My father always advised me to register in the party that appeared to present the greatest threat to liberty. So, the party I am NOT registered in is the Libertarian party. They are by and large pretty hopeless. No, my opinion is that the government preferrs that people remain passive rather than resist. Probably it helps occasionally. For three out of four aircraft, it did not on 9/11/01. I can also point annecdotally to the story of a neighbor whose was attacked by a purse snatcher. She froze when she thought he was a rapist, but went more or less nuclear on him when she realized he was "just" a purse snatcher. She ran him into the ground and made HIM call the police hoping they could protect him from her. My issue is that criminals and terrorists are aided by a government policy that advises victims to assuage and mediate. As a class criminals and terrorists don't fear their intended victims sufficiently. The government's policy encourages this.
So, why don't you run a parity check on your translation system. It appeares to have acquired a virus.
Precede the cell designators with a "$", e.g. $A$1, specifies A1 and only A1. It works the same in both an OO spreadsheet and in Excel.
Unfortunately, some of the calculations in OO also get iffy with larger numbers just as Excel's do. The stdev() function for instance starts to return crap between 10,000,000 and 100,000,000. If you take a small set of numbers like 100, 101, 102, and 103, and then pad zeros to yield larger numbers like 1000, 1001, etc., the stdev() value should be the same for each series. Around 1*10^8 rounding error creeps in and instead of properly calculating the stdev()it starts yielding a zero value. There is no warning that precision has suffered either.
The thing that irks me is when people say "technology" when all they are talking about is "information technology" (i.e. "Get all your technology news here!" gar!)
As you might guess, I absolutely agree with your feelings about this common use of "technology." Being an archaeologist, my primary form of data tends to be "technological," chips from making or using stone, charcoal from fires, worked materials of any sort. Anyway, no one really appreciates a purist.
GPS signals are jammable now. Iraq actually tried it during the late fracas betweeen their military and the US military. The US military could also turn selective availabiliy back on in the GPS system, but that was a demonstrably futile "feature." Engineers had worked out methods for post-processing GPS and real-time differential correction before the first GPS satellite was launched. Besides, I doubt there are such things as un-jammable radio transmissions. They would require tremendous signal strength to override a jamming signal. It's foolishness.
the terrorists have is government itself and a social policy that encourages civilians to trust the authorities to protect them. We are routinely encouraged to avoid resistance to criminals through the misguided idea that it will protect us. "Let the snatcher have your purse..." "Don't resist..." Any government finds a passive population preferrable to one armed and willing to take a risk rather than submit to a terrorist or a tyrant. Don't blame the "optimism" of the passengers, blame their trust of authorities instead. And blame the authorities who encourage this.
would point out that paper is STILL a technological product. Material products are mostly technological, either in that they assist in achieving an end or are the product of such a process. Referring to electronics as "technology" is a bit of historical media semantic sloppiness that has emerged over the years as "high technology" became common place. Your hammer and wedge are basic technology and will remain so.
You ought to keep in mind that the command ONLY clobbers the one brand of drive, LG. Other drives are built to spec. and aren't susceptible to that particular weirdness. The same result could be achieved with LG drives using Win* just as easily as with linux. The fault is a poor job with the drives, not the OS.
There are far too many imponderables to say much about the signal. For one, how other arrays were looking at that part of the sky during the 24 hour period that prededed the detection? Rather than cathing the "instant" they might have caught 72 seconds out of the last 112 or whatever. The signal could have been up for an hour before the array came onto bearing and died as it passed. Because it wasn't detected by the second "beam" doesn't make it impossible, just unlikely. Because we don't know the actual time the real signal lasted, we can't even say how unlikely that might have been.
The original poster's use of "discredit" and "debunked" are rash. There was no use of those words in the cited article. Nor was there any reason to do so. No accidental terrestrial source was likely. The signal strength argues against that. If the researchers had said they discovered a hoaxster who had visited the array with a transmitter capable faking the apparent signal, that would be "debunking" or "discrediting" it. As it is, who knows anything?
Aside from the comic aspects of worrying about the cost-effectiveness and not using Microsoft software, the critical aspect is not the software and source so much as the problem of accessible data storage standards. Where your data and electronically stored documents are stashed in formats that cannot be opened legally without a license from some software company, the public is potentially closed away data and documents that their taxes paid for. For years it has been more or less winked at when one rival company or a lone shareware hacker blackboxed a means of reading and saving some specialized format like a dbf file or a MS doc file. Because, while the software used to accumulate the data or write the document was indeed a licensed closed source program, that data or document did not belong to the software company; it belonged to the agency or person who produced it and to the people who paid for the work.
Ethically, simply because you produced an application, there is no grounds for you to claim ownership of the software's output, stored data, or any other product of someone else's hard work. DRM now presents the grim potential of a serious abuse of public trust through locking away publically paid-for data in proprietary formats that are protected from "hacking" through the DMCA and various similarly poorly thoughout laws.
