You don't entirely waive them, it's true--but you do somewhat waive them. They can't, for example, open a closed container, but they can amble about the living area. Having consented to entry into the home makes your case against them significantly harder if they do find something, since you have to start arguing about the scope of consent.
> the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights.
I agree. The classic example is coming to your door--they always ask "may we come in" instead of just speaking with you there, even if they're just there to ask a very quick question, because if you consent you waive your fourth amendment right to be free from search and seizure.
IANAL, so don't believe or rely on a word of my post. However:
(1) Police are allowed to lie. The most common example is in interrogations and interviews. One of the most successful techniques for eliciting a confession from a suspect is confronting them with evidence against the suspect. The police will do this with both false and true evidence. The false evidence (pretending they have evidence) may be slightly less effective than true evidence, IIRC, but both are common interrogation techniques. Source: Lao's "Inside the Interrogation Room." Google it. Personally, I think it's one of the main reasons that we have a huge segment of society that really hates the police--it's not because the police are arresting them, it's because to most people, a lie is unprofessional and insulting, and the police use them all the time. It's a problem, because officers do a lot of really good work and are often very professional. I think every time I've encountered a police officer, they've been polite and professional. But many people I've known have had the opposite experience.
(2) You are usually allowed to lie to a cop, but you shouldn't. It IS a crime to lie to a Federal Agent, IIRC, but in most states I don't think it's a crime to lie to a police officer. But if you're arrested for something and you go to trial, you're going to have to explain why you lied to the cop. And a cop can ALWAYS find something to arrest you with. Good luck getting the jury to believe you after you've been caught in a lie. "So you lied to the officer?" "Yes." "But that means you're a liar, doesn't it?" "Er..." "So you're story is you lie sometimes to police officers, but you don't lie to juries?"
(3) Police are also allow to do pretty much anything a member of the public can do, and some things a member of the public can't, to pursue a criminal investigation. For example, in... Wisconsin, I think... police officers can do what would be considered identity theft if someone else did it.
(4) In the South, police can do whatever they want. This isn't true legally, but sometimes it's true in fact. (Although you can always fight them in court, after.) They may be more helpful if you're white (I actually saw them helping a woman change her tire!) but more likely to pull you out of the car and threaten you at shotgun point for being both black and in their town. (Happened to someone I know.) Although these are generalizations; there are really wonderful police officers all over, as there are really horrible ones in many places. You get encounters with good cops and bad cops everywhere.
> as a percentage of our economy, manufacturing production is pretty stable.
If this is actually true, I suspect the following:
(1) As a percentage of our economy, it is stable, but that both (a) as a percentage of world production and (b) in terms of raw tonnage, production is down because industrial production prices are rising faster than inflation.
(2) This would be wholly false if the government had not bailed out GM. General Motors is one of the largest, if not the largest, auto manufacturers in the world. Its production capacity could not be allowed to be destroyed, for military reasons if none other.
(3) The Military Industrial Complex is responsible for most of this manufacturing production. This isn't tinfoil hat, it's just the size of the defense budget and the national interest in keeping production capacity at home.
> I do really believe that doing a single simple division is not "doing mathematics".
I feel the same way, I regard it as arithmetic, but that's technically a branch of mathematics and most people never see the more advanced stuff. My guess is that less than a billion people even know calculus. (It may be far less; I haven't done a study.) It's a bubble effect, so best not to mock people for their conventional use of language which is, perhaps, inapplicable to the few.
It reminds me of the first time I heard someone talk about a "scientist" after college. Even the word sounded strange, because for the most part, nobody in the sciences is a scientist--they're a chemist, or a biologist, or an astrophysicist, or perhaps even a computer scientist--but there is always a degree of specificity, without which it seems as if you've stepped into a twilight world where there is no science. Because in a way, when you step outside the scientific bubble, that's what you've done.
I don't think there's a good way to tell, short of a truly rigorous approach that takes a long time to verify all the software on a system. It's a combination of (1) too many things happening at once on a modern system, (2) lack of good DRM-type authentication (which would allow you to approve or disapprove vendors, or approve each software package independently if from a noncommercial vendor), (3) too much of the stuff that's happening being distributed to different locations. In linux, you can usually tell pretty easily what's going on by running ps and tracing down the processes--okay, you can hide stuff in libraries and modify the code, but you've got a good first step there.. In windows, some is in processes and some is in services, and it's a pain to even put together a list of everything that's running, much less find out where it comes from or whether it's the software it claims to be. It should be easy, but I don't know of a good way to do it.
