I already pointed this out when I hypothesized that a District Court can't apply state law. The point I was trying to make is that while the judge's decision seems correct as far as the judgment is concerned, the reasoning is sloppy. Much of the opinion seems like a straw man. Tinker, Fraser, Morse v. Frederick, etc., are not completely on point since all those deal with disruptive speech made in school or at a school event. It seems that Killion is the most similar case (website created off school grounds, other students responsible for bringing the speech on to school grounds), but the judge's treatment is not very illuminating. Its seems to amount to "Killion may be on point, but we don't have follow it, so we're not going to."
I disagree. The opinion spells out several distinguishing features between Killion and the instant case: 1) level of vulgarity, 2) effect that it had on the school, and 3) the speech could have supported criminal charges against the principal. All of these factors support the argument that the instant case wasn't merely censorship of vulgarity outside of the school place/time (as was the situation in Killion), it was a disciplinary action against a student who injected serious and -- one assumes -- baseless accusations into the school context. The part of the paragraph that you quoted was a summary of the judge's disagreement, not his whole argument, and the part about being "not binding" just a nail in that particular coffin.
I'm especially impressed by the opinion's final paragraph:
Under Pennsylvania law, school districts can punish students only
"during such times as they are under the supervision of the board of school
directors and teachers, including the time necessarily spent in coming to
and returning from school." 24 PENN. STAT. Sec. 5-510. Plaintiffs cast J.S.'s
actions as occurring at home; and therefore, the school could not properly
punish her for them. We have found above, however, that the school did
not err in disciplining J.S., and her actions were not merely personal home
activities.
Perhaps you didn't read the other parts of the opinion, where it was made clear that the author of the MySpace page initiated discussions of it with other students at the school, and there was even a hard copy of the page which made it into the school. If the MySpace page had remained isolated from the school, then maybe that statute above would apply. But clearly it "leaked" into the school, and thus was a proper subject for disciplinary procedures.
Of course! If something doesn't violate any court precedents, it's impossible for it to violate a state law, right?
Well, the plaintiffs certainly had the opportunity to raise that point if they had even bothered to sue in state court, but as the opinion points out "Plaintiff had the opportunity to appeal the discipline she received to the
school superintendent and the school board. (Def. Facts  62). She
evidently did not take advantage of this opportunity.
Plaintiffs instead instituted the instant case.". In other words, they went directly from "suspension" to "filing a civil rights case in federal court", not bothering with any state-court proceeding in between. The judge is certainly correct: a state law is not binding on a federal judge in a civil rights matter. That was one price they paid when they leapfrogged over a few steps in the litigation process.
The court's reasoning is even more funny when you consider an earlier quote:
To the
extent that Killion stands for the proposition that a school can never
discipline a student for lewd and vulgar speech made off of the school
campus, we simply disagree, and Killion is not binding on this court.
Disagree all you want, it appears that the above statute does stand for that proposition.
Killion was a Federal Court precedent, trying to compare it to a state law is apples and oranges.
Did you read Kaminsky's full presentation? Oftentimes higher-level security measures can be circumvented if the lower levels are not sufficiently secured. E.g. SSL-protected password protection can be circumvented if there is a "forgot my password?" mechanism and the provider's cache can be poisoned with a bogus mail server address. Defense in Depth requires that we address security at all levels of the infrastructure, and the DNS level is a pretty damn important one.
Yes, but they solve slightly different problems. Basically, DNSCurve is point-to-point and DNSSEC is end-to-end. This distinction is very important to keep in mind, since DNS resolution often goes through multiple "middlemen", some or all of which you may not particularly trust.
There is a decent page on the site you linked, highlighting the differences between the two solutions: http://dnscurve.org/dnssec.html
Wow, there's an amazing amount of confusion over this ruling, and the article summary seems to cloud things almost as much as it clarifies them. The actual text of the ruling is here:
http://howappealing.law.com/JSvsBlueMountainSD.pdf, and I'd recommend everyone read that before spouting off their amateur legal or political opinions in this forum
First, the principal did not accuse the student of libel, and did not punish her on that basis. It punished her, with a suspension, for a) making false accusations against the school staff, and b) using a copyrighted photo from the school district's own website, without permission. Before we get sidetracked into a "fair use" discussion, I'll note that both (a) and (b) above were explicitly spelled out as forbidden in the district's school discipline code, and their computer use policy, respectively. Whether they were violations of a (federal, state, municipal) law is irrelevant; they were violations of school rules, and for that, the student got a suspension.
Next, a lot of people have questioned whether the student's accusations could be protected under the "parody" exception to libel, but again, this is irrelevant. She was not sued for libel. She was suspended for violating school rules. Now, whether the school district has some sort of appeal process, and whether they follow the same "parody exception" rules as actual libel laws, I have no clue. But one should not simply assume that "parody" shields one from punishment under any and all systems of rules.
