But they aren't any more secure. Little boys have always played war, or cowboys and indians, or knights in shining armor. Quake III doesn't encourage hooliganism anymore than cap guns or toy swords.
Really? We have those studies? You know for a fact that the modeling/desensitization effect of first person shooters is no different from that of active role play? You have some information on widely based, longetudinal studies about the play activities of youthful offenders?
Not to be bitchy, but I really doubt that you have any more evidence to back up that statement than those you criticise have for their concerns. There are ways to test the short term effects of and long term correlations with different kinds of play activities and violence. But there is no particualr reason to assume that there would be no differences until said studies are done. And I can think of few to indicate that the study would be worth doing and might find a effect.
Of course having seen the responses around here when the people trained to make those sort of statements actual test them, I suspect that finding some of the answers will have zero effect on this sort of pronouncement.
Really? That's a fact? Got a source for that? Or is it just one of those things that "everyone knows"? "Everyone" is usually wrong, as they are in this case. School shootings are not "occuring on an unprecedented scale." They've been on the decline since early last decade. Here's a few real facts that actually cite sources:
While such is encouraging, I don't think you are addressing the issue that the orriginal poster was concerned about. That is, mass school shootings, similar in nature to the old "going postal" stories, which seemed to begin with Jonesboro. Whether they were there and hushed up before, or not, they are not addressed in your stats.
Now, the general idea seems to be "so what? Schools are getting safer, so this attention is unwarented." I think this is a foolish view. It assumes that all violence is the same, and that mass violence incidents can be veiwed as just a statistical blip, rather than a seperate phenomenon from individualized violence. I see it as far more likely that average violence is going down because of school and society wide programs that address and reduce individual on individual and small group on individual/small group violence. AND at the same time, other factors are leading to a at least partially unrelated increase in indiscriminate indivual on large group violence.
To lump these two trends together and say "violence is going down, why are you worried" sounds a little to me like if someone had said after the implicatons of AIDS had become widely known, "Look, compared to the 1700's the number of people dying of STDs has actually decreased dramaticly. The deaths have gone down, but everyone is acting like this is some big new deal. Its just media hype." This would be silly, since the near elimination of other STDs as a cause of death was due to medical advances (esp antibiotics) that had no relation to the real and new threat of AIDS.
I would think a little more about the issue before dismissing concern about mass murder with generalized stats that show individual violence in on the decrease. I can be glad that little timmy isn't snapping and stabbing little bobby on the playground over personal fights as much and still be concerned that little martin is for possibly the first time making a planned effort to take out a dozen kids he barely knows.
On the more general issues, my social psych background tells me that yes, modeling and desensitisation, even in a "fantasy" setting can have a contributory effect on various kinds of violence. This does not mean that first person shooters "cause" violence, or that all concerns can be dismissed. I'd also note that the actuall law being proposed was aimed at business owners and letting minors play video games, presumedly in arcades and similar settings. I think it is dishonest to try to turn this purely into a "parent's responsibility" issue. Does a "good parent" really shadow their child 24/7 walking arround the arcade or movie theater with him and commenting on his video games choices? Yes the parent can communicate with the child in general about the issue, but where did the "gameboy as babysitter" comments start comming from? try to address the real issues.
Heh, maybe, but more likely, moderators don't read the guidelines: attempts at humor are NOT offtopic.
well, not if the humor is sufficiently related to the topic at hand, no. I was more thinking of off color humor being ranked as trolls, but I don't know your posting enough to assume.:)
Kahuna Burger
Re:I hate to say it, but leave the companies alone
on
Make Way for Fiber
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· Score: 1
Therefor, it is my opinion that the government should use its right of eminent domain to allow those lines to be laid along the railroad tracks without any sort of settlement being needed to private citizens. There is precedent for this - power and phone lines are sometimes laid using eminent domain.
I don't know what you are assuming, but there are very few cases in which an eminent domain taking is not compensated. There will be a settlement to the property owners even if uncle same steps in and if you individual users of a luxury service* don't want it adding to your bills, what makes you think I would want it coming out of my taxes?