There are anti-malware programs that take a common swipe at your system. Sometimes they work. But it's like practicing bad medicine as opposed to figuring out what's really wrong--it may work sometimes, but it doesn't solve the larger problem. The reality is it's a completely broken system. We can hunt down bugs, and if we lock down a system from install-time and don't do anything too adventurous or unusual we can be sure to keep it clean, but our security model is basically wrong because we're blacklisting instead of whitelisting, and it's hard to even get a list in the first place. Why aren't there system utilities that automatically generate a list of all running processes and services and anything else that uses CPU time, lists their pipes to each other and to the file system and the network, and then verifies all of that against digitally signed configurations from the vendor?
If the software isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, it should shut down after giving you a chance to override the shutdown. So leave the end-user with control, but leave the default conditions so for the 99.99% of end users who don't want the nondefault behavior, their machines are safe.
> the same treatments may have better results on others on average, and therefore be worth it.
Even assuming all the relevant context, sometimes it doesn't make sense to pay for treatment with better results. Doctors always want you to do the best thing--and if money were no object you might want it--but I'm unlikely to trade a 2% increase in my likelihood of survival for all of my life savings if those are what my family has to live on when I'm dead. There are exceptions--when the second-"best" option leaves you less productive, or you're young and very likely to recover and have time to build a new nest egg, etc...; but there isn't really a system in place for someone to (1) get a realistic portrayal of the facts, and (2) make a decision based on those facts. Doctors will give you some information, but they pretty much never tell you to get your affairs in order (no matter how bad it is), and why on earth aren't we told "with your insurance, this will cost X" as soon as we walk in the door and for every procedure, or at least after we are told what the procedure is and maybe what our options are before they perform it? In a life-threatening situation, you need experience with the way medicine works, you need to understand the politics of hospitals, you need to get opinions from multiple professionals and decide which one to trust, you need to do so much more than we ever teach in schools. And you need an in, somewhere, that lets you know who the good surgeons are. That may be the hardest part, because you have to penetrate the veil of the profession. Does the money take a back seat to all of that? Yes. But it shouldn't disappear completely. And the reality of a 70% chance of death, for example, shouldn't disappear completely either. I can be told I'm likely to die, but that doesn't mean that I'm already dead or that I'm not going to fight; but I should know if my fight is going to cost my family everything it has.
> That is fitting, so the space program will match the economy the republicans left the current administration.
Dear SmallFurryCreature (593017),
The economy is not the fault of any given administration. The most recent economic crisis was due primarily to the actions of a few people in the NY financial district, and to the failure of the many to realize how broad the consequences would be when that group inevitably failed. It was slightly exacerbated by widely-performed mortgage fraud, but it was really a question of a few guys on wall street who decided to start trading credit-default swaps and the like irresponsibly.
Everyone blames the economy on the administration in power, to the extent where any major event on the market is very likely to determine the outcome of a Presidential Election. This is an irrational reaction on the part of the people, but it occurs anyway. The people in government with the most power for this kind of thing are actually the senators and representatives, but they rarely regulate the banking segment of the economy since it gives them money. Most of a senator's day is raising money. If he has two minutes between events, he's on the phone with donors. If he's sitting in the back of his car as someone drives him to work, he's on the phone with donors. Numerous donors are in finance. Therefore it takes something extraordinary for the government to even consider regulating finance.
The linked article at the register, with the helpful diagram, kinda makes that sentence make sense. It also has gems like '“The strangeness value could be non-zero" [in such places] says Chen, a statement with which no doubt most would agree.'
They'll make it open as soon as we properly regulate it and require them to. And we should properly regulate it and require them to--a certain set of black box information should be publicly available for every car crash in the United States, and possibly the world, in order to identify common factors and trends. Yes, it's giving up a little privacy in exchange for an increased level of safety that there is even a black box in the car. But (1) the black box isn't going away any time soon short of a finding of a violation of Constitutional Law, and (2) the public interest in preventing accidents is more important than my interest in hiding my reckless driving. The only particularly bad thing is that insurance companies might use it to deny claims on illegal but safe driving, if the government lets them.
> But, today, with the US government being the largest shareholder in GM, I would bet that life for Toyota is going to get really bad.
