Teachers also use word problems, discrete objects, and liquids, ideally delivered in quick enough succession that the student's brain catches the only constant: the concept of a fraction.
I think the problem isn't education research getting into the classroom - it's exactly the opposite. Teaching is an application-focused industry. When a teacher solves a particular educational problem, the technique stays within the school district, or perhaps makes a few rounds at educational conferences. The technique rarely gets any widespread attention, hardly any formal study, and is entirely forgotten within the decade... until an "educational researcher" stumbles across it and publishes a paper describing its effectiveness, which doesn't help because the school boards aren't interested in using new experimental techniques when their budgets are already in such jeopardy.
So was every gay person who engaged in relationships with other gay people an activist? Or were they all criminal scum because they didn't intend to get caught?
In accordance with due process, anyone "getting caught" through a well-regulated surveillance system would first have been caught through normal means. This is why I specified that any information coming out of queries should simply be handed over to the judicial branch. Even with clear evidence, it's still the prosecutor's job to make a case, and there is always the possibility of legitimate jury nullification. Prosecutors are not required to prosecute every crime, whether or not anyone was harmed.
Anyone engaging in a forbidden relationship could indeed be caught by surveillance and charged by an oppressive prosecutor - but a camera produces less paperwork and better evidence.
As a matter of course, we already can see the results of this. We already have drug cases where police have received secret tips and then manufactured a false chain of events to justify an arrest and hide the real source of information.
Except that's not how it really works. Rather than manufacturing evidence, the DEA is an advisory source of more accurate information that is never actually brought to trial. Again, this is why the surveillance system should have no power in itself. All information coming out to the public should be passed through a trial judge to ensure its relevance and importance.
It doesn't matter if the will of the people is to silence speech, it is not the governments job to enforce that.
Sure it is. Speech is silenced all the time, for many reasons. Mostly, it's just for ease of conducting business. For example, you're allowed to submit any petitions or express any opinions you want at the appropriate time, but many states have various laws against interrupting the legislature. The US government's job is to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty". Being a representative republic, it is the will of the people that determines how to pursue these things. Personally, I'm inclined to agree that free expression is one of those "blessings of liberty", but I prefer having functional authority.
Those limits specifically include protections against search... I cannot believe that the people who wrote the 4th and 5th amendments would have envisioned such a program as falling within their powers to implement.
The people who wrote the 4th and 5th amendments likely wouldn't have cared. The second through eighth amendments are all aimed to counteract the colonial British harassment tactics, and really had little to do with personal rights when they were written. Do note that that was over two centuries ago, when walls were thin and gossip was a major source of entertainment. The locally-posted British military would routinely close down colonists' businesses without reason, severely disrupting the owner's life. Goods would be confiscated under weak excuses, and if the colonist resisted, they'd likely be arrested and held indefinitely while their family starved.
The application of the 4th amendment to privacy is a fairly new concept, made possible by the Supreme Court recognizing that the will of the people had changed to demand such protection. Since the surveillance I describe would not unreasonably disrupt the target's life, would be ineffective for harassment, and could more easily be used as a tool to prove one's innocence under the sixth amendment, I see no conflict with the Constitution.
A lot of progress socially and morally has come from law breakers.
As has a lot of regression and resistance to change.
When an activist intentionally breaks a law as an act of civil disobedience, usually the goal is to be caught. During the ensuing trial, the activist's chosen issue is discussed in the media at length. Privacy surrounding the act is undesirable, and the records of the activist's actions leading up to the event would be subject to the judge's review before being made public. As a matter of course, anyone accused of a crime could be protected from inquiries without a warrant, to prevent overzealous prosecutors from going after the activist's associates.
As for where gay rights would be today, I'd suspect about the same. Civil rights, on the other hand, wouldn't have had to deal with the militant violence of the Black Panthers and related groups, instead focusing on King's speeches and his message of nonviolence. The movement could have been dominated by calls for improvement, rather than calls for revolution. Perhaps today, we'd have government that responds to peoples' requests, rather than treating everyone as an adversary.
"What goes on behind closed doors" is already known to the participants. For a government that ostensibly follows the will of the people, protecting those participants from injustice, regardless of their opinions, is its duty. Being inside those closed doors and aware of everything going on, with strong operational security, helps fulfill that duty. Again, though, the information gathered should be kept secure unless it's needed - and only then should it be used on a limited basis, and its use should be known to those affected.
if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
Well, yes... but it's one more thing to screw up, and it takes time, and you need someone who knows how to reprogram a receiver's firmware rather than just an Arduino, RPi, or other DIY autopilot.
