I'm not sure exactly how to do it, but I feel like this problem of wanting the internet tweaked to protect this or that group, that
A) having a free, neutral internet is flat out beneficial to the society that has it.
B) tweaking that from being completely free and neutral puts that society at a competitive disadvantage versus any society that doesn't, and
C) unless you can prove that the benefits to society outweigh the competitive disadvantage gain by 'tweaking' the internet away from being a free and neutral common carrier, you are arbitrarily laughed out of the room.
We invented the Internet, the largest change in the ability to transmit ideas since the printing press.
Every time we decide that we need to arbitrarily lower the ability of the Internet to transmit ideas, we are seriously considering undermining the exact thing that as made it useful to have, but generally without explicitly admitting to that.
Now, I'm will to concede the possibility that undermining the Internets ability to transmit information may in fact involve less opportunity cost in a specific case than simply putting more people to fix the problem caused by transmitting that information - the obvious example is 'child pornography', recidivism of sexual offenders being a notoriously difficult issue to 'cure', even in comparison to things like drug addiction.
But even in a case like that - I'm at the point of being willing to wipe the slate clean and forcing people to measure the actual damage caused by lowering the Internets ability to transmit that information compared to simply using the same amount of money to catch the people that actually cause the problem.
And frankly, if I am willing to force the advocates of that to make their case for it in mathematical precision, you can imagine how sick and tired I am of hearing the intellectual property lobby scream over and over that they need the internet redesigned to their personal specifications because someone somewhere may theoretically be keeping them from making 231% profit on every dollar of investment instead of the mere 230% profit margin they have now.
I don't care how many billions of dollars you're losing because of the internet. You have to prove that *I* am, as an average citizen of the country that has an internet, going to be inconvenienced more by retaining net neutrality and forcing you to do the work of having to prove your case than I am by compromising net neutrality.
If, taking into account all the opportunity costs involved in each possible solution, you can't mathematically prove that - then shut the fuck up and quit throwing fits.
Pug, who is evidently more pissed about this than he had realized.
For a small fee you can subscribe to our proprietary whitelisting system - it simply tracks down every male at every IP your computer system interacts with and sends a gentleman of our acquaintance with the middle-name "The" to the residence associated with the IP.
If they're whitelisted, we simply break their kneecaps.
I despise that stupid show. "House - because people aren't sufficiently programmed to believe smart people are assholes that hold them in contemt!"
Fuck House. I'm a geek, statistically there are 300 people on the planet smarter than me, and dammit I'm a nice guy that recognizes that being smart is both an important thing and not the only important thing.
A: The Management team that gets involved in a co-dependent relationship with *one* person on the team, and treats the rest as disposable.
If that one person is the reason you can't keep other people, then you need to verify - is this guy *really* worth any three other programmers you have. And if so, is there a reason you can't get somebody as good that *not* a personality problem - since evidently that would be worth six other programmers - him and the three he's been costing you.
B: I've seen a lot of people that bitch and complain about the corporate 'fit all pegs into round holes', right until they're in a corporation that actually allows people some individuality and recognizes that, even in the same job, people have different strengths.
Turns out, you're not always the star, and the company may go further for somebody else with unique strengths. In which case, the problem is obviously that the company lets themselves get co-dependent with these people - not that they were *actually* worth it.
Unfortunately, both of these cases sound the same when the co-worker is grumbling about it after work.
That doesn't even make any kind of logical or ethical sense. The fact that one can take on a set of mutual obligations in no way implies that one can withdraw from that set of mutual obligations without the consent of other parties involved.
This is obvious from the most rudimentary theory of contracts - to endeavor to argue otherwise you are, quite literally, insisting that the document considered the "Supreme law of the land" is less binding than the most rudimentary contract that must be enforced under it.
Obviously, there are a lot of people emotionally invested with some strange belief that the Constitution is an exception, somehow weaker than this most rudimentary concept inherent in any instrument of mutual obligation such as a treaty, contract, or promissary note, but the blunt fact is there is no logic to it - an instrument such as what you are trying to reduce the Constitution to could not possibly even be conceived of as a "Supreme" legal document.
