Peace, love and understanding has nothing to do with defending yourself. The martial arts are primarily a means of defense, not attack, and are said to be quite handy against guns, knives and indeed rocks. You can love your fellow man and wear body armour, to much the same effect. Peace does not require intimidating everyone else into cowardice. It is quite sufficient to make hostile intent completely ineffective.
(Hell, most geeks already know this. Which is a more effective way to stop someone reading your e-mail? Threatening them or encrypting it?)
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent, a wise man once said. I beg to differ. It is usually the first. It is the competent who defer it until all other options have failed, and even then the most competent would seek to find ways to not have to resort to it.
IANAL, but I'm not sure he does. Craigslist's TOS makes it clear they do not offer privacy in legal issues, and since the papers were served against Craigslist and not against a John Doe whom Craigslist can identify, he would probably have no legal standing on the matter.
And that is a failure of the system. IMHO, whether a case is civil or criminal, if there seem to be excellent grounds for a case and the principles involved would have non-trivial repercussions one way or the other, legal aid should be available. The problem with having it too universal is that it'd get abused, but if you confine it in civil cases to matters where there's a major impact, then it should be safe enough. The idea of it being restricted is to not waste public money or court time on things that aren't critical, but I'd call cult activity (and this Texas group is clearly a cult) a sufficient public menace to warrant special circumstances. All rules, no matter how well-intentioned or how good under normal conditions, need a contingency clause for exceptional cases that should be covered but aren't explicitly.
Tests have also shown that below the age of 10, white girls outperform white boys at maths, but this reverses above that age. Whether asian boys outperform asian girls below the age of 10 is not clear. However, the essence of this study and others is that the ability to do maths is not gender-based but is primarily a social thing. Those who are expected to be good at maths will outperform in maths those who are expected to be poor at maths, and that the ratio will be comparable between any such groups in any culture, no matter what the supposed factor is that makes people good at maths in each respective culture.
I do believe that it is not just cultural prejudice, but also a matter of communication style. It is harder to learn a subject when you do not communicate in the same way as the person doing the instructing. I firmly believe that classes should be streamed according to ability in that specific subject, but perhaps more importantly also streamed according to communication style. I believe that the former will accelerate learning where there is a minimal communication barrier, but the latter is vital if you are to maximize the number of people able to take advantage of this and not have people artificially slowed. Since we're talking about 50% of the population being hampered by communication and cultural issues, versus maybe 10% hampered by difference in ability, communication streaming would logically seem to offer the greatest initial gains. Ability streaming then converts the gains into maximizations.
Fairy nuff. Still, the stable version is 3.8.2, not 3.6.0, so there's still a distinct gap in updates, though it's not as bad as I'd thought (ie: missing).
Ok, I'm going to have to make one of those rare corrections. (ha!) It was on the fun3d.larc.nasa.gov website and on some of their other CFD pages, but is no longer present. If you go to g95's website and look under status (or just go to http://www.g95.org/g95_status.html), and look for fun3d, you will see an excerpt from the authors to the same effect.
Ok, I finally got a response back from the atlas3 link you gave, but you might not like it. I'm thinking it's a false message, though, and more of a timeout issue:
Being confused is healthy. G95 (g95.sourceforge.net) is NOT gfortran, which is a Fortran 90 implementation, not a Fortran 95 implementation. gfortran is also listed by organizations such as NASA as not to be used due to severe bugs, with instructions to use g95 instead. Hey, I can only go by what they say. I can't access the other pages you linked to - I suspect they're now slashdotted. However, HDF5 1.8.1 is extremely stable and is the version people are supposed to be using. No idea what version of ATLAS Debian is using, but the latest stable (and yes, it is stable) version is 3.8.2. If Debian is using anything later than 3.6, I'd be surprised. MUMPS is used in specialist areas. By not including it, it obviously won't impact anyone who does use Debian since, if they needed MUMPS, Debian isn't something they'd use. It's self-fulfilling and therefore quite useless as a measure of interest. The question should be one of "if MUMPS was included, what changes would there be in the size and nature of the userbase, if any"? That is entirely different, as it does not fall into the recursive dependency trap.
Part of the problem is that UIs either assume a single, universal level of skill and aptitude, or on the very few occasions they allow you to enable/disable advanced features, it's so coarse-grain that you're expected to move from rank beginner to genius AND face a radically different set of menus where things are not at the same place as they were.
