Since the entire purpose of the article is to compare the freedom of the press in both open societies and 3rd world dictatorships, does that make the entire article disingenuous or uninformed?
At the very least, I think it's probably biased, but I don't know enough about the results of the other countries on the list to be able to do a proper comparison. It's possible that an objective scoring would place the U.S. at 53, though.
The choices I made for examples were chosen because they were directly on point of the previous poster saying he could shout 'Fuck Bush' all he wanted & he wouldn't get arrested. The truth is he shouldn't be arrested, but that doesn't mean he won't be. The whole point is that the lack of certainty of won't be has a noticible effect on free speach/freedom of the press which has been noted & commented on by SCOTUS.
The problem with that logic is that there will always be isolated examples of injustice no matter what the issue. To take a few incidents over the last couple of years and say "look, we're losing our freedoms" assumes that if you were to look at any other five year period you'd find fewer examples. If you were able to show that there was an increasing trend in this kind of thing happening, then I'd say you had an argument. Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything, though, and if people are so scared by such minor anecdotes that they stop expressing their opinions then they never had much of a spine to begin with.
If you examine the article, you'll see that it's not only ranking the countries just on the legal aspects of being a reporter, but also the real aspects such as requiring police protection after writing an unpopular article. Given a few of the diatribes I have heard comming from Congress in the last 4 years reguarding how it borders on treasonous to 'publicly undermine faith' [read "question"] in the presidents decisions in times of war, I would have to say that even if we haven't lost ground on the legal standings in the chart - we have lost ground in the social standings.
Empty rhetoric coming from idiot congressmen with no power in such matters, real or imagined. Never once have I heard a serious suggestion from someone in congress implying that we should prosecute those who disagree with Bush, nor do I think there would have been even minor support if such a statement had happened. Again, there will always be jackasses in any democracy---it doesn't mean that people should cower in fear at their blustering. Which is not to say they shouldn't express concern over the potential consequences of suggestions, just that they shouldn't think some idiot's suggestion is automatically national policy. You should shout as loudly and as often as you want about the dangers of giving up our freedoms or speech or press, I just think it's disingenuous to think that we've already lost them (even in part).
As for protesting, yes, if you stay so far away & hold signs & chant buzwords, you'll be fine. Walk up to the fence & yell "fuck Bush" and you'll get a trip downtown & an appointment with the judge for distrubing the peace - of course that's also likely to happen pretty much anywhere else too, reguardless of who's name you yell.
You've just disproven your own point. Yes you risk entanglement with the law if you yell Fuck outside the White House, but not specifically because you're outside the White House (except that you're more likely to be heard by law enforcement outside the WH) or because Bush is the president. Yelling obscenities in public is and always has been considered inappropriate almost everywhere in the country. The implication of your original comment was that you'd be arrested for yelling "Fuck Bush" because of the political nature of the comment, but that isn't true. In fact, I'd guess that you'd be less likely to get arrested for yelling "Fuck Bu
I direct you to: here and here for people who were ticketed and harassed for bumper stickers. I also direct you to here for a person who was detained for several hours by sherrifs deputies for writing "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on the clear toiletries bag inside his suitcase. So, while you can say "fuck Bush" all you want here on slashdot, I wouldn't recommend you try exerting that particular right standing in front of the Whitehouse - unless you have a few days of extra vacation you want to spend as a guest of DC's finest.
Three examples in a country of over 300,000,000 people, all of which were either thrown out of court quickly or never got there in the first place, does not provide evidence that there is a massive government crackdown on our free speech rights. All it does is provide irrefutable evidence that there are at least three idiots with inflated opinions of their own power employed by the various law enforcement agencies around the country (and in relatively minor positions at that).
There are a lot of problems with this country, but to compare our freedom of the press to that of third world dictatorships just belittles the (often deadly) hardships faced by the brave men and women who fight against a very real lack of freedom with someone who was harrassed by a jackass cop over a tasteless bumper sticker is either disingenuous or uninformed.
