Bingo, all I see are logical fallacies attacking Cenzic because people don't like the results. You don't dispute bad results by saying the source of the information is evil, because that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the results are factual.
How many of these vulnerabilities were due to Firefox itself, and how many due to plugins?
Does it matter? If FF allows the plugins enough control over the browser to present a vulnerability in the browser, then that's a vulnerability in FF that they need to fix.
Saying "oh no, we don't have vulnerabilities ourselves, we just allow vulnerable plugins to run" doesn't speak much to the security of Fire Fox.
In other words, the cop-out doesn't fly. If FireFox is vulnerable to something another browser is not, it has one more vulnerability than that browser, period.
So I'm assuming you don't trust surveys sponsored by rivals of MS either, right?
Right?
No?
I thought so. You just don't like the results. If the methodology truly is flawed, Firefox and Safari can hire another company to do another survey. If the results are the complete opposite, then we know one or both surveys are complete bullshit, and we can't really trust either without a truly independant survey.
I don't know if you know this, but survey companies don't do this kind of work for free. They can't. If Mozilla and Apple aren't interested in a fair and balanced survey, but Microsoft is, MS has no choice but to foot the bill for it themselves. The opposite is also true, as is the inverse (if MS wants a manipulated survey, they have to pay for it). Regardless of who wants it done or how fairly and accurately it is done, Cenzic is not going to do it without money.
If you really want to cast doubt on the survey, why not attempt to verify their results? You're commiting a classic logical fallacy (circumstantial ad hominem) I see here on Slashdot a lot - especially regarding MS. That this company has done business with MS in the past does not make their claim false. No matter how much you wish that were so, it is not the case.
You've also fallen victim to the "poisoned well" fallacy - you believe the things you've heard about MS's motives, and therefore any information produced by MS must be false. This is foolishness. Be skeptical, but don't outright assume that because it came from MS it is wrong. You are doing yourself a great disservice by thinking this way.
With all that said, I can confidently say that I have absolutely no idea how valid this survey is. It seems pretty legitimate to me but I haven't exactly scruitinized it either.
Actually if the OS interceeds in a buffer-overrun situation (basically, out of memory and crash), you are not vulnerable to code injection into memory. Most operating systems today do exactly that for precisely that reason - to prevent code injection. In other words, your browser can crash all the time and you aren't necessarily vulnerable to code injection.
There are various other conditions that can leave you open to code injection though.
Safari is not open-source, WebKit is. Prove me wrong by finding a copy of Safari 4's source code. Yeah, didn't think so. The vulnerabilities aren't necessarily related to the browser engine (though they certainly can be).
From what I understand the report was based on the number of vulnerabilities patched, not announced. for IE these are released every tuesday of every month, for FireFox I believe they are released whenever they are finished.
Vulnerabilities patched is a decent indicator, because for closed source you would not know about any unpatched vulnerabilities that were discovered internally (and there are a lot) before patching. Any serious vulnerability that MS knows about MUST be patched for IE, for if it is discovered they knew for any extended period about a serious vulnerability and did nothing, they risk losing the confidence of their business partners.
So despite the fact that some people, particularly open-source advocates, don't trust MS to patch vulnerabilities, it is certainly in their best interest to do so. The evidence is the speed and number of vulnerabilities they patch.
I don't think severity would help the metric in favor of Firefox or Safari because serious vulnerabilities get patched as quickly as possible on all sides (except maybe when Safari devs don't consider a severe vulnerability severe, heh), and a large portion of patches that MS releases for IE are less than critical.
With the most recent versions of IE Microsoft has really cleaned up its act in regards to security, and they have the ability to be the best at it if they choose to be.
Patched vulnerabilities may not be the best metric, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better one.
Actually, in order to qualify as libel it MUST be damaging, and malicious and untrue as well.
In other words, you can't argue that anonymous libel is NOT damaging.
I think what you meant to say, is that you can hardly argue alleged libel posted anonymously is going to be seriously damaging.
I would guess that anonymous revelations of the truth do society much more good than anonymous lies do harm.
I would argue that they should not be mutually exclusive - that we should have a right to protect another's anonymity in cases where it is legitimate(incidentally, we do, and this scenario is usually the case), and the courts should have the ability to supercede that right when we abuse it to harm others (incidentally, they do, but it should be kept as rare as possible).
Note that I did NOT say you have the right to force others to protect your anonymity. You do have the right to protect your own anonymity as best you can, and you have the right to protect someone else's anonymity. It is essentially the right to not speak when you don't want to. As with everything though, there are limits, and there have been a number of cases that show these limits. Generally they make sense.
However, on this case, I think the Judge is way out of line. Not so much that the judge ruled that the guy's identity should be revealed, but that she ruled this without a formal suit against the man! She is basically saying "I want to know who this guy is" and the court is forcing people to tell her, it's ridiculous! The judge should have told her to go pound sand until she's willing to bring a legitimate lawsuit against him. As someone else has stated, this is like forcing discovery without having to have a legitimate case, and it stinks to high heaven. Until she files a suit, she has no legitimate claim to that information.