Lastly, a lot is made of the fact that the student composed the MySpace page physically and chronologically outside of school. So what? If you read further into the case, you'll see that the author deliberately made the MySpace page available to her classmates, discussed the page in school, and apparently there was a hard copy which made it into the school physically. The barrier between "school" and "not school" here was, if it existed at all, extremely permeable. That's the way of the world. But, it's also a double-edged sword. While students in this day and age may on the one hand avail themselves of the ability to be connected to the outside world while in school (through cellphones, text messaging, email etc.), they also must learn to accept responsibility for data/information/content that leaks into school from the outside. The distinction is blurred.
So, in summary, in case it wasn't already obvious, as much as I like and defend Free Speech in general, I think the judge ruled correctly here. The student was punished for violating school rules, and this seems perfectly appropriate when you understand that those rules (which the student knew or should have known ahead of time) included prohibitions on making false accusations and/or snarfing copyrighted material from the district's web site. You break the rules, you get punished. This may have pushed things closer towards the slippery slope, but I don't think we're there yet.
Not to hijack this thread into a political debate, but have you, honestly, ever run into a person expressing the opinion
You know what we need to fix our problems? More government. We don't have enough; we need more. Then everything will be hunkey-dorey
?
It's only Conservative/Liberatarian demogoguery that lumps together all "government" into one big monolithic blob. Most Moderates and Progressives (sometimes called "Liberals") support specific government programs, that address specific problems/challenges, but no-one I know supports "government" for the sake of government, and it's just Straw Man-like tactics for Conservatives/Liberals to attack that (alleged) mindset.
Yes, there's a lot of waste/fraud/abuse/incompetence/pork in our governmental structure, and we need to fix that. But it's not just a "less government" versus "more government" thing. More like, good versus bad government.
Modern rouge networked devices don't have red and blue wires. They vibrate. Usually it's someone's electric razor connected to the network, but ever once in a while, it's a dildo with an IP address.
If it's rouge by definition it's red
Rouge != rogue
(Grrr... as a WoW player, I see this rouge/rogue misspelling all the fricking time, so excuse me if I'm a little hypersensitive).
This system is very much designed. It's defined by a small group of huge banks, foreign debt buyers, large "market maker" brokers, and the entites that are more than just one of those at a time.
But isn't that kind of like saying that our natural species are "designed" by the plankton, bacteria, antelopes, rodents, snakes, etc. that all compete for resources, and against each other, in the natural environment? That is the very essence of Evolution by Natural Selection. It's not "design" at all. It's the antithesis of design.
It's governed by loads of regulations, mostly installed to squash competition and protect banks.
I concede that there is a certain amount of unnatural selection in the form of governmental regulation, control of the currency, key interest rates, etc. but that is still a fractional amount of influence. Mostly the market operates on its own.
All trading in corporations about which any sudden bad news is believable, because most bad news is suppressed, but everyone can tell that bad news is rampant. All of which news spin is of course designed, by a consensus rather than a conspiracy.
Yes, our economy is "evolving". Everything evolves, even despite mighty efforts to design in the face of vaster natural trends. But the way our economy is designed right now, and has been for many years, is so dependent on unsupportable debt that's finally running out, on extracting resources (and dumping waste into "unused" places) that are finally running out, and on naive gullibility from every quarter except the bankers, we're looking like the one essential part of evolution: extinction.
America's extremely weak now, as measured by capital, because our outstanding debts total more than the entire planet (including us) produces in more than a year. Debt owed in substantial amounts to some of our fiercest enemies, China and OPEC, which are in turn extremely strong. All economic indications are that the US is not fit to survive in this environment, and is merely on life support while our predators switch diets. That might be an accident. But it's a fatal one.
You have a valid point in that there are different levels or tiers of economic "system": while we may have evolution within our own system, we are also just one player (albeit the biggest one, but perhaps not for long) in a larger, global economic "system", in which we compete with other economies, and in which there are winners and losers. If we end up as losers, though, my main point is that it won't be because we were "designed" badly, but only because as a nation we became too lazy, too stupid, too complacent to maintain our edge against more aggressive competitors.
Our current economic system is largely evolved. You express outrage as if the economic system were badly designed, but that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of that system, because, for the most part, it was never designed in the first place.
So yes, a major airline lost a lot of its available capital, in the course of a morning, due to a trivial bug, but a) it wouldn't have been so dramatic if the company hadn't been in a precarious position in the first place (e.g. imagine if some old news story about Walmart was regurgitated, would it have any appreciable impact on their market capitalization, assuming anyone actually believed it was current news?), and b) because of the financial stakes involved, there will be intense pressure to fix or refine the mechanisms that were to blame.
So, again, we see the workings of evolution: that the weak are more subject to Natural Selection than the strong, and that organisms and systems adapt to their surroundings. You can express outrage all you want, but the economic system just continues evolving. This is just a minor speedbump, not a reason to chuck the whole thing and look for "alternatives" (whatever you mean by that).
