To clarify I'm defending the initial auction which the summary seemed to lump in with the fees.
I think the fees are abominable. From an economic perspective all they are doing is penalizing use of cellphones. There is no justification for not simply raising taxes more generally and avoiding this skewing effect.
Using the 700Mhz spectrum for cell phones means it can't be used for other purposes. If we hadn't used this spectrum for cell service we could have used it to provide faster WiFi or for all sorts of other uses.
Now the net effect of auctioning off the spectrum rather than giving it away is (assuming an efficent market) just to transfer money from the users of cellphones to those who don't use cellphones. That seems only fair. The people who benefit from exclusive use of a public resource should compensate those who are denied benefits as a result.
When developers want to build houses on federal land we expect them to pay for the land even though it means the cost of the houses they sell will be higher. This is no different.
Of course if you accept the evidence that the cellphone market is not really competitive (high barriers to entry make it more like a monopoly) then this cost won't be all passed on to consumers so it's even more justified.
Because the anti-trust laws don't prevent the companies from getting together and colluding to ensure that the only HD disk players require the DRM and the only way you can get really high quality TV inputs is with DRM.
MS knows it's buisness model is doomed and they are DESPERATE to replace windows and office with a similar cash cow.
They need a new monopoly and they are smart enough to realize that computer based entertainment centers are going to be worth an immense amount of money. If MS can get the public to expect their media OS/media box (Xbox 3?) as a standard living room feature they've just captured as much revenue as windows & office together have provided. It doesn't matter what they sell the actual units for if they control the screen and sell ads for the indefinite future. Moreover, it provides the same kind of lock in and opportunity to leverage market share they've used so effectively in the past. I'm sure that the MS gaming system will be the only one that integrates seemlessly with the media center and MS's near field interface devices will make it way easier to get your media onto the media center.
They've been trying to muscle into this field since long before apple released the ipod and they've consistantly failed. They are deathly afraid that apple will capture the space the way they did the portable music player market. If they can't beat them on design and interface MS figures it can beat them on content by cozying up to the media companies so apple will be left out in the cold.
Of course it would be pretty short sighted of the media industry to help MS without some very long term guarantees. If MS succeeds suddenly the relationship will flip around and the media companies will live or die at MS's whim.
I don't remember the exact definitions but I seem to remember that any modified copy of the product that your customers create, even if it is never distributed, counts as a derived work.
Now if you are really going to be selling this software as a commercial product I think it's a mistake to do so without getting some legal advice. The fact that you are selling your product (instead of giving it away) may very well create implied rights of action, e.g., state or federal law may allow customers to sue you for damages if your product causes data loss or otherwise fails to live up to expectations. Therefore failing to get legal advice might open you up to liability.
Of course there are probably generic software licensces that are prewritten but the genericity usually comes from the fact that they cover your ass by restricting the customer's rights as much as possible. Still, if you look you might find something.
What you really seem to want is a licenses that give the customer the rights to use the work and create derivative works as they see fit but not to redistribute the work or any derived works. Since you should be getting legal advice anyway this would be trivial for a lawyer to arrange.
Hmm, so you want "NO internet censorship or whatsoever" yet you want to use the law to punish those who don't take down offensive videos?
Sounds pretty inconsistent to me.
Now don't get me wrong. While I disagree I recognize that serious arguments can be made for laws censoring racist, nationalistic, or harassing content. But it's still censorship.
I think the point was that if there were magnetic monopoles then Maxwell's equations would be even more elegant because there would be more symmetry between the electric and magnetic fields.
Also will this mean I can't take a video clip on my phone without it always starting with a clicking sound? If I can what distinguishes taking a frame from a video and a picture?
What if I want to snap a closeup of a sleeping baby without risking waking it?
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Moreover, what does this really stop? Anyone who is a serious stalker can just buy a telephoto lens and get better results. In most truly private situations like restrooms you would notice the person aiming the phone at you.
So what does this stop? People on the bus recording that hideous outfit you wore the other day? Girls snapping a pic of the cute guy at the coffee shop to show their friends?
This is a perfect example of the intrinsic structural costs to democratic government.
There is some proposal (making phones click) that sounds appealing at first blush since it attacks some behavior/situation that is widely disliked. However, the issue isn't a high prority for the vast majority of people so few people give it more thought than, "Yah, it's bad for stalkers to take silent pictures." making it a pure political win for the legislators supporting it.
Worse costs of a law like this are in the applications that never get created. When we don't get the cool eyeglasses camera that snaps pictures to help us remember names we can't see what we didn't get so it's very very hard for anyone to challenge this kind of regulation.