You degenerate piece of slime editing my words to say something that I did not say. You have no idea how to make a proper argument, so you must blatantly lie about what I said. You are a scumbag.
If you want to disagree with me, fine. Argue against my points in an honest way, but do NOT lie about what I said. You are scum, and your whole post is bullshit nonsense.
By the way, libel is protected.
First off, Fox News and Glenn Beck did not bring a libel suit against glennbeckrapedagirlin1990.com, they brought a trademark infringement suit, which is entirely different. Maybe if you didn't like to lie about what other people write it would help your case a bit, hmm?
Second, libel is definitely not protected, there are laws that have been upheld by SCOTUS relating to libel and slander, but there are stringent requirements that must be met before a piece of text can be considered libelous. The first is that it is untrue. The second is that the text was malicious, that it intended to cause harm. The third is that it actually did damage the person's reputation. There are also all sorts of qualifications within each of those criteria for determining if the text/speech fits each criteria.
glennbeckrapedagirlin1990.com is an obvious parody, and so while it satisfies the first criteria, it does not satisfy the second or third. It is political satyr, making a point, and I think it makes it somewhat, but not very effectively. Glenn Beck can be fun to watch but it does get tiresome after a while.
Death threats with nothing behind them harm no one, so there is obviously no reason to curtail them in a free society. However, it's pretty easy to get a substantial restraining order against someone who issues a death threat. As I said in my post which you misrepresented, you are free to say whatever you want, but you are not free from the consequences that may come about because of that speech.
Anonymity has nothing to do with it, and is not guaranteed in any way (outside of the few areas that are already protected) beyond what you can provide for yourself.
This is due to the simple fat that expressing certain views and opinions, such as in politics may get you killed.
Bullshit, maybe in oppressive regimes that don't have freedom of speech laws, like the UK (I kid! I kid!), but that simply doesn't happen in the US. On the rare case that someone uses that as an excuse, they go to jail for a long, long time.
Anonymity is completely unrelated to free speech. In fact, anonymity is only necessary when you do NOT have free speech - when the government is willing to suppress dissenting opinions, lack of anonymity will get you killed. In that case, anonymity is also not a right the government would not recognize. In other words, in a free society it is not necessary, and in a repressed society it will not happen.
Freedom of speech does not include freedom from consequences. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater - claiming a "right" to anonymity will not change a thing as they sentance you to multiple lifetimes in prison for the dozens of people you killed. Other examples include libel and slander laws.
The point of free speech is that nobody can STOP you from saying something (note that they don't have to help you say something, either), not that you cannot be held accountable for what you say. You cannot be silenced before you can speak, as is common in countries without any respect to free speech.
Another example was a biker chick who runs the "Top-Free" protest, attempting to allow women to go topless without violating obscenity laws like men can. She was protesting in I think Nevada somewhere, everybody knew what she was going to do, there were cops everywhere, but they couldn't touch her until she actually broke the law. It wasn't until she pulled her top off that they arrested her, even though they would have loved to bring her in a lot sooner.
As long as the option for anonymity does not exist, free speech does not existant on any topic of any real world importance.
Wrong, freedom of speech makes anonymity unnecessary and often counter-productive. Because of freedom of speech, you can say whatever you want out in the open without fear of reprisal, so long as that speech does not harm somebody else - annonymity is not necessary. Anonymity is also not guaranteed by freedom of speech, that has been determined dozens of times in a court of law. In a free society, anonymity is used as a cover to harrass, inflame and spread libelous or slanderous speech. It is only occasionally used in cases where, for example, an employee wants to point out abuses by their employer and still maintain the ability to get a job somewhere else. That case is covered under whistle-blower laws.
Anonymity is necessary for dissenting speech in situations where there IS legitimate fear of reprisal, and these situations generally occur in countries without free speech laws. In the few cases where anonymity is still not so much necessary but desirable for society as a whole, we have laws guaranteeing it.
Freedom of speech is not a license to hurt others without consequence. Freedom of speech ends when it infringes someone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Anonymity is not a right, and is only legitimate for as long as YOU can maintain it - there is no expectation that anybody else will maintain it for you unless that person is in a sensitive position (like a doctor or lawyer) or you have a contract maintaining it (like a non-disclosure agreement).
Freedom of speech does not mean "Freedom to say whatever I want with no consequences". Freedom of speech means you are free to say what you want, and the government cannot censor you. However, if what you said caused real harm to another person, you can be held liable for that action. If the people you were hiding behind aren't willing to fight for you, well, you're SOL. The only time I know of when anonymity is a legal right is when voting and under certain whistle-blower laws. That's about it, and that's all it should be.
