I don't think there's a real good argument out there for a need for there to be...
I think you're looking at this the wrong way; you shouldn't need a "good argument" to release government information, you should have to have a good argument to keep it secret.
Our outlook towards government information should be patterned after the "presumption of innocence" of our common law. In other words, "taxpayer funded information should be free unless an independent body determines it must be secret for the common good". Currently, the assumption of too many people is that "taxpayer funded information should be secret unless a bureaucrat allows it to be released to the public". I think that's the wrong attitude in a free society.
Now, as far as this specific anecdote is concerned (taking off my devil's advocate hat now), it's likely that a independent panel would determine that street level views of a military base might be worthy of censorship, but don't leave that decision to some unknown and unnamed functionary.
I willing to play devil's advocate and say that it is a bad thing. Or, at least, the presumption that everything associated with the U.S. government should be kept secret from her citizens. In a democracy, everything paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open unless there is a real national security reason that it should be kept secret. And, I'm not convinced that there was a national security reason for Google to take down those images; it was probably some "cover my ass" action.
Every scandal in the last 7 years has been accompanied by a chorus from the right telling us that public exposure to incompetence (Walter Reed) or malfeasance (billions of dollars lost to contractors in Iraq) or law breaking (torture and warrantless wiretaps) are giving "aid and comfort" to the enemies. But, it is obvious that the real desire for secrecy is not to protect America but to protect the careers and reputations of the people who fucked up in the first place.
No, it will be sexy when the football jocks start hanging around the Engineering library trying to pick up all the sexy CS babes. No career will be "sexy" so long as it remains 80-90% male.
A. you believe in protectionism and we need it to protect ourselfs from highly competitive countries LIKE china and japan.
B. you don't believe in protectionism and in some weird way you don'ts thingk china or japan are competitive.
any other combination doesn't make sense...
I think the point is that we are currently not free-market and we are, in fact, intensely protectionist. The problem is that our protectionist policies are all directed towards bailing out huge corporations and banks and not the individual jobs of normal Americans. It's not necessarily hypocritical to say U.S. priorities are backwards and to believe that we should be protecting the poor citizens and not the billion dollar corporations. There's really four options:
1. Free market 2. Socialist 3. Free market towards U.S. citizens and socialist towards corporations 4. Socialist towards U.S. citizens and free market towards corporations
Currently, the U.S. follows a #3 world view and many liberals think we should move to a #4.
You called me a shitstain? I'm going to come over to your high school and beat you up! Ha, ha, just kidding, kid. I realize that all the freedom and anonymity of the internet can go to your head and make you say things that you would never say at the dinner table so I forgive you.
But, seriously, when you grow up you will eventually realize that attacking a political opponent using non-political leverage (e.g. Hillary's gender, Barack's race, Mitt's religion, McCain's age) just makes you sound like a uneducated hayseed. You don't want to sound like an uneducated hayseed do you?
Well, Mr. Some-of-the-Candidates-I-Support-are-Black-Women-Therefore-I'm-Very-PC, unless the GPP was claiming that Mrs. Clinton was engaging in non-evil Wiccan magic spells* by calling her a "White Witch" -- a possibility that I didn't consider and for which I am very sorry -- the slur was based on her gender and not on her policies or personality. You should ask your mommy if she like being called a "witch" and get back to me. Kthxbi
* Which would be pretty cool. If she calls upon her forest friends to defend the nation from terrorists and brews love potions that the special forces can sprinkle in Osama's falafel, I will definitely give her my vote.
Slashdot: News for Nerds. With an Undercurrent of Misogyny.
I bet most of the basement-dwelling, high school students here don't even know why they hate Clinton; other than their mommy didn't buy them a new Alienware computer for Christmas.
Am I the only person who is sad that the word "invention" seems to have disappeared in favor of "innovation".
As far as I'm concerned, innovation is what happens when the marketing department slaps a "cool evergreen scent" sticker on the latest jug of Tide detergent.
