Seems like a pretty good analogy. Just because someone manages to roll a car along on hexagons doesn't put a nail in the coffin of cars with round wheels. block off a road because you don't like it and someone finds another harder, longer more circituitous route that doesn't make blocking the road any more sensible or mean that taking the better route wouldn't have been a far far better idea.
if only people had sense.... and could all grok legalese.
you see that approach is defeated by the cunning approach of every service offering terms and policies which
1: make no guarantee or promise of anything at all under any circumstances (just read your antivirus T&C) 2: state that you have no rights at all 3: state that they reserve the right to do anything they feel like doing.
Since nobody reads the T&C or policies it's not a selling point. So they include whatever they like and then simply don't enforce it most of the time.
If you can agree that some limits are sensible, permitted by the constitution
You imply the 2 are one in the same. the constitution is extremely clear on the matter, there's no ambiguity there. don't pretend you're paying it any attention in this matter.
some limits are most certainly sensible but that document permits none, if you want limits you simply have to ignore it.
Do you really think that the founders intended to give every citizen complete license to lie through their teeth and vilify each other with unfounded rumors?
It doesn't matter what they meant, what they wrote is quite clear. It may not be what they intended or what is sensible but it's what they wrote.
Your right to bear arms doesn't give you the right to shoot anyone you please for any reason, does it?
You have a right to free speech, not a right to bear words. With the first amendment the right is the right to do something, not posses something.
Likewise, your right to free speech doesn't give you the right to harm other people through your speech, by inciting violence, by causing a panic,
See right there you've just eliminated any free speech as just about anything that really needs saying has the potential to cause people to be violent or panic. And you can be damned sure any politician will interpret any laws to that effect to be covering people who say things they'd rather not be said. Calling for a protest is *potentially* inciting violence, complaining publicly about injustice could incite violence as people take the law into their own hands.
please explain how we will continue to function as a semi-sane society, when anything can be said by anybody, at anytime
well right now we're doing pretty ok and there is nothing, absolutely nothing stopping me from hopping on a few chained anonymous proxies or compromised hosts and making up some bullshit about you and spreading it far and wide to every message board, forum and discussion board on the net with utter impunity and no fear of repressions .
and yet we have a functioning society.
You see it's really quite hard to wreck your business with just a few words to your customers. You need to have authority, familiarity or proof to convince people for the most part. It's not easy to destroy someone with words alone, particularly if people know that it comes from an untrustworthy source. But for the most part I'd agree that they're quite sensible because people are stupid and believe anything they're told.
If you can agree that some limits are sensible, permitted by the constitution, and needed
you're using the words "sensible" and "permitted by the constitution" as if they mean the same thing. they most certainly are not permitted by the constitution but they can be quite sensible and needed at the same time.
The document is not whatever you want it to be. It's extremely clear on the subject.
I'm quite happy to agree that limits on speech can be quite sensible and are often needed (though they're needed far far far less than many politicians would have you believe) but claiming the constitution allows for them is simply wishful thinking. Now the issue of whether it's a good idea to blindly follow the rules set down in the constitution under all circumstances is another debate.
I see nothing in the constitution about obscenity, I see nothing in there about free speech zones, I see nothing in there about saying things which might convince people to break the law. If the argument is "what does the constitution say" then then it's quite clear on the matter with "make no law". What "should be" may be a different matter but it's pretty clear on that.
If you just want to apply common sense, fairness and every now and then the occasional bit of abuse instead and ignore the constitution then that's a different matter. The document says what it says, not what you'd like it to say or what it would be sensible for it to say.
Many of those things have been brought in by simply ignoring what it says.
For one you can't actually copyright *a recipe*. You can copyright an article or a paragraph of text about a recipe but the list of ingredients, that particular way of making a cake cannot be copyrighted.
Oh I'd just be damned strict about what constitutes harm and only allow libel/slander where real unjustified harm was caused. The sad thing is that there is no shortage of people who like you will use your little justification for anything and thus we have "free speech zones" and other such nonsense.
personally I'd err extremely far on the side of free speech.