Also, it's been a while since I've been to D.C., but every time I've visited, there's been no lack of people willing to express their negative feelings about the government within shouting distance of the White House.
So it's ok to enact a bad law, as long as it's unenforceable?
The problem isn't that there will suddenly be this huge mass of prosecutions against every single blogger who mentions a candidate. The problem is that there will be targeted prosecutions against only those bloggers who stick their head up and end up on the losing side (which ever side ends up losing). You may believe (incorrectly) that the Democrats are honorable enough not to abuse this law, but do you really believe that the Republicans aren't?
Alright I'll bite. I in no way agree with everything that Card says. For one, I'm not (nor would I ever want to be) a Mormon. That said, if you're going to demonize a man, at least use what he actually said to demonize him, rather than taking a slanted reading with a side of hyperbole. I just read the reference you provided (all of it), and nowhere do I see Card advocating unchecked censorship of the media. In fact, the only thing I see him call for is consequence for the media when they publish something that they should have known was false. Do I agree? Not really. Even though it's a nice idea to hold the media accountable, I think it's too likely to be abused. Do I think that expressing the opinion that it might be a good idea (while seeming to also realize that it's untenable) makes Card into some hard-right statist who wants to control my life? Not by a long shot.
OS X 10.0 -> 10.1 was a free upgrade (mainly because Apple realized that 10.0 was so buggy and slow that it was barely useable). After that, upgrades to 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4 have definitely been worth the money.
That aside though, I agree with your post. I'm no fan of Microsoft or their products, but their upgrade prices are very reasonable.
This really has nothing to do with software patents, other than the fact that the patent in question just happens to be a software patent. The problem is that you can patent something and then sit on it for half the patent's life before you do anything about it, all the while watching as the rest of the world independently invents your idea and puts it into widespread use. The chances that eHarmony (or anyone else) was inspired by these patents are slim-to-none. It's also slim-to-none that anyone else knew anything about these patents before Epic Realm started suing people over them. Also, as far as I can tell, Epic Realm has never produced anything related to these patents.
What needs to happen to fix this problem is some sort of requirement on the part of patent law that invalidates (or at least limits) a patent if the owner of that patent makes no attempt to produce or license the patented process. If these guys had started pushing the older patent back in 1996, when it may have been arguably novel, I'd have no problem with them profiting from their idea. As it stands now though, they're just a bunch of hustlers shaking down the real producers so they can get rich off someone else's work.
These people were offered on average $1.7 million for (again, on average).1 acres of land.
This time... however, now that companies know that you can do this sort of thing, they'll get bidding wars going, trying to find the town most willing to undersell their citizens to raise more property taxes. In many places that won't work, because the local courts will see what's happening and stop it, but it will work somewhere and that's the major tragedy of the ruling.
And soon they will be full of people who cannot pay their debts.
Huh? Did I miss something? Is some state planning to reimplement debtor's prisons? If so, please provide a link, as that would be a huge deal, and isn't something I've seen mentioned anywhere.
Depending on whether they were brought up in a red or blue state, they may or may not have it down intellectually
Do blue staters not learn about it as early? That must be what you're saying, because I was brought up in a very red family, in a very red state, surrounded by a lot of other red families, and everyone I know had a pretty good idea how sex worked by 12 years old.
Really? I would have thought that that's exactly what Linux is.
Please explain how Linus writing Linux was not reverse-engineering of Unix.
Because Linus didn't snoop out undocumented proprietary formats in order to figure out how to make Linux compatible with Unix operating systems. He simply built a free operating system that conformed to the published and open Posix standards. If he had examined Solaris binaries to figure out how to make Linux a binary compatible Solaris clone, that would have been reverse engineering. Implementing a published standard is not reverse engineering.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with Linus' opinion here. I don't think there's anything wrong with reverse engineering, as long as you don't steal trade secrets or perform some other such corporate espionage tactic to facilitate the reverse engineering. That doesn't make Linus a hypocrite, though. It just means that he's not in line with the predominate opinion in the open source world (which anyone who follows Linus' opinions already knew anyway).
