> Maybe the world be a better and safer place if government was not allowed to be so large.
Smaller governments might have prevented the civil war at the cost of allowing slavery. The fourth amendment and the right of minorities to vote and be treated equally under the law would not exist in much of today's United States. For almost every non-technological advancement that has been made to our society as a whole, someone has argued against it on the platform of states' rights.
Smaller governments are also, in some ways, more susceptible to bribery. It costs less to bribe a smaller government and it is more likely that the people policing for bribes know the people getting them. I know states that are corrupt through-and-through on local levels. Washington is bad in a lot of ways, but there are still rules about bribes that if you break them, you are supposed to go to jail, and sometimes you actually do.
It's just like the Grand Canyon is the European name for it, while its proper name, given by Native Americans, is Weemoteeuktuk.
A name is an identifier. There's nothing inherently more legitimate or "proper" about a name just because it's the first name used for something. Variables can take on a new name in a new scope. A new group of people can use a different name. It may be that communication between the groups will suffer for it--sometimes intentionally (consider politicians using different phrases to mean the same thing, such as "tax subsidy," "loophole," and "job-creating tax break"). It may also be that under a particular legal regime, the first person to encounter or capture something has a right to it (there are old common-law cases about fox hunts, for example). But objectively, there is nothing improper about coming across a giant hole in the ground and calling it "giant hole in the ground," even if someone else already calls it--for example--France.
That's okay. In five seconds your subscriber agreement will be modified to make it a violation of your contract to make a post on this topic or contribute to related research.
> It has been U.S. policy from the beginning to maintain a nuclear stockpile that can function as a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons by any and all others that have them.
To be fair, it was US policy at the beginning to build the bomb and win the second world war.
Any policies about stockpiles as a deterrent came later--I would guess the instant the Russians set off an A-bomb.
"Accidentally" running over your camera with a squad car is still a crime if a cop does it. It's just very hard to convict the criminal, resulting in a de facto exception to the law.
A de jure exception is what you would expect in a law like this, and possibly fourth amendment issues. One example of another law with de jure exceptions for police officers in performance of their duties--in most jurisdictions--is identity theft.
I suspect just spying generally, including gathering information from non-spying sources, and including non-domestic. Why on earth would it be limited to domestic spying?
Yes. Tickets by municipalities are taxation without representation. This is true in every traffic court in the United States--your chances of having a ticket dismissed if you are a non-local are close to nil. However, if a municipality ticks off commuters too much, they work somewhere else. But it takes a lot.
> The impression is a result of your perception being biased by your knowledge.
Well, I would hope so, for all impressions that I get, although that is not one of them. =)
Software costs comparatively little to develop, with one or two major exceptions. Drugs cost a lot, with some exceptions.
Of course there will always be innovation, even with no patents, but the objective isn't just innovation, it's innovation even when a drug costs billions to bring to market. The drug will only be worth bringing to market if it can't be reverse engineered and copied quickly by competitors. This isn't software patents, where you have a thousand patents involved in your laptop. This is where you have maybe one or two key patents involved in the drug.
There are some negative side-effects even in pharm, things that do desperately need fixing--but just getting rid of patents would be a mistake.
"Right" has a different meaning outside the US. It usually goes more in the direction of fascism, in other words, MORE control of the population by the government.
Even in the US, it means that in certain contexts. The right in the US tends to be both pro-law-enforcement and anti-regulation. Those two things aren't necessarily compatible, but that has never stopped a political party from trying.:)
The strongest anti-regulation voices in the party are market deregulation, lower taxes, and the gun lobby (both manufacturers and owners). Party members generally don't trust the government to do things right, but they also want to government to punish criminals and have the power to throw criminals away and generally don't care about criminals. They just don't want the government to regulate THEM, because of course they will never be a criminal, and neither will anyone they care about.:)
Of course, these are generalizations, and the real party is quite a mix of interests.
The patent system is rotten to the core. Not just software patents, the entire patent system. It needs to be done away with and replaced with nothing.
Um. No. I know we tend to think patents are terrible because... well... most software patents stifle new innovation and are granted on things that we think are so obvious we could come up with them in a few minutes given the problem conditions. But even if that were true for software, it's not true, for example, in biopharm. It costs hundreds of millions, or even billions, to bring a drug to market. You either need a very good government grant system that is willing to spend money on wacky ideas too occasionally (so that you don't have the best-iron-lung-in-the-world problem), or you need patents.