Amazingly, the US government does actually understand that perfect security is impossible. Rather, the modern security strategy is centered around making enemy attacks more difficult, ideally requiring so much planning and expertise that they can be noticed and stopped before coming to fruition. As you've seen, most folks don't know that GPS is artificially limited, and most normal applications don't need the high precision of an unlimited receiver. When someone starts asking around on forums or posting classified ads looking for GPS firmware experts, suspicions are rightfully raised.
Of course, with more suspicion comes the need to eliminate such suspicion. If you're claiming to need unrestricted GPS for rocketry, this probably isn't your first rocket. There's likely records of supply purchases, perhaps travel to launch sites, and probably even phone records of you calling other rocketry experts. If only there was some big searchable database of exculpatory evidence, to help quickly separate the valid suspicions from the false positives...
NSA... shit on the constitution...
What seems strange to me is that we're mad at the NSA for invading our privacy, when we really should be mad at them for having poor access control. In my opinion, the NSA's databases should be kept operational, but with a PR campaign and better operational security. Database queries must be associated with an ongoing investigation, which could be started with as little as an anonymous tip, and must end either with escalation (to the judicial branch) or dismissal accompanied by a letter to the target disclosing the inquiry and its nature. Records should also be subject to subpoenas, but their contents must be reviewed by the judge prior to inclusion in any trial.
The NSA has built the ability to find evidence on an unprecedented scale. We should not fear such an ability, but rather we should be demanding that such power directly and visibly serves the people.
"In polynomial time" does not necessarily mean "quickly". Perhaps the verification will only take a century, rather than fifty millenia... I'd still prefer to not wait around for it.
Per Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Therefore, any of our technology that is insufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from being natural. To a sufficiently-advanced alien civilization, our adorable little skyscrapers are simply the natural result of our natural building instinct.
you're taking carbon that [was] sitting quietly underground
A fact that has always given me mild amusement. Our current trend of releasing the CO2 from fossil fuels is just repairing the damage caused by prehistoric vegetation, which absorbed the natural CO2 from the atmosphere and replaced it with harmful oxygen.
Surely, our ethical duty is to return the Earth to its former glory!
The alternative attitude is what happened recently in my hometown, where a student was nearly suspended for possessing "hacking tools" - a Linux live-cd.
Part of the purpose of schools is to be a safety net, where irresponsible kids can test their limits and, while not getting away with anything fully, they are shielded from the worst repercussions and are given gentle encouragement that they are not supposed to be doing that. Unfortunately, that attitude doesn't mix with the "freedom is doing anything I want" or the "kids should be imprisoned in schools until they are perfect adults" mentalities that are so popular today, and it's made even more complex (as is everything else) by the ever-expanding community boundaries brought about by modern technology.
Sales teams are, in my experience, usually the ones running demos. Since they're generally not technology-minded people, they also make for decent testers, and can give valuable feedback about where interfaces aren't intuitive - usually because that's the point in the demo where they have to pull out the reassuring comments and distracting details to cover up how sloppy the system is.
I agree that Google should be emphasizing teamwork to produce better interfaces, but that's utterly unrelated to the "quality of its engineers". It's not an engineering problem.
Hardly. Basic mobile phones in West Africa cost about $20, or about a month's wages, when purchased in a store. When bought from a street vendor or from a friend, they can be had for as little as $1 for a very low-end model.
Where in America, a phone is a status symbol showing how much wealth you can spend luxury, in Africa it's a declaration that you will be a part of modern globally-connected society. To cultures emphasizing family and tribal relationships, and now facing decline as tribe members leave for economic gain elsewhere, a cell phone represents the ability to always stay connected. A village that is still able to contact its departed members is held in higher regard than one with just money. Much of Africa's history has seen forms of money come and go, but territorial influence is always valued.
Nice tech but the user experience is very low for a company that prides itself on the quality of its engineers.
I know... it's such a shame that the engineers are busy building the cool tech, so they aren't helping out the design and sales team with their brilliance.
I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...
aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?
Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.
Minors are special. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.
California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.
Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.
am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever
The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.
I highly recommend reading the actual text of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.
...But it happened in Chicago.... The boss says nothing happened, so nothing happened. I know that analyst said something happened, but he's an idiot. Look how dumb he is now! He's trying to swim with concrete shoes! You're not that dumb, are you?