This conceptualization doesn't even make any basic logical sense.
No - A) The Constitution makes provisions for being the "Supreme law of the Land". This would be the polar opposite of being "Nullifiable based on a lack of provisions for it making anything that is not expressly forbidden allowed".
B) State do not 'make oaths', anymore than they 'sign treaties' with large mountain sized feather quills. Nonetheless it is more than mere rhetorical device that a state, having had a treaty signed by it's duly appointed representative in good faith with all concerned has 'signed the treaty' - The representative is not, indeed cannot, sign a treaty on his own behalf. Likewise by breaking the promises her representative partook of on the behalf of a state, the state is forswearing it's oath.
This seems to me to be an obvious implication of the ethics required in any nominally republican form of government. Either you have agreed to be represented by a person speaking on your behalf, or you have not. All thirteen founding colonies and additional states later joining the union had agreed to this.
C) Under Article VI the Constitution explicitly recognizes both oaths and affirmations. Without re-arguing the various court cases in Slashdot, the first amendment of course bans the government from either expressly sanctioning or prohibiting any specific religion, but oaths are "calling upon something or someone that the oath maker considers sacred, usually God, as a witness to the binding nature of the promise or the truth of the statement of fact."
The mere fact that the oathmaker consider the oath sacred (or not) does not mean they are any less empowered to act as duly appointed representatives of the states they represented. When they, as individuals, forswore those oaths, they were not merely forswearing themselves, they were, under any theory of ethics *I* am familiar with, forswearing the states they represented.
As to whether they were forswearing themselves before man and God, well, one supposes that depends on whether they took oaths and so themselves called upon God to witness it, or chose to take affirmations without invoking something sacred to themselves. Given the historical rarity of the use of affirmations, one presumes the former, but it could undoubtedly be verified on a case by case basis should you feel that *this* is somehow the sticking point regarding the right for the South to unilaterally desert a compact made in good faith.
"Which Land?" - Well, presumably the some total of all lands which agreed with all terms and agreements thoroughly hashed out in advance, to sign on. The South was not obligated to join the United States, nor were they forced into it.
No - The Constitution contains a specific method for amending it. Therefore, even if there is no binding lesser means for a state to secede from the union (IANAL but it is feasible that SCOTUS as a court of first resort on Constitutional questions could accept something less than this), in the worst case scenario the same functions that would allow for an amendment would allow release of a state from it's responsibilities.
This would obviously not be an easy way for a state to sue for release from it's obligations, but then, one should not *have* easy ways to be released from ones obligations.
Under that theory, a compact is only binding if it is explicitly stated that no single member of the compact can render it null and void at will.
That's a silly and irresponsible interpretation that makes neither intuitive nor logical sense.
Article VI: "This Constitution, "... ", shall be the supreme Law of the Land;"
10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But the power to decide the "Supreme Law of the Land" had been delegated to the Constitution, and despite the admitted and obvious brilliance of the "The South had their fingers crossed" defense, the nature of the word "Secession" mean they were trying to render the Constitution to the Status of "The Constitution formerly known as 'The Supreme law of the Land'", a right explicitly denied them.
Sorry - your theory lacks the legal insight typically demanded by any five-year old going "But you promised!" - Pug
No, even if the North had lost, it would have been unconstitutional and illegal.
The Constitution having no provision for being unilaterally rendered null and void by one or more signatories, to legally and Constitutionally secede would require agreement such that a Constitutional amendment would render the secession legal, as listed under Article V.
That such a thing would be required is obvious - that no such attempt was even attempted by the Southern states, equally so. Accordingly the attempt to secede was simply forswearing their oaths before man and God.
I've known too many cops - hell yes that defense would work.
One thing I've noticed about assholes with authority is that they *do* brag about how they are assholes with authority, and how they're going to screw up someones life. I've learned over the years - when someone claims that's the way they are, they are generally being honest.
Quite often, that's the only warning you receive, before they screw up your life.
