SG:Atlantis and SG1 hardly belong in the same sentence. They were both set in the same universe, but after that they diverge greatly because of the quality of the writing. SG1 had self-awareness and good prose. Atlantis had recycling of tropes with bad dialogue. McCay being afraid of oranges is close to the best sideline going.
SGA's writing has nothing at all on exchanges like Daniel: "Teal'c is so deep! Tell them how deep you are. You're not even going to understand this!" Teal'c: "My depth is immaterial to this conversation." Daniel: "See?" O'Neil to Daniel: "No more beer for you."
The McCay two-people-in-one-body bit was a good episode--but they were few and far between. SGA lacks the dialogue quality of SG1, the character rapport of DS9, the cadence of B5, or the 3-dimensionality of BSG.
To put it succinctly, if you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.
> If you can't handle allocating and managing memory, you don't deserve the right to call yourself a programmer.
Part of the point of Java was that programmers didn't have to worry about allocating and managing memory. Unless you're a JVM developer you shouldn't have to worry about it. The machine should throw an exception if it reaches capacity and you should have your code designed to deal with it.
Don't get me wrong--I prefer managing my own memory (unless I'm scripting) at a level around that of C or C++ (Assembly only if really necessary, or if the C or C++ turns out to do something weird you need to look at the assembly to figure out, and microcode only for fun)--but Java is designed not to do that, and someone who is a great Java programmer but doesn't manage his own memory should still be considered a programmer if he programs. He's just not a programming guru. He's a Java-specific guru.
A girl (or boy) has a duty to avoid a rapist, but we don't ascribe blame if she is raped because she should not have that duty, and she isn't guilty of anything if she fails to avoid the rapist. Why do I say she has a duty? Because there is still common sense. If you've lived in New York for long enough, you know not to ride the subway alone at 3 AM if you're a pretty girl, not to go into that park after dark, etc... And if you do, and you get mugged, or raped, or killed, we don't blame you for doing something stupid because why would we be so cruel? We wish you hadn't been hurt, but we don't blame you. At the same time, it is our duty not to put ourselves stupidly into too dangerous a situation because when we are hurt, it costs social resources and hurts those who care about us. But it is idiotic and cruel to blame someone who does something stupid--or ignorant--and gets hurt because of it. So we don't. Well, that and because we incentivized blaming the victim by defense attorneys.
> file suit against the government for criminal negligence
You can only file suit against the government (and win) when they consent to be sued in plain language in the law. The most common case where they do that is section 1983 claims; section 1983 of part of the United States Code lets you sue the government for violating your Constitutional rights. I am unaware of any sovereign immunity waivers that apply in this situation. It's not like you have a Constitutional right to have the government not be a moron.
> For those still unaware, "human trafficking" is basically a euphemism for slavery. See River of Innocents for a good primer. In the US alone, tens of thousands of kids are at high risk for being enslaved every year.
Victor Malarek's The Natashas is also good.
I've always heard Scientology engaged in some disreputable tactics, but seriously, this is a new low.
> No law is adequate, no business is more important, no constitutional right can supersede the wishes of the commercial content industry.
G'kar, I know your government did some sketchy things to raise money during the Earth-Mimbari war, but speaking for the MPAA? Dude, go back to the arms sales. Much more honorable.
I remember there was a flap (on the images) and a lawsuit (on the books). I don't recall a lawsuit on the images, or the results of a court holding. But I also haven't bothered to Google it. =)
It's not clear they don't violate copyright law--we just assume they don't because google image search is normal to us. But they're making copies of someone else's copyrighted works, after all. Maybe they are violating copyright. I don't remember reading a case on it, though, so maybe nobody has decided yet.
Or at least sexual harassment? Are you nuts? There's nothing sexual about spanking a child. It is abuse that a lot of people grew up with and don't know better than to do in certain situations. People doing it should be corrected the first time and punished the second.
Sports stars, sadly, are often rich, objectifying substance abusers. While some few compete legitimately and are gentlemen, most do not embody fair competition or the kind of behavior that I, at least, think we should be encouraging in our communities, our nation, or our species. Shouldn't our real objective be to teach that accomplishments and respect for others are what make people cool, rather than to make one group cool by heightening their profile?
