If this discussion was well moderated you'd have a -1 flamebait by now. The parent poster in no way said that this court decision exonerated or excused any of the bad that Bush has done. You're just putting words in his mouth so that you can go off on a tangential rant. I think he had a good point and that was that if we want to have balanced discussions and be intellectually honest, we should give credit where credit is due even if it goes to Bush.
Your post is completely wrong (perhaps you're thinking about a different case). I guess I shouldn't be surprised based on your sig, but obviously you didn't read the article...
In dismissing UMG's lawsuit late Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero ruled that the promo CDs are gifts distributed by UMG, as they are mailed free and unsolicited to thousands of people without any expectation or intention of their return.
Unfortunately, like any article that mentions evolution or something that happened in the universe over 6000 years ago, this has turned into a flamewar against creationists and Christians. However, this article is actually news if you are looking for more than just something to throw in the face of people who don't believe in evolution. The reason this is really interesting is that these scientists can go back through the generations of bacteria they stored and pinpoint exactly where the bacteria started to evolve this new trait and how it came about. This will be kind of like stepping through code in a debugger vs. just giving it some input and seeing what the output is. We will actually get to see step by step how a very useful trait evolved uniquely in one population.
To be fair, the yahoo article is dated today. I'm guessing that this is "new news" because it was the first public demonstration:
A Swiss pilot strapped on a jet-powered wing and leaped from a plane Wednesday for the first public demonstration of the homemade device, turning figure eights and soaring high above the Alps.
Those videos likely came from private practice runs. Now it seems they're confident enough with the device that they'll do live public demos.
Quote: Posted 05/04/08 00:03 (GMT) by darthviper107
That's ridiculous. To have it require activation every 10 days, what happens in the future if the servers go offline for some reason? (out of business, decide not to support it or whatever)
Then we would release an update that removes this.
That response is about as well thought out as this whole plan. I'm sure that when the game is no longer supported EA will go to the trouble of creating and distributing such an update as well as maintaining a server to provide the update to all who need it. I'm sure the same would be true if EA went out of business.
Please, it's not as if they've banned their law students from accessing the internet completely. They're just not providing them with a convenient way to play flash games and read blogs during class. I graduated from college about a year ago, and as someone who normally sits in the back of the class I can tell you that a large percentage of the class would just browse the internet idly while the professor lectured and sometimes even play games like WoW. This got to be very distracting when trying to concentrate, because one would have to ignore movement on laptop screens and frantic clicking. I would hope law students would be a bit more mature and would simply be browsing the news or chatting with friends, but when they're doing that they're definitely not getting the most out of their lectures.
That said, overall I don't have a problem with students wasting their tuition money (or their parents' tuition money) by browsing the internet in class all day. But this isn't some power grab to squelch independent thinking. These students are free to browse the internet in their dorms, or the library, or the dining halls, etc. It might be poorly thought out, but I think people (or at least you) are freaking out over nothing.
Just like you, plants require oxygen from the air to metabolize their food (in their case the sugars they produce from photosynthesis). If they had no oxygen, they couldn't perform plant respiration. Plants don't store oxygen from photosynthesis internally so they rely on being able to pull oxygen from the air when they need it. Of course, overall plants produce more oxygen through photosynthesis than they use through respiration, so if we put these moon plants in some kind of dome they'd not die from lack of oxygen.
If it doesn't cause humans to explode, why would it cause plants to explode? From the link...
Humans and animals exposed to vacuum will lose consciousness after a few seconds and die of hypoxia within minutes, but the symptoms are not nearly as graphic as commonly shown in pop culture.
and probably buried by flames about liberal arts schools alongside rants about how CS is math, and how you should go to a tech school if you just want to learn to program... All that aside, here's my perspective as someone who graduated last May and has worked as a software engineer ever since.
If both schools are good and both programs are good (which appears to be the case), go with the school you prefer. What if you got into CS a bit and decided that you want to do something else? It would suck to be stuck at a school that you're not a big fan of because you chose it for a program you're not in any more. Also, what you do in your in-major classes isn't everything. More enjoyable electives, dorm life, food, etc. are very important too.
The reason I say this is because it doesn't really matter which you graduate from. A few hiring managers might care, but those aside you should have no problems if you have good grades and some intern/co-op experience. I work alongside people who went to very technical schools and wouldn't know Faust from Faulkner, and I also work with people who went to liberal arts schools with tiny CS departments. Both sides do good work and had no problem getting hired on. The only real advantage I can think of is that the more technical school might have a more extensive hiring network for CS grads. But a little bit of legwork on your part at the liberal arts college could easily make up for this.
