The premise of intelligent design is that God wasn't able to create a universe in which everything happened automatically. instead, it argues that He created the universe, and then had to constantly meddle because He couldn't get the animals He wanted by following the physical laws that He, Himself, made. This is utterly against my religion's conception of God, in which He does not make such mistakes.
My religion is, I think, a fairly popular one called 'Christianity', and I fail to see why whatever minority religious group is pushing 'intelligent design' should be able to teach Christian children that God is fallible and makes mistakes that He then has to correct.
Surely a better compromise between our two religions would be to simply not talk about what God did or didn't do at all in public schools.
Blocking facebook is a good idea in general, but companies that block entire sites like that should also have a computer free from the blocks, like in the break room or something. It's entirely reasonable to want to check facebook before leaving work for the day.
Having a separate computer and network would also let companies avoid security issues that unfiltered internet access can present, and also have a network to put visitors on who come in with unsecured laptops. Setup a separate, unfiltered network, stick a computer in a public place for employees on it. (A rate limited network, of course, so people don't run around downloading stuff on it.)
And it would solve the problem of 'Facebook is blocked but the damn customer sent me his cell phone number last night on facebook.'. issue that people on filtered networks run into.
Because free stuff to specific politicians count as, duh, political contributions.
For an an actual real life example of this, google 'c-street boarding house', and look at something that certainly should be under investigation, although it's not as far as we know. Renting a house you own to politicians at a fraction of the normal rent in that area is a political contribution.
However, I don't understand the logic here. They're not refraining from suing politicians, because politicians aren't normally bloggers. Nor do they appear to be refraining from suing any tax-deducible political organizations, which might possibly be relevant, or at least require disclosure.
It's perfectly legal to find some blogger who agrees with you politically and give them money (Or not sue them to take money away), as far as I'm aware. Media matters appears incorrect here under any interpretation of the law.
Of course, if they're a publically traded company, they could be subject to shareholder lawsuits for that sort of behavior.
And, soon, assuming people can get the bill passed, all corporations will be required to disclose to their owners, and get unanimous consent, for political actions. Sadly, this has not passed yet.
I don't understand why you're acting like there was any breach of contract at all.
There is no assertions that Zuckerberg was supposed to, for example, pay him X dollars years ago. The assertion is that Ceglia did, and always has, owned 84% of the company, in exchange for money. Assuming the money was paid, the contract was fulfilled at that time. Ceglia is arguing the contract is valid, not that it was breached. There is no statute of limitation on a valid sale.
If I buy a house, and say you can maintain it until I move in, and I don't move in until 10 years later, that's not a breach of contract. If I discover that you sold parts of it off more than 6 years ago, that's still not a breach of contract, it's theft by conversion. (Yes, yes, there are squatting laws that apply in that specific example, but that's not the point.)
Even if the six years applies to this situation, that just means that any part of the company sold more than six years ago was legally sold, or at least can't be disputed. Any sales after that point are still bogus, or will be diluted to near nonexistence, as he owns 84% of the company as of six years ago.
Yes, because I mentioned the Democratic party. No, wait, I didn't, I guess someone else did. No, they didn't either.
Anyway, pretending the Democratic party is relevant here...so, to talk about the 'Democratic party', you quoted fucking Greenpeace? When did they become the representative of the Democratic party's stance on environmentalism? Greenpeace isn't even American.
You could have at least picked an American environmental group, like the Sierra Club, which would have had a better claim to representing 'Demcratic thought'...oh, wait, they aren't opposed to nuclear power. Decades ago they were opposed to nuclear power until safety issues were worked out, but haven't made a comment on normal nuclear reactors in thirty years. But, of course, they aren't the Democrats either.
Al Gore, who doesn't really represent the Democratic party's stance either, said, 'I’m not a reflexive opponent of nuclear. I used to be enthusiastic about it, but I’m now sceptical about it.'
Which, I must point out, the article says was a surprising comment, which rather implies that other pro-environmental people tend to lean towards nuclear, and it is Al Gore (Who, I must point out, has never been chosen to represent the Democratic party in any way since taking his strong environmental stance) who is the outlier.
And he's the outlier in that he's less enthusiastic about nuclear power. Not against it. He basically says 'Companies might not want to invest in it', and 'We have to worry about nuclear weapons', not 'We shouldn't build any'.
So, you misrepresent me as being 'pro-Democratic methods of energy production', then you misrepresent them as saying something that Greenpeace believes by quoting an article about how a Democratic politician surprisingly isn't entirely in favor of nuclear power.
Yes, and the government should feel free to tax it.
But having giant programs and wasting everyone's efforts and the entire direction of the environmental so that a tiny fraction of the industry energy used in this county can be reduce by a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction...um...no. Just no.
You want to reduce energy use, you add a 1% tax to electricity, which would do more to reduce energy use in the next year than all the recycling programs combined.
