The above post sounds like a troll, but what the hell, I'm feeling my oats right now, so here goes.
Make fun of Furbies, ok. Furbies are just a stupid plastic piece of American consumerism, and when you ridicule them, you're correctly ridiculing the worst parts of our society. I'm fine with that.
Furbies represent the worst parts of American society, therefore it is ok to ridicule them. I won't comment yet, but let's keep this in mind for a moment.
But when you satirize capital punishment, you're going too far. Capital punishment exists; it's very real in the sense that it actually kills people. It's a disgrace that any modern "civilized" society could commit such an abomination (just as it's a disgrace that we commit racial profiling or other offenses against human liberties), and by using it solely as a premise for laughter, you're demeaning its impact on the innocent lives it takes.
Actually, I agree with you. I don't like capital punishment. I'm not sure what you mean by demeaning its impact on the innocent lives it takes. The only thing I can think of that would be relevant is the emotional impact of capital punishment in the minds of others. I can tell you that jokes about capital punishment have not diminished the horror in my mind. Judging by your post, it hasn't diminished the impact in your mind either. That's two data points against your argument. Please remember also, that the humor is dependent on the emotional impact of capital punishment. The people who find it funniest are likely to be the people who agree with you about how horrible it is.
By the way, remember where you said that Furbies represented the worst parts of American society? Are you saying that they are worse than capital punishment? In your first paragraph, you say it is ok to ridicule something because of how bad it is and in the next you say that ridiculing something that is bad demeans its impact. I think perhaps you should make up your mind.
When you teach children that it's ok to electrocute talking fuzzy toys, you may not realize it, but you're teaching them a lot more. At best, you're teaching them that it's ok to destroy property wantonly. At worse, you're setting them up to think it's ok to electrocute pets and animals, and eventually, people. Children who are taught violence grow up to become adults who commit violence, and we all suffer for it. We have to start by reaching them when they're young and teaching them otherwise. There's no other way our society can survive.
You may not have figured this out yet, but it is ok to destroy your own property. As for the rest, was the humor directed at children? Furbies are inanimate objects. How does electrocuting one imply that it is all right to electrocute pets, animals, and people? If this is the case, then how does ridiculing one (see your first paragraph) not imply that it is alright to ridicule pets, animals, and people? As far as societies survival, don't forget that the vast majority of children grow up to be responsible adults even though every parent has different, contradictory ideas about how to raise children.
I think perhaps you should consider getting that broomstick removed. You will find sitting down to be so much easier.
I agree with you, I've always hated the anti-aliasing effect on LCD screens. However, I just got a laptop with an SXGA+ screen (1400x1050) and I've found that it is no longer a problem. I still don't like 1280x1024, but 1024x768 is acceptable and 800x600 and 640x480 both look as good to me as they do on CRT's.
I imagine that the UXGA laptops (1600x1200) will look even better.
some of the credit probably belongs to the video chipset which actually does the anti-aliasing.
There is a distinct possibility that the reason Netscape is crashing on your Windows box is that Netscape is a piece of crap. Half the time when it crashes, it leaves a hung background task which needs to be killed manually before restarting it. All bets are off if you try to resize it with full window drag enabled. It even steals your newsreader association without telling you. Maybe it was inevitable that they would lose the browser war, but it happened that much faster because they were putting out crap.
People use IE for two reasons. It comes free with their OS, and it is easily the best browser on any OS. I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft, but in this case, the winner is obvious. I am hoping that Mozilla will be better, but right now, I dread the times that I have to use Netscape under Linux for surfing the web.
As far as Opera goes, the MDI layout it uses is just so amazingly awful that it trumps all other considerations.
Handspring has no flash memory. Instead, the OS is loaded into DRAM like everything else. Why? So that they can easily issue software patches to people that don't require flashing! Software patching to fix something like this is not only what Palm is doing, but also, one of the reasons why Handspring went with their design in the first place.
Actually, the OS on a Handspring is in ROM. The reason they did that is to save money. There is no technical advantage to it. There is no reason that Palm couldn't release a software patch just like Handspring. They have chosen to instead release a patch that goes into flash memory so that it won't be lost on a hard reset.
This isn't necessarily good. I don't know what the procedure is for doing the upgrade on a Palm. If it involves reflashing the entire OS, then I think they need to rethink it a little. However, it probably just involves taking nearly the same patch that you are getting for your Handspring and putting it in flash. For myself, I know that if Palm released the upgrade as a software patch, I would use FlashPro to burn it into flash myself and get the same effect.