Only the Simpsons could introduce a word into the English language as a result of a joke about words not in the English language.
Re:Satire Sans Agenda
on
Planet Simpson
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· Score: 4, Funny
If I weren't, in fact, the great-great-grandparent poster, I'd mod you up for managing to summarize the complete pointlessness of this thread...right there.
Satire Sans Agenda
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've always thought one of the best things about The Simpsons' satire has been its decided lack of an agenda. So often, satire seems aimed at making you agree to one particular viewpoint or another (or at least aimed at only being funny to those who already believe said viewpoint). Simpsons has never done that. They effectively satirize the weaknesses of all manner of views and beliefs. They're an impartial commentator. Nothing is sacred. For any cutting satirical jab made at a part of the American cultural landscape, I can point to another made at the opposing viewpoint. They aren't conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, great tasting or less filling. That in and of itself is a great achievement.
Using which storage backend? BerkeleyDB or the filesystem-based storage system?
Are you sure it was really that much slower with a huge repository? Or just with a huge working copy?
Subversion is not universally faster than CVS (checkouts and imports can be significantly slower, but you don't do those very often anyway), but it's generally faster where it counts. It also scales very nicely (for the most part), and I'd be surprised if correct use of SVN was really that much slower, even at 120K files. (I've never had a repository that big, but people talk about having them that big on the mailing list all the time.) One place where it might be slow is if you have a working copy with 120K files in it and try to do an update or commit from the top-level WC directory, since that would require SVN to locally crawl the whole WC tree. There is work being done to improve the places where SVN still lacks in speed, though.
As for being unusable around 1000 files? That's a bunch of crap. I use a >5000 file working copy every single day (>20000 file repos), and it is VERY zippy.
They get an already developed product that they can build on--less development time.
They get all of the existing TiVo engineers, without needing to try to pry them away from TiVo one-by-one.
They get a lot of press out of the deal. Probably a lot more than they'd get from a simple "we're developing a PVR" announcement.
They get an existing customer base numbering in the millions.
Instead of pissing off all the TiVo lovers out there because they put another nail in TiVo's coffin, they turn all of the TiVo lovers into Mac lovers, because they saved the dying company from being bought by some cable company that would gut all of the TiVo's personality.
And, most importantly, they get the TiVo name, which is already a household word.
There is an important point here that people seem to be glossing over. This isn't a patent. It's a patent application. There's no guarantee that it will be granted (and I'd say the odds are good it will be denied). I also doubt that this patent is a result of some grand conspiracy inside Microsoft. Rather, it's probably just a part of a routine policy of filing patent applications for every conceivable invention, in the hopes that as many as possible will be granted. That's a pretty standard practice for large companies.
What needs to happen is some reform in the patent office that discourages this type of shotgun approach to patent applications. This patent is unlikely to get accepted, but it still requires the efforts of a patent examiner to determine if it's valid, further clogging the patent office and reducing the amount of time that can be spent examining less obvious patents (which is probably why a lot of the bad patents out there got through).
No, one of their specialized claims is for the exact IsNot spelling. The general claim is for the concept. Patents are generally filed with the most general concept the applicants think they can get away with, and then add a bunch of claims that are progressively less general. In court, claims can be held invalid on an individual basis. So, a court might say that only the exact IsNot spelling claim is valid, or they might rule that the more general claim is valid.
It probably depends a lot on the type of user that you're supporting. Supporting secretaries who do nothing but type and send email is going to be a lot easier than supporting engineers who have use a wide variety of software requirements, push their computers hard, and often need new software products installed.
Are you sure about that? In most states they just want you to pay the difference (so, if you buy an item and pay 4%, you'd owe 2% to the state). Of course, I don't know Michigan specifically, so you may be entirely correct.