Let's be honest. The elephant in the room during the GM buyout was the production capacity. The United States cannot afford to lose the production capacity of GM, because in the event of a full scale sustained conventional war we would need its production capacity. The government buyout wasn't only about keeping money in Detroit or helping other GM stockholders or even the fact that the government often buys GM--it was absolutely necessary from the standpoint of defense. That it was done without bringing GM into the military-industrial complex is a good thing.
On a related issue, we should be treating Detroit like it got hit with Katrina. It's probably in worse shape than New Orleans at this point.
> why does everyone keep telling the Chinese what to do with their country? Didn't you guys believe in freedom or something?
Clasically, international law recognized the state's right to do whatever it wanted within its borders, but even then the creation of international law had to do with the problem of human rights, in a way. The thirty years war had wreaked havoc on Europe, and hundreds of towns and cities across the continent were burned or otherwise scourged by the war. Starting around 1648, after the Peace of Westphalia, nations could not longer do whatever they wanted.
The connection to human rights remained largely latent until WW2, however. Then we had the holocaust. War Crime prosecution at Nurenberg, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ICCPR, and then the formation for the first time of transnational organizations (Amnesty International being one of the early starters) for the advancement of human rights, led us into a world where everyone agreed that it mattered what people did within their own country. Some things are illegal. Slavery, piracy, and aggressive war are the most obvious.
In our society, individuals have certain freedoms so long as they don't break the social contract, express or implied. In international society, nations have freedom so long as they don't break the social contract among nations, express or implied. In both cases, it's easier to get away with breaking the contract if you're bigger, you're stronger, you have more money, or nobody finds out about it.
As to your last point, if we knew how to fix our country, we would. We're trying, and we'll keep trying. But we still live in the world. We still have obligations--and so does China--not only on a moral level and arising out of our duty to our citizenry and our species, but also arising out of treaty obligations under the WTO. If China agrees to be part of the WTO, then it can expect to have a complaint filed against it if it violates WTO rules. The same is true for the United States, or Canada, or any other signatory to the relevant treaties.
IANAL, but I can see where fair use would be an appealing technique here, but the public trust might actually be the right way to argue this one. The argument to make would be that whoever signed the contract, and perhaps even the Congress, does not have the power to grant the artist a copyright good against the public in a case where, as in a monument, the work is commissioned for display at the seat of the federal government and for the public good. The monument is something created for and held in the public trust and as such, control over its use cannot be restricted to a single individual or corporation.
The idea of the public trust overriding corporate ownership came up about a hundred years ago when a Railroad Company was arguing an older (1869, IIRC) act of the (corrupt) Illinois legislature had successfully given the railroad company title to a square mile of the lakebed of Lake Michigan. The court held that if the title had been valid, it certainly didn't survive a repeal of the original act, and in any event the State couldn't really give up control of its harbor to a private entity because that would violate the public trust.
The environmental law folks pulled the public trust doctrine out of a drawer about 40 years ago, now, and it might have been useful here.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but of course the trick is what we do moving forward. Some of the simple techniques, such as ensuring hospital staff wash their hands, are very useful in terms of preventing the contraction of bacterial infections and should be something where we encourage, expect, and ultimately demand a 100% success rate (i.e. always wash your hands), without blaming people for not having done it in the past. Nurses at the hospitals with poor discipline stopped washing their hands once disposable gloves started being commonly used in medicine. At this point, for many of them, they have been told or taught to always wash hands or put on new gloves before touching a patient after touching nonsterile surfaces, but they're not part of a hospital culture where that is the unbreakable rule, so they get sloppy.
It's not everyone, nor every hospital, but it's common enough that it's not even frowned on at some hospitals. Simply attacking someone about doing it wrong isn't enough, nor helpful, and our goal isn't to blame, it's to move forward and say, "all right. No more! Let's get this right! Let's cut down on staph infections by twenty percent in the next year." There should be intense competition for objectively defineable metrics of success, where the higher the number the better the patient care (so no race conditions), with conservative results and massive penalties for failing to report properly (so it's in everyone's interest to do well but nobody's interest to cheat), and each year the hospital should be able to report, "we saved X lives this year, and Y of those are lives we saved because of these particular programs and improvements we've achieved since last year."
The goal isn't to blame, it's to achieve. It's to save lives. And ultimately, of course, to save the world. *Flash Gordon Theme plays*
I don't think apple would have a problem with documented 16-year-olds working 2-8 hours a week while they were doing well at school. This has to do with kids working full time or more, particularly if under terrible working conditions. In terms of safe disposal, it has other implications with terrible health effects for certain destitute communities. (Google it.)