There are huge realms of data collection that are paid for publically including assessors tables and plats, census data, mapping, aerial and sattelite imaging, documents that have entered the public domain, etc. There is absolutely no justification that can be offered for requiring the use of expensive, proprietary software to access that data, regardless of whether the data was collected with a Microsoft program, Autodesk, ESRI, Trimble or any other company that produces software frequently employed for public purposes.
a place to practice their particular idiosyncratic beliefs" would be more correct. The continent received representatives from various Christian sects, primarily be cause they thought they could live remote from the "misbelief" of other creeds. They came to have the freedom to worship "my God" rather than tolerate the Satanic mischief maker those heretics believe in. There were repeated riots, lynchings and murders between various sects in Europe, most notably the persecution of Catholics by various protestant sects, but also the Quakers by protestants and protestants by each other, all quite certain of their own correctness. The pilgrims bugged out because they were actually so self-righteous that not even covenanters could stand them.
The first ammendment exists to protect the religious from each other, because very few really agree about what they really believe, in detail, and what little concurrence there is does not extend across sectarian boundaries. In short, the first ammendment exists so that Catholics and protestants can't argue that either sects is imposing their beliefs on the other. This extends to all religions.
The nation was not and never was intended to be "under God." No two groups could ever agree on which God that might be.
Try titles starting with "The Works of...", "The Collected Letters of...", and the Federalist Papers for starters. The entire Christan right argument about how their values are core to the founding father's ideas was documented as baloney by the founding fathers themselves.
This whole business was because the McCarthyites somehow came to the conclusion that a communist would refuse to say the word "God," just as the Inquisition assumed that witches would refuse to utter it. The stupidity was profound and of course the Inquisition's heirs are still with us.
are something I can understand. However, until we can legally shoot a telemarketer - not the poor sap making the call, but the jerk who hired him - in the ass for ignoring a non-governmental "do not call" list, laws are all we have.
Just as a matter of rationality, no corporation should be allowed to claim ANY constitutional rights. The "constitionality" therefore, should not worry you. It it applies to human beings and a business is not a class of humans that is being prohibited excercising free speech rights. As regards charities and politicians, well maybe next iteration. Regardless, half a loaf is better than none.
The companies that hire people to telephone you at dinner are not humans and individuals. They are fictive associations and can't rationally have any constitutional rights, though the individuals that compose a corporation all do have indivdual rights. Nowhere in the constitution is the right given to a private individual to call you or in anyway invade your privacy uninvited. They have no right whatsoever, regardless of whether they are corporations or human beings, to use your telephone for "free speech" purposes. That phone is private property and they are trespassing by calling you, even if you don't mind that they are. The whole idea that TM is somehow covered by free speech is stupid and self-serving.
Also, while free-speech is a constitutional guarantee, there is no guarantee of an audience. Neither you nor I are bound by law or ethics to listen just because someone has something they want to say. We have a right to privacy, even in public places, that supercedes any right a private individual has to speek to us. They can say what they want, its a free country, but we do not have to listen, its a free country. By extension, using our own telephone to "market" to us is equivalent to button-holing us on the street and trying to force us to listen. It violates OUR constitutional rights, not the fictional ones some theorist dreamed up for a business.
BTW, IANAL, but I am REALLY opinionated about this.
You're right. The constituion here says that we have a right to free speech. However, nowhere does it say that the speaker has a constitutional right to an audience. When the drummer mounts a a soap box on a street corner you can walk on by or stop and listen, your choice. Telemarketers however are arguing that access to YOUR telephone and ears is part of their constitutional right. The theory is total hogwash. Not to mention that the judges who decided that ANY corporate entities had ANY constitutional rights should have been sedated with an animal tranquilizer from a distance, approached in level 4 containment suits, and locked up in padded cells, and fed at the ends of poles lest their insanity be contagious. Any court decisions they made shgould have been voided as potentially insane.
Um, how about writing code that works better than anything SCO ever produced? SCO would really like to make superior code that is not SCO property either go away or become SCO property. Unlike Linux, whick they claim could never have advanced as it did without benefiting from 25 years of unix experience, SCO never did benefit from that experience. Now they want to obviously.;-)
neurons among the individuals deciding on what projects to award that prize. They were probably jealous when the study got air time on PBS. It also explains why some people are perpetually lost, possibly even some of the awards committee.
I can just imagine the real decision discussion. "They funded that 'who cares' investigation on spatial learning and its effects on neurological development, and they used London cabbies of all things for subjects. But they wouldn't even glance at my proposal to investigate the myriad ways in which post-modern critical theory and hermeneutic approaches have advanced the cause of scientific understanding through demonstrating that the requirement of empirical content in scientific knowledge is simply a delusional structure introduced into the individual's thinking through scholastic indoctrination and ignores neomarxist understanding of the subtextual social determinants that vitiate our ability to understand reality, which renders any hope of empirical content meaningless." "That was cruel. Lets give them the prize."