How many people have died in the Gulf Region because of our geopolitical policies and actions?
Much of which is driven by our need to keep (historically/relatively) cheap oil flowing from that region.
Which, in turn, is driven by our ravenous hunger for energy.
A significant portion of which goes to feed our air-conditioning addiction.
Get it?
So, while some vulnerable people in this country may die from lack of air conditioning (they should have been identified as vulnerable to begin with and provided with safe surroundings, of course), this air conditioning "culture" we have actually causes more deaths in the long run.
(I would have mentioned something about Arab/Muslim lives not being considered as valuable as American lives, but then I'd be labelled as Flamebait and I'm trying to improve my karma. Oops, there it goes again...)
The main difference is between "was sentenced to X" and "could mean up to X". The reporter is just speculating as to what the maximum sentence could be.
Furthermore, the reporter of that article is probably just adding up X number of (alleged) offenses times Y years maximum for each offense, when in actual fact some of the charges could be dropped, reduced, combined, or the sentences could be served "concurrently".
Bottom line: until the charges have been sorted out, plea-bargaining conducted, the trial held, and the sentencing hearings concluded, any estimates for the sentence are liable to be wildly inaccurate. Even after the fact, the jail time can be reduced as a result of appeals, or "time off for good behavior".
I do agree, however, that in this case it doesn't look like he caused any "damage", so I'm not sure where they got that dollar amount and why the (potential) prison sentences are so harsh.
I consider content the TCP stream that delivers my (X)HTML, CSS, binary data, etc. How, exactly, is inserting additional data into the stream not modifying the content?
You can "consider" it that way all you want, but I doubt that courts will buy it. "Content" in legal terms (disclaimer: IANAL), is the stuff you can experience directly with your 5 senses. Audio, video, text, these things are "content", in legal terms. The bits and bytes that keep that content flowing, are, in legal terms, just a "conduit", and not content itself; the medium, rather than the message, as it were.
Also, as pointed out by others, modifying "content", even if that could e proven to a court's satisfaction, isn't really relevant, since Comcast and other network providers aren't, and don't claim to be "common carriers" in any case, and thus don't seek protection in that status. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 pretty much redefined ISPs as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services", and "common carrier" status only adheres to the latter.
In a more abstract sense, I think your point should be that there is a double balancing-act to be performed here.
There is always going to be, in the first place, a balance of items, enhancements and abilities within the game itself (if something is horribly unbalanced then folks will gravitate to that thing and then, as you pointed out, it just becomes "a race to see who shoots first"). All of the other items/abilities/enhancements/etc. get sidelined, even if they're more interesting, and the game suffers from a lack of variety/diversity.
The other balancing act is between in-game balance, as described above, and "realism".
The problem with "guns" per se is that, in real life, they dominated and obseleted almost all other preceding weapons (swords, bows, polearms, etc) by a huge margin. So, to be "realistic" in an MMO they need to be really powerful, and that risks upsetting the delicate balance within the game itself. If you reduce guns' effectiveness, then you can maintain in-game balance, but it seems rather unrealistic, in historical terms. Guns exist in WoW, for instance, but they do roughly the same damage, and in some cases less damage, than bows or crossbows. This is historically unrealistic, of course, but necessary for game balance: otherwise, you'd have nothing but Hunters blasting their way through quests, instances and PvP (welcome to World of Guncraft)
I guess my bottom line here, is that any item/ability/enhancement has the potential to upset in-game balance, but "guns" have more of a potential to do so, because of the temptation to make their power "realistic", in real-life, historical terms.
MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online, typically used as the prefix in MMORPG (RPG = Role-Playing Game), and sometimes as an abbreviation for same. Although, technically, you could have MMOFPS (First-Person Shooter), MMORTS (Real-Time Strategy), or other variants, due to technology and design limitations, RPGs are currently the predominant MMOs.
The only lesson to be drawn from Ayn Rand's life and works, is that novelists generally make lousy philosophers, unless they shed their storytelling, melodramatic skins and adopt some intellectual rigor.
Jean-Paul Sartre made the transition, but Ayn Rand spectacularly failed.
Diablo 2 at your LAN party was Multiplayer, and sometimes O, but never Massive.
Are there games that are O, but not M or MM? Eventually we could just say ORPG or OFPS and the MM will be implied.
First of all, your logic is screwy (affirming the consequent, a formal fallacy): to say that MM implies O is not to say that O implies MM. "All Cretans are liars" does not imply "all liars are Cretans"
Secondly, you could theoretically run a massively-multiplayer game over a non-Internet network, and it technically wouldn't be "online" in that case.
Anyone feel like repurposing some old SNA or X.25 networks for gaming?
Nah, didn't think so...
But, in any case, it proves that M or even MM does not necessarily imply O
Lastly, O does not necessarily imply M (or MM) either: example, MechQuest, a single-player online RPG.
