Some people learn differently. Some incredibly intelligent people who learn well in many fields find learning in other fields to be *very* hard. Hell, if you're teaching someone to *read*, some people will learn very quickly and others will struggle with it their entire lives. Even bright people.
You're also assuming that people stop only because they don't want to learn. People stop because they find learning in a field to be very, very hard. To us it's trivial--we grew up with it--but for people who find a particular subject matter hard to learn, they turn away after a while because they're frustrated. They don't stop because they don't want to learn, they stop because it seems to them that they can't.
Also, may I suggest that slashdot isn't the best place to try smacking someone on an appeal to authority? It's less powerful among educated people, and besides it's not nice, and we've all known bad or good but undereducated high school CS teachers, while only a few of us have known good ones, so it doesn't help much anyway.
Learning how to think, being well rounded, and having a solid fundamental base (you know, doing things with a pencil and paper and calculating in one's head), makes learning a spreadsheet or computer research trivial.
Not really. I know people who know how to think, are well-rounded, and are quite well educated compared to most. But they didn't grow up with computers, and it takes them forever to get tasks done, and malware is a hell of a lot more than a minor annoyance for them. They find the entire process frustrating and sometimes inaccessible.
You need to learn how to use computers, and to be an environment that has them--particularly if you're from a home that doesn't have them--but they're not the only thing you have to learn. They are not helpful for most classes, but are for some. Most of the time, they will not help in a classroom.
The U.S. presence meant there was actually a whole lot of hypocritical bullshit acting as justification for doing exactly what you wanted to do. FTFY.
Americans -- can't even do the right thing without being hypocrites.
Establishing international precedent that war criminals should be tried and proved guilty is not hypocritical bullshit. It laid foundations for the later international tribunals of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court. It laid foundations for the truth and reconciliation commissions that are becoming part of international law.
Generally true, yes. (At least more or less--most criminals do not suffer for their crimes, except in a philisophical sense, but many criminals do.)
Your point is one of the reasons the veto ability of the permanent security council members are looked down on. On the other hand, the veto also isolates them from unfounded attacks and lets them play roles which run counter to certain prejudice. (Continuous condemnation of Israel, which is sometimes legitimate but usually racist, for example, is classically blocked by US veto.) It's power, and it's used for good and ill.
For the US in particular, you also have a problem in that for the most part, it plays a unique role in the world that generates illegitimate resentment, in addition to some legitimate resentment. Support for Israel again racism makes racists dislike the US, and when Israel does something bad and the US supports it anyway that makes everyone dislike the US (except Israel), discounted for people who perceive the legitimate condemnation as racist. The "hate the other that is the US" mentality cultivated in some countries (e.g. North Korea, Iran) likewise makes it a target, and the pictures of people cheering in the streets after 9/11 weren't fakes. Though there *should* still be accountability for US soldiers when they commit war crimes, they are also often the only country in a given alliance capable of providing most of the support. (This is a classic argument for its non-ICC-signatory status. There is a lot of anti-american sentiment, and while the ICC would could in theory be used for increasing legitimate accountability among American forces, it be used for political grudge matches left, right, and center.)
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with. People who uncover secrets are not responsible for deaths -- killers are.
If your ex will kill you if he/she knows where you live, and I know your ex will do that, and I tell your ex where you live, I am *not* blameless
If the country you're in will kill you if it knows what you do, and I know the country will do that, and I tell them what you do, I am not blameless.
Saying someone accepted the risk of a bad result does not mean that other people who cause that result are inherently blameless. You may accept the risk of an accident when you drive to work in the morning, but if I hit you with my car, it may still be my fault.
> Age really has no factor except in the many cases where people simply stagnate and fall so far behind willingly that they are not marketable and really shouldn't be.
That's why we call it age "discrimination". In theory discrimination can be for good and legitimate reasons, but as a practice of modern usage, we use the term to mean "discrimination without a basis that society [or law] recognizes as legitimate."
First, just because there might be a lawsuit doesn't mean you don't behave in a profitable activity, it just increases the amount of profit required to justify the risk.
Second, if Congress decides to address the problem, it can specifically prevent related lawsuits, making such defendants judgment-proof for those purposes--or at least can set a very high standard of liability. (e.g. wanton negligence, and perhaps the plaintiff has to show that inaction would not have resulted in more harm to others than you suffered).
If you leak it to the media where you can go to watch the cops count their money in their squad cars, some of them will do this thing called "reporting." It sometimes involves cameras. You can also by a hidden camera and walk by.
