Language changes with usage, so hard and soft g both seem to be reasonable conclusions. If not, we can always keep going back, all the way to Old English:
The class of problem, "runaway trim" can be caused by a few different systems malfunctioning. Most of those systems also exist on the old 737, but MCAS is new to the MAX and behaves a little differently, though if you figure that out, the remedial action is the same.
This isn't quite true - in older versions of the 737, pulling up on the stick against runaway trim prevented stabilizers (automatically acting or otherwise) from moving the nose down, in addition to the checklist item of disabling it through switches:
In addition, the MCAS altered the control column response to the stabilizer movement. Pulling back on the column normally interrupts any stabilizer nose-down movement, but with MCAS operating that control column function was disabled.
There was no MCAS documentation and training, so that is the likely reason the pilots did not remember to follow the checklist - they tried the same thing they did on the old 737 models and it didn't work, because of the actions of a system they weren't told about.
The judge ruled not that Twitter is a designated public forum, but that the replies section to the President's tweets are a designated public forum:
We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account -- the “interactive space” where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s tweets -- are properly analyzed under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.
I don't know public forum law well enough to judge the decision (pdf) fully, but here's an attempt at an analogy:
A "meeting for hire" company starts running open to the public events where one person makes a statement and then anyone else can come in and discuss it with them and others. If the government starts paying them to run public events where it makes official government statements for public discussion, it can't bar specific people from entering and joining the discussion, as it is still a public forum even though they've hired someone else to set it up. At the same time, the "meeting for hire" company wouldn't be required to accept the government as a client.
Because these are designed to replace their use of UPS and the post office. I live in the suburbs, close enough to a major city that over the years Amazon deliveries have moved from UPS/USPS to primarily Amazon's delivery people (which are currently Uber-style "contractors") over the last few years. Amazon's delivery people are both obviously cheaper for them and fairly terrible at their job.
Did you just randomly combine numbers? Your math has nothing to do with anything.
.18 parts per trillion = 0.00000018 parts per million for PFTBA, vs 400 parts per million for CO2.
Even at 7000 times stronger for PFTBA, the PFTBA would be equivalent to .00000018 * 7000 = 0.00126 parts per million of carbon, which is .00126 / 400 = 0.00000315, or 0.000315 percent of the effect of the CO2.
The reporting on this was overblown. All that was issue was two examples -
The controversy began in May, when Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced that revised editions of high school textbooks would leave out discussion of two examples of evolution: the Archaeopteryx, an ancient ancestor to birds, and ancestors of the modern horse.
Not removing the subject from the textbooks -
The STR's Lim, meanwhile, says the group won't end its efforts to remove other evolution examples from Korean textbooks "one by one."
But that could be difficult, notes Choe. Government regulations mandate that all Korean science textbooks include a section on evolutionary theory with a discussion of the fossil record. STR sidestepped those rules by targeting two examples of evolution whose exact mechanisms evolutionary biologists still puzzle over, Choe says. "Korean newspapers give the impression that the whole discussion of evolution is disappearing" from textbooks, Choe says, "which is ridiculous, but exactly what the STR was aiming at."
So evolution in textbooks was never in danger, just two diagrams. And they were only in danger because they were apparently outdated; and they're not being removed, just fixed.
And you're sure of this why? And from geek.com (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/how-much-of-your-phone-is-yours-20111115/):
Currently, Trevor has found CarrierIQ in a number of Sprint phones, including HTC and Samsung Android devices. CarrierIQ is confirmed to be found on the iPhone or on feature phones, but Trevor has found RIM’s Blackberry handsets and several Nokia devices with CarrierIQ on board as well.
This may just be a terribly worded sentence and CarrierIQ isn't on the iPhone (and I can't find any other cites), but even if this specific software isn't there, that doesn't mean other software that does the same thing under the excuse of "improving the network" isn't. Further, "Apple doesn't engage in abuse <x>" is a bullshit excuse for other problems.
I think you just have to state that it is a religion, if all you want to do is call it that. I would you want an exemption, I would imagine the burden of proof that it's a real belief, and not one ginned up for the exemption is on a sliding scale.
Under current US law while you don't need to belong to an organized church (Seshadri v. Kasraian for one example), it does need to be sincere and there has been some attempts to distinguish "personal creeds" from religions (Brown vs Pena gave: (1) whether the belief is based on atheory of "man's nature or his place in the Universe," (2) which is not merely a personal preference but has an institutional quality about it, and (3) which is sincere. Unique personal moral preferences cannot be characterized as religious beliefs) and marijuana-related religions (for one example) have done rather poorly in court.
As for the broader context of exceptions, Employment Division vs Smith gutted a lot of protections, but the various federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts passed in its wake have generally imposed some variant of a Strict Scrutiny test. Which I have no real problem with, as laws adhering to a standard of meeting a compelling government interest, and being narrowly tailored and using the least restrictive means seems like a good idea for laws.