Hell, before Firefly I was a fan of Dark Angel - good acting, good writing, interesting characters . . . and then Fox started preempting it on Tuesdays at every opportunity, moved it to Fridays and preempted it two weeks out of three even there.
Then they replaced it with Firefly, for no other reason than to kill that after one season.
If the Religious Right want's to do "The Right Thing" and adopt each and every pre-fertilized set of embryonic stem cells that are used to create a child for childless couples, I have no objections to them doing so.
I'll even grant them every right to purchasing an "option" on a set of cell until so adopted, and so covering the power to keep them refrigerated until such time as they are either adopted or the option runs out.
But the 'Moral Objection' is, quite literally, that they don't want them used for Stem Cell research. Have you seen a single one of these people with their 'moral objections' either raising money to maintain refrigeration or objects to these cells being discarded?
So my question is simple - which hyperencephalic genius here can do the important work of creating a simple open-source system that automatically scans Google Earth for blurred images - {G}.
Should be opensource, deployable as a distributed system that automatically marks the imagery for everyone, and preferably have a built in algorithm for reversing the blurring like they do on every crime show ever whelped - {G}.
This is the chain that refused to either A) Sell me the last remaining item of a sale item, B) Give me a rain-check on it C) Produce a policy saying they were not to sell display items, or D) give me a working phone number to the corporate office - the number they gave me did in fact not work.
And frankly, they were *ass-holes* about the whole thing.
I wouldn't *wish* job-hunting on anyone in this economy, but the BS I went through (From the sales person through three supervisors and extending to a call to their corporate HQ) from the Indianapolis store over what should have been a simple purchase?
As an attempt to assist New Zealand keep down it's crime rate, I believe we can propose a wonderful new law to assist them.
We shall simply set up a system where reporting a license plate number that has been shown to be on the street during a burglary will result in the car being seized by the government.
I don't for foresee any issue ever arising from such a plan.
So, to sum up, authors deserve to special protection from changes in the value of their market because of new technology.
I say "special protection" on the assumption that you don't feel the same way about other professions - if you do in fact believe we should protect every profession from changes in it's market value due to technology, by all means say so.
First of all - I am not (in all likelihood) paying for her college education. As a property owner, I am paying for her highschool education. She wants to make offensive art in art class or write erotica in creative writing, I have no objection to her doing so, but if the teacher says pay attention and get off the damn phone, then gee, sucks to be you.
I have no sympathy for boredom or dishonesty, nevermind dishonesty fomented by boredom.
I'm no great shakes as a programmer, but as soon as the article mentioned tha.desktop files didn't respect the 'x' switch, *I* knew exactly where this was going to go and that he was 100% right in going there.
Which begs the question - how the hell did this get approved as a good idea?
It violates the entire program/data paradigm, in an obvious way.
It ignores I don't know how many years of security theory and practice.
And you couldn't come up with a flaw more likely to make Bill Gates laugh his ass off going "Oh, yeah, we made that mistake once . . . . years and years ago . .." without a committee.
So, is there some reason this seemed perfectly reasonable that I missed?
Pug, who should always be the dumbest person in any given room dammit!
Well, no - but they still had that *reputation* in the 80's.
Reagan managed to get that reputation small enough you could drown it in a bathtub, but that's post 80's - {G}.
Actually, the factoid I love/fear is that, since FDR, there have been 17 months of recession under Democrats (11 under Truman and 6 under Carter.) This latest one gives us over 100 months of recession since then under Republican presidents, although I believe even among Republicans Bush Jr. is the first to manage two on his watch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure exactly how to do it, but I feel like this problem of wanting the internet tweaked to protect this or that group, that
A) having a free, neutral internet is flat out beneficial to the society that has it.
B) tweaking that from being completely free and neutral puts that society at a competitive disadvantage versus any society that doesn't, and
C) unless you can prove that the benefits to society outweigh the competitive disadvantage gain by 'tweaking' the internet away from being a free and neutral common carrier, you are arbitrarily laughed out of the room.