Meh. I don't think it really caused mass panic. People were extremely cautious and the news hyped it. The earthquake caused a lot more panic than the hurricane--mostly because it was an unexpected event.
It's hilarious watching people from the Northeast react to Hurricanes, even one as wimpy as Irene. I remember after Ivan, we had no power for two weeks. TWO WEEKS. And guess what, somehow, we survived. Shocking, I know. I laughed hardest when CNN was trying to be critical of the cellular providers regarding possibly flooding of cell phone networks after the storm. Anyone who's lived through hurricanes in an area like Florida will tell you that the first thing that you should prepare for is to be on your own a minimum of 3-5 days after a storm, and to be prepared for no power, no clean water (which means you have to boil it to use it), and probably very delayed emergency services for the first few days (power is restored to places like Hospitals and Emergency Services first, because you know, they need it more than the average person does).
Much of Canada had no power for months following the Ice Storm a few years back.
The cell phone networks is a legitimate critique, mostly because when everyone had landlines, they were likely to continue working even when the power went out. The telephone infrastructure, whether land-line or cellular should be designed to withstand at least a category 3 hurricane in a relatively robust fashion. It is critical for the continuing delivery of emergency services.
That being said, one should certainly be prepared to go without a phone, power, or running water for at least 3-5 days following a light hurricane.
You're assuming a hurricane is worse than not-a-hurricane. It isn't always. Hurricane reflects windspeed, but speed is not the only measure of damage.
I was on Nantucket for a wedding during Hurricane Bob. We stayed in a tiny, poorly-built cottage right over a small dune from the ocean. During the storm itself, we moved to higher ground and a better-constructed building, but the tiny, poorly-built cottage was fine. A Noreaster came through six months later, broke through the sand dune, and took out the cottage and all the cottages around it, and caused much more damage than hurricane Bob had generally.
In this hurricane, the water was the damaging factor, not the windspeed, and the water could have been far worse very easily. Places in Virginia got 16" of rain. Normally at 4" of rain, a county or municipality will have major outages.
The windspeed was not the source of damage, for the most part. The flooding was. It was not as bad as it could have been--the storm increased speed, so it was stationary for a shorter period of time and there was less rainfall than predicted--but it was still bad.
If you are serious, report it. That is a pretty big deal, the kind that makes national news and the kind of people whom the justice system does not *want* in power.
Anyone who thinks the courts in the USA are as crooked as any third world country is wrong. They're heavily stacked in favor of the wealthy as a consequence of allowing people to select their own representation, combined with a respect for status among members of the bar. But they are, for the most part, not bribed by the rich every time the rich get a parking ticket, for example. When you call a law firm in the United States, chances are the law firm is not paying off the judge. That's not true in a lot of places.
Although there are also underdeveloped places that have some remarkable judiciaries, or that have some very reputable members.
More or less, the legal system in the US has gotten to the point where you really need to be a lawyer in order to understand when you're breaking the law.
And the lawyer in question will have to do a lot of research before he knows it, and even then he may not be sure. (Except in the rare case where the law happens to be in his area.) There are a lot of laws, and a lot of regulations further defining them, and a lot of law that's unsettled because a particular case has never come up before.
It's still a pretty important statement for the First Circuit to say that the right to film police action in public is *clearly established* First Amendment law. Not only in terms of how the case winds up, but because most cases like this will involve a defense of qualified immunity.
Specifically, the state won't risk applying for a writ of cert on this because it's a bad test case for it. For this to get to the Supreme Court, you'll need either a stupid prosecutor (or one doing the wrong thing institutionally), a set of facts more favorable to the police, or a decision going the other way on the appeals court level.
It's not an argument, it's a definition. You don't argue with facts.
Of course you do. The facts given by another party may not be the facts as you see them.
We will leave the idea of objective facts aside, since they are rarely used in arguments of any kind--even the selection of the rare objective fact is usually just a rationalization of a policy position already taken.
Slashdot Mirror
> The "well-rounded" means be able to learn,
Some people learn differently. Some incredibly intelligent people who learn well in many fields find learning in other fields to be *very* hard. Hell, if you're teaching someone to *read*, some people will learn very quickly and others will struggle with it their entire lives. Even bright people.
You're also assuming that people stop only because they don't want to learn. People stop because they find learning in a field to be very, very hard. To us it's trivial--we grew up with it--but for people who find a particular subject matter hard to learn, they turn away after a while because they're frustrated. They don't stop because they don't want to learn, they stop because it seems to them that they can't.