It's all a matter of concentrations. Even if you live with a chain smoker, the concentration of second hand smoke in the air is significantly less than the concentration of the smoke that the smoker inhales. Furthermore, most of the second hand smoke will be doubly filtered, because it is a result of the smoker's exhalation, not the smoke from the end of the cigarette. Also, smokers inhale both first-hand smoke and second-hand smoke. Non-smokers only inhale second-hand smoke. Logic would imply that second-hand smoke will probably cause cancer in significant quantities, but so far no one has been able to show that the required concentration for a statistically significant rise in cancer risk is a quantity that people are normally subjected too, even if they live with a smoker.
I have no idea. I'm not an expert on what police are or aren't allowed to do.
You seem to be trying to catch me in some kind of inconsistency or fallacy so you can argue with me; however, you're missing my point that what is legal and what we'd like to be legal are not always the same thing. I agree with you that cops shouldn't be indiscriminately tailing people (with or without GPS). My point, though, is that to at least a certain degree it appears to be perfectly legal and constitutional for the cops to track you by GPS. If you want that to change (as I do), the solution is through legislatures, not the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very least, I think it's probably biased, but I don't know enough about the results of the other countries on the list to be able to do a proper comparison. It's possible that an objective scoring would place the U.S. at 53, though.
The problem with that logic is that there will always be isolated examples of injustice no matter what the issue. To take a few incidents over the last couple of years and say "look, we're losing our freedoms" assumes that if you were to look at any other five year period you'd find fewer examples. If you were able to show that there was an increasing trend in this kind of thing happening, then I'd say you had an argument. Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything, though, and if people are so scared by such minor anecdotes that they stop expressing their opinions then they never had much of a spine to begin with.
Empty rhetoric coming from idiot congressmen with no power in such matters, real or imagined. Never once have I heard a serious suggestion from someone in congress implying that we should prosecute those who disagree with Bush, nor do I think there would have been even minor support if such a statement had happened. Again, there will always be jackasses in any democracy---it doesn't mean that people should cower in fear at their blustering. Which is not to say they shouldn't express concern over the potential consequences of suggestions, just that they shouldn't think some idiot's suggestion is automatically national policy. You should shout as loudly and as often as you want about the dangers of giving up our freedoms or speech or press, I just think it's disingenuous to think that we've already lost them (even in part).
You've just disproven your own point. Yes you risk entanglement with the law if you yell Fuck outside the White House, but not specifically because you're outside the White House (except that you're more likely to be heard by law enforcement outside the WH) or because Bush is the president. Yelling obscenities in public is and always has been considered inappropriate almost everywhere in the country. The implication of your original comment was that you'd be arrested for yelling "Fuck Bush" because of the political nature of the comment, but that isn't true. In fact, I'd guess that you'd be less likely to get arrested for yelling "Fuck Bu
Three examples in a country of over 300,000,000 people, all of which were either thrown out of court quickly or never got there in the first place, does not provide evidence that there is a massive government crackdown on our free speech rights. All it does is provide irrefutable evidence that there are at least three idiots with inflated opinions of their own power employed by the various law enforcement agencies around the country (and in relatively minor positions at that).
There are a lot of problems with this country, but to compare our freedom of the press to that of third world dictatorships just belittles the (often deadly) hardships faced by the brave men and women who fight against a very real lack of freedom with someone who was harrassed by a jackass cop over a tasteless bumper sticker is either disingenuous or uninformed.
Also, it's been a while since I've been to D.C., but every time I've visited, there's been no lack of people willing to express their negative feelings about the government within shouting distance of the White House.
So it's ok to enact a bad law, as long as it's unenforceable?
The problem isn't that there will suddenly be this huge mass of prosecutions against every single blogger who mentions a candidate. The problem is that there will be targeted prosecutions against only those bloggers who stick their head up and end up on the losing side (which ever side ends up losing). You may believe (incorrectly) that the Democrats are honorable enough not to abuse this law, but do you really believe that the Republicans aren't?
