Rule of thumb: take out "on the internet" when you're discussing civil rights (or... well, anything, really.) In other words, the question is not "is anonymity on the internet a fundamental right?" but simply "is anonymity a fundamental right?" And the answer of history is "yes, it is." From the run-up to the American Revolution to samizdat in the USSR, the cause of freedom has always been better served when those who would be persecuted for speaking out can keep their identities secret from the persecutors.
You do know that it's government keeping only a few Cable providers available don't you? (ie: I can't start up my own cable company tomorrow and offer service to my neighborhood without going through my local government.) They also sign deals with cable companies to have exclusive rights to areas for certain periods of time (effectively granting a monopoly to said company.)
You want government to fix a government problem by adding more government?
Municipal government != state government != federal government. While in general, governments at the lower levels are better at serving the interests of their citizens, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. As an example, "fix[ing] a (municipal and state) government problem by adding more (federal) government" was exactly how we got rid of Jim Crow laws. The monopoly status of cable providers, and the power it gives them over the internet in the age of broadband, is a problem which clearly is not going to be resolved at the municipal or state level, nor is the free market going to invisible-hand it away. If you've got a better alternative than the proposed very mild federal intervention, feel free to present it.
Now they can compare his DNA to Kary Mullis and see where (if at all) they differ.
One's a raving lunatic who once did great things under the influence of massive amounts of mind-altering substances, then burned himself out completely and has since turned into a sad shell of his former self...
As a CEO of a Major Corporation... if it is a male or female: IE I have given raises and next thing I know she is preganant and that pisses me off
You are either lying (this is most likely) or you're setting yourself up for a massive discrimination lawsuit. Have fun with that.
Actually, you may be lying and setting yourself up, etc.; lying about being the "CEO of a Major Corporation" (why the capital M and C?) but telling the truth about running a company and discriminating on the basis of sex. In which case you're still liable for a massive lawsuit, but you don't have the deep pockets to absorb the damages. When you find yourself out on the street begging for spare change, remember exactly how you got there. And don't be surprised when your former employees walk by and laugh in your face.
Every time the free market fundamentalists start their proselytizing, we need to remind them where their religion inevitably leads. Randroids are as bad as (and have a great deal in common with) Marxists, in their total inability to separate their belief in what should happen according to their ideals from what actually happens in the real world.
Gambling is based on odds and randomness. Investing is usually based on performance of companies, which is not random. Yes there is speculation in investing but at its foundation most (traditional) investing is based on how well companies do. Gambling is based on chance.
Depends on what type of gambling you're talking about. Playing slot machines or roulette -- yeah, that's chance and nothing more. But playing poker, or betting on a horse race, is not purely on dependent on chance by any means. A good poker player can clean up over a bad one even if he has bad luck with the hands he's dealt. Horse-race bettors who know about horses, jockeys, and tracks, and who understand the interactions between them, will make a lot more money than those who don't. Obviously, there's still a good amount of luck involved too.
I'd say traditional investing "buy and hold" is a lot like cards and horses. Certainly stock pricing isn't deterministic -- either there's a lot of pure randomness involved, or it's a chaotic system in which it is actually impossible to find and integrate all the information which will move a company's stock price up or down -- but there are also real trends in the noise, if you can find them. Millisecond trading is more like slots and roulette, because the real factors that contribute to a company's value (new products, changes in management, etc.) don't change that fast, and any profit you make is going to be the result of getting lucky with the noise. Systems like the one described in the article seem to me like attempts to make high-speed training more like traditional investing.
Macs are at least a step up from Windows in terms of viruses
What you replied:
Yes (popularity).
Are you so ignorant you can't even be bothered to read your own posts?
In fact, security through obscurity is just something people who have a superficial knowledge of security say to sound knowledgeable.
No, security through obscurity is something people who have no knowledge of security rely on when they're confronted with the undeniable fact that the most popular OS is horribly insecure.
Windows is a more hardened OS, it has been under scrutiny for longer and all the easy exploits have been plugged, all the moderate exploits have been plugged, and almost all the hard exploits have been plugged.