Is there a miniscule chance that an innocent person might be put to death? Yes. But this risk pales in comparison to the number of innocent people who will die if we do not put dangerous criminals to death.
Poppycock. I'm not against the death penalty, but lets not kid ourselves. The number of lives saved by the death penalty is very likely to be fewer than the number mistakenly murdered by jury. Death is a punishment, not a protection. Also, you need to remember that it is not just your life you are gambling with in this "acceptable" risk. Then too, you have to add liars to your list to cover the number of non-rapists murdered by a lie, non-child molesters murdered by a lie, and just how are you going to actually tell the difference between a "terrorist" and a revolutionary or someone seeking a little freedom? How will you decide? Are the Palestininans worse than the Israelis, say? How do you tell? Casualty figures? Last I saw the counts were from ten to six Palestinian deaths for every non-Palestinian. Does that make the Israeli military terrorists? If not, why not. A death penalty might make things simple, but that is no excuse for being simple.
Assuming you are a US citizen, it sounds as if you must have misunderstood the term "innocent unile proven guilty in a court of law" that you hould have become acquainted with in civics. That's "court of law" there, not Justice Department or FBI or media assertion or "trust John Ashcroft." Also, if you are really that blase and easily impressed by the assertions of authority, perhaps you would be happier living in the PRC, Vietnam or some place of similar attitude. Obviously the philosophical and ethical and potential personal aspects to trials and jury deliberations are not of great consequence to you.
Lamo is alledged to have broken laws. As of the breaking of this news about the FBI and its casual attitude to the First Ammendment, it appears that they are not confident of their case and may perceive the need to go on a fishing expedition and in the process break some laws themselves. Personally I think we ought to give them the right to violate constitutional protections and then require them to spend a year in prison - with the normal prison population - for each violation. No trial allowed, after all they broke the law, right? The upside is that violations of suspects rights are likely to go down and convictions up because there will be fewer dismissals due to "technicalities."
One sad aspect of this entire point in time is that thanks to the Al Qaeda, the JD has acquired the means to permanently weaken the basic rights of citizens.
I disagree with your view on the courts. By and large, the courts tend to remain fairly independent of politics. We tend to see verdicts we approve of as judicial integrity while those we dislike are obvious judicial "over interpretation" of the law.
The fact is that laws are framed by politicians who are frequently about as bright as Dan Quail - a pencil that never encountered the sharpener. Laws are often so vague that no two people are likely to agree on the meaning of the language and may frequently contain section that may be clear enough but are also directly contradictory of other sections of the same law. Beyond this is the issue of the Constitution. Laws are framed by politicians that aim to keep their constituents happy. They aren't there to tell a voter, "I'm sorry, but your fears/biases/prejudices/religious beliefs have lead you to ask for measures that would have shocked Adolf Hitler. WHile such a law might comfort you, it would violate the constitutional rights of other voters, and sooner or later it would bite you in the ass too."
Few constituents really give a sour owl pellet for the rights of anyone but themselves. They don't mind that a law might curtail someone else's freedom of speech invade areas of personal conscience or curtail freedom of movement as long they are allowed to continue to say and do what THEY wish. Christians mostly approve of the term "under God" in the pledge, yet it was introduced as bit McCarthyist stupidity that would trap communist - all atheist - who would be too stupid to lie. It's also offensive to any agnostic, and even any Buddhist or Taoist. Even to many Christians it smacks of hubris and the kind of pridefulness that got God mad at the Jews in the Bible. Never the less despite the constitutional injunction against government establishing any religion, much of the population wants that phrase in the pledge. They think, "that can't apply to MY beliefs, they're the true Christian beliefs, unlike those doomed Mormons / Catholics / Baptists / Adventists / Muslims / Buddhists / Shintoists / Voodooists /..." The courts will always err when they confuse their jobs with those of elected officials and try to apply "majority" rules and values to legal decisions. The constitution exists to protect minorities.
The worst recent failure of the courts was the 2000 election which brought to light a serious problem in the present voting system. When it was plain that no recount could possibly yield a decision that was significant at a level greater than the known error of the voting machines, the court should have called for a run-off and/or sent the issue to congress for work on a constitutional ammendment to deal with cases where there is no clear majority vote in a critical federal election.
2) Open source evolves more quickly than any closed source can, at less cost to the company.
3) Users, given the opportunity, will go for the least expensive product that does what they want it to. Thus the price wars that practically killed Borland, throttled OS/2 Warp and wiped out Wordperfect showed that MS, with its infinite supply of money through the "tax" on CPUs could kill rivals through providing functional suites of OS and apps at or below cost (competive up-grades) to computer makers who had to pay them anyway.