Ultimately democratic government just does very poorly at properly weighing opportunity costs or balancing small harms to many people (who won't care enough to vote on that issue) against big benefits to a few.
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This is why I think that the law should simply be reset ever so often just like an install of windows. Say laws always last for a randomly determined number of years (don't want all the laws to sunset at the same time) with the standard being 5-10 years and a supermajority allowing 50-100. Various procedural hurdle would need to be enacted to prevent unrelated laws from being bundled too much.
Indeed, ideally we would restart many agencies from the ground up every so often. Say start up a second version of the FBI and slowly expand it's responsibilities while shrinking those of the current agency. One might even require that 90% of the old employees be hired by the new agency but simply giving them the chance to start over and fix the procedures that were thoughtlessly implemented could be a huge win if we did it only say every 50 years for every major agency.
It's a sorry state of affairs that there are so few people like you (and I) who don't believe gun rights are particularly important and that we should should consider repealing the 2nd ammendment but nevertheless believe it does protect the rights of Americans to possess arms.
I mean a good estimate of most American's objectivity is how many things they think make for bad polity but are nevertheless required by the constituion. In my experience this number is depressing low if at all greater than 0.
Frankly, I think it's pretty damn clear that the 2nd ammendment gives US citizens a right to own and possess (in their homes) weapons equivalent to standard military issue personal weapons, e.g., M16/AK47 assault rifles and maybe even grenades but not squad level weapons like rpgs. This is certainly what a stupidly simpleminded totally literal reading of the ammendment using either the modern or historical meaning of the terms would demand. So any attempt to claim the 2nd ammendment doesn't protect the right to own personal combat weapons must look to the historical context and the motivations for the amendment.
Yet, examining the amendment in this more sophisticated manner just makes things worse for those who want to radically restrict the rights it guarantees. The 2nd amendment was clearly a reaction to various attempts by European powers such as England to disarm their citizens and thereby deny their ability to effectively resist tyranny. Thus far from curtailing the protections of the 2nd amendment this provides a plausible (but I think ultimately false) argument that the protections should actually extend to weapons like missile launchers to give the people a chance against tanks and planes.
Attempts to curtail this right to only members of the national guard by virtue of the "well regulated militia" clause miss the point that the militia was understood to be composed of the able bodied adult men (modulo felons, slaves etc..). It wouldn't even make sense to have an ammendment guaranteeing the right of federal troops to posses weapons and if they had intended to merely grant states the right to arm designated forces they would have just said so. Indeed, a situation where arms were only permitted to officially designated soldiers was exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was designed to protect against. Since the federal government obviously was prohibited from restricting weapon possession to only federally designated troops (or equivalently passing laws restricting militia membership to individuals they choose) the incorporation of the bill of rights by the 14th amendment unequivocally entails that states are now barred from doing this as well and the perception of the 2nd amendment at the time of incorporation only strengthens this argument. Moreover, a federally controlled national guard surely does not meet the standards set by the 2nd amendment for a militia as it is exactly the sort of force the militia is supposed to resist.
On the other hand I think the 2nd ammendment may not provide any protection for personal self-defense. Indeed, I see no reason that it should be unconstitutional to ban pistols entirely and require that all guns be stored in a locked safe and the ammo in a separate safe. However, that just goes to show you how outdated the 2nd ammendment really is.
The idea that we need guns to we can repel invasions before the government arrives or to fight off a tyrannical regime are relics from an earlier era. Jet planes and radio make the idea of a amateur army absurd and if a meaningful percent of the population realizes the danger before their weapons are taken then the tyrannical regime isn't much of a danger. What's puzzling isn't that the 2nd amendment might be inappropriate given the transformation of the USA from a sparsely populated agrarian nation composed of loosely affiliated states and the huge technological changes. Rather, what's amazing is that so many people on both sides don't seem to think it needs to be updated.
P.S. Just because I thi
Numbers Isn't Bad
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Daemon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I mean they don't make a secret of the fact that Charlie (the lead actor) has superhuman skills and sometimes his attempts to explain the math the the lay people aren't the best but the math is all solid and most of the applications are plausible. I mean the game theory/psychology ones are pushing it a little but the math is at least as plausible as anything on a crime drama is.
I mean shows spice up every element to make it more appealing. The cases always involve interesting coincedences or cunning criminals. Everyone knows that real investigators don't end up kidnapped so often or that real serial killers aren't perfect masterminds. We accept that the main charachters never trip at the last minute and die rather than saving the day because we want a good narrative that's fun to watch not a documentary about solving crimes.