Note that "wrong" refers to your comment as an analysis of the case in question. Your example is strictly accurate, it just isn't what happened in this case, either by the summary or article, and using it as the "moral of the story" is wrong.
I need to actually read the case, but: 1. Alice sends Bob a message 2. Bob decides to post the message on Facebook or even, the police ask Bob for the message and Bob says: Sure here you go! 3. Alice has no expectation of privacy from Bob because she chose to send him the message.
The above situation is already well established as being perfectly fine from long before the time of the Internet. The meaning of the term "Third Party" is at issue here, and third party does *not* necessarily mean your ISP. Look at the stored communications act for the rules on how email is treated by law enforcement. If you send your email to somebody (the "third party") that somebody can choose to hand it over to anyone. However, this isn't any different than sending a letter over the Pony Express and having the person you sent the letter to read it in the town square for everyone to here. Moral of the story: If you don't trust a third party, don't send them information!
Wrong, as you would learn if you RTFA:
1. Alice sends Bob a message. There are now copies of the message with both Alice (her ISP) and Bob (his ISP). 2. Alice has no expectation of privacy from the copy of the message with Bob because she chose to send him the message. 3. Court decides because Alice has no expectation of privacy from Bob's copy of the message, Alice has no expectation of privacy from Alice's copy of the message either, and so the police can grab the email from her ISP without a warrant or probable cause.
Two quotes from Kerr, now that the site is back up:
The conceptual error in Rehberg is in treating Fourth Amendment rights in the copy stored at the ISP as if it were the same as the Fourth Amendment rights in the copy that was delivered.
Moreover, the court applied to the emails seized that Rehberg received as well as sent (again quoting Kerr):
The complaint suggests that the government obtained both incoming and outgoing e-mails stored with Rehberg’s ISP; according to the complaint, investigators “obtained Mr. Rehberg’s personal e-mails that were sent and received from his personal computer.”
The short version of the argument is that allowing a lot of character customization a) Can't fully achieve the goal of having the player "become" the character, as the gameplay and narrative of the game provide their own limits; b) Doesn't really solve the problem of the interaction of race and video games; and c) Limits the games, because it prevents them from using meaningful character details as driving the narrative, gutting it. This misses the point to a great deal;
For (a) All creation has limits but that doesn't make it valueless or not an act of creation; even if the limits are that born within a game system.
For (b) it's true but character customization was never really aimed at solving the interaction fully.
For (c) not all details of a character limit the story of a game (would it really matter if Gordon Freeman was black?) and if a game is anything other than a railroad it needs to branch at some point anyway, so the branching of a game in response to character creation (see Dragon Age's multiple origin stories) is not a meaningful limit of narrative.
In longer form, his argument is full of holes in general; he starts off by begging the question, complete with passive-agressive "I'm going to get modded down for this, but" bullshit:
Now, to offend half the blogosphere offhand: For the purpose of this article, we will consider avatar customization a convenient narrative cop-out. We shall also assume that no mechanisms are in place stopping developers from writing and designing heterogeneous yet fully structured, narrative-based computer games with carefully constructed and immutable, unchangeable characters.
So he assumes the practice he's complaining about is the only thing stopping him from getting the games he wants (it isn't, but I can see the assumption as useful for purposes of argument) and then assumes the practice he disagrees with is valueless (it isn't). He even admits that in terms of narrative etc he's dismissing the value with nothing more than the word "seems":
(Obviously, there are occasions wherein the “tabula rasa” scenario is a fully motivated one, either by its ludic or narrative function, but assuming this to be a default state to be aspired to seems ultimately misguided beyond the MMO.)
As he asserts this without evidence, I'll dismiss it with little more (At very least, games in the line of Fallout or (from what I know about it) Dragon Age are clear examples in opposition to this).
He goes on for a while about minorities and gaming, nothing that minorities are underrepresented in gaming, and that the common approach of reading % of characters as a measure of this is a bit of tokenism and misses the point – that the experience of growing up white and growing up, say, Latino are different and this affects a lot of things in subtle ways, and just changing a character's skin isn't going to reflect these ways. And that making this irrelevant works against both the white and Latino's experience. This is true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't have much to do with character creation:
a) I've always thought the % studies as a quick and dirty measure of how much of the creators are working to take those experiences into account. If the numbers are heavily lopsided, then it's a sign the probably aren't; if the numbers are more even there's at least a chance they are. b) More importantly, the ability of a trait to help someone connect with a character isn't necessarily connected with the importance in the game world. To paraphrase from a shadowrun sourcebook, “Who cares about the color of someone's skin when the guy over there is a rock with hands as big as your head?” This is even true for characters set initially in our on world (c.f. Gordon Freeman). So the race of the character could end up being meaningful for the player and not meaningful for the game world. c) Even where it is relevant, it can be bra
I believe it could apply to databases as well. Excel could be considered (in a loose way) to be a database that includes the capability to format the data.