4) Linux is cheaper and more versatile than any other OS and users will certainly continue to behave per item 3 above.
5) By supporting an open source, "free" OS, IBM can stop paying into MS war chest in direct proportion to how many of its clients it can wean from Windows. IBM now has the potential eat MS lunch for the first time since they first settled on DOS as the OS for the PC.
Your memory has a parity problem. First, IBM NEVER had any monopoly that involved OS/2. Their attempt at monopoly was years earlier and it had to do with hardware, not software, when they tried to close up the hole they inadvertently made in their business by using an open standard for the PC. That monopoly was broken by many small computer makers assembling clones from off the shelf parts. MS happily provided its OS to all makers - for a fee, the infamous MS "tax" on CPUs and mo'bo's. Second, the people who cheered when MS Windows became the monopoly it now is were not "geeks." Anyone who has used OS/2, especially the later versions - Warp and after knows just how much Windows 9* and later versions owes to the shameless copying of OS/2's capabilities. XP is still catching up. Built-in internet was something Gates hated. He wanted Windows users on a glorified BBS of all things run by MS - the original MSN.
OS/2 Warp had a built-in browser, ftp links on the desktop, and dial-on-demand to your ISP. IE was the shoddy result of a last minute buy-out by MS to counter act a surprising growth in the OS/2 user base and internet operation in Windows required acquiring an add-on set of tcp/ip winsock utilities from MS or an independent vendor like Trumpet. Even the recent XP ability to restore to a previous system state following a failed or problem installation of software was preceded in OS/2 Warp years earlier. OS/2 even offered a menu of different states and you could step back through five states or so.
OS/2's big problems were that the OS and the developer's kit were both expensive and the people I know who programmed for OS/2 all say it was very difficult to program for. Even so, the end results were generally more stable than comparable Windows programs, and the OS was far more stable than any competing version of Windows including NT. Problem programs were mostly ports of Windows programs that often were pretty badly done.
And if copying a work for reference and citation, you still have not bought the work have you? Regardless of circulation, unless the publisher specifically wants you to advertise for them, you're ripping them off.
If it is not for sale, then the publisher can not logically claim a loss. Actually, I have had a publisher or two suggest xeroxing works they no longer offer. One example is a translated work from Russian. I could not find a copy to keep on hand and contacted the publisher, who actually suggested xeeroxing a copy from interlibrary loan. I did that. Fifteen years later I tracked down a hard copy.
Another work I know of gets copied regularly because the estate of the author won't permit re-publishing the volume, though I can't imagine why. Rumour has it that the family disapproved of the author's "hobby" and would like it to go away. I do not have a copy of it, but only because it is not essential to a prehistorian. From the number of people I know who HAVE copied it, it would have paid for republishing quite nicely.
Given these examples: explain how the publisher, or more importantly, the dead authors are getting ripped off. Publishers should never HAVE copyright to content and jandiced though I may be, I can't see that extending copyright to the third and fourth generation of an author's descendants can possibly encourage anything but slackers.
Obviously then lending libraries are very bad for publishers as well. The argument MIGHT hold weight while discussing works that are still in print, but the way copyright operates, I can't legally make a copy of an out-of-print work that is still under copyright. Rationally, under your logic I should not be able to buy a used copy either, if you argue that the sale fails to benefit the publisher or author. In fact, by copying a work for reference and citation I may very well bring the work to the attention of others to the extent that the publisher might republish, or be persuaded to release the rights so that others may benefit, which WOULD benefit the publisher and hopefully the author.
Yep. At least R will warn you with and NA return when you push it past its internal accuracy. No speadsheet does that. They just give bogus zero-values that munge signifcance results.
Give my druthers, I would really have preferred to see StarOffice OR, better, OpenOffice use postgres for the database backend. It's open source, sql, comes with most linux releases, and desperately needs a good report interface anyway.
Copyrights were an idea meant to support the creativity of individual artists "for a limited time." Copyright law these days has been altered away from this to support stupid extensions of the duration of copyright. An institution that was self-evidently NEVER intended to last even the life-time of the artist or other creative worker, now can pass down through generations, or persist as the sole property of a corporate entity that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination "create" anything. The consequence is less creativity, and a loss of art, science, and literature as works go out of circulation yet remain under copyright.
The RIAA does not represent "artists" though a laughable few do seem to hope that they will. I can see reason in Harlan Ellison defending a copyright on his work - for a time, copyright was never meant as a means of riding on one's laurels - but United, Sony?? One great improvement would be to forbid or severly limit the term that any corporation could hold copyrights (or patents for that matter). THAT would encourage creativity and production.