You can reform patents. But if you want private industry doing product innovation, then for a lot of products, you need something like patent protection.
News reports are written for a deadline by people who know (sometimes) more than a layman in a given field and (usually much) less than an expert, often while using a standard template. They serve their purpose, but they aren't terribly accurate or reliable.
Why on earth would people who live in NYC drive cars?
Usually they don't. People who *work* in NYC drive cars. Not all of them, but enough. NYC generally handles traffic flow well (Washington looks like it was designed by a fourth grader with a crayon compared to NYC for traffic efficiency), and depending on where you live and work it may be faster to drive than to take public transportation. Depending on the value of your time, plus (For some) the added comfort factor, it may well be worth driving.
Similarly, people going to a hospital in NYC regularly will prefer to drive--or rather, be driven. Chemo + forty minutes and home by car is less stressful than Chemo+40 minutes downtown+20minutes crosstown+50 minutes commuter rail.
People who *live* in NYC usually only own cars if they are quite wealthy, or if they need them for work.
For what purpose could they possibly need historical positioning data?
It's not anonymous data, or data that has been made anonymous, because the Feds are requesting specifics, so no demographics and usage bullshit will explain this.
Need? They don't need it. But it's information with potential value, and also having it keeps the feds liking them, so they hang onto it.
Note that even if there's fourth amendment protection, that doesn't mean there's constitutional protection to prevent them from selling it to the highest bidder. There may be legal protections, but it's a lot easier for a telecom lobby and a buyer lobby (say, insurance) to re-write the law than it is for them to re-write the constitution.
The implication of these facts is that cellular service providers have records of the geographic location of almost every American at almost every time of day and night. And under current statutes and law enforcement practices, these records can be obtained without a search warrant and its requisite showing of probable cause.
What does this mean for ordinary Americans? That at all times, our physical movements are being monitored and recorded, and once the Government can make a showing of less-thanprobable- cause, it may obtain these records of our movements, study the map our lives, and learn the many things we reveal about ourselves through our physical presence.
...
[opinion quotes a dissent by judge Kozinski] "The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether twentyfour hour surveillance of any citizen of this country by means of dragnet-type law enforcement practices violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. When requests for cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the comfort of their desks, we can safely say that such dragnet-type law enforcement practices are already in use. This is precisely the wrong time... to say that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play in mediating the voracious appetites oflaw enforcement."
...
The Maynard court noted two important distinctions between the short-term surveillance in Knotts and the prolonged surveillance at issue in Mavnard. First, the court concluded that while the individual in Katz did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy over his location while traveling from one place to another, the individual in Mavnard had a reasonable expectation of privacy over the totality of his movements over the course of a month. The court reasoned that the totality of one's movements over an extended time period is not actually exposed to the public "because the likelihood a stranger would observe all those movements is not just remote, it is essentially nil." Mavnard, 615 F.3d at 560. Second, the court concluded that people have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements over an extended period because an individual's privacy interests in the totality of his movements far exceeds any privacy interest in a single public trip from one place to another.
...
there are circumstances in which the legal interest being protected from government intrusion trumps any actual belief that it will remain private. In such cases, society's recognition of a particular privacy right as important swallows the discrete articulation of Fourth Amendment doctrine in Smith [indicating information conveyed to third parties is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment] As addressed below, the court concludes that the "normative inquiry" envisioned in Smith is required here, and it preserves the reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.
Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith? Only when it apparently contradicts science you can reject a doctrine, or what is the verification principle at play here for these "Christian" "scientists".
The point of faith is to live, do, and be better, where the metric of better is normative. Of course there is a verifiability/epistemelogical problem with what is better, but there is in science too. (I know, gasp, shudder, science has reproducable results--the point is how you decide what's best, what to aspire to and how to act. We make a normative decision to have faith in science the same way we do to have faith in religion. The difference is that once you make the normative decision to subscribe to science, your further normative decisions become explicitly goal-oriented, at least if you are thorough about it.)
Put another way, Star Trek or Grand Theft Auto? I'll give you a hint: the difference is *not* that one espouses science.
Interesting points. I don't disagree, and it isn't a "must have," just a possibility with happens to fit the story in the light of modern knowledge.
I would also point out the ancestry is also important to the religion of the Jews today. Certainly that is one major difference between Judaism and Christianity.
Not understanding basic math or other facts about the world seems to be a common whichever-wing-I-don't-subscribe-to talking point. On the other hand, I'm quite happy you committed such an error here as it means I can now safely skip any of your future posts without worrying about missing anything intelligent.