There's nothing wrong with putting the OS in ROM the way Handspring has done, but it is not an added feature.
I would say the differences is that a gun is a weapon and a car is a tool made for transportation.
Yes a car can kill, but that is not the purpose of it. A gun on the other hand doesn't really have any other purpose but to kill.
Tell me, how exactly is this a difference? Why is the purpose of a tool more important than the use to which it is put? A car may have transportation as its primary use, but it can be far deadlier than a simple handgun. It requires less skill, has greater range, and offers a level of defense to the user. If I wanted to kill a large group of people, and didn't care about getting caught in the process, I think I would choose a motor vehicle as a more effective weapon. It also has as an advantage the fact that people won't see it as a weapon until I use it as such.
Once upon a time, a man in California named Dr. Kubota developed a set of self defense techniques that could be used by businessmen carrying an implement that they generally had on them. Namely, a metal pen such as a Cross or Parker pen. He discovered, however, that the techniques were far too dangerous and it was difficult for the users to defend themselves without either killing or seriously injuring their assailants. You may not consider this a bad thing, but he did.
He developed a new device he called a Kubotan. It was a cylinder of plastic or metal 5-6 inches long with a.5 inch diameter. In many states, the metal version is illegal. In some places the plastic version is illegal. Keep in mind that it exists only because it is safer than a metal pen which is legal everywhere.
Mag manufactures a small aluminum flashlight that takes two AA batteries. This flashlight is functionally equivalent to a metal Kubotan except for the fact that is also provides illumination. It is also legal everywhere.
Many martial arts weapons are actually farm implements which were put to use as weapons out of necessity and the desire to get around laws banning weapons.
Now, a gun is an extremely dangerous weapon. In a house with children, it should be kept locked up when it is not in use, and it should not be left out around people you don't know. Maybe the same restriction should apply to cars. It is certainly a tragedy when a child gets access to a gun and an accident results. It is also, however, a tragedy when a child gets access to a car and an accident results. I don't know the statistics, but I would be surprised if deaths involving children trying to drive cars were not far more common than deaths involving children playing with guns. The difference is that deaths involving guns involve guns.
You said that regarding the gun issue you are neutral, and I think you really believe that. However, your position implies that at some level you have a perception that guns are fundamentally evil in a way that cars are not.
Somehow, I don't think that the concept of original sin should be relevant.
There is a reason the planes we fly in have 50 year old designs, despite advances in materials and aeronotical sciences.
The reason is that 50 year old designs work. They have a good track record and they are known quantities in general. New designs would give you improvements in speed, efficiency, and cargo capacity. How strongly are market forces pushing these factors? The trend lately has been towards smaller planes rather than monsters like the 747. Fuel costs are only a small part of your overall ticket cost, and would you be willing to pay more money for a 20% faster trip? Keep in mind that it took you an hour to get to the airport, you got there nearly an hour early, it took you 20-30 minutes to get your luggage, you have an hour's drive to your destination, and the plane wasted at least 20-30 minutes between waiting for a runway to take off and circling for a runway to land.
There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years.
The reason is that high pressure hydrogen is dangerous to work with. If the tank ruptures in an accident, your car goes up like a bomb. The gas station (if you can find one) needs to be able to fill your tank at high pressure. You have the chicken and egg problem as well. You need a gas station that can fill it, and a mechanic that can work on it. (God help you if you neglect the maintenance on your fuel system.) In addition, gasoline engines are, again, a known quantity. Think about rotary engines. In theory, they are simpler and more reliable. In reality, the compression ratio sucks, so you have to turbocharge it for decent performance, and turbochargers have their own reliability problems. As soon as you turbocharge a rotary engine, you increase the likelyhood that it will blow its apex seals. This is the moral equivalent of a ring job for a piston engine.
Innovations do get out there, but in order to be viable, there must be people willing to buy them after considering costs, benefits, and shortcomings. When it comes to safety being new is a shortcoming.
It sounds like windows hosed the bios settings. Try setting the jumper to clear the CMOS. Windows can sometimes get funny when it is moved from one chipset to another.
I don't see why they would have to CONSISTENTLY behave recklessly in order to EVER behave recklessly.
But that aside, you claimed that because malice was necessary, no mistake was libelous, and that's just not true. And we're CLEARLY not talking about this case, ANYWAY, because THIS WOMAN IS PROBABLY NOT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OR CHER.
Ok, a document is libelous if it was created with a reckless disregard for the truth. That was a mistake on my part. Now, let us discuss the matter of whether the facts in this situation constitute reckless disregard.
