Can anyone explain why there are _any_ limits on political speech? Isn't that the most important kind of speech to protect?
1. We have important laws against lying about someone and presenting it as factual information. I cannot start a blog about bmajik or run commercials about you in which I call you a child molester, unless of course this is true. If you are a candidate for office, I still cannot create a blog or run commercials about you in which I call you a child molester, unless it is true. The Supreme Court has ruled that such things do not count as free speech, unless reasonable people believe it to be a parody.
2. We have serious problems with freedom of speech when corporations monopolize the process of distributing information. If enough corporations choose to unfairly favor one candidate or political viewpoint to the exclusion of other political viewpoints, then the freedom of speech of citizens is actually reduced in favor of the bias of the majority corporate viewpoint, which is in the hands of a select few individuals. This problem is present because the average citizen is financially unable to start a television station or cable news network, even if strongly motivated to do so. (There are also a limited number of broadcast slots available, and a limited number of cable lines which can be run in any one area without excessive disruption of life.) Thus, laws which ensure the fairness of the limited number of major gateways for political speech can actually increase freedom of speech. We may hope that the internet may eliminate this problem in the future, but for now it has only reduced it.
Recently polar bears were put on the endangered species list. Humans aren't the only species we should protect.
You DID say we should think of ways not to die from it, not that we should think of ways to save the polar bears. That was either a wild sensationalist statement, or you think there is some clear demonstrated way that we will die from global warming.
Also, look at what the crazy hurricane season did to Louisiana
And was followed the immediate next year by an unusually calm hurricane season.
smog causes health problems as well as deaths.
Yes it does, but smog is not caused by global warming. Smog is the direct result of localized emissions, and many cities have successfully managed this problem by changes in local policy.
It's not stupid or arrogant. It's simply stating that we need to stop bitching about who is causing global warming, nature or humans, and think of ways to not die from it.
Pardon me for intervening with a simple question, but why exactly would you think I'm going to die from it?
If humans survive the next century or two I'm sure they'll explore the galaxy in person far faster than this unambitious probe idea.
Precisely. Even in an unambitious model, you could easily estimate a society that creates say, one probe for every 2 billion members of the society, and this would change the result from linear to exponential. It doesn't matter if it takes thousands of years for a colony to grow to full size, since this would happen many many times in billions of years.
The "personal attack" rule was pertinent whenever a person or small group was subject to a character attack during a broadcast. Stations had to notify such persons or groups within a week of the attack, send them transcripts of what was said, and offer the opportunity to respond on the air.
My goodness, under this rule and with current behavior, the Democratic politicians on Fox News would significantly outnumber the Republican ones.
An intriguing idea, which alone would probably cause a bit more objectiveness.
If you are being paid to advertise a position, it was never free(libre) speech in the first place. It's commercial speech and has been regulated for centuries. You can't advertise Twinkies as a cure for cancer if you make money selling Twinkies, and society is far better off for having restricted such fraudulent or deceptive speech.
But what if you simply make a profit from speaking, and your choice of what to say is your own? This is the case for someone who has a blog which is funded by advertisements, and potentially makes more money than it costs to run (which can count as compensation for writing). One can argue that the things this blogger says can affect how much profit is made, as popular positions will usually net more income than unpopular ones. However, it would be a bit of a stretch to call this commercial speech of the type you are discussing.
What I'm not seeing, however, is a clear dividing line.
What if it's in the middle? It would be intriguing if we had a law which guaranteed all journalists free-speech independence from their employers, unless their employers wanted to call them lobbyists instead of journalists, but I wouldn't count on that happening. So where is the dividing line?
Around here I can buy (for cash) a Visa gift card at the mall which is used a lot like a credit card. I was able to use this is some of the places a credit card is required, even some online services.
Do you need to submit your real name for these under penalty of perjury, or can they be used anonymously?
Why is this any different than any other organization pulling my credit report?
Check the original article, not the title. The title says "credit report", but the original article says "banking and credit records", which includes a complete list of all money in and out, and who that money came from or goes to, which usually gives information about the types of things you are spending money on. This can reveal what type of magazines you buy, how much you drink, whether or not you're seeing a shrink, whether you're seeing medical specialists, what you pay for on the internet, etc... So yes, it is equivalent to going through your mail and listening to phone calls.