The only combination that makes no sense whatsoever is "massively" without "multiplayer". Massively what? Massively online? Either you're online or you're not. There's no "massively" about it.
"because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school"
So you truley believe that:
buying a $50 USB steering wheel
paying $10/month for your racing game
racing from the comfort of your home in your underwear
the biggest fear of dying is malnutrition
Hmmm... Being murdered by your crazed, estranged girlfriend/wife might rank up there in mortality risks.
Who else already has a racing wheel? Um, only 1337 gamers.
Nintendo has sold a lot more than 1,337 copies of Mario Kart Wii in each region, each with an adapter to convert a Wii Remote into a Bluetooth racing wheel.
The original poster had it right: "gigabyte" is the brand name. The global site is http://www.gigabyte.com.tw./ Perhaps you were confused by the fact that the U.S. site is http://www.giga-byte.com/ but that's probably only because http://www.gigabyte.com/ was already taken by some stupid web-design company.
Am I a Gigabyte fanboi? You bet I am. Good riddance to Abit and their leaky caps.
1. If you have knowledge of the quests ahead of time, you can usually gang them up and do them in a very efficient manner (having lots of bag space helps, for collection quests). People who are running around a lot to do quests just haven't optimized their questing. Note that some of the "go to the next zone over and talk to so-and-so" quests are specifically designed to make you explore the next zone. This is for the benefit of folks that are too clueless to realize that they've outlevelled their current zone. Just save those until you're about ready to move on. Again, it's just a matter of optimization. We Slashdot geeks are all about optimization...
2. I agree, some of the "kill ten rats" kinds of quests seem rather pointless, but on the other hand they get you experience faster, because you get XP from the kills in addition to the XP for turning in the quest. So think of those quests as fast track, and the relatively-non-violent "pick 10 flowers" types as slow mode. As for orcs killing orcs, why not? In real life, humans have killed humans for all of human history. "Your" orcs are the "good" ones; "their" orcs are the "bad" ones and deserving of death. I see no thematic issue. As for quests not being part of a storyline arc, you can't really expect every quest to advance the storyline. WoW's storyline is quite expansive and convoluted, more so than other MMORPGs, but the "storyline" quests are still only a fraction of the overall quests that are required to level.
3. As others have commented, this is de rigeur on a pvp server. Why did you roll on a pvp server if you didn't like this kind of thing? Note that for a mere $25 can you transfer to a pve server (but not the other way around, so you would never be able to go back). Then you could quest and level and farm in relative peace.
4. At 70, the BGs are mostly about gear, but individual skill, and teamwork, are still very important. In the lowbie brackets, you see a much wider variety of gear, skills and teamwork, and it can be quite fun. I have a number of toons that I BG with in various brackets, some of them twinks (e.g. my level 19 paladin flagrunner with over 2K unbuffed health), some of them total scrubs, and many in between. Battlegrounds are as fun as you make them.
If you limit your claims to "intelligence", simplistically defined as the capacity to learn, then for the most part I concur, although there are some environmental factors (e.g. lead in drinking water) which can affect brain development, and we're getting better at identifying and managing those factors.
But, your claims go beyond that. You assert that the only thing standing in the way of "build, expand and innovate" is "quality of life". It's not quite that simple.
Educational techniques, for instance, have improved dramatically over the decades/centuries, and that's a critical component in intellectual/technological progression.
Also, there are cultural factors. One of the explanations for why the Arab world fell behind the non-Arab world, subsequent to their peak in the middle ages, is that they (for the most part) forbid women from participating in their intellectual/technological/social development. When you exclude roughly half of your population from participating, solely on the basis of their gender, you stand at a disadvantage with respect to other, less misogynstic cultures.
Other factors come into play here, but my point is, it's not just a "quality of life" issue. You can slay a water buffalo and still have time in the day to prove a mathematical theorem.
(Oh, and if fending off hordes of enemies is a problem, you shouldn't have rolled Alliance in the first place. Don't be such a noob).
The question is malformed. Not all theists are creationists. For that matter, not all religions are theistic or have a creation myth.
If you meant to ask "what do creationists consider neanderthals?", then the answer is that they probably just wave their hands, seek to impugn the accuracy of radiocarbon dating, and/or mutter something about "the flood", since that's the catch-all explanation for every piece of scientific evidence that seems to support evolution-as-the-origin-of-species.
Python has an indentation regime built into the language syntax, Perl does not. If your only differentiator is "Python looks cleaner", then feel free to enforce strict indentation standards in your development environment. That doesn't seem like a sufficient reason to pick one language over the other.
Well, I'll match my geek credentials against yours any day, but I still fail to find the humor in (apparently) purposely misunderstanding the derivation of a perfectly good word.
At least when the Marx brothers made fun of foreign accents/ESL (e.g. "Why a duck?"), there was an undertone of deliberate, playful obfuscation involved, in the same vein as the classic (albeit unilingual) "Who's on first?" skit. But with "canard" it's more of a case of "let's pretend to be ignorant and then all laugh at our pretended ignorance". Contrived yet simplistic at the same time. Leaves me cold.