Invention is what happens when someone develops a new idea -- via a lot of thought and hard work -- into an invention.
That's a lie. Matt Romney -- a Republican -- created a workable health-insurance system in Massachusetts and is not averse to implementing the same nation-wide. He would not be my top-choice among Republicans, but your claims are false nonetheless.
Actually, you've lied -- twice (actually, call you a liar seems awfully harsh, perhaps you're just misinformed). Clinton's plan is actually very similar to Flopping Mitt's Massachusetts plan. And, Flopping Mitt has disavowed many aspects of his statewide plan for fear of alienating his "fuck the poor" conservative base.
Despite all that, experts say Clinton's plan borrows heavily from one Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts, which made the liberal state the first in the United States with near-universal health insurance.
That similarity could be fodder for Romney's rivals vying to be the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.
"Hillary's plan is just like the Massachusetts plan. There's not a whole lot of difference," said Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was an adviser to Romney on the state's health care reform law.
Of course here's Flopping Mitt's current stance:
Though it was his crowning achievement as governor, Romney has distanced himself from aspects of the law that offend his party's conservative base, including the extent of the government's role. He has proposed a plan that includes federal tax breaks and incentives to states to help the 47 million uninsured Americans afford coverage.
"What works in Massachusetts may not work in Texas," Romney said at a campaign stop in Salt Lake City, Utah.
You're right. I was describing the basic GoDaddy price for a.com address and, as you point out, other TLDs can be much more expensive.
But, I guess I don't see your point. Whether it's $9 or $90, there is no law that says you automatically get a right for "backsies" on a purchase. Either you're buying the domain for yourself in which case you will probably make an extra effort not to make a mistake. Or, you're buying the domain for a client in which case you'll explain the pricing structure to your client and pass it on; all your competitors will be doing exactly the same thing.
I understand your anecdote, but considering that a domain name only costs $9 I'm still on the side of banning the practice.
ICANN says it pretty eloquently:
Whereas, it is apparent that the AGP is being used for purposes for which it was not intended;
Whereas, abuse of the AGP is, in the opinion of the majority of respondents whose statements were collected by the GNSO Ad Hoc Group on Domain Name Tasting (4 October 2007 report), producing disadvantages in the form of consumer confusion and potential fraud that outweigh the benefits of the AGP;
In other words, your experience has become the exception (by a factor of millions) not the rule and a few bad apples have ruined it for the rest of us.
I'm not so sure about that. Many of us like our NIH, DoD, DoE, or univeristy grants. Many of us would be for a new orbiting space telescope, or a new Internet backbone (that isn't all filled up with random commercial crap and pr0n), or a manned trip to Mars, or a new super-collider, or a thousand other basic science projects that corporations are less likely to fund.
I'm sure there are some scientists who are libertarian enough to only work for corporations that are not receiving subsidies from the government, but I doubt it's the majority.
Just for the hell of it, I did some domain searches on yahoo! today. I'll be checking on them to see if they coincidentally get registered in the near future (they're unusual, but not just random).
This is a second-degree anecdote, but a friend of mine seems to have run into the same issue. He's not a technical guy so I can't vouch for the details. But, apparently his business web site is hosted on Yahoo! and he was looking at domains on November 8th. A few hours later the one he wanted was registered. He's already been solicited to purchase the domain from this company. It may be a coincidence, but the timing was so close that it's my opinion that there was fraudulent activity somewhere.
Here's the whois on this particular entity: Registrant: Transure Enterprise Ltd Host Master (hostmaster@transureent.com) Mill Mall Suite 6 PO Box 3085 Wickhams Cay 1 Road Town Tortola Tortola,3085 VG Tel. +00.12676535381
One last point: Do not confuse "biodiesel" (diesel that happens to be made from renewable sources) with vegetable oil / grease. While my understanding is that most diesel engines can theoretically run filtered waste vegetable oil, to reliably run it in your car you need fuel line heaters and a whole conversion kit. I personally have no experience with that.
My biodiesel use? I put it in my car (