The ruling applies to all digital evidence (databases, excel sheets, text documents, images, whatever). I'm just wondering (a) where the summary got it from and (b) why a number of people are acting like the ruling is limited to databases, given that neither the facts of the case nor the scope of the ruling deal with them specifically.
It explicitly sets down a rule applying to *all* electronic media search warrants (though it will only apply to federal courts in the 9th circuit). The ruling's core is about the method of electronic searches and the plain sight doctrine, and eviscerates the usage of the latter for electronic media:
In general, we adopt Tamura's solution to the problem of necessary over-seizing of evidence: When the government wishes to obtain a warrant to examine a computer hard drive or electronic storage medium in searching for certain incriminating files, or when a search for evidence could result in the seizure of a computer, see, e.g., United States v. Giberson, 527 F.3d 882 (9th Cir. 2008), magistrate judges must be UNITED STATES v. COMPREHENSIVE DRUG TESTING, INC. 11891 vigilant in observing the guidance we have set out throughout our opinion, which can be summed up as follows: 1. Magistrates should insist that the government waive reliance upon the plain view doctrine in digital evidence cases. See p. 11876 supra. 2. Segregation and redaction must be either done by specialized personnel or an independent third party. See pp. 11880-81 supra. If the segregation is to be done by government computer personnel, it must agree in the warrant application that the computer personnel will not disclose to the investigators any information other than that which is the target of the warrant. 3. Warrants and subpoenas must disclose the actual risks of destruction of information as well as prior efforts to seize that information in other judicial fora. See pp. 11877-78, 11886-87 supra. 4. The government's search protocol must be designed to uncover only the information for which it has probable cause, and only that information may be examined by the case agents. See pp. 11878, 11880-81 supra. 5. The government must destroy or, if the recipient may lawfully possess it, return non-responsive data, keeping the issuing magistrate informed about when it has done so and what it has kept. See p. 11881-82 supra.
So while it hasn't changed the plain sight doctrine per se, it's basically ordered magistrates to require cops to not use the plain sight doctrine when issuing a warrant for electronic data, among other restrictions to help ensure privacy. (Tamura is about a set of restrictions around searching things like filing cabinets, which have some of the same issues with the "plain sight" doctrine). Orin Kerr has a good post about the decision, which is part of a series of posts he's done on the situation.
So it's an extremely important case for computer privacy, at least in the 9th circuit, although it will probably end up being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
Also, I have no idea why "database records" keeps coming up; the records searched were an excel sheet. The summary is terrible.
Please look at the "Wii" portion of that table. And then note the title of the GP post is "Please think of the Wiildren!"
Incidentally, the chart is still wrong, in that you can use GH / GH:WT instruments in Rock Band. The other way around (Rock Band in GH:WT) is a no-go however.
Jefferson (D-Icebox) is rather embarrassing (particularly in that he did survive re-election), but to be fair he hasn't been convicted yet. Pelosi and the Dems should expel him as soon as he inevitably is.
Well, this wasn't a recount, it was a count of absentee and early votes. Given the amount Republican candidates overperformed on Election Day in Alaska (probably Democrats stayed home with the election decided and Begich with a strong polling lead) and the better Democratic Early Voting turnout this year, the switch isn't too surprising.
The Franken/Coleman race hasn't been recounted, and corrections of the vote have gone both ways (it went slightly back towards Coleman recently).
And recounts usually go slightly Democratic because they: 1) Are hand counts, and therefore run into fewer undervotes and overvotes than scan machines; undervotes and overvotes are more common among less affluent, Democratic voters. 2) Later counts (recounts or otherwise) are the first to deal with provisional ballots, which are more common among less affluent voters, and also first time voters (which are also heavily democratic this year).
One thing you're missing is that the news media is largely event-driven. "Joe the Plumber" (and yes, the media "investigation" was idiotic) has been doing things - appearing at rallies, chasing the media, negotiating a recording contract, etc. Ayers are Wright aren't doing anything - Ayers is continuing at his job, and Wright hasn't talked to the press since I think late April. In that sort of situation, of course Wurzelbacher will get more coverage.
What, exactly, is new to say about Ayers and Wright? News media can report "Joe the Plumber attends campaign rally for McCain". They can't report "William Ayers goes to work again today" or "Jeremiah Wright walked around his house".
(And wasn't it ABC - that evil "mainstream media" - that turned up the "God Damn America" tape?)
As for the news media in general - Obama got a higher percentage of negative coverage than McCain over the summer IIRC, although he did get more coverage. McCain's certainly got more negatives recently, although given that his campaign is leaking like a sieve, he went 100% negative (at least for a while), and his running mate managed to beat Joe Biden in the say-something-dumb contest, completely even coverage was never going to happen.