*"benifits all of us" indeed. Yeah, just like a mall does (eminent domain has been used for that too). Where are the damn libertarians on this one? probably drooling over their high speed access....
hmmmm.... eminent domain... must read ROADWORK again. Bachman.....
There are cables layed underground near every modern RR as part of the control and monitoring system.
probes memory.... me seems to recal riding trains and seeing such lines either on the ground, on poles or on metal walls againt steep embankments. Not to say that they aren't underground (where I would not remember seeing them) in many other areas, but I would not jump to the conclusion that all railroad tracks already have cable buried beside them.
The network companies went thru the railroad companies to get the rights to lay the fiber. It's not like they did it at night trying not to get caught. My guess is these agreements between the landowners and the railroads are decades old and a lawyer decided it was a chance to get rich. I doubt if the network companies knew that the land really didn't belong to the railroads.
Which is why if someone with a brain had worked for them, they would have done a title search before laying the wire. I suppose they could countersue the railroads for misleading them and recoup some, but I'm suprized anyone dealing with this project had never heard, say, the word "easement" before. The line isn't actually buried under the tracks, after all, and in some areas, surface rights aside, the area they dug in may well be an easement between the railroad and the adjoining owner.
The land in a lot of the cases was probably also taken by eminent domain and thus could be expected to come with a few caveats.
"A lawyer decided it was a chance to get rich". When did you guys turn into communists, anyway? A company saw a chance to save money on actually buying easements by working with another company that saw a chance to make millions on a yard wide strip that it can't use, but someone sees a way to make money AND give money to thousands of small property owners too and the lawyers are the ones you jump on?
Practices like this prompted the Pure Food and Drug Act, the first truth-in-labelling law.
Ironicly, IIRC Upton Sinclair's goals in writing "The Jungle" were more focused on revealing the wretched and unsafe conditions that the meat packers worked under. It was meant as a pro labor book, but the idea of where their food was coming from caught the people's imaginations more readily. Now we have highly improved food safety rules, but meat packing is still one of the most dangerous and damaging jobs you can have. (they might have been helped by the OSHA ergonomic rules, but business leaders fooled everyone into thinking that was just about office workers and got it reversed.)
Kahuna Burger, who's not bitter about her father's hands being mostly ruined after only a few years in the packing house.
And for those that believe that any publicity is good-- imagine that there's a scare due to some sort of tainting in the factory, and the headline reads
CONTAMINATED COKE BOTTLES KILL 4
But then the article says that it's some mom and pop soda company, and not Coca-Cola brand. If companies do not protect their trademarks, this is something that has the potential of happening. (The misleading articles, not the death of people by contaminated coke bottles)
IIRC, a similar thing happened with the bombing at the centenial olympic park. News outlets had been refering to a "tupperware container filled with nails", and the official Tupperware (tm) people got very pissy because they were not only using their trademark as a generic word, it was in the context of a fairly traumatic event.
Since I have no moderator points, and this is an excellent response to a silly post, I will simply cut and paste it at my higher base posting score and take the karma burn if anyone decides that's reduntant or off topic.
There are three reasons:
1. Fruit and vegetable consumption was much higher than it is today, partially negating the bad effects of high-fat diets.
2. Activity levels were higher, particularly in rural populations.
3. Most people died of something else first. For example, before widespread refrigeration, stomach cancer (from eating salted and smoked meats) was a leading killer.
To the second point I would also add that during the winter the added fuel of all the fat would be burned off keeping the poor blokes warm. I used to give my family's outside cats (dad insisted, poor kitties) hot fat and meat drippings over their dry food or some stale bread during the winter. It helped them deal with the cold, they didn't get fat from it and like many of our ancestors they died of other causes well before heart disease was even on the radar.
When a corporation leaves the law behind, the best thing to do is to open criminal prosecutions against the individuals who made the corporate decisions.