What is needed is a way to allow fine-grained control over what options are seen and (now, the hard part) keep the UI reasonably uniform so that new options don't necessitate relearning a software component.
What is also needed is for there to be a simple expert system shell that the user can enter, describe their strengths and weaknesses, and have the system auto-configure itself for that kind of user as well as auto-configuration can be expected to do. No two users are the same, everyone has their own needs, and setting a bunch of flags on/off based on the answers to maybe four or five questions is trivial to a computer program.
Just looked through the Debian package list. Looks like there's a lot I'd have expected that isn't there (ATLAS seems to be missing, as are the MUMPS and Fortran 95 programming languages - gfortran's f90 support is considered an old dialect, buggy and inadequate by a number of Fortran sites, and I didn't see Erlang on the list either). There are also a lot of ancient versions. For example, HDF5 1.6.6 has not been supported for some time. HDF 1.6.7 is the supported current version in the 1.6.x branch and has been since February, but the website makes it clear that the 1.8.x branch is intended as the official current release.
This is something that isn't Debian't fault -- there are way too many packages with way too many updates and far too few people helping -- and is something that all distributins suffer from. The specialist distros may help, but I don't like the concept. Beter to have a single core distro with extensions for specialist needs, as then you can combine extensions according to problem-space rather than dealing with the version hell that always happens when you mix distros.
IANAL, but IMHO, the blogger was probably protected under British law (what he was doing was reasonable, he was sticking to the truth, no reputations were harmed in the eyes of a reasonable person, etc) and he may have been eligible for legal aid. The Unions in Britain vary wildly, but have been known to go out on a limb to support those who were considered friendly and supportive. Those who were dismissed unfairly should have been eligible for protection and could probably have won compensation for violation of contract, unfair dismissal and - if it was on religious grounds - for discrimination. (Religious freedom in England has been protected for some time, but what falls under the umbrella of freedom is much narrower than in the US. Interestingly, for a country will less mandated religious "freedom", I would regard England as having far greater religious tolerance.")
Had this gone to court, it seems almost certain the blogger would have won outright. Had it gone further, the House of Lords would probably have advocated annexing Texas, and the European Court of Human Rights might well have ordered an immediate airstrike on the Texans. Neither has much sympathy for the deliberate abuse of law, and in this case can easily be imagined as reaching a state of outright fury.
Getting back to the blogger's inability to defend themselves, that is supposed to be what legal aid is for. The fact that legal aid failed (for whatever reason) to enable the blogger to present their case to a fair an impartial court, as has been the lawful right of all British citizens since the signing of the Magna Carta, is a disgrace, dishonour and indignity that Britain must now carry, until or unless those rights and dignities denied are restored in full.
...I'd be arguing the case that the person was likely mentally ill and needed involuntary commitment for the two years, but anyone who escapes for the purpose of killing themselves...??? If someone is determined enough to self-harm, they will succeed, treatment or no. His wife - well, he probably wasn't issued the gun in prison. Was she expecting a shoot-out with the FBI? If so, she was equally determined to die, and again there is nothing anyone could really have done to change that.
The killed infant and the seriously injured girl (the update pointed to by the story says she has neck wounds) - well, yes, I do feel sorry for them. I hope, I really hope, the girl gets adequate treatment to recover fully. Health care isn't cheap and is way too mercenary. Worse, it is likely to only cover the physical issues, not the psychological ones likely to crop up when your head is nearly blown off your shoulders at close range.
Is society better off? Well, the sad reality is that there are probably far more people in all segments of society who are a detriment to life than an asset, so probably society is better off but, unless you're planning on identifying indisputably all of the others and doing something about them, not by any detectable degree or in any useful way.
Yes. You need to have it marked +5 (something else), where one previous negative moderation has occurred. The next moderation must be -1 Redundant, followed by the prior negative moderation being lost through the person posting in that discussion. If two prior negative moderations have occurred, it used to be possible to get a +6 moderation by this method, but from the lack of any examples in a long time, I believe that has been eliminated. +6 Troll was a difficult one to achieve, but could be done.
He seems to have shot himself (a felon) and his wife (who, by helping a felon escape, would have been wanted on felony charges). The rewards must start to stack up, at that point. He shot two innocent people too, but since that's never stopped the US Army, I assume that'll be written off as him just being a bad apple in the barrel.