> And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)
We're not talking about a traffic court here, we're talking about a US Federal District Court. It will still be a little unfair for a foreigner, but it won't be a fly-by-night local parochial institution. Convince them the law is on your side, and you'll win whether you're a foreigner or not.
A non-citizen will of course face obstacles because they're a non-citizen, and it will be a harder case because someone can be painted as a big nasty foreigner stealing American Intellectual Property. But the outcome is by no means predetermined. The bigger problem is the expense and time associated with going to trial in a foreign legal system thousands of miles from where you live.
Nothing at all, and that generally is what they do. But if someone rubber-stamps a warrant where there was no probable cause, you not only are likely to get the evidence excluded, you can sue the government for having violated your rights. So your pre-seizure due process may be mostly a formality, but if it's not done right, there are consequences.
> What Egypt and the US have in common is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.
Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.
In the US, in terms of due process, the warrants are seized based on a warrant, as they say on the "well-known" graphic. That means someone in a judicial capacity has approved the seizure.
If that power was misused and the warrant is bad, you have a very strong case for a lawsuit against the government for violating your constitutional rights. (Google "section 1983 lawsuits")
In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.
And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.
> unless you have first-hand experience with violent criminals, I think your opinion is worthless.
That's a bad way to look at it. You have more experience with the problem than most of us, so your voice carries more weight. But it doesn't make you an exclusive authority, and the opinion of others can be of value. For example, the airplane captain who landed his plane in the Hudson had previously written on how to land a plane in a river in case of a mid-air emergency. He'd never done it before, but that didn't mean his opinion of how it should be done was worthless.
The appeal to authority adds weight and a higher likelihood of correctness to opinion or to information, but does not render the opinion or information correct. I can tie my shoes inefficiently all my life, and still be shown at the end a better way to do it by a five-year-old.
> Years after getting out of the system, I still saw high school seniors in honors programs who couldn't spell worth a damn.
I have a friend who teaches intro composition classes at one of the largest US Universities. The first year students wrestle with trying to write (or think about) anything in the abstract.
I went to one of the best colleges in the US, and people considered my writing skills excellent. But I know, in retrospect, how little I knew. (I'm sure I'll know more about how little I know now in the future.) I wrote tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but probably well under 500 pages of English prose in all that time, and with no real skills-building. I did not learn how to proofread English well until after college, when I had been writing and editing novels for a few years. And it took those few years to learn.
The problem is a lot bigger than spelling.
(Although for spelling, use the Wordly Wise books, if they're still out and like they were. Every child you teach with them will hate how much work it is, a little, But they'll get used to it and they'll learn A LOT more than they do with most spelling books. Our school switched to them around 4th or 5th grade, from... maybe Laidlaw? The difference was amazing.)
The man gave billions of his personal fortune to help make real change possible. Tangible things that save lives. The Pope may have done some great things too--but his biggest accomplishment is being politically successful in the church. That may require a higher level of personal generosity than does Bill Gates' decision to give billions away once he had them. But the church would have done good with a different pope. And most billionaires don't give so much of their fortune away.
Part of it may also be the institutional problem--people think of leaders as the individual doing something great more than of the individual making slight political changes to a major established institution.
A lot of it will also be the money. A lot of Americans have problems in their life that money can solve. Spiritual guidance may help them be content with their lot in life, and make them happier--but it doesn't solve the fact that you're out of work while your spouse has cancer and needs the insurance, or that your son or daughter needs money for college, or for legal bills about one really stupid thing they did. Money makes these things easier. It doesn't always make them easy, but it makes them easier.
> By the time someone is 17 or 18 years old, they either know Linux or they don't. At that age, they've got their lot in life and if they haven't picked up Linux stuff by now, fuck 'em.
That's a remarkably shortsighted view. The tech community is better off being welcoming, and the economy is better off when the tech community is welcoming.
I didn't know linux when I went to college. I learned about unix-based OS/s there, though only a little bit from the school. Using it on school systems taught me a bit, but I didn't really begin to get it until I started running a second machine as a linux mailserver, and then switched my main one over to linux after six months or a year. By the time I graduated I was one of the leaders of a student group that maintains dozens of services for hundreds of orgs and thousands of users.
> Sorry , but since when are lawyers experts on every possible area?
