Creation versus evolution is one of those cases of pseudoscience where the unscientific side (the creationists, if I must spell it out) claims that they want to "compromise" between the two sides by claiming that each side can account for some things, or that each side has a certain amount of faith, or "we have no way to be sure about creation, but we have no way to be sure about evolution either". Almost any time someone says this it's a case where the science and the pseudoscience aren't equal at all, the person who is trying to "compromise" supports the pseudoscience, and they don't like that science is completely on the other side and they would rather that the two sides at least be equal.
All creationists get lumped together because the "compromise" creationist is just as wrong as the blatant creationist. Either you accept evolution or you don't. "I'm not saying the creationists are right, but evolution can't explain this" followed by a list of misconceptions means you don't.
However, my understanding is that material obtained through such wiretapping is not directly admissible in the court, so it cannot itself be used as a proof of wrongdoing.
They will probably just use the standard dodge that's already used in the US: once they look at the inadmissible evidence and figure out who they want to search, claim to have received an "anonymous tip" implicating that person and search them based on the "anonymous tip".
Never mind security, how about speed? Is a PDF reader written in Javascript going to be as fast as a PDF reader written in a standard compiled language (which is already quite slow even on a modern machine)?
The whole thing has an excessive amount of "I don't like the open source movement, so even though the GNU stuff satisfies the definition of open source, don't you dare call it that."
Oh, the pronunciation of "GNU" is also stupid. Telling people to not pronounce it like the word reminds me of Raymond Luxury Yacht in Monty Python, whose name is pronounced "Throat Warbler Mangrove".
I'm wondering about the potential for copyright and trademark violations. How long until the manufacturer gets sued because kids are downloading and printing Pikachu, Mickey Mouse, GI Joe, or one of a zillion other designs that you have to pay the big bucks to legally license?
Because, seriously, why the fuck would we want to get to Mars?!! Would you start training today for a race that might not have to be run in your lifetime?
You've got it backwards. The expensive "exciting new rocket" that the administration likes would be able to take people to Mars ("The Space Launch System, or SLS, will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond.") The robotic space probes (the only ones that mention Mars in the Slashdot summary) do not--they're robotic. (And they'll get there in your lifetime, too).
Insurance is always a bad bet, from an expected value sense. On the average, you will lose more by buying insurance than by not doing so.
Insurance is useful in coping with large, but rare, losses. If not having insurance costs you less on the average, but that average is made up of a 99.9% chance of paying nothing and a 0.1% chance of going bankrupt, it's worse than having a 100% chance of paying a fixed insurance premium, even if the fixed insurance premium costs more than that average.
If the large loss is *not* going to bankrupt you, then insurance is a bad deal, and you'd be better off sucking up the loss. If a large company suffers a loss from a natural disaster, and they can survive the loss, then we should let them have the loss. It would be stupid for them to buy insurance (since on the average the insurance costs them more), but they definitely shouldn't be getting a government bailout.
Netflix can rent physical DVDs without cooperation from the studios, because of the first sale right.
They can't do this for streaming. Streaming requires negotiation with the companies, who can charge anything they want or refuse to provide streams at all.
That's why the streaming library blows, and that's why it's always going to blow.
Sony doesn't consider a buyer of used games to be a legitimate customer, since a used game gives Sony no income. Piracy has nothing to do with this, except that it's something else which also gives Sony no income but which sounds better to complain about in press releases.
Serving food makes them subject to licensing, inspection, and to all sorts of public health and safety laws, some of which have very tenuous connections to actual public health and safety.
The Toysmart precedent, which was used by the FTC here, is that selling the information is allowed only if the purchaser is in the same business and agrees to obey the same privacy policy. While it does violate any pledge not to sell your data at all, selling data under these circumstances can't cause most of the harm that selling your data normally causes. It's not as if they would be allowed to sell it to Facebook or Publisher's Clearing House.
About the only realistic situation I can think of where someone would be okay with one bookstore having their information but not with another bookstore having it would be if they charged frequent customers more than infrequent customers (something Amazon has been known to do) and getting the information from the other bookstore pushed you into the frequent category.
You are correct now, but not as originally stated, because that section only actually applies when it's voluntary. And by your reasoning, there would still have to be due process to determine if joining the foreign army actually was voluntary. The end result would be that being in a state of war makes no difference since he would need due process either way.
What I'm getting at is that correlation is not causation. Just because someone said bad things about the government and then got investigated for leaking doesn't mean he was investigated because of his speech. It more likely means that his initial speech and his leaking had the same cause.
Looks more like the State Dept was looking for anything to get him for.
More reasonable alternate explanation: the same motivations which lead him to criticize US activities also led him to link to Wikileaks.
In other words, one is not an attempt to get him for the other--rather, he's a would-be activist and would-be activists like to do both of those things.