Also, may I suggest that slashdot isn't the best place to try smacking someone on an appeal to authority? It's less powerful among educated people, and besides it's not nice, and we've all known bad or good but undereducated high school CS teachers, while only a few of us have known good ones, so it doesn't help much anyway.
Learning how to think, being well rounded, and having a solid fundamental base (you know, doing things with a pencil and paper and calculating in one's head), makes learning a spreadsheet or computer research trivial.
Not really. I know people who know how to think, are well-rounded, and are quite well educated compared to most. But they didn't grow up with computers, and it takes them forever to get tasks done, and malware is a hell of a lot more than a minor annoyance for them. They find the entire process frustrating and sometimes inaccessible.
You need to learn how to use computers, and to be an environment that has them--particularly if you're from a home that doesn't have them--but they're not the only thing you have to learn. They are not helpful for most classes, but are for some. Most of the time, they will not help in a classroom.
Comparing the most expensive hotel in the world to a local Walmart may tend to distort the "nicer looking" scale. =)
The U.S. presence meant there was actually a whole lot of hypocritical bullshit acting as justification for doing exactly what you wanted to do.
FTFY.
Americans -- can't even do the right thing without being hypocrites.
Establishing international precedent that war criminals should be tried and proved guilty is not hypocritical bullshit. It laid foundations for the later international tribunals of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court. It laid foundations for the truth and reconciliation commissions that are becoming part of international law.
Generally true, yes. (At least more or less--most criminals do not suffer for their crimes, except in a philisophical sense, but many criminals do.)
Your point is one of the reasons the veto ability of the permanent security council members are looked down on. On the other hand, the veto also isolates them from unfounded attacks and lets them play roles which run counter to certain prejudice. (Continuous condemnation of Israel, which is sometimes legitimate but usually racist, for example, is classically blocked by US veto.) It's power, and it's used for good and ill.
For the US in particular, you also have a problem in that for the most part, it plays a unique role in the world that generates illegitimate resentment, in addition to some legitimate resentment. Support for Israel again racism makes racists dislike the US, and when Israel does something bad and the US supports it anyway that makes everyone dislike the US (except Israel), discounted for people who perceive the legitimate condemnation as racist. The "hate the other that is the US" mentality cultivated in some countries (e.g. North Korea, Iran) likewise makes it a target, and the pictures of people cheering in the streets after 9/11 weren't fakes. Though there *should* still be accountability for US soldiers when they commit war crimes, they are also often the only country in a given alliance capable of providing most of the support. (This is a classic argument for its non-ICC-signatory status. There is a lot of anti-american sentiment, and while the ICC would could in theory be used for increasing legitimate accountability among American forces, it be used for political grudge matches left, right, and center.)
> See Nuremberg. When the US is the authority, it doesn't punish itself.
The U.S. wasn't "the authority." The victorious powers together were the authority. The U.S. presence meant there was actually a trial.
They accepted the risks when they engaged in the covert operations to begin with. People who uncover secrets are not responsible for deaths -- killers are.
If your ex will kill you if he/she knows where you live, and I know your ex will do that, and I tell your ex where you live, I am *not* blameless
If the country you're in will kill you if it knows what you do, and I know the country will do that, and I tell them what you do, I am not blameless.
Saying someone accepted the risk of a bad result does not mean that other people who cause that result are inherently blameless. You may accept the risk of an accident when you drive to work in the morning, but if I hit you with my car, it may still be my fault.
> Age really has no factor except in the many cases where people simply stagnate and fall so far behind willingly that they are not marketable and really shouldn't be.
That's why we call it age "discrimination". In theory discrimination can be for good and legitimate reasons, but as a practice of modern usage, we use the term to mean "discrimination without a basis that society [or law] recognizes as legitimate."
Not necessarily.
First, just because there might be a lawsuit doesn't mean you don't behave in a profitable activity, it just increases the amount of profit required to justify the risk.
Second, if Congress decides to address the problem, it can specifically prevent related lawsuits, making such defendants judgment-proof for those purposes--or at least can set a very high standard of liability. (e.g. wanton negligence, and perhaps the plaintiff has to show that inaction would not have resulted in more harm to others than you suffered).
How about "widely available and what newbies were taught to use for decades because nobody built a good, free Windows GUI for scp until much later"?
Not to mention "gets the job done." If it gets the job done, most people don't want to learn a new tool.