Lawyers don't have to be experts. They need to understand the material at least a little better than the jury. If you argue a patent case, it is helpful to know more, but what you really need to know is a little bit more than the judge and jury. You don't need to know as much as the inventor does about his field. You need enough understanding to help other people come to the right conclusion, which just happens to be that your side wins.:)
> Dred Scott may have been an immoral ruling, but it was also legally correct. Under the Union Constitution, each member state had freedom to decide if blacks were Citizens or Property. The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written. It was upto the Congress/States to change the law (via amendment) not the courts.
That's a very tenuous claim. Dred Scott decided that blacks, even if they were citizens of a state, could never be citizens of the United States.
The Constitution certainly didn't say that, so it was decidedly *not* the law as written. At best, it was an original understanding of the law, but even that is questionable. Keep in mind that when the Constitution was drafted, there was not an agreement on slavery. Everyone was worried about it, nobody agreed on what to do with it, and basically all they did was agreed to disagree for a few decades. That left a lot of ambiguity in the document.
But once SCOTUS decided Dred Scott was the law anyway, it took the civil war and the post-reconstruction amendments to overturn it.
Wickard's foundation was, while not remotely tenable under an "as written standard," one of those things that happens when you let nine justices with liberal arts degrees rationalize something with logic: a person's growth of food, even if it never enters commerce, impacts commerce because he's no longer buying someone else's food. That is theoretically possible, but it was nevertheless an insane decision.
Slashdot Mirror
> I think SGU had a lot of potential but it was basically Twilight in space.
Do you just mean bad? Comparisons to Twilight imply its primary theme (and plot point) is how important it is to have a boyfriend protecting you.
> SG:Atlantis and SG1 were great shows.
SG:Atlantis and SG1 hardly belong in the same sentence. They were both set in the same universe, but after that they diverge greatly because of the quality of the writing. SG1 had self-awareness and good prose. Atlantis had recycling of tropes with bad dialogue. McCay being afraid of oranges is close to the best sideline going.
SGA's writing has nothing at all on exchanges like Daniel: "Teal'c is so deep! Tell them how deep you are. You're not even going to understand this!" Teal'c: "My depth is immaterial to this conversation." Daniel: "See?" O'Neil to Daniel: "No more beer for you."
The McCay two-people-in-one-body bit was a good episode--but they were few and far between. SGA lacks the dialogue quality of SG1, the character rapport of DS9, the cadence of B5, or the 3-dimensionality of BSG.
To put it succinctly, if you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.
> If you can't handle allocating and managing memory, you don't deserve the right to call yourself a programmer.
Part of the point of Java was that programmers didn't have to worry about allocating and managing memory. Unless you're a JVM developer you shouldn't have to worry about it. The machine should throw an exception if it reaches capacity and you should have your code designed to deal with it.
Don't get me wrong--I prefer managing my own memory (unless I'm scripting) at a level around that of C or C++ (Assembly only if really necessary, or if the C or C++ turns out to do something weird you need to look at the assembly to figure out, and microcode only for fun)--but Java is designed not to do that, and someone who is a great Java programmer but doesn't manage his own memory should still be considered a programmer if he programs. He's just not a programming guru. He's a Java-specific guru.
A girl (or boy) has a duty to avoid a rapist, but we don't ascribe blame if she is raped because she should not have that duty, and she isn't guilty of anything if she fails to avoid the rapist. Why do I say she has a duty? Because there is still common sense. If you've lived in New York for long enough, you know not to ride the subway alone at 3 AM if you're a pretty girl, not to go into that park after dark, etc... And if you do, and you get mugged, or raped, or killed, we don't blame you for doing something stupid because why would we be so cruel? We wish you hadn't been hurt, but we don't blame you. At the same time, it is our duty not to put ourselves stupidly into too dangerous a situation because when we are hurt, it costs social resources and hurts those who care about us. But it is idiotic and cruel to blame someone who does something stupid--or ignorant--and gets hurt because of it. So we don't. Well, that and because we incentivized blaming the victim by defense attorneys.
> file suit against the government for criminal negligence
You can only file suit against the government (and win) when they consent to be sued in plain language in the law. The most common case where they do that is section 1983 claims; section 1983 of part of the United States Code lets you sue the government for violating your Constitutional rights. I am unaware of any sovereign immunity waivers that apply in this situation. It's not like you have a Constitutional right to have the government not be a moron.