While this would work (and is happening) in the specific case mentioned, it wouldn't in many others. The entire point of a corporation, in some ways, is to protect individuals from responsibility. In a large, multi executive company, the plausible deniability of any given individual is huge. Thats why most sexual harrassment cases are made against companies and rarely individuals. The individual offender wasn't warned so he didn't know it was a problem, and the supervisor didn't think there was anything he could do because the department manager didn't hear enough to take it seriously, and the vice president didn't make a policy because he wasn't even in that position when it started, and the executive vice president who was in that position certainly can't be held responsible for NOT doing something that long ago and is in London now anyway....
In some cases, the corporate veil is more like an onion - you lift all the layers and then it turns out there's nothing there. So do you throw up your hands and say "guess there's no one we can hold responsible", or do you you declare the whole onion rotten and take what you can out of it?
To strip someone of some of their rights when they have broken the social contract in certain ways is commonplace. This simply puts crimes committed under the umbrella of a corporation in the same class as crimes committed when acting as an individual.
I find it somewhat frightening that corporations are often held to LOWER standards than people. I recal reading about a case where a corporation admitted that a factory fire that had killed several people had been not just preventable, but predicatable (to the point of "It was gonna happen eventually"). The company was fined. An individual would have been charged with manslaughter at the least.
Its disgusting that courts give corporate entities all the freedoms of individuals (especially the "freedom of speech" to give huge campaign donations) but don't hold them to responsibilities the way real people are.
Pheh. Buncha dates in NY and he doesn't even stop in to Boston/Cambridge? Or were those earier and I've already missed them. Too busy getting to OHIO I guess. Pheh again.
unless you really think you want to go back to a system where there are no patents (and hence where everything is kept secret). But expect to see higher prices and less innovation as companies are forced to recoup the costs of their investments in other ways. Expect to see no pharmaceutical research, among other things
The "pharmacuticals need patents" line is pretty weak, IMHO. Huge amounts of pharm research is done at government funded universities and teaching hospitals, by researchers getting most of their money from government grants or pre/post docs who need to do research and a little help from some major company that then turns around and patents it. Or what about comunity groups raising millions of dollars for "AIDS research" or "cancer research". Funny that I've never heard of one company saying "well, we recieved so much government, comunity and pure research university support to bring about this advance/drug/product that we're gonna just release it directly into the public domain."
Personally, I'm all in support of a "public interest patent" opt in/out. If a company is producing soemthing that is considered such a public interest that their work is being underwritten at almost every level by government and charitable interests, they get a very limited patent that aims to put the drug/advance/product into general production/use as soon as possible to lower the end costs to the users. If they want it all to themselves with full patent rights, fine. Just do all the work in house. Build your own labs, hire all your own researchers completely, do all your own testing for FDA aproval, with no help from government grants, charitable funding, hospitals, universities, or what have you.
And we'll see whether removal of a lot of patent rights, or removal of outside support gives us "no pharmacutical research, amoung other things."
Y'know, I've read the Constitution many, many times, and I'm reasonably sure that it says freedom of "speech," not freedom of "expressive speech."
Wow, you better get to the supreme court, they need you bad. Here legal scolars for years have been making exceptions for silly things like libel, slander, threats, harrassment and conspiracy, divying up speech any way they choose, and if they'd only "read the constitution many many times" like you, they'd know better.
*cough* *cough* but in serious non flame, the legal issue here is in fact expressive speech, not just the ability to write or say it. And if we want to have a useful legal discussion about how things will be treated in the real world, I thought it would be useful to understand the terms that matter in the courts, not our personal opinions on How The Legal World Should Be.
The plans for the bridge (the design) is most certainly expression.
however, while I am not a lawyer, I'm fairly certain that said plans are not "expressive speech" as used in constitutional law.
All information is not expressive speech. I believe the term was coined in response to non verbal protests such as the black arm bands in "Tinker..." or flag burning. I may be wrong. But we need a solid legal definition of "expressive speech" before everyone goes running around trying to say what is and isn't.
For myself, I don't buy the all code is expressive speech line in the slightest. The lawyer quoted seemed to be trying to prove it by showing that code could be USED as expressive speech, therefore code IS expressive speech. BS. There is very little that a creative person cannot do or create in a way that makes it expressive speech. Those examples do not make everything in the world expressive speech when done without that special intent.