My favorite example that clearly shows the distinction is a case during WW2, where the New York Times got ahold of sensitive military troop movements, and wanted to publish them. I don't think they were necessarily malicious, it was just a massive scoop. The Military learned of the leak before the Times published the information, and sought a court ordered injunction against the Times publishing the information. The judge ruled that an injunction was unconstitutional, however, if the Times published the information and American lives were lost as a direct result, they could be held responsible, facing charges of manslaughter and potentially even treason.
In other words, nobody can prevent you from saying anything, even yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but that does not mean you can't be held responsible. We don't punish people based on what it "can lead to", we punish based on what it DID lead to. In this particular case, a whole lot of nothing. If I were a judge and she brought this suit I'd tell her to grow the hell up. Of course, I probably wouldn't make a good judge anyway.
I'd say the fact that so many outrages come to light and are subsequently curtailed, if not stopped completely, would be evidence of free speech helping.
Think of all the arguments surrounding the patriot act, those warrants that were issued after the fact, etc. The law didn't get changed, but the Bush administration was MUCH more carefull about it. Still, the whole Patriot Act is mostly BS and needs to be neutered. Why haven't Obama and the Dems pushed to fix this? They can spend trillions of our money in the course of a couple years but they can't repeal a bad law they've been using to bash Republicans over the head with(and rightfully so)? They may lose their power in Congress soon, so they should get busy and do it now!
Don't leave Obama* off that list, he'll have you in jail for saying mean things about black people, muslims, or homosexuals.
Back on topic, the truth is there is no right to anonymity - if you say something to someone you can be held accountable for it. There is a right to free speech - in that you can say what you want when you want to who you want and nobody can stop you. However, if your speech is harmful in a meaningful way to others (I'm not talking about bulshit "it hurt my feelings" crap, grow the fuck up people) others there can be consequences. Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater that is not on fire is the famous example, others include libel/slander, where the speech must be untrue and intended to cause harm, and publicly revealing military secrets which would put American lives in danger if revealed. The last one actually happened in WW2 to the New York Times, the military could not get an injunction against them, but if they had published the information they could have reigned hell upon them legally, and several members of the news organization would have gone to jail for intentionally putting American troops in harm's way. They couldn't stop it, but they could certainly punish it after the fact.
As it relates to this mom, I think she's full of it and over-protective, and if she wants to sue this guy she should sue, she should not harrass him like she is doing - there are laws against harassment too, you know. I also think it's complete bull that she could get as far as she has without actually filing a suit against the guy. Illinois is one screwed up state.
*This source is not the least biased by any means, but none of the "news" sources would say much about what is actually in the bill.
From what I've seen of the LIDAR issues in Europe, jitter isn't the problem (you can't shoot a gun with a wiggly hand, most cops practice handgun usage regularly), it's reflection. Because the LIDAR measures distance traveled over an extremely short amount of time, if a particular scan is reflected at all the chances are good that all or most of the individual pulses for that scan were also likely reflected.
I vaguely remember a UK court case where the defense set up a real-world scenario in which a LIDAR scan reflected off a reflective road sign back to a traffic camera and was in the neighborhood of 20mph off. The situation was similar enough to real world conditions that the defendant got off and UK LIDAR procedures and equipment had to be changed out to more reliable guns and practices.
So apparently speeding isn't a behavior because there is a number involved? What he's seeing with his eyeballs is a behavior, what he is measuring with RADAR is a number directly related to that behavior.
Maybe because the sole purpose of a Traffic Judge is to determine whether or not a Cop's judgement was correct in issuing a traffic ticket? I could see some real resentment forming there, putting them in conflict with each other. Especially if one group does not approve of the way another group does their job.
What we've seen in past year is that high oil prices destroy economic growth which destroys high oil prices.
That's not what happened at all, the oil prices had nothing to do with economic growth, and the oil prices also had nothing to do with supply/demand which would ordinarily govern such things.
The oil prices were artificially inflated by the OPEC cartel, which is unmaintainable. They reset prices before the bubble burst on them (which would be very bad for OPEC), and for a little while oil was priced a little lower than it should have been.
The economic crisis was a completely separate issue, caused by funny business in the housing markets - particularly the insurance markets.
In fact what was remarkable about the period of extremely high oil prices was consumption of oil did not change much, people simply got a little angry, and put MPG higher on their list of "things I want in a car" for their next purchase. A lot of companies used oil prices as an excuse, but for most of them it was a complete crock.
Let me help you out with a brief history lesson: In Germany nearly a century ago, things were not so great. They just lost The Big One, and reparations to the rest of Europe completely bankrupted the country. Along comes this group called the Nazi Party, and they promised to fix that. All you had to give them was complete control and they'd take care of it. As they grew to power they turned out to be one of the most oppressive and threatening regimes in the last 100 years, they cared for nothing but German superiority, and as such there was no room for compromise. The only way to stop them was with the combined might of the rest of the world.
