Re:There's only one problem with this...
on
When Elephants Dance
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
the ban on ex post facto laws (per the const.) was designed with one particular idea in mind: you can't get punished for doing something 20 years ago that was only made illegal 10 years ago.
This is still the case - the last big time it came into play, however, was when the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 by the states. I knew several teachers who used to talk about how they could buy beer at 19 but their friends couldn't simply because their birthday fell on the day that the law came into effect.
Congress is (to the best of my knowledge) still afforded the right to make laws that do not *punish* crimes or the like that are retroactive.
The nerd litmus test.
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Just divide the number of people who download the latest version of this game by the number of valid IP's on the internet and you can figure out exactly what percentage of people on the planet earth won't be contributing to the world's "population" problem;-)
is that people like my mom and sister watch this show and think it's a complete duplicate of real science. In fact, I've had conversations about forensic science and heard the quote "well, you know, on CSI they <insert bullshit dramatic device passing for science here>."
I am very weary of shows like this because they seem to dupe 99.9% of the american public into actually believing half of this shit is real scientific technique. The/. crowd may be a bit more savvy than all that, but your average american isn't.
You don't have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Then again....we're all fucked if a fire breaks out during a showing of LoTR:The Two Towers;-)
okay, so by that definition i can tell you that you are a penis sucking, shit slurpping male whore who does truck drivers in reeking porto-potties for free, right?
Seriously, if you're going to troll, at least do it right.
I'll give you $20 if you can get modded down to -1 without using a single explative, and you must stay on-topic in relation to the posted article. Also, you can't mention Natalie Portman or Star-Wars at all. (Provided, of course, that you're still posting at 1)
Then again, I think my $20 is staying in my wallet. Now go back to posting Op-Ed pieces on K5 where you belong.
Sites which include this (and all its variations and others you can think of) would be the real life equivilant of holding a car rally against driving
I think your car analogy might go more along the lines of a Chevrolet rally against every other car manufacturer. It seems, of course, that what you propose is to exclude Chevrolet from the next open rally. Then again, since freedom of speech isn't that abstract of a concept, I don't think we need to go into these kinds of analogies.
The issue I take with your post is that you are advocating censorship. Granted, that vast majority of racists are incompitent assholes. Of course, I've known some very intelligent and erudite racists. Now this is not to say I agree at all with what they are saying, quite the contrary, but I firmly believe that they have every right to say it.
Let us imagine this circumstance. This assumes that you agree that the pro-life pro-choice dialog is a healthy one, and that both sides are equally entiteled to their argument. Now imagine that Roe v. Wade is overturned and that abortion is summarily outlawed in all 50 states. At that point, the discussion heats up and a conservative U.S. legislature outlaws pro-choice speech on the basis that it advocates murder.
Would you now argue that pro-choic speech should be outlawed because it promotes murder?
You see, for any controversial topic, there will always be strong arguments for banning all, if not part, of its discussion. Racism, communism, abortion, the list goes on. The important thing is to never let either side be muted. If that happens we have opted not for freedom of speech, but for uniformity of speech.
I think Barlow has alot of it slated down pretty well. The internet is becoming less free and more commercialized. Ads are worse than ever, and we're seeing a return to something I think we left off in the 80's. It's not who you are, but what you buy.
I especially hope that people will start to reflect a bit more on theiropinions of the music industry now that JPB has said it. Royalties are bullshit. Pay for the performance, not the music.
All in all, an excellent review. I just hope this reaches more eyes than the/. community.
I agree this PVR trend has gone quite far enough! If we continue to let people use these "magic boxes" to record TV shows, pause them, skip the commercials, or pretty much view the shows as they want to view them, then its only a matter of time before we slip into total anarchy!
It's a snowball effect....even today, I've been hearing rumors of people that buy blank reels of magnetic tape and put them in short, wide, black boxes to record shows when they're not home! They even use other buttons on their new-fangled "remote controls" other than Play, Pause, and Stop."
Someone stop this insanity before the child-actors from "Different Strokes" become destitute and are forced to rob convenience stores!
Look at El Al in Israel -- they have massive amounts of data on passengers and participate in profiling unlike any other airline
And we probably would to if a bunch of Canuks started border-jumping/bombing cafe's in Seattle.
Of course, maybe it's just my own idiosyncratic way, but I'm not a big fan of the government tracking all of my purchases. I pay taxes for them to go blow shit up when it needs blowing up, to make sure my roads are paved, and to spray magnesium chloride in Downtown denver just before it snows. I don't pay them to tell the guy driving the 747 what I had to eat yesterday.