Suppose someone's arrested for robbing a bank. For the past month, he ranted to everyone who would listen about how evil banks are. It's possible that the police heard his speech and decided to prosecute him for the bank robbery as a result. But what's more likely is that the kind of person who talks about how evil banks are is more likely to rob one in the first place.
If Iran decides that someone in our country is an enemy and kills him, then Iran has committed an act of war against us. So if the US kills an enemy, the US has committed an act of war against them.
So using your Iran analogy, you can say "now that we killed this guy, that puts us at war with Al Qaeda". I have news for you; we've been at war with them for a while already.
By this reasoning, a US citizen who simply went overseas and, oh, joined the German army during World War II couldn't be shot either. You say "far from any battlefield", but you are not claiming that the fifth amendment doesn't apply to battlefields, you are claiming that it doesn't apply to people who are not members of the US military, which a German soldier wouldn't be.
Of course, someone who is fighting the US "far from any battlefield" is, since he is fighting, actually on the battlefield.
Twilight is on the list and it is widely criticized by left-wingers as right wing propaganda, as the main female character tries to make her husband happy, getting married young is considered important, and the characters refuse to have sex until marriage. While it's not really right wing hate literature, from the way the left talks about it, you'd think it's right wing Mormon propaganda that contributes to the oppression of women everywhere.
Boycotting does indeed give them political capital to strengthen copyrights (though not monetary capital). Haven't you ever heard them say "our sales are down because of pirates so we need this copyright crackdown and these DRM laws"? If the sales are actually down because of boycotts and not piracy, they'll still claim the lost sales are caused by "piracy: and use that as an excuse.
The law says that teachers cannot "have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student." Aside from the bad wording (which leads to questions about whether "Facebook" is considered a website or whether each Facebook page is considered a separate website), this law doesn't just say the teachers can't talk secretly. It says that the teachers can't use a site that *allows* secret talk. Just the fact that methods of private communication exist on the website makes use of the website illegal, regardless of whether the teachers use them.
It also prohibits teachers who are parents from communicating with their children over Facebook, since parents' communication with their children is not normally visible to school administrators.
You censor things because you are afraid people might believe them. It is certainly possible to be afraid that people might believe something that is false.
If someone wanted to go into your store and post a large sign on the bulletin board saying "This store serves poisoned food", would you really have nothing to worry about from such a sign just because your food isn't poisoned?
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You're implying a symmetry that isn't there.
Creation versus evolution is one of those cases of pseudoscience where the unscientific side (the creationists, if I must spell it out) claims that they want to "compromise" between the two sides by claiming that each side can account for some things, or that each side has a certain amount of faith, or "we have no way to be sure about creation, but we have no way to be sure about evolution either". Almost any time someone says this it's a case where the science and the pseudoscience aren't equal at all, the person who is trying to "compromise" supports the pseudoscience, and they don't like that science is completely on the other side and they would rather that the two sides at least be equal.
All creationists get lumped together because the "compromise" creationist is just as wrong as the blatant creationist. Either you accept evolution or you don't. "I'm not saying the creationists are right, but evolution can't explain this" followed by a list of misconceptions means you don't.
They will probably just use the standard dodge that's already used in the US: once they look at the inadmissible evidence and figure out who they want to search, claim to have received an "anonymous tip" implicating that person and search them based on the "anonymous tip".
Never mind security, how about speed? Is a PDF reader written in Javascript going to be as fast as a PDF reader written in a standard compiled language (which is already quite slow even on a modern machine)?
Microsoft faced those lawsuits because they were not yet politically savvy enough to buy off politicians. Now that they are, it's not happening again.
The whole thing has an excessive amount of "I don't like the open source movement, so even though the GNU stuff satisfies the definition of open source, don't you dare call it that."
Oh, the pronunciation of "GNU" is also stupid. Telling people to not pronounce it like the word reminds me of Raymond Luxury Yacht in Monty Python, whose name is pronounced "Throat Warbler Mangrove".
This isn't going to be practical for thousands of pages of documents, that would take hours of filming rather than a few seconds to copy.
Women do drool over men who are into other men, you know.
I'm wondering about the potential for copyright and trademark violations. How long until the manufacturer gets sued because kids are downloading and printing Pikachu, Mickey Mouse, GI Joe, or one of a zillion other designs that you have to pay the big bucks to legally license?
You've got it backwards. The expensive "exciting new rocket" that the administration likes would be able to take people to Mars ("The Space Launch System, or SLS, will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond.") The robotic space probes (the only ones that mention Mars in the Slashdot summary) do not--they're robotic. (And they'll get there in your lifetime, too).
You're supporting the wrong side.
Insurance is always a bad bet, from an expected value sense. On the average, you will lose more by buying insurance than by not doing so.