I find it very suspicious that the sole recognizable environmental project in the US is not that is not particularly helpful, but it is the one that uses free human labor and government resources to reduce the costs for companies to operate. So a few of the companies that make goods that can be recycled save a tiny tiny tiny tiny amount of energy, and everything else is exactly the same.
If you go at the right point, North America and Asia are only 53 miles apart, and there's an island in the middle.
I mean, heck, people have seriously talked about a bridge or a tunnel. (The Chunnel, after all, is 30 miles.) Running power lines wouldn't be too impossible hard.
I'm for compressed air and any other system that allows you to store power without converting to electricity, which is just a pointless step.
Windmills should be spinning and mechanically pumping air into pressurized chambers. Which should then have power generated from it when needed.
In theory, you can do this with pumping water up a height, also, but the problem is that most wind power is exactly where that would not be helpful, and you'd have to convert to electricity and back to pump water. If you did happen to have wind power near a dam, though, it would be a good idea to have it sit there and pump water back from the output to the top.
That's all well and good. If someone wants to buy used junk from me, I have no problem with it. I might even give it to them for free.
However, that's not a environmental issue, now is it?
And I'm sick of it being passed off as one, with community running weekly pickups of fucking harmless and easily replaceable paper, and schools teaching everyone of the importance of recycling stuff that grows on trees, while people happily throw batteries and other hazardous shit in the trash, because it'd just be totally insane to try to teach people not to do that or have a weekly pickup of hazardous stuff.
Uh, there's plenty of energy to power all that. Nuclear's the best we've got right now, but we're slowly coming up with alternatives. A lot more local power from renewable stuff, and nuclear to, right now, fill in the gaps.
And before you mention 'plastic', there's enough oil to provide the plastic requirements from essentially now to the end of time if we don't stupidly burn it all. Although it can be made from things other than oil if we need to.
And, of course, using oil as plastic doesn't cause global warming, it's releasing the carbon that causes global warming. (Although I think we've all been clued in recently that just drilling for oil can cause environmental damage, so we need to obviously be a bit more concerned about that.)
Here's a clue: Pretending that all 'environmental' problems are the same makes you look like an idiot, as does pretending we need to cut everything back to zero.
What we need to do is stop letting everyone use the commons as a goddamn free dumping ground.,P>
And, no, we can't 'adapt', you asshat. 'Adaptation' usually involves 90% of a species dying out, and, if billions of dead people don't convince you, the simple fact is we're probably changing the world in ways that we cannot adapt fast enough to. Not via AGW, which we could, in theory, adapt to (If we wanted a goodly percentage of the world's population to die)...but via things like cancerogens in our water and air, which would require most life on this planet to die and start over to adapt to, because cell replication and stuff like that is so low-level.
What we need to do is stop worrying about separating out things it's inherently stupid to recycle, like paper and glass, which we have essentially an limitless supplies of(1), and start separating out things we really shouldn't be putting in landfills, like batteries.
Fuck 'recycling'. Call me when I have they'll come to my house to pick up smoke detectors. That's the problem in landfills, not people who don't recycle their newspapers. I'm perfectly fine with drinking water that seeped through newspapers. Are you fine with drinking water that seeped through motor oil?
Work on getting the 5% of the landfill that is unsafe from getting put in the landfill, and maybe everyone else will stop caring so much about where landfills are built in the first place. As long as the only only requirement is 'far enough away we can't smell them', we've got plenty of room for them.
1) If someone figures out it's more profitable to recycle glass and paper than to make more, by all means, they should set up some sort of infrastructure to do so...but they shouldn't be asserting it's good 'for the environment' or having government help with it.
If charging your cell is a PITA, you are doing it wrong. Or have the wrong phone.
But, obviously, you're one of those people who can't be bothered to spend fifteen second hooking their phone to their charger when they set it down. There's probably no hope for you.
And, as I pointed out, trips are different. When you can't charge, obviously you should spread the battery usage between all devices equally.
There are always specific circumstances where one thing is better than the other, but, statistically, there have to be more in the other direction.
That doesn't mean anything for you, who obviously doesn't want to switch back and forth, but even you have to admit, even if everyone had the exact same devices as you, it would be easier for most people to just use their phone, as most people do not listen to eight hours of music a day, and are not an overnight stay away from their charger. It makes more sense for them to listen to an hour or three of music, and charge their phone every night, instead of having to charge their phone every other night and their mp3 player every fourth night, which is a very good way to fail to charge one of them.
And this is much much much more true of calculators than mp3 players, which is what we were actually talking about. Calculators are even bigger and bulkier than phones, and using a phone as a calculator is negligible on battery life. It is very hard to imaging some valid battery-life reason for someone to carry around and use a physical graphing calculator instead of their phone.