> There has to be some meaningful consequence for the losers.
Almost nobody wants to go to court. (Attorneys sometimes do because it's fun to do advocacy before the court, but most of them are smart enough to put client interests first. Debt Collection agencies also want to because they're almost never opposed, because people don't have money to fight them, but they don't even really think of it as going to court.) Courts also have pre-trial systems in place to try to get the parties to agree to a settlement before trial is necessary--pretrial conferences serve that function in most courts. A judge can look at the record and say "Are you sure you don't want to just settle this?"
Losing a lawsuit that you've spent years on (and likely paid for someone else to spend years on) is a pretty meaningful consequence for the losers.
You've also got the problem that the bigger the consequence to the loser, the less likely they are to bring legitimate claims to court.
The media uses stock photos whenever they don't have real photos of something. This is normal. I've even seen stock photos of Bumble Bee tuna used in contamination stories for another brand. (I forget which one.) Talk about misleading...
> ''the brake pedal to take precedence over the gas pedal if both were pressed' or, as their latest notice states, 'would cut power to the engine if both pedals were pressed.'
Hint: this is a feature, not a bug. And even if you're reviewing very closely, it's not something that it takes three months to avoid messing up. if(X&&Y) Z=Y;
When the two pedals work at the same time, it can result in pretty horrible accidents. Unless your driving style uses both pedals at the same time in a way that increases your safety (in which case you're James Bond and you don't ask slashdot questions), just take the update.
One of the points he makes, which is a good one, is that data-sharing for enforcement purposes among countries that have different criminal punishments for copyright law is hard to justify. It also makes me wonder if--for example--I live in a country with fair use and a country with more stringent fair use policies wants to go after me for copyright infringement... well, you see the issues. Will the country with the most stringent policies suddenly be the equivalent of the patent troll district in Texas?
We need to develop greater use of proveable correctness in bank security, promote the use of isolated secure workstations for private banking transactions online, and use contractual incentives and accountability to incentivize better security systems.
Seriously, how about a physical random token generator where someone has to enter what the token currently displays each time they make a transaction for an account with a $5000+ balance, or more than $500 in a single transaction, or $1000 in a day? Or similar systems that make phishing alone useless.
> net result is we're bringing the war to them using technology we have and they don't.
Oh yeah. None of the old-fashioned junk like Stealth Bombers. Why, I picked one of those up from a neighboring cave for cheap, just last month.:)
It's powerful new tech, though, and useful--more because of the increased visibility and flexibility brought on by the drones than because of lowering the risk to the pilot of being shot down.
If it's a distinguished school with an honor code, point out that they're insulting you by assuming you're defrauding them. If you get caught defrauding them, you can get suspended or kicked out--but they shouldn't assume that you're doing it. It's like systems that automatically hash assignments to check them for cheating. You can have trust and a few people will take advantage of it, or you can have distrust and dishonor, which is demeaning to the integrity of the school and insulting to the student.
> Since your post has inspired a debate about whether corpses and zombies can be raped, I'll point out that slaves cannot be. Being a slave-trader is worse than being a rapist, not the reverse as your post would seem to imply. Now I ask you, are gamers scarier than Thomas Jefferson?
On the contrary; slaves can be raped, and frequently are. (I would say usually are, but a lot depends on which definitions you use, and labor trafficking does not always involve rape, although sometimes it does.)
It is possible to claim otherwise by claiming that a slave has no rights, but that applies only in cases of legal slavery, and slavery is not legal today. (The prohibition on slavery takes on the status of jus cogens in international law, meaning that it is not and cannot be legal anywhere in the world.)
As to slave trading and rape, that's generally true at least because the former usually involves a lot of the latter. (So there's no need to get into the messy question of what absolute wrong is worse than another, all other things being equal).
Thomas Jefferson... Mmm.... Probably not, but some gamers would be the exception. Thomas Jefferson was an especially effective politician, which makes him dangerous. Only some gamers are dangerous. Therefore on the whole, gamers are not scarier than Thomas Jefferson.
"Gamers are not scarier than Thomas Jefferson." Of all the sentences I didn't expect to use today...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't entirely waive them, it's true--but you do somewhat waive them. They can't, for example, open a closed container, but they can amble about the living area. Having consented to entry into the home makes your case against them significantly harder if they do find something, since you have to start arguing about the scope of consent.