You have no idea whether I am attempting to discredit the decision, or their decisions. I didn't say whether I approved of it or not, or whether the Supreme Court would be right to reverse it or not. I did say that the results of a lawsuit on this issue would depend on the remarks made by the teacher--i.e. the fact-pattern--and the judge or panel presiding over or reviewing the case. I did not say that it was bad to be liberal, in this case or any other. You seem to have assumed that liberal meant something bad, or that having the Supreme court overrule a decision would mean the decision was necessarily wrong, or some other silly thing.
You do have an interesting point about the proportionality. A quick glance at online statistics shows that per total reported cases in circuit cert grants were not the highest, suggesting that they are not reversed most frequently on a purely per-case basis. I don't see a more exhaustive work-up, but believe a paper I read last year had some numbers suggesting that cert petitions from the ninth circuit were easier to get heard--which is why I mentioned it.
The perception may have been adopted at some point by some right-wingers as a talking point, but it is in line with a general perception in the field--that is, they mentioned it as a talking point because people who study law have that belief, and a politician debating gay marriage or video games probably pointed to the belief, perhaps even making it a kind of mini-talking-point. That's okay. Politicians who point to the common beliefs in a field--even if it turns out (without foreknowledge on the politician's part) that those beliefs aren't entirely right--aren't necessarily doing a bad thing. If nothing else, it lets some fact-checker correct the point, which filters back into the field if the fact-checking is valid rather than merely a counter-talking-point.
Eve was created from Adam's rib. Doesn't that imply God just ripped out a rib, tore out the Pesky male Chromosome, cloned a twin sister for Adam, and patched him up before he could say "ouch!"?
Slashdot Mirror
> Maybe the world be a better and safer place if government was not allowed to be so large.
Smaller governments might have prevented the civil war at the cost of allowing slavery. The fourth amendment and the right of minorities to vote and be treated equally under the law would not exist in much of today's United States. For almost every non-technological advancement that has been made to our society as a whole, someone has argued against it on the platform of states' rights.
Smaller governments are also, in some ways, more susceptible to bribery. It costs less to bribe a smaller government and it is more likely that the people policing for bribes know the people getting them. I know states that are corrupt through-and-through on local levels. Washington is bad in a lot of ways, but there are still rules about bribes that if you break them, you are supposed to go to jail, and sometimes you actually do.
> As a scientist you're not supposed to name things after yourself or have your students name them after you.
What ethical rule? Is this in your institution's IRB materials?
And why not? It's not like being forced to not put one's name on something by a committee is going to make one less of a jerk if one is a jerk.
It's just like the Grand Canyon is the European name for it, while its proper name, given by Native Americans, is Weemoteeuktuk.
A name is an identifier. There's nothing inherently more legitimate or "proper" about a name just because it's the first name used for something. Variables can take on a new name in a new scope. A new group of people can use a different name. It may be that communication between the groups will suffer for it--sometimes intentionally (consider politicians using different phrases to mean the same thing, such as "tax subsidy," "loophole," and "job-creating tax break"). It may also be that under a particular legal regime, the first person to encounter or capture something has a right to it (there are old common-law cases about fox hunts, for example). But objectively, there is nothing improper about coming across a giant hole in the ground and calling it "giant hole in the ground," even if someone else already calls it--for example--France.
That's okay. In five seconds your subscriber agreement will be modified to make it a violation of your contract to make a post on this topic or contribute to related research.
Thank you. That makes the summary much more sensible.
> It has been U.S. policy from the beginning to maintain a nuclear stockpile that can function as a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons by any and all others that have them.
To be fair, it was US policy at the beginning to build the bomb and win the second world war.
Any policies about stockpiles as a deterrent came later--I would guess the instant the Russians set off an A-bomb.
So, you would propose watching for tweets about secret underground nuclear tests?
Better. I'd get government funding for it. =)
"Accidentally" running over your camera with a squad car is still a crime if a cop does it. It's just very hard to convict the criminal, resulting in a de facto exception to the law.
A de jure exception is what you would expect in a law like this, and possibly fourth amendment issues. One example of another law with de jure exceptions for police officers in performance of their duties--in most jurisdictions--is identity theft.
What's it for? No surprise, domestic spying.
I suspect just spying generally, including gathering information from non-spying sources, and including non-domestic. Why on earth would it be limited to domestic spying?