Alright I'll bite. I in no way agree with everything that Card says. For one, I'm not (nor would I ever want to be) a Mormon. That said, if you're going to demonize a man, at least use what he actually said to demonize him, rather than taking a slanted reading with a side of hyperbole. I just read the reference you provided (all of it), and nowhere do I see Card advocating unchecked censorship of the media. In fact, the only thing I see him call for is consequence for the media when they publish something that they should have known was false. Do I agree? Not really. Even though it's a nice idea to hold the media accountable, I think it's too likely to be abused. Do I think that expressing the opinion that it might be a good idea (while seeming to also realize that it's untenable) makes Card into some hard-right statist who wants to control my life? Not by a long shot.
OS X 10.0 -> 10.1 was a free upgrade (mainly because Apple realized that 10.0 was so buggy and slow that it was barely useable). After that, upgrades to 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4 have definitely been worth the money.
That aside though, I agree with your post. I'm no fan of Microsoft or their products, but their upgrade prices are very reasonable.
This really has nothing to do with software patents, other than the fact that the patent in question just happens to be a software patent. The problem is that you can patent something and then sit on it for half the patent's life before you do anything about it, all the while watching as the rest of the world independently invents your idea and puts it into widespread use. The chances that eHarmony (or anyone else) was inspired by these patents are slim-to-none. It's also slim-to-none that anyone else knew anything about these patents before Epic Realm started suing people over them. Also, as far as I can tell, Epic Realm has never produced anything related to these patents.
What needs to happen to fix this problem is some sort of requirement on the part of patent law that invalidates (or at least limits) a patent if the owner of that patent makes no attempt to produce or license the patented process. If these guys had started pushing the older patent back in 1996, when it may have been arguably novel, I'd have no problem with them profiting from their idea. As it stands now though, they're just a bunch of hustlers shaking down the real producers so they can get rich off someone else's work.
In other words, my tax dollars should be used to support Britney Spears' coke habit? No thanks!
Microsoft may have the most desktop market share, but Apple drives the technology.
This time... however, now that companies know that you can do this sort of thing, they'll get bidding wars going, trying to find the town most willing to undersell their citizens to raise more property taxes. In many places that won't work, because the local courts will see what's happening and stop it, but it will work somewhere and that's the major tragedy of the ruling.
Huh? Did I miss something? Is some state planning to reimplement debtor's prisons? If so, please provide a link, as that would be a huge deal, and isn't something I've seen mentioned anywhere.
Do blue staters not learn about it as early? That must be what you're saying, because I was brought up in a very red family, in a very red state, surrounded by a lot of other red families, and everyone I know had a pretty good idea how sex worked by 12 years old.
Because Linus didn't snoop out undocumented proprietary formats in order to figure out how to make Linux compatible with Unix operating systems. He simply built a free operating system that conformed to the published and open Posix standards. If he had examined Solaris binaries to figure out how to make Linux a binary compatible Solaris clone, that would have been reverse engineering. Implementing a published standard is not reverse engineering.
Don't get me wrong, I disagree with Linus' opinion here. I don't think there's anything wrong with reverse engineering, as long as you don't steal trade secrets or perform some other such corporate espionage tactic to facilitate the reverse engineering. That doesn't make Linus a hypocrite, though. It just means that he's not in line with the predominate opinion in the open source world (which anyone who follows Linus' opinions already knew anyway).
Yes, but those people die of a brain aneurism halfway through watching their first FG episode, so they're not a vocal part of the anti-FG lobby.
Only the Simpsons could introduce a word into the English language as a result of a joke about words not in the English language.
If I weren't, in fact, the great-great-grandparent poster, I'd mod you up for managing to summarize the complete pointlessness of this thread...right there.