For instance, in the midwest farmers growing feed crops such as alfalfa will use a special machine to turn the harvest into a bunch of big bales that look vaugly like 6 foot tall cinnomon rolls. (then the neighboring kids play on them all fall and as adults discover that just sniffing a bag of pet alfalfa makes them relaxed and happy, but thats a different subject.) A farmer with something to say could do his baling in such a way that passengers on an airplane flying above would see little dots spelling out "I love my guns" or "go Royals!" or any other expression he wished to make. And his alfalfa baling would then be a form of expressive speech. But no one in their right mind would say that this possibility makes all baling a form of expressive speech.
Entrenched interests of all sorts have proposed everything from famous trademarks to city, state, province, and country names to generic drug names for such exclusion, while people favoring a more free and open Internet have opposed all such exclusions in favor of the traditional First Come, First Served system."
Why not just throw in "puppy kickers vs noble citizens" while you're at it? the range of suggested exclusions looks like it spans the whole spectrum of entrenched, new, corporate, civic and public health concerns and definitly some would favor a "more" free and open internet than others. To put the whole range short of internet anarchist (those who prefer an anarctic internet, not a political appalation) as "intrenched interests" and the "no rules except first comes first served" crowd as moderates is just insulting to the intelligence of your readers.
yeah,/. has an agenda, and I know that when I come here, but could you lay the propaganda a little less thick next time? Some people want lots of limits. some want a few, some want a different few. You want none. Don't let your position blind you to the existance of a range outside of it, it just makes you look foolish.
I had to go to the customer service desk and fill in all sorts of personal data.
Could you clarify the all sorts? Are we talking age, income level, employment, marital status, fetishes, what? Some people consider their zip code a private matter while others talk loudly in the elevator about their bondage collection, so I'm really not getting a clear sense of what you were asked for. Seriously, I'd at least like to compare to what I've been asked for at the 5 or more boston area places I've gotten the cute cards.
I did think, and I already made a consideration of the multi name issue. Did you read?
A store IS private property. Its also a place of public accomedation. Its an interesting, complex combination, but the issue I was responding to, where the claim was that you could go back to the exact same store, no confusion involved is BS.
And I'm so worried about my reputation with you. A little less ego would help you, methinks.
Basically you get a 'membership card' in exchange for all sorts of personal information, so they can accumulate demographic sales information whenever you try to get a sale on anything you've purchased.
"All sorts of personal information"?? I have a few of those lovely cards, and I've never been asked for more than my name address and maybe phone number. And the clerks don't hassle you if you don't want to give some of the info. If they're in a hurry, they just give you the card.
What I want is one card that I can use to opt into all of the individual store programs. Yeah, they could cross check my purchases across many venues and figure out that I own a cat, like to quilt and don't drink anything caffinated, alchoholic, diet or with high fructose corn syrup. And I'd start getting junk mail that actually interested me. ooohhh, trauma.
And if they paid attention, they'd find that some people activly avoid buying things made in china or certain companies with lousy policies.... and the old suggestion to vote with your checkbook could actually be noticed.... someone tell me when I get to the scary part.
I don't see how this is really going to help retail stores. You can figure out whats selling by the purchases and I can't imagine how it could help rate promotions as the article suggested.
well, AFAIK banner advertisers don't pay by the amount of actual money they make off people coming to their site through click throughs, they pay by the eyeballs. So with this technology, a store could tell a vendor "setting up display X gaurentees you Y additional looks at your product and Z additional close examinations. Whether they actually buy the product at that point differs by the quality and price of product, but the look number is consistent for this display."
As an advertising technique, this would bring benifit analysis more concretely in line with any other advertising venue where people reached is consistent and predictable even if response is up to the advertiser to a certain extent.
They cannot charge you for trespassing even if you enter the very same store where you were banned, much less another store in the chain somewhere else in the country, unless they first ask you to leave and you refuse.
Excuse me? Thats a bit like saying that I can't file charges on a person who walks into my house and hangs out there without asking him real nice to get out first. If they have told you, plainly and without equivocation that you are never welcome on their property again, why should they have to remind you of it?