Go on believing that, kid. "Sure, okay, Windows[3.0|3.1|95|98|Me|XP|Vista] sucked, but with Windows[3.1|95|98|Me|XP|Vista|7] we've fixed all the bugs and plugged all the security holes, honest!" Whatever, keep sucking down the Kool-Aid.
While my high school years aren't THAT far behind, the technology you were allowed to use was limited at best.
So you had to use quill pens dipped in ink you mixed yourself? I kind of doubt it.
"Limited technology" is a phrase that roughly translates to "technology that was commonplace around the time I [the person using the phrase] was born". Most people never think about high-tech their world really is, and has been all their lives.
I think you have it exactly backwards. A literal, context-free reading of the First Amendment says that since there's no printing press and involved in making an online post, Congress can make all the laws it wants barring the expression of opinions on the internet. Taking historical context into account, we recognize that websites are in fact "the press" just as much as newspapers are.
Like most people who focus on the issue of slavery, you're forgetting the practices of indentured servitude, which was probably more widespread at time than was slavery.
I'd be interested to see the numbers on indentured servants vs. slaves; I suspect that by the late 1700s there were more of the latter than the former, but I don't really know for sure.
In any case, it's irrelevant. Indentured servants weren't the "other Persons" the three-fifths compromise referred to at all, and while they were indeed "Person[s] held to Service or Labour" there was never anything for indenture like the massive enforcement apparatus devoted to slavery. Indentured servants -- who, in theory at least, had voluntarily signed their contracts of indenture -- disappeared into the West (which at that point meant just about anything away from salt water) all the time, and most people just shrugged it off. No court ever held that an indentured servant could not, by some condition of birth, bring suit for his freedom. There was no national Fugitive Indentured Servant Act. And most importantly, indenture was a temporary condition; slavery was lifelong. The "Service or Labour" referred to in the Constitution was quite specifically that variety which was involuntary, permanent, and based on the color of skin.
Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it.
I have, and your interpration is not only wrong, but bizarrely so. Lincoln's overriding concern was holding the Union together, and he had no desire to hurt the South; if anything, he wanted to bring the war to an end much more quickly and humanely than most of his political allies in the North did. His personal distaste for slavery did harden into political policy as the war progressed, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a recognition that the contination of slavery was inextricably linked to the survival of the Confederacy. In 1861, he was naive enough to think that the war might be settled quickly and the nation restored to its antebellum state. By late 1862, he knew better.
I have also read the words of the agitators for secession and the leaders of the Confederacy, and it is overwhelmingly clear that the only states' right which was sufficient to inspire sesession in its defense was this: the "right" to make and enforce laws holding human beings as slaves. Without the fear of abolition, no other cause would have split the Union; with that fear, nothing could hold it together. Modern Southern Confederate apologists who frantically try to find something -- anything! -- other than slavery to justify secession are denying their own ancestors' words.
You know, I understand the desire to make one's ancestors out to be more noble and heroic than they really were. Practically everyone does it to some degree or another. But it can blind us to the reality of the past. Half my family is from the Southern US, and the other half is Russian. I can admire the courage many of my ancestors displayed in their struggles, and even sympathize with their ideals to a degree... but I never forget what both the CSA and the USSR actually were.
The US Constitution itself is a politically correct document. Look how it dances around the issue of slavery: "Person held to Service or Labour" and "three fifths of all other Persons" are the really egregious ones. Everyone knew who these "other Persons" were, but nobody wanted to say it. It wasn't until 1865, almost 80 years later, that the word "slavery" appeared in the 13th amendment, when it was safely in the past tense -- and then in 1870, when the mealy-mouthed Southern gentry, who had been willing to fight a war on behalf of slavery but could never talk about it when Yankees were about, were back in Congress, the 15th gently whispers about "previous condition of servitude."
So for those who think PC is some new an unique blight on our language, sorry, it's pretty much part of our national DNA.
There are other instances which still cause trouble today. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" means that it's illegal for the government to give money to churches just as much as "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means that it's illegal for for the government to ban them. And "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" is explanatory, not prescriptive; "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is the part that has the force of law, and all they really needed to write. But there's been enough wiggle room in the phrasing for the enemies of liberty to exploit for the last 220+ years.