It sounds to me like some banks and credit companies need to be rebuked for this. Credit and bank statements can contain substantially private information about an individual, as personal as medical records or intimate phone conversations.
In the only example given in the article of the successful use of this technique, Aldrich Ames, he was under careful surveillance by the FBI, and well known to be living beyond his stated income. There should have been no difficulty obtaining a search warrant as described in that constitution thing that law enforcement officials seem to find so inconvenient. And the banks and credit companies should EXPECT and DEMAND that law enforcement officials provide this search warrant as standard process, as much as most individuals would expect and demand this before letting police read ones private love letters.
The Bill of Rights loses its power if all the major corporations just voluntarily ignore it on behalf of their customers.
The problem in this case is that people voting with their wallets and NOT buying stuff further increases the record companies resolve: "See, we're losing money because everyone's downloading pirated music! We must crush crush crush!"
But then they have less money to crush with, which I think was the grandparent poster's goal.
To me, half of the fun with Star Trek was watching technology develop.
It does seem to me that there is a lot of potential in setting a new Star Trek series during the 29th century. 29th century "timeships" showed up a number of times in Voyager, yielding a glimpse of a way of life that was substantially different from the other Star Treks, while still having some of the same essential qualities. It is not the case that every episode would need to involve time travel either, since the 29th century would presumably have other concerns as well. Most good Star Trek episodes involved questions of "What would we do if?", and I think a 29th century setting would offer substantial opportunity for such questions.
The idea that the economy is a zero-sum affair is so abundantly contradicted by readily available evidence that I find it almost amusing that it holds such sway over people.
No, a job created elsewhere instead of here does not automatically mean that it "costs" us a job here. Jobs aren't a resource that is mined from the Earth, jobs are created by the economy.
Jobs are not created through mystical forces in the economy. Jobs are created by employers. Employer A has $60,000 to hire a person to do a job, and needs one job done. Employer A can either hire someone from the location of business, or hire someone in another country to do the job. If the second condition occurs, then the first has not. That first order effect IS zero-sum, because the employer's resources and needs are both finite and zero-sum. Even if Employer A saved money by hiring someone in another country to do the job, it is guaranteed that the amount of the difference is less than the original $60,000, and thus this cannot directly compensate for the reduced local hiring resources of Employer A. Lets say the net savings is $10,000.
If that overseas person does well enough, it may "create" two jobs here.
Lets assume for the moment that the overseas person does equally well in comparison to the local person (although many studies have shown that under current conditions, the quality of that produced by hiring local individuals is higher). Then the value of whatever is produced by the overseas person will be equivalent to the value that WOULD have been produced in the case of hiring a local person. The net result of this is then that the same value product is produced by employer A, with an increase of one job overseas instead of one local job, and the employer has $10,000 extra.
Now this is perfectly fine in the case where there is no difference between the overseas person and the local person, because then the net result is simply fair competition. It would be no different from hiring a person from one town or the next town over. But when people are not free to move between one country and another due to complicated legal restrictions, then this is not fair competition. In that case, a job is created in one region for one group of people, and not created in another region for a separate group of people. Therefore, the job markets for the regions MUST be considered separately for as long as the people cannot freely redistribute themselves between the regions.
So perhaps you can explain EXACTLY how employer A's choice will produce two jobs in the local job market, when the same value product is produced, and the net savings for employer A must be less than the salary of the job created. The amount of money that can be spent by the overseas employee is also less than the amount of money that could have been spent by the local employee because the overseas employee is paid slightly less, and the bulk of the money spent by the overseas employee will be spent in the same overseas market, thus having a reduced chance of creating a job in the local employee's market.
In the end the economy has to be made up of individual actors, and I would like to see a statistically common explanation for how employer A creating one job overseas instead of locally will result in the production of two more local jobs than would have been produced if the first job had been filled locally, and I would like to see the numbers for this add up properly for each actor involved.
Every function should be designed with the assumption that its input is faulty, and should have safe failure modes for every possible value and all possible content. Any unsafe external libraries must be wrapped in handlers which verify the data being passed to them with a similar mindset. Do not EVER presume data will be of a certain form, or that a function will be used a certain way. If sequential routines are becoming long such that you cannot verify the accurate function or the absence of a buffer overflow immediately in your head, then stop and look for a way to break it down into smaller abstract pieces.