As long as the math and science are treated just like the other elements in the show I'm happy. Sure, make the hero more awesome than most people and let his hail mary passes turn out to work as long as you don't make false claims or misrepresent how the math/science works. Numbers lives up to this and that's all I want.
Besides, I want more cute mathematicians depicted on TV...we could use more girls in the field.
Anything that ejects mass has a non-zero thrust by Newton's ? law. Perhaps you mean they don't have enough thrust to weight ratio to escape earth's gravity? I believe that is still false but you are correct that a fully solid fueled approach would require prohibitively large rockets with currently available technology.
But I would take it farther and say that sending men into space now is like investing in OS research by building giant vacuum tube computers instead of investing in transistor research.
First create a decent way to get men into space then send them there not the other way around. We gain very little continuing to send men up into space the same way we have been doing since the 60s.
Yah, and the CIA had an extremely detailed report describing why we knew Iraq certainly had WMDs. Lots of paperwork making a show of comparing the possible theories isn't worth squat if the process that produced that report isn't fair, objective and openminded. And there have been reasonable credible allegations that the NASA process that selected Ares was, like the CIA intelligence on Iraq, biased by a boss who already knew the "right" answer.
For instance I seem to remember hearing (but can't verify so take with a grain of salt) that the selected proposal was very similar to the proposal Griffin himself advocated in one of his theses. Whether he did or not the credibility of the ESAS is already somewhat questionable given that it's rejection of the previously preferred approach coincided with Griffin's appointment. In this context the accusations made by people involved in the process that Griffin had already decided on the desired answer seem reasonably credible. Certainly there is no doubt that Griffin has already displayed the sort of inflexibility and intolerance of dissent that are warning signs of a management style that could bias the decisions. Being smart doesn't make one a good manager and bad management can poison the results despite the best of intentions.
Now I have no idea whether reusing Shuttle parts in the way the DIRECT guys propose is a good idea or not but given the reasons to question the value of the ESAS report I think it's certainly worthwhile to rexamine the issue and at least ask whether the DIRECT approach is sufficently superior to Ares that it justifies abandoning the sunk costs.
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Of course this whole buisness is kinda tragic. We are debating the best way to throw away our space budget for the sake of national pride. The amount of space research and propulsion/vehicle research that NASA could finance if it abandoned the ISS or better yet put man space flight on hold until launch technology improved is enormous. I mean repairing the Hubble is probably the biggest contribution manned space flight has made to our scientific knowledge in the past 15 years and with the money wasted on manned flight we could have launched a fleet of telescopes.
Even if you believe in the ultimate importance of sending men into space doing it now isn't a a good way to achieve that goal. It's the aerospace equivalent of realizing that preemptive process scheduling and memory protection are the future of computers before the invention of the transistor and investing your money to build giant vacuum tube based machines to explore OS design rather than first improving the underlying technology. Useful human presence in space requires cheaper launches and the money NASA wastes on manned exploration now could fund an amazing amount of research into new launch technologies.
Just because it would make us look stupid if we effectively gave the ISS to the Russians or abandoned it after the huge expense of building it isn't a reason to keep the program.
It's an awful summary. Google isn't dumb enough to go compete in the router market. They are likely creating optimized routers to service their own backend.
Don't you remember this was the same thing that happened when information on GFS leaked or the custom OS versions they use in their data center. People hyped it up as if google was going to take on MS in the OS arena.
Why go bringing CISCO into this. Apart from creating products people want to use (gmail, search, etc..) google has two main focuses: building a back end able to efficiently run those applications and ensuring the consumer has easy access to those services.
Android and google's actions in the spectrum market weren't made just to fuck around with products outside their core competencies. They were strategic moves made to ensure that customers on mobile devices didn't end up directed away from google products by someone controlling the network or providing the handset.
Similarly google isn't about to start competing in the router market just for kicks. It's outside of their core competencies and the potential for profit simply wouldn't justify the resource expenditure.
Likely google is working on a custom router to help make their backend more efficient. To take an educated guess I would imagine that they want to build in intelligent load balancing into their routers. In other words have the routers maintain information about where certain kinds of data live and/or what machines are heavily loaded and then intelligently send requests for computations to lightly loaded nodes near the data. They might also want to simply build in custom handling of packets for things like GFS.
Not only will google not bother to compete in the router market but I suspect they won't even allow the technology they use for this to escape the company. After all most of the people who would benefit from this kind of optimization are their direct competitors.
Possibly the worry from MS's point of view is that linux/BSD/etc.. won't be considered part of the market from a legal point of view. I mean I think it should be but I don't know what the law is.