It's not that interesting. They can be committing "insider trading" even if they'd waited until after the information had arrived, because they'd still have had an unfair time to decide what to do with it. As others have pointed out, in this case someone probably prepared an order plan ahead of time, and sent it off just ahead of everyone else. Even today's computers still take some time to process the incoming data.
Valve's second major living-room-gaming announcement...
...so we're done now, I guess. Next they'll move on to a pair of kitchen-gaming announcements, and maybe a hallway-outside-the-living-room-gaming announcement just to keep the hype up, but interest will wane, anyway... until the upstairs-bedroom-by-the-window-gaming announcement, which will bring back hopes for a third living-room-gaming announcement, and Valve will see the pressure, and release a backyard-gaming announcement.
how do you know that "In this case, the DEA claims their actions are justified by a SCOTUS ruling"? Does the President not have access to the same newspapers I do?
I read TFA, and the linked FAs, and one of them gave the DEA's reason as background. Then I used a bit of critical thought, and realized that the ACLU might not be wholly unbiased, so I read more, mentally emphasizing the DEA's justification. Then, applying Hanlon's razor, I assume that the DEA believes their own justification, and would apply that in their reports to the President.
Sure, he has access to the same newspapers you do, but he's also getting the counter-biased reports, so he's not likely to be as overcome by hatred as you are.
where is his office of civil liberties
The same place as every other President's: In the other branches. Funny thing about the President is that he has no ability, per the Constitution, to stop anything. He has veto power, but that's about it. Rather, the Congressional committees are supposed to be deciding what's right or wrong, and the Supreme Court is supposed to reconcile that decision with society and precedent.
The fact... proves that he doesn't care.
Or it proves you don't know everything about what's going on, and are just looking for a scapegoat for your prejudice against the government.
You know about it because you read a one-sided story fed to you by the media. Before that, you didn't know about it, or if you did see some little blurb about the case before now, it'd be mixed in with the millions of other trivial incidents that happen every day. The President's office is exactly the same. They get their updates through thousands of periodic reports, and each one comes with a ready-built rationale for what they're doing. In this case, the DEA claims their actions are justified by a SCOTUS ruling. Mixed in with the reports from every other agency, it's indistinguishable. There is no big red label saying "THIS IS WRONG" sticking out.
Of course, in hindsight, we can easily see the reports, the flimsy justification, and the resulting inaction, but that doesn't make the situation any better. It's just easier to blame somebody, then return to our blissful ignorance while the next outrageous indecency is happening right under our noses.
I remember well my first Linux system. LILO on a floppy disk, which I had to modify by hand because my hardware wasn't detected properly. Once I booted into the shell, I had to start X, which would crash, but then I could start it again and it'd work fine.
A decade ago, Linux was indeed a pretty shaky option for desktop use. In contrast, Windows XP was pretty straightforward to install and it worked well quickly - no hacking required.
That's exactly what Canonical's done well with Ubuntu. Ubuntu (or a derivative) is usually my first choice of distro, because I often work on donated hardware and I just need the drivers to work from the start. The only configuration I do by hand now is for customization, not getting it to work in the first place.
As the proud owner of not a single console (except an old homebuilt kit), I'd agree.
My point was that the Wii is intentionally targeted at a different market segment than the PS4 or XBox. That allowed it to be successful, because its direct competitors weren't designed for that market. PCs are similarly different - they're designed to be a general-purpose user-configurable multi-tasking machine, and there's just no other device that competes in that regard. If you must have the absolute highest video performance, you need to put the latest greatest video card in your custom-built overclocked rig. Customizability isn't a feature consoles offer, so they're not the best fit for the performance-loving market.
Stock car crashes often send debris hurtling down the track in the right direction, too. The car's still screwed.
Personally, I think PowerShell is departing further from any UNIX ideals. Part of what makes UNIX ideal is that (almost) everything is plain text. Data passed between components should be serialized into a human-readable form, or at least something a human can easily understand with a hex editor. That means that replacing components is possible and fairly straightforward, and your debugger can be a plain text editor.
PowerShell is different. It's the bastard child of COM objects and batch files, raised by.NET, with occasional visits from Crazy Uncle BASIC. Everything is a binary object, except for parameters being passed, which are strings, except for arrays which are neither strings nor regular objects, unless they're an object pretending to be an array... but either way, arrays being passed as parameters are subject to unpacking to become strings. Want to inspect any of this? Your tool is Microsoft's documentation. Since all of PowerShell's actual function comes from compiled libraries, you can only use what the vendor tells you to use, and good luck figuring out what exactly it's doing.