Combine this mentality with the usage of safe classes as datatypes whenever possible, so that you can wrap your input verification into the functionality of the classes. If prudent, wrap external library routines in classes which manage the interaction with them, and which verify the data content being passed.
Use test suites to test every component of your program, and be sure to include invalid and pathologically insane input in your test suites.
Do not trade security for efficiency. And don't forget to cross your fingers.
But if the chainsaw goes off on its own power, while I'm sleeping, and slices and dices the whole damn town, it's your fault for selling me such a product, especially if you manufactured it with the knowledge that it could, in certain not-uncommon circumstances, do exactly that.
And what if it's a GPL'd chainsaw that you made in college, put on the internet for people to copy and use if they want, but never took the time to test thoroughly?
Causality means that if a condition is true, then another must be true as well.
That's called "implication". See the wikipedia Causality page. Note the sections "Necessary cause", "Sufficient cause", and most importantly, "Probabilistic causation" which is the default when one discusses a causal relationship like above.
What the law assumes is that the relationship is not causal. That is, just because you're over 50 you can't do the job, even if most 50-year olds really can't.
I think what you mean to say, is that the law assumes the relationship is not universal. Even if a causal relationship is shown, the law still protects. For example, it's well known that there's a causal relationship which causes women (in general) to be unable to lift weights as heavy as average men can. But we also know this relationship is not universal. Therefore if a woman is rejected from a job requiring lifting because she is female, then this is illegal, but if a person is rejected from such a job because of failing a required strength test, then this may be legal if done in a non-discriminatory fashion.
It's just like Slashdot to make it sound like the problems that were discovered in the summer were just reported publicly, when they were actually disclosed almost 4 months ago.
Actually, it was the New York Times which said the commission's action was not disclosed over the summer. If you have evidence otherwise, please include a link.
Re:The French news is the most interesting
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 1
I've always wondered about this. If it was aliens why would they come down here and then fly about really quickly and in random directions? It seems to serve no purpose other than to show off. I suppose they could be just being alien.
This isn't an attack at you btw, as you say you don't know what it was, I alway just wonder why the outrageous maneuvers?
Who says they are outrageous maneuvers? They may be outrageous compared to planes designed for traveling from New York to Paris, but if, as per the hypothesis, you have an actual interstellar craft, it seems that you would have to figure out how to accelerate quite a bit faster than this. And once you have something that accelerates fast, why drive it slower than normal?
"There is no definitive evidence that controlled food additives cause cancer.
In people the evidence is sparse and only correlative, simply because we do not do properly controlled studies which attempt to cause cancer in humans. In animals, however, the scientific evidence is plentiful that some commonly used food additives cause cancer under carefully controlled conditions. Thus the truth of the scientist's statement rests on your definition of "definitive".
"We do know that half of cancers are caused by lifestyle factors such as being overweight."
And of course, being overweight would have nothing to do with what is eaten, and is simply a lifestyle? Again, in animals the scientific evidence is plentiful that some commonly used food additives cause obesity under carefully controlled conditions. In humans, we do not usually conduct experiments in which diet is controlled for long enough to observe the corresponding result. It's very expensive to get people to eat only what you tell them to for months or years at a time, especially if they know half of the participants could end up in poor health.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably smarter to put it on the roof. Hydrogen goes up.
1. We have important laws against lying about someone and presenting it as factual information. I cannot start a blog about bmajik or run commercials about you in which I call you a child molester, unless of course this is true. If you are a candidate for office, I still cannot create a blog or run commercials about you in which I call you a child molester, unless it is true. The Supreme Court has ruled that such things do not count as free speech, unless reasonable people believe it to be a parody.
2. We have serious problems with freedom of speech when corporations monopolize the process of distributing information. If enough corporations choose to unfairly favor one candidate or political viewpoint to the exclusion of other political viewpoints, then the freedom of speech of citizens is actually reduced in favor of the bias of the majority corporate viewpoint, which is in the hands of a select few individuals. This problem is present because the average citizen is financially unable to start a television station or cable news network, even if strongly motivated to do so. (There are also a limited number of broadcast slots available, and a limited number of cable lines which can be run in any one area without excessive disruption of life.) Thus, laws which ensure the fairness of the limited number of major gateways for political speech can actually increase freedom of speech. We may hope that the internet may eliminate this problem in the future, but for now it has only reduced it.