I happen to believe that companies acting in good faith to help after 9/11, and who were given assurances that they would be immune from legal sanction, should in fact be immune from legal sanction.
If they had a reasonable, good faith belief that the requests were legal, they're already immune. But, you know, I don't actually know whether they had such a reasonable, good faith belief. The information I've found has been conflicted. The ideal way to find out would be, oh, a court case?
Telecom Immunity is bad because companies already have strong motivation to roll over on their customers if the government asks them to no matter the actual legality of the action. Retroactive Immunity like this is deadly because it removes any incentive for them not to, since they can just wait for Congress to make the act legal if - by some rare chance - they actually get caught doing something illegal. With no incentive at all to respect our rights, it seems unlikely that they're going to.
Furthermore, the expansion of surveillance authority in the bill is completely unnessecary. Retroactive FISA warrants are fine.
As Anderson notes, the defintion of "head" and "tail" are important; Anderson was initially basing his information off of the result of switching away from retail space. If less than 1% of the items of a market can make it into the inventory of a Wal-Mart, then even if the top 1% is 32% of sales, the Long Tail is pretty powerful.
Around the "research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail." From the article -
First, that a disproportionately large share of the audience for popular products consists of relatively light consumers, whereas a disproportionately large share of the audience for obscure products consists of relatively heavy consumers; and second, that consumers of obscure products generally appreciate them less than they do popular products.
Popularity and quality are not completely divorced from one another; I'd expect the more popular titles to better, just not nearly to the same extent as their sales would indicate.
I'd be interested in "in-genre vs out-of-genre" ratings for the heavy users as well; while the article indicates that heavy users rate popular titles disproportionately highly, this may be a result of the heavy users (who consume a lot of obscure stuff) working primarily within their genre as opposed to across genres. If you like action movies more than romantic comedies, you're more likely to give the action movie the higher rating if you both of them and they're of equal quality. I think it's likely (though not certain) that heavier consumers stick more to their genre/tastes even among the popular items, which would result in them having a disproportionately high rating for popular stuff compared to lighter consumers. (The article does note the disparity is true for products as a whole - heavier/obscure consumers are more likely to stick to a single genre - but doesn't run the comparison among the popular subset of their tastes).
As for the business suggestions, some of them seem ok, but others -
Given that obscure products tend to be appreciated less than hits, it will be very difficult to earn any kind of price premium for them.
There's a difference between knowing something isn't actually any good and the amount you'd pay for it, especially for obscure products. Consumer ratings are not directly analogous to the price premium someone would willingly pay for something, and not simply in the people buying things because they suck market; things like completionism and other impulses that aren't connected to a work's quality will lead to obscure works being worth high price premiums regardless of quality.
Donâ(TM)t radically alter blockbuster resource-allocation or product-portfolio management strategies. A few winners will still go a long way - probably even further than before.
While you shouldn't radically alter things, this is ignoring the issue of what the "head" is in the first place. If the "head" of an online store is bigger than the entirely inventory of a typical Wal-Mart, there's going to be a shift in marketing tactics.
The insurance companies maintain profitability by selecting price points that set them ahead, given all of the expenses they are likely to incur. The more fat people they have on their plans, the more likely they are to spend money on all the fat-related medical issues that arise, so the more they must charge.
So join a plan that penalizes obese people. Private companies can do that too, you know; there are at least some plans that raise prices for people in a certain BMI range. And many of them raise prices for smokers; so they both pay more.
If you enter into a plan that doesn't raise prices on smokers or the obese, that's your choice. In that case, you are choosing to subsidize them. And then whining about it. It's not unfair to you because it's a choice you are specifically making.
As usual, this door swings both ways, and it doesn't matter whether the health care is universal or privatized...any kind of medical insurance raises these issues.
Except with single-payer government care (universal care in some cases - such as a voucher system - can be setup to use the private system) *there is no choice*. In a private system, you can choose to join a plan that takes into account tobacco usage. Or choose one that doesn't. In single-payer government care, the government can force anyone they want to pay for the care in taxes, and then deny them care.
No, either you're misunderstanding or I'm not being clear. (Or I'm misunderstanding you). The first amendment does apply to them; what they did violated both the law and the constitution. There is discrimination against Christians, and when it does happen it's bad; see also a reference to an apparent bible club case, and a situation involving a wrestling coach and his assistant. I just don't think the cluelessness of school officials about the constitution has anything much to do with "political correctness" and I see the position you took in that original post that Christians are somehow the "real" targets of discrimination now as absurd; discrimination against them is neither greater than or more acceptable than discrimination against other groups, particularly under the law. Laws and the Constitution are broken and have to be defended; if they weren't ever broken they'd be somewhat unnecessary.