> the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights.
I agree. The classic example is coming to your door--they always ask "may we come in" instead of just speaking with you there, even if they're just there to ask a very quick question, because if you consent you waive your fourth amendment right to be free from search and seizure.
--
IANAL; don't believe me.
IANAL, so don't believe or rely on a word of my post. However:
(1) Police are allowed to lie. The most common example is in interrogations and interviews. One of the most successful techniques for eliciting a confession from a suspect is confronting them with evidence against the suspect. The police will do this with both false and true evidence. The false evidence (pretending they have evidence) may be slightly less effective than true evidence, IIRC, but both are common interrogation techniques. Source: Lao's "Inside the Interrogation Room." Google it. Personally, I think it's one of the main reasons that we have a huge segment of society that really hates the police--it's not because the police are arresting them, it's because to most people, a lie is unprofessional and insulting, and the police use them all the time. It's a problem, because officers do a lot of really good work and are often very professional. I think every time I've encountered a police officer, they've been polite and professional. But many people I've known have had the opposite experience.
(2) You are usually allowed to lie to a cop, but you shouldn't. It IS a crime to lie to a Federal Agent, IIRC, but in most states I don't think it's a crime to lie to a police officer. But if you're arrested for something and you go to trial, you're going to have to explain why you lied to the cop. And a cop can ALWAYS find something to arrest you with. Good luck getting the jury to believe you after you've been caught in a lie. "So you lied to the officer?" "Yes." "But that means you're a liar, doesn't it?" "Er..." "So you're story is you lie sometimes to police officers, but you don't lie to juries?"
(3) Police are also allow to do pretty much anything a member of the public can do, and some things a member of the public can't, to pursue a criminal investigation. For example, in... Wisconsin, I think... police officers can do what would be considered identity theft if someone else did it.
(4) In the South, police can do whatever they want. This isn't true legally, but sometimes it's true in fact. (Although you can always fight them in court, after.) They may be more helpful if you're white (I actually saw them helping a woman change her tire!) but more likely to pull you out of the car and threaten you at shotgun point for being both black and in their town. (Happened to someone I know.) Although these are generalizations; there are really wonderful police officers all over, as there are really horrible ones in many places. You get encounters with good cops and bad cops everywhere.
> as a percentage of our economy, manufacturing production is pretty stable.
If this is actually true, I suspect the following:
(1) As a percentage of our economy, it is stable, but that both (a) as a percentage of world production and (b) in terms of raw tonnage, production is down because industrial production prices are rising faster than inflation.
(2) This would be wholly false if the government had not bailed out GM. General Motors is one of the largest, if not the largest, auto manufacturers in the world. Its production capacity could not be allowed to be destroyed, for military reasons if none other.
(3) The Military Industrial Complex is responsible for most of this manufacturing production. This isn't tinfoil hat, it's just the size of the defense budget and the national interest in keeping production capacity at home.
> I do really believe that doing a single simple division is not "doing mathematics".
I feel the same way, I regard it as arithmetic, but that's technically a branch of mathematics and most people never see the more advanced stuff. My guess is that less than a billion people even know calculus. (It may be far less; I haven't done a study.) It's a bubble effect, so best not to mock people for their conventional use of language which is, perhaps, inapplicable to the few.
It reminds me of the first time I heard someone talk about a "scientist" after college. Even the word sounded strange, because for the most part, nobody in the sciences is a scientist--they're a chemist, or a biologist, or an astrophysicist, or perhaps even a computer scientist--but there is always a degree of specificity, without which it seems as if you've stepped into a twilight world where there is no science. Because in a way, when you step outside the scientific bubble, that's what you've done.
I don't think there's a good way to tell, short of a truly rigorous approach that takes a long time to verify all the software on a system. It's a combination of (1) too many things happening at once on a modern system, (2) lack of good DRM-type authentication (which would allow you to approve or disapprove vendors, or approve each software package independently if from a noncommercial vendor), (3) too much of the stuff that's happening being distributed to different locations. In linux, you can usually tell pretty easily what's going on by running ps and tracing down the processes--okay, you can hide stuff in libraries and modify the code, but you've got a good first step there.. In windows, some is in processes and some is in services, and it's a pain to even put together a list of everything that's running, much less find out where it comes from or whether it's the software it claims to be. It should be easy, but I don't know of a good way to do it.