You DID say we should think of ways not to die from it, not that we should think of ways to save the polar bears. That was either a wild sensationalist statement, or you think there is some clear demonstrated way that we will die from global warming.
And was followed the immediate next year by an unusually calm hurricane season.
Yes it does, but smog is not caused by global warming. Smog is the direct result of localized emissions, and many cities have successfully managed this problem by changes in local policy.
Pardon me for intervening with a simple question, but why exactly would you think I'm going to die from it?
Precisely. Even in an unambitious model, you could easily estimate a society that creates say, one probe for every 2 billion members of the society, and this would change the result from linear to exponential. It doesn't matter if it takes thousands of years for a colony to grow to full size, since this would happen many many times in billions of years.
My goodness, under this rule and with current behavior, the Democratic politicians on Fox News would significantly outnumber the Republican ones.
An intriguing idea, which alone would probably cause a bit more objectiveness.
But what if you simply make a profit from speaking, and your choice of what to say is your own? This is the case for someone who has a blog which is funded by advertisements, and potentially makes more money than it costs to run (which can count as compensation for writing). One can argue that the things this blogger says can affect how much profit is made, as popular positions will usually net more income than unpopular ones. However, it would be a bit of a stretch to call this commercial speech of the type you are discussing.
What I'm not seeing, however, is a clear dividing line.
What if it's in the middle? It would be intriguing if we had a law which guaranteed all journalists free-speech independence from their employers, unless their employers wanted to call them lobbyists instead of journalists, but I wouldn't count on that happening. So where is the dividing line?
Do you need to submit your real name for these under penalty of perjury, or can they be used anonymously?
Check the original article, not the title. The title says "credit report", but the original article says "banking and credit records", which includes a complete list of all money in and out, and who that money came from or goes to, which usually gives information about the types of things you are spending money on. This can reveal what type of magazines you buy, how much you drink, whether or not you're seeing a shrink, whether you're seeing medical specialists, what you pay for on the internet, etc... So yes, it is equivalent to going through your mail and listening to phone calls.
It sounds to me like some banks and credit companies need to be rebuked for this. Credit and bank statements can contain substantially private information about an individual, as personal as medical records or intimate phone conversations.
In the only example given in the article of the successful use of this technique, Aldrich Ames, he was under careful surveillance by the FBI, and well known to be living beyond his stated income. There should have been no difficulty obtaining a search warrant as described in that constitution thing that law enforcement officials seem to find so inconvenient. And the banks and credit companies should EXPECT and DEMAND that law enforcement officials provide this search warrant as standard process, as much as most individuals would expect and demand this before letting police read ones private love letters.
The Bill of Rights loses its power if all the major corporations just voluntarily ignore it on behalf of their customers.
But then they have less money to crush with, which I think was the grandparent poster's goal.
It does seem to me that there is a lot of potential in setting a new Star Trek series during the 29th century. 29th century "timeships" showed up a number of times in Voyager, yielding a glimpse of a way of life that was substantially different from the other Star Treks, while still having some of the same essential qualities. It is not the case that every episode would need to involve time travel either, since the 29th century would presumably have other concerns as well. Most good Star Trek episodes involved questions of "What would we do if?", and I think a 29th century setting would offer substantial opportunity for such questions.
...worry about that when the time comes.
Jobs are not created through mystical forces in the economy. Jobs are created by employers. Employer A has $60,000 to hire a person to do a job, and needs one job done. Employer A can either hire someone from the location of business, or hire someone in another country to do the job. If the second condition occurs, then the first has not. That first order effect IS zero-sum, because the employer's resources and needs are both finite and zero-sum. Even if Employer A saved money by hiring someone in another country to do the job, it is guaranteed that the amount of the difference is less than the original $60,000, and thus this cannot directly compensate for the reduced local hiring resources of Employer A. Lets say the net savings is $10,000.
Lets assume for the moment that the overseas person does equally well in comparison to the local person (although many studies have shown that under current conditions, the quality of that produced by hiring local individuals is higher). Then the value of whatever is produced by the overseas person will be equivalent to the value that WOULD have been produced in the case of hiring a local person. The net result of this is then that the same value product is produced by employer A, with an increase of one job overseas instead of one local job, and the employer has $10,000 extra.