And I'd contest that you have every right to make them, you merely may suffer civil consequences if they are unjustified or untrue.
you can take a civil case against someone for quite literally anything. Whether you're win or not is another matter but if the fact that someone can take a civil case against you for something means you have no right to do it then you already have exactly zero rights.
You can be sued for literally anything, I could sue you for being ugly(whether you are or not I don't know but that wouldn't stop me).
The case would almost certainly be thrown out but that doesn't stop you trying.
That doesn't mean there are any limits in law on your right to be ugly/pretty/etc.
If being able to take a civil case against someone for X means they have no right to X then that would mean george carlin was more right than even he knew when he used the phrase "you have no rights"
If I through negligence etc harm you while doing something I have every right to do you can still sue me for causing you harm. the government just can't arrest me for it.
you don't seem to understand. If the *only* sites you use are the big ones which can pay to get on the high-bandwidth list then it barely effects you.
if you like the less well known sites, the ones which don't have a big budget well you can suck it up cause their packets will be getting pushed to the end of the queue behind those from youtube, facebook and any other sites which can pay the extra fee and you'll be stuck with shitty shitty latency and bandwidth.
Guido doesn't know the paper you handed him is the real receipt you switched for the fake. Sure, if Guido wants to buy my vote I'll take his money and vote how I like.
you're complaining about a problem that is no worse with the electronic voting system though potentially could be done better.
Over the past 150 years, the age of puberty onset has fallen substantially across many developed countries. Although trends are apparent in both sexes,1 the evidence in females (where biological markers are clearer) suggests that, for instance, in northern Europe the age at menarche (first menstruation) fell during the 1800s, then further reduced by up to 3 years over the last century (fig 1). Factors contributing to this fall include a combination of public health successes and changes in social structures. Thus, successes such as improved childhood nutrition and health status through reduction in childhood infections have been major factors accelerating the onset of puberty
so unless you're very old it shouldn't be that noticeable.
ANYTHING that gives the voter the opportunity to walk out with confirmation of HOW they voted is a huge problem. In the paper system , the voter could decide to pull out their camera phone, take a photo of their market ballot.
So, they walk out the door, show their photo to "Guido", and poof - their vote has been bought.
and even with a manual re-count it doesn't show up.
but people are hopeless romantics about paper. everything is better on paper.
The OED is used as somewhat of a touchstone but it is still nothing but a private organisation with no actual authority. If tomorrow the vast majority of english speakers started spelling "lexicography" as "lexcography" and the OED didn't update it's spelling then simply put the OED would be wrong and merely be out of date.
With both code and starwars have some kind of official standard, either the spec or reference to the actual movie. English does not. Even with perfect grammar and spelling natural language can still be too ambiguous to parse, particularly in it's spoken form.(well spelling doesn't come into that)
unless there's a significant chance of there being some confusion,lets say the misspelling or poor grammar changes the meaning of the sentence in some meaningful coherent manner such that there are multiple reasonable interpretations, if you cannot resist the urge to jump in and point out that it's "whom" not "who" then you aren't being helpful, you aren't correcting any kind of important error, you're being nothing but a rude jerk.
And lets not even get into dialects. that only leads to the kind of argument normally only seen when large numbers of c-programmers who aren't fans of ansi C and all have their own favourite flavours end up in the same room.
Just to make the point that while there is no silver bullet you can get slight improvements. Higher level languages help with complex tasks but in practice the complexity of the tasks just gets scaled up to the maximum possible, picking the right language for the job can mean the difference between development hell and a merely hard project. Good planning and good organisation with some expereienced project managers probably has even more effect.
The thing is that no matter the improvements development will remain exactly as hard forever. Which is because the more you can do easily the more will be demanded.#
If a launguage was developed or a development style adopted which allowed what would take the same team months to write now mere days then all that would happen is that the scale, complexity and demands would be scaled up until even with those fantastic tools it would take just as many months.
Programs do get easier to write (just for kicks try writing the same trivial app in assembly or a really low level language and in a high level language) but that just means that the customers can get more of their demands met and the competition will be making even more complex software.