If you're concerned that you won't get enough technical knowledge from the liberal arts college, just be sure to take a summer and semester off of school to co-op with a company in the industry. If you do this, you should get plenty of offers (and probably one from the company where you worked). Also, you'll gain some great real world programming experience and technical knowledge.
Totally off topic, but reminds me of something I saw a few years ago... An addiction recovery program used to advertise on large billboards along the highway in my hometown. The advertisements said, "Alcoholism, there is hope ahead." Sure enough, I drove past one of those and right ahead was another large billboard advertising Budweiser. If only I had a cameraphone back then...
I think people are more capable of that than you give them credit. Even if they aren't, the added broadband expenses might justify hiring a professional to clean up windows or install a new operating system.
Oh please, they already tell you all that you need to know. As soon as you sign up you'll get amazingly insane blindingly fast super speed boostingly high groin grabbingly good comcastesticular fiber optic digital marketing buzzword speeds!!! You'll be literally flying around the internet with service better than god himself could provide (literally). That's way better than any actual numbers an ISP could give you. Numbers are so easy to manipulate. Marketing speak though... That never lies.
Good point, users definitely wouldn't be happy to use their metered bandwidth to download ads embedded in webpages. On the other side of the coin though, think about what this might do to the spam/botnet problem. If a user's box got owned one month and started using up bandwidth like crazy spewing v1agr4 ads all over the internet they would probably want to fix the issue when they got their bill. To continue your analogy, imagine how many people would ignore leaky faucets if we paid for water by the month instead of by the gallon.
No, it's your reading comprehension that is lacking. I really don't know how to make that post any clearer, but I'll try...
You seemed to take issue with this statement that I made:
"Do you want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything?"
Fair enough. You don't want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything. So you're saying that in some situations it's acceptable for an automated process to give permission to use some resource, correct? Then my question is, how do I know when I can trust the automated process that granted me access, and when do I need to ask permission from a person despite an automated process telling me to go ahead? Seriously, is there a list of technologies that I can trust and a list that I can't?
So again, I ask how I'm supposed to know that wireless routers are off limits even if they grant me permission but almost any other technology is acceptable to use when it grants me permission?
And at the risk of flaming... You're not so fucking special that I should just magically know that your router is off limits despite the fact that it willingly grants me access. If you run a website, is that off limits too? How am I supposed to know that it's not just for your family to use or something and I'm not authorized? Sure it responded to my http request, but you're so fucking special that you get special rules to protect your technology from authorized yet unauthorized use.
Why is is that you people think that's too much to ask?
Because you're asking me to read your mind. How am I supposed to know that in almost every situation when a computer or some automated process grants me access that's ok, but when it's a wireless router it's not?
As was posted elsewhere. . . trespassing is trespassing even if land is not fenced or posted private.
That's fine. I don't need to use your land to check my email through your router. In fact, you're the one beaming your wireless signal into my house.
Sorry, it has not been legally established that an open router gives consent to use that person's internet.
Has it been legally established that I cannot be given consent by your router to access the internet? Has it even been legally established that a webserver can render consent for its contents to be browsed?
By giving me an IP address and forwarding data to it, your AP has authorized me to use your service. However, it seems that you don't think consent from your AP should imply consent from you, correct? If that's the case, I'll copy part of a different post I made...
Do you want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything? Then you better stop reading any website. Oh, sure they send you the data when you send their webserver an http request, but so? A computer can't render consent in your bizarre world. You should first contact the owner of any website you'd like to visit to ensure that they didn't just misconfigure their webserver, allowing access to anyone.
And elaborate... When you go to slashdot, you're allowed to use their bandwidth and computer resources because an automated process consents when you send them an http request. How is this different than when I send your router a dhcp request and it complies? I'll even take it a step further. Your router goes so far as to beam electromagnetic radiation onto my property to announce to my computers that it exists. Even slashdot doesn't do that, yet you would likely say it's safe for me to assume that I'm allowed to use slashdot's resources. How is consent from your router different?
Stop calling it stealing and we'll stop calling you a troll. If your router is open, it is giving me its consent to connect to the internet through it. Don't like that? Then secure your router. Do you want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything? Then you better stop reading any website. Oh, sure they send you the data when you send their webserver an http request, but so? A computer can't render consent in your bizarre world. You should first contact the owner of any website you'd like to visit to ensure that they didn't just misconfigure their webserver, allowing access to anyone.
That's a horrible analogy. First, it requires that you trespass on my property. Using a neighbor's wireless connection does not require physical trespass. Second, there was no authorization in your analogy. No person or computer told you that you were allowed to use that outlet. Unless you've secured your AP it does authorize me to use your services by giving me an ip address. If there was a robot in front of the outlet that responded affirmatively when you asked it if you could use the outlet, then maybe you'd have something...