If you cannot find anything beyond the initial filing, the case must be false and thrown out. Also if several eye witnesses placed the Vice Principle at the school, but he claims he wasn't there, the case should be thrown out as well. Even if the child was written up and the lawyer showed the papers in court for having a bible as an offense. Then the money for the civil suit ran out and the case had to be dropped.
No, not finding any more information about the first case just meant I couldn't find any more information about it. Single articles, however, rarely give the full picture so I wanted to know more; it is certainly plausible. As for the other case, if you have any source for more information, I'd be happy to see it (Especially if they showed the writeup she got, which is information I hadn't found).
And your evidence is two actions by local school boards. How did local actions by school boards indicate current judicial thought on the first amendment?
Actually, it should have read "school officials" not "school boards" here. Grr. You always notice after posting...
Speaking for myself, I don't doubt that there are liberal idiots that misinterpret the establishment clause and the first amendment in general, just as there are conservative idiots that do the same. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with what you said:
For example a public school student cannot read a bible at recess, but they can read a Koran or a book on Secular Humanism. They cannot wear a cross or a chastity ring, but they can wear a star of David or a crescent or pentagram, or even a scarf or burka or anything they want as long as it isn't from a certain religion that is outlawed.
This is the standard whine about how despite the fact conservative christians held the presidency, both houses of congress, and had a majority of justices on the supreme court as recently as 2006 they're horribly horribly oppressed by the liberal PC Squad. And that somehow this is accepted as part of the constitution. And your evidence is two actions by local school boards. How did local actions by school boards indicate current judicial thought on the first amendment? And how did those two cases turn out?
A bit of searching on the second case shows: First the Vice Principal was identified as the person that told her off. The same Vice Principal that, um, wasn't at the school. Plus, the suit was apparently the first time the school heard about this, at which point they promptly investigated. Truly, our constitution has been rewritten.
I can't find anything about the first case beyond the initial filing.
As I said, there are undoubtedly school officials who act in violation of the Constitution like that, and if your two citations are accurate I strongly disagree with the (illegal and unconstitutional) actions of the school board officials involved. This, however, is a far cry from the idea that political correctness is law. For the latter, court decision citations are a minimum requirement, preferably US Supreme Court decisions, what with you complaining about the first amendment and all.
I expanded on the original quote from TFA. What makes sense is that people should need to pay the cost for their decisions, rather than getting to externalize it to the general population.
But externalization of some costs is a good idea. (Roads for example). Both for reasons of efficiency (you can't make everything a toll road) and fairness (a good road structure ultimately benefits everyone). And any sort of tax incentive for a "healthy lifestyle" will prevent certain things from being externalized that should be. An example that's been mentioned elsewhere on this page is drug side effects - some epilepsy drugs slow metabolism, and thus promote obesity. This seems like the kind of cost that should be externalized, but "healthy lifestyle" incentives will prevent this.
Slashdot Mirror
Language changes with usage, so hard and soft g both seem to be reasonable conclusions. If not, we can always keep going back, all the way to Old English:
the Old English word gif 'if' (pronounced "yiff")
(from a completely unrelated article about entries for the Universal Coded Character Set that has, of course, bounced around the internet since).
The class of problem, "runaway trim" can be caused by a few different systems malfunctioning. Most of those systems also exist on the old 737, but MCAS is new to the MAX and behaves a little differently, though if you figure that out, the remedial action is the same.
This isn't quite true - in older versions of the 737, pulling up on the stick against runaway trim prevented stabilizers (automatically acting or otherwise) from moving the nose down, in addition to the checklist item of disabling it through switches:
In addition, the MCAS altered the control column response to the stabilizer movement. Pulling back on the column normally interrupts any stabilizer nose-down movement, but with MCAS operating that control column function was disabled.
(from the Seattle Times article).
There was no MCAS documentation and training, so that is the likely reason the pilots did not remember to follow the checklist - they tried the same thing they did on the old 737 models and it didn't work, because of the actions of a system they weren't told about.
The judge ruled not that Twitter is a designated public forum, but that the replies section to the President's tweets are a designated public forum:
I don't know public forum law well enough to judge the decision (pdf) fully, but here's an attempt at an analogy:
A "meeting for hire" company starts running open to the public events where one person makes a statement and then anyone else can come in and discuss it with them and others. If the government starts paying them to run public events where it makes official government statements for public discussion, it can't bar specific people from entering and joining the discussion, as it is still a public forum even though they've hired someone else to set it up. At the same time, the "meeting for hire" company wouldn't be required to accept the government as a client.
Because these are designed to replace their use of UPS and the post office. I live in the suburbs, close enough to a major city that over the years Amazon deliveries have moved from UPS/USPS to primarily Amazon's delivery people (which are currently Uber-style "contractors") over the last few years. Amazon's delivery people are both obviously cheaper for them and fairly terrible at their job.
Did you just randomly combine numbers? Your math has nothing to do with anything.