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My father always advised me to register in the party that appeared to present the greatest threat to liberty. So, the party I am NOT registered in is the Libertarian party. They are by and large pretty hopeless. No, my opinion is that the government preferrs that people remain passive rather than resist. Probably it helps occasionally. For three out of four aircraft, it did not on 9/11/01. I can also point annecdotally to the story of a neighbor whose was attacked by a purse snatcher. She froze when she thought he was a rapist, but went more or less nuclear on him when she realized he was "just" a purse snatcher. She ran him into the ground and made HIM call the police hoping they could protect him from her. My issue is that criminals and terrorists are aided by a government policy that advises victims to assuage and mediate. As a class criminals and terrorists don't fear their intended victims sufficiently. The government's policy encourages this.
So, why don't you run a parity check on your translation system. It appeares to have acquired a virus.
Precede the cell designators with a "$", e.g. $A$1, specifies A1 and only A1. It works the same in both an OO spreadsheet and in Excel.
Unfortunately, some of the calculations in OO also get iffy with larger numbers just as Excel's do. The stdev() function for instance starts to return crap between 10,000,000 and 100,000,000. If you take a small set of numbers like 100, 101, 102, and 103, and then pad zeros to yield larger numbers like 1000, 1001, etc., the stdev() value should be the same for each series. Around 1*10^8 rounding error creeps in and instead of properly calculating the stdev()it starts yielding a zero value. There is no warning that precision has suffered either.
The thing that irks me is when people say "technology" when all they are talking about is "information technology" (i.e. "Get all your technology news here!" gar!)
As you might guess, I absolutely agree with your feelings about this common use of "technology." Being an archaeologist, my primary form of data tends to be "technological," chips from making or using stone, charcoal from fires, worked materials of any sort. Anyway, no one really appreciates a purist.
GPS signals are jammable now. Iraq actually tried it during the late fracas betweeen their military and the US military. The US military could also turn selective availabiliy back on in the GPS system, but that was a demonstrably futile "feature." Engineers had worked out methods for post-processing GPS and real-time differential correction before the first GPS satellite was launched. Besides, I doubt there are such things as un-jammable radio transmissions. They would require tremendous signal strength to override a jamming signal. It's foolishness.
the terrorists have is government itself and a social policy that encourages civilians to trust the authorities to protect them. We are routinely encouraged to avoid resistance to criminals through the misguided idea that it will protect us. "Let the snatcher have your purse..." "Don't resist ..." Any government finds a passive population preferrable to one armed and willing to take a risk rather than submit to a terrorist or a tyrant. Don't blame the "optimism" of the passengers, blame their trust of authorities instead. And blame the authorities who encourage this.
would point out that paper is STILL a technological product. Material products are mostly technological, either in that they assist in achieving an end or are the product of such a process. Referring to electronics as "technology" is a bit of historical media semantic sloppiness that has emerged over the years as "high technology" became common place. Your hammer and wedge are basic technology and will remain so.
You ought to keep in mind that the command ONLY clobbers the one brand of drive, LG. Other drives are built to spec. and aren't susceptible to that particular weirdness. The same result could be achieved with LG drives using Win* just as easily as with linux. The fault is a poor job with the drives, not the OS.
There are far too many imponderables to say much about the signal. For one, how other arrays were looking at that part of the sky during the 24 hour period that prededed the detection? Rather than cathing the "instant" they might have caught 72 seconds out of the last 112 or whatever. The signal could have been up for an hour before the array came onto bearing and died as it passed. Because it wasn't detected by the second "beam" doesn't make it impossible, just unlikely. Because we don't know the actual time the real signal lasted, we can't even say how unlikely that might have been.
The original poster's use of "discredit" and "debunked" are rash. There was no use of those words in the cited article. Nor was there any reason to do so. No accidental terrestrial source was likely. The signal strength argues against that. If the researchers had said they discovered a hoaxster who had visited the array with a transmitter capable faking the apparent signal, that would be "debunking" or "discrediting" it. As it is, who knows anything?
Aside from the comic aspects of worrying about the cost-effectiveness and not using Microsoft software, the critical aspect is not the software and source so much as the problem of accessible data storage standards. Where your data and electronically stored documents are stashed in formats that cannot be opened legally without a license from some software company, the public is potentially closed away data and documents that their taxes paid for. For years it has been more or less winked at when one rival company or a lone shareware hacker blackboxed a means of reading and saving some specialized format like a dbf file or a MS doc file. Because, while the software used to accumulate the data or write the document was indeed a licensed closed source program, that data or document did not belong to the software company; it belonged to the agency or person who produced it and to the people who paid for the work.
Ethically, simply because you produced an application, there is no grounds for you to claim ownership of the software's output, stored data, or any other product of someone else's hard work. DRM now presents the grim potential of a serious abuse of public trust through locking away publically paid-for data in proprietary formats that are protected from "hacking" through the DMCA and various similarly poorly thoughout laws.