Oops, that should have been "... bought up over the last couple of decades..." above, of course. Apparently I'm also too lazy to use the preview button properly. Fortunately, my editing on the paper I just submitted is of a higher standard. I hope.
No, the root of the problem is that traditional journals have largely been bought up by the last couple of decades by publishing companies which see them as a cash cow. But every journal I know of, traditional or open access, requires that the papers they publish be originals. (There may possibly be a couple of journals which specialize in reprints, I'm too lazy to go check right now.) In and of itself, this is no problem at all. Any academic who tried to pad out a CV with multiple publications of the same paper would be treated with suspicion and contempt, and rightly so.
Sorry if I was unclear -- I was trying to correct OP's assumption that you can publish the same paper in two separate journals, one traditional and one open-access, which of course you can't.
Not exactly. The NIH Public Acess Policy requires that articles based on research funded by NIH be made available to the public no more than a year after publication, by submitting the paper to PubMed. So you don't have to publish your article in both, say, Nature and BMC Biology; you just have to make sure that if the paper is published in Nature, PubMed gets a copy and posts it on their server. Alternately, the PubMed listing may link to the paper at the publisher's site if it's open-access. Wellcome Trust has a similar policy. A number of traditional journal publishers (e.g. Oxford University Press) are automatically making NIH- and/or Wellcome-funded papers available on their sites to ensure compliance -- in fact, most OUP biomedical journals just open everything up after six months to make sure. At a guess, at least three-quarters of the biomedical research published in English depends on NIH, Wellcome, or both, so this is really the easiest way to do it.
I really do believe it's possible for traditional journal publishing, open access, and other methods of disseminating research to peacefully coexist. Just a lot of folks haven't got the message yet.
If the pilot's life isn't at risk, I just don't think he's going to have the same drive to handle an emergency.
During my emergency medical career, my life was rarely at risk, but I didn't feel any lack of drive to try to save other people's lives. And on the rare occasions when I was as much at risk as my patients, it made it a lot harder to do my job. I see no reason to assume that it would be any different for a pilot in the cockpit vs. sitting at a remote control unit miles away. Your point about sensory feedback makes sense, but it's orthogonal to the odd idea that pilots will perform better when they're about to die.
Trust me, when your rear is in the hot seat and death is riding you, you tend to care a lot more about what the hell is going on.
And? Do you really think how much the pilot cares has anything to do with how likely you are, as a passenger, to survive a crash?
I can pretty much guarantee you that in every fatal crash (with the exception of suicides a la 9/11) the pilot cares a great deal. I mean, he really, really doesn't want to die. And yet somehow, this caring fails to translate into survival.
It doesn't matter how much the pilot cares; it matters how well he does his job. Now, I will agree that in general, people who care about their jobs do better than those who don't, and so a caring pilot will, over the course of a career in the cockpit, tend to do better at developing the skills to prevent a fatal crash. But the same can be said of a UAV pilot sitting at a desk. When the crash is happening, when split-second decisions can make the difference between life and death for a hundred or more people... at that point, it's a little late for how much anyone cares to make a difference.
There are a couple of answers to your question. The first is the answer to the more general question, "Why study the universe at all?" and the answer is "Because it's there." We want to understand the processes by which the universe we see around us was formed, what it's like now (to the degree that "now" has any meaning on cosmological scales) and where it's going. It is an awe-inspiring place, and becomes more so the more we learn about it.
The second, with respect to the study of the Milky Way, is that we learn a lot about our galaxy by studying other galaxies. We don't have a good vantage point for studying the Milky Way, for obvious reasons. Hell, it wasn't until quite recently that we even knew what shape it was (barred spiral vs. plain spiral.) With the enormous number of galaxies out there, many of them similar to our own, at a variety of viewing angles from Earth, we can get a much better idea of what's going on in our own neighborhood than we could by restricting our observations to the Milky Way alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Rule of thumb: take out "on the internet" when you're discussing civil rights (or ... well, anything, really.) In other words, the question is not "is anonymity on the internet a fundamental right?" but simply "is anonymity a fundamental right?" And the answer of history is "yes, it is." From the run-up to the American Revolution to samizdat in the USSR, the cause of freedom has always been better served when those who would be persecuted for speaking out can keep their identities secret from the persecutors.