There are anti-malware programs that take a common swipe at your system. Sometimes they work. But it's like practicing bad medicine as opposed to figuring out what's really wrong--it may work sometimes, but it doesn't solve the larger problem. The reality is it's a completely broken system. We can hunt down bugs, and if we lock down a system from install-time and don't do anything too adventurous or unusual we can be sure to keep it clean, but our security model is basically wrong because we're blacklisting instead of whitelisting, and it's hard to even get a list in the first place. Why aren't there system utilities that automatically generate a list of all running processes and services and anything else that uses CPU time, lists their pipes to each other and to the file system and the network, and then verifies all of that against digitally signed configurations from the vendor?
If the software isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, it should shut down after giving you a chance to override the shutdown. So leave the end-user with control, but leave the default conditions so for the 99.99% of end users who don't want the nondefault behavior, their machines are safe.
> Toyota is currently planning an event to challenge evidence ...
Macroscopic events generally don't challenge evidence. They challenge the politics of evidence.
One challenges evidence with small, discrete, verifiable events.
> the same treatments may have better results on others on average, and therefore be worth it.
Even assuming all the relevant context, sometimes it doesn't make sense to pay for treatment with better results. Doctors always want you to do the best thing--and if money were no object you might want it--but I'm unlikely to trade a 2% increase in my likelihood of survival for all of my life savings if those are what my family has to live on when I'm dead. There are exceptions--when the second-"best" option leaves you less productive, or you're young and very likely to recover and have time to build a new nest egg, etc...; but there isn't really a system in place for someone to (1) get a realistic portrayal of the facts, and (2) make a decision based on those facts. Doctors will give you some information, but they pretty much never tell you to get your affairs in order (no matter how bad it is), and why on earth aren't we told "with your insurance, this will cost X" as soon as we walk in the door and for every procedure, or at least after we are told what the procedure is and maybe what our options are before they perform it? In a life-threatening situation, you need experience with the way medicine works, you need to understand the politics of hospitals, you need to get opinions from multiple professionals and decide which one to trust, you need to do so much more than we ever teach in schools. And you need an in, somewhere, that lets you know who the good surgeons are. That may be the hardest part, because you have to penetrate the veil of the profession. Does the money take a back seat to all of that? Yes. But it shouldn't disappear completely. And the reality of a 70% chance of death, for example, shouldn't disappear completely either. I can be told I'm likely to die, but that doesn't mean that I'm already dead or that I'm not going to fight; but I should know if my fight is going to cost my family everything it has.
> It sounds like Wile E. Coyote falling off of a cliff.
Well, a good space program teaches that some things are constant everywhere in the Universe.
Beep, beep.
> That is fitting, so the space program will match the economy the republicans left the current administration.
Dear SmallFurryCreature (593017),
The economy is not the fault of any given administration. The most recent economic crisis was due primarily to the actions of a few people in the NY financial district, and to the failure of the many to realize how broad the consequences would be when that group inevitably failed. It was slightly exacerbated by widely-performed mortgage fraud, but it was really a question of a few guys on wall street who decided to start trading credit-default swaps and the like irresponsibly.
Everyone blames the economy on the administration in power, to the extent where any major event on the market is very likely to determine the outcome of a Presidential Election. This is an irrational reaction on the part of the people, but it occurs anyway. The people in government with the most power for this kind of thing are actually the senators and representatives, but they rarely regulate the banking segment of the economy since it gives them money. Most of a senator's day is raising money. If he has two minutes between events, he's on the phone with donors. If he's sitting in the back of his car as someone drives him to work, he's on the phone with donors. Numerous donors are in finance. Therefore it takes something extraordinary for the government to even consider regulating finance.
Regards,
OxfordCommaLover
The linked article at the register, with the helpful diagram, kinda makes that sentence make sense. It also has gems like '“The strangeness value could be non-zero" [in such places] says Chen, a statement with which no doubt most would agree.'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/05/negative_strangeness/
They'll make it open as soon as we properly regulate it and require them to. And we should properly regulate it and require them to--a certain set of black box information should be publicly available for every car crash in the United States, and possibly the world, in order to identify common factors and trends. Yes, it's giving up a little privacy in exchange for an increased level of safety that there is even a black box in the car. But (1) the black box isn't going away any time soon short of a finding of a violation of Constitutional Law, and (2) the public interest in preventing accidents is more important than my interest in hiding my reckless driving. The only particularly bad thing is that insurance companies might use it to deny claims on illegal but safe driving, if the government lets them.