Now, phones make awkward graphing calculators, so in the real world, someone who did a lot of graphing on them might want real buttons, like I said. Of course, in the real world, people don't actually use graphing calculators anyway. They use scientific calculators, which phones are fine at, and graphing software on PCs.
Indeed. Graphing calculators are pointless in the real world.
People who do actually calculations in their job while not at a computer, like builders who have to calculate Pythagorean distances, have a scientific calculator. (Although plenty of people have started using their phones, there are some nice apps out there.) Sometimes a cheap one, sometimes a nice one.
People who do graphing or equation solving use a computer. No one uses graphing calculators to make graphs, because when you actually make graphs in real life, you need to, you know, actually save them and pass them around, which calculators can't do. Plus, equation graphing software can also do all sorts of other useful graphs, like statistical analysis, or even simple X-Y plotting from a spreadsheet, which a calculator would have a rather large hassle trying to do. (How do you get a CSV file into a TI-89?)
Considering the (steady) cost of graphing calculators is actually reaching the plummeting costs of a computer, perhaps it's just time we start holding math classes in computer labs when we need graphing, and give everyone fifteen dollar scientific calculators for everything else.
It's absurd we teach people how to do math using something that functionally doesn't exist in real life. It's especially absurd when it's the one piece of hardware costs the same as it cost 15 years ago...and it really hasn't made any technological improvements. (because there aren't really any it can make.)
There are $30 MP3 players with better screens and better processors! For about the same price as an NSpire, I can buy a Wifi Nook, with just as much processing power, 16 times the memory, a screen four times as big, made out of a material that is still very expensive, and WIFI. What. The. Fuck.
It says there's a known way to load custom OSes onto TI calcs.
Which I happen to know is factually true. I had one, and I did that. About 9 years ago, in fact. on a TI-89, which is a Z80.
It was unstable and I put the original back, but I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
And, even without a custom OS, you could put stuff in flash memory, which meant that no calculator reset any teacher knew about would clear it. (Flash memory was, however, very small.)
There were even programs that would hijack the flash and volatile memory resetter ability and keep that from working, although, as I mentioned, at most schools teachers only knew how to reset the volatile memory anyway.
Technically, you could still ensure a clean calculator...but you had to remove the batteries, including the screwed-in backup battery, resetting the volatile memory, and then boot it up and clear the flash memory. This only worked because there was no way to auto-start a program from flash memory, so the resetter-hijacker couldn't run. Of course, storing 'random' information into flash memory was pretty damn hard.
No teacher ever did this.
...and if they had, of course, as I said, you could load a custom ROM in the first place, as a new OS, and do whatever the hell you wanted.
The idea that schools would stop using TI calculators if they were 'hackable' is nonsense. TI calculators have always been hackable. And requirements are always 'downward' anyway, so people would just downgrade if they wanted a hacked calculator...no school that allows an NSpire is going to have an issue with someone using an old TI-83.
The whole thing is utterly stupid, because what school should be doing is providing calculators...but TI sure as hell doesn't want that. Right now, almost every single person in the county buys one of their calculators at one time, uses it for four years, and then sticks it in a box somewhere. Their business model would be ruined if schools started buying them...they'd need less to start with (As not everyone takes math at the same time), and then they'd stop buying them once they got enough.
The battery life of a device you have to keep charged anyway doesn't matter.
Seriously, this is such an obvious point, but every time someone says 'You can use use your phone instead of an ereader/mp3 player/calculator', someone always makes the point that the specific device has a longer battery life, which is isn't the least bit relevant, as everyone already has a phone, which they already keep charged! Using a separate device just means they now have to keep two devices charged.
The only time that a standalone device could be better, charging-hassle-wise, is if they're using the phone enough that it drains the battery much much faster than the standalone device, fast enough that you have to charge it more often. People don't really use a calculator enough to do that, but it applies if you're using your phone like an ereader or something.
Now, there is that weird minority of people who've decided that the correct time to charge a phone is 'when it gets low', as opposed to 'whenever you're at home and not using it' or 'overnight', which results in their phone being dead all the time. Those people are usually people who got introduced to cell phones rather recently, and probably not the ones who are going to be using their phones for anything but phones anyway. Obviously, such people should make plans which do not require their cell phones having a battery charge, as that is how they have decided to live their life.(1) This includes 'making telephone calls'.
That said, your other point is entirely valid...devices with fixed keys are a lot easier to use than a touchscreen, and, while smartphones have roughly the same screen size as a graphing calculator, obviously the phone has to cram the keys in there.
On the other hand, a phone is a lot easier to carry. (They should start making clam-shell calculators, where the screen flips down over the keys. No more stupid sliding case and only two-thirds the length.) On the third hand, you wouldn't actually be allowed to use phones on many tests.
1) Seriously, those people piss me off. When I know people have cell phones, I expect them to have functional cell phones. I don't expect them to be able to always answer, I don't expect them to always be able to talk, i don't expect them to always be in cell range here. (I know I'm not.) But I don't expect them to make plans to call me but then get somewhere and realize 'their cell phone is dead'. What the fuck? You were at your house an hour ago! Oh, you didn't charge it.