Assuming that the company which did the background check makes a business of doing background checks, it seems to me that no matter what safeguards they put in place, there will always be a few errors. Just as a matter of common sense, I think that in order for the woman to prove that reckless disregard has taken place, she must demonstrate one of the following two scenarios:
She must find solid evidence that they acted in a reckless fashion in her case. Note that the very existence of the error does not constitute evidence of this.
She must demonstrate that the company has an inordinately high error rate in their background checks. This would indicate that their process is reckless. If this is the case, then I don't see their clients giving them money for very much longer.
So no, they don't have to consistently behave recklessly in order to ever behave recklessly. However, you seem to be assuming the existence of evidence you have heard nothing about. Also, you are assuming the existence of evidence that could be very difficult and expensive to obtain. That's quite a bit of assumption for a week's wages.
Finally, throughout the course of this discussion, I have in fact been talking about this case. I'm a little confused by your references to the president and to Cher. I'm also a little confused about why you felt the need to shout them in my ear.
Unless her company performed the check themselves, it's none of their business and they shouldn't be offended.
It may not be any of her companies business, but she will probably have to call representatives of the company as witnesses. In terms of lost work on the part of the employees, the company could very easily stand to lose more than she stands to make.
Incidentally, you may want to research the courts' interpretation of "malice" further - a mistake as the result of "reckless disregard" of the truth of the statement is malicious.
If the company that did the background check recklessly disregarded the truth, they would probably not be in the business of doing background checks for very long. In addition, if they corrected the error when presented with evidence, then I doubt that "reckless disregard" would apply. The standard for proving libel and slander is fairly high.
Maybe you missed something very important: Nothing much happened. A mistake was made, and it was corrected. She could sue, but look at the potential consequences:
Representatives of her employer, which is just getting to know her, get called as witnesses, taking time out of work quite possibly costing the company more than she stands to win. What kind of impression does that leave with them?
She got the job and only lost a week's wages. Her constitutional rights were not violated, her ability to earn a living wasn't compromised, and her reputation wasn't tarnished.
Mistakes happen. A mistake was made, it was corrected, and the consequences weren't very severe. Yes she probably has standing to sue in small claims court, but she has to make a decision about the potential costs vs. benefits of doing so, and one of the factors she should consider is the budding relationship she has with her new employer.
One thing she could possibly do is hire a lawyer to write a nastygram. She may get some money out of that, but if they do nothing, I think she should just leave it.
As for this being the cause of things going to crap in this country, notice I didn't say that all cases like this should be ignored, just the ones where nothing much happened. If you actually sustain some significant hurt, financial or otherwise, then you should persue it, but considering the cost of action and then choosing to let the piddling shit lie does not represent a slippery slope.
The funny thing is, he didn't know she was born in Austria, and she didn't know she was born in Austria. The background check revealed that she was adopted by a german family, another fact that she didn't know her whole life up until that point.
Unfortunately, libel and slander require that you prove malice. A mistake, even as the result of incompetence, does not constitute libel or slander.
One possibility would be suing in small claims court for a week's wages. This could, however, lead to potential problems with her new employer when she calls her new manager as a witness.
On the whole, the harm done was only a week's wages. I would tell her to document it so her next employer won't have the same problem and to otherwise just suck it up.
He asks Stallman about the issue and Stallman says he is the wrong person to ask. Then, instead of feeling like a complete goober and going off to ask someone else, he quotes Stallman saying he should not have been asked.
In addition, there's the initials thing. I think I've heard Stallman referred to as RMS nearly as often as I've heard Raymond referred to as ESR.
Black boxes to assign blame? We already know what causes the majority of fatal accidents. We know that alchohol/drugs contribute to 60%- 80% of the accidents. That is why they drive recklessly. We don't need black boxes or video cameras to prove that.
I think the statistic you want is around 50% last I heard. Also, that statistic is only where alcohol and drugs are related to the accident. If a drunk staggers into the road, and you swerve to miss him and hit a telephone pole, that is alcohol related. If you are on antihistimines and they hit you harder than you expected, that is drug related. If someone has a couple of drinks and their BAC is around.05, it's alcohol related. If I had to guess, I would say that 25-30% is more accurate.
On a side note, one thing that really yanks my chain is when organizations (MADD) feel it's all right to lie or misrepresent statistics if it's for a good cause.
You see, it turns out that a lot of people are still using horses. I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm pointing out that it's there, it's real... and it's not in any way less relevant just because it's in the Third World.
Why is it not a good thing? Cars are expensive, unreliable, require maintenance, parts, fuel, and they don't handle rural roads very well.