It's a canard to say that the problem with Vista is that "the hardware is not ready for it"
Isn't that kind of a lot for a duck to say?
Lame attempt at humor, not deserving of +5 Funny.
If he had said "shaggy dog story" instead of "canard", would you be blathering about canines? I doubt many people would see the humor in that. Or, does the French derivation somehow make it funnier?
Slashdot Mirror
I already pointed this out when I hypothesized that a District Court can't apply state law. The point I was trying to make is that while the judge's decision seems correct as far as the judgment is concerned, the reasoning is sloppy. Much of the opinion seems like a straw man. Tinker, Fraser, Morse v. Frederick, etc., are not completely on point since all those deal with disruptive speech made in school or at a school event. It seems that Killion is the most similar case (website created off school grounds, other students responsible for bringing the speech on to school grounds), but the judge's treatment is not very illuminating. Its seems to amount to "Killion may be on point, but we don't have follow it, so we're not going to."
I disagree. The opinion spells out several distinguishing features between Killion and the instant case: 1) level of vulgarity, 2) effect that it had on the school, and 3) the speech could have supported criminal charges against the principal. All of these factors support the argument that the instant case wasn't merely censorship of vulgarity outside of the school place/time (as was the situation in Killion), it was a disciplinary action against a student who injected serious and -- one assumes -- baseless accusations into the school context. The part of the paragraph that you quoted was a summary of the judge's disagreement, not his whole argument, and the part about being "not binding" just a nail in that particular coffin.
First, link to the opinion here.
I'm especially impressed by the opinion's final paragraph:
Under Pennsylvania law, school districts can punish students only "during such times as they are under the supervision of the board of school directors and teachers, including the time necessarily spent in coming to and returning from school." 24 PENN. STAT. Sec. 5-510. Plaintiffs cast J.S.'s actions as occurring at home; and therefore, the school could not properly punish her for them. We have found above, however, that the school did not err in disciplining J.S., and her actions were not merely personal home activities.
Perhaps you didn't read the other parts of the opinion, where it was made clear that the author of the MySpace page initiated discussions of it with other students at the school, and there was even a hard copy of the page which made it into the school. If the MySpace page had remained isolated from the school, then maybe that statute above would apply. But clearly it "leaked" into the school, and thus was a proper subject for disciplinary procedures.
Of course! If something doesn't violate any court precedents, it's impossible for it to violate a state law, right?
Well, the plaintiffs certainly had the opportunity to raise that point if they had even bothered to sue in state court, but as the opinion points out "Plaintiff had the opportunity to appeal the discipline she received to the school superintendent and the school board. (Def. Facts  62). She evidently did not take advantage of this opportunity. Plaintiffs instead instituted the instant case.". In other words, they went directly from "suspension" to "filing a civil rights case in federal court", not bothering with any state-court proceeding in between. The judge is certainly correct: a state law is not binding on a federal judge in a civil rights matter. That was one price they paid when they leapfrogged over a few steps in the litigation process.
The court's reasoning is even more funny when you consider an earlier quote:
To the extent that Killion stands for the proposition that a school can never discipline a student for lewd and vulgar speech made off of the school campus, we simply disagree, and Killion is not binding on this court.
Disagree all you want, it appears that the above statute does stand for that proposition.
Killion was a Federal Court precedent, trying to compare it to a state law is apples and oranges.
Did you read Kaminsky's full presentation? Oftentimes higher-level security measures can be circumvented if the lower levels are not sufficiently secured. E.g. SSL-protected password protection can be circumvented if there is a "forgot my password?" mechanism and the provider's cache can be poisoned with a bogus mail server address. Defense in Depth requires that we address security at all levels of the infrastructure, and the DNS level is a pretty damn important one.
Yes, but they solve slightly different problems. Basically, DNSCurve is point-to-point and DNSSEC is end-to-end. This distinction is very important to keep in mind, since DNS resolution often goes through multiple "middlemen", some or all of which you may not particularly trust.
There is a decent page on the site you linked, highlighting the differences between the two solutions: http://dnscurve.org/dnssec.html
Wow, there's an amazing amount of confusion over this ruling, and the article summary seems to cloud things almost as much as it clarifies them. The actual text of the ruling is here: http://howappealing.law.com/JSvsBlueMountainSD.pdf, and I'd recommend everyone read that before spouting off their amateur legal or political opinions in this forum
First, the principal did not accuse the student of libel, and did not punish her on that basis. It punished her, with a suspension, for a) making false accusations against the school staff, and b) using a copyrighted photo from the school district's own website, without permission. Before we get sidetracked into a "fair use" discussion, I'll note that both (a) and (b) above were explicitly spelled out as forbidden in the district's school discipline code, and their computer use policy, respectively. Whether they were violations of a (federal, state, municipal) law is irrelevant; they were violations of school rules, and for that, the student got a suspension.