I've had my cell phone die on my a few times, but it was always after quite some time....like an entire day of air travel and listening to music on it, or an entire day of driving and talking on it. Because I start with a charged phone.
If you do not make the effort to have a functional cell phone, a) don't tell me you have a cell phone, and b) don't make plans requiring a cell phone.
But, you see, that would result in a level playing field, where how well you do on standardized tests isn't dependent on how much money your parents have.
And if that happened, poor schools might have better test scores, and get more money, when the whole point of the 'rank each school by standardize testing' stupidity is the opposite of that.
Even if you did, it's hard to protect against everything.
I'm reminded of 'mistake' that someone checked into a Linux kernel cvs (Not the real kernel) which was an if() that did a bunch of process flag checks, followed by a user_id=0 check, and then did some innocuous stuff.
Catch that? user_id=0, not ==0
It was a 'bug'...that just happened to set any user process that had that weird random assortment of flags to being owned by root. (And then do some totally safe and useless things for that process.)
Luckily, the actual Linux kernel has some programmers looking at each line of code before it goes in, but those types of bugs are hard enough to detect when made by accident.
They're nearly impossible to detect on purpose, especially when there's not someone who's going through looking at each cvs checkin, from unknown users (Like that problem was found.), but instead presented with the entirety of source code at once.
Actually, it's more like claiming copying by pointing out the second page of a book has the exact same placement of the title, an 'if you purchased this book without a cover' warning, an identical disclaimer about the work being a work of fiction, a (slightly modified) copyright line, an 'All right reserved' line, publisher information, the ISBN. In almost exactly the same order, at that!
BSD actually got it from the standard, as did Linux. The ELF standard actually had header
Of course, where all this falling apart is the ELF standard was specifically released as an open standard. 'The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby.'
And it was, obviously, owned by the TIS committee, not the SysV copyright holders, although they were part of that committee. And this standard had all the headers and a good portion of the actual code that SCO claims was 'copied' in it.
IBM actually submitted a brief with the court quoting email where Linux developers were asked to implement ELF, by the current SysV copyright owners, as part of their general 'standardize Unix' push.
The fact that the board approved it doesn't mean that the board can't sue for being lied to (As they, and everyone were.), nor does it mean that other shareholders can't sue.
Patents don't 'override' free speech because that is not their function at all. The function of patents is not to restrict anything but using patented methods. They're certainly not designed to restrict any sort of speech at all.
Copyrights, however, certainly do override free speech, at least to some extent, and copyright law would be unconstitutional except such laws are explicitly spelled out as a power of Congress in the Constitution.
I'm not going to argue this anymore. I quoted the goddamn section of the constitution where it authorized such laws, if you can't read or understand it, it's your problem.
This is true, but that does not mean that any law or case under the copyright clause is safe from First Amendment analysis. And courts have found that fair use excpetions are required by the First Amendment, although recently the US Supreme Court has been moving to a more "copyright trumps everything" stance.
Yes, I was just saying that if the 1st amendment trumped copyright, we'd have no copyright at all. The entire point of copyright is to restrict the ability of people to make speech, or use a press. It would be completely, utterly, blatantly unconstitutional if it didn't have constitutional grounds, or if the 1st amendment overrode it.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights were not written by the same people.
Um, yeah they were.
James Madison was the principle author of the Constitution, and the person who introduce the Bill of Rights.
Although you're right in that the Bill of Rights was probably based on existing stuff, and the same with the Constitution, but I wasn't actually arguing authorship, I was arguing intent.
If someone writes a rule that says X in a document, and then immediately says 'We better enumerate rights that exist in that document but aren't listened.', and, in this enumeration, writes a rule that would seem to override that first rule...
...well, the courts quite rightly said 'Oh, wait, there's an implied exception for copyright, no one meant the first amendment to not allow that.'.
This isn't the only example of the bill or rights failing to override something, by the way.
For example, people have a right to a jury trial of their peers...but not people in an impeachment trial. Which is not actually restricted to the president. Congress can hold an impeachment trial barring J. Random Citizen from holding any Federal public office in this county, without any of the bill of right protections. This, obviously, almost never happens.
The Bill of Rights is, by the courts, usually considered as being more 'a part' of the constitution, and not really 'overriding' it. It's weird, I know, but the premise is that nothing in the Bill of Rights was actually supposed to 'change' anything in the constitution, being as they were written by, like I said, the same people, debated by the same people, and passed by the same people, at roughly the same time. So, for example, the copyright clause and freedom of speech and press have the same weight, instead of the later destroying the former.
Only later amendments really get treated as 'updates'.