> But, today, with the US government being the largest shareholder in GM, I would bet that life for Toyota is going to get really bad.
Let's be honest. The elephant in the room during the GM buyout was the production capacity. The United States cannot afford to lose the production capacity of GM, because in the event of a full scale sustained conventional war we would need its production capacity. The government buyout wasn't only about keeping money in Detroit or helping other GM stockholders or even the fact that the government often buys GM--it was absolutely necessary from the standpoint of defense. That it was done without bringing GM into the military-industrial complex is a good thing.
On a related issue, we should be treating Detroit like it got hit with Katrina. It's probably in worse shape than New Orleans at this point.
> why does everyone keep telling the Chinese what to do with their country? Didn't you guys believe in freedom or something?
Clasically, international law recognized the state's right to do whatever it wanted within its borders, but even then the creation of international law had to do with the problem of human rights, in a way. The thirty years war had wreaked havoc on Europe, and hundreds of towns and cities across the continent were burned or otherwise scourged by the war. Starting around 1648, after the Peace of Westphalia, nations could not longer do whatever they wanted.
The connection to human rights remained largely latent until WW2, however. Then we had the holocaust. War Crime prosecution at Nurenberg, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ICCPR, and then the formation for the first time of transnational organizations (Amnesty International being one of the early starters) for the advancement of human rights, led us into a world where everyone agreed that it mattered what people did within their own country. Some things are illegal. Slavery, piracy, and aggressive war are the most obvious.
In our society, individuals have certain freedoms so long as they don't break the social contract, express or implied. In international society, nations have freedom so long as they don't break the social contract among nations, express or implied. In both cases, it's easier to get away with breaking the contract if you're bigger, you're stronger, you have more money, or nobody finds out about it.
As to your last point, if we knew how to fix our country, we would. We're trying, and we'll keep trying. But we still live in the world. We still have obligations--and so does China--not only on a moral level and arising out of our duty to our citizenry and our species, but also arising out of treaty obligations under the WTO. If China agrees to be part of the WTO, then it can expect to have a complaint filed against it if it violates WTO rules. The same is true for the United States, or Canada, or any other signatory to the relevant treaties.
IANAL, but I can see where fair use would be an appealing technique here, but the public trust might actually be the right way to argue this one. The argument to make would be that whoever signed the contract, and perhaps even the Congress, does not have the power to grant the artist a copyright good against the public in a case where, as in a monument, the work is commissioned for display at the seat of the federal government and for the public good. The monument is something created for and held in the public trust and as such, control over its use cannot be restricted to a single individual or corporation.
The idea of the public trust overriding corporate ownership came up about a hundred years ago when a Railroad Company was arguing an older (1869, IIRC) act of the (corrupt) Illinois legislature had successfully given the railroad company title to a square mile of the lakebed of Lake Michigan. The court held that if the title had been valid, it certainly didn't survive a repeal of the original act, and in any event the State couldn't really give up control of its harbor to a private entity because that would violate the public trust.
The environmental law folks pulled the public trust doctrine out of a drawer about 40 years ago, now, and it might have been useful here.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but of course the trick is what we do moving forward. Some of the simple techniques, such as ensuring hospital staff wash their hands, are very useful in terms of preventing the contraction of bacterial infections and should be something where we encourage, expect, and ultimately demand a 100% success rate (i.e. always wash your hands), without blaming people for not having done it in the past. Nurses at the hospitals with poor discipline stopped washing their hands once disposable gloves started being commonly used in medicine. At this point, for many of them, they have been told or taught to always wash hands or put on new gloves before touching a patient after touching nonsterile surfaces, but they're not part of a hospital culture where that is the unbreakable rule, so they get sloppy.
It's not everyone, nor every hospital, but it's common enough that it's not even frowned on at some hospitals. Simply attacking someone about doing it wrong isn't enough, nor helpful, and our goal isn't to blame, it's to move forward and say, "all right. No more! Let's get this right! Let's cut down on staph infections by twenty percent in the next year." There should be intense competition for objectively defineable metrics of success, where the higher the number the better the patient care (so no race conditions), with conservative results and massive penalties for failing to report properly (so it's in everyone's interest to do well but nobody's interest to cheat), and each year the hospital should be able to report, "we saved X lives this year, and Y of those are lives we saved because of these particular programs and improvements we've achieved since last year."