Next, a lot of people have questioned whether the student's accusations could be protected under the "parody" exception to libel, but again, this is irrelevant. She was not sued for libel. She was suspended for violating school rules. Now, whether the school district has some sort of appeal process, and whether they follow the same "parody exception" rules as actual libel laws, I have no clue. But one should not simply assume that "parody" shields one from punishment under any and all systems of rules.
Lastly, a lot is made of the fact that the student composed the MySpace page physically and chronologically outside of school. So what? If you read further into the case, you'll see that the author deliberately made the MySpace page available to her classmates, discussed the page in school, and apparently there was a hard copy which made it into the school physically. The barrier between "school" and "not school" here was, if it existed at all, extremely permeable. That's the way of the world. But, it's also a double-edged sword. While students in this day and age may on the one hand avail themselves of the ability to be connected to the outside world while in school (through cellphones, text messaging, email etc.), they also must learn to accept responsibility for data/information/content that leaks into school from the outside. The distinction is blurred.
So, in summary, in case it wasn't already obvious, as much as I like and defend Free Speech in general, I think the judge ruled correctly here. The student was punished for violating school rules, and this seems perfectly appropriate when you understand that those rules (which the student knew or should have known ahead of time) included prohibitions on making false accusations and/or snarfing copyrighted material from the district's web site. You break the rules, you get punished. This may have pushed things closer towards the slippery slope, but I don't think we're there yet.
Not to hijack this thread into a political debate, but have you, honestly, ever run into a person expressing the opinion
You know what we need to fix our problems? More government. We don't have enough; we need more. Then everything will be hunkey-dorey
?
It's only Conservative/Liberatarian demogoguery that lumps together all "government" into one big monolithic blob. Most Moderates and Progressives (sometimes called "Liberals") support specific government programs, that address specific problems/challenges, but no-one I know supports "government" for the sake of government, and it's just Straw Man-like tactics for Conservatives/Liberals to attack that (alleged) mindset.
Yes, there's a lot of waste/fraud/abuse/incompetence/pork in our governmental structure, and we need to fix that. But it's not just a "less government" versus "more government" thing. More like, good versus bad government.
Modern rouge networked devices don't have red and blue wires. They vibrate. Usually it's someone's electric razor connected to the network, but ever once in a while, it's a dildo with an IP address.
If it's rouge by definition it's red
Rouge != rogue
(Grrr... as a WoW player, I see this rouge/rogue misspelling all the fricking time, so excuse me if I'm a little hypersensitive).
This system is very much designed. It's defined by a small group of huge banks, foreign debt buyers, large "market maker" brokers, and the entites that are more than just one of those at a time.
But isn't that kind of like saying that our natural species are "designed" by the plankton, bacteria, antelopes, rodents, snakes, etc. that all compete for resources, and against each other, in the natural environment? That is the very essence of Evolution by Natural Selection. It's not "design" at all. It's the antithesis of design.
It's governed by loads of regulations, mostly installed to squash competition and protect banks.
I concede that there is a certain amount of unnatural selection in the form of governmental regulation, control of the currency, key interest rates, etc. but that is still a fractional amount of influence. Mostly the market operates on its own.
All trading in corporations about which any sudden bad news is believable, because most bad news is suppressed, but everyone can tell that bad news is rampant. All of which news spin is of course designed, by a consensus rather than a conspiracy.
Yes, our economy is "evolving". Everything evolves, even despite mighty efforts to design in the face of vaster natural trends. But the way our economy is designed right now, and has been for many years, is so dependent on unsupportable debt that's finally running out, on extracting resources (and dumping waste into "unused" places) that are finally running out, and on naive gullibility from every quarter except the bankers, we're looking like the one essential part of evolution: extinction.
America's extremely weak now, as measured by capital, because our outstanding debts total more than the entire planet (including us) produces in more than a year. Debt owed in substantial amounts to some of our fiercest enemies, China and OPEC, which are in turn extremely strong. All economic indications are that the US is not fit to survive in this environment, and is merely on life support while our predators switch diets. That might be an accident. But it's a fatal one.
You have a valid point in that there are different levels or tiers of economic "system": while we may have evolution within our own system, we are also just one player (albeit the biggest one, but perhaps not for long) in a larger, global economic "system", in which we compete with other economies, and in which there are winners and losers. If we end up as losers, though, my main point is that it won't be because we were "designed" badly, but only because as a nation we became too lazy, too stupid, too complacent to maintain our edge against more aggressive competitors.
Our current economic system is largely evolved. You express outrage as if the economic system were badly designed, but that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of that system, because, for the most part, it was never designed in the first place.
So yes, a major airline lost a lot of its available capital, in the course of a morning, due to a trivial bug, but a) it wouldn't have been so dramatic if the company hadn't been in a precarious position in the first place (e.g. imagine if some old news story about Walmart was regurgitated, would it have any appreciable impact on their market capitalization, assuming anyone actually believed it was current news?), and b) because of the financial stakes involved, there will be intense pressure to fix or refine the mechanisms that were to blame.