...tends to be taken rather more seriously than in the US. There is no automatic right to free speech (except on Speaker's Corner, where even the slander laws can't touch you) and the penalties aren't gentle - the satirical magazine Private Eye found that one out. However, the standards of proof are high and a false accuser can expect rough treatment too from both the courts and the press. That is why frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the legal system are rarer in England. In this case, however, if the alleged victim was indeed a victim of libel, the damage will be hard to undo. What is on the Internet is there forever and falsehoods will continue to circulate in all perpetuity. This is not the trivial stuff of a local gossip causing problems in a local village, where you can simply move. You cannot (yet) move off-planet.
The correct action is to give Larry Godwin as much rope as he wants. Record everything. Document everything. Ensure this pooled information is made accessible to the blogger somehow - someone'll know who it is. People who are upset make mistakes. Pushing them deeper into their paranoia and neurotic state of mind will cause them to make bigger and bigger mistakes. It's not entrapment, as nobody is making Mr Godwin do anything illegal, they're not even suggesting it. It would be his choice, with the alternative being to back off. He has total free will. Once he has done something openly illegal, provided immunity doesn't cover him, arrest him for it.Even if immunity did cover him, this is election year and politicians aren't going to want to leave a loose cannon in a public position. He'll be removed from office.
The result will not be a court decision (which never helps anyone) but will give whistleblowers additional measures they can take.
How do you propose to violate Godwin's Law? Do you even know what Godwin's Law is?
(For those interested in the subject, Godwin's Law states that as the length of any discussion approaches infinity, the probability of a reference to Naziism within that thread in any context approaches 1. It says nothing about who wins, who loses, or even when the event occurs, only that the probability goes up with time. You could substitute any word or phrase you like into that equation and it would still hold true. In an infinitely long thread, you are absolutely certain to have at least one mention of every single concept, object, philosophy and idea ever known to humanity, because of the way probability works. In other words, the law is senselessly specific and statistically meaningless.)
Slashdot Mirror
Peace, love and understanding has nothing to do with defending yourself. The martial arts are primarily a means of defense, not attack, and are said to be quite handy against guns, knives and indeed rocks. You can love your fellow man and wear body armour, to much the same effect. Peace does not require intimidating everyone else into cowardice. It is quite sufficient to make hostile intent completely ineffective.
(Hell, most geeks already know this. Which is a more effective way to stop someone reading your e-mail? Threatening them or encrypting it?)
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent, a wise man once said. I beg to differ. It is usually the first. It is the competent who defer it until all other options have failed, and even then the most competent would seek to find ways to not have to resort to it.
The Aussies have 99% of the world's supply of a war-fuelling substance, and it's not a lager?
IANAL, but I'm not sure he does. Craigslist's TOS makes it clear they do not offer privacy in legal issues, and since the papers were served against Craigslist and not against a John Doe whom Craigslist can identify, he would probably have no legal standing on the matter.
And 75% of the animal kingdom, 50% of the plants and at least 10% of geological formations.
No, once they'd caught they buyer, they just put the tickets up on eBay.
And that is a failure of the system. IMHO, whether a case is civil or criminal, if there seem to be excellent grounds for a case and the principles involved would have non-trivial repercussions one way or the other, legal aid should be available. The problem with having it too universal is that it'd get abused, but if you confine it in civil cases to matters where there's a major impact, then it should be safe enough. The idea of it being restricted is to not waste public money or court time on things that aren't critical, but I'd call cult activity (and this Texas group is clearly a cult) a sufficient public menace to warrant special circumstances. All rules, no matter how well-intentioned or how good under normal conditions, need a contingency clause for exceptional cases that should be covered but aren't explicitly.
Tests have also shown that below the age of 10, white girls outperform white boys at maths, but this reverses above that age. Whether asian boys outperform asian girls below the age of 10 is not clear. However, the essence of this study and others is that the ability to do maths is not gender-based but is primarily a social thing. Those who are expected to be good at maths will outperform in maths those who are expected to be poor at maths, and that the ratio will be comparable between any such groups in any culture, no matter what the supposed factor is that makes people good at maths in each respective culture.