Even at 7000 times stronger for PFTBA, the PFTBA would be equivalent to
.00000018 * 7000 = 0.00126 parts per million of carbon, which is
.00126 / 400 = 0.00000315, or 0.000315 percent of the effect of the CO2.
The reporting on this was overblown. All that was issue was two examples -
Not removing the subject from the textbooks -
So evolution in textbooks was never in danger, just two diagrams. And they were only in danger because they were apparently outdated; and they're not being removed, just fixed.
(See also this post by a Korean-American).
And you're sure of this why?
And from geek.com (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/how-much-of-your-phone-is-yours-20111115/):
This may just be a terribly worded sentence and CarrierIQ isn't on the iPhone (and I can't find any other cites), but even if this specific software isn't there, that doesn't mean other software that does the same thing under the excuse of "improving the network" isn't. Further, "Apple doesn't engage in abuse <x>" is a bullshit excuse for other problems.
some don't (Native Americans cannot use Peyote).
Nitpick, but you're wrong about Peyote.
I think you just have to state that it is a religion, if all you want to do is call it that. I would you want an exemption, I would imagine the burden of proof that it's a real belief, and not one ginned up for the exemption is on a sliding scale.
Under current US law while you don't need to belong to an organized church (Seshadri v. Kasraian for one example), it does need to be sincere and there has been some attempts to distinguish "personal creeds" from religions (Brown vs Pena gave:
(1) whether the belief is based on atheory of "man's nature or his place in the Universe,"
(2) which is not merely a personal preference but has an institutional quality about it, and
(3) which is sincere.
Unique personal moral preferences cannot be characterized as religious beliefs) and marijuana-related religions (for one example) have done rather poorly in court.
As for the broader context of exceptions, Employment Division vs Smith gutted a lot of protections, but the various federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts passed in its wake have generally imposed some variant of a Strict Scrutiny test. Which I have no real problem with, as laws adhering to a standard of meeting a compelling government interest, and being narrowly tailored and using the least restrictive means seems like a good idea for laws.
Note that "wrong" refers to your comment as an analysis of the case in question. Your example is strictly accurate, it just isn't what happened in this case, either by the summary or article, and using it as the "moral of the story" is wrong.
Wrong, as you would learn if you RTFA:
1. Alice sends Bob a message. There are now copies of the message with both Alice (her ISP) and Bob (his ISP).
2. Alice has no expectation of privacy from the copy of the message with Bob because she chose to send him the message.
3. Court decides because Alice has no expectation of privacy from Bob's copy of the message, Alice has no expectation of privacy from Alice's copy of the message either, and so the police can grab the email from her ISP without a warrant or probable cause.
Two quotes from Kerr, now that the site is back up:
Moreover, the court applied to the emails seized that Rehberg received as well as sent (again quoting Kerr):
The short version of the argument is that allowing a lot of character customization
a) Can't fully achieve the goal of having the player "become" the character, as the gameplay and narrative of the game provide their own limits;
b) Doesn't really solve the problem of the interaction of race and video games; and
c) Limits the games, because it prevents them from using meaningful character details as driving the narrative, gutting it.
This misses the point to a great deal;
For (a) All creation has limits but that doesn't make it valueless or not an act of creation; even if the limits are that born within a game system.
For (b) it's true but character customization was never really aimed at solving the interaction fully.
For (c) not all details of a character limit the story of a game (would it really matter if Gordon Freeman was black?) and if a game is anything other than a railroad it needs to branch at some point anyway, so the branching of a game in response to character creation (see Dragon Age's multiple origin stories) is not a meaningful limit of narrative.
In longer form, his argument is full of holes in general; he starts off by begging the question, complete with passive-agressive "I'm going to get modded down for this, but" bullshit:
So he assumes the practice he's complaining about is the only thing stopping him from getting the games he wants (it isn't, but I can see the assumption as useful for purposes of argument) and then assumes the practice he disagrees with is valueless (it isn't). He even admits that in terms of narrative etc he's dismissing the value with nothing more than the word "seems":
As he asserts this without evidence, I'll dismiss it with little more (At very least, games in the line of Fallout or (from what I know about it) Dragon Age are clear examples in opposition to this).
He goes on for a while about minorities and gaming, nothing that minorities are underrepresented in gaming, and that the common approach of reading % of characters as a measure of this is a bit of tokenism and misses the point – that the experience of growing up white and growing up, say, Latino are different and this affects a lot of things in subtle ways, and just changing a character's skin isn't going to reflect these ways. And that making this irrelevant works against both the white and Latino's experience. This is true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't have much to do with character creation:
a) I've always thought the % studies as a quick and dirty measure of how much of the creators are working to take those experiences into account. If the numbers are heavily lopsided, then it's a sign the probably aren't; if the numbers are more even there's at least a chance they are.
b) More importantly, the ability of a trait to help someone connect with a character isn't necessarily connected with the importance in the game world. To paraphrase from a shadowrun sourcebook, “Who cares about the color of someone's skin when the guy over there is a rock with hands as big as your head?” This is even true for characters set initially in our on world (c.f. Gordon Freeman). So the race of the character could end up being meaningful for the player and not meaningful for the game world.
c) Even where it is relevant, it can be bra
The ruling applies to all digital evidence (databases, excel sheets, text documents, images, whatever). I'm just wondering (a) where the summary got it from and (b) why a number of people are acting like the ruling is limited to databases, given that neither the facts of the case nor the scope of the ruling deal with them specifically.