Slashdot Mirror
The premise of intelligent design is that God wasn't able to create a universe in which everything happened automatically. instead, it argues that He created the universe, and then had to constantly meddle because He couldn't get the animals He wanted by following the physical laws that He, Himself, made. This is utterly against my religion's conception of God, in which He does not make such mistakes.
My religion is, I think, a fairly popular one called 'Christianity', and I fail to see why whatever minority religious group is pushing 'intelligent design' should be able to teach Christian children that God is fallible and makes mistakes that He then has to correct.
Surely a better compromise between our two religions would be to simply not talk about what God did or didn't do at all in public schools.
Oddly enough, M. is the abbreviation for monsieur, so M. Sex Change is the french equivalent of Mr. Sex Change.
Blocking facebook is a good idea in general, but companies that block entire sites like that should also have a computer free from the blocks, like in the break room or something. It's entirely reasonable to want to check facebook before leaving work for the day.
Having a separate computer and network would also let companies avoid security issues that unfiltered internet access can present, and also have a network to put visitors on who come in with unsecured laptops. Setup a separate, unfiltered network, stick a computer in a public place for employees on it. (A rate limited network, of course, so people don't run around downloading stuff on it.)
And it would solve the problem of 'Facebook is blocked but the damn customer sent me his cell phone number last night on facebook.'. issue that people on filtered networks run into.
I agree. Cut and paste is bad
I think you should be able to cut and paste to quote something to to rebut a argument.
Because free stuff to specific politicians count as, duh, political contributions.
For an an actual real life example of this, google 'c-street boarding house', and look at something that certainly should be under investigation, although it's not as far as we know. Renting a house you own to politicians at a fraction of the normal rent in that area is a political contribution.
However, I don't understand the logic here. They're not refraining from suing politicians, because politicians aren't normally bloggers. Nor do they appear to be refraining from suing any tax-deducible political organizations, which might possibly be relevant, or at least require disclosure.
It's perfectly legal to find some blogger who agrees with you politically and give them money (Or not sue them to take money away), as far as I'm aware. Media matters appears incorrect here under any interpretation of the law.
Of course, if they're a publically traded company, they could be subject to shareholder lawsuits for that sort of behavior.
And, soon, assuming people can get the bill passed, all corporations will be required to disclose to their owners, and get unanimous consent, for political actions. Sadly, this has not passed yet.
I don't understand why you're acting like there was any breach of contract at all.
There is no assertions that Zuckerberg was supposed to, for example, pay him X dollars years ago. The assertion is that Ceglia did, and always has, owned 84% of the company, in exchange for money. Assuming the money was paid, the contract was fulfilled at that time. Ceglia is arguing the contract is valid, not that it was breached. There is no statute of limitation on a valid sale.
If I buy a house, and say you can maintain it until I move in, and I don't move in until 10 years later, that's not a breach of contract. If I discover that you sold parts of it off more than 6 years ago, that's still not a breach of contract, it's theft by conversion. (Yes, yes, there are squatting laws that apply in that specific example, but that's not the point.)
Even if the six years applies to this situation, that just means that any part of the company sold more than six years ago was legally sold, or at least can't be disputed. Any sales after that point are still bogus, or will be diluted to near nonexistence, as he owns 84% of the company as of six years ago.
Yes, because I mentioned the Democratic party. No, wait, I didn't, I guess someone else did. No, they didn't either.
Anyway, pretending the Democratic party is relevant here...so, to talk about the 'Democratic party', you quoted fucking Greenpeace? When did they become the representative of the Democratic party's stance on environmentalism? Greenpeace isn't even American.
You could have at least picked an American environmental group, like the Sierra Club, which would have had a better claim to representing 'Demcratic thought'...oh, wait, they aren't opposed to nuclear power. Decades ago they were opposed to nuclear power until safety issues were worked out, but haven't made a comment on normal nuclear reactors in thirty years. But, of course, they aren't the Democrats either.
Al Gore, who doesn't really represent the Democratic party's stance either, said, 'I’m not a reflexive opponent of nuclear. I used to be enthusiastic about it, but I’m now sceptical about it.'
Which, I must point out, the article says was a surprising comment, which rather implies that other pro-environmental people tend to lean towards nuclear, and it is Al Gore (Who, I must point out, has never been chosen to represent the Democratic party in any way since taking his strong environmental stance) who is the outlier.
And he's the outlier in that he's less enthusiastic about nuclear power. Not against it. He basically says 'Companies might not want to invest in it', and 'We have to worry about nuclear weapons', not 'We shouldn't build any'.
So, you misrepresent me as being 'pro-Democratic methods of energy production', then you misrepresent them as saying something that Greenpeace believes by quoting an article about how a Democratic politician surprisingly isn't entirely in favor of nuclear power.
You are, frankly, a liar.
Yes, and the government should feel free to tax it.
But having giant programs and wasting everyone's efforts and the entire direction of the environmental so that a tiny fraction of the industry energy used in this county can be reduce by a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction...um...no. Just no.