Niche? It's actually a really really good idea. It used to be common that I'd be within walking distance of a few stations and simply wanted the fastest way home and didn't care which station I went to.
Can we just get rid of both kinds of pedantic dickheads and have a far better discussion forum?
Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.
Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not. and that doesn't change.
There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.
let me repeat that: There is no standards body for the english language.
If some pedantic asshole insists it's "whom not who" yet the vast majority of english speakers don't agree and can understand each other when they ignore his rule then the pedantic asshole is wrong. No if's, no buts. He's wrong. he's failed to keep up with a changing language.
you can't beat someone into being a good person. Singling out crimes which are done with the intent of intimidating or sending a message to a larger community is fine but making a list of different types of people and treating crimes against them differently because they're apparently a special *victim class* of society is quite different.
Beating a furry/train-spotter/prostitute/tax collector to death to send a message to the rest of their community,profession or group shouldn't be treated as less bad than beating anyone else to death to send a message to their community just because someone decided that the latter groups are different type of people.
Messages are also aimed at the local community. (to make sure people respect them or more accurately, fear them.) Local businessmen to make sure they pay protection. Local families to make sure they get recruits and nobody even thinks about joining any rival gangs.
I'd also ask why you can't seem to talk in a civil manner in this topic? You have a somewhat reasonable position but it's overshadowed by your awful discussion style and abusive language.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I guess that Wikipedia must know best. It's not like it can just be edited by anyone...
What is it about lazy people who can't believe that they're wrong.
Can't dispute the fact, well lets just attack wikipedia because you've got a stick firmly up your ass.
Follow the fucking citation.
Hyde, Grant Milnor. Handbook for Newspaper Workers. D. Appleton and company, 1921, p. 38
http://www.amazon.com/Newspaper-Punctuation-Journalistic-Structure-Typographical/dp/1150066504
Seems like a pretty good analogy.
Just because someone manages to roll a car along on hexagons doesn't put a nail in the coffin of cars with round wheels.
block off a road because you don't like it and someone finds another harder, longer more circituitous route that doesn't make blocking the road any more sensible or mean that taking the better route wouldn't have been a far far better idea.
Paypal may be bad but the fact that they're still better than the majority is deeply depressing.
If they were subject to any kind of law other than their ToS and couldn't confiscate your money on a whim paypal would be even further ahead.
I assume they'd act like tinted windows since they'd be absorbing some of the light.
car windows which gradually charge the battery perhaps?
good point, seems even I'm using such terms now.
if only people had sense.... and could all grok legalese.
you see that approach is defeated by the cunning approach of every service offering terms and policies which
1: make no guarantee or promise of anything at all under any circumstances (just read your antivirus T&C)
2: state that you have no rights at all
3: state that they reserve the right to do anything they feel like doing.
Since nobody reads the T&C or policies it's not a selling point.
So they include whatever they like and then simply don't enforce it most of the time.
So the only indicator is their actual behaviour.
not their policies or T&C's
100km???
any chance of a reference, I'd like to compare it with some other mapping services.
I haven't played with the GPS aspect of it but the maps around my area seem pretty close to the reality.
If you can agree that some limits are sensible, permitted by the constitution
You imply the 2 are one in the same.
the constitution is extremely clear on the matter, there's no ambiguity there.
don't pretend you're paying it any attention in this matter.
some limits are most certainly sensible but that document permits none, if you want limits you simply have to ignore it.
Do you really think that the founders intended to give every citizen complete license to lie through their teeth and vilify each other with unfounded rumors?
It doesn't matter what they meant, what they wrote is quite clear.
It may not be what they intended or what is sensible but it's what they wrote.
Your right to bear arms doesn't give you the right to shoot anyone you please for any reason, does it?
You have a right to free speech, not a right to bear words.
With the first amendment the right is the right to do something, not posses something.
Likewise, your right to free speech doesn't give you the right to harm other people through your speech, by inciting violence, by causing a panic,
See right there you've just eliminated any free speech as just about anything that really needs saying has the potential to cause people to be violent or panic.
And you can be damned sure any politician will interpret any laws to that effect to be covering people who say things they'd rather not be said.