I've always thought one of the best things about The Simpsons' satire has been its decided lack of an agenda. So often, satire seems aimed at making you agree to one particular viewpoint or another (or at least aimed at only being funny to those who already believe said viewpoint). Simpsons has never done that. They effectively satirize the weaknesses of all manner of views and beliefs. They're an impartial commentator. Nothing is sacred. For any cutting satirical jab made at a part of the American cultural landscape, I can point to another made at the opposing viewpoint. They aren't conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, great tasting or less filling. That in and of itself is a great achievement.
I use BDB. I keep meaning to move to FSFS, but just haven't properly motivated myself.
Using which storage backend? BerkeleyDB or the filesystem-based storage system?
Are you sure it was really that much slower with a huge repository? Or just with a huge working copy?
Subversion is not universally faster than CVS (checkouts and imports can be significantly slower, but you don't do those very often anyway), but it's generally faster where it counts. It also scales very nicely (for the most part), and I'd be surprised if correct use of SVN was really that much slower, even at 120K files. (I've never had a repository that big, but people talk about having them that big on the mailing list all the time.) One place where it might be slow is if you have a working copy with 120K files in it and try to do an update or commit from the top-level WC directory, since that would require SVN to locally crawl the whole WC tree. There is work being done to improve the places where SVN still lacks in speed, though.
As for being unusable around 1000 files? That's a bunch of crap. I use a >5000 file working copy every single day (>20000 file repos), and it is VERY zippy.
There is an important point here that people seem to be glossing over. This isn't a patent. It's a patent application. There's no guarantee that it will be granted (and I'd say the odds are good it will be denied). I also doubt that this patent is a result of some grand conspiracy inside Microsoft. Rather, it's probably just a part of a routine policy of filing patent applications for every conceivable invention, in the hopes that as many as possible will be granted. That's a pretty standard practice for large companies.
What needs to happen is some reform in the patent office that discourages this type of shotgun approach to patent applications. This patent is unlikely to get accepted, but it still requires the efforts of a patent examiner to determine if it's valid, further clogging the patent office and reducing the amount of time that can be spent examining less obvious patents (which is probably why a lot of the bad patents out there got through).
No, one of their specialized claims is for the exact IsNot spelling. The general claim is for the concept. Patents are generally filed with the most general concept the applicants think they can get away with, and then add a bunch of claims that are progressively less general. In court, claims can be held invalid on an individual basis. So, a court might say that only the exact IsNot spelling claim is valid, or they might rule that the more general claim is valid.
It probably depends a lot on the type of user that you're supporting. Supporting secretaries who do nothing but type and send email is going to be a lot easier than supporting engineers who have use a wide variety of software requirements, push their computers hard, and often need new software products installed.
Are you sure about that? In most states they just want you to pay the difference (so, if you buy an item and pay 4%, you'd owe 2% to the state). Of course, I don't know Michigan specifically, so you may be entirely correct.
It's all a matter of concentrations. Even if you live with a chain smoker, the concentration of second hand smoke in the air is significantly less than the concentration of the smoke that the smoker inhales. Furthermore, most of the second hand smoke will be doubly filtered, because it is a result of the smoker's exhalation, not the smoke from the end of the cigarette. Also, smokers inhale both first-hand smoke and second-hand smoke. Non-smokers only inhale second-hand smoke. Logic would imply that second-hand smoke will probably cause cancer in significant quantities, but so far no one has been able to show that the required concentration for a statistically significant rise in cancer risk is a quantity that people are normally subjected too, even if they live with a smoker.
I have no idea. I'm not an expert on what police are or aren't allowed to do.
You seem to be trying to catch me in some kind of inconsistency or fallacy so you can argue with me; however, you're missing my point that what is legal and what we'd like to be legal are not always the same thing. I agree with you that cops shouldn't be indiscriminately tailing people (with or without GPS). My point, though, is that to at least a certain degree it appears to be perfectly legal and constitutional for the cops to track you by GPS. If you want that to change (as I do), the solution is through legislatures, not the courts.