So when someone says "enviro-nazi", they are talking about someone who is concerned for the environment at the expense of all else. They are dogmatic in their beliefs, and generally follow an "it's our way or we'll [try to] destroy you" philosophy. No compromise, if you disagree you are wrong and must be eliminated.
There are a number of people who are like that, they generally head various environmental organizations, and the term "enviro-nazi" is very descriptive and only slightly exaggerated.
In other words, quit with the ad Hominem attacks and actually rebutt an argument, or I'm going to assume you simply have nothing rational or interesting to add to these arguments.
I work on a large oil field that is located in barren tundra, and as a rough guesstimate I'd figure complying with environmental regulations accounts for about 1/4 of the cost to run the field, with taxes taking up another 1/4.
You would not believe how many people are employed as environmental watch-dogs. The gravel roads have to be a certain thickness (generally about 6 ft high) so that, when areas are eventually decommissioned and the permafrost underneath will not have been affected. Buildings are built up off the tundra so animals can walk under them, etc. Before can set foot on the site you must go through an 8-hour training seminar covering the basic rules and regulations. Anybody working in a position that they consider potentially hazardous to the environment. Everything must be reported, including things like spilling small amounts of motor oil onto a concrete shop floor (I'm talking over spill here, a few ounces at most). Does the company get dinged for every little thing? Not necessarily, but still time and effort must be taken to report every single little thing that happens.
One of the quickest ways to get fired is blatant disregard for the plethora of environmental rules, and even you are following the rules but have too many "accidents", you can get fired. It's too high a liability for the company.
You're also ignoring the permitting process - if the greenies have any influence in their LOCAL government, they can fairly easily block new permits for things like drilling and refining. Even if they don't have any influence in government, they can always file lawsuits and submit ethics complaints against officials who are just doign their job correctly. This can and does happen regularly in my state, one of the main reasons our oil field exists at all is because it has been here for decades, before the big green push.
I don't think these environmental protections are necessarily a bad thing, I think in some ways they go a bit too far but on the whole I believe we have a responsibility to protect our environment, so in general I think they are perfectly justifiable.
However, you'd have to be an unrealistic daydreamer to think these environmental protections do not have a significant impact on the viability of an oil field, and whether or not a company starting drilling operations in an area will be able to turn a profit.
I think the reason he got a poor grade was likely linked to his lack of the word "existential", or any of its derivatives. Philosophers love things like "existential" and "existentialism", pepper in a few of them bad boys and you're golden. If you turn it in to some nonsense like "dynamic existentialism" you'll probably even get extra credit!
It's pretty easy to argue someone else's view when you state it incorrectly.
If there is no free will, what complex series of events caused you to choose the color shirt you wore today instead of the color you wore two days ago? You can argue that with a powerful enough computer you could compute that answer, but we have immensely powerful computers that are not up to the task. Saying "a computer could do it" is therefore nothing more than whatif's and fantasy. It is no different than saying Free Will requires a soul, they are both nothing more than (currently) unknowable quantities that influence every action a person takes.
In my view, Free Will is simply the option to choose an apparently less rational option, whether or not a person makes the less rational choice is irrelevant. Free Will is the big monkey wrench that always manages to screw up every mathematical model of human behavior that has ever been devised. Not one of them correctly accounts for it, or really accounts for it more correctly than the models that came before. Game theory is the prevailing tool for creating these models, and none have been very accurate. They seem to be accurate for a time, but completely fall apart after a point.
Seriously, the "if we had a computer big enough" argument is complete nonsense without out any evidence that that is the case. Our computing power is an order of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago, and yet we are not one bit closer to computing the cause of what we see as Free Will. Why?
The sad thing is, for 90% of news stories the headline and a few lines of text is all you need to read to realize that it is in no way relevant to you, and that you really don't care about what the article itself says.
If you want to be realistic, how's this? Almost all news organizations re-sell someone else's reporting for global, national, and regional news. It's only at the local level that news is rarely re-sold. Also, the larger the news organization the less they re-sell, however most US news agencies get their national and international news from the Associated Press, which is a co-op of 1700 news papers and 5,000 broadcast news outlets.
In other words, Google has simply beaten Mr. Murdoch and the rest of the news agencies to the punch, linking together and diseminating news from thousands of sources via a single location on the internet.
Frankly, the first group to come up with a way of vetting blogs as reliable news sources is going to make obscene amounts of cash, and in the mean time traditional news organizations are fighting to make sure they'll be dead and gone by the time that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft, everybody knows Lynx is the most secure browser.
In truth I trust no browser, I read straight HTML. You would not believe how hard it is to get ASP pages to render...
Bingo, all I see are logical fallacies attacking Cenzic because people don't like the results. You don't dispute bad results by saying the source of the information is evil, because that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the results are factual.