You have two options. The FBI and the Media.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/march/corruption_032610
If you leak it to the media where you can go to watch the cops count their money in their squad cars, some of them will do this thing called "reporting." It sometimes involves cameras. You can also by a hidden camera and walk by.
Meh. I don't think it really caused mass panic. People were extremely cautious and the news hyped it. The earthquake caused a lot more panic than the hurricane--mostly because it was an unexpected event.
It's hilarious watching people from the Northeast react to Hurricanes, even one as wimpy as Irene. I remember after Ivan, we had no power for two weeks. TWO WEEKS. And guess what, somehow, we survived. Shocking, I know. I laughed hardest when CNN was trying to be critical of the cellular providers regarding possibly flooding of cell phone networks after the storm. Anyone who's lived through hurricanes in an area like Florida will tell you that the first thing that you should prepare for is to be on your own a minimum of 3-5 days after a storm, and to be prepared for no power, no clean water (which means you have to boil it to use it), and probably very delayed emergency services for the first few days (power is restored to places like Hospitals and Emergency Services first, because you know, they need it more than the average person does).
Much of Canada had no power for months following the Ice Storm a few years back.
The cell phone networks is a legitimate critique, mostly because when everyone had landlines, they were likely to continue working even when the power went out. The telephone infrastructure, whether land-line or cellular should be designed to withstand at least a category 3 hurricane in a relatively robust fashion. It is critical for the continuing delivery of emergency services.
That being said, one should certainly be prepared to go without a phone, power, or running water for at least 3-5 days following a light hurricane.
NOAA forecasts predicted a lot more rain, and I think a bigger storm surge.
You're assuming a hurricane is worse than not-a-hurricane. It isn't always. Hurricane reflects windspeed, but speed is not the only measure of damage.
I was on Nantucket for a wedding during Hurricane Bob. We stayed in a tiny, poorly-built cottage right over a small dune from the ocean. During the storm itself, we moved to higher ground and a better-constructed building, but the tiny, poorly-built cottage was fine. A Noreaster came through six months later, broke through the sand dune, and took out the cottage and all the cottages around it, and caused much more damage than hurricane Bob had generally.
In this hurricane, the water was the damaging factor, not the windspeed, and the water could have been far worse very easily. Places in Virginia got 16" of rain. Normally at 4" of rain, a county or municipality will have major outages.
The windspeed was not the source of damage, for the most part. The flooding was. It was not as bad as it could have been--the storm increased speed, so it was stationary for a shorter period of time and there was less rainfall than predicted--but it was still bad.
If you are serious, report it. That is a pretty big deal, the kind that makes national news and the kind of people whom the justice system does not *want* in power.
Anyone who thinks the courts in the USA are as crooked as any third world country is wrong. They're heavily stacked in favor of the wealthy as a consequence of allowing people to select their own representation, combined with a respect for status among members of the bar. But they are, for the most part, not bribed by the rich every time the rich get a parking ticket, for example. When you call a law firm in the United States, chances are the law firm is not paying off the judge. That's not true in a lot of places.
Although there are also underdeveloped places that have some remarkable judiciaries, or that have some very reputable members.
That's what we get for electing so many lawyers to write the laws.
If engineers wrote the laws, do you think they'd be *easier* for people to understand?
=)
More or less, the legal system in the US has gotten to the point where you really need to be a lawyer in order to understand when you're breaking the law.
And the lawyer in question will have to do a lot of research before he knows it, and even then he may not be sure. (Except in the rare case where the law happens to be in his area.) There are a lot of laws, and a lot of regulations further defining them, and a lot of law that's unsettled because a particular case has never come up before.
It's still a pretty important statement for the First Circuit to say that the right to film police action in public is *clearly established* First Amendment law. Not only in terms of how the case winds up, but because most cases like this will involve a defense of qualified immunity.
Specifically, the state won't risk applying for a writ of cert on this because it's a bad test case for it. For this to get to the Supreme Court, you'll need either a stupid prosecutor (or one doing the wrong thing institutionally), a set of facts more favorable to the police, or a decision going the other way on the appeals court level.
And carries a beef.
It's not an argument, it's a definition. You don't argue with facts.
Of course you do. The facts given by another party may not be the facts as you see them.
We will leave the idea of objective facts aside, since they are rarely used in arguments of any kind--even the selection of the rare objective fact is usually just a rationalization of a policy position already taken.
It's not an argument, it's a definition. You don't argue with facts.
Of course you don't. If someone else accepted the facts, they would already have your position.