A more likely answer though is the following. Linux threatens MS in particularly lucrative areas (servers and backend systems). Moreover, the unix software culture and software ecosystem means that few linux servers will run the various DB and backend MS software solutions.
Also, MS likely realizes the important role the developing world will play in software sales in the future and the threat that a totally free OS provides. OS X, MS likely assumed, would face too high a barrier to entry to ever get really popular (who wants to spend thousands on an OS that you find unfamiliar and are unsure if it can do what you need?) but that a free OS would be tried and gain a foothold.
Moreover, MS may think that linux's low desktop penetration means that it wouldn't provide much legal defense in the first place.
I love how some of these reports describe the cut as "eerily" similar to the earlier ones. Doesn't seem eerie to me, just evidence you should keep your cable lines farther apart.
Alternatively one option you might want to explore is alternative financing arrangements for these computers. I mean I suspect the reason that filters are required is that these would be state owned computers.
I encourage you to think about finding a private company that would lease these computers to the students with the understanding that at the end of the lease the student or failing that the state would have the option to purchase at a specified price. This might let you make an end run around the legal requirement for filtering.
Regardless of your stance on filtering content for students this is wise for several reasons.
If you put filters on these computers then you or the school will be blamed when kids access inappropriate content. I mean after all you put the filters there to stop the kids from accessing such content so it's your failure when they do. Someone will manage to access inappropriate content (either b/c of bad filters or clever hacks) and then the program gets blamed.
On the other hand if the parents view these as simply computers provided to them as a school supply they will be more likely to assume responsibility for policing their children's behavior themselves.
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Finally, I would point out that people tend to act the way they are expected to act. If you put up a bunch of filters against looking at inappropriate content you communicate the expectation that this is what they would do without the filters and they will proceed to act in accordance with that expectation and circumvent filters.
First of all why would you want to stop children from doing the social activities (myspace etc..) they would enjoy on a computer? Not only are they reading but they are learning to like computers, and socializing. All of these are valuable for children.
Now as for the obscenity/filtering issue things get more complicated. While a bunch of people here will tell you not to filter at all you have no legal choice and if you don't appear to be trying you risk getting shit from parents who stumble on their kids looking at porn.
As far as the filter you need to realize that no matter what you do if the kids want to get around it they will succeed!
I remember dealing with the locked down computers in the school computer lab when I was in school. Not only did I circumvent them but I of course immediately told my friends how do so and word spread to everyone who used the machines frequently. Not to toot my own horn but these weren't trivial hacks but since I didn't care (I had a computer at home) I also let the guy running the computer lab know so he could go tell the software company to patch things (made it more fun). The point is that filters will be circumvented.
Now one approach is to simply make the filters as unobtrusive as possible to minimize the incentive the kids have to circumvent it. The best you can hope for is that it's not worth the bother for anyone but the couple of wanna be computer berds at the school.
Ultimately though I suggest you talk to a lawyer and the political people at the school. This isn't a technical question. Your filters will fail, the question is what do you need to do to be legally and politically protected from any fall out if this occurs
Yes, generally anything that is encountered during the course of a lawful search (even if for something else) is admissable. Sure, cops can't go paw the drawer next to your bed looking for a stolen TV but the problem is how this is understood by the courts.
In particular this rule is understood to mean that if the police open your safe looking for a stolen laptop the papers inside would be admissible in court. In other words once the police have cause to look inside a container you own they can examine the contents at their leisure, they need not immediately cease looking the second it's apparent the subject of their warrant isn't present. Now if you had a locked jewelery box inside that safe they likely wouldn't be able to examine the contents if it was outside the scope of the original warrant but the problem is when you try to map this notion onto that of a computer.
In particular it turns out that case law so far has endorsed the idea that the computer is just one big container. Maybe things would be different if you had an encrypted volume on the computer but in general once they have reason to examine your computer for one thing they can examine everything.
In fact the standard practice in the US is to seize your computer and have their experts perform a low level clone of the disk the second they have any reason to search your computer. Moreover, since the 4th ammendment and past case law is grounded in the notions of physical searches and seizures there is no framework for restricting what they can use the HD clone for once it's been made (well privacy laws might prevent them from disclosing your cybersex logs but that's about it)
What, that couldn't be true. I can't imagine a school confiscating a sci-fi novel or your credit cards from your backpack just because they weren't school related.
Are you sure you don't mean that things taken out in class that weren't school related were confiscated?
Slashdot Mirror
It's totally reasonable to use it as a lower bound on the amount of time they've been here.
Yes, I too switched account names and used to have a shorter UID. So what, it's a fucking website login.
All I'm saying is if you have been here for longer than a week you shouldn't be surprised at this.