> For those still unaware, "human trafficking" is basically a euphemism for slavery. See River of Innocents for a good primer. In the US alone, tens of thousands of kids are at high risk for being enslaved every year.
Victor Malarek's The Natashas is also good.
I've always heard Scientology engaged in some disreputable tactics, but seriously, this is a new low.
Excuse me, my Kitchen is on fire.
> No law is adequate, no business is more important, no constitutional right can supersede the wishes of the commercial content industry.
G'kar, I know your government did some sketchy things to raise money during the Earth-Mimbari war, but speaking for the MPAA? Dude, go back to the arms sales. Much more honorable.
I remember there was a flap (on the images) and a lawsuit (on the books). I don't recall a lawsuit on the images, or the results of a court holding. But I also haven't bothered to Google it. =)
Is that true even when it is google, rather than a third-party poster, who posts the copyrighted content to google?
It's not clear they don't violate copyright law--we just assume they don't because google image search is normal to us. But they're making copies of someone else's copyrighted works, after all. Maybe they are violating copyright. I don't remember reading a case on it, though, so maybe nobody has decided yet.
Or at least sexual harassment? Are you nuts? There's nothing sexual about spanking a child. It is abuse that a lot of people grew up with and don't know better than to do in certain situations. People doing it should be corrected the first time and punished the second.
Sports stars, sadly, are often rich, objectifying substance abusers. While some few compete legitimately and are gentlemen, most do not embody fair competition or the kind of behavior that I, at least, think we should be encouraging in our communities, our nation, or our species. Shouldn't our real objective be to teach that accomplishments and respect for others are what make people cool, rather than to make one group cool by heightening their profile?
> And how much of a chance does a non-citizen have of getting their day in court, do you think? (Remember, this is a foreign country, getting rooked around just because a quirk of history gave the US control over the top-level domains)
We're not talking about a traffic court here, we're talking about a US Federal District Court. It will still be a little unfair for a foreigner, but it won't be a fly-by-night local parochial institution. Convince them the law is on your side, and you'll win whether you're a foreigner or not.
A non-citizen will of course face obstacles because they're a non-citizen, and it will be a harder case because someone can be painted as a big nasty foreigner stealing American Intellectual Property. But the outcome is by no means predetermined. The bigger problem is the expense and time associated with going to trial in a foreign legal system thousands of miles from where you live.
Yes, even non-US Citizens. Congress and the President are much less likely to *care*, but you can still petition.
Nothing at all, and that generally is what they do. But if someone rubber-stamps a warrant where there was no probable cause, you not only are likely to get the evidence excluded, you can sue the government for having violated your rights. So your pre-seizure due process may be mostly a formality, but if it's not done right, there are consequences.
> What Egypt and the US have in common is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.
Wrong. The US has both due process and a right to appeal. Comparing the situation in the US to that in Egypt is overgeneralizing in a way which is both incorrect and insultingly trivializing the troubles in those parts of the world that do not have US rights.
In the US, in terms of due process, the warrants are seized based on a warrant, as they say on the "well-known" graphic. That means someone in a judicial capacity has approved the seizure.
If that power was misused and the warrant is bad, you have a very strong case for a lawsuit against the government for violating your constitutional rights. (Google "section 1983 lawsuits")
In terms of a right to appeal, you are perfectly entitled to defend yourself in court. You are entitled to appeal if the court gets it wrong--or even if they get it right.
And you are entitled to petition Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the President.
> unless you have first-hand experience with violent criminals, I think your opinion is worthless.
That's a bad way to look at it. You have more experience with the problem than most of us, so your voice carries more weight. But it doesn't make you an exclusive authority, and the opinion of others can be of value. For example, the airplane captain who landed his plane in the Hudson had previously written on how to land a plane in a river in case of a mid-air emergency. He'd never done it before, but that didn't mean his opinion of how it should be done was worthless.
The appeal to authority adds weight and a higher likelihood of correctness to opinion or to information, but does not render the opinion or information correct. I can tie my shoes inefficiently all my life, and still be shown at the end a better way to do it by a five-year-old.
> And yet the rate of instances in which I want to punch these texting douchebags repeatedly in the face is trending upwards.
Quick! Someone get a control group!
> Years after getting out of the system, I still saw high school seniors in honors programs who couldn't spell worth a damn.
