Does this mean that if 47% of the popular vote was for Bush and
40% was for Gore (13% for everyone else) that Bush would receive
47% of the state's electoral votes - or ALL of them?
In most states, the answer is that Bush would receive all of the electoral votes.
In New Hampshire, however, things are run a bit differently. As you probably know, the number of electoral votes assigned to a state is equal to the size of its congressional delegation, i.e., the total number of Representatives and Senators, or the number of Representatives plus two. New Hampshire tallies the popular vote by congressional districts (New Hampshire has two) and awards one electoral vote to the winner of each district. The remaining two electoral votes go to the overall winner of the statewide popular vote. Generally, both districts have swung the same way, but I believe that in either '92 or '96 the two districts voted different ways, resulting in a 3-1 split of the state's four electoral votes. (Don't remember which year exactly, or who got what.)
I've heard rumors that other states are considering something like this. IMO, it makes sense.
However, if humans dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the planet gets hotter, that changes the weather patterns, so Mars would be less useful for understanding Earth.
Kim Stanley Robinson has written a trilogy of novels -- Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars -- that address this very issue. I'd call them required reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about terraforming Mars. The science is solid, and the exploration of future politics is very interesting.
One of the major political divisions among the human colonists in the novels is between the "Greens", who favor terraforming, and the "Reds" who oppose it for the reasons you describe.
As a huge corporation, Creative is most certainly NOT doing this for the "principle", they are doing this because the continued attack on mp3's, which hinders their eventual acceptance, has a negative revenue effect for Creative.
Agreed.
Creative is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, which in my mind is about the same as just doing nothing.
Except that doing the right thing for the wrong reason has the potential to actually accomplish something, whereas doing nothing doesn't. If Creative receives support from the people who want the right thing for the right reason, it will encourage other companies to join the boycott. That would be a good thing, even though those companies would also be doing it for the wrong reason.
Given the tone of your reply, the picture I have is that a cop asked you to move
along, or to show ID, and you lipped off to that cop and got yourself arrested.
Whether the cop had a basis for stopping you or not, the intelligent thing to do
would have been to keep your mouth shut and do what you were asked--minors
aren't full citizens and don't have the full rights associated with majority, as I'm
sure you know by now.
Oh, bra-vo! Well done! You've just fabricated out of thin air a situation involving waldoj and a police officer, and then scolded him for the behavior you imagined him displaying. That'll teach him to mouth off to imaginary policemen in your made-up little world.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not
be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note the phrase "but upon probable cause". This means the government has the
right perform lawful searches. That's called "inherent authority".
Surveillance is neither search nor seizure. Search and/or seizure happens in the open, with the knowledge of the those whose security is being (lawfully) violated. When your house is searched for drugs, you know it. When you are arrested for possession, you know it.
This is not the case with wiretapping, nor is it the case with Carnivore -- surveillance happens without the knowledge of its subject. If the Founding Fathers had intended the Fourth Amendment to cover surveillance, the word "surveillance" would appear in it.
Justice's Colgate counters the FBI already has laws it must
follow to intercept e-mail. "What we don't want is a debate
over the government's inherent authority to conduct
electronic surveillance.
The government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance? Funny, I thought the government was only supposed to have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and I'm fairly sure Madison&co. didn't include an "inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance."
Without the legal protection, companies will stop doing it. Video games, cell phones, Internet access devices, and others are subsidized by the money you're expected to spend later. Consider an example: If the PlayStation 2 comes out, and a Linux distro for it appears the day after and as time goes on, Sony sees more PS2's being sold as workstations than as gaming machines, what will it mean?
It'll mean that Sony has to change their business model. Too bad for them.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that just because a company formulates a business model, they have a right to succeed with it. They don't. If a business model doesn't work, the company that banked on it loses. They don't have the right to sue others to protect a faulty business model.
Regardless of the temperature, I find it ridiculous that McDs lost the suit. It's friggin coffee. If you put coffee
(HOT) in your crotch and drive, you SHOULD get burned, and probably be beaten to death for the rest of
your life for being a risk to other drivers.
Since you didn't bother to follow the provided link regarding the lawsuit,
here it is again.
As it states, the woman who suffered the burns was not driving the car, her grandson was. In fact, the car was not even moving; the grandson had stopped the car so that she could remove the lid from the cup.
Facts are wonderful things. You should check them out.