To clarify I'm defending the initial auction which the summary seemed to lump in with the fees.
I think the fees are abominable. From an economic perspective all they are doing is penalizing use of cellphones. There is no justification for not simply raising taxes more generally and avoiding this skewing effect.
Using the 700Mhz spectrum for cell phones means it can't be used for other purposes. If we hadn't used this spectrum for cell service we could have used it to provide faster WiFi or for all sorts of other uses.
Now the net effect of auctioning off the spectrum rather than giving it away is (assuming an efficent market) just to transfer money from the users of cellphones to those who don't use cellphones. That seems only fair. The people who benefit from exclusive use of a public resource should compensate those who are denied benefits as a result.
When developers want to build houses on federal land we expect them to pay for the land even though it means the cost of the houses they sell will be higher. This is no different.
Of course if you accept the evidence that the cellphone market is not really competitive (high barriers to entry make it more like a monopoly) then this cost won't be all passed on to consumers so it's even more justified.
Because the anti-trust laws don't prevent the companies from getting together and colluding to ensure that the only HD disk players require the DRM and the only way you can get really high quality TV inputs is with DRM.
You have a 6 digit uid and your SHOCKED by the number of comments that immediately start bashing windows and promoting Linux!
Are you feeling ok?
MS knows it's buisness model is doomed and they are DESPERATE to replace windows and office with a similar cash cow.
They need a new monopoly and they are smart enough to realize that computer based entertainment centers are going to be worth an immense amount of money. If MS can get the public to expect their media OS/media box (Xbox 3?) as a standard living room feature they've just captured as much revenue as windows & office together have provided. It doesn't matter what they sell the actual units for if they control the screen and sell ads for the indefinite future. Moreover, it provides the same kind of lock in and opportunity to leverage market share they've used so effectively in the past. I'm sure that the MS gaming system will be the only one that integrates seemlessly with the media center and MS's near field interface devices will make it way easier to get your media onto the media center.
They've been trying to muscle into this field since long before apple released the ipod and they've consistantly failed. They are deathly afraid that apple will capture the space the way they did the portable music player market. If they can't beat them on design and interface MS figures it can beat them on content by cozying up to the media companies so apple will be left out in the cold.
Of course it would be pretty short sighted of the media industry to help MS without some very long term guarantees. If MS succeeds suddenly the relationship will flip around and the media companies will live or die at MS's whim.
Censorship may not always be bad. Just usually.
I think a more clear cut case is the removal of defamatory remarks but either way sometimes censorship is good.
I don't remember the exact definitions but I seem to remember that any modified copy of the product that your customers create, even if it is never distributed, counts as a derived work.
Now if you are really going to be selling this software as a commercial product I think it's a mistake to do so without getting some legal advice. The fact that you are selling your product (instead of giving it away) may very well create implied rights of action, e.g., state or federal law may allow customers to sue you for damages if your product causes data loss or otherwise fails to live up to expectations. Therefore failing to get legal advice might open you up to liability.
Of course there are probably generic software licensces that are prewritten but the genericity usually comes from the fact that they cover your ass by restricting the customer's rights as much as possible. Still, if you look you might find something.
What you really seem to want is a licenses that give the customer the rights to use the work and create derivative works as they see fit but not to redistribute the work or any derived works. Since you should be getting legal advice anyway this would be trivial for a lawyer to arrange.
Hmm, so you want "NO internet censorship or whatsoever" yet you want to use the law to punish those who don't take down offensive videos?
Sounds pretty inconsistent to me.
Now don't get me wrong. While I disagree I recognize that serious arguments can be made for laws censoring racist, nationalistic, or harassing content. But it's still censorship.
I think the point was that if there were magnetic monopoles then Maxwell's equations would be even more elegant because there would be more symmetry between the electric and magnetic fields.
Also will this mean I can't take a video clip on my phone without it always starting with a clicking sound? If I can what distinguishes taking a frame from a video and a picture?
What if I want to snap a closeup of a sleeping baby without risking waking it?
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Moreover, what does this really stop? Anyone who is a serious stalker can just buy a telephoto lens and get better results. In most truly private situations like restrooms you would notice the person aiming the phone at you.
So what does this stop? People on the bus recording that hideous outfit you wore the other day? Girls snapping a pic of the cute guy at the coffee shop to show their friends?
This is a perfect example of the intrinsic structural costs to democratic government.
There is some proposal (making phones click) that sounds appealing at first blush since it attacks some behavior/situation that is widely disliked. However, the issue isn't a high prority for the vast majority of people so few people give it more thought than, "Yah, it's bad for stalkers to take silent pictures." making it a pure political win for the legislators supporting it.