In other words, now batch files can suffer from inaccessible code, too!
That depends on local law. Some states and cities have absolute pedestrian right-of-way, where they can cross at any crosswalk legally at any time. I've heard of other places that allow any pedestrian who started legally to finish crossing, no matter how long it takes (used as a defense by arrested protesters who blocked traffic). In those cases, even with a green light, the driver can be ticketed.
I'm not particularly familiar with the laws in Gwinnett County, but I'd bet many of the ticketed drivers aren't, either. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it.
Slashdot Mirror
Teachers also use word problems, discrete objects, and liquids, ideally delivered in quick enough succession that the student's brain catches the only constant: the concept of a fraction.
I think the problem isn't education research getting into the classroom - it's exactly the opposite. Teaching is an application-focused industry. When a teacher solves a particular educational problem, the technique stays within the school district, or perhaps makes a few rounds at educational conferences. The technique rarely gets any widespread attention, hardly any formal study, and is entirely forgotten within the decade... until an "educational researcher" stumbles across it and publishes a paper describing its effectiveness, which doesn't help because the school boards aren't interested in using new experimental techniques when their budgets are already in such jeopardy.
There is no Nobel Prize for education.
So was every gay person who engaged in relationships with other gay people an activist? Or were they all criminal scum because they didn't intend to get caught?
In accordance with due process, anyone "getting caught" through a well-regulated surveillance system would first have been caught through normal means. This is why I specified that any information coming out of queries should simply be handed over to the judicial branch. Even with clear evidence, it's still the prosecutor's job to make a case, and there is always the possibility of legitimate jury nullification. Prosecutors are not required to prosecute every crime, whether or not anyone was harmed.
Anyone engaging in a forbidden relationship could indeed be caught by surveillance and charged by an oppressive prosecutor - but a camera produces less paperwork and better evidence.
As a matter of course, we already can see the results of this. We already have drug cases where police have received secret tips and then manufactured a false chain of events to justify an arrest and hide the real source of information.
Except that's not how it really works. Rather than manufacturing evidence, the DEA is an advisory source of more accurate information that is never actually brought to trial. Again, this is why the surveillance system should have no power in itself. All information coming out to the public should be passed through a trial judge to ensure its relevance and importance.
It doesn't matter if the will of the people is to silence speech, it is not the governments job to enforce that.
Sure it is. Speech is silenced all the time, for many reasons. Mostly, it's just for ease of conducting business. For example, you're allowed to submit any petitions or express any opinions you want at the appropriate time, but many states have various laws against interrupting the legislature. The US government's job is to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty". Being a representative republic, it is the will of the people that determines how to pursue these things. Personally, I'm inclined to agree that free expression is one of those "blessings of liberty", but I prefer having functional authority.
Those limits specifically include protections against search... I cannot believe that the people who wrote the 4th and 5th amendments would have envisioned such a program as falling within their powers to implement.
The people who wrote the 4th and 5th amendments likely wouldn't have cared. The second through eighth amendments are all aimed to counteract the colonial British harassment tactics, and really had little to do with personal rights when they were written. Do note that that was over two centuries ago, when walls were thin and gossip was a major source of entertainment. The locally-posted British military would routinely close down colonists' businesses without reason, severely disrupting the owner's life. Goods would be confiscated under weak excuses, and if the colonist resisted, they'd likely be arrested and held indefinitely while their family starved.
The application of the 4th amendment to privacy is a fairly new concept, made possible by the Supreme Court recognizing that the will of the people had changed to demand such protection. Since the surveillance I describe would not unreasonably disrupt the target's life, would be ineffective for harassment, and could more easily be used as a tool to prove one's innocence under the sixth amendment, I see no conflict with the Constitution.
A lot of progress socially and morally has come from law breakers.
As has a lot of regression and resistance to change.
When an activist intentionally breaks a law as an act of civil disobedience, usually the goal is to be caught. During the ensuing trial, the activist's chosen issue is discussed in the media at length. Privacy surrounding the act is undesirable, and the records of the activist's actions leading up to the event would be subject to the judge's review before being made public. As a matter of course, anyone accused of a crime could be protected from inquiries without a warrant, to prevent overzealous prosecutors from going after the activist's associates.
