do have the flexibility to do any kind of analysis without reconfiguring our whole database. We could think ahead a bit, though, and add to our schema for a big speed boost: Whenever a visibility change happens, the new settings are stored serialized in the event. Sure, it violates normalization, but we don't really care about that.Now, our query need not replay all of the user's events... just enough to get the last status and visibility, and any "mentioned" events. That'll at least be pretty likely constant time, regardless of how long our users have been around.
Counting all those "mentioned" events might be a needless waste of time, though... and our query (probably a MapReduce job) must still run through our cluster, and that's a fair amount o
Uh, that;'s not 'fortunately', yet. Call me when they actually are convicted.
The iPhone is not export-restricted.
In fact, neither is PuTTY. And it hasn't been for over a decade. All those sort of restrictions were seriously loosened in 2000.
And the PuTTY download pages does not mention any sort of export restrictions at all. It does mention that _encryption is illegal_ in various countries and thus provides a non-encrypting telnet version, but that is something completely different.
As for the Apple Store, here's the deal: if you, the customer, makes it clear that you're buying electronics to export, the retailer is potentially on the hook with the Federal Government for aiding unlicensed exports of technology
Jesus Christ, the know-nothings have all come out at once.
IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO EXPORT IPHONES.
Not illegal in the slightest bit, unless you're selling to Iran or something. It is perfectly legal, under US law, to purchase an iPhone, fly to China, and sell it.
If it was illegal to sell iPhones in China it would be illegal for Apple to help make iPhones in China. You think it's somehow legal for a company to send the manufacturing blueprints of restricted tech to overseas factories? Just how stupid do you think the law is?
The 'unauthorized' stuff the article is talking about is the fact that China doesn't want people selling iPhone 5s in China. They apparently have not been certified by the Chinese equivalent of the FCC or something.
In case you are unclear about this, it is not the job of local law enforcement to enforce Chinese law.
Of course, even if it _was_ illegal to export under US law, it is also not the job of local law enforcement to enforce US export law, either! It is the job of the Bureau of Industry and Security. Local law enforcement has no authority to enforce _any_ import and export laws _at all_, as control over imports and exports are powers specifically reserved to the US government. Local police can no more arrest someone for illegally exporting something than they can arrest someone for operating an illegal radio station.
This is also pretending there is such a crime as _planning_ to export something, which I'm fairly certain there is not. Laws banning things that did not happen are basically restricted to attempted murder laws, and even that requires the attempt to actually be made. People cannot be arrested for _planning_ a crime. (Of course, what she was planning was not a crime anyway.)
That said, the woman apparently was _trespassing_, which is certainly illegal. (Whether or not the police response was reasonable is another matter.) But pretending this has something to do with export law is complete and utter nonsense.
Einstein being dead doesn't make it public domain. Einstein actually hasn't been dead long enough (70 years) to make all his works public domain. That's not until 2025.
However, the fact it's a scientific theory and never was copyrighted makes it (duh) public domain. (Yes, yes, stuff published _now_ is automatically copyrighted...but not back then.)
Except that while there are a lot of publishers abusing copyright to keep things locked down forever, O'Reilly, which publishes computer books, is publishing books that are less than 28 years old and hence would be under copyright even under the original 28 year copyright law that this country started with. No one buys 29 year old computer books.
In fact, O'Reilly public domains their books after 28 years.
There are plenty of complaints about copyright law. Please do not aim them at O'Reilly.
I get the feeling they just don't want anything to do with the ensuing shitstorm that would come down from signing GPL3 code and giving it to someone else to distribute.
It would be incredibly stupid to blame MS for that. Now, of course, there will always be idiots on the anti-MS side who will blame them for anything...but, uh, those people will blame them for anything, so who the hell cares what they think? And refusing to sign binaries for a random reason looks just as bad to those people, so there is no actual way for MS to win.