Yes. Tickets by municipalities are taxation without representation. This is true in every traffic court in the United States--your chances of having a ticket dismissed if you are a non-local are close to nil. However, if a municipality ticks off commuters too much, they work somewhere else. But it takes a lot.
> The impression is a result of your perception being biased by your knowledge.
Well, I would hope so, for all impressions that I get, although that is not one of them. =)
Software costs comparatively little to develop, with one or two major exceptions. Drugs cost a lot, with some exceptions.
Of course there will always be innovation, even with no patents, but the objective isn't just innovation, it's innovation even when a drug costs billions to bring to market. The drug will only be worth bringing to market if it can't be reverse engineered and copied quickly by competitors. This isn't software patents, where you have a thousand patents involved in your laptop. This is where you have maybe one or two key patents involved in the drug.
There are some negative side-effects even in pharm, things that do desperately need fixing--but just getting rid of patents would be a mistake.
"Right" has a different meaning outside the US. It usually goes more in the direction of fascism, in other words, MORE control of the population by the government.
Even in the US, it means that in certain contexts. The right in the US tends to be both pro-law-enforcement and anti-regulation. Those two things aren't necessarily compatible, but that has never stopped a political party from trying. :)
The strongest anti-regulation voices in the party are market deregulation, lower taxes, and the gun lobby (both manufacturers and owners). Party members generally don't trust the government to do things right, but they also want to government to punish criminals and have the power to throw criminals away and generally don't care about criminals. They just don't want the government to regulate THEM, because of course they will never be a criminal, and neither will anyone they care about. :)
Of course, these are generalizations, and the real party is quite a mix of interests.
The patent system is rotten to the core. Not just software patents, the entire patent system. It needs to be done away with and replaced with nothing.
Um. No. I know we tend to think patents are terrible because... well... most software patents stifle new innovation and are granted on things that we think are so obvious we could come up with them in a few minutes given the problem conditions. But even if that were true for software, it's not true, for example, in biopharm. It costs hundreds of millions, or even billions, to bring a drug to market. You either need a very good government grant system that is willing to spend money on wacky ideas too occasionally (so that you don't have the best-iron-lung-in-the-world problem), or you need patents.
You can reform patents. But if you want private industry doing product innovation, then for a lot of products, you need something like patent protection.
News reports are written for a deadline by people who know (sometimes) more than a layman in a given field and (usually much) less than an expert, often while using a standard template. They serve their purpose, but they aren't terribly accurate or reliable.
Did anyone raise the PSM issue? Has that been decided by a court anywhere? Does it vary much by country?
I'm just thinking that in the US at least, there are strong arguments against patentability of a gesture.
Why on earth would people who live in NYC drive cars?
Usually they don't. People who *work* in NYC drive cars. Not all of them, but enough. NYC generally handles traffic flow well (Washington looks like it was designed by a fourth grader with a crayon compared to NYC for traffic efficiency), and depending on where you live and work it may be faster to drive than to take public transportation. Depending on the value of your time, plus (For some) the added comfort factor, it may well be worth driving.
Similarly, people going to a hospital in NYC regularly will prefer to drive--or rather, be driven. Chemo + forty minutes and home by car is less stressful than Chemo+40 minutes downtown+20minutes crosstown+50 minutes commuter rail.
People who *live* in NYC usually only own cars if they are quite wealthy, or if they need them for work.
For what purpose could they possibly need historical positioning data?
It's not anonymous data, or data that has been made anonymous, because the Feds are requesting specifics, so no demographics and usage bullshit will explain this.
Need? They don't need it. But it's information with potential value, and also having it keeps the feds liking them, so they hang onto it.
Note that even if there's fourth amendment protection, that doesn't mean there's constitutional protection to prevent them from selling it to the highest bidder. There may be legal protections, but it's a lot easier for a telecom lobby and a buyer lobby (say, insurance) to re-write the law than it is for them to re-write the constitution.
The implication of these facts is that cellular service providers have records of the
geographic location of almost every American at almost every time of day and night. And under
current statutes and law enforcement practices, these records can be obtained without a search
warrant and its requisite showing of probable cause.
What does this mean for ordinary Americans? That at all times, our physical movements
are being monitored and recorded, and once the Government can make a showing of less-thanprobable-
cause, it may obtain these records of our movements, study the map our lives, and learn
the many things we reveal about ourselves through our physical presence.