Calling for a protest is *potentially* inciting violence, complaining publicly about injustice could incite violence as people take the law into their own hands.
please explain how we will continue to function as a semi-sane society, when anything can be said by anybody, at anytime
well right now we're doing pretty ok and there is nothing, absolutely nothing stopping me from hopping on a few chained anonymous proxies or compromised hosts and making up some bullshit about you and spreading it far and wide to every message board, forum and discussion board on the net with utter impunity and no fear of repressions .
and yet we have a functioning society.
You see it's really quite hard to wreck your business with just a few words to your customers. You need to have authority, familiarity or proof to convince people for the most part.
It's not easy to destroy someone with words alone, particularly if people know that it comes from an untrustworthy source.
But for the most part I'd agree that they're quite sensible because people are stupid and believe anything they're told.
If you can agree that some limits are sensible, permitted by the constitution, and needed
you're using the words "sensible" and "permitted by the constitution" as if they mean the same thing.
they most certainly are not permitted by the constitution but they can be quite sensible and needed at the same time.
The document is not whatever you want it to be.
It's extremely clear on the subject.
I'm quite happy to agree that limits on speech can be quite sensible and are often needed (though they're needed far far far less than many politicians would have you believe) but claiming the constitution allows for them is simply wishful thinking.
Now the issue of whether it's a good idea to blindly follow the rules set down in the constitution under all circumstances is another debate.
I see nothing in the constitution about obscenity, I see nothing in there about free speech zones, I see nothing in there about saying things which might convince people to break the law.
If the argument is "what does the constitution say" then then it's quite clear on the matter with "make no law".
What "should be" may be a different matter but it's pretty clear on that.
If you just want to apply common sense, fairness and every now and then the occasional bit of abuse instead and ignore the constitution then that's a different matter.
The document says what it says, not what you'd like it to say or what it would be sensible for it to say.
Many of those things have been brought in by simply ignoring what it says.
yes, the summary is truly awful.
For one you can't actually copyright *a recipe*.
You can copyright an article or a paragraph of text about a recipe but the list of ingredients, that particular way of making a cake cannot be copyrighted.
they stole her article, not her recipe.
Oh I'd just be damned strict about what constitutes harm and only allow libel/slander where real unjustified harm was caused.
The sad thing is that there is no shortage of people who like you will use your little justification for anything and thus we have "free speech zones" and other such nonsense.
personally I'd err extremely far on the side of free speech.
And I'd contest that you have every right to make them, you merely may suffer civil consequences if they are unjustified or untrue.
you can take a civil case against someone for quite literally anything.
Whether you're win or not is another matter but if the fact that someone can take a civil case against you for something means you have no right to do it then you already have exactly zero rights.
You can be sued for literally anything, I could sue you for being ugly(whether you are or not I don't know but that wouldn't stop me).
The case would almost certainly be thrown out but that doesn't stop you trying.
That doesn't mean there are any limits in law on your right to be ugly/pretty/etc.
If being able to take a civil case against someone for X means they have no right to X then that would mean george carlin was more right than even he knew when he used the phrase "you have no rights"
Treat them as civil cases.
If I through negligence etc harm you while doing something I have every right to do you can still sue me for causing you harm.
the government just can't arrest me for it.
you don't seem to understand.
If the *only* sites you use are the big ones which can pay to get on the high-bandwidth list then it barely effects you.
if you like the less well known sites, the ones which don't have a big budget well you can suck it up cause their packets will be getting pushed to the end of the queue behind those from youtube, facebook and any other sites which can pay the extra fee and you'll be stuck with shitty shitty latency and bandwidth.
it's very very bad.
educate yourself.
Guido doesn't know the paper you handed him is the real receipt you switched for the fake.
Sure, if Guido wants to buy my vote I'll take his money and vote how I like.
you're complaining about a problem that is no worse with the electronic voting system though potentially could be done better.