In the real world, MS did not write the GPLv3, so can't possibly be blamed that the GPLv3 is incompatible with their binary signing system. (Which existed long before the GPLv3) Some people might decry the entire code signing system, which is, in fact, the reason the GPLv3 has that clause in it, and that's fine, but no one can complain that MS isn't giving out their own private signing keys, that would just be stupid and make the entire system pointless.
The real question is: Why does MS care enough to make people certify anything? Heck, MS has no reason to even know the license of the code it's signing.
In fact, legally speaking, they'd probably be better off refusing to know anything about what they were signing except what it does. The second they start trying to be the license police, they find themselves in dubious legal waters if they miss a violation. They're signing that binary code does specific, safe, things, not that someone has the right to redistribute it.
But MS using that opportunity to spread FUD about the GPLv3 and 'other similar open source licenses' and making people 'certify' they aren't using them (Instead of actually explaining what is going on, and not making people 'certify' anything, which is nonsense.) looks bad to those of us who aren't rabid anti-MS but do still remember MS's history.
Call us the 'MS-wary', and we remember this is exactly the sort of bullshit attacks on OSS that MS liked to do. MS and OSS are on fairly good terms right now, and there's generally cooperation...but this is either FUD, or it is accidentally indistinguishable from FUD, and is not acceptable, and needs to be changed.
Hey, why do they single out 'open source' licenses anyway? Surely there are commercial licenses that would have problems with signing. Somehow those are not mentioned.
No, this is not a 'helpful message'. In fact, it's extremely unhelpful, because it does not explain what the problem is, and does not explain what 'similar licenses' are. As I said, the GPLv2 is a 'similar license' to GPLv3 by almost anyone's definition, but it's fine to use.
A message saying 'Note: The GPLv3 section X.Y prohibits redistribution of signed binaries without the signing key. As you will not receive a copy of the signing key, you cannot comply with that. Thus you will need to use a different license like the GPLv2 or the Ms-RL(1) if you wish to redistribute signed binaries. Other OSS licenses may have similar restrictions, please read them carefully. Click to continue.' is a 'helpful message'.
Saying 'Click to certify that this is not licensed under GPLv3 or similar open source licenses.' is not a helpful message, and is pretty clearly there to cause FUD.
It doesn't explain the issue, it doesn't bother to mention the problem is specific to GPLv3 and GPLv2 is fine, and it doesn't even explain things enough to let you check the GPLv2 or other licenses.
And there is no reason anyone needs to 'certify' anything, MS legally doesn't give a damn whether or not you follow the GPLv3 or not, and is no more liable for your GPL violation because they signed a program than if you compile GPL-violating binaries using their compiler.
1) Note I would have no problem with MS plugging their own OSS license as an alternative to the GPLv3, and I actually find it somewhat funny they failed to mention whether their own open source license would be a 'similar open source license'. I guess it would have looked really bad if they had mentioned the Ms-RL but not the GPLv2, and FUD was more important than reassuring their own developers that it was okay to use their own services. ;)
They are distributing it to you when they give it back to you after signing.
Erm, no, they are not. That is not how signing works. They get a binary, they give you a signature back, which you then embed in the binary. They do not give you an actual binary back, that would be stupid and pointless.
At that point, the GPL3 specifies that MS must also give you the key.
And that wouldn't be true even if they gave you the binary back. MS is not magically bound by the GPL because you copied a file to them and then downloaded it back from them.
Hey, look, everyone, I can bind MS to the GPL by writing a GPL program, compiling it, putting the binary on SkyDrive, downloading a copy back, and now MS is bound to distribute the source of that binary for 7 years! Mwhahahaha!
Uh, no. Just no. If the copyright holder asks someone else to make a copy and to distribute it back to them (Or to anyone else), that copy is ipso facto legal and does not require MS agreeing to any sort of license. That is, in fact, the entire premise of what 'copyright' is...the right to authorize copies being made.
This, of course, pretending that putting a copy into a machine of someone else's and having it make a copy means that other person made the copy. This is not actually true. If MS owns a signing machine, and the way that signing machine works is to make copies, and I put something in it, I made the copy, not MS.
tl;dr: Getting a binary signed does not involve distributing copies. And even if it did, legally those copies were made by the person who put the binary in the signing machine not MS. And even if MS counted as the one making the copies, they're obviously allowed to do that upon request of the copyright holder so don't need to agree to the GPL to make copies.