Insurance is useful in coping with large, but rare, losses. If not having insurance costs you less on the average, but that average is made up of a 99.9% chance of paying nothing and a 0.1% chance of going bankrupt, it's worse than having a 100% chance of paying a fixed insurance premium, even if the fixed insurance premium costs more than that average.
If the large loss is *not* going to bankrupt you, then insurance is a bad deal, and you'd be better off sucking up the loss. If a large company suffers a loss from a natural disaster, and they can survive the loss, then we should let them have the loss. It would be stupid for them to buy insurance (since on the average the insurance costs them more), but they definitely shouldn't be getting a government bailout.
Netflix can rent physical DVDs without cooperation from the studios, because of the first sale right.
They can't do this for streaming. Streaming requires negotiation with the companies, who can charge anything they want or refuse to provide streams at all.
That's why the streaming library blows, and that's why it's always going to blow.
Sony doesn't consider a buyer of used games to be a legitimate customer, since a used game gives Sony no income. Piracy has nothing to do with this, except that it's something else which also gives Sony no income but which sounds better to complain about in press releases.
Serving food makes them subject to licensing, inspection, and to all sorts of public health and safety laws, some of which have very tenuous connections to actual public health and safety.
The Toysmart precedent, which was used by the FTC here, is that selling the information is allowed only if the purchaser is in the same business and agrees to obey the same privacy policy. While it does violate any pledge not to sell your data at all, selling data under these circumstances can't cause most of the harm that selling your data normally causes. It's not as if they would be allowed to sell it to Facebook or Publisher's Clearing House.
About the only realistic situation I can think of where someone would be okay with one bookstore having their information but not with another bookstore having it would be if they charged frequent customers more than infrequent customers (something Amazon has been known to do) and getting the information from the other bookstore pushed you into the frequent category.
You are correct now, but not as originally stated, because that section only actually applies when it's voluntary. And by your reasoning, there would still have to be due process to determine if joining the foreign army actually was voluntary. The end result would be that being in a state of war makes no difference since he would need due process either way.
What I'm getting at is that correlation is not causation. Just because someone said bad things about the government and then got investigated for leaking doesn't mean he was investigated because of his speech. It more likely means that his initial speech and his leaking had the same cause.
More reasonable alternate explanation: the same motivations which lead him to criticize US activities also led him to link to Wikileaks.
In other words, one is not an attempt to get him for the other--rather, he's a would-be activist and would-be activists like to do both of those things.
Suppose someone's arrested for robbing a bank. For the past month, he ranted to everyone who would listen about how evil banks are. It's possible that the police heard his speech and decided to prosecute him for the bank robbery as a result. But what's more likely is that the kind of person who talks about how evil banks are is more likely to rob one in the first place.
This is not true and would lead to ridiculous situations considering that someone could be forcibly conscripted into a foreign military.
If Iran decides that someone in our country is an enemy and kills him, then Iran has committed an act of war against us. So if the US kills an enemy, the US has committed an act of war against them.
So using your Iran analogy, you can say "now that we killed this guy, that puts us at war with Al Qaeda". I have news for you; we've been at war with them for a while already.
By this reasoning, a US citizen who simply went overseas and, oh, joined the German army during World War II couldn't be shot either. You say "far from any battlefield", but you are not claiming that the fifth amendment doesn't apply to battlefields, you are claiming that it doesn't apply to people who are not members of the US military, which a German soldier wouldn't be.
Of course, someone who is fighting the US "far from any battlefield" is, since he is fighting, actually on the battlefield.
Tell us your opinions about the loudness war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war ) and how it affects the release of your music.
Twilight is on the list and it is widely criticized by left-wingers as right wing propaganda, as the main female character tries to make her husband happy, getting married young is considered important, and the characters refuse to have sex until marriage. While it's not really right wing hate literature, from the way the left talks about it, you'd think it's right wing Mormon propaganda that contributes to the oppression of women everywhere.
Boycotting does indeed give them political capital to strengthen copyrights (though not monetary capital). Haven't you ever heard them say "our sales are down because of pirates so we need this copyright crackdown and these DRM laws"? If the sales are actually down because of boycotts and not piracy, they'll still claim the lost sales are caused by "piracy: and use that as an excuse.
The law says that teachers cannot "have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student." Aside from the bad wording (which leads to questions about whether "Facebook" is considered a website or whether each Facebook page is considered a separate website), this law doesn't just say the teachers can't talk secretly. It says that the teachers can't use a site that *allows* secret talk. Just the fact that methods of private communication exist on the website makes use of the website illegal, regardless of whether the teachers use them.
It also prohibits teachers who are parents from communicating with their children over Facebook, since parents' communication with their children is not normally visible to school administrators.
You censor things because you are afraid people might believe them. It is certainly possible to be afraid that people might believe something that is false.
If someone wanted to go into your store and post a large sign on the bulletin board saying "This store serves poisoned food", would you really have nothing to worry about from such a sign just because your food isn't poisoned?