You want to reduce energy use, you add a 1% tax to electricity, which would do more to reduce energy use in the next year than all the recycling programs combined.
I find it very suspicious that the sole recognizable environmental project in the US is not that is not particularly helpful, but it is the one that uses free human labor and government resources to reduce the costs for companies to operate. So a few of the companies that make goods that can be recycled save a tiny tiny tiny tiny amount of energy, and everything else is exactly the same.
That depends on what 'intercontinental' means.
If you go at the right point, North America and Asia are only 53 miles apart, and there's an island in the middle.
I mean, heck, people have seriously talked about a bridge or a tunnel. (The Chunnel, after all, is 30 miles.) Running power lines wouldn't be too impossible hard.
I'm for compressed air and any other system that allows you to store power without converting to electricity, which is just a pointless step.
Windmills should be spinning and mechanically pumping air into pressurized chambers. Which should then have power generated from it when needed.
In theory, you can do this with pumping water up a height, also, but the problem is that most wind power is exactly where that would not be helpful, and you'd have to convert to electricity and back to pump water. If you did happen to have wind power near a dam, though, it would be a good idea to have it sit there and pump water back from the output to the top.
xkcd is stalking me. (Or just reads slashdot, and then had to make the same point, but I like my version better.)
That's all well and good. If someone wants to buy used junk from me, I have no problem with it. I might even give it to them for free.
However, that's not a environmental issue, now is it?
And I'm sick of it being passed off as one, with community running weekly pickups of fucking harmless and easily replaceable paper, and schools teaching everyone of the importance of recycling stuff that grows on trees, while people happily throw batteries and other hazardous shit in the trash, because it'd just be totally insane to try to teach people not to do that or have a weekly pickup of hazardous stuff.
Uh, there's plenty of energy to power all that. Nuclear's the best we've got right now, but we're slowly coming up with alternatives. A lot more local power from renewable stuff, and nuclear to, right now, fill in the gaps.
And before you mention 'plastic', there's enough oil to provide the plastic requirements from essentially now to the end of time if we don't stupidly burn it all. Although it can be made from things other than oil if we need to.
And, of course, using oil as plastic doesn't cause global warming, it's releasing the carbon that causes global warming. (Although I think we've all been clued in recently that just drilling for oil can cause environmental damage, so we need to obviously be a bit more concerned about that.)
Here's a clue: Pretending that all 'environmental' problems are the same makes you look like an idiot, as does pretending we need to cut everything back to zero.
What we need to do is stop letting everyone use the commons as a goddamn free dumping ground.,P> And, no, we can't 'adapt', you asshat. 'Adaptation' usually involves 90% of a species dying out, and, if billions of dead people don't convince you, the simple fact is we're probably changing the world in ways that we cannot adapt fast enough to. Not via AGW, which we could, in theory, adapt to (If we wanted a goodly percentage of the world's population to die)...but via things like cancerogens in our water and air, which would require most life on this planet to die and start over to adapt to, because cell replication and stuff like that is so low-level.
What we need to do is stop worrying about separating out things it's inherently stupid to recycle, like paper and glass, which we have essentially an limitless supplies of(1), and start separating out things we really shouldn't be putting in landfills, like batteries.
Fuck 'recycling'. Call me when I have they'll come to my house to pick up smoke detectors. That's the problem in landfills, not people who don't recycle their newspapers. I'm perfectly fine with drinking water that seeped through newspapers. Are you fine with drinking water that seeped through motor oil?
Work on getting the 5% of the landfill that is unsafe from getting put in the landfill, and maybe everyone else will stop caring so much about where landfills are built in the first place. As long as the only only requirement is 'far enough away we can't smell them', we've got plenty of room for them.
1) If someone figures out it's more profitable to recycle glass and paper than to make more, by all means, they should set up some sort of infrastructure to do so...but they shouldn't be asserting it's good 'for the environment' or having government help with it.
If charging your cell is a PITA, you are doing it wrong. Or have the wrong phone.
But, obviously, you're one of those people who can't be bothered to spend fifteen second hooking their phone to their charger when they set it down. There's probably no hope for you.
And, as I pointed out, trips are different. When you can't charge, obviously you should spread the battery usage between all devices equally.
There are always specific circumstances where one thing is better than the other, but, statistically, there have to be more in the other direction.
That doesn't mean anything for you, who obviously doesn't want to switch back and forth, but even you have to admit, even if everyone had the exact same devices as you, it would be easier for most people to just use their phone, as most people do not listen to eight hours of music a day, and are not an overnight stay away from their charger. It makes more sense for them to listen to an hour or three of music, and charge their phone every night, instead of having to charge their phone every other night and their mp3 player every fourth night, which is a very good way to fail to charge one of them.