You idiot. FIRE doesn't rate your school's 'freedom'. They rate your school's speech code.
Actually, the air cost is $2700 per mile is in total, whereas the train cost is $1 is per passenger, so the train cost is more like $300 per mile.
Erm, the fad _isn't_ blowing up airplanes. It i ssupposedly, and this is the justification for the added security, flying them into buildings.
Nor do I see a rationalization for why security would be any cheaper per passenger for a train station than it would be for an airport.
Because you cannot drive trains into buildings.
However, I believe you have entirely missed the context of the point, in that air travel doesn't include that cost in calculating airport profits, and that one item, by itself, erases any 'profit' Hartsfield might make. (And, of course, that's not the only thing Hartfield gets for free.)
The point is not that air travel has more costs than rail, the point is that air travel is entirely dependent on subsidies. For all the people complaining about subsidies of rail, air has just as many.
My view is that until someone drops the cost of the rail infrastructure itself, say to around $10 million per mile in current dollars, it will never make sense economically to balance rail and air.
First off, it might make sense to build trains even if they cost more. Air travel costs a hell of a lot more than automotive travel, and yet somehow air travel apparently makes sense.
Second, as I was just pointing out, using the cost of the California system you brought up, I pointed out that the entire system was, in actual fact, cheaper per passenger than the Hartfield expansion would be for two airports.
You can't just pretend that all rail is more expensive than all air. California, right now, is looking at a system to move 120 million people by rail that is (on paper) cheaper than expanding the current system used to move them by air.
Third, $10 million per mile is nothing. That's how much roads cost to be built. And automotive travel is cheaper than air. Trying to cleverly claim it's expensive based on 'infrastructure cost per mile', the one expense that air travel doesn't have, isn't fooling anyone. It's just as valid to point out that airplanes cost $27,000 a mile to operate and trains tend to cost about $1 a mile to operate. So, after building a mile of infrastructure, running the train or airplane just 300 times over it would make up a cost difference of $10 million. Of course, HSR rail infrastructure actually costs about $30 million, not ten, but that just changes the break even point to 1200 times.
What are you talking about? Why would a signed bootloader prompt anyone?
Why would Microsoft, which is not distributing the Linux bootloader, be worried about the Linux bootloader license?
You are correct in that the bootloader cannot be GPLv3, because the GPLv3 does not allowed the distribution of signed-binaries that cannot be recompiled from source and signed again...but the fact is, this has _nothing_ to do with MS, which cannot possible be required to do anything at all.
MS was handed something to sign, it signed it. If there are distribution limitations on the thing signed, that is not MS's problem, because MS IS NOT DISTRIBUTING IT. There is absolutely no theory of law under which MS would be required to give up their incredibly valuable signing keys because a third party was in violation of yet another third party's license.
Now, it's certainly possible for MS to be nice and telling people that by saying 'Oh, and developers might want to check to see if the license their code is under is anything like the GPLv3 because that added restrictions on signed binaries that the developer cannot meet, as we have the keys and we sure as hell aren't giving them to random users, so the developer will be in violation of that license.'
But what MS is doing is clearly something else. There's no reason to make people 'certify' anything, especially that's it not under 'GPLv3 or similar open source licenses', which is fairly clearly worded in such a way to try to scare people away from using the GPL at all, when the GPLv2 has no such problems.
MS is using a specific issue with a specific OSS license in specific circumstances to try to scare people away from licenses 'similar' to the GPLv3.
Quick poll: Who here would assume the GPLv2 is 'similar' to the GPLv3 if you didn't read this site and didn't know 'signed binaries' was one of the big GPLv3 changes?
It's not actually a monopoly, because MS doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly in the tablet market yet. Ergo, no antitrust stuff is going to kick in...it's no more a monopoly than Apple locking down iPads is.