So, again, we see the workings of evolution: that the weak are more subject to Natural Selection than the strong, and that organisms and systems adapt to their surroundings. You can express outrage all you want, but the economic system just continues evolving. This is just a minor speedbump, not a reason to chuck the whole thing and look for "alternatives" (whatever you mean by that).
Connect the dots please:
How many people have died in the Gulf Region because of our geopolitical policies and actions?
Much of which is driven by our need to keep (historically/relatively) cheap oil flowing from that region.
Which, in turn, is driven by our ravenous hunger for energy.
A significant portion of which goes to feed our air-conditioning addiction.
Get it?
So, while some vulnerable people in this country may die from lack of air conditioning (they should have been identified as vulnerable to begin with and provided with safe surroundings, of course), this air conditioning "culture" we have actually causes more deaths in the long run.
(I would have mentioned something about Arab/Muslim lives not being considered as valuable as American lives, but then I'd be labelled as Flamebait and I'm trying to improve my karma. Oops, there it goes again...)
The main difference is between "was sentenced to X" and "could mean up to X". The reporter is just speculating as to what the maximum sentence could be.
Furthermore, the reporter of that article is probably just adding up X number of (alleged) offenses times Y years maximum for each offense, when in actual fact some of the charges could be dropped, reduced, combined, or the sentences could be served "concurrently".
Bottom line: until the charges have been sorted out, plea-bargaining conducted, the trial held, and the sentencing hearings concluded, any estimates for the sentence are liable to be wildly inaccurate. Even after the fact, the jail time can be reduced as a result of appeals, or "time off for good behavior".
I do agree, however, that in this case it doesn't look like he caused any "damage", so I'm not sure where they got that dollar amount and why the (potential) prison sentences are so harsh.
... inserting forged protocol packets ...
I consider content the TCP stream that delivers my (X)HTML, CSS, binary data, etc. How, exactly, is inserting additional data into the stream not modifying the content?
You can "consider" it that way all you want, but I doubt that courts will buy it. "Content" in legal terms (disclaimer: IANAL), is the stuff you can experience directly with your 5 senses. Audio, video, text, these things are "content", in legal terms. The bits and bytes that keep that content flowing, are, in legal terms, just a "conduit", and not content itself; the medium, rather than the message, as it were.
Also, as pointed out by others, modifying "content", even if that could e proven to a court's satisfaction, isn't really relevant, since Comcast and other network providers aren't, and don't claim to be "common carriers" in any case, and thus don't seek protection in that status. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 pretty much redefined ISPs as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services", and "common carrier" status only adheres to the latter.
In a more abstract sense, I think your point should be that there is a double balancing-act to be performed here.
There is always going to be, in the first place, a balance of items, enhancements and abilities within the game itself (if something is horribly unbalanced then folks will gravitate to that thing and then, as you pointed out, it just becomes "a race to see who shoots first"). All of the other items/abilities/enhancements/etc. get sidelined, even if they're more interesting, and the game suffers from a lack of variety/diversity.
The other balancing act is between in-game balance, as described above, and "realism".
The problem with "guns" per se is that, in real life, they dominated and obseleted almost all other preceding weapons (swords, bows, polearms, etc) by a huge margin. So, to be "realistic" in an MMO they need to be really powerful, and that risks upsetting the delicate balance within the game itself. If you reduce guns' effectiveness, then you can maintain in-game balance, but it seems rather unrealistic, in historical terms. Guns exist in WoW, for instance, but they do roughly the same damage, and in some cases less damage, than bows or crossbows. This is historically unrealistic, of course, but necessary for game balance: otherwise, you'd have nothing but Hunters blasting their way through quests, instances and PvP (welcome to World of Guncraft)
I guess my bottom line here, is that any item/ability/enhancement has the potential to upset in-game balance, but "guns" have more of a potential to do so, because of the temptation to make their power "realistic", in real-life, historical terms.
MMO = Massively Multiplayer Online, typically used as the prefix in MMORPG (RPG = Role-Playing Game), and sometimes as an abbreviation for same. Although, technically, you could have MMOFPS (First-Person Shooter), MMORTS (Real-Time Strategy), or other variants, due to technology and design limitations, RPGs are currently the predominant MMOs.
The only lesson to be drawn from Ayn Rand's life and works, is that novelists generally make lousy philosophers, unless they shed their storytelling, melodramatic skins and adopt some intellectual rigor.
Jean-Paul Sartre made the transition, but Ayn Rand spectacularly failed.
MM seems to require O. Particularly that first M.
Diablo 2 at your LAN party was Multiplayer, and sometimes O, but never Massive.
Are there games that are O, but not M or MM? Eventually we could just say ORPG or OFPS and the MM will be implied.