We invented the Internet, the largest change in the ability to transmit ideas since the printing press.
Every time we decide that we need to arbitrarily lower the ability of the Internet to transmit ideas, we are seriously considering undermining the exact thing that as made it useful to have, but generally without explicitly admitting to that.
Now, I'm will to concede the possibility that undermining the Internets ability to transmit information may in fact involve less opportunity cost in a specific case than simply putting more people to fix the problem caused by transmitting that information - the obvious example is 'child pornography', recidivism of sexual offenders being a notoriously difficult issue to 'cure', even in comparison to things like drug addiction.
But even in a case like that - I'm at the point of being willing to wipe the slate clean and forcing people to measure the actual damage caused by lowering the Internets ability to transmit that information compared to simply using the same amount of money to catch the people that actually cause the problem.
And frankly, if I am willing to force the advocates of that to make their case for it in mathematical precision, you can imagine how sick and tired I am of hearing the intellectual property lobby scream over and over that they need the internet redesigned to their personal specifications because someone somewhere may theoretically be keeping them from making 231% profit on every dollar of investment instead of the mere 230% profit margin they have now.
I don't care how many billions of dollars you're losing because of the internet. You have to prove that *I* am, as an average citizen of the country that has an internet, going to be inconvenienced more by retaining net neutrality and forcing you to do the work of having to prove your case than I am by compromising net neutrality.
If, taking into account all the opportunity costs involved in each possible solution, you can't mathematically prove that - then shut the fuck up and quit throwing fits.
Pug, who is evidently more pissed about this than he had realized.
For a small fee you can subscribe to our proprietary whitelisting system - it simply tracks down every male at every IP your computer system interacts with and sends a gentleman of our acquaintance with the middle-name "The" to the residence associated with the IP.
If they're whitelisted, we simply break their kneecaps.
We've had very few complaints.
I despise that stupid show.
"House - because people aren't sufficiently programmed to believe smart people are assholes that hold them in contemt!"
Fuck House. I'm a geek, statistically there are 300 people on the planet smarter than me, and dammit I'm a nice guy that recognizes that being smart is both an important thing and not the only important thing.
Pug
Thank - Good Article, and seems pretty on point to me.
Pug
There *is* a tendency for the corporate world to not recognize a genius *unless* he's also a complete ass.
Pug
My problem with this comes from both ends.
A: The Management team that gets involved in a co-dependent relationship with *one* person on the team, and treats the rest as disposable.
If that one person is the reason you can't keep other people, then you need to verify - is this guy *really* worth any three other programmers you have. And if so, is there a reason you can't get somebody as good that *not* a personality problem - since evidently that would be worth six other programmers - him and the three he's been costing you.
B: I've seen a lot of people that bitch and complain about the corporate 'fit all pegs into round holes', right until they're in a corporation that actually allows people some individuality and recognizes that, even in the same job, people have different strengths.
Turns out, you're not always the star, and the company may go further for somebody else with unique strengths. In which case, the problem is obviously that the company lets themselves get co-dependent with these people - not that they were *actually* worth it.
Unfortunately, both of these cases sound the same when the co-worker is grumbling about it after work.
Pug
That doesn't even make any kind of logical or ethical sense. The fact that one can take on a set of mutual obligations in no way implies that one can withdraw from that set of mutual obligations without the consent of other parties involved.
This is obvious from the most rudimentary theory of contracts - to endeavor to argue otherwise you are, quite literally, insisting that the document considered the "Supreme law of the land" is less binding than the most rudimentary contract that must be enforced under it.
Obviously, there are a lot of people emotionally invested with some strange belief that the Constitution is an exception, somehow weaker than this most rudimentary concept inherent in any instrument of mutual obligation such as a treaty, contract, or promissary note, but the blunt fact is there is no logic to it - an instrument such as what you are trying to reduce the Constitution to could not possibly even be conceived of as a "Supreme" legal document.
This conceptualization doesn't even make any basic logical sense.