In the same situation where cars aren't so good, however, horses excel. They handle rough terrain, they can pull plows and other implements of destruction, eat grass and etc. from a pasture, and can be somewhat self guided.
The right tool for the job is the one that does the job best for the least investment of time and money. If you decide that horses are a Bad Thing because they aren't "modern" enough, your approaching it from the wrong angle. The coolness factor is a hindrance to the decision making process, not an aid.
Battlefield Earth has brought to a close a period of prolonged stagnation which very nearly caused the elimination of the exciting sport of cow tipping from the 2000 Olympic games.
Competitive tippers everywhere have spent weeks perfecting their own personal variations on the new techniques demonstrated by actor John Travolta.
Travolta, an amateur sportsman for whom tipping bovines is only an occasional hobby, says the "Terl" maneuver was originally a fortuitous accident:
I'm only a hobbyist. I don't even really have enough upper body strength for a proper cow tip. Oh, I'd try every once in a while, and even succeed somtimes, but most of the time, I confined myself to the bush league overbalancing activities involving sheep, goats, and cats. One day, however, I was trying to take off in my F16 from a field, but there were cows all over the place. Out of frustration, I pressed the fire button for the machine guns. Ordinarily, this would not have done anything, since armament isn't actually permitted in civilian owned jets, but a buddy from the air force had, merely as a prank, installed twin Vulcan gattling guns loaded with rubber bullets. Imagine my surprise when I leveled three cows in under a second.
The International Bovine Overbalancing Authority (IBOA) has ruled that any armament used in competition must be carried onto the field by the competitor. This rules out the use of F16's or other aircraft. This has generally been considered a positive decision as otherwise, many amateur athletes would have been priced out of the competition.
During the Olympic games, look out for the innovative styles that will be employed:
One athlete is experimenting with a sling and a rotary saw blade.
Australian customs officials report a marked jump in the number of Stinger missle assemblies arriving.
Anonymous sources claim that the Japanese team is secretly training with a Kendo master.
All in all, this looks like an exciting time for sports fans.
Things were were always better in the old days, weren't they?
Remember how horribly everything broke when dos 4.0 came out?
Was Windows 95 really worse than windows3.1?
I think the Denver airport has been 5-6 years by now.
Every version of Netscape has been riddled with bugs.
Is Motif better than GTK?
X Windows is the defacto standard for unix displays. Is this really a good thing?
Do you actually like the design of NFS?
What about MacOS 6?
What you have is a gut feeling that things used to be better because you only remember the good stuff. You remember how great Wing Commander was while forgetting that it took you 3 hours to figure out the config.sys and autoexec.bat for the boot disk.
Now, the specific time frame being discussed is 5-6 years. Would you rather use Windows 95? As for unix, would you rather use SunOS? I remember some epic battles with xf86config under Linux. Was Netscape 1.1 really less buggy than Netscape 4.7?
The OO paradigm promised to save the world of software engineering from bugs, complexity, and maintenance difficulties, but if the last 5 or 6 years are to be considered as indicators for future performance, it's not worth the hype.
Think of it in terms of economics. People will write the most complex and featureful software they can that stays within the level of buggyness they can tolerate. Therefore, buggyness will tend to stay constant.
Software is just as buggy now as it was 5 or 6 years ago, but is far more complex. I have personal experience with what can be done with OO to facilitate large complex systems which would be unthinkable without it.
Therefore, people have taken advantage of the ability of OO to manage complexity and pushed the envelope with it. I don't consider this a bad thing.
In addition, while I know Perl well and like it a lot, I would not dare use it for a large complex project.
My first language was Applesoft Basic, but I couldn't really get into it. I really got into programming when I learned logo. It was easy, and I could grow with it into advanced programming topics. (It's really a dialect of Lisp.) I was playing with references, recursion, and binary search trees in no time. When I got into college and learned about pointers, I realized that I already knew about them. I breezed through what most people considered the hardest part of programming 102. Logo lets you go from printing your name and moving a turtle around to some pretty advanced topics. The only thing it doesn't support is OO, but you can always introduce Python as the second language.
I use VB occasionally, but it has inconsistencies which I always run into and the editor gets in the way. Can anyone tell me the difference between Let and Set? Why do you need one sometimes and not others? When do you use . and when do you use ! to access members?
Perl is powerful, but it was designed to be easy for Unix admins. I think others who learn it end up shaking their heads a little even if they grow to like it.