Kind of difficult to follow that advice when the lawbreaking in question consists solely of not keeping your mouth shut.
You do know that it's government keeping only a few Cable providers available don't you? (ie: I can't start up my own cable company tomorrow and offer service to my neighborhood without going through my local government.) They also sign deals with cable companies to have exclusive rights to areas for certain periods of time (effectively granting a monopoly to said company.)
You want government to fix a government problem by adding more government?
Municipal government != state government != federal government. While in general, governments at the lower levels are better at serving the interests of their citizens, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. As an example, "fix[ing] a (municipal and state) government problem by adding more (federal) government" was exactly how we got rid of Jim Crow laws. The monopoly status of cable providers, and the power it gives them over the internet in the age of broadband, is a problem which clearly is not going to be resolved at the municipal or state level, nor is the free market going to invisible-hand it away. If you've got a better alternative than the proposed very mild federal intervention, feel free to present it.
The internet is not the web. The web is not the internet. Any argument which relies on equating the two fails immediately.
Now they can compare his DNA to Kary Mullis and see where (if at all) they differ.
One's a raving lunatic who once did great things under the influence of massive amounts of mind-altering substances, then burned himself out completely and has since turned into a sad shell of his former self ...
... and the other's an old rock star.
(They're cops.)
((Coming this fall to FOX.))
the doctor WILL be objective ... Doctors do not need to speak to patients.
Any physician who thinks this way should be required to post his name and specialty, so that prospective patients know to stay far, far away.
As a CEO of a Major Corporation ... if it is a male or female: IE I have given raises and next thing I know she is preganant and that pisses me off
You are either lying (this is most likely) or you're setting yourself up for a massive discrimination lawsuit. Have fun with that.
Actually, you may be lying and setting yourself up, etc.; lying about being the "CEO of a Major Corporation" (why the capital M and C?) but telling the truth about running a company and discriminating on the basis of sex. In which case you're still liable for a massive lawsuit, but you don't have the deep pockets to absorb the damages. When you find yourself out on the street begging for spare change, remember exactly how you got there. And don't be surprised when your former employees walk by and laugh in your face.
Bravo!
Every time the free market fundamentalists start their proselytizing, we need to remind them where their religion inevitably leads. Randroids are as bad as (and have a great deal in common with) Marxists, in their total inability to separate their belief in what should happen according to their ideals from what actually happens in the real world.
Grrr. Arrrgh. "... attempts to make high-speed trading more like ..."
Gambling is based on odds and randomness. Investing is usually based on performance of companies, which is not random. Yes there is speculation in investing but at its foundation most (traditional) investing is based on how well companies do. Gambling is based on chance.
Depends on what type of gambling you're talking about. Playing slot machines or roulette -- yeah, that's chance and nothing more. But playing poker, or betting on a horse race, is not purely on dependent on chance by any means. A good poker player can clean up over a bad one even if he has bad luck with the hands he's dealt. Horse-race bettors who know about horses, jockeys, and tracks, and who understand the interactions between them, will make a lot more money than those who don't. Obviously, there's still a good amount of luck involved too.
I'd say traditional investing "buy and hold" is a lot like cards and horses. Certainly stock pricing isn't deterministic -- either there's a lot of pure randomness involved, or it's a chaotic system in which it is actually impossible to find and integrate all the information which will move a company's stock price up or down -- but there are also real trends in the noise, if you can find them. Millisecond trading is more like slots and roulette, because the real factors that contribute to a company's value (new products, changes in management, etc.) don't change that fast, and any profit you make is going to be the result of getting lucky with the noise. Systems like the one described in the article seem to me like attempts to make high-speed training more like traditional investing.
I said nothing about security through obscurity.
What OP said:
Macs are at least a step up from Windows in terms of viruses
What you replied:
Yes (popularity).
Are you so ignorant you can't even be bothered to read your own posts?
In fact, security through obscurity is just something people who have a superficial knowledge of security say to sound knowledgeable.
No, security through obscurity is something people who have no knowledge of security rely on when they're confronted with the undeniable fact that the most popular OS is horribly insecure.
Windows is a more hardened OS, it has been under scrutiny for longer and all the easy exploits have been plugged, all the moderate exploits have been plugged, and almost all the hard exploits have been plugged.