Worse costs of a law like this are in the applications that never get created. When we don't get the cool eyeglasses camera that snaps pictures to help us remember names we can't see what we didn't get so it's very very hard for anyone to challenge this kind of regulation.
Ultimately democratic government just does very poorly at properly weighing opportunity costs or balancing small harms to many people (who won't care enough to vote on that issue) against big benefits to a few.
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This is why I think that the law should simply be reset ever so often just like an install of windows. Say laws always last for a randomly determined number of years (don't want all the laws to sunset at the same time) with the standard being 5-10 years and a supermajority allowing 50-100. Various procedural hurdle would need to be enacted to prevent unrelated laws from being bundled too much.
Indeed, ideally we would restart many agencies from the ground up every so often. Say start up a second version of the FBI and slowly expand it's responsibilities while shrinking those of the current agency. One might even require that 90% of the old employees be hired by the new agency but simply giving them the chance to start over and fix the procedures that were thoughtlessly implemented could be a huge win if we did it only say every 50 years for every major agency.
It's a sorry state of affairs that there are so few people like you (and I) who don't believe gun rights are particularly important and that we should should consider repealing the 2nd ammendment but nevertheless believe it does protect the rights of Americans to possess arms.
I mean a good estimate of most American's objectivity is how many things they think make for bad polity but are nevertheless required by the constituion. In my experience this number is depressing low if at all greater than 0.
Frankly, I think it's pretty damn clear that the 2nd ammendment gives US citizens a right to own and possess (in their homes) weapons equivalent to standard military issue personal weapons, e.g., M16/AK47 assault rifles and maybe even grenades but not squad level weapons like rpgs. This is certainly what a stupidly simpleminded totally literal reading of the ammendment using either the modern or historical meaning of the terms would demand. So any attempt to claim the 2nd ammendment doesn't protect the right to own personal combat weapons must look to the historical context and the motivations for the amendment.
Yet, examining the amendment in this more sophisticated manner just makes things worse for those who want to radically restrict the rights it guarantees. The 2nd amendment was clearly a reaction to various attempts by European powers such as England to disarm their citizens and thereby deny their ability to effectively resist tyranny. Thus far from curtailing the protections of the 2nd amendment this provides a plausible (but I think ultimately false) argument that the protections should actually extend to weapons like missile launchers to give the people a chance against tanks and planes.
Attempts to curtail this right to only members of the national guard by virtue of the "well regulated militia" clause miss the point that the militia was understood to be composed of the able bodied adult men (modulo felons, slaves etc..). It wouldn't even make sense to have an ammendment guaranteeing the right of federal troops to posses weapons and if they had intended to merely grant states the right to arm designated forces they would have just said so. Indeed, a situation where arms were only permitted to officially designated soldiers was exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was designed to protect against. Since the federal government obviously was prohibited from restricting weapon possession to only federally designated troops (or equivalently passing laws restricting militia membership to individuals they choose) the incorporation of the bill of rights by the 14th amendment unequivocally entails that states are now barred from doing this as well and the perception of the 2nd amendment at the time of incorporation only strengthens this argument. Moreover, a federally controlled national guard surely does not meet the standards set by the 2nd amendment for a militia as it is exactly the sort of force the militia is supposed to resist.
On the other hand I think the 2nd ammendment may not provide any protection for personal self-defense. Indeed, I see no reason that it should be unconstitutional to ban pistols entirely and require that all guns be stored in a locked safe and the ammo in a separate safe. However, that just goes to show you how outdated the 2nd ammendment really is.
The idea that we need guns to we can repel invasions before the government arrives or to fight off a tyrannical regime are relics from an earlier era. Jet planes and radio make the idea of a amateur army absurd and if a meaningful percent of the population realizes the danger before their weapons are taken then the tyrannical regime isn't much of a danger. What's puzzling isn't that the 2nd amendment might be inappropriate given the transformation of the USA from a sparsely populated agrarian nation composed of loosely affiliated states and the huge technological changes. Rather, what's amazing is that so many people on both sides don't seem to think it needs to be updated.
P.S. Just because I thi
I mean they don't make a secret of the fact that Charlie (the lead actor) has superhuman skills and sometimes his attempts to explain the math the the lay people aren't the best but the math is all solid and most of the applications are plausible. I mean the game theory/psychology ones are pushing it a little but the math is at least as plausible as anything on a crime drama is.
I mean shows spice up every element to make it more appealing. The cases always involve interesting coincedences or cunning criminals. Everyone knows that real investigators don't end up kidnapped so often or that real serial killers aren't perfect masterminds. We accept that the main charachters never trip at the last minute and die rather than saving the day because we want a good narrative that's fun to watch not a documentary about solving crimes.