In the case of a store with a different name I could see it, but if they can prove that you already knew you did not have permission to be there, I'd say having to ask again is BS. What ever happened to the great/. creedo of taking responsibility for your own actions?
so I don't know what they expected to do except perhaps make the whole thing look like a community groundswell (which, of course, I thought it was until now).
(late to the thread so no one will see this of course, but) Actually the community groundsweel looks to be getting pissed at IBM just like in SF. I live in that neighborhood, and I ran into my landlady talking with a nieghbor and they were both prety irked. This is just a dumb thing for a corporate entity to do. The streets of Sna Fran or Cambridge are not a college campus that anyone can go drawing on to let us know about their cool new event. And the stuff is not chalk, its not coming off. What a bunch of gits.
There's a lot of tragedy in this world. If you can't laugh about it, then how can you deal with it? It's a nice coping mechanism. People who can't laugh at tragedy have as their only recourse just not thinking about it, and I've never been fond of head-in-sand types of behavior.
Uh, actually, there are a lot of other ways to deal with tragedies besides "laughing at it". I mean, if that's the one that works for you, have fun, but its just redicouslous to call any other (perhaps even more healthy) coping machanism "head in the sand behaviour".
Try not to assume the whole world reacts the same way you do and those who don't show the same outward expressions are just hiding from it. That way lies assinine randians and fred phelps.
But it should be noted that the Nader ad never used the name of Mastercard. It may not be enough of a difference, but it is a highly significant differnce between the two "parodies" IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? We have those studies? You know for a fact that the modeling/desensitization effect of first person shooters is no different from that of active role play? You have some information on widely based, longetudinal studies about the play activities of youthful offenders?
Not to be bitchy, but I really doubt that you have any more evidence to back up that statement than those you criticise have for their concerns. There are ways to test the short term effects of and long term correlations with different kinds of play activities and violence. But there is no particualr reason to assume that there would be no differences until said studies are done. And I can think of few to indicate that the study would be worth doing and might find a effect.
Of course having seen the responses around here when the people trained to make those sort of statements actual test them, I suspect that finding some of the answers will have zero effect on this sort of pronouncement.
Kahuna Burger
While such is encouraging, I don't think you are addressing the issue that the orriginal poster was concerned about. That is, mass school shootings, similar in nature to the old "going postal" stories, which seemed to begin with Jonesboro. Whether they were there and hushed up before, or not, they are not addressed in your stats.
Now, the general idea seems to be "so what? Schools are getting safer, so this attention is unwarented." I think this is a foolish view. It assumes that all violence is the same, and that mass violence incidents can be veiwed as just a statistical blip, rather than a seperate phenomenon from individualized violence. I see it as far more likely that average violence is going down because of school and society wide programs that address and reduce individual on individual and small group on individual/small group violence. AND at the same time, other factors are leading to a at least partially unrelated increase in indiscriminate indivual on large group violence.
To lump these two trends together and say "violence is going down, why are you worried" sounds a little to me like if someone had said after the implicatons of AIDS had become widely known, "Look, compared to the 1700's the number of people dying of STDs has actually decreased dramaticly. The deaths have gone down, but everyone is acting like this is some big new deal. Its just media hype." This would be silly, since the near elimination of other STDs as a cause of death was due to medical advances (esp antibiotics) that had no relation to the real and new threat of AIDS.
I would think a little more about the issue before dismissing concern about mass murder with generalized stats that show individual violence in on the decrease. I can be glad that little timmy isn't snapping and stabbing little bobby on the playground over personal fights as much and still be concerned that little martin is for possibly the first time making a planned effort to take out a dozen kids he barely knows.
On the more general issues, my social psych background tells me that yes, modeling and desensitisation, even in a "fantasy" setting can have a contributory effect on various kinds of violence. This does not mean that first person shooters "cause" violence, or that all concerns can be dismissed. I'd also note that the actuall law being proposed was aimed at business owners and letting minors play video games, presumedly in arcades and similar settings. I think it is dishonest to try to turn this purely into a "parent's responsibility" issue. Does a "good parent" really shadow their child 24/7 walking arround the arcade or movie theater with him and commenting on his video games choices? Yes the parent can communicate with the child in general about the issue, but where did the "gameboy as babysitter" comments start comming from? try to address the real issues.