Python is a great language. It is easy, consistent, has an interactive interface, and scales from the easiest programming to some very advanced stuff. The only reason that it is my second choice is that it shields you from lots of things involving the use of references. You can't, for example, have variable X which is a reference to the variable Y. X can only be a reference to the object Y references. (All variables are really references.) Also, I don't know of any graphics packages that can be manipulated interactively like the turtle in Logo. (Tk is easy, but in Python, you have to set it up and then run your event loop. No interactive experimentation.)
I think there is a need for a learning language that:
Is interactive at the command line
Has a very consistent and easy syntax
Supports advanced programming concepts including OO, recursion, references, data structures, and multitasking/multithreading
Has an easy to use interactive graphics package
I'm thinking case insensitive symbol names might be useful
Basically, I think a good language for teaching children would be as friendly as Logo, as consistent as Python, and as conducive to cs theory as scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
The above post sounds like a troll, but what the hell, I'm feeling my oats right now, so here goes.
Make fun of Furbies, ok. Furbies are just a stupid plastic piece of American consumerism, and when you ridicule them, you're correctly ridiculing the worst parts of our society. I'm fine with that.
Furbies represent the worst parts of American society, therefore it is ok to ridicule them. I won't comment yet, but let's keep this in mind for a moment.
But when you satirize capital punishment, you're going too far. Capital punishment exists; it's very real in the sense that it actually kills people. It's a disgrace that any modern "civilized" society could commit such an abomination (just as it's a disgrace that we commit racial profiling or other offenses against human liberties), and by using it solely as a premise for laughter, you're demeaning its impact on the innocent lives it takes.
Actually, I agree with you. I don't like capital punishment. I'm not sure what you mean by demeaning its impact on the innocent lives it takes. The only thing I can think of that would be relevant is the emotional impact of capital punishment in the minds of others. I can tell you that jokes about capital punishment have not diminished the horror in my mind. Judging by your post, it hasn't diminished the impact in your mind either. That's two data points against your argument. Please remember also, that the humor is dependent on the emotional impact of capital punishment. The people who find it funniest are likely to be the people who agree with you about how horrible it is.
By the way, remember where you said that Furbies represented the worst parts of American society? Are you saying that they are worse than capital punishment? In your first paragraph, you say it is ok to ridicule something because of how bad it is and in the next you say that ridiculing something that is bad demeans its impact. I think perhaps you should make up your mind.
When you teach children that it's ok to electrocute talking fuzzy toys, you may not realize it, but you're teaching them a lot more. At best, you're teaching them that it's ok to destroy property wantonly. At worse, you're setting them up to think it's ok to electrocute pets and animals, and eventually, people. Children who are taught violence grow up to become adults who commit violence, and we all suffer for it. We have to start by reaching them when they're young and teaching them otherwise. There's no other way our society can survive.
You may not have figured this out yet, but it is ok to destroy your own property. As for the rest, was the humor directed at children? Furbies are inanimate objects. How does electrocuting one imply that it is all right to electrocute pets, animals, and people? If this is the case, then how does ridiculing one (see your first paragraph) not imply that it is alright to ridicule pets, animals, and people? As far as societies survival, don't forget that the vast majority of children grow up to be responsible adults even though every parent has different, contradictory ideas about how to raise children.
I think perhaps you should consider getting that broomstick removed. You will find sitting down to be so much easier.
oke it in the osterior, inhead.
I agree with you, I've always hated the anti-aliasing effect on LCD screens. However, I just got a laptop with an SXGA+ screen (1400x1050) and I've found that it is no longer a problem. I still don't like 1280x1024, but 1024x768 is acceptable and 800x600 and 640x480 both look as good to me as they do on CRT's.
I imagine that the UXGA laptops (1600x1200) will look even better.
some of the credit probably belongs to the video chipset which actually does the anti-aliasing.
There is a distinct possibility that the reason Netscape is crashing on your Windows box is that Netscape is a piece of crap. Half the time when it crashes, it leaves a hung background task which needs to be killed manually before restarting it. All bets are off if you try to resize it with full window drag enabled. It even steals your newsreader association without telling you. Maybe it was inevitable that they would lose the browser war, but it happened that much faster because they were putting out crap.
People use IE for two reasons. It comes free with their OS, and it is easily the best browser on any OS. I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft, but in this case, the winner is obvious. I am hoping that Mozilla will be better, but right now, I dread the times that I have to use Netscape under Linux for surfing the web.
As far as Opera goes, the MDI layout it uses is just so amazingly awful that it trumps all other considerations.
Cool! I want to steal precious documents!