Right now, we're like a blind person with a bag of money standing in the middle of the street. We don't know if the neighborhood is good or bad, but we should be taking steps to find out.
Until about a hundred years ago, extraterrestrial intelligence would have had no way of knowing there was intelligent life on Earth unless they actually happened to visit. But since then, we've been putting out an awful lot of radio flux, and anyone listening nearby would have to know that we're here. They might send the welcome wagon... or they might call the exterminators.
I'm not saying I think it's likely that someone's going to pop into the solar system with a can of Raid, but if they do, now is the time to expect it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't imagine that any intelligent race would replace themselves with machines, so the thought that any ETs we might meet would be machines seems rather far fetched.
Certainly no intelligent species would want to replace itself with machines, but I could easily see it happening anyway as an accident. A newly-created machine intelligence could very well decide that its biological creators are far too capricious and unstable for its own safety. If it's nice, it would simply try to get the hell out of there. If not, it might engineer a convenient plage to eliminate them.
Should MS apps be established on Linux it'd be like that only instead of dealing
with a single point of development and control, MS would be dealing with little
groups and individuals, threatening them that if they didn't stop work on their
projects, MS would kill Office for Linux (and presumably blame said
developer).
And how exactly would that be done? "Yes, the XMMS folks wouldn't stop development of their audio player, so we had no choice but to terminate development of MS Office for Linux. I hope it's obvious that this is the fault of the XMMS development team for not knuchkling under."
Microsoft doesn't think they're doing anything wrong. They don't think they've ever done anything wrong. They
think they've meerly been competitive and innovative. And innovatively competitive. At various times in the past,
burning, looting and pillaging was meerly competitive, too.
That's hilarious, but I think it really is true. Microsoft folks have spent day upon day repeating their party line: "We're not doing anything wrong. We're just being competitive." Anyone who keeps repeating something like that will sooner or later become convinced that it's true. Even if they didn't believe it at first, they'll eventually start agreeing with their own propoganda. It happened to the officials of the former Soviet Union, and it's apparently happened to the people at Microsoft. I think that's why Microsoft has bungled the antitrust case so badly; they really are convinced that they've done nothing wrong, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, because they've brainwashed themselves with their own press releases.
Why does cooperation make more sense? There is no support to that premise...
...says the poster who just admitted he hadn't even read the whole article. Really, if you're going to claim that the author doesn't support his assertions, the least you can do is read the entire thing and make sure that's the case.
These developments have greatly increased the communications interconnectedness of all the countries in the world, especially technologically advanced nations like the US and the Netherlands.
Does anyone have any idea why the Netherlands was mentioned specifically in this sentence?
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture. Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
Let's assume for the moment that your characterization of the current state of the web is accurate -- it's all about terrorism, porn, and hatred. If that's the case, don't you think future historians will want to know this? Don't you think they should know it? If the web shows the "worst side of humanity," doesn't that say something about society today? You seem to be suggesting that we omit the web from the historical record because it makes us look bad.
I'd also like to point out that the internet, as "unbalanced" as it currently is, is still the most egalitarian communications medium in history. Your rationale for rejecting the web as a source of history is that not everyone in the world is wired. If that criterion were applied to all written/spoken/filmed/televised media in history, we wouldn't have a single source for historical information. Even personal written correspondence doesn't count, because it excludes those who are illiterate.
[It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it. ]
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Well, in the rest of my paragraph, which you snipped, I pointed out that future historians, who will do studies on it, will be smart enough to take into account the fact that the majority of the human race is still unwired. The best thing we can do to help them is to simply provide as much information as possible.
Sure, this'll be a useful reference for future generations, won't it? I'm sorry, but as much of a fan of the web as I am, I really wouldn't consider it to be something worthy of archival in the state that it is at the moment. Why? Well, because currently the web is still in the transitional period between the days of ARPAnet and purely academic use and acceptance as a medium through which the general public can communicate. And as such, it's still in a state where teething problems overwhelm content.
The "teething problems" are what makes it historically interesting! I think historians of the future will be much more interested in looking at the development of the web through trial and error than at the finished product.
Anyway, any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it. Yes, the contents of today's web are reflective of the current online population. But it's rather naive to assume that future historians won't be smart enough to realize that and account for it. They'll know that the vast majority of today's world is still unwired, just as modern historians know, for example, that the vast majority of people in the 18th century did not have access to a printing press.