This will solve all of our problems! Hurah for the FBI and other organizations. they've seriously cleaned everything up.
Now that we've weeded out that large portion of the terrorist world that runs around conspicuously advertising the fact that they're terrorists, using their real names and all kinds of paper-trail leaving items like credit cards, real id's and such, all we have to worry about now is that tremendously tiny segment of the criminal population that uses devious means to achieve their goals.
Thank god the vast majority of criminals and terrorist won't be able to circumvent this measure! Otherwise, it would just be a burden on the American public. And the government would never do something that shortsighted and dumb! Right?
I'm on the same track you are. The tech that signed me up told me that Qwest.net wasn't really going away, but that the offer wasn't publicized, etc. A rather nebulous conversation, all in all.
Regardless...i'm still confident that my service will be shut off come Jan 21. And when it is, i'm going to call them, get my money back for the router, and pray to god i can find another isp.
Well then. it does sound like you went to the wrong school.
I attende the U. of Missouri for a year before we mutually agreed upon my departure (I agreed that I didn't have enough money to pay for it, and they agreed that I smoked too much weed and missed too many classes....go figure). However, I took three CS related classes whilst I was there (I was a J major thinking of changing to CS).
CECS 103 was the basic C class for first and second semester students. This gave us a pretty rudimentary understanding of C. There were no real complex data structures discussed, but we did touch a little on stacks and queues. Primarily it was designed for people with no background in code who were going for their CS degree. (Remember, only in the past few years have all highschools started to teach any programming here in the states. It's mostly math) However, it wasn't easy, and by the end of the semester, we were coding accounting programs, etc.
CECS 203 was the second semester class I took. Much harder. This class generally emphasized the finer points of programming and algorithms. We would be given libraries and miscellaneous functions and it was our responsibility to actually write elegant code. In this class, it was not unheard of for the best students to work on assignments for an average of 6 hours a night.
It sounds to me like the college you attended was doing what the majority of colleges now-a-days are doing: turning themselves into trade schools. The very same reason why I haven't decided to give college another try.
If the man says you need a BS to prove you are intelligent, then the man is wrong and he can go fuck himself;-)
The labels are worried that the rise of home CD-burners has eaten into album sales, particularly after the worst year in a decade for the music industry.
These sales figures couldn't possibly shaped by the fact that the RIAA is releasing the shittiest music in a decade, could it?
you mean Qworst actually fucked up your phone bill? But they have such a good reputation for not doing that! I don't know a single customer who has been fucked by them aside from everyone I've ever talked to that has them as a local telco.
that's a pretty good service record if you ask me. Not like those other companies. Do you know how pissed off I was to find out that AT&T and Xcel energy billed me exactly what they said they would for a month's worth of service. Not to mention a lack of hidden charges! ARGH!
Besides, I'm actually starting to like this 256k DSL connection I have through them. I probably just would have been irritated by them setting up the 648k pipe I actually ordered.
For every dollar that the US gives out in foreign aid, it gets back 10 or 20 in debt repayments.
you mean like the $31 billion that Europe still owes us from WWI and WWII? (Am i breaking Godwin's law here?) Or do you mean the $9.4 billion that the U.S. spent on foreign aid in 1996 (the most of any country)? If you have a link to a site that shows the $100 billion repaid on that, I, for one, would be very interested to see it.
That is not to say that I would like to see this money be repaid, not at all. But the only people I hear defending the U.S.'s current position are quickly branded as unenlightened neanderthals who know nothing about any goings on outside their little hobbit villages. While I agree that the United States does in fact need to rethink alot of its foreign policy I cannot excuse those who would villify us for doing our best. Progress takes time. And for a country that had Jim Crow laws on the books up until 50 years ago, I think we've come a pretty long way. We've still got a long way to go, but to quote the bible: "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
oh, and FWIW - i'm an atheist, but it's a damned good quote nevertheless;-)
Slashdot Mirror
the ban on ex post facto laws (per the const.) was designed with one particular idea in mind: you can't get punished for doing something 20 years ago that was only made illegal 10 years ago.
This is still the case - the last big time it came into play, however, was when the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 by the states. I knew several teachers who used to talk about how they could buy beer at 19 but their friends couldn't simply because their birthday fell on the day that the law came into effect.
Congress is (to the best of my knowledge) still afforded the right to make laws that do not *punish* crimes or the like that are retroactive.