The statute of limitations is your friend.
Handspring has no flash memory. Instead, the OS is loaded into DRAM like everything else. Why? So that they can easily issue software patches to people that don't require flashing! Software patching to fix something like this is not only what Palm is doing, but also, one of the reasons why Handspring went with their design in the first place.
Actually, the OS on a Handspring is in ROM. The reason they did that is to save money. There is no technical advantage to it. There is no reason that Palm couldn't release a software patch just like Handspring. They have chosen to instead release a patch that goes into flash memory so that it won't be lost on a hard reset.
This isn't necessarily good. I don't know what the procedure is for doing the upgrade on a Palm. If it involves reflashing the entire OS, then I think they need to rethink it a little. However, it probably just involves taking nearly the same patch that you are getting for your Handspring and putting it in flash. For myself, I know that if Palm released the upgrade as a software patch, I would use FlashPro to burn it into flash myself and get the same effect.
There's nothing wrong with putting the OS in ROM the way Handspring has done, but it is not an added feature.
I would say the differences is that a gun is a weapon and a car is a tool made for transportation.
Yes a car can kill, but that is not the purpose of it. A gun on the other hand doesn't really have any other purpose but to kill.
Tell me, how exactly is this a difference? Why is the purpose of a tool more important than the use to which it is put? A car may have transportation as its primary use, but it can be far deadlier than a simple handgun. It requires less skill, has greater range, and offers a level of defense to the user. If I wanted to kill a large group of people, and didn't care about getting caught in the process, I think I would choose a motor vehicle as a more effective weapon. It also has as an advantage the fact that people won't see it as a weapon until I use it as such.
Once upon a time, a man in California named Dr. Kubota developed a set of self defense techniques that could be used by businessmen carrying an implement that they generally had on them. Namely, a metal pen such as a Cross or Parker pen. He discovered, however, that the techniques were far too dangerous and it was difficult for the users to defend themselves without either killing or seriously injuring their assailants. You may not consider this a bad thing, but he did.
He developed a new device he called a Kubotan. It was a cylinder of plastic or metal 5-6 inches long with a .5 inch diameter. In many states, the metal version is illegal. In some places the plastic version is illegal. Keep in mind that it exists only because it is safer than a metal pen which is legal everywhere.
Mag manufactures a small aluminum flashlight that takes two AA batteries. This flashlight is functionally equivalent to a metal Kubotan except for the fact that is also provides illumination. It is also legal everywhere.
Many martial arts weapons are actually farm implements which were put to use as weapons out of necessity and the desire to get around laws banning weapons.
Now, a gun is an extremely dangerous weapon. In a house with children, it should be kept locked up when it is not in use, and it should not be left out around people you don't know. Maybe the same restriction should apply to cars. It is certainly a tragedy when a child gets access to a gun and an accident results. It is also, however, a tragedy when a child gets access to a car and an accident results. I don't know the statistics, but I would be surprised if deaths involving children trying to drive cars were not far more common than deaths involving children playing with guns. The difference is that deaths involving guns involve guns.
You said that regarding the gun issue you are neutral, and I think you really believe that. However, your position implies that at some level you have a perception that guns are fundamentally evil in a way that cars are not.
Somehow, I don't think that the concept of original sin should be relevant.
There is a reason the planes we fly in have 50 year old designs, despite advances in materials and aeronotical sciences.
The reason is that 50 year old designs work. They have a good track record and they are known quantities in general. New designs would give you improvements in speed, efficiency, and cargo capacity. How strongly are market forces pushing these factors? The trend lately has been towards smaller planes rather than monsters like the 747. Fuel costs are only a small part of your overall ticket cost, and would you be willing to pay more money for a 20% faster trip? Keep in mind that it took you an hour to get to the airport, you got there nearly an hour early, it took you 20-30 minutes to get your luggage, you have an hour's drive to your destination, and the plane wasted at least 20-30 minutes between waiting for a runway to take off and circling for a runway to land.
There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years.
The reason is that high pressure hydrogen is dangerous to work with. If the tank ruptures in an accident, your car goes up like a bomb. The gas station (if you can find one) needs to be able to fill your tank at high pressure. You have the chicken and egg problem as well. You need a gas station that can fill it, and a mechanic that can work on it. (God help you if you neglect the maintenance on your fuel system.) In addition, gasoline engines are, again, a known quantity. Think about rotary engines. In theory, they are simpler and more reliable. In reality, the compression ratio sucks, so you have to turbocharge it for decent performance, and turbochargers have their own reliability problems. As soon as you turbocharge a rotary engine, you increase the likelyhood that it will blow its apex seals. This is the moral equivalent of a ring job for a piston engine.