[opinion quotes a dissent by judge Kozinski] "The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether twentyfour ... to say that the Fourth Amendment has no
hour surveillance of any citizen of this country by means of dragnet-type law enforcement
practices violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. When requests for
cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must
develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the
comfort of their desks, we can safely say that such dragnet-type law enforcement practices are
already in use. This is precisely the wrong time
role to play in mediating the voracious appetites oflaw enforcement."
The Maynard court noted two important distinctions between the short-term surveillance
in Knotts and the prolonged surveillance at issue in Mavnard. First, the court concluded that
while the individual in Katz did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy over his location
while traveling from one place to another, the individual in Mavnard had a reasonable
expectation of privacy over the totality of his movements over the course of a month. The court
reasoned that the totality of one's movements over an extended time period is not actually
exposed to the public "because the likelihood a stranger would observe all those movements is
not just remote, it is essentially nil." Mavnard, 615 F.3d at 560. Second, the court concluded
that people have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their
movements over an extended period because an individual's privacy interests in the totality of
his movements far exceeds any privacy interest in a single public trip from one place to another.
there are circumstances in which the legal interest
being protected from government intrusion trumps any actual belief that it will remain private.
In such cases, society's recognition of a particular privacy right as important swallows the
discrete articulation of Fourth Amendment doctrine in Smith [indicating information conveyed to third parties is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment] As addressed below, the court
concludes that the "normative inquiry" envisioned in Smith is required here, and it preserves the
reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.
Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith? Only when it apparently contradicts science you can reject a doctrine, or what is the verification principle at play here for these "Christian" "scientists".
The point of faith is to live, do, and be better, where the metric of better is normative. Of course there is a verifiability/epistemelogical problem with what is better, but there is in science too. (I know, gasp, shudder, science has reproducable results--the point is how you decide what's best, what to aspire to and how to act. We make a normative decision to have faith in science the same way we do to have faith in religion. The difference is that once you make the normative decision to subscribe to science, your further normative decisions become explicitly goal-oriented, at least if you are thorough about it.)
Put another way, Star Trek or Grand Theft Auto? I'll give you a hint: the difference is *not* that one espouses science.
I bet the textbook authors are happy.
Interesting points. I don't disagree, and it isn't a "must have," just a possibility with happens to fit the story in the light of modern knowledge.
I would also point out the ancestry is also important to the religion of the Jews today. Certainly that is one major difference between Judaism and Christianity.
Not understanding basic math or other facts about the world seems to be a common whichever-wing-I-don't-subscribe-to talking point. On the other hand, I'm quite happy you committed such an error here as it means I can now safely skip any of your future posts without worrying about missing anything intelligent.
Fixed that for you.
You have no idea whether I am attempting to discredit the decision, or their decisions. I didn't say whether I approved of it or not, or whether the Supreme Court would be right to reverse it or not. I did say that the results of a lawsuit on this issue would depend on the remarks made by the teacher--i.e. the fact-pattern--and the judge or panel presiding over or reviewing the case. I did not say that it was bad to be liberal, in this case or any other. You seem to have assumed that liberal meant something bad, or that having the Supreme court overrule a decision would mean the decision was necessarily wrong, or some other silly thing.
You do have an interesting point about the proportionality. A quick glance at online statistics shows that per total reported cases in circuit cert grants were not the highest, suggesting that they are not reversed most frequently on a purely per-case basis. I don't see a more exhaustive work-up, but believe a paper I read last year had some numbers suggesting that cert petitions from the ninth circuit were easier to get heard--which is why I mentioned it.
The perception may have been adopted at some point by some right-wingers as a talking point, but it is in line with a general perception in the field--that is, they mentioned it as a talking point because people who study law have that belief, and a politician debating gay marriage or video games probably pointed to the belief, perhaps even making it a kind of mini-talking-point. That's okay. Politicians who point to the common beliefs in a field--even if it turns out (without foreknowledge on the politician's part) that those beliefs aren't entirely right--aren't necessarily doing a bad thing. If nothing else, it lets some fact-checker correct the point, which filters back into the field if the fact-checking is valid rather than merely a counter-talking-point.
Okay then, can the teacher be sued for making a claim that violated the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
(hint: "The other possibility is, itâ(TM)s always been there.")
Only if it is signed by the governator.
Because then you would be my cousin.
That and, by natural law, Eve was Adams sister.
Eve was created from Adam's rib. Doesn't that imply God just ripped out a rib, tore out the Pesky male Chromosome, cloned a twin sister for Adam, and patched him up before he could say "ouch!"?