Go on believing that, kid. "Sure, okay, Windows[3.0|3.1|95|98|Me|XP|Vista] sucked, but with Windows[3.1|95|98|Me|XP|Vista|7] we've fixed all the bugs and plugged all the security holes, honest!" Whatever, keep sucking down the Kool-Aid.
Right... I have NEVER seen commercial products made from experiments where the resulting product was smaller than the experimental rig...
You know that computer you're looking at?
1883 called. They want their "security through obscurity" argument back.
While my high school years aren't THAT far behind, the technology you were allowed to use was limited at best.
So you had to use quill pens dipped in ink you mixed yourself? I kind of doubt it.
"Limited technology" is a phrase that roughly translates to "technology that was commonplace around the time I [the person using the phrase] was born". Most people never think about high-tech their world really is, and has been all their lives.
I think you have it exactly backwards. A literal, context-free reading of the First Amendment says that since there's no printing press and involved in making an online post, Congress can make all the laws it wants barring the expression of opinions on the internet. Taking historical context into account, we recognize that websites are in fact "the press" just as much as newspapers are.
Like most people who focus on the issue of slavery, you're forgetting the practices of indentured servitude, which was probably more widespread at time than was slavery.
I'd be interested to see the numbers on indentured servants vs. slaves; I suspect that by the late 1700s there were more of the latter than the former, but I don't really know for sure.
In any case, it's irrelevant. Indentured servants weren't the "other Persons" the three-fifths compromise referred to at all, and while they were indeed "Person[s] held to Service or Labour" there was never anything for indenture like the massive enforcement apparatus devoted to slavery. Indentured servants -- who, in theory at least, had voluntarily signed their contracts of indenture -- disappeared into the West (which at that point meant just about anything away from salt water) all the time, and most people just shrugged it off. No court ever held that an indentured servant could not, by some condition of birth, bring suit for his freedom. There was no national Fugitive Indentured Servant Act. And most importantly, indenture was a temporary condition; slavery was lifelong. The "Service or Labour" referred to in the Constitution was quite specifically that variety which was involuntary, permanent, and based on the color of skin.
Lincoln was only bent on hurting the south, not helping the slaves -- read his own words about it.
I have, and your interpration is not only wrong, but bizarrely so. Lincoln's overriding concern was holding the Union together, and he had no desire to hurt the South; if anything, he wanted to bring the war to an end much more quickly and humanely than most of his political allies in the North did. His personal distaste for slavery did harden into political policy as the war progressed, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a recognition that the contination of slavery was inextricably linked to the survival of the Confederacy. In 1861, he was naive enough to think that the war might be settled quickly and the nation restored to its antebellum state. By late 1862, he knew better.
I have also read the words of the agitators for secession and the leaders of the Confederacy, and it is overwhelmingly clear that the only states' right which was sufficient to inspire sesession in its defense was this: the "right" to make and enforce laws holding human beings as slaves. Without the fear of abolition, no other cause would have split the Union; with that fear, nothing could hold it together. Modern Southern Confederate apologists who frantically try to find something -- anything! -- other than slavery to justify secession are denying their own ancestors' words.
You know, I understand the desire to make one's ancestors out to be more noble and heroic than they really were. Practically everyone does it to some degree or another. But it can blind us to the reality of the past. Half my family is from the Southern US, and the other half is Russian. I can admire the courage many of my ancestors displayed in their struggles, and even sympathize with their ideals to a degree ... but I never forget what both the CSA and the USSR actually were.
The US Constitution itself is a politically correct document. Look how it dances around the issue of slavery: "Person held to Service or Labour" and "three fifths of all other Persons" are the really egregious ones. Everyone knew who these "other Persons" were, but nobody wanted to say it. It wasn't until 1865, almost 80 years later, that the word "slavery" appeared in the 13th amendment, when it was safely in the past tense -- and then in 1870, when the mealy-mouthed Southern gentry, who had been willing to fight a war on behalf of slavery but could never talk about it when Yankees were about, were back in Congress, the 15th gently whispers about "previous condition of servitude."
So for those who think PC is some new an unique blight on our language, sorry, it's pretty much part of our national DNA.