There are huge realms of data collection that are paid for publically including assessors tables and plats, census data, mapping, aerial and sattelite imaging, documents that have entered the public domain, etc. There is absolutely no justification that can be offered for requiring the use of expensive, proprietary software to access that data, regardless of whether the data was collected with a Microsoft program, Autodesk, ESRI, Trimble or any other company that produces software frequently employed for public purposes.
a place to practice their particular idiosyncratic beliefs" would be more correct. The continent received representatives from various Christian sects, primarily be cause they thought they could live remote from the "misbelief" of other creeds. They came to have the freedom to worship "my God" rather than tolerate the Satanic mischief maker those heretics believe in. There were repeated riots, lynchings and murders between various sects in Europe, most notably the persecution of Catholics by various protestant sects, but also the Quakers by protestants and protestants by each other, all quite certain of their own correctness. The pilgrims bugged out because they were actually so self-righteous that not even covenanters could stand them.
The first ammendment exists to protect the religious from each other, because very few really agree about what they really believe, in detail, and what little concurrence there is does not extend across sectarian boundaries. In short, the first ammendment exists so that Catholics and protestants can't argue that either sects is imposing their beliefs on the other. This extends to all religions.
The nation was not and never was intended to be "under God." No two groups could ever agree on which God that might be.
Try titles starting with "The Works of...", "The Collected Letters of...", and the Federalist Papers for starters. The entire Christan right argument about how their values are core to the founding father's ideas was documented as baloney by the founding fathers themselves.
This whole business was because the McCarthyites somehow came to the conclusion that a communist would refuse to say the word "God," just as the Inquisition assumed that witches would refuse to utter it. The stupidity was profound and of course the Inquisition's heirs are still with us.
are something I can understand. However, until we can legally shoot a telemarketer - not the poor sap making the call, but the jerk who hired him - in the ass for ignoring a non-governmental "do not call" list, laws are all we have.
Just as a matter of rationality, no corporation should be allowed to claim ANY constitutional rights. The "constitionality" therefore, should not worry you. It it applies to human beings and a business is not a class of humans that is being prohibited excercising free speech rights. As regards charities and politicians, well maybe next iteration. Regardless, half a loaf is better than none.
The companies that hire people to telephone you at dinner are not humans and individuals. They are fictive associations and can't rationally have any constitutional rights, though the individuals that compose a corporation all do have indivdual rights. Nowhere in the constitution is the right given to a private individual to call you or in anyway invade your privacy uninvited. They have no right whatsoever, regardless of whether they are corporations or human beings, to use your telephone for "free speech" purposes. That phone is private property and they are trespassing by calling you, even if you don't mind that they are. The whole idea that TM is somehow covered by free speech is stupid and self-serving.
Also, while free-speech is a constitutional guarantee, there is no guarantee of an audience. Neither you nor I are bound by law or ethics to listen just because someone has something they want to say. We have a right to privacy, even in public places, that supercedes any right a private individual has to speek to us. They can say what they want, its a free country, but we do not have to listen, its a free country. By extension, using our own telephone to "market" to us is equivalent to button-holing us on the street and trying to force us to listen. It violates OUR constitutional rights, not the fictional ones some theorist dreamed up for a business.
BTW, IANAL, but I am REALLY opinionated about this.
You're right. The constituion here says that we have a right to free speech. However, nowhere does it say that the speaker has a constitutional right to an audience. When the drummer mounts a a soap box on a street corner you can walk on by or stop and listen, your choice. Telemarketers however are arguing that access to YOUR telephone and ears is part of their constitutional right. The theory is total hogwash. Not to mention that the judges who decided that ANY corporate entities had ANY constitutional rights should have been sedated with an animal tranquilizer from a distance, approached in level 4 containment suits, and locked up in padded cells, and fed at the ends of poles lest their insanity be contagious. Any court decisions they made shgould have been voided as potentially insane.
...How exactly is this possible?...
Um, how about writing code that works better than anything SCO ever produced? SCO would really like to make superior code that is not SCO property either go away or become SCO property. Unlike Linux, whick they claim could never have advanced as it did without benefiting from 25 years of unix experience, SCO never did benefit from that experience. Now they want to obviously.;-)
neurons among the individuals deciding on what projects to award that prize. They were probably jealous when the study got air time on PBS. It also explains why some people are perpetually lost, possibly even some of the awards committee.
I can just imagine the real decision discussion. "They funded that 'who cares' investigation on spatial learning and its effects on neurological development, and they used London cabbies of all things for subjects. But they wouldn't even glance at my proposal to investigate the myriad ways in which post-modern critical theory and hermeneutic approaches have advanced the cause of scientific understanding through demonstrating that the requirement of empirical content in scientific knowledge is simply a delusional structure introduced into the individual's thinking through scholastic indoctrination and ignores neomarxist understanding of the subtextual social determinants that vitiate our ability to understand reality, which renders any hope of empirical content meaningless." "That was cruel. Lets give them the prize."