As for where gay rights would be today, I'd suspect about the same. Civil rights, on the other hand, wouldn't have had to deal with the militant violence of the Black Panthers and related groups, instead focusing on King's speeches and his message of nonviolence. The movement could have been dominated by calls for improvement, rather than calls for revolution. Perhaps today, we'd have government that responds to peoples' requests, rather than treating everyone as an adversary.
"What goes on behind closed doors" is already known to the participants. For a government that ostensibly follows the will of the people, protecting those participants from injustice, regardless of their opinions, is its duty. Being inside those closed doors and aware of everything going on, with strong operational security, helps fulfill that duty. Again, though, the information gathered should be kept secure unless it's needed - and only then should it be used on a limited basis, and its use should be known to those affected.
if you're competent to make your own attack drone, you probably know how to bypass the restrictions.
Well, yes... but it's one more thing to screw up, and it takes time, and you need someone who knows how to reprogram a receiver's firmware rather than just an Arduino, RPi, or other DIY autopilot.
Amazingly, the US government does actually understand that perfect security is impossible. Rather, the modern security strategy is centered around making enemy attacks more difficult, ideally requiring so much planning and expertise that they can be noticed and stopped before coming to fruition. As you've seen, most folks don't know that GPS is artificially limited, and most normal applications don't need the high precision of an unlimited receiver. When someone starts asking around on forums or posting classified ads looking for GPS firmware experts, suspicions are rightfully raised.
Of course, with more suspicion comes the need to eliminate such suspicion. If you're claiming to need unrestricted GPS for rocketry, this probably isn't your first rocket. There's likely records of supply purchases, perhaps travel to launch sites, and probably even phone records of you calling other rocketry experts. If only there was some big searchable database of exculpatory evidence, to help quickly separate the valid suspicions from the false positives...
NSA... shit on the constitution...
What seems strange to me is that we're mad at the NSA for invading our privacy, when we really should be mad at them for having poor access control. In my opinion, the NSA's databases should be kept operational, but with a PR campaign and better operational security. Database queries must be associated with an ongoing investigation, which could be started with as little as an anonymous tip, and must end either with escalation (to the judicial branch) or dismissal accompanied by a letter to the target disclosing the inquiry and its nature. Records should also be subject to subpoenas, but their contents must be reviewed by the judge prior to inclusion in any trial.
The NSA has built the ability to find evidence on an unprecedented scale. We should not fear such an ability, but rather we should be demanding that such power directly and visibly serves the people.
"In polynomial time" does not necessarily mean "quickly". Perhaps the verification will only take a century, rather than fifty millenia... I'd still prefer to not wait around for it.
What is not natural is supernatural.
What is supernatural is magic.
Per Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Therefore, any of our technology that is insufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from being natural. To a sufficiently-advanced alien civilization, our adorable little skyscrapers are simply the natural result of our natural building instinct.
Well, obviously. H. Sapiens is a parasitic species that was not present in that pristine natural environment.
Also, s/vegetation/microbes/ in my first post... Silly absent-minded lunch-break posting...
you're taking carbon that [was] sitting quietly underground
A fact that has always given me mild amusement. Our current trend of releasing the CO2 from fossil fuels is just repairing the damage caused by prehistoric vegetation, which absorbed the natural CO2 from the atmosphere and replaced it with harmful oxygen.
Surely, our ethical duty is to return the Earth to its former glory!
The alternative attitude is what happened recently in my hometown, where a student was nearly suspended for possessing "hacking tools" - a Linux live-cd.
Part of the purpose of schools is to be a safety net, where irresponsible kids can test their limits and, while not getting away with anything fully, they are shielded from the worst repercussions and are given gentle encouragement that they are not supposed to be doing that. Unfortunately, that attitude doesn't mix with the "freedom is doing anything I want" or the "kids should be imprisoned in schools until they are perfect adults" mentalities that are so popular today, and it's made even more complex (as is everything else) by the ever-expanding community boundaries brought about by modern technology.
Thank you. That is exactly what I wanted to know.
Sales teams are, in my experience, usually the ones running demos. Since they're generally not technology-minded people, they also make for decent testers, and can give valuable feedback about where interfaces aren't intuitive - usually because that's the point in the demo where they have to pull out the reassuring comments and distracting details to cover up how sloppy the system is.
I agree that Google should be emphasizing teamwork to produce better interfaces, but that's utterly unrelated to the "quality of its engineers". It's not an engineering problem.