The goal isn't to blame, it's to achieve. It's to save lives. And ultimately, of course, to save the world. *Flash Gordon Theme plays*
I don't think apple would have a problem with documented 16-year-olds working 2-8 hours a week while they were doing well at school. This has to do with kids working full time or more, particularly if under terrible working conditions. In terms of safe disposal, it has other implications with terrible health effects for certain destitute communities. (Google it.)
> There has to be some meaningful consequence for the losers.
Almost nobody wants to go to court. (Attorneys sometimes do because it's fun to do advocacy before the court, but most of them are smart enough to put client interests first. Debt Collection agencies also want to because they're almost never opposed, because people don't have money to fight them, but they don't even really think of it as going to court.) Courts also have pre-trial systems in place to try to get the parties to agree to a settlement before trial is necessary--pretrial conferences serve that function in most courts. A judge can look at the record and say "Are you sure you don't want to just settle this?"
Losing a lawsuit that you've spent years on (and likely paid for someone else to spend years on) is a pretty meaningful consequence for the losers.
You've also got the problem that the bigger the consequence to the loser, the less likely they are to bring legitimate claims to court.
The media uses stock photos whenever they don't have real photos of something. This is normal. I've even seen stock photos of Bumble Bee tuna used in contamination stories for another brand. (I forget which one.) Talk about misleading...
> ''the brake pedal to take precedence over the gas pedal if both were pressed' or, as their latest notice states, 'would cut power to the engine if both pedals were pressed.'
Hint: this is a feature, not a bug. And even if you're reviewing very closely, it's not something that it takes three months to avoid messing up. if(X&&Y) Z=Y;
When the two pedals work at the same time, it can result in pretty horrible accidents. Unless your driving style uses both pedals at the same time in a way that increases your safety (in which case you're James Bond and you don't ask slashdot questions), just take the update.
One of the points he makes, which is a good one, is that data-sharing for enforcement purposes among countries that have different criminal punishments for copyright law is hard to justify. It also makes me wonder if--for example--I live in a country with fair use and a country with more stringent fair use policies wants to go after me for copyright infringement... well, you see the issues. Will the country with the most stringent policies suddenly be the equivalent of the patent troll district in Texas?
We need to develop greater use of proveable correctness in bank security, promote the use of isolated secure workstations for private banking transactions online, and use contractual incentives and accountability to incentivize better security systems.
Seriously, how about a physical random token generator where someone has to enter what the token currently displays each time they make a transaction for an account with a $5000+ balance, or more than $500 in a single transaction, or $1000 in a day? Or similar systems that make phishing alone useless.
> net result is we're bringing the war to them using technology we have and they don't.
Oh yeah. None of the old-fashioned junk like Stealth Bombers. Why, I picked one of those up from a neighboring cave for cheap, just last month. :)
It's powerful new tech, though, and useful--more because of the increased visibility and flexibility brought on by the drones than because of lowering the risk to the pilot of being shot down.
If it's a distinguished school with an honor code, point out that they're insulting you by assuming you're defrauding them. If you get caught defrauding them, you can get suspended or kicked out--but they shouldn't assume that you're doing it. It's like systems that automatically hash assignments to check them for cheating. You can have trust and a few people will take advantage of it, or you can have distrust and dishonor, which is demeaning to the integrity of the school and insulting to the student.
> Since your post has inspired a debate about whether corpses and zombies can be raped, I'll point out that slaves cannot be. Being a slave-trader is worse than being a rapist, not the reverse as your post would seem to imply. Now I ask you, are gamers scarier than Thomas Jefferson?
On the contrary; slaves can be raped, and frequently are. (I would say usually are, but a lot depends on which definitions you use, and labor trafficking does not always involve rape, although sometimes it does.)
It is possible to claim otherwise by claiming that a slave has no rights, but that applies only in cases of legal slavery, and slavery is not legal today. (The prohibition on slavery takes on the status of jus cogens in international law, meaning that it is not and cannot be legal anywhere in the world.)
As to slave trading and rape, that's generally true at least because the former usually involves a lot of the latter. (So there's no need to get into the messy question of what absolute wrong is worse than another, all other things being equal).
Thomas Jefferson... Mmm.... Probably not, but some gamers would be the exception. Thomas Jefferson was an especially effective politician, which makes him dangerous. Only some gamers are dangerous. Therefore on the whole, gamers are not scarier than Thomas Jefferson.
"Gamers are not scarier than Thomas Jefferson." Of all the sentences I didn't expect to use today...