Is there a miniscule chance that an innocent person might be put to death? Yes. But this risk pales in comparison to the number of innocent people who will die if we do not put dangerous criminals to death.
Poppycock. I'm not against the death penalty, but lets not kid ourselves. The number of lives saved by the death penalty is very likely to be fewer than the number mistakenly murdered by jury. Death is a punishment, not a protection. Also, you need to remember that it is not just your life you are gambling with in this "acceptable" risk. Then too, you have to add liars to your list to cover the number of non-rapists murdered by a lie, non-child molesters murdered by a lie, and just how are you going to actually tell the difference between a "terrorist" and a revolutionary or someone seeking a little freedom? How will you decide? Are the Palestininans worse than the Israelis, say? How do you tell? Casualty figures? Last I saw the counts were from ten to six Palestinian deaths for every non-Palestinian. Does that make the Israeli military terrorists? If not, why not. A death penalty might make things simple, but that is no excuse for being simple.
Assuming you are a US citizen, it sounds as if you must have misunderstood the term "innocent unile proven guilty in a court of law" that you hould have become acquainted with in civics. That's "court of law" there, not Justice Department or FBI or media assertion or "trust John Ashcroft." Also, if you are really that blase and easily impressed by the assertions of authority, perhaps you would be happier living in the PRC, Vietnam or some place of similar attitude. Obviously the philosophical and ethical and potential personal aspects to trials and jury deliberations are not of great consequence to you.
Lamo is alledged to have broken laws. As of the breaking of this news about the FBI and its casual attitude to the First Ammendment, it appears that they are not confident of their case and may perceive the need to go on a fishing expedition and in the process break some laws themselves. Personally I think we ought to give them the right to violate constitutional protections and then require them to spend a year in prison - with the normal prison population - for each violation. No trial allowed, after all they broke the law, right? The upside is that violations of suspects rights are likely to go down and convictions up because there will be fewer dismissals due to "technicalities."
One sad aspect of this entire point in time is that thanks to the Al Qaeda, the JD has acquired the means to permanently weaken the basic rights of citizens.
..." The courts will always err when they confuse their jobs with those of elected officials and try to apply "majority" rules and values to legal decisions. The constitution exists to protect minorities.
I disagree with your view on the courts. By and large, the courts tend to remain fairly independent of politics. We tend to see verdicts we approve of as judicial integrity while those we dislike are obvious judicial "over interpretation" of the law.
The fact is that laws are framed by politicians who are frequently about as bright as Dan Quail - a pencil that never encountered the sharpener. Laws are often so vague that no two people are likely to agree on the meaning of the language and may frequently contain section that may be clear enough but are also directly contradictory of other sections of the same law. Beyond this is the issue of the Constitution. Laws are framed by politicians that aim to keep their constituents happy. They aren't there to tell a voter, "I'm sorry, but your fears/biases/prejudices/religious beliefs have lead you to ask for measures that would have shocked Adolf Hitler. WHile such a law might comfort you, it would violate the constitutional rights of other voters, and sooner or later it would bite you in the ass too."
Few constituents really give a sour owl pellet for the rights of anyone but themselves. They don't mind that a law might curtail someone else's freedom of speech invade areas of personal conscience or curtail freedom of movement as long they are allowed to continue to say and do what THEY wish. Christians mostly approve of the term "under God" in the pledge, yet it was introduced as bit McCarthyist stupidity that would trap communist - all atheist - who would be too stupid to lie. It's also offensive to any agnostic, and even any Buddhist or Taoist. Even to many Christians it smacks of hubris and the kind of pridefulness that got God mad at the Jews in the Bible. Never the less despite the constitutional injunction against government establishing any religion, much of the population wants that phrase in the pledge. They think, "that can't apply to MY beliefs, they're the true Christian beliefs, unlike those doomed Mormons / Catholics / Baptists / Adventists / Muslims / Buddhists / Shintoists / Voodooists /
The worst recent failure of the courts was the 2000 election which brought to light a serious problem in the present voting system. When it was plain that no recount could possibly yield a decision that was significant at a level greater than the known error of the voting machines, the court should have called for a run-off and/or sent the issue to congress for work on a constitutional ammendment to deal with cases where there is no clear majority vote in a critical federal election.
Through the last twenty years was that:
1) Open standards eat your lunch.
2) Open source evolves more quickly than any closed source can, at less cost to the company.