Innovations do get out there, but in order to be viable, there must be people willing to buy them after considering costs, benefits, and shortcomings. When it comes to safety being new is a shortcoming.
It sounds like windows hosed the bios settings. Try setting the jumper to clear the CMOS. Windows can sometimes get funny when it is moved from one chipset to another.
I don't see why they would have to CONSISTENTLY behave recklessly in order to EVER behave recklessly.
But that aside, you claimed that because malice was necessary, no mistake was libelous, and that's just not true. And we're CLEARLY not talking about this case, ANYWAY, because THIS WOMAN IS PROBABLY NOT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OR CHER.
Ok, a document is libelous if it was created with a reckless disregard for the truth. That was a mistake on my part. Now, let us discuss the matter of whether the facts in this situation constitute reckless disregard.
Assuming that the company which did the background check makes a business of doing background checks, it seems to me that no matter what safeguards they put in place, there will always be a few errors. Just as a matter of common sense, I think that in order for the woman to prove that reckless disregard has taken place, she must demonstrate one of the following two scenarios:
So no, they don't have to consistently behave recklessly in order to ever behave recklessly. However, you seem to be assuming the existence of evidence you have heard nothing about. Also, you are assuming the existence of evidence that could be very difficult and expensive to obtain. That's quite a bit of assumption for a week's wages.
Finally, throughout the course of this discussion, I have in fact been talking about this case. I'm a little confused by your references to the president and to Cher. I'm also a little confused about why you felt the need to shout them in my ear.
Unless her company performed the check themselves, it's none of their business and they shouldn't be offended.
It may not be any of her companies business, but she will probably have to call representatives of the company as witnesses. In terms of lost work on the part of the employees, the company could very easily stand to lose more than she stands to make.
Incidentally, you may want to research the courts' interpretation of "malice" further - a mistake as the result of "reckless disregard" of the truth of the statement is malicious.
If the company that did the background check recklessly disregarded the truth, they would probably not be in the business of doing background checks for very long. In addition, if they corrected the error when presented with evidence, then I doubt that "reckless disregard" would apply. The standard for proving libel and slander is fairly high.
Maybe you missed something very important: Nothing much happened. A mistake was made, and it was corrected. She could sue, but look at the potential consequences:
Mistakes happen. A mistake was made, it was corrected, and the consequences weren't very severe. Yes she probably has standing to sue in small claims court, but she has to make a decision about the potential costs vs. benefits of doing so, and one of the factors she should consider is the budding relationship she has with her new employer.
One thing she could possibly do is hire a lawyer to write a nastygram. She may get some money out of that, but if they do nothing, I think she should just leave it.
As for this being the cause of things going to crap in this country, notice I didn't say that all cases like this should be ignored, just the ones where nothing much happened. If you actually sustain some significant hurt, financial or otherwise, then you should persue it, but considering the cost of action and then choosing to let the piddling shit lie does not represent a slippery slope.
It's very easy to forget that people are human beings, not tuples in a database.
I am a tuple and damn proud of it too.
Yea, verily, my record is strong, and lo my fields are mighty. Unto my very key which is unique beyond human measure.
The funny thing is, he didn't know she was born in Austria, and she didn't know she was born in Austria. The background check revealed that she was adopted by a german family, another fact that she didn't know her whole life up until that point.
Now that's a background check.
Unfortunately, libel and slander require that you prove malice. A mistake, even as the result of incompetence, does not constitute libel or slander.
One possibility would be suing in small claims court for a week's wages. This could, however, lead to potential problems with her new employer when she calls her new manager as a witness.
On the whole, the harm done was only a week's wages. I would tell her to document it so her next employer won't have the same problem and to otherwise just suck it up.
He asks Stallman about the issue and Stallman says he is the wrong person to ask. Then, instead of feeling like a complete goober and going off to ask someone else, he quotes Stallman saying he should not have been asked.
In addition, there's the initials thing. I think I've heard Stallman referred to as RMS nearly as often as I've heard Raymond referred to as ESR.
Black boxes to assign blame? We already know what causes the majority of fatal accidents. We know that alchohol/drugs contribute to 60%- 80% of the accidents. That is why they drive recklessly. We don't need black boxes or video cameras to prove that.