And this is much much much more true of calculators than mp3 players, which is what we were actually talking about. Calculators are even bigger and bulkier than phones, and using a phone as a calculator is negligible on battery life. It is very hard to imaging some valid battery-life reason for someone to carry around and use a physical graphing calculator instead of their phone.
Now, phones make awkward graphing calculators, so in the real world, someone who did a lot of graphing on them might want real buttons, like I said. Of course, in the real world, people don't actually use graphing calculators anyway. They use scientific calculators, which phones are fine at, and graphing software on PCs.
Indeed. Graphing calculators are pointless in the real world.
People who do actually calculations in their job while not at a computer, like builders who have to calculate Pythagorean distances, have a scientific calculator. (Although plenty of people have started using their phones, there are some nice apps out there.) Sometimes a cheap one, sometimes a nice one.
People who do graphing or equation solving use a computer. No one uses graphing calculators to make graphs, because when you actually make graphs in real life, you need to, you know, actually save them and pass them around, which calculators can't do. Plus, equation graphing software can also do all sorts of other useful graphs, like statistical analysis, or even simple X-Y plotting from a spreadsheet, which a calculator would have a rather large hassle trying to do. (How do you get a CSV file into a TI-89?)
Considering the (steady) cost of graphing calculators is actually reaching the plummeting costs of a computer, perhaps it's just time we start holding math classes in computer labs when we need graphing, and give everyone fifteen dollar scientific calculators for everything else.
It's absurd we teach people how to do math using something that functionally doesn't exist in real life. It's especially absurd when it's the one piece of hardware costs the same as it cost 15 years ago...and it really hasn't made any technological improvements. (because there aren't really any it can make.)
There are $30 MP3 players with better screens and better processors! For about the same price as an NSpire, I can buy a Wifi Nook, with just as much processing power, 16 times the memory, a screen four times as big, made out of a material that is still very expensive, and WIFI. What. The. Fuck.
And did you read the post that you commented on.
It says there's a known way to load custom OSes onto TI calcs.
Which I happen to know is factually true. I had one, and I did that. About 9 years ago, in fact. on a TI-89, which is a Z80.
It was unstable and I put the original back, but I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
And, even without a custom OS, you could put stuff in flash memory, which meant that no calculator reset any teacher knew about would clear it. (Flash memory was, however, very small.)
There were even programs that would hijack the flash and volatile memory resetter ability and keep that from working, although, as I mentioned, at most schools teachers only knew how to reset the volatile memory anyway.
Technically, you could still ensure a clean calculator...but you had to remove the batteries, including the screwed-in backup battery, resetting the volatile memory, and then boot it up and clear the flash memory. This only worked because there was no way to auto-start a program from flash memory, so the resetter-hijacker couldn't run. Of course, storing 'random' information into flash memory was pretty damn hard.
No teacher ever did this.
The idea that schools would stop using TI calculators if they were 'hackable' is nonsense. TI calculators have always been hackable. And requirements are always 'downward' anyway, so people would just downgrade if they wanted a hacked calculator...no school that allows an NSpire is going to have an issue with someone using an old TI-83.
The whole thing is utterly stupid, because what school should be doing is providing calculators...but TI sure as hell doesn't want that. Right now, almost every single person in the county buys one of their calculators at one time, uses it for four years, and then sticks it in a box somewhere. Their business model would be ruined if schools started buying them...they'd need less to start with (As not everyone takes math at the same time), and then they'd stop buying them once they got enough.
The battery life of a device you have to keep charged anyway doesn't matter.
Seriously, this is such an obvious point, but every time someone says 'You can use use your phone instead of an ereader/mp3 player/calculator', someone always makes the point that the specific device has a longer battery life, which is isn't the least bit relevant, as everyone already has a phone, which they already keep charged! Using a separate device just means they now have to keep two devices charged.
The only time that a standalone device could be better, charging-hassle-wise, is if they're using the phone enough that it drains the battery much much faster than the standalone device, fast enough that you have to charge it more often. People don't really use a calculator enough to do that, but it applies if you're using your phone like an ereader or something.
Now, there is that weird minority of people who've decided that the correct time to charge a phone is 'when it gets low', as opposed to 'whenever you're at home and not using it' or 'overnight', which results in their phone being dead all the time. Those people are usually people who got introduced to cell phones rather recently, and probably not the ones who are going to be using their phones for anything but phones anyway. Obviously, such people should make plans which do not require their cell phones having a battery charge, as that is how they have decided to live their life.(1) This includes 'making telephone calls'.
That said, your other point is entirely valid...devices with fixed keys are a lot easier to use than a touchscreen, and, while smartphones have roughly the same screen size as a graphing calculator, obviously the phone has to cram the keys in there.
On the other hand, a phone is a lot easier to carry. (They should start making clam-shell calculators, where the screen flips down over the keys. No more stupid sliding case and only two-thirds the length.) On the third hand, you wouldn't actually be allowed to use phones on many tests.