Kahuna Burger
well, not if the humor is sufficiently related to the topic at hand, no. I was more thinking of off color humor being ranked as trolls, but I don't know your posting enough to assume. :)
Kahuna Burger
I don't know what you are assuming, but there are very few cases in which an eminent domain taking is not compensated. There will be a settlement to the property owners even if uncle same steps in and if you individual users of a luxury service* don't want it adding to your bills, what makes you think I would want it coming out of my taxes?
*"benifits all of us" indeed. Yeah, just like a mall does (eminent domain has been used for that too). Where are the damn libertarians on this one? probably drooling over their high speed access....
hmmmm.... eminent domain... must read ROADWORK again. Bachman.....
Kahuna Burger
probes memory.... me seems to recal riding trains and seeing such lines either on the ground, on poles or on metal walls againt steep embankments. Not to say that they aren't underground (where I would not remember seeing them) in many other areas, but I would not jump to the conclusion that all railroad tracks already have cable buried beside them.
Kahuna Burger
Maybe you just have a really bad sense of humor?
Kahuna Burger
Which is why if someone with a brain had worked for them, they would have done a title search before laying the wire. I suppose they could countersue the railroads for misleading them and recoup some, but I'm suprized anyone dealing with this project had never heard, say, the word "easement" before. The line isn't actually buried under the tracks, after all, and in some areas, surface rights aside, the area they dug in may well be an easement between the railroad and the adjoining owner.
The land in a lot of the cases was probably also taken by eminent domain and thus could be expected to come with a few caveats.
"A lawyer decided it was a chance to get rich". When did you guys turn into communists, anyway? A company saw a chance to save money on actually buying easements by working with another company that saw a chance to make millions on a yard wide strip that it can't use, but someone sees a way to make money AND give money to thousands of small property owners too and the lawyers are the ones you jump on?
Kahuna Burger
Ironicly, IIRC Upton Sinclair's goals in writing "The Jungle" were more focused on revealing the wretched and unsafe conditions that the meat packers worked under. It was meant as a pro labor book, but the idea of where their food was coming from caught the people's imaginations more readily. Now we have highly improved food safety rules, but meat packing is still one of the most dangerous and damaging jobs you can have. (they might have been helped by the OSHA ergonomic rules, but business leaders fooled everyone into thinking that was just about office workers and got it reversed.)
Kahuna Burger, who's not bitter about her father's hands being mostly ruined after only a few years in the packing house.
CONTAMINATED COKE BOTTLES KILL 4
But then the article says that it's some mom and pop soda company, and not Coca-Cola brand. If companies do not protect their trademarks, this is something that has the potential of happening. (The misleading articles, not the death of people by contaminated coke bottles)
IIRC, a similar thing happened with the bombing at the centenial olympic park. News outlets had been refering to a "tupperware container filled with nails", and the official Tupperware (tm) people got very pissy because they were not only using their trademark as a generic word, it was in the context of a fairly traumatic event.
Kahuna Burger
There are three reasons:
1. Fruit and vegetable consumption was much higher than it is today, partially negating the bad effects of high-fat diets.
2. Activity levels were higher, particularly in rural populations.
3. Most people died of something else first. For example, before widespread refrigeration, stomach cancer (from eating salted and smoked meats) was a leading killer.
To the second point I would also add that during the winter the added fuel of all the fat would be burned off keeping the poor blokes warm. I used to give my family's outside cats (dad insisted, poor kitties) hot fat and meat drippings over their dry food or some stale bread during the winter. It helped them deal with the cold, they didn't get fat from it and like many of our ancestors they died of other causes well before heart disease was even on the radar.