This is really a cool idea. Up 'til know, we've taken it for granted that our media would last long enough for historians to make use of it in the future. With the web, you can't assume that's the case, so it's good that someone's taking it upon themselves to archive the web.
But I want to know more:
How deep does this archiving go? Are they going to store every single page and image of every single website?
How much storage space is required for the whole web? Wild guess: A recent/. story put the number of Apache-served websites at about 10 million. Since Apache has roughly two-thirds of the market, that makes the total number of web sites 15 million. If sites average, say, 10Mb in size (wild guess), then it looks like 150 terabytes would be enough to store the entire web.
What software/OSes are they using for this project?
Slashdot Mirror
In most states, the answer is that Bush would receive all of the electoral votes.
In New Hampshire, however, things are run a bit differently. As you probably know, the number of electoral votes assigned to a state is equal to the size of its congressional delegation, i.e., the total number of Representatives and Senators, or the number of Representatives plus two. New Hampshire tallies the popular vote by congressional districts (New Hampshire has two) and awards one electoral vote to the winner of each district. The remaining two electoral votes go to the overall winner of the statewide popular vote. Generally, both districts have swung the same way, but I believe that in either '92 or '96 the two districts voted different ways, resulting in a 3-1 split of the state's four electoral votes. (Don't remember which year exactly, or who got what.)
I've heard rumors that other states are considering something like this. IMO, it makes sense.
TheFrood
It was, in fact, Conan O'Brien.
Kim Stanley Robinson has written a trilogy of novels -- Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars -- that address this very issue. I'd call them required reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about terraforming Mars. The science is solid, and the exploration of future politics is very interesting.
One of the major political divisions among the human colonists in the novels is between the "Greens", who favor terraforming, and the "Reds" who oppose it for the reasons you describe.
TheFrood
Agreed.
Creative is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, which in my mind is about the same as just doing nothing.
Except that doing the right thing for the wrong reason has the potential to actually accomplish something, whereas doing nothing doesn't. If Creative receives support from the people who want the right thing for the right reason, it will encourage other companies to join the boycott. That would be a good thing, even though those companies would also be doing it for the wrong reason.
TheFrood
Oh, bra-vo! Well done! You've just fabricated out of thin air a situation involving waldoj and a police officer, and then scolded him for the behavior you imagined him displaying. That'll teach him to mouth off to imaginary policemen in your made-up little world.
TheFrood
TheFrood
So is arrogance like yours.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note the phrase "but upon probable cause". This means the government has the right perform lawful searches. That's called "inherent authority".
Surveillance is neither search nor seizure. Search and/or seizure happens in the open, with the knowledge of the those whose security is being (lawfully) violated. When your house is searched for drugs, you know it. When you are arrested for possession, you know it. This is not the case with wiretapping, nor is it the case with Carnivore -- surveillance happens without the knowledge of its subject. If the Founding Fathers had intended the Fourth Amendment to cover surveillance, the word "surveillance" would appear in it.
TheFrood
The government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance? Funny, I thought the government was only supposed to have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and I'm fairly sure Madison&co. didn't include an "inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance."
TheFrood
It'll mean that Sony has to change their business model. Too bad for them.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that just because a company formulates a business model, they have a right to succeed with it. They don't. If a business model doesn't work, the company that banked on it loses. They don't have the right to sue others to protect a faulty business model.
TheFrood
Since you didn't bother to follow the provided link regarding the lawsuit, here it is again.
As it states, the woman who suffered the burns was not driving the car, her grandson was. In fact, the car was not even moving; the grandson had stopped the car so that she could remove the lid from the cup.
Facts are wonderful things. You should check them out.
TheFrood
Could it be that he doesn't fit neatly into your little "luddite" and "technocrat" boxes?
TheFrood
Until about a hundred years ago, extraterrestrial intelligence would have had no way of knowing there was intelligent life on Earth unless they actually happened to visit. But since then, we've been putting out an awful lot of radio flux, and anyone listening nearby would have to know that we're here. They might send the welcome wagon... or they might call the exterminators.
I'm not saying I think it's likely that someone's going to pop into the solar system with a can of Raid, but if they do, now is the time to expect it.
TheFrood
Certainly no intelligent species would want to replace itself with machines, but I could easily see it happening anyway as an accident. A newly-created machine intelligence could very well decide that its biological creators are far too capricious and unstable for its own safety. If it's nice, it would simply try to get the hell out of there. If not, it might engineer a convenient plage to eliminate them.