I have a friend who teaches intro composition classes at one of the largest US Universities. The first year students wrestle with trying to write (or think about) anything in the abstract.
I went to one of the best colleges in the US, and people considered my writing skills excellent. But I know, in retrospect, how little I knew. (I'm sure I'll know more about how little I know now in the future.) I wrote tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but probably well under 500 pages of English prose in all that time, and with no real skills-building. I did not learn how to proofread English well until after college, when I had been writing and editing novels for a few years. And it took those few years to learn.
The problem is a lot bigger than spelling.
(Although for spelling, use the Wordly Wise books, if they're still out and like they were. Every child you teach with them will hate how much work it is, a little, But they'll get used to it and they'll learn A LOT more than they do with most spelling books. Our school switched to them around 4th or 5th grade, from... maybe Laidlaw? The difference was amazing.)
The man gave billions of his personal fortune to help make real change possible. Tangible things that save lives. The Pope may have done some great things too--but his biggest accomplishment is being politically successful in the church. That may require a higher level of personal generosity than does Bill Gates' decision to give billions away once he had them. But the church would have done good with a different pope. And most billionaires don't give so much of their fortune away.
Part of it may also be the institutional problem--people think of leaders as the individual doing something great more than of the individual making slight political changes to a major established institution.
A lot of it will also be the money. A lot of Americans have problems in their life that money can solve. Spiritual guidance may help them be content with their lot in life, and make them happier--but it doesn't solve the fact that you're out of work while your spouse has cancer and needs the insurance, or that your son or daughter needs money for college, or for legal bills about one really stupid thing they did. Money makes these things easier. It doesn't always make them easy, but it makes them easier.
> By the time someone is 17 or 18 years old, they either know Linux or they don't. At that age, they've got their lot in life and if they haven't picked up Linux stuff by now, fuck 'em.
That's a remarkably shortsighted view. The tech community is better off being welcoming, and the economy is better off when the tech community is welcoming.
I didn't know linux when I went to college. I learned about unix-based OS/s there, though only a little bit from the school. Using it on school systems taught me a bit, but I didn't really begin to get it until I started running a second machine as a linux mailserver, and then switched my main one over to linux after six months or a year. By the time I graduated I was one of the leaders of a student group that maintains dozens of services for hundreds of orgs and thousands of users.
> Sorry , but since when are lawyers experts on every possible area?
Lawyers don't have to be experts. They need to understand the material at least a little better than the jury. If you argue a patent case, it is helpful to know more, but what you really need to know is a little bit more than the judge and jury. You don't need to know as much as the inventor does about his field. You need enough understanding to help other people come to the right conclusion, which just happens to be that your side wins. :)
> Do we really need a constitutional amendment to clarify that yes, people are actually people?
Yes. That's what the post-Civil-War Amendments did. Now the anti-immigration lobby is trying to change it.
Real life, for better and for worse, is more absurd than computer programming.
> Dred Scott may have been an immoral ruling, but it was also legally correct. Under the Union Constitution, each member state had freedom to decide if blacks were Citizens or Property. The justices did what they were supposed to do: Enforce the law as written. It was upto the Congress/States to change the law (via amendment) not the courts.
That's a very tenuous claim. Dred Scott decided that blacks, even if they were citizens of a state, could never be citizens of the United States.
The Constitution certainly didn't say that, so it was decidedly *not* the law as written. At best, it was an original understanding of the law, but even that is questionable. Keep in mind that when the Constitution was drafted, there was not an agreement on slavery. Everyone was worried about it, nobody agreed on what to do with it, and basically all they did was agreed to disagree for a few decades. That left a lot of ambiguity in the document.
But once SCOTUS decided Dred Scott was the law anyway, it took the civil war and the post-reconstruction amendments to overturn it.
Wickard's foundation was, while not remotely tenable under an "as written standard," one of those things that happens when you let nine justices with liberal arts degrees rationalize something with logic: a person's growth of food, even if it never enters commerce, impacts commerce because he's no longer buying someone else's food. That is theoretically possible, but it was nevertheless an insane decision.
> That is the most absurd and arbitrary distinction I've ever heard.
You haven't read a lot of court cases, have you? :)
Interestingly, patent law also has a first sale doctrine that applies to patented articles first sold in the United States.