There are other instances which still cause trouble today. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" means that it's illegal for the government to give money to churches just as much as "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" means that it's illegal for for the government to ban them. And "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" is explanatory, not prescriptive; "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is the part that has the force of law, and all they really needed to write. But there's been enough wiggle room in the phrasing for the enemies of liberty to exploit for the last 220+ years.
Oops, that should have been "... bought up over the last couple of decades ..." above, of course. Apparently I'm also too lazy to use the preview button properly. Fortunately, my editing on the paper I just submitted is of a higher standard. I hope.
No, the root of the problem is that traditional journals have largely been bought up by the last couple of decades by publishing companies which see them as a cash cow. But every journal I know of, traditional or open access, requires that the papers they publish be originals. (There may possibly be a couple of journals which specialize in reprints, I'm too lazy to go check right now.) In and of itself, this is no problem at all. Any academic who tried to pad out a CV with multiple publications of the same paper would be treated with suspicion and contempt, and rightly so.
Sorry if I was unclear -- I was trying to correct OP's assumption that you can publish the same paper in two separate journals, one traditional and one open-access, which of course you can't.
Not exactly. The NIH Public Acess Policy requires that articles based on research funded by NIH be made available to the public no more than a year after publication, by submitting the paper to PubMed. So you don't have to publish your article in both, say, Nature and BMC Biology; you just have to make sure that if the paper is published in Nature, PubMed gets a copy and posts it on their server. Alternately, the PubMed listing may link to the paper at the publisher's site if it's open-access. Wellcome Trust has a similar policy. A number of traditional journal publishers (e.g. Oxford University Press) are automatically making NIH- and/or Wellcome-funded papers available on their sites to ensure compliance -- in fact, most OUP biomedical journals just open everything up after six months to make sure. At a guess, at least three-quarters of the biomedical research published in English depends on NIH, Wellcome, or both, so this is really the easiest way to do it.
I really do believe it's possible for traditional journal publishing, open access, and other methods of disseminating research to peacefully coexist. Just a lot of folks haven't got the message yet.
If the pilot's life isn't at risk, I just don't think he's going to have the same drive to handle an emergency.
During my emergency medical career, my life was rarely at risk, but I didn't feel any lack of drive to try to save other people's lives. And on the rare occasions when I was as much at risk as my patients, it made it a lot harder to do my job. I see no reason to assume that it would be any different for a pilot in the cockpit vs. sitting at a remote control unit miles away. Your point about sensory feedback makes sense, but it's orthogonal to the odd idea that pilots will perform better when they're about to die.
Trust me, when your rear is in the hot seat and death is riding you, you tend to care a lot more about what the hell is going on.
And? Do you really think how much the pilot cares has anything to do with how likely you are, as a passenger, to survive a crash?
I can pretty much guarantee you that in every fatal crash (with the exception of suicides a la 9/11) the pilot cares a great deal. I mean, he really, really doesn't want to die. And yet somehow, this caring fails to translate into survival.
It doesn't matter how much the pilot cares; it matters how well he does his job. Now, I will agree that in general, people who care about their jobs do better than those who don't, and so a caring pilot will, over the course of a career in the cockpit, tend to do better at developing the skills to prevent a fatal crash. But the same can be said of a UAV pilot sitting at a desk. When the crash is happening, when split-second decisions can make the difference between life and death for a hundred or more people ... at that point, it's a little late for how much anyone cares to make a difference.
There are a couple of answers to your question. The first is the answer to the more general question, "Why study the universe at all?" and the answer is "Because it's there." We want to understand the processes by which the universe we see around us was formed, what it's like now (to the degree that "now" has any meaning on cosmological scales) and where it's going. It is an awe-inspiring place, and becomes more so the more we learn about it.
The second, with respect to the study of the Milky Way, is that we learn a lot about our galaxy by studying other galaxies. We don't have a good vantage point for studying the Milky Way, for obvious reasons. Hell, it wasn't until quite recently that we even knew what shape it was (barred spiral vs. plain spiral.) With the enormous number of galaxies out there, many of them similar to our own, at a variety of viewing angles from Earth, we can get a much better idea of what's going on in our own neighborhood than we could by restricting our observations to the Milky Way alone.