No, this is a perfect example of an ad hominem attack... This particular type of ad hominem is an ad hominem circumstantial:
Ad hominem circumstantial involves pointing out that someone is in circumstances such that he is disposed to take a particular position. Essentially, ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a person. The reason that this is fallacious in syllogistic logic is that pointing out that one's opponent is disposed to make a certain argument does not make the argument, from a logical point of view, any less credible; this overlaps with the genetic fallacy (an argument that a claim is incorrect due to its source).
One example given by wikipedia is:
Tobacco company representatives should not be believed when they say smoking doesn't seriously affect your health, because they're just defending their own multi-million-dollar financial interests.
Just replace the relevant references with words like IBM, OOXML, etc. and it's basically the same.
In less time than it took you to post that you could have gone to http://www.openoffice.org and seen for yourself that the website looks good and has a nice big new user & general info link to a useful page with tons of information.
I hope not. I would imagine that it's much cheaper to just have a competent patent examiner with enough time to do his/her research reject a patent than it is to get the courts involved.
Reminds me of a similar incident with a protest group against walmart.
An article in Las Vegas Weekly reports that as part of its Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign, the UFCW hired some protestors to stand outside a Nevada Wal-Mart and protest against it. According to the article, the UFCW was being hypocritical in several ways. In particular: [1]
* The protest workers were not unionized.
* The UFCW paid the protestors less than Wal-Mart paid its employees. The UFCW paid the protestors $6.00 an hour. Meanwhile, the average Nevada Wal-Mart employee was paid $10.17 an hour.
* The protestors did not have health insurance. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart provided its employees with health insurance. For example, the article mentioned a Wal-Mart employee whose husband received a liver transplant, and the $600,000 cost was paid for by their insurance policy.
* The protestors were working outside in the hot sun where the temperature was 104 degrees. One of the protestors ended up suffering from heat stoke. Meanwhile, the Wal-Mart employees were working inside a cool, air conditoined environment.
Those people had to walk around in the hot sun for $6/hour so I doubt comcast had to pay much for warm butts to sit inside and nap.
Disclaimer: I'm all for protesting walmart although I don't think it's right to pay people to do it. And I think what comcast did was much much shadier.
Slashdot Mirror
If this discussion was well moderated you'd have a -1 flamebait by now. The parent poster in no way said that this court decision exonerated or excused any of the bad that Bush has done. You're just putting words in his mouth so that you can go off on a tangential rant. I think he had a good point and that was that if we want to have balanced discussions and be intellectually honest, we should give credit where credit is due even if it goes to Bush.
Unfortunately, like any article that mentions evolution or something that happened in the universe over 6000 years ago, this has turned into a flamewar against creationists and Christians. However, this article is actually news if you are looking for more than just something to throw in the face of people who don't believe in evolution. The reason this is really interesting is that these scientists can go back through the generations of bacteria they stored and pinpoint exactly where the bacteria started to evolve this new trait and how it came about. This will be kind of like stepping through code in a debugger vs. just giving it some input and seeing what the output is. We will actually get to see step by step how a very useful trait evolved uniquely in one population.
That said, overall I don't have a problem with students wasting their tuition money (or their parents' tuition money) by browsing the internet in class all day. But this isn't some power grab to squelch independent thinking. These students are free to browse the internet in their dorms, or the library, or the dining halls, etc. It might be poorly thought out, but I think people (or at least you) are freaking out over nothing.
Just like you, plants require oxygen from the air to metabolize their food (in their case the sugars they produce from photosynthesis). If they had no oxygen, they couldn't perform plant respiration. Plants don't store oxygen from photosynthesis internally so they rely on being able to pull oxygen from the air when they need it. Of course, overall plants produce more oxygen through photosynthesis than they use through respiration, so if we put these moon plants in some kind of dome they'd not die from lack of oxygen.
If both schools are good and both programs are good (which appears to be the case), go with the school you prefer. What if you got into CS a bit and decided that you want to do something else? It would suck to be stuck at a school that you're not a big fan of because you chose it for a program you're not in any more. Also, what you do in your in-major classes isn't everything. More enjoyable electives, dorm life, food, etc. are very important too.
The reason I say this is because it doesn't really matter which you graduate from. A few hiring managers might care, but those aside you should have no problems if you have good grades and some intern/co-op experience. I work alongside people who went to very technical schools and wouldn't know Faust from Faulkner, and I also work with people who went to liberal arts schools with tiny CS departments. Both sides do good work and had no problem getting hired on. The only real advantage I can think of is that the more technical school might have a more extensive hiring network for CS grads. But a little bit of legwork on your part at the liberal arts college could easily make up for this.