How many of these vulnerabilities were due to Firefox itself, and how many due to plugins?
Does it matter? If FF allows the plugins enough control over the browser to present a vulnerability in the browser, then that's a vulnerability in FF that they need to fix.
Saying "oh no, we don't have vulnerabilities ourselves, we just allow vulnerable plugins to run" doesn't speak much to the security of Fire Fox.
In other words, the cop-out doesn't fly. If FireFox is vulnerable to something another browser is not, it has one more vulnerability than that browser, period.
So I'm assuming you don't trust surveys sponsored by rivals of MS either, right?
Right?
No?
I thought so. You just don't like the results. If the methodology truly is flawed, Firefox and Safari can hire another company to do another survey. If the results are the complete opposite, then we know one or both surveys are complete bullshit, and we can't really trust either without a truly independant survey.
I don't know if you know this, but survey companies don't do this kind of work for free. They can't. If Mozilla and Apple aren't interested in a fair and balanced survey, but Microsoft is, MS has no choice but to foot the bill for it themselves. The opposite is also true, as is the inverse (if MS wants a manipulated survey, they have to pay for it). Regardless of who wants it done or how fairly and accurately it is done, Cenzic is not going to do it without money.
If you really want to cast doubt on the survey, why not attempt to verify their results? You're commiting a classic logical fallacy (circumstantial ad hominem) I see here on Slashdot a lot - especially regarding MS. That this company has done business with MS in the past does not make their claim false. No matter how much you wish that were so, it is not the case.
You've also fallen victim to the "poisoned well" fallacy - you believe the things you've heard about MS's motives, and therefore any information produced by MS must be false. This is foolishness. Be skeptical, but don't outright assume that because it came from MS it is wrong. You are doing yourself a great disservice by thinking this way.
With all that said, I can confidently say that I have absolutely no idea how valid this survey is. It seems pretty legitimate to me but I haven't exactly scruitinized it either.
Actually if the OS interceeds in a buffer-overrun situation (basically, out of memory and crash), you are not vulnerable to code injection into memory. Most operating systems today do exactly that for precisely that reason - to prevent code injection. In other words, your browser can crash all the time and you aren't necessarily vulnerable to code injection.
There are various other conditions that can leave you open to code injection though.
Safari is not open-source, WebKit is. Prove me wrong by finding a copy of Safari 4's source code. Yeah, didn't think so. The vulnerabilities aren't necessarily related to the browser engine (though they certainly can be).
From what I understand the report was based on the number of vulnerabilities patched, not announced. for IE these are released every tuesday of every month, for FireFox I believe they are released whenever they are finished.
Vulnerabilities patched is a decent indicator, because for closed source you would not know about any unpatched vulnerabilities that were discovered internally (and there are a lot) before patching. Any serious vulnerability that MS knows about MUST be patched for IE, for if it is discovered they knew for any extended period about a serious vulnerability and did nothing, they risk losing the confidence of their business partners.
So despite the fact that some people, particularly open-source advocates, don't trust MS to patch vulnerabilities, it is certainly in their best interest to do so. The evidence is the speed and number of vulnerabilities they patch.
I don't think severity would help the metric in favor of Firefox or Safari because serious vulnerabilities get patched as quickly as possible on all sides (except maybe when Safari devs don't consider a severe vulnerability severe, heh), and a large portion of patches that MS releases for IE are less than critical.
With the most recent versions of IE Microsoft has really cleaned up its act in regards to security, and they have the ability to be the best at it if they choose to be.
Patched vulnerabilities may not be the best metric, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better one.
Actually, in order to qualify as libel it MUST be damaging, and malicious and untrue as well.
In other words, you can't argue that anonymous libel is NOT damaging.
I think what you meant to say, is that you can hardly argue alleged libel posted anonymously is going to be seriously damaging.
I would guess that anonymous revelations of the truth do society much more good than anonymous lies do harm.
I would argue that they should not be mutually exclusive - that we should have a right to protect another's anonymity in cases where it is legitimate(incidentally, we do, and this scenario is usually the case), and the courts should have the ability to supercede that right when we abuse it to harm others (incidentally, they do, but it should be kept as rare as possible).
Note that I did NOT say you have the right to force others to protect your anonymity. You do have the right to protect your own anonymity as best you can, and you have the right to protect someone else's anonymity. It is essentially the right to not speak when you don't want to. As with everything though, there are limits, and there have been a number of cases that show these limits. Generally they make sense.
However, on this case, I think the Judge is way out of line. Not so much that the judge ruled that the guy's identity should be revealed, but that she ruled this without a formal suit against the man! She is basically saying "I want to know who this guy is" and the court is forcing people to tell her, it's ridiculous! The judge should have told her to go pound sand until she's willing to bring a legitimate lawsuit against him. As someone else has stated, this is like forcing discovery without having to have a legitimate case, and it stinks to high heaven. Until she files a suit, she has no legitimate claim to that information.