The decision is here.
It explicitly sets down a rule applying to *all* electronic media search warrants (though it will only apply to federal courts in the 9th circuit). The ruling's core is about the method of electronic searches and the plain sight doctrine, and eviscerates the usage of the latter for electronic media :
So while it hasn't changed the plain sight doctrine per se, it's basically ordered magistrates to require cops to not use the plain sight doctrine when issuing a warrant for electronic data, among other restrictions to help ensure privacy. (Tamura is about a set of restrictions around searching things like filing cabinets, which have some of the same issues with the "plain sight" doctrine). Orin Kerr has a good post about the decision, which is part of a series of posts he's done on the situation.
So it's an extremely important case for computer privacy, at least in the 9th circuit, although it will probably end up being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
Also, I have no idea why "database records" keeps coming up; the records searched were an excel sheet. The summary is terrible.
you can use GH / GH:WT instruments in Rock Band.
Well, Rock Band 2 I should have said. Rock Band 1 the chart is probably accurate; I don't have the game for Wii.
Please look at the "Wii" portion of that table. And then note the title of the GP post is "Please think of the Wiildren!"
Incidentally, the chart is still wrong, in that you can use GH / GH:WT instruments in Rock Band. The other way around (Rock Band in GH:WT) is a no-go however.
Jefferson (D-Icebox) is rather embarrassing (particularly in that he did survive re-election), but to be fair he hasn't been convicted yet. Pelosi and the Dems should expel him as soon as he inevitably is.
Well, this wasn't a recount, it was a count of absentee and early votes. Given the amount Republican candidates overperformed on Election Day in Alaska (probably Democrats stayed home with the election decided and Begich with a strong polling lead) and the better Democratic Early Voting turnout this year, the switch isn't too surprising.
The Franken/Coleman race hasn't been recounted, and corrections of the vote have gone both ways (it went slightly back towards Coleman recently).
And recounts usually go slightly Democratic because they:
1) Are hand counts, and therefore run into fewer undervotes and overvotes than scan machines; undervotes and overvotes are more common among less affluent, Democratic voters.
2) Later counts (recounts or otherwise) are the first to deal with provisional ballots, which are more common among less affluent voters, and also first time voters (which are also heavily democratic this year).
One thing you're missing is that the news media is largely event-driven. "Joe the Plumber" (and yes, the media "investigation" was idiotic) has been doing things - appearing at rallies, chasing the media, negotiating a recording contract, etc. Ayers are Wright aren't doing anything - Ayers is continuing at his job, and Wright hasn't talked to the press since I think late April. In that sort of situation, of course Wurzelbacher will get more coverage.
What, exactly, is new to say about Ayers and Wright? News media can report "Joe the Plumber attends campaign rally for McCain". They can't report "William Ayers goes to work again today" or "Jeremiah Wright walked around his house".
(And wasn't it ABC - that evil "mainstream media" - that turned up the "God Damn America" tape?)
As for the news media in general - Obama got a higher percentage of negative coverage than McCain over the summer IIRC, although he did get more coverage. McCain's certainly got more negatives recently, although given that his campaign is leaking like a sieve, he went 100% negative (at least for a while), and his running mate managed to beat Joe Biden in the say-something-dumb contest, completely even coverage was never going to happen.
If they had a reasonable, good faith belief that the requests were legal, they're already immune. But, you know, I don't actually know whether they had such a reasonable, good faith belief. The information I've found has been conflicted. The ideal way to find out would be, oh, a court case?
Telecom Immunity is bad because companies already have strong motivation to roll over on their customers if the government asks them to no matter the actual legality of the action. Retroactive Immunity like this is deadly because it removes any incentive for them not to, since they can just wait for Congress to make the act legal if - by some rare chance - they actually get caught doing something illegal. With no incentive at all to respect our rights, it seems unlikely that they're going to.
Furthermore, the expansion of surveillance authority in the bill is completely unnessecary. Retroactive FISA warrants are fine.
As Anderson notes, the defintion of "head" and "tail" are important; Anderson was initially basing his information off of the result of switching away from retail space. If less than 1% of the items of a market can make it into the inventory of a Wal-Mart, then even if the top 1% is 32% of sales, the Long Tail is pretty powerful.