Just divide the number of people who download the latest version of this game by the number of valid IP's on the internet and you can figure out exactly what percentage of people on the planet earth won't be contributing to the world's "population" problem ;-)
troll? I'll bite.
The subject of the sentance was Heckencamp (sic?). "him" is a pronoun referencing the subject, Heckencamp.
Think about it, you can logically shorten the sentance to "When Heckencamp replied [The Judge] ordered him taken into custody."
is that people like my mom and sister watch this show and think it's a complete duplicate of real science. In fact, I've had conversations about forensic science and heard the quote "well, you know, on CSI they <insert bullshit dramatic device passing for science here>."
/. crowd may be a bit more savvy than all that, but your average american isn't.
I am very weary of shows like this because they seem to dupe 99.9% of the american public into actually believing half of this shit is real scientific technique. The
careful. not all speech
;-)
You don't have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. Then again....we're all fucked if a fire breaks out during a showing of LoTR:The Two Towers
okay, so by that definition i can tell you that you are a penis sucking, shit slurpping male whore who does truck drivers in reeking porto-potties for free, right?
Seriously, if you're going to troll, at least do it right.
I'll give you $20 if you can get modded down to -1 without using a single explative, and you must stay on-topic in relation to the posted article. Also, you can't mention Natalie Portman or Star-Wars at all. (Provided, of course, that you're still posting at 1)
Then again, I think my $20 is staying in my wallet. Now go back to posting Op-Ed pieces on K5 where you belong.
If you commit suicide because a website told you to, that's not an act of expression, that's a Darwin Award nomination!
Sites which include this (and all its variations and others you can think of) would be the real life equivilant of holding a car rally against driving
I think your car analogy might go more along the lines of a Chevrolet rally against every other car manufacturer. It seems, of course, that what you propose is to exclude Chevrolet from the next open rally. Then again, since freedom of speech isn't that abstract of a concept, I don't think we need to go into these kinds of analogies.
The issue I take with your post is that you are advocating censorship. Granted, that vast majority of racists are incompitent assholes. Of course, I've known some very intelligent and erudite racists. Now this is not to say I agree at all with what they are saying, quite the contrary, but I firmly believe that they have every right to say it.
Let us imagine this circumstance. This assumes that you agree that the pro-life pro-choice dialog is a healthy one, and that both sides are equally entiteled to their argument. Now imagine that Roe v. Wade is overturned and that abortion is summarily outlawed in all 50 states. At that point, the discussion heats up and a conservative U.S. legislature outlaws pro-choice speech on the basis that it advocates murder.
Would you now argue that pro-choic speech should be outlawed because it promotes murder?
You see, for any controversial topic, there will always be strong arguments for banning all, if not part, of its discussion. Racism, communism, abortion, the list goes on. The important thing is to never let either side be muted. If that happens we have opted not for freedom of speech, but for uniformity of speech.
Perhaps this whole argument is best summed up by one of my favorite quotes (from none other than George Orwell):
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
It's "Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see"
;-)
I think Barlow has alot of it slated down pretty well. The internet is becoming less free and more commercialized. Ads are worse than ever, and we're seeing a return to something I think we left off in the 80's. It's not who you are, but what you buy.
/. community.
I especially hope that people will start to reflect a bit more on theiropinions of the music industry now that JPB has said it. Royalties are bullshit. Pay for the performance, not the music.
All in all, an excellent review. I just hope this reaches more eyes than the
we might actually one day hope to find intelligent life in this solar system?
finally!
second place?
second place is a set of steak knives.
yes, you are correct. it's from the onion. however i'm just too lazy to edit my sig.
I agree this PVR trend has gone quite far enough! If we continue to let people use these "magic boxes" to record TV shows, pause them, skip the commercials, or pretty much view the shows as they want to view them, then its only a matter of time before we slip into total anarchy!
It's a snowball effect....even today, I've been hearing rumors of people that buy blank reels of magnetic tape and put them in short, wide, black boxes to record shows when they're not home! They even use other buttons on their new-fangled "remote controls" other than Play, Pause, and Stop."
Someone stop this insanity before the child-actors from "Different Strokes" become destitute and are forced to rob convenience stores!
Look at El Al in Israel -- they have massive amounts of data on passengers and participate in profiling unlike any other airline
And we probably would to if a bunch of Canuks started border-jumping/bombing cafe's in Seattle.