Hardly. Basic mobile phones in West Africa cost about $20, or about a month's wages, when purchased in a store. When bought from a street vendor or from a friend, they can be had for as little as $1 for a very low-end model.
Where in America, a phone is a status symbol showing how much wealth you can spend luxury, in Africa it's a declaration that you will be a part of modern globally-connected society. To cultures emphasizing family and tribal relationships, and now facing decline as tribe members leave for economic gain elsewhere, a cell phone represents the ability to always stay connected. A village that is still able to contact its departed members is held in higher regard than one with just money. Much of Africa's history has seen forms of money come and go, but territorial influence is always valued.
Nice tech but the user experience is very low for a company that prides itself on the quality of its engineers.
I know... it's such a shame that the engineers are busy building the cool tech, so they aren't helping out the design and sales team with their brilliance.
I don't know about 30%, but the statistic for people being productive is usually the GDP per capita
.
TL;DR: Yes, yes, no, probably not.
I am not a lawyer, I am certainly not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just read a lot of laws, and have far too many lawyer friends for my own good...
aren't they giving permission to publish it online? Can they really revoke that permission later?
Per the conditions of your site's Terms of Service (you do have them, don't you?), the content your users give you may or may not be retained, retransmitted, adapted, or whatever else. By using the site, your users agree to that and grant you permission. Those terms govern what you can do with what you're given. For example, Slashdot's terms say that by commenting, you're giving them permission to publish your comments indefinitely, in pretty much any form they want. Under Slashdot's terms, that permission cannot be rescinded.
Minors are special. Despite the apparent common opinion here, they can enter into a contract... they just usually can't be forced to uphold their end of it. As far as copyright permission goes, this means you probably are already under a legal obligation to remove it if they want, because they can choose to void the contract giving you the permission... but to make you do that, the minor would have to realize the intricacies of contract law, realize that they still have exclusive copyright over their posting, and figure out how to contact you to request removal.
California's law requires an accessible way to remove (or request the removal of) a minor's own posting, that stops whatever's deleted from being published further. It's practically irrelevant, since most sites already have such a function... the problem is that it's hard to find, and people don't use it nearly as quickly as they should. The law only requires that such a function be "clear". Good luck with that.
Aren't there First Amendment issues here?
The First Amendment has no real part in this. The First Amendment is between you and the government, only. It does not come into play in contracts between you and a web site operator, unless the operator is a government entity itself. That might involve the First Amendment, but I doubt it will be a significant issue.
am I legally obligated to maintain that site forever
The law doesn't have any time limit built into it, so time limits will be up to the courts to decide, but the law also doesn't require you to actually erase the data. You're only forbidden from retransmitting it, so if your site has a self-service delete button, that's probably fine. If you take your whole site offline, nobody can get to it, so that's probably fine, too. Bringing it back later with all the old content intact is riskier. The exact type of site also matters, because the law only comes into effect if you know that minors are using it. A forum dedicated to the latest teen heartthrobs would obviously fall into that category, but a forum for discussing do-it-yourself RV repairs probably wouldn't.
I highly recommend reading the actual text of the law. The first part is prohibiting certain advertisements toward minors, but the erasure part starts at section 22581. As with all legal text, realize that it's written to cover as much as possible, so try to ignore the repetition and it becomes much easier to read.
...But it happened in Chicago.... The boss says nothing happened, so nothing happened. I know that analyst said something happened, but he's an idiot. Look how dumb he is now! He's trying to swim with concrete shoes! You're not that dumb, are you?
It's not that interesting. They can be committing "insider trading" even if they'd waited until after the information had arrived, because they'd still have had an unfair time to decide what to do with it. As others have pointed out, in this case someone probably prepared an order plan ahead of time, and sent it off just ahead of everyone else. Even today's computers still take some time to process the incoming data.
Valve's second major living-room-gaming announcement...
...so we're done now, I guess. Next they'll move on to a pair of kitchen-gaming announcements, and maybe a hallway-outside-the-living-room-gaming announcement just to keep the hype up, but interest will wane, anyway... until the upstairs-bedroom-by-the-window-gaming announcement, which will bring back hopes for a third living-room-gaming announcement, and Valve will see the pressure, and release a backyard-gaming announcement.
how do you know that "In this case, the DEA claims their actions are justified by a SCOTUS ruling"? Does the President not have access to the same newspapers I do?