Oh you are an asshole.
You degenerate piece of slime editing my words to say something that I did not say. You have no idea how to make a proper argument, so you must blatantly lie about what I said. You are a scumbag.
If you want to disagree with me, fine. Argue against my points in an honest way, but do NOT lie about what I said. You are scum, and your whole post is bullshit nonsense.
By the way, libel is protected.
First off, Fox News and Glenn Beck did not bring a libel suit against glennbeckrapedagirlin1990.com, they brought a trademark infringement suit, which is entirely different. Maybe if you didn't like to lie about what other people write it would help your case a bit, hmm?
Second, libel is definitely not protected, there are laws that have been upheld by SCOTUS relating to libel and slander, but there are stringent requirements that must be met before a piece of text can be considered libelous. The first is that it is untrue. The second is that the text was malicious, that it intended to cause harm. The third is that it actually did damage the person's reputation. There are also all sorts of qualifications within each of those criteria for determining if the text/speech fits each criteria.
glennbeckrapedagirlin1990.com is an obvious parody, and so while it satisfies the first criteria, it does not satisfy the second or third. It is political satyr, making a point, and I think it makes it somewhat, but not very effectively. Glenn Beck can be fun to watch but it does get tiresome after a while.
Death threats with nothing behind them harm no one, so there is obviously no reason to curtail them in a free society. However, it's pretty easy to get a substantial restraining order against someone who issues a death threat. As I said in my post which you misrepresented, you are free to say whatever you want, but you are not free from the consequences that may come about because of that speech.
Anonymity has nothing to do with it, and is not guaranteed in any way (outside of the few areas that are already protected) beyond what you can provide for yourself.
This is due to the simple fat that expressing certain views and opinions, such as in politics may get you killed.
Bullshit, maybe in oppressive regimes that don't have freedom of speech laws, like the UK (I kid! I kid!), but that simply doesn't happen in the US. On the rare case that someone uses that as an excuse, they go to jail for a long, long time.
Anonymity is completely unrelated to free speech. In fact, anonymity is only necessary when you do NOT have free speech - when the government is willing to suppress dissenting opinions, lack of anonymity will get you killed. In that case, anonymity is also not a right the government would not recognize. In other words, in a free society it is not necessary, and in a repressed society it will not happen.
Freedom of speech does not include freedom from consequences. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater - claiming a "right" to anonymity will not change a thing as they sentance you to multiple lifetimes in prison for the dozens of people you killed. Other examples include libel and slander laws.
The point of free speech is that nobody can STOP you from saying something (note that they don't have to help you say something, either), not that you cannot be held accountable for what you say. You cannot be silenced before you can speak, as is common in countries without any respect to free speech.
Another example was a biker chick who runs the "Top-Free" protest, attempting to allow women to go topless without violating obscenity laws like men can. She was protesting in I think Nevada somewhere, everybody knew what she was going to do, there were cops everywhere, but they couldn't touch her until she actually broke the law. It wasn't until she pulled her top off that they arrested her, even though they would have loved to bring her in a lot sooner.
As long as the option for anonymity does not exist, free speech does not existant on any topic of any real world importance.
Wrong, freedom of speech makes anonymity unnecessary and often counter-productive. Because of freedom of speech, you can say whatever you want out in the open without fear of reprisal, so long as that speech does not harm somebody else - annonymity is not necessary. Anonymity is also not guaranteed by freedom of speech, that has been determined dozens of times in a court of law. In a free society, anonymity is used as a cover to harrass, inflame and spread libelous or slanderous speech. It is only occasionally used in cases where, for example, an employee wants to point out abuses by their employer and still maintain the ability to get a job somewhere else. That case is covered under whistle-blower laws.
Anonymity is necessary for dissenting speech in situations where there IS legitimate fear of reprisal, and these situations generally occur in countries without free speech laws. In the few cases where anonymity is still not so much necessary but desirable for society as a whole, we have laws guaranteeing it.
Freedom of speech is not a license to hurt others without consequence. Freedom of speech ends when it infringes someone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Anonymity is not a right, and is only legitimate for as long as YOU can maintain it - there is no expectation that anybody else will maintain it for you unless that person is in a sensitive position (like a doctor or lawyer) or you have a contract maintaining it (like a non-disclosure agreement).
Freedom of speech does not mean "Freedom to say whatever I want with no consequences". Freedom of speech means you are free to say what you want, and the government cannot censor you. However, if what you said caused real harm to another person, you can be held liable for that action. If the people you were hiding behind aren't willing to fight for you, well, you're SOL. The only time I know of when anonymity is a legal right is when voting and under certain whistle-blower laws. That's about it, and that's all it should be.