First of all, your logic is screwy (affirming the consequent, a formal fallacy): to say that MM implies O is not to say that O implies MM. "All Cretans are liars" does not imply "all liars are Cretans"
Secondly, you could theoretically run a massively-multiplayer game over a non-Internet network, and it technically wouldn't be "online" in that case.
Anyone feel like repurposing some old SNA or X.25 networks for gaming?
Nah, didn't think so...
But, in any case, it proves that M or even MM does not necessarily imply O
Lastly, O does not necessarily imply M (or MM) either: example, MechQuest, a single-player online RPG.
The only combination that makes no sense whatsoever is "massively" without "multiplayer". Massively what? Massively online? Either you're online or you're not. There's no "massively" about it.
"because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school"
So you truley believe that:
buying a $50 USB steering wheel
paying $10/month for your racing game
racing from the comfort of your home in your underwear
the biggest fear of dying is malnutrition
Hmmm... Being murdered by your crazed, estranged girlfriend/wife might rank up there in mortality risks.
Who else already has a racing wheel? Um, only 1337 gamers.
Nintendo has sold a lot more than 1,337 copies of Mario Kart Wii in each region, each with an adapter to convert a Wii Remote into a Bluetooth racing wheel.
Links for the clueless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
Am I a Gigabyte fanboi? You bet I am. Good riddance to Abit and their leaky caps.
2. I agree, some of the "kill ten rats" kinds of quests seem rather pointless, but on the other hand they get you experience faster, because you get XP from the kills in addition to the XP for turning in the quest. So think of those quests as fast track, and the relatively-non-violent "pick 10 flowers" types as slow mode. As for orcs killing orcs, why not? In real life, humans have killed humans for all of human history. "Your" orcs are the "good" ones; "their" orcs are the "bad" ones and deserving of death. I see no thematic issue. As for quests not being part of a storyline arc, you can't really expect every quest to advance the storyline. WoW's storyline is quite expansive and convoluted, more so than other MMORPGs, but the "storyline" quests are still only a fraction of the overall quests that are required to level.
3. As others have commented, this is de rigeur on a pvp server. Why did you roll on a pvp server if you didn't like this kind of thing? Note that for a mere $25 can you transfer to a pve server (but not the other way around, so you would never be able to go back). Then you could quest and level and farm in relative peace.
4. At 70, the BGs are mostly about gear, but individual skill, and teamwork, are still very important. In the lowbie brackets, you see a much wider variety of gear, skills and teamwork, and it can be quite fun. I have a number of toons that I BG with in various brackets, some of them twinks (e.g. my level 19 paladin flagrunner with over 2K unbuffed health), some of them total scrubs, and many in between. Battlegrounds are as fun as you make them.
But, your claims go beyond that. You assert that the only thing standing in the way of "build, expand and innovate" is "quality of life". It's not quite that simple.
Educational techniques, for instance, have improved dramatically over the decades/centuries, and that's a critical component in intellectual/technological progression.
Also, there are cultural factors. One of the explanations for why the Arab world fell behind the non-Arab world, subsequent to their peak in the middle ages, is that they (for the most part) forbid women from participating in their intellectual/technological/social development. When you exclude roughly half of your population from participating, solely on the basis of their gender, you stand at a disadvantage with respect to other, less misogynstic cultures.
Other factors come into play here, but my point is, it's not just a "quality of life" issue. You can slay a water buffalo and still have time in the day to prove a mathematical theorem.
(Oh, and if fending off hordes of enemies is a problem, you shouldn't have rolled Alliance in the first place. Don't be such a noob).
If you meant to ask "what do creationists consider neanderthals?", then the answer is that they probably just wave their hands, seek to impugn the accuracy of radiocarbon dating, and/or mutter something about "the flood", since that's the catch-all explanation for every piece of scientific evidence that seems to support evolution-as-the-origin-of-species.
Python has an indentation regime built into the language syntax, Perl does not. If your only differentiator is "Python looks cleaner", then feel free to enforce strict indentation standards in your development environment. That doesn't seem like a sufficient reason to pick one language over the other.
Well, I'll match my geek credentials against yours any day, but I still fail to find the humor in (apparently) purposely misunderstanding the derivation of a perfectly good word. At least when the Marx brothers made fun of foreign accents/ESL (e.g. "Why a duck?"), there was an undertone of deliberate, playful obfuscation involved, in the same vein as the classic (albeit unilingual) "Who's on first?" skit. But with "canard" it's more of a case of "let's pretend to be ignorant and then all laugh at our pretended ignorance". Contrived yet simplistic at the same time. Leaves me cold.
It's a canard to say that the problem with Vista is that "the hardware is not ready for it"
Isn't that kind of a lot for a duck to say?
Lame attempt at humor, not deserving of +5 Funny. If he had said "shaggy dog story" instead of "canard", would you be blathering about canines? I doubt many people would see the humor in that. Or, does the French derivation somehow make it funnier?