I think the statistic you want is around 50% last I heard. Also, that statistic is only where alcohol and drugs are related to the accident. If a drunk staggers into the road, and you swerve to miss him and hit a telephone pole, that is alcohol related. If you are on antihistimines and they hit you harder than you expected, that is drug related. If someone has a couple of drinks and their BAC is around .05, it's alcohol related. If I had to guess, I would say that 25-30% is more accurate.
On a side note, one thing that really yanks my chain is when organizations (MADD) feel it's all right to lie or misrepresent statistics if it's for a good cause.
You see, it turns out that a lot of people are still using horses. I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm pointing out that it's there, it's real... and it's not in any way less relevant just because it's in the Third World.
Why is it not a good thing? Cars are expensive, unreliable, require maintenance, parts, fuel, and they don't handle rural roads very well.
In the same situation where cars aren't so good, however, horses excel. They handle rough terrain, they can pull plows and other implements of destruction, eat grass and etc. from a pasture, and can be somewhat self guided.
The right tool for the job is the one that does the job best for the least investment of time and money. If you decide that horses are a Bad Thing because they aren't "modern" enough, your approaching it from the wrong angle. The coolness factor is a hindrance to the decision making process, not an aid.
Battlefield Earth has brought to a close a period of prolonged stagnation which very nearly caused the elimination of the exciting sport of cow tipping from the 2000 Olympic games.
Competitive tippers everywhere have spent weeks perfecting their own personal variations on the new techniques demonstrated by actor John Travolta.
Travolta, an amateur sportsman for whom tipping bovines is only an occasional hobby, says the "Terl" maneuver was originally a fortuitous accident:
The International Bovine Overbalancing Authority (IBOA) has ruled that any armament used in competition must be carried onto the field by the competitor. This rules out the use of F16's or other aircraft. This has generally been considered a positive decision as otherwise, many amateur athletes would have been priced out of the competition.During the Olympic games, look out for the innovative styles that will be employed:
All in all, this looks like an exciting time for sports fans.
Things were were always better in the old days, weren't they?
What you have is a gut feeling that things used to be better because you only remember the good stuff. You remember how great Wing Commander was while forgetting that it took you 3 hours to figure out the config.sys and autoexec.bat for the boot disk.
Now, the specific time frame being discussed is 5-6 years. Would you rather use Windows 95? As for unix, would you rather use SunOS? I remember some epic battles with xf86config under Linux. Was Netscape 1.1 really less buggy than Netscape 4.7?
The OO paradigm promised to save the world of software engineering from bugs, complexity, and maintenance difficulties, but if the last 5 or 6 years are to be considered as indicators for future performance, it's not worth the hype.
Think of it in terms of economics. People will write the most complex and featureful software they can that stays within the level of buggyness they can tolerate. Therefore, buggyness will tend to stay constant.
Software is just as buggy now as it was 5 or 6 years ago, but is far more complex. I have personal experience with what can be done with OO to facilitate large complex systems which would be unthinkable without it.
Therefore, people have taken advantage of the ability of OO to manage complexity and pushed the envelope with it. I don't consider this a bad thing.
In addition, while I know Perl well and like it a lot, I would not dare use it for a large complex project.
It's the law
My first language was Applesoft Basic, but I couldn't really get into it. I really got into programming when I learned logo. It was easy, and I could grow with it into advanced programming topics. (It's really a dialect of Lisp.) I was playing with references, recursion, and binary search trees in no time. When I got into college and learned about pointers, I realized that I already knew about them. I breezed through what most people considered the hardest part of programming 102. Logo lets you go from printing your name and moving a turtle around to some pretty advanced topics. The only thing it doesn't support is OO, but you can always introduce Python as the second language.
I use VB occasionally, but it has inconsistencies which I always run into and the editor gets in the way. Can anyone tell me the difference between Let and Set? Why do you need one sometimes and not others? When do you use . and when do you use ! to access members?
Perl is powerful, but it was designed to be easy for Unix admins. I think others who learn it end up shaking their heads a little even if they grow to like it.
Python is a great language. It is easy, consistent, has an interactive interface, and scales from the easiest programming to some very advanced stuff. The only reason that it is my second choice is that it shields you from lots of things involving the use of references. You can't, for example, have variable X which is a reference to the variable Y. X can only be a reference to the object Y references. (All variables are really references.) Also, I don't know of any graphics packages that can be manipulated interactively like the turtle in Logo. (Tk is easy, but in Python, you have to set it up and then run your event loop. No interactive experimentation.)
I think there is a need for a learning language that:
Basically, I think a good language for teaching children would be as friendly as Logo, as consistent as Python, and as conducive to cs theory as scheme.
Um, trademarks and patents are monopolies. That's what they are for.