My favorite example that clearly shows the distinction is a case during WW2, where the New York Times got ahold of sensitive military troop movements, and wanted to publish them. I don't think they were necessarily malicious, it was just a massive scoop. The Military learned of the leak before the Times published the information, and sought a court ordered injunction against the Times publishing the information. The judge ruled that an injunction was unconstitutional, however, if the Times published the information and American lives were lost as a direct result, they could be held responsible, facing charges of manslaughter and potentially even treason.
In other words, nobody can prevent you from saying anything, even yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, but that does not mean you can't be held responsible. We don't punish people based on what it "can lead to", we punish based on what it DID lead to. In this particular case, a whole lot of nothing. If I were a judge and she brought this suit I'd tell her to grow the hell up. Of course, I probably wouldn't make a good judge anyway.
I'd say the fact that so many outrages come to light and are subsequently curtailed, if not stopped completely, would be evidence of free speech helping.
Think of all the arguments surrounding the patriot act, those warrants that were issued after the fact, etc. The law didn't get changed, but the Bush administration was MUCH more carefull about it. Still, the whole Patriot Act is mostly BS and needs to be neutered. Why haven't Obama and the Dems pushed to fix this? They can spend trillions of our money in the course of a couple years but they can't repeal a bad law they've been using to bash Republicans over the head with(and rightfully so)? They may lose their power in Congress soon, so they should get busy and do it now!
Don't leave Obama* off that list, he'll have you in jail for saying mean things about black people, muslims, or homosexuals.
Back on topic, the truth is there is no right to anonymity - if you say something to someone you can be held accountable for it. There is a right to free speech - in that you can say what you want when you want to who you want and nobody can stop you. However, if your speech is harmful in a meaningful way to others (I'm not talking about bulshit "it hurt my feelings" crap, grow the fuck up people) others there can be consequences. Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater that is not on fire is the famous example, others include libel/slander, where the speech must be untrue and intended to cause harm, and publicly revealing military secrets which would put American lives in danger if revealed. The last one actually happened in WW2 to the New York Times, the military could not get an injunction against them, but if they had published the information they could have reigned hell upon them legally, and several members of the news organization would have gone to jail for intentionally putting American troops in harm's way. They couldn't stop it, but they could certainly punish it after the fact.
As it relates to this mom, I think she's full of it and over-protective, and if she wants to sue this guy she should sue, she should not harrass him like she is doing - there are laws against harassment too, you know. I also think it's complete bull that she could get as far as she has without actually filing a suit against the guy. Illinois is one screwed up state.
*This source is not the least biased by any means, but none of the "news" sources would say much about what is actually in the bill.
From what I've seen of the LIDAR issues in Europe, jitter isn't the problem (you can't shoot a gun with a wiggly hand, most cops practice handgun usage regularly), it's reflection. Because the LIDAR measures distance traveled over an extremely short amount of time, if a particular scan is reflected at all the chances are good that all or most of the individual pulses for that scan were also likely reflected.
I vaguely remember a UK court case where the defense set up a real-world scenario in which a LIDAR scan reflected off a reflective road sign back to a traffic camera and was in the neighborhood of 20mph off. The situation was similar enough to real world conditions that the defendant got off and UK LIDAR procedures and equipment had to be changed out to more reliable guns and practices.
So apparently speeding isn't a behavior because there is a number involved? What he's seeing with his eyeballs is a behavior, what he is measuring with RADAR is a number directly related to that behavior.
(By the way, what's with all the square brackets? Isn't $ alone enough in all sane languages/template processors?)
English is not a sane language.
Maybe because the sole purpose of a Traffic Judge is to determine whether or not a Cop's judgement was correct in issuing a traffic ticket? I could see some real resentment forming there, putting them in conflict with each other. Especially if one group does not approve of the way another group does their job.
No no no no, not Donuts that Eat Machines, Machines that Eat Donuts!
What we've seen in past year is that high oil prices destroy economic growth which destroys high oil prices.
That's not what happened at all, the oil prices had nothing to do with economic growth, and the oil prices also had nothing to do with supply/demand which would ordinarily govern such things.
The oil prices were artificially inflated by the OPEC cartel, which is unmaintainable. They reset prices before the bubble burst on them (which would be very bad for OPEC), and for a little while oil was priced a little lower than it should have been.
The economic crisis was a completely separate issue, caused by funny business in the housing markets - particularly the insurance markets.
In fact what was remarkable about the period of extremely high oil prices was consumption of oil did not change much, people simply got a little angry, and put MPG higher on their list of "things I want in a car" for their next purchase. A lot of companies used oil prices as an excuse, but for most of them it was a complete crock.
It's called Hyperbole, grow up a little, will ya?
OMG! He said Nazi! Godwin! Godwin! Godwin!