Pug
No -
A) The Constitution makes provisions for being the "Supreme law of the Land". This would be the polar opposite of being "Nullifiable based on a lack of provisions for it making anything that is not expressly forbidden allowed".
B) State do not 'make oaths', anymore than they 'sign treaties' with large mountain sized feather quills. Nonetheless it is more than mere rhetorical device that a state, having had a treaty signed by it's duly appointed representative in good faith with all concerned has 'signed the treaty' - The representative is not, indeed cannot, sign a treaty on his own behalf. Likewise by breaking the promises her representative partook of on the behalf of a state, the state is forswearing it's oath.
This seems to me to be an obvious implication of the ethics required in any nominally republican form of government. Either you have agreed to be represented by a person speaking on your behalf, or you have not. All thirteen founding colonies and additional states later joining the union had agreed to this.
C) Under Article VI the Constitution explicitly recognizes both oaths and affirmations. Without re-arguing the various court cases in Slashdot, the first amendment of course bans the government from either expressly sanctioning or prohibiting any specific religion, but oaths are "calling upon something or someone that the oath maker considers sacred, usually God, as a witness to the binding nature of the promise or the truth of the statement of fact."
The mere fact that the oathmaker consider the oath sacred (or not) does not mean they are any less empowered to act as duly appointed representatives of the states they represented. When they, as individuals, forswore those oaths, they were not merely forswearing themselves, they were, under any theory of ethics *I* am familiar with, forswearing the states they represented.
As to whether they were forswearing themselves before man and God, well, one supposes that depends on whether they took oaths and so themselves called upon God to witness it, or chose to take affirmations without invoking something sacred to themselves. Given the historical rarity of the use of affirmations, one presumes the former, but it could undoubtedly be verified on a case by case basis should you feel that *this* is somehow the sticking point regarding the right for the South to unilaterally desert a compact made in good faith.
Pug
"Which Land?" - Well, presumably the some total of all lands which agreed with all terms and agreements thoroughly hashed out in advance, to sign on. The South was not obligated to join the United States, nor were they forced into it.
No - The Constitution contains a specific method for amending it. Therefore, even if there is no binding lesser means for a state to secede from the union (IANAL but it is feasible that SCOTUS as a court of first resort on Constitutional questions could accept something less than this), in the worst case scenario the same functions that would allow for an amendment would allow release of a state from it's responsibilities.
This would obviously not be an easy way for a state to sue for release from it's obligations, but then, one should not *have* easy ways to be released from ones obligations.
That's why they're, y'know, obligations.
Pug
Under that theory, a compact is only binding if it is explicitly stated that no single member of the compact can render it null and void at will.
That's a silly and irresponsible interpretation that makes neither intuitive nor logical sense.
Article VI: ... ", shall be the supreme Law of the Land;"
"This Constitution, "
10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But the power to decide the "Supreme Law of the Land" had been delegated to the Constitution, and despite the admitted and obvious brilliance of the "The South had their fingers crossed" defense, the nature of the word "Secession" mean they were trying to render the Constitution to the Status of "The Constitution formerly known as 'The Supreme law of the Land'", a right explicitly denied them.
Sorry - your theory lacks the legal insight typically demanded by any five-year old going "But you promised!" - Pug
No, even if the North had lost, it would have been unconstitutional and illegal.
The Constitution having no provision for being unilaterally rendered null and void by one or more signatories, to legally and Constitutionally secede would require agreement such that a Constitutional amendment would render the secession legal, as listed under Article V.
That such a thing would be required is obvious - that no such attempt was even attempted by the Southern states, equally so. Accordingly the attempt to secede was simply forswearing their oaths before man and God.
Pug
I've known too many cops - hell yes that defense would work.
One thing I've noticed about assholes with authority is that they *do* brag about how they are assholes with authority, and how they're going to screw up someones life. I've learned over the years - when someone claims that's the way they are, they are generally being honest.
Quite often, that's the only warning you receive, before they screw up your life.
Pug
Hell, before Firefly I was a fan of Dark Angel - good acting, good writing, interesting characters . . . and then Fox started preempting it on Tuesdays at every opportunity, moved it to Fridays and preempted it two weeks out of three even there.