As long as the math and science are treated just like the other elements in the show I'm happy. Sure, make the hero more awesome than most people and let his hail mary passes turn out to work as long as you don't make false claims or misrepresent how the math/science works. Numbers lives up to this and that's all I want.
Besides, I want more cute mathematicians depicted on TV...we could use more girls in the field.
That doesn't even make sense!
Anything that ejects mass has a non-zero thrust by Newton's ? law. Perhaps you mean they don't have enough thrust to weight ratio to escape earth's gravity? I believe that is still false but you are correct that a fully solid fueled approach would require prohibitively large rockets with currently available technology.
Hey, you stole my metaphor!
But I would take it farther and say that sending men into space now is like investing in OS research by building giant vacuum tube computers instead of investing in transistor research.
First create a decent way to get men into space then send them there not the other way around. We gain very little continuing to send men up into space the same way we have been doing since the 60s.
Yah, and the CIA had an extremely detailed report describing why we knew Iraq certainly had WMDs. Lots of paperwork making a show of comparing the possible theories isn't worth squat if the process that produced that report isn't fair, objective and openminded. And there have been reasonable credible allegations that the NASA process that selected Ares was, like the CIA intelligence on Iraq, biased by a boss who already knew the "right" answer.
For instance I seem to remember hearing (but can't verify so take with a grain of salt) that the selected proposal was very similar to the proposal Griffin himself advocated in one of his theses. Whether he did or not the credibility of the ESAS is already somewhat questionable given that it's rejection of the previously preferred approach coincided with Griffin's appointment. In this context the accusations made by people involved in the process that Griffin had already decided on the desired answer seem reasonably credible. Certainly there is no doubt that Griffin has already displayed the sort of inflexibility and intolerance of dissent that are warning signs of a management style that could bias the decisions. Being smart doesn't make one a good manager and bad management can poison the results despite the best of intentions.
Now I have no idea whether reusing Shuttle parts in the way the DIRECT guys propose is a good idea or not but given the reasons to question the value of the ESAS report I think it's certainly worthwhile to rexamine the issue and at least ask whether the DIRECT approach is sufficently superior to Ares that it justifies abandoning the sunk costs.
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Of course this whole buisness is kinda tragic. We are debating the best way to throw away our space budget for the sake of national pride. The amount of space research and propulsion/vehicle research that NASA could finance if it abandoned the ISS or better yet put man space flight on hold until launch technology improved is enormous. I mean repairing the Hubble is probably the biggest contribution manned space flight has made to our scientific knowledge in the past 15 years and with the money wasted on manned flight we could have launched a fleet of telescopes.
Even if you believe in the ultimate importance of sending men into space doing it now isn't a a good way to achieve that goal. It's the aerospace equivalent of realizing that preemptive process scheduling and memory protection are the future of computers before the invention of the transistor and investing your money to build giant vacuum tube based machines to explore OS design rather than first improving the underlying technology. Useful human presence in space requires cheaper launches and the money NASA wastes on manned exploration now could fund an amazing amount of research into new launch technologies.
Just because it would make us look stupid if we effectively gave the ISS to the Russians or abandoned it after the huge expense of building it isn't a reason to keep the program.
It's an awful summary. Google isn't dumb enough to go compete in the router market. They are likely creating optimized routers to service their own backend.
Don't you remember this was the same thing that happened when information on GFS leaked or the custom OS versions they use in their data center. People hyped it up as if google was going to take on MS in the OS arena.
Why go bringing CISCO into this. Apart from creating products people want to use (gmail, search, etc..) google has two main focuses: building a back end able to efficiently run those applications and ensuring the consumer has easy access to those services.
Android and google's actions in the spectrum market weren't made just to fuck around with products outside their core competencies. They were strategic moves made to ensure that customers on mobile devices didn't end up directed away from google products by someone controlling the network or providing the handset.
Similarly google isn't about to start competing in the router market just for kicks. It's outside of their core competencies and the potential for profit simply wouldn't justify the resource expenditure.
Likely google is working on a custom router to help make their backend more efficient. To take an educated guess I would imagine that they want to build in intelligent load balancing into their routers. In other words have the routers maintain information about where certain kinds of data live and/or what machines are heavily loaded and then intelligently send requests for computations to lightly loaded nodes near the data. They might also want to simply build in custom handling of packets for things like GFS.
Not only will google not bother to compete in the router market but I suspect they won't even allow the technology they use for this to escape the company. After all most of the people who would benefit from this kind of optimization are their direct competitors.