Let me help you out with a brief history lesson: In Germany nearly a century ago, things were not so great. They just lost The Big One, and reparations to the rest of Europe completely bankrupted the country. Along comes this group called the Nazi Party, and they promised to fix that. All you had to give them was complete control and they'd take care of it. As they grew to power they turned out to be one of the most oppressive and threatening regimes in the last 100 years, they cared for nothing but German superiority, and as such there was no room for compromise. The only way to stop them was with the combined might of the rest of the world.
So when someone says "enviro-nazi", they are talking about someone who is concerned for the environment at the expense of all else. They are dogmatic in their beliefs, and generally follow an "it's our way or we'll [try to] destroy you" philosophy. No compromise, if you disagree you are wrong and must be eliminated.
There are a number of people who are like that, they generally head various environmental organizations, and the term "enviro-nazi" is very descriptive and only slightly exaggerated.
In other words, quit with the ad Hominem attacks and actually rebutt an argument, or I'm going to assume you simply have nothing rational or interesting to add to these arguments.
Dude! You just said Nazi! You just got Godwinded... Godwindeded... whatever!
I work on a large oil field that is located in barren tundra, and as a rough guesstimate I'd figure complying with environmental regulations accounts for about 1/4 of the cost to run the field, with taxes taking up another 1/4.
You would not believe how many people are employed as environmental watch-dogs. The gravel roads have to be a certain thickness (generally about 6 ft high) so that, when areas are eventually decommissioned and the permafrost underneath will not have been affected. Buildings are built up off the tundra so animals can walk under them, etc. Before can set foot on the site you must go through an 8-hour training seminar covering the basic rules and regulations. Anybody working in a position that they consider potentially hazardous to the environment. Everything must be reported, including things like spilling small amounts of motor oil onto a concrete shop floor (I'm talking over spill here, a few ounces at most). Does the company get dinged for every little thing? Not necessarily, but still time and effort must be taken to report every single little thing that happens.
One of the quickest ways to get fired is blatant disregard for the plethora of environmental rules, and even you are following the rules but have too many "accidents", you can get fired. It's too high a liability for the company.
You're also ignoring the permitting process - if the greenies have any influence in their LOCAL government, they can fairly easily block new permits for things like drilling and refining. Even if they don't have any influence in government, they can always file lawsuits and submit ethics complaints against officials who are just doign their job correctly. This can and does happen regularly in my state, one of the main reasons our oil field exists at all is because it has been here for decades, before the big green push.
I don't think these environmental protections are necessarily a bad thing, I think in some ways they go a bit too far but on the whole I believe we have a responsibility to protect our environment, so in general I think they are perfectly justifiable.
However, you'd have to be an unrealistic daydreamer to think these environmental protections do not have a significant impact on the viability of an oil field, and whether or not a company starting drilling operations in an area will be able to turn a profit.
I think the reason he got a poor grade was likely linked to his lack of the word "existential", or any of its derivatives. Philosophers love things like "existential" and "existentialism", pepper in a few of them bad boys and you're golden. If you turn it in to some nonsense like "dynamic existentialism" you'll probably even get extra credit!
Belief in free will is belief in a soul...
Says you.
It's pretty easy to argue someone else's view when you state it incorrectly.
If there is no free will, what complex series of events caused you to choose the color shirt you wore today instead of the color you wore two days ago? You can argue that with a powerful enough computer you could compute that answer, but we have immensely powerful computers that are not up to the task. Saying "a computer could do it" is therefore nothing more than whatif's and fantasy. It is no different than saying Free Will requires a soul, they are both nothing more than (currently) unknowable quantities that influence every action a person takes.
In my view, Free Will is simply the option to choose an apparently less rational option, whether or not a person makes the less rational choice is irrelevant. Free Will is the big monkey wrench that always manages to screw up every mathematical model of human behavior that has ever been devised. Not one of them correctly accounts for it, or really accounts for it more correctly than the models that came before. Game theory is the prevailing tool for creating these models, and none have been very accurate. They seem to be accurate for a time, but completely fall apart after a point.
Seriously, the "if we had a computer big enough" argument is complete nonsense without out any evidence that that is the case. Our computing power is an order of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago, and yet we are not one bit closer to computing the cause of what we see as Free Will. Why?
The sad thing is, for 90% of news stories the headline and a few lines of text is all you need to read to realize that it is in no way relevant to you, and that you really don't care about what the article itself says.
If you want to be realistic, how's this? Almost all news organizations re-sell someone else's reporting for global, national, and regional news. It's only at the local level that news is rarely re-sold. Also, the larger the news organization the less they re-sell, however most US news agencies get their national and international news from the Associated Press, which is a co-op of 1700 news papers and 5,000 broadcast news outlets.
In other words, Google has simply beaten Mr. Murdoch and the rest of the news agencies to the punch, linking together and diseminating news from thousands of sources via a single location on the internet.
Frankly, the first group to come up with a way of vetting blogs as reliable news sources is going to make obscene amounts of cash, and in the mean time traditional news organizations are fighting to make sure they'll be dead and gone by the time that happens.