Then they replaced it with Firefly, for no other reason than to kill that after one season.
What Moral Gray Area?
If the Religious Right want's to do "The Right Thing" and adopt each and every pre-fertilized set of embryonic stem cells that are used to create a child for childless couples, I have no objections to them doing so.
I'll even grant them every right to purchasing an "option" on a set of cell until so adopted, and so covering the power to keep them refrigerated until such time as they are either adopted or the option runs out.
But the 'Moral Objection' is, quite literally, that they don't want them used for Stem Cell research. Have you seen a single one of these people with their 'moral objections' either raising money to maintain refrigeration or objects to these cells being discarded?
Funny, neither have I.
Pug
So my question is simple - which hyperencephalic genius here can do the important work of creating a simple open-source system that automatically scans Google Earth for blurred images - {G}.
Should be opensource, deployable as a distributed system that automatically marks the imagery for everyone, and preferably have a built in algorithm for reversing the blurring like they do on every crime show ever whelped - {G}.
Pug
This is the chain that refused to either
A) Sell me the last remaining item of a sale item,
B) Give me a rain-check on it
C) Produce a policy saying they were not to sell display items, or
D) give me a working phone number to the corporate office - the number they gave me did in fact not work.
And frankly, they were *ass-holes* about the whole thing.
I wouldn't *wish* job-hunting on anyone in this economy, but the BS I went through (From the sales person through three supervisors and extending to a call to their corporate HQ) from the Indianapolis store over what should have been a simple purchase?
My shock is imaginable.
Pug
As an attempt to assist New Zealand keep down it's crime rate, I believe we can propose a wonderful new law to assist them.
We shall simply set up a system where reporting a license plate number that has been shown to be on the street during a burglary will result in the car being seized by the government.
I don't for foresee any issue ever arising from such a plan.
Pug
So, to sum up, authors deserve to special protection from changes in the value of their market because of new technology.
I say "special protection" on the assumption that you don't feel the same way about other professions - if you do in fact believe we should protect every profession from changes in it's market value due to technology, by all means say so.
Pug
Next up - getting reading your child a bedtime story classified as "Public Performance".
Good lord.
Jessica Alba and I have volunteered to be quantum entangled.
Hey - I'll be entangled with Jessica Alba any way I can managed it!
Pug, exceedingly glad there's no -1, shallow as hell option - {G}.
Sounds like an xml schema waiting to be developed to me.
Pug
First of all - I am not (in all likelihood) paying for her college education. As a property owner, I am paying for her highschool education. She wants to make offensive art in art class or write erotica in creative writing, I have no objection to her doing so, but if the teacher says pay attention and get off the damn phone, then gee, sucks to be you.
I have no sympathy for boredom or dishonesty, nevermind dishonesty fomented by boredom.
Pug
I'm no great shakes as a programmer, but as soon as the article mentioned tha .desktop files didn't respect the 'x' switch, *I* knew exactly where this was going to go and that he was 100% right in going there.
Which begs the question - how the hell did this get approved as a good idea?
It violates the entire program/data paradigm, in an obvious way.
It ignores I don't know how many years of security theory and practice.
And you couldn't come up with a flaw more likely to make Bill Gates laugh his ass off going "Oh, yeah, we made that mistake once . . . . years and years ago . . ." without a committee.
So, is there some reason this seemed perfectly reasonable that I missed?
Pug, who should always be the dumbest person in any given room dammit!
"Hey Kids - Did you know you genetic code spells out 'Gullible' in it - go ahead, check!"
Well, no - but they still had that *reputation* in the 80's.
Reagan managed to get that reputation small enough you could drown it in a bathtub, but that's post 80's - {G}.
Actually, the factoid I love/fear is that, since FDR, there have been 17 months of recession under Democrats (11 under Truman and 6 under Carter.) This latest one gives us over 100 months of recession since then under Republican presidents, although I believe even among Republicans Bush Jr. is the first to manage two on his watch.