I read TFA, and the linked FAs, and one of them gave the DEA's reason as background. Then I used a bit of critical thought, and realized that the ACLU might not be wholly unbiased, so I read more, mentally emphasizing the DEA's justification. Then, applying Hanlon's razor, I assume that the DEA believes their own justification, and would apply that in their reports to the President.
Sure, he has access to the same newspapers you do, but he's also getting the counter-biased reports, so he's not likely to be as overcome by hatred as you are.
where is his office of civil liberties
The same place as every other President's: In the other branches. Funny thing about the President is that he has no ability, per the Constitution, to stop anything. He has veto power, but that's about it. Rather, the Congressional committees are supposed to be deciding what's right or wrong, and the Supreme Court is supposed to reconcile that decision with society and precedent.
The fact ... proves that he doesn't care.
Or it proves you don't know everything about what's going on, and are just looking for a scapegoat for your prejudice against the government.
The buck used to stop with the President.
When was that, exactly?
You know about it because you read a one-sided story fed to you by the media. Before that, you didn't know about it, or if you did see some little blurb about the case before now, it'd be mixed in with the millions of other trivial incidents that happen every day. The President's office is exactly the same. They get their updates through thousands of periodic reports, and each one comes with a ready-built rationale for what they're doing. In this case, the DEA claims their actions are justified by a SCOTUS ruling. Mixed in with the reports from every other agency, it's indistinguishable. There is no big red label saying "THIS IS WRONG" sticking out.
Of course, in hindsight, we can easily see the reports, the flimsy justification, and the resulting inaction, but that doesn't make the situation any better. It's just easier to blame somebody, then return to our blissful ignorance while the next outrageous indecency is happening right under our noses.
If you prefer, s/text file//.
I remember well my first Linux system. LILO on a floppy disk, which I had to modify by hand because my hardware wasn't detected properly. Once I booted into the shell, I had to start X, which would crash, but then I could start it again and it'd work fine.
A decade ago, Linux was indeed a pretty shaky option for desktop use. In contrast, Windows XP was pretty straightforward to install and it worked well quickly - no hacking required.
That's exactly what Canonical's done well with Ubuntu. Ubuntu (or a derivative) is usually my first choice of distro, because I often work on donated hardware and I just need the drivers to work from the start. The only configuration I do by hand now is for customization, not getting it to work in the first place.
As the proud owner of not a single console (except an old homebuilt kit), I'd agree.
My point was that the Wii is intentionally targeted at a different market segment than the PS4 or XBox. That allowed it to be successful, because its direct competitors weren't designed for that market. PCs are similarly different - they're designed to be a general-purpose user-configurable multi-tasking machine, and there's just no other device that competes in that regard. If you must have the absolute highest video performance, you need to put the latest greatest video card in your custom-built overclocked rig. Customizability isn't a feature consoles offer, so they're not the best fit for the performance-loving market.
Stock car crashes often send debris hurtling down the track in the right direction, too. The car's still screwed.
Personally, I think PowerShell is departing further from any UNIX ideals. Part of what makes UNIX ideal is that (almost) everything is plain text. Data passed between components should be serialized into a human-readable form, or at least something a human can easily understand with a hex editor. That means that replacing components is possible and fairly straightforward, and your debugger can be a plain text editor.
PowerShell is different. It's the bastard child of COM objects and batch files, raised by .NET, with occasional visits from Crazy Uncle BASIC. Everything is a binary object, except for parameters being passed, which are strings, except for arrays which are neither strings nor regular objects, unless they're an object pretending to be an array... but either way, arrays being passed as parameters are subject to unpacking to become strings. Want to inspect any of this? Your tool is Microsoft's documentation. Since all of PowerShell's actual function comes from compiled libraries, you can only use what the vendor tells you to use, and good luck figuring out what exactly it's doing.
In other words, now batch files can suffer from inaccessible code, too!
Curiosity overcame me. Apparently Georgia is one such state. Pedestrians in crosswalks have the right of way, even at lights.
That depends on local law. Some states and cities have absolute pedestrian right-of-way, where they can cross at any crosswalk legally at any time. I've heard of other places that allow any pedestrian who started legally to finish crossing, no matter how long it takes (used as a defense by arrested protesters who blocked traffic). In those cases, even with a green light, the driver can be ticketed.
I'm not particularly familiar with the laws in Gwinnett County, but I'd bet many of the ticketed drivers aren't, either. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it.