That said, I think it's a clear sign MS _will_ lock down the hardware as much as they can, and the only reason they've refrained from doing that on x86/x64 _for now_ is that they _do_ have a monopoly on that platform so antitrust rules would kick in if they try.
MS should not actually get any props for 'refraining' from doing something they clearly want to, but the government would slap them down for doing if they tried.
In fact, I wonder, after they sign this bootloader and Linux can boot even on locked down systems, if they aren't going to turn around and make it impossible to disable secure boot next standard revision. And they can say 'See, look, we're willing to sign anyone, so secure boot doesn't actually lock it to just us, so it's not an antitrust violation.'.
And then three years later, people are having trouble getting new bootloaders signed, and while mainstream Linux might still be fine, other, even smaller OSes like FreeBSD can't get booted, and it's a lot harder to boot off USB because of weird rules, etc, etc. They might have to put up with the current big linux distros, which they can point the DOJ to, but they can rig the game where the _next_ Linux distro, or the next OS, has a much steeper hill.
Hey, moron. Harassment is a specific legal thing.
AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH OFFENDING PEOPLE.
As long as you are not intentionally being offensive you can chalk messages on the sidewalk... just provide the chalk, no need for permission - this includes political views, religious views, and pretty much anything else you want.
Except this isn't even slightly what the actual code forbids: It say you can't 'Demean the race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry or age of the individual or individuals; and Create an intimidating, hostile or demeaning environment for education, university-related work, or other university-authorized activity.'
If you don't understand what that actually says, I suspect you don't know what 'demean' means. Demeans just means 'to lower'. It means to lower the value in any way, it doesn't even have to be offensive or untrue.
And that's not lowering the value the individual, as a poor reading of that sentence would imply...it's barring people from lowering the value of the race, sex, etc.
And I can only conclude by 'demeaning environment', they mean 'an environment where X is lowered in the eyes of people'.(1) Aka, that 'intent' thing just means you have to intend to change people's opinions. (Which does mean they can't get people for speaking facetiously, but that's about all the 'protection' that provides.)
So, to recap: It is against the rules to, in any way, speak negatively about any attribute any student holds hold with an intent of convincing anyone else of that. Not to 'offend' them as you seem to think...they don't even have to be there, or aware it happened.
That is the ACTUAL STATED POLICY OF THE SCHOOL.
And to make this even stupider, these attributes include creed.You know, if I attended that school, I'd be tempted to have a stated creed that school administrators ate babies, and constantly repeat that near them, hoping some day that they would, some day, tell some random person that my idea was wrong, thus putting them in violation of their own speech code.
1) A 'demeaning environment' really would be something like Saw, where you have to do horrible things to survive. However, a) that would be crazy for _speech_ to create, and b) is already covered by 'hostile' or 'intimidating' anyway. So I think my interpretation of 'a demeaning environment' meaning 'an environment where people think demeaning things' is correct.
Alternately, 'demeaning environment' might mean one where people say demeaning things, but that's even stupider: You are barred from saying demeaning things, but only if you're intending to create an environment where people are saying demeaning things. OTOH, if no one is saying demeaning things, feel free to say demeaning things. Huh?
The origins of speech codes on campus made some amount of sense, in that they were based in restricting harassment. It is not acceptable to follow people around calling them racial slurs, just like it's not acceptable to follow people around doing the chicken dance.
It is perfectly permissible for the government to restrict harassment even if said harassment is done via speech. In fact, it does restrict that. There are actual legal remedies to harassment in the real world, and it's entirely reasonable for a university to make rules duplicating those laws so they can punish students there or kick them out of the school, instead of requiring a restraining order and the legal system.
Incidentally, if you ever seen anyone defending the speech codes on campus, they seem to be defending the original intent. They run around defending the idea it is not acceptable for students to go around harassing people.
The problem with speech codes is that everyone seemed to have immediately forgotten the original premise, and decided that speech codes weren't to stop to the problem of people being harassed, it was to stop people being offended.
AND THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME.