If you're concerned that you won't get enough technical knowledge from the liberal arts college, just be sure to take a summer and semester off of school to co-op with a company in the industry. If you do this, you should get plenty of offers (and probably one from the company where you worked). Also, you'll gain some great real world programming experience and technical knowledge.
Totally off topic, but reminds me of something I saw a few years ago... An addiction recovery program used to advertise on large billboards along the highway in my hometown. The advertisements said, "Alcoholism, there is hope ahead." Sure enough, I drove past one of those and right ahead was another large billboard advertising Budweiser. If only I had a cameraphone back then...
I think people are more capable of that than you give them credit. Even if they aren't, the added broadband expenses might justify hiring a professional to clean up windows or install a new operating system.
Oh please, they already tell you all that you need to know. As soon as you sign up you'll get amazingly insane blindingly fast super speed boostingly high groin grabbingly good comcastesticular fiber optic digital marketing buzzword speeds!!! You'll be literally flying around the internet with service better than god himself could provide (literally). That's way better than any actual numbers an ISP could give you. Numbers are so easy to manipulate. Marketing speak though... That never lies.
Good point, users definitely wouldn't be happy to use their metered bandwidth to download ads embedded in webpages. On the other side of the coin though, think about what this might do to the spam/botnet problem. If a user's box got owned one month and started using up bandwidth like crazy spewing v1agr4 ads all over the internet they would probably want to fix the issue when they got their bill. To continue your analogy, imagine how many people would ignore leaky faucets if we paid for water by the month instead of by the gallon.
You seemed to take issue with this statement that I made: Fair enough. You don't want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything. So you're saying that in some situations it's acceptable for an automated process to give permission to use some resource, correct? Then my question is, how do I know when I can trust the automated process that granted me access, and when do I need to ask permission from a person despite an automated process telling me to go ahead? Seriously, is there a list of technologies that I can trust and a list that I can't?
So again, I ask how I'm supposed to know that wireless routers are off limits even if they grant me permission but almost any other technology is acceptable to use when it grants me permission?
And at the risk of flaming... You're not so fucking special that I should just magically know that your router is off limits despite the fact that it willingly grants me access. If you run a website, is that off limits too? How am I supposed to know that it's not just for your family to use or something and I'm not authorized? Sure it responded to my http request, but you're so fucking special that you get special rules to protect your technology from authorized yet unauthorized use.
By giving me an IP address and forwarding data to it, your AP has authorized me to use your service. However, it seems that you don't think consent from your AP should imply consent from you, correct? If that's the case, I'll copy part of a different post I made...
Do you want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything? Then you better stop reading any website. Oh, sure they send you the data when you send their webserver an http request, but so? A computer can't render consent in your bizarre world. You should first contact the owner of any website you'd like to visit to ensure that they didn't just misconfigure their webserver, allowing access to anyone.
And elaborate... When you go to slashdot, you're allowed to use their bandwidth and computer resources because an automated process consents when you send them an http request. How is this different than when I send your router a dhcp request and it complies? I'll even take it a step further. Your router goes so far as to beam electromagnetic radiation onto my property to announce to my computers that it exists. Even slashdot doesn't do that, yet you would likely say it's safe for me to assume that I'm allowed to use slashdot's resources. How is consent from your router different?
Stop calling it stealing and we'll stop calling you a troll. If your router is open, it is giving me its consent to connect to the internet through it. Don't like that? Then secure your router. Do you want to live in a world where you must get consent from a human before doing anything? Then you better stop reading any website. Oh, sure they send you the data when you send their webserver an http request, but so? A computer can't render consent in your bizarre world. You should first contact the owner of any website you'd like to visit to ensure that they didn't just misconfigure their webserver, allowing access to anyone.
That's a horrible analogy. First, it requires that you trespass on my property. Using a neighbor's wireless connection does not require physical trespass. Second, there was no authorization in your analogy. No person or computer told you that you were allowed to use that outlet. Unless you've secured your AP it does authorize me to use your services by giving me an ip address. If there was a robot in front of the outlet that responded affirmatively when you asked it if you could use the outlet, then maybe you'd have something...
One example given by wikipedia is:
Just replace the relevant references with words like IBM, OOXML, etc. and it's basically the same.
In less time than it took you to post that you could have gone to http://www.openoffice.org and seen for yourself that the website looks good and has a nice big new user & general info link to a useful page with tons of information.
I downloaded it for the free t-shirt.
I hope not. I would imagine that it's much cheaper to just have a competent patent examiner with enough time to do his/her research reject a patent than it is to get the courts involved.
Disclaimer: I'm all for protesting walmart although I don't think it's right to pay people to do it. And I think what comcast did was much much shadier.