Possibly the worry from MS's point of view is that linux/BSD/etc.. won't be considered part of the market from a legal point of view. I mean I think it should be but I don't know what the law is.
A more likely answer though is the following. Linux threatens MS in particularly lucrative areas (servers and backend systems). Moreover, the unix software culture and software ecosystem means that few linux servers will run the various DB and backend MS software solutions.
Also, MS likely realizes the important role the developing world will play in software sales in the future and the threat that a totally free OS provides. OS X, MS likely assumed, would face too high a barrier to entry to ever get really popular (who wants to spend thousands on an OS that you find unfamiliar and are unsure if it can do what you need?) but that a free OS would be tried and gain a foothold.
Moreover, MS may think that linux's low desktop penetration means that it wouldn't provide much legal defense in the first place.
I love how some of these reports describe the cut as "eerily" similar to the earlier ones. Doesn't seem eerie to me, just evidence you should keep your cable lines farther apart.
Alternatively one option you might want to explore is alternative financing arrangements for these computers. I mean I suspect the reason that filters are required is that these would be state owned computers.
I encourage you to think about finding a private company that would lease these computers to the students with the understanding that at the end of the lease the student or failing that the state would have the option to purchase at a specified price. This might let you make an end run around the legal requirement for filtering.
Regardless of your stance on filtering content for students this is wise for several reasons.
If you put filters on these computers then you or the school will be blamed when kids access inappropriate content. I mean after all you put the filters there to stop the kids from accessing such content so it's your failure when they do. Someone will manage to access inappropriate content (either b/c of bad filters or clever hacks) and then the program gets blamed.
On the other hand if the parents view these as simply computers provided to them as a school supply they will be more likely to assume responsibility for policing their children's behavior themselves.
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Finally, I would point out that people tend to act the way they are expected to act. If you put up a bunch of filters against looking at inappropriate content you communicate the expectation that this is what they would do without the filters and they will proceed to act in accordance with that expectation and circumvent filters.
First of all why would you want to stop children from doing the social activities (myspace etc..) they would enjoy on a computer? Not only are they reading but they are learning to like computers, and socializing. All of these are valuable for children.
Now as for the obscenity/filtering issue things get more complicated. While a bunch of people here will tell you not to filter at all you have no legal choice and if you don't appear to be trying you risk getting shit from parents who stumble on their kids looking at porn.
As far as the filter you need to realize that no matter what you do if the kids want to get around it they will succeed!
I remember dealing with the locked down computers in the school computer lab when I was in school. Not only did I circumvent them but I of course immediately told my friends how do so and word spread to everyone who used the machines frequently. Not to toot my own horn but these weren't trivial hacks but since I didn't care (I had a computer at home) I also let the guy running the computer lab know so he could go tell the software company to patch things (made it more fun). The point is that filters will be circumvented.
Now one approach is to simply make the filters as unobtrusive as possible to minimize the incentive the kids have to circumvent it. The best you can hope for is that it's not worth the bother for anyone but the couple of wanna be computer berds at the school.
Ultimately though I suggest you talk to a lawyer and the political people at the school. This isn't a technical question. Your filters will fail, the question is what do you need to do to be legally and politically protected from any fall out if this occurs
Yes, generally anything that is encountered during the course of a lawful search (even if for something else) is admissable. Sure, cops can't go paw the drawer next to your bed looking for a stolen TV but the problem is how this is understood by the courts.
In particular this rule is understood to mean that if the police open your safe looking for a stolen laptop the papers inside would be admissible in court. In other words once the police have cause to look inside a container you own they can examine the contents at their leisure, they need not immediately cease looking the second it's apparent the subject of their warrant isn't present. Now if you had a locked jewelery box inside that safe they likely wouldn't be able to examine the contents if it was outside the scope of the original warrant but the problem is when you try to map this notion onto that of a computer.
In particular it turns out that case law so far has endorsed the idea that the computer is just one big container. Maybe things would be different if you had an encrypted volume on the computer but in general once they have reason to examine your computer for one thing they can examine everything.
In fact the standard practice in the US is to seize your computer and have their experts perform a low level clone of the disk the second they have any reason to search your computer. Moreover, since the 4th ammendment and past case law is grounded in the notions of physical searches and seizures there is no framework for restricting what they can use the HD clone for once it's been made (well privacy laws might prevent them from disclosing your cybersex logs but that's about it)
What, that couldn't be true. I can't imagine a school confiscating a sci-fi novel or your credit cards from your backpack just because they weren't school related.
Are you sure you don't mean that things taken out in class that weren't school related were confiscated?