I do believe that it is not just cultural prejudice, but also a matter of communication style. It is harder to learn a subject when you do not communicate in the same way as the person doing the instructing. I firmly believe that classes should be streamed according to ability in that specific subject, but perhaps more importantly also streamed according to communication style. I believe that the former will accelerate learning where there is a minimal communication barrier, but the latter is vital if you are to maximize the number of people able to take advantage of this and not have people artificially slowed. Since we're talking about 50% of the population being hampered by communication and cultural issues, versus maybe 10% hampered by difference in ability, communication streaming would logically seem to offer the greatest initial gains. Ability streaming then converts the gains into maximizations.
Fairy nuff. Still, the stable version is 3.8.2, not 3.6.0, so there's still a distinct gap in updates, though it's not as bad as I'd thought (ie: missing).
Ok, I'm going to have to make one of those rare corrections. (ha!) It was on the fun3d.larc.nasa.gov website and on some of their other CFD pages, but is no longer present. If you go to g95's website and look under status (or just go to http://www.g95.org/g95_status.html), and look for fun3d, you will see an excerpt from the authors to the same effect.
I dunno. It's hard to find good, solid paperweights these days.
Ok, I finally got a response back from the atlas3 link you gave, but you might not like it. I'm thinking it's a false message, though, and more of a timeout issue:
Error
Package not available in this suite.
Being confused is healthy. G95 (g95.sourceforge.net) is NOT gfortran, which is a Fortran 90 implementation, not a Fortran 95 implementation. gfortran is also listed by organizations such as NASA as not to be used due to severe bugs, with instructions to use g95 instead. Hey, I can only go by what they say. I can't access the other pages you linked to - I suspect they're now slashdotted. However, HDF5 1.8.1 is extremely stable and is the version people are supposed to be using. No idea what version of ATLAS Debian is using, but the latest stable (and yes, it is stable) version is 3.8.2. If Debian is using anything later than 3.6, I'd be surprised. MUMPS is used in specialist areas. By not including it, it obviously won't impact anyone who does use Debian since, if they needed MUMPS, Debian isn't something they'd use. It's self-fulfilling and therefore quite useless as a measure of interest. The question should be one of "if MUMPS was included, what changes would there be in the size and nature of the userbase, if any"? That is entirely different, as it does not fall into the recursive dependency trap.
Part of the problem is that UIs either assume a single, universal level of skill and aptitude, or on the very few occasions they allow you to enable/disable advanced features, it's so coarse-grain that you're expected to move from rank beginner to genius AND face a radically different set of menus where things are not at the same place as they were. What is needed is a way to allow fine-grained control over what options are seen and (now, the hard part) keep the UI reasonably uniform so that new options don't necessitate relearning a software component. What is also needed is for there to be a simple expert system shell that the user can enter, describe their strengths and weaknesses, and have the system auto-configure itself for that kind of user as well as auto-configuration can be expected to do. No two users are the same, everyone has their own needs, and setting a bunch of flags on/off based on the answers to maybe four or five questions is trivial to a computer program.
The only colour plane that works right now is blue.
Just looked through the Debian package list. Looks like there's a lot I'd have expected that isn't there (ATLAS seems to be missing, as are the MUMPS and Fortran 95 programming languages - gfortran's f90 support is considered an old dialect, buggy and inadequate by a number of Fortran sites, and I didn't see Erlang on the list either). There are also a lot of ancient versions. For example, HDF5 1.6.6 has not been supported for some time. HDF 1.6.7 is the supported current version in the 1.6.x branch and has been since February, but the website makes it clear that the 1.8.x branch is intended as the official current release.
This is something that isn't Debian't fault -- there are way too many packages with way too many updates and far too few people helping -- and is something that all distributins suffer from. The specialist distros may help, but I don't like the concept. Beter to have a single core distro with extensions for specialist needs, as then you can combine extensions according to problem-space rather than dealing with the version hell that always happens when you mix distros.
...this release had been called Lemmy instead, the jokes would have been, well, I guess louder for a start.
IANAL, but IMHO, the blogger was probably protected under British law (what he was doing was reasonable, he was sticking to the truth, no reputations were harmed in the eyes of a reasonable person, etc) and he may have been eligible for legal aid. The Unions in Britain vary wildly, but have been known to go out on a limb to support those who were considered friendly and supportive. Those who were dismissed unfairly should have been eligible for protection and could probably have won compensation for violation of contract, unfair dismissal and - if it was on religious grounds - for discrimination. (Religious freedom in England has been protected for some time, but what falls under the umbrella of freedom is much narrower than in the US. Interestingly, for a country will less mandated religious "freedom", I would regard England as having far greater religious tolerance.")