Kahuna Burger
While this would work (and is happening) in the specific case mentioned, it wouldn't in many others. The entire point of a corporation, in some ways, is to protect individuals from responsibility. In a large, multi executive company, the plausible deniability of any given individual is huge. Thats why most sexual harrassment cases are made against companies and rarely individuals. The individual offender wasn't warned so he didn't know it was a problem, and the supervisor didn't think there was anything he could do because the department manager didn't hear enough to take it seriously, and the vice president didn't make a policy because he wasn't even in that position when it started, and the executive vice president who was in that position certainly can't be held responsible for NOT doing something that long ago and is in London now anyway....
In some cases, the corporate veil is more like an onion - you lift all the layers and then it turns out there's nothing there. So do you throw up your hands and say "guess there's no one we can hold responsible", or do you you declare the whole onion rotten and take what you can out of it?
Kahuna Burger
I find it somewhat frightening that corporations are often held to LOWER standards than people. I recal reading about a case where a corporation admitted that a factory fire that had killed several people had been not just preventable, but predicatable (to the point of "It was gonna happen eventually"). The company was fined. An individual would have been charged with manslaughter at the least.
Its disgusting that courts give corporate entities all the freedoms of individuals (especially the "freedom of speech" to give huge campaign donations) but don't hold them to responsibilities the way real people are.
Kahuna Burger
Kahuna Burger
The "pharmacuticals need patents" line is pretty weak, IMHO. Huge amounts of pharm research is done at government funded universities and teaching hospitals, by researchers getting most of their money from government grants or pre/post docs who need to do research and a little help from some major company that then turns around and patents it. Or what about comunity groups raising millions of dollars for "AIDS research" or "cancer research". Funny that I've never heard of one company saying "well, we recieved so much government, comunity and pure research university support to bring about this advance/drug/product that we're gonna just release it directly into the public domain."
Personally, I'm all in support of a "public interest patent" opt in/out. If a company is producing soemthing that is considered such a public interest that their work is being underwritten at almost every level by government and charitable interests, they get a very limited patent that aims to put the drug/advance/product into general production/use as soon as possible to lower the end costs to the users. If they want it all to themselves with full patent rights, fine. Just do all the work in house. Build your own labs, hire all your own researchers completely, do all your own testing for FDA aproval, with no help from government grants, charitable funding, hospitals, universities, or what have you.
And we'll see whether removal of a lot of patent rights, or removal of outside support gives us "no pharmacutical research, amoung other things."
Removing my plus one cause this is way off topic.
Kahuna Burger
Wow, you better get to the supreme court, they need you bad. Here legal scolars for years have been making exceptions for silly things like libel, slander, threats, harrassment and conspiracy, divying up speech any way they choose, and if they'd only "read the constitution many many times" like you, they'd know better.
*cough* *cough* but in serious non flame, the legal issue here is in fact expressive speech, not just the ability to write or say it. And if we want to have a useful legal discussion about how things will be treated in the real world, I thought it would be useful to understand the terms that matter in the courts, not our personal opinions on How The Legal World Should Be.
kahuna Burger
however, while I am not a lawyer, I'm fairly certain that said plans are not "expressive speech" as used in constitutional law.
All information is not expressive speech. I believe the term was coined in response to non verbal protests such as the black arm bands in "Tinker..." or flag burning. I may be wrong. But we need a solid legal definition of "expressive speech" before everyone goes running around trying to say what is and isn't.
For myself, I don't buy the all code is expressive speech line in the slightest. The lawyer quoted seemed to be trying to prove it by showing that code could be USED as expressive speech, therefore code IS expressive speech. BS. There is very little that a creative person cannot do or create in a way that makes it expressive speech. Those examples do not make everything in the world expressive speech when done without that special intent.
For instance, in the midwest farmers growing feed crops such as alfalfa will use a special machine to turn the harvest into a bunch of big bales that look vaugly like 6 foot tall cinnomon rolls. (then the neighboring kids play on them all fall and as adults discover that just sniffing a bag of pet alfalfa makes them relaxed and happy, but thats a different subject.) A farmer with something to say could do his baling in such a way that passengers on an airplane flying above would see little dots spelling out "I love my guns" or "go Royals!" or any other expression he wished to make. And his alfalfa baling would then be a form of expressive speech. But no one in their right mind would say that this possibility makes all baling a form of expressive speech.