Around the "research suggests that consumers also derive more enjoyment from the hits, rather than the tail." From the article -
Popularity and quality are not completely divorced from one another; I'd expect the more popular titles to better, just not nearly to the same extent as their sales would indicate.
I'd be interested in "in-genre vs out-of-genre" ratings for the heavy users as well; while the article indicates that heavy users rate popular titles disproportionately highly, this may be a result of the heavy users (who consume a lot of obscure stuff) working primarily within their genre as opposed to across genres. If you like action movies more than romantic comedies, you're more likely to give the action movie the higher rating if you both of them and they're of equal quality. I think it's likely (though not certain) that heavier consumers stick more to their genre/tastes even among the popular items, which would result in them having a disproportionately high rating for popular stuff compared to lighter consumers. (The article does note the disparity is true for products as a whole - heavier/obscure consumers are more likely to stick to a single genre - but doesn't run the comparison among the popular subset of their tastes).
As for the business suggestions, some of them seem ok, but others -
There's a difference between knowing something isn't actually any good and the amount you'd pay for it, especially for obscure products. Consumer ratings are not directly analogous to the price premium someone would willingly pay for something, and not simply in the people buying things because they suck market; things like completionism and other impulses that aren't connected to a work's quality will lead to obscure works being worth high price premiums regardless of quality.
While you shouldn't radically alter things, this is ignoring the issue of what the "head" is in the first place. If the "head" of an online store is bigger than the entirely inventory of a typical Wal-Mart, there's going to be a shift in marketing tactics.
So join a plan that penalizes obese people. Private companies can do that too, you know; there are at least some plans that raise prices for people in a certain BMI range. And many of them raise prices for smokers; so they both pay more.
If you enter into a plan that doesn't raise prices on smokers or the obese, that's your choice. In that case, you are choosing to subsidize them. And then whining about it. It's not unfair to you because it's a choice you are specifically making.
Except with single-payer government care (universal care in some cases - such as a voucher system - can be setup to use the private system) *there is no choice*. In a private system, you can choose to join a plan that takes into account tobacco usage. Or choose one that doesn't. In single-payer government care, the government can force anyone they want to pay for the care in taxes, and then deny them care.
No, either you're misunderstanding or I'm not being clear. (Or I'm misunderstanding you). The first amendment does apply to them; what they did violated both the law and the constitution. There is discrimination against Christians, and when it does happen it's bad; see also a reference to an apparent bible club case, and a situation involving a wrestling coach and his assistant. I just don't think the cluelessness of school officials about the constitution has anything much to do with "political correctness" and I see the position you took in that original post that Christians are somehow the "real" targets of discrimination now as absurd; discrimination against them is neither greater than or more acceptable than discrimination against other groups, particularly under the law. Laws and the Constitution are broken and have to be defended; if they weren't ever broken they'd be somewhat unnecessary.
No, not finding any more information about the first case just meant I couldn't find any more information about it. Single articles, however, rarely give the full picture so I wanted to know more; it is certainly plausible. As for the other case, if you have any source for more information, I'd be happy to see it (Especially if they showed the writeup she got, which is information I hadn't found).
Actually, it should have read "school officials" not "school boards" here. Grr. You always notice after posting
Speaking for myself, I don't doubt that there are liberal idiots that misinterpret the establishment clause and the first amendment in general, just as there are conservative idiots that do the same. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with what you said :
This is the standard whine about how despite the fact conservative christians held the presidency, both houses of congress, and had a majority of justices on the supreme court as recently as 2006 they're horribly horribly oppressed by the liberal PC Squad. And that somehow this is accepted as part of the constitution. And your evidence is two actions by local school boards. How did local actions by school boards indicate current judicial thought on the first amendment? And how did those two cases turn out?
A bit of searching on the second case shows:
First the Vice Principal was identified as the person that told her off. The same Vice Principal that, um, wasn't at the school. Plus, the suit was apparently the first time the school heard about this, at which point they promptly investigated. Truly, our constitution has been rewritten.
I can't find anything about the first case beyond the initial filing.
As I said, there are undoubtedly school officials who act in violation of the Constitution like that, and if your two citations are accurate I strongly disagree with the (illegal and unconstitutional) actions of the school board officials involved. This, however, is a far cry from the idea that political correctness is law. For the latter, court decision citations are a minimum requirement, preferably US Supreme Court decisions, what with you complaining about the first amendment and all.
But externalization of some costs is a good idea. (Roads for example). Both for reasons of efficiency (you can't make everything a toll road) and fairness (a good road structure ultimately benefits everyone). And any sort of tax incentive for a "healthy lifestyle" will prevent certain things from being externalized that should be. An example that's been mentioned elsewhere on this page is drug side effects - some epilepsy drugs slow metabolism, and thus promote obesity. This seems like the kind of cost that should be externalized, but "healthy lifestyle" incentives will prevent this.