3) Users, given the opportunity, will go for the least expensive product that does what they want it to. Thus the price wars that practically killed Borland, throttled OS/2 Warp and wiped out Wordperfect showed that MS, with its infinite supply of money through the "tax" on CPUs could kill rivals through providing functional suites of OS and apps at or below cost (competive up-grades) to computer makers who had to pay them anyway.
4) Linux is cheaper and more versatile than any other OS and users will certainly continue to behave per item 3 above.
5) By supporting an open source, "free" OS, IBM can stop paying into MS war chest in direct proportion to how many of its clients it can wean from Windows. IBM now has the potential eat MS lunch for the first time since they first settled on DOS as the OS for the PC.
Your memory has a parity problem. First, IBM NEVER had any monopoly that involved OS/2. Their attempt at monopoly was years earlier and it had to do with hardware, not software, when they tried to close up the hole they inadvertently made in their business by using an open standard for the PC. That monopoly was broken by many small computer makers assembling clones from off the shelf parts. MS happily provided its OS to all makers - for a fee, the infamous MS "tax" on CPUs and mo'bo's. Second, the people who cheered when MS Windows became the monopoly it now is were not "geeks." Anyone who has used OS/2, especially the later versions - Warp and after knows just how much Windows 9* and later versions owes to the shameless copying of OS/2's capabilities. XP is still catching up. Built-in internet was something Gates hated. He wanted Windows users on a glorified BBS of all things run by MS - the original MSN.
OS/2 Warp had a built-in browser, ftp links on the desktop, and dial-on-demand to your ISP. IE was the shoddy result of a last minute buy-out by MS to counter act a surprising growth in the OS/2 user base and internet operation in Windows required acquiring an add-on set of tcp/ip winsock utilities from MS or an independent vendor like Trumpet. Even the recent XP ability to restore to a previous system state following a failed or problem installation of software was preceded in OS/2 Warp years earlier. OS/2 even offered a menu of different states and you could step back through five states or so.
OS/2's big problems were that the OS and the developer's kit were both expensive and the people I know who programmed for OS/2 all say it was very difficult to program for. Even so, the end results were generally more stable than comparable Windows programs, and the OS was far more stable than any competing version of Windows including NT. Problem programs were mostly ports of Windows programs that often were pretty badly done.
And if copying a work for reference and citation, you still have not bought the work have you? Regardless of circulation, unless the publisher specifically wants you to advertise for them, you're ripping them off.
If it is not for sale, then the publisher can not logically claim a loss. Actually, I have had a publisher or two suggest xeroxing works they no longer offer. One example is a translated work from Russian. I could not find a copy to keep on hand and contacted the publisher, who actually suggested xeeroxing a copy from interlibrary loan. I did that. Fifteen years later I tracked down a hard copy.
Another work I know of gets copied regularly because the estate of the author won't permit re-publishing the volume, though I can't imagine why. Rumour has it that the family disapproved of the author's "hobby" and would like it to go away. I do not have a copy of it, but only because it is not essential to a prehistorian. From the number of people I know who HAVE copied it, it would have paid for republishing quite nicely.
Given these examples: explain how the publisher, or more importantly, the dead authors are getting ripped off. Publishers should never HAVE copyright to content and jandiced though I may be, I can't see that extending copyright to the third and fourth generation of an author's descendants can possibly encourage anything but slackers.
Obviously then lending libraries are very bad for publishers as well. The argument MIGHT hold weight while discussing works that are still in print, but the way copyright operates, I can't legally make a copy of an out-of-print work that is still under copyright. Rationally, under your logic I should not be able to buy a used copy either, if you argue that the sale fails to benefit the publisher or author. In fact, by copying a work for reference and citation I may very well bring the work to the attention of others to the extent that the publisher might republish, or be persuaded to release the rights so that others may benefit, which WOULD benefit the publisher and hopefully the author.
Yep. At least R will warn you with and NA return when you push it past its internal accuracy. No speadsheet does that. They just give bogus zero-values that munge signifcance results.
Give my druthers, I would really have preferred to see StarOffice OR, better, OpenOffice use postgres for the database backend. It's open source, sql, comes with most linux releases, and desperately needs a good report interface anyway.
Copyrights were an idea meant to support the creativity of individual artists "for a limited time." Copyright law these days has been altered away from this to support stupid extensions of the duration of copyright. An institution that was self-evidently NEVER intended to last even the life-time of the artist or other creative worker, now can pass down through generations, or persist as the sole property of a corporate entity that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination "create" anything. The consequence is less creativity, and a loss of art, science, and literature as works go out of circulation yet remain under copyright.
The RIAA does not represent "artists" though a laughable few do seem to hope that they will. I can see reason in Harlan Ellison defending a copyright on his work - for a time, copyright was never meant as a means of riding on one's laurels - but United, Sony?? One great improvement would be to forbid or severly limit the term that any corporation could hold copyrights (or patents for that matter). THAT would encourage creativity and production.