Kahuna Burger
Why not just throw in "puppy kickers vs noble citizens" while you're at it? the range of suggested exclusions looks like it spans the whole spectrum of entrenched, new, corporate, civic and public health concerns and definitly some would favor a "more" free and open internet than others. To put the whole range short of internet anarchist (those who prefer an anarctic internet, not a political appalation) as "intrenched interests" and the "no rules except first comes first served" crowd as moderates is just insulting to the intelligence of your readers.
yeah, /. has an agenda, and I know that when I come here, but could you lay the propaganda a little less thick next time? Some people want lots of limits. some want a few, some want a different few. You want none. Don't let your position blind you to the existance of a range outside of it, it just makes you look foolish.
Kahuna Burger
Could you clarify the all sorts? Are we talking age, income level, employment, marital status, fetishes, what? Some people consider their zip code a private matter while others talk loudly in the elevator about their bondage collection, so I'm really not getting a clear sense of what you were asked for. Seriously, I'd at least like to compare to what I've been asked for at the 5 or more boston area places I've gotten the cute cards.
Kahuna Burger
A store IS private property. Its also a place of public accomedation. Its an interesting, complex combination, but the issue I was responding to, where the claim was that you could go back to the exact same store, no confusion involved is BS.
And I'm so worried about my reputation with you. A little less ego would help you, methinks.
Kahuna Burger
"All sorts of personal information"?? I have a few of those lovely cards, and I've never been asked for more than my name address and maybe phone number. And the clerks don't hassle you if you don't want to give some of the info. If they're in a hurry, they just give you the card.
What I want is one card that I can use to opt into all of the individual store programs. Yeah, they could cross check my purchases across many venues and figure out that I own a cat, like to quilt and don't drink anything caffinated, alchoholic, diet or with high fructose corn syrup. And I'd start getting junk mail that actually interested me. ooohhh, trauma.
And if they paid attention, they'd find that some people activly avoid buying things made in china or certain companies with lousy policies.... and the old suggestion to vote with your checkbook could actually be noticed.... someone tell me when I get to the scary part.
Kahuna Burger Kahuna Burger
well, AFAIK banner advertisers don't pay by the amount of actual money they make off people coming to their site through click throughs, they pay by the eyeballs. So with this technology, a store could tell a vendor "setting up display X gaurentees you Y additional looks at your product and Z additional close examinations. Whether they actually buy the product at that point differs by the quality and price of product, but the look number is consistent for this display."
As an advertising technique, this would bring benifit analysis more concretely in line with any other advertising venue where people reached is consistent and predictable even if response is up to the advertiser to a certain extent.
Kahuna Burger
Excuse me? Thats a bit like saying that I can't file charges on a person who walks into my house and hangs out there without asking him real nice to get out first. If they have told you, plainly and without equivocation that you are never welcome on their property again, why should they have to remind you of it?
In the case of a store with a different name I could see it, but if they can prove that you already knew you did not have permission to be there, I'd say having to ask again is BS. What ever happened to the great /. creedo of taking responsibility for your own actions?
Kahuna Burger
(late to the thread so no one will see this of course, but) Actually the community groundsweel looks to be getting pissed at IBM just like in SF. I live in that neighborhood, and I ran into my landlady talking with a nieghbor and they were both prety irked. This is just a dumb thing for a corporate entity to do. The streets of Sna Fran or Cambridge are not a college campus that anyone can go drawing on to let us know about their cool new event. And the stuff is not chalk, its not coming off. What a bunch of gits.
Kahuna Burger
Uh, actually, there are a lot of other ways to deal with tragedies besides "laughing at it". I mean, if that's the one that works for you, have fun, but its just redicouslous to call any other (perhaps even more healthy) coping machanism "head in the sand behaviour".
Try not to assume the whole world reacts the same way you do and those who don't show the same outward expressions are just hiding from it. That way lies assinine randians and fred phelps.
Kahuna Burger
Kahuna Burger