Harassment is when someone makes repeated legal-but-annoying actions directed non-consensually at a specific other person, with none of it individually doing any real harm, but cumulatively it causing enough that it rises to something we've decided to stop. And indeed, the government, and government institutions, can stop that.
But the government has absolutely no ability to stop being from being offended, or the right to punish people who do offend other people. Offending people is a constitutional right.
And while it might have possibly been understandable confusion between 'harassing someone' and 'deliberately offending someone' (Hint: Harassment has to happen more than once, at the very least.), at this point speech codes have clearly slipped off the deep end and are now attempting to ban stuff that is just sorta vaguely offensive to some random person, somewhere.
It is not possible to accidentally harass someone. Nor is not possible to say something to someone and harass someone else. Nor is it possible to be giving a speech and have someone walk up and be harassed. Reading a book near someone else cannot be harassment.
Nothing without a specific person that is not specifically impacted, on purpose, can be harassment.
I didn't recall "hope" being a good investment strategy. Point is that they'll turn a profit even without that boost from visitors, property values, etc.
No. Because there are _ongoing_ subsidies in addition to building subsidies.
For example, the TSA. The Federal government is operating security at airports _at no cost_ to the airport. Assuming that security costs at least $2 a person, that's an unreported cost of $240 million a year, which more than wipes out any 'profits' at Hartsfield. And that's just one completely random example, and a totally unrealistic cost per person.
Airports do not turn profits. Period. They are nowhere near turning profits. They are giant pits of money that we throw more money in.
Airports, like all infrastructure, make society money solely by increased tax revenue from the result of the infrastructure.
While with high speed rail, one hopes that the income that these governments get from these sources will more than counter the revenue gap and the money lost from road systems, airports, and associated property which are somewhat less used now.
That is the premise under which all infrastructure is built.
And as I note, you could have built several major airports serving most of the urban areas rather than a couple larger than the current world record.
And those cost much, much more, in addition to causing all sorts of logistics problems with ATC. Airports do not scale well in the 'build more of them' direction, which is something that has become more and more clear with increasing urban sprawl. Airports (Over a certain size, not tiny county airports) have almost fixed cost in security, and baggage, and maintenance. Reducing the airport by two thirds might reduce the cost by only one third. Doubling it might increase costs by 30%. There is a reason we end up with giant airports.
Also, in the specific case of Atlanta...there's nowhere to build another airport. You could go south or west, but making a smaller airport even farther away from the city is not actually helpful. Skip over the city proper and try to build one on the north or east side...even in this recession, the cost of property would be astronomical, unless you went an hour north of town. (Atlanta was actually pretty damn lucky where it was able to build its airport. Visitors are often astonished it's _inside_ our perimeter road. It's just annoying to get to because it is _so_ big, but the solution wasn't 'We should have built two smaller airports in the same space'...that makes no sense.)
There are things rail is suited for. Rail allows much smaller stations, it allows almost no security, it allows shorter trips, it allows stations _within_ cities instead of fifteen minutes outside.
OTOH, it's much slower, both because it's actually slower, and because it often is somewhat indirect.
So no one is saying we should stop using air travel. What people are saying is that considering the massive imbalance in passenger rail vs. air, it's probably time to expand rail some.
And part of that is we need to stop hypocritically ignoring the _massive_ subsidies in air while bleating about them in rail.
Amtrak received a billion dollars [wikipedia.org] in subsidies last fiscal year.
That is correct, I was wrong. OTOH, we weren't really talking about Amtrak, I was just trying to to point out the irrational dislike of rail. So I like the fact it points out that cruise lines (Which are not actually a form of 'transport' at all.) got $8 billion in 2010. (Also, Amtrak is only 31 years old, not 40.)
And per passenger-mile, it's subsidies are an order of magnitude larger than they are for air travel.
Except somehow, when talking about airplane subsidies, somehow the TSA gets entirely left out, and the _repeated_ airline bailouts get left out, and even the cost of airport construction gets left out... You know, that $9 billion dollars I was talking about? Not inclu
And I'm sure discounted fares exist under passenger rail, also.