TheFrood
And how exactly would that be done? "Yes, the XMMS folks wouldn't stop development of their audio player, so we had no choice but to terminate development of MS Office for Linux. I hope it's obvious that this is the fault of the XMMS development team for not knuchkling under."
TheFrood
That's hilarious, but I think it really is true. Microsoft folks have spent day upon day repeating their party line: "We're not doing anything wrong. We're just being competitive." Anyone who keeps repeating something like that will sooner or later become convinced that it's true. Even if they didn't believe it at first, they'll eventually start agreeing with their own propoganda. It happened to the officials of the former Soviet Union, and it's apparently happened to the people at Microsoft. I think that's why Microsoft has bungled the antitrust case so badly; they really are convinced that they've done nothing wrong, even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, because they've brainwashed themselves with their own press releases.
TheFrood
...says the poster who just admitted he hadn't even read the whole article. Really, if you're going to claim that the author doesn't support his assertions, the least you can do is read the entire thing and make sure that's the case.
The Frood
These developments have greatly increased the communications interconnectedness of all the countries in the world, especially technologically advanced nations like the US and the Netherlands.
Does anyone have any idea why the Netherlands was mentioned specifically in this sentence?
But, pornography aside, what is there of real historical value on the net? Sure there are any number of mindless geocities homepages full of drivel about people's pets, but sifitng through this would drive anyone mad and there are a lot more "insightful" sources already available about today's culture. Unfortunately the web as it stands at the moment shows the worst side of humanity rather than its best side - historians looking through terabytes of things like the anarchists cookbook, virulent anti-Christian diabtribes, terrorist manifestos and race hate sites will hardly pick up a balanced view of society will they?!
Let's assume for the moment that your characterization of the current state of the web is accurate -- it's all about terrorism, porn, and hatred. If that's the case, don't you think future historians will want to know this? Don't you think they should know it? If the web shows the "worst side of humanity," doesn't that say something about society today? You seem to be suggesting that we omit the web from the historical record because it makes us look bad.
I'd also like to point out that the internet, as "unbalanced" as it currently is, is still the most egalitarian communications medium in history. Your rationale for rejecting the web as a source of history is that not everyone in the world is wired. If that criterion were applied to all written/spoken/filmed/televised media in history, we wouldn't have a single source for historical information. Even personal written correspondence doesn't count, because it excludes those who are illiterate.
[It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it. ]
But unless it will be used as the basis for future studies then this project is a waste of time, so I don't think you have a valid point here.
Well, in the rest of my paragraph, which you snipped, I pointed out that future historians, who will do studies on it, will be smart enough to take into account the fact that the majority of the human race is still unwired. The best thing we can do to help them is to simply provide as much information as possible.
Sure, this'll be a useful reference for future generations, won't it? I'm sorry, but as much of a fan of the web as I am, I really wouldn't consider it to be something worthy of archival in the state that it is at the moment. Why? Well, because currently the web is still in the transitional period between the days of ARPAnet and purely academic use and acceptance as a medium through which the general public can communicate. And as such, it's still in a state where teething problems overwhelm content.
The "teething problems" are what makes it historically interesting! I think historians of the future will be much more interested in looking at the development of the web through trial and error than at the finished product.
Anyway, any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
It's not a study, it's an archive. The purpose of this project is to collect data, not to analyze it or place any sort of value judgement on it. Yes, the contents of today's web are reflective of the current online population. But it's rather naive to assume that future historians won't be smart enough to realize that and account for it. They'll know that the vast majority of today's world is still unwired, just as modern historians know, for example, that the vast majority of people in the 18th century did not have access to a printing press.
This is really a cool idea. Up 'til know, we've taken it for granted that our media would last long enough for historians to make use of it in the future. With the web, you can't assume that's the case, so it's good that someone's taking it upon themselves to archive the web.
/. story put the number of Apache-served websites at about 10 million. Since Apache has roughly two-thirds of the market, that makes the total number of web sites 15 million. If sites average, say, 10Mb in size (wild guess), then it looks like 150 terabytes would be enough to store the entire web.
But I want to know more:
How deep does this archiving go? Are they going to store every single page and image of every single website?
How much storage space is required for the whole web? Wild guess: A recent
What software/OSes are they using for this project?
When do we get to see the archive?