1) Seriously, those people piss me off. When I know people have cell phones, I expect them to have functional cell phones. I don't expect them to be able to always answer, I don't expect them to always be able to talk, i don't expect them to always be in cell range here. (I know I'm not.) But I don't expect them to make plans to call me but then get somewhere and realize 'their cell phone is dead'. What the fuck? You were at your house an hour ago! Oh, you didn't charge it.
I've had my cell phone die on my a few times, but it was always after quite some time....like an entire day of air travel and listening to music on it, or an entire day of driving and talking on it. Because I start with a charged phone.
If you do not make the effort to have a functional cell phone, a) don't tell me you have a cell phone, and b) don't make plans requiring a cell phone.
But, you see, that would result in a level playing field, where how well you do on standardized tests isn't dependent on how much money your parents have.
And if that happened, poor schools might have better test scores, and get more money, when the whole point of the 'rank each school by standardize testing' stupidity is the opposite of that.
Even if you did, it's hard to protect against everything.
I'm reminded of 'mistake' that someone checked into a Linux kernel cvs (Not the real kernel) which was an if() that did a bunch of process flag checks, followed by a user_id=0 check, and then did some innocuous stuff.
Catch that? user_id=0, not ==0
It was a 'bug'...that just happened to set any user process that had that weird random assortment of flags to being owned by root. (And then do some totally safe and useless things for that process.)
Luckily, the actual Linux kernel has some programmers looking at each line of code before it goes in, but those types of bugs are hard enough to detect when made by accident.
They're nearly impossible to detect on purpose, especially when there's not someone who's going through looking at each cvs checkin, from unknown users (Like that problem was found.), but instead presented with the entirety of source code at once.
Actually, it's more like claiming copying by pointing out the second page of a book has the exact same placement of the title, an 'if you purchased this book without a cover' warning, an identical disclaimer about the work being a work of fiction, a (slightly modified) copyright line, an 'All right reserved' line, publisher information, the ISBN. In almost exactly the same order, at that!
Um, yeah.
BSD actually got it from the standard, as did Linux. The ELF standard actually had header
Of course, where all this falling apart is the ELF standard was specifically released as an open standard. 'The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby.'
And it was, obviously, owned by the TIS committee, not the SysV copyright holders, although they were part of that committee. And this standard had all the headers and a good portion of the actual code that SCO claims was 'copied' in it.
IBM actually submitted a brief with the court quoting email where Linux developers were asked to implement ELF, by the current SysV copyright owners, as part of their general 'standardize Unix' push.
The fact that the board approved it doesn't mean that the board can't sue for being lied to (As they, and everyone were.), nor does it mean that other shareholders can't sue.
Patents don't 'override' free speech because that is not their function at all. The function of patents is not to restrict anything but using patented methods. They're certainly not designed to restrict any sort of speech at all.
Copyrights, however, certainly do override free speech, at least to some extent, and copyright law would be unconstitutional except such laws are explicitly spelled out as a power of Congress in the Constitution.
I'm not going to argue this anymore. I quoted the goddamn section of the constitution where it authorized such laws, if you can't read or understand it, it's your problem.
This is true, but that does not mean that any law or case under the copyright clause is safe from First Amendment analysis. And courts have found that fair use excpetions are required by the First Amendment, although recently the US Supreme Court has been moving to a more "copyright trumps everything" stance.
Yes, I was just saying that if the 1st amendment trumped copyright, we'd have no copyright at all. The entire point of copyright is to restrict the ability of people to make speech, or use a press. It would be completely, utterly, blatantly unconstitutional if it didn't have constitutional grounds, or if the 1st amendment overrode it.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights were not written by the same people.
Um, yeah they were.
James Madison was the principle author of the Constitution, and the person who introduce the Bill of Rights.
Although you're right in that the Bill of Rights was probably based on existing stuff, and the same with the Constitution, but I wasn't actually arguing authorship, I was arguing intent.
If someone writes a rule that says X in a document, and then immediately says 'We better enumerate rights that exist in that document but aren't listened.', and, in this enumeration, writes a rule that would seem to override that first rule...
This isn't the only example of the bill or rights failing to override something, by the way.
For example, people have a right to a jury trial of their peers...but not people in an impeachment trial. Which is not actually restricted to the president. Congress can hold an impeachment trial barring J. Random Citizen from holding any Federal public office in this county, without any of the bill of right protections. This, obviously, almost never happens.
The Bill of Rights is, by the courts, usually considered as being more 'a part' of the constitution, and not really 'overriding' it. It's weird, I know, but the premise is that nothing in the Bill of Rights was actually supposed to 'change' anything in the constitution, being as they were written by, like I said, the same people, debated by the same people, and passed by the same people, at roughly the same time. So, for example, the copyright clause and freedom of speech and press have the same weight, instead of the later destroying the former.
Only later amendments really get treated as 'updates'.