Of course, maybe it's just my own idiosyncratic way, but I'm not a big fan of the government tracking all of my purchases. I pay taxes for them to go blow shit up when it needs blowing up, to make sure my roads are paved, and to spray magnesium chloride in Downtown denver just before it snows. I don't pay them to tell the guy driving the 747 what I had to eat yesterday.
This will solve all of our problems! Hurah for the FBI and other organizations. they've seriously cleaned everything up.
Now that we've weeded out that large portion of the terrorist world that runs around conspicuously advertising the fact that they're terrorists, using their real names and all kinds of paper-trail leaving items like credit cards, real id's and such, all we have to worry about now is that tremendously tiny segment of the criminal population that uses devious means to achieve their goals.
Thank god the vast majority of criminals and terrorist won't be able to circumvent this measure! Otherwise, it would just be a burden on the American public. And the government would never do something that shortsighted and dumb! Right?
if you have a 48" waist...this technology has been out for years.
Ahh...
I'm on the same track you are. The tech that signed me up told me that Qwest.net wasn't really going away, but that the offer wasn't publicized, etc. A rather nebulous conversation, all in all.
Regardless...i'm still confident that my service will be shut off come Jan 21. And when it is, i'm going to call them, get my money back for the router, and pray to god i can find another isp.
AT&T Broadband, why have you forsaken me?!?!?
Well then. it does sound like you went to the wrong school.
;-)
I attende the U. of Missouri for a year before we mutually agreed upon my departure (I agreed that I didn't have enough money to pay for it, and they agreed that I smoked too much weed and missed too many classes....go figure). However, I took three CS related classes whilst I was there (I was a J major thinking of changing to CS).
CECS 103 was the basic C class for first and second semester students. This gave us a pretty rudimentary understanding of C. There were no real complex data structures discussed, but we did touch a little on stacks and queues. Primarily it was designed for people with no background in code who were going for their CS degree. (Remember, only in the past few years have all highschools started to teach any programming here in the states. It's mostly math) However, it wasn't easy, and by the end of the semester, we were coding accounting programs, etc.
CECS 203 was the second semester class I took. Much harder. This class generally emphasized the finer points of programming and algorithms. We would be given libraries and miscellaneous functions and it was our responsibility to actually write elegant code. In this class, it was not unheard of for the best students to work on assignments for an average of 6 hours a night.
It sounds to me like the college you attended was doing what the majority of colleges now-a-days are doing: turning themselves into trade schools. The very same reason why I haven't decided to give college another try.
If the man says you need a BS to prove you are intelligent, then the man is wrong and he can go fuck himself
From the article:
The labels are worried that the rise of home CD-burners has eaten into album sales, particularly after the worst year in a decade for the music industry.
These sales figures couldn't possibly shaped by the fact that the RIAA is releasing the shittiest music in a decade, could it?
that's the best part of it.
;-)
aparently the patent office has shown that prior art isn't a criterion for not getting a patent
Another licensee on my patent on "a method in which a female and male, in combination, create a being of signifigant mental incompetence."
Wait.
you mean Qworst actually fucked up your phone bill? But they have such a good reputation for not doing that! I don't know a single customer who has been fucked by them aside from everyone I've ever talked to that has them as a local telco.
that's a pretty good service record if you ask me. Not like those other companies. Do you know how pissed off I was to find out that AT&T and Xcel energy billed me exactly what they said they would for a month's worth of service. Not to mention a lack of hidden charges! ARGH!
Besides, I'm actually starting to like this 256k DSL connection I have through them. I probably just would have been irritated by them setting up the 648k pipe I actually ordered.
For every dollar that the US gives out in foreign aid, it gets back 10 or 20 in debt repayments.
;-)
you mean like the $31 billion that Europe still owes us from WWI and WWII? (Am i breaking Godwin's law here?) Or do you mean the $9.4 billion that the U.S. spent on foreign aid in 1996 (the most of any country)? If you have a link to a site that shows the $100 billion repaid on that, I, for one, would be very interested to see it.
That is not to say that I would like to see this money be repaid, not at all. But the only people I hear defending the U.S.'s current position are quickly branded as unenlightened neanderthals who know nothing about any goings on outside their little hobbit villages. While I agree that the United States does in fact need to rethink alot of its foreign policy I cannot excuse those who would villify us for doing our best. Progress takes time. And for a country that had Jim Crow laws on the books up until 50 years ago, I think we've come a pretty long way. We've still got a long way to go, but to quote the bible: "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
oh, and FWIW - i'm an atheist, but it's a damned good quote nevertheless