Had this gone to court, it seems almost certain the blogger would have won outright. Had it gone further, the House of Lords would probably have advocated annexing Texas, and the European Court of Human Rights might well have ordered an immediate airstrike on the Texans. Neither has much sympathy for the deliberate abuse of law, and in this case can easily be imagined as reaching a state of outright fury.
Getting back to the blogger's inability to defend themselves, that is supposed to be what legal aid is for. The fact that legal aid failed (for whatever reason) to enable the blogger to present their case to a fair an impartial court, as has been the lawful right of all British citizens since the signing of the Magna Carta, is a disgrace, dishonour and indignity that Britain must now carry, until or unless those rights and dignities denied are restored in full.
...I'd be arguing the case that the person was likely mentally ill and needed involuntary commitment for the two years, but anyone who escapes for the purpose of killing themselves...??? If someone is determined enough to self-harm, they will succeed, treatment or no. His wife - well, he probably wasn't issued the gun in prison. Was she expecting a shoot-out with the FBI? If so, she was equally determined to die, and again there is nothing anyone could really have done to change that.
The killed infant and the seriously injured girl (the update pointed to by the story says she has neck wounds) - well, yes, I do feel sorry for them. I hope, I really hope, the girl gets adequate treatment to recover fully. Health care isn't cheap and is way too mercenary. Worse, it is likely to only cover the physical issues, not the psychological ones likely to crop up when your head is nearly blown off your shoulders at close range.
Is society better off? Well, the sad reality is that there are probably far more people in all segments of society who are a detriment to life than an asset, so probably society is better off but, unless you're planning on identifying indisputably all of the others and doing something about them, not by any detectable degree or in any useful way.
On Slashdot and Digg, it seems reasonable to assume all threads are random.
Yes. You need to have it marked +5 (something else), where one previous negative moderation has occurred. The next moderation must be -1 Redundant, followed by the prior negative moderation being lost through the person posting in that discussion. If two prior negative moderations have occurred, it used to be possible to get a +6 moderation by this method, but from the lack of any examples in a long time, I believe that has been eliminated. +6 Troll was a difficult one to achieve, but could be done.
He seems to have shot himself (a felon) and his wife (who, by helping a felon escape, would have been wanted on felony charges). The rewards must start to stack up, at that point. He shot two innocent people too, but since that's never stopped the US Army, I assume that'll be written off as him just being a bad apple in the barrel.
...tends to be taken rather more seriously than in the US. There is no automatic right to free speech (except on Speaker's Corner, where even the slander laws can't touch you) and the penalties aren't gentle - the satirical magazine Private Eye found that one out. However, the standards of proof are high and a false accuser can expect rough treatment too from both the courts and the press. That is why frivolous lawsuits and abuses of the legal system are rarer in England. In this case, however, if the alleged victim was indeed a victim of libel, the damage will be hard to undo. What is on the Internet is there forever and falsehoods will continue to circulate in all perpetuity. This is not the trivial stuff of a local gossip causing problems in a local village, where you can simply move. You cannot (yet) move off-planet.
The correct action is to give Larry Godwin as much rope as he wants. Record everything. Document everything. Ensure this pooled information is made accessible to the blogger somehow - someone'll know who it is. People who are upset make mistakes. Pushing them deeper into their paranoia and neurotic state of mind will cause them to make bigger and bigger mistakes. It's not entrapment, as nobody is making Mr Godwin do anything illegal, they're not even suggesting it. It would be his choice, with the alternative being to back off. He has total free will. Once he has done something openly illegal, provided immunity doesn't cover him, arrest him for it.Even if immunity did cover him, this is election year and politicians aren't going to want to leave a loose cannon in a public position. He'll be removed from office.
The result will not be a court decision (which never helps anyone) but will give whistleblowers additional measures they can take.
How do you propose to violate Godwin's Law? Do you even know what Godwin's Law is?
(For those interested in the subject, Godwin's Law states that as the length of any discussion approaches infinity, the probability of a reference to Naziism within that thread in any context approaches 1. It says nothing about who wins, who loses, or even when the event occurs, only that the probability goes up with time. You could substitute any word or phrase you like into that equation and it would still hold true. In an infinitely long thread, you are absolutely certain to have at least one mention of every single concept, object, philosophy and idea ever known to humanity, because of the way probability works. In other words, the law is senselessly specific and statistically meaningless.)