From the other poster who replied to my post:
http://jech.bmj.com/content/60/11/910.extract
Over the past 150 years, the age of puberty onset has fallen substantially across many developed countries. Although trends are apparent in both sexes,1 the evidence in females (where biological markers are clearer) suggests that, for instance, in northern Europe the age at menarche (first menstruation) fell during the 1800s, then further reduced by up to 3 years over the last century (fig 1). Factors contributing to this fall include a combination of public health successes and changes in social structures. Thus, successes such as improved childhood nutrition and health status through reduction in childhood infections have been major factors accelerating the onset of puberty
so unless you're very old it shouldn't be that noticeable.
"that is those "
nice
And paper voting?
Vote buying. That's what's wrong with it.
ANYTHING that gives the voter the opportunity to walk out with confirmation of HOW they voted is a huge problem. In the paper system , the voter could decide to pull out their camera phone, take a photo of their market ballot.
So, they walk out the door, show their photo to "Guido", and poof - their vote has been bought.
and even with a manual re-count it doesn't show up.
but people are hopeless romantics about paper.
everything is better on paper.
The OED is used as somewhat of a touchstone but it is still nothing but a private organisation with no actual authority.
If tomorrow the vast majority of english speakers started spelling "lexicography" as "lexcography" and the OED didn't update it's spelling then simply put the OED would be wrong and merely be out of date.
With both code and starwars have some kind of official standard, either the spec or reference to the actual movie.
English does not.
Even with perfect grammar and spelling natural language can still be too ambiguous to parse, particularly in it's spoken form.(well spelling doesn't come into that)
unless there's a significant chance of there being some confusion,lets say the misspelling or poor grammar changes the meaning of the sentence in some meaningful coherent manner such that there are multiple reasonable interpretations, if you cannot resist the urge to jump in and point out that it's "whom" not "who" then you aren't being helpful, you aren't correcting any kind of important error, you're being nothing but a rude jerk.
And lets not even get into dialects.
that only leads to the kind of argument normally only seen when large numbers of c-programmers who aren't fans of ansi C and all have their own favourite flavours end up in the same room.
Just to make the point that while there is no silver bullet you can get slight improvements.
Higher level languages help with complex tasks but in practice the complexity of the tasks just gets scaled up to the maximum possible, picking the right language for the job can mean the difference between development hell and a merely hard project.
Good planning and good organisation with some expereienced project managers probably has even more effect.
The thing is that no matter the improvements development will remain exactly as hard forever.
Which is because the more you can do easily the more will be demanded.#
If a launguage was developed or a development style adopted which allowed what would take the same team months to write now mere days then all that would happen is that the scale, complexity and demands would be scaled up until even with those fantastic tools it would take just as many months.
Programs do get easier to write (just for kicks try writing the same trivial app in assembly or a really low level language and in a high level language) but that just means that the customers can get more of their demands met and the competition will be making even more complex software.
Niche?
It's actually a really really good idea.
It used to be common that I'd be within walking distance of a few stations and simply wanted the fastest way home and didn't care which station I went to.
Can we just get rid of both kinds of pedantic dickheads and have a far better discussion forum?
Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.
Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not.
and that doesn't change.
There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.
let me repeat that:
There is no standards body for the english language.
If some pedantic asshole insists it's "whom not who" yet the vast majority of english speakers don't agree and can understand each other when they ignore his rule then the pedantic asshole is wrong.
No if's, no buts. He's wrong.
he's failed to keep up with a changing language.
you can't beat someone into being a good person.
Singling out crimes which are done with the intent of intimidating or sending a message to a larger community is fine but making a list of different types of people and treating crimes against them differently because they're apparently a special *victim class* of society is quite different.
Beating a furry/train-spotter/prostitute/tax collector to death to send a message to the rest of their community,profession or group shouldn't be treated as less bad than beating anyone else to death to send a message to their community just because someone decided that the latter groups are different type of people.
Messages are also aimed at the local community. (to make sure people respect them or more accurately, fear them.)
Local businessmen to make sure they pay protection.
Local families to make sure they get recruits and nobody even thinks about joining any rival gangs.
I'd also ask why you can't seem to talk in a civil manner in this topic?
You have a somewhat reasonable position but it's overshadowed by your awful discussion style and abusive language.