Now this is perfectly fine in the case where there is no difference between the overseas person and the local person, because then the net result is simply fair competition. It would be no different from hiring a person from one town or the next town over. But when people are not free to move between one country and another due to complicated legal restrictions, then this is not fair competition. In that case, a job is created in one region for one group of people, and not created in another region for a separate group of people. Therefore, the job markets for the regions MUST be considered separately for as long as the people cannot freely redistribute themselves between the regions.
So perhaps you can explain EXACTLY how employer A's choice will produce two jobs in the local job market, when the same value product is produced, and the net savings for employer A must be less than the salary of the job created. The amount of money that can be spent by the overseas employee is also less than the amount of money that could have been spent by the local employee because the overseas employee is paid slightly less, and the bulk of the money spent by the overseas employee will be spent in the same overseas market, thus having a reduced chance of creating a job in the local employee's market.
In the end the economy has to be made up of individual actors, and I would like to see a statistically common explanation for how employer A creating one job overseas instead of locally will result in the production of two more local jobs than would have been produced if the first job had been filled locally, and I would like to see the numbers for this add up properly for each actor involved.
In the words of the great Donald Knuth, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
Every function should be designed with the assumption that its input is faulty, and should have safe failure modes for every possible value and all possible content. Any unsafe external libraries must be wrapped in handlers which verify the data being passed to them with a similar mindset. Do not EVER presume data will be of a certain form, or that a function will be used a certain way. If sequential routines are becoming long such that you cannot verify the accurate function or the absence of a buffer overflow immediately in your head, then stop and look for a way to break it down into smaller abstract pieces.
Combine this mentality with the usage of safe classes as datatypes whenever possible, so that you can wrap your input verification into the functionality of the classes. If prudent, wrap external library routines in classes which manage the interaction with them, and which verify the data content being passed.
Use test suites to test every component of your program, and be sure to include invalid and pathologically insane input in your test suites.
Do not trade security for efficiency. And don't forget to cross your fingers.
That seems like the likely outcome.
Hmm. Perhaps they should consider putting the design under a wiki which specifically encourages original research, and see what happens to it.
Finally! A way to rationalize building a Beowulf cluster.
This story brought to you via the botnet which tookover the NYT.
And what if it's a GPL'd chainsaw that you made in college, put on the internet for people to copy and use if they want, but never took the time to test thoroughly?
That's called "implication". See the wikipedia Causality page. Note the sections "Necessary cause", "Sufficient cause", and most importantly, "Probabilistic causation" which is the default when one discusses a causal relationship like above.
I think what you mean to say, is that the law assumes the relationship is not universal. Even if a causal relationship is shown, the law still protects. For example, it's well known that there's a causal relationship which causes women (in general) to be unable to lift weights as heavy as average men can. But we also know this relationship is not universal. Therefore if a woman is rejected from a job requiring lifting because she is female, then this is illegal, but if a person is rejected from such a job because of failing a required strength test, then this may be legal if done in a non-discriminatory fashion.
Actually, it was the New York Times which said the commission's action was not disclosed over the summer. If you have evidence otherwise, please include a link.
Who says they are outrageous maneuvers? They may be outrageous compared to planes designed for traveling from New York to Paris, but if, as per the hypothesis, you have an actual interstellar craft, it seems that you would have to figure out how to accelerate quite a bit faster than this. And once you have something that accelerates fast, why drive it slower than normal?
In people the evidence is sparse and only correlative, simply because we do not do properly controlled studies which attempt to cause cancer in humans. In animals, however, the scientific evidence is plentiful that some commonly used food additives cause cancer under carefully controlled conditions. Thus the truth of the scientist's statement rests on your definition of "definitive".
And of course, being overweight would have nothing to do with what is eaten, and is simply a lifestyle? Again, in animals the scientific evidence is plentiful that some commonly used food additives cause obesity under carefully controlled conditions. In humans, we do not usually conduct experiments in which diet is controlled for long enough to observe the corresponding result. It's very expensive to get people to eat only what you tell them to for months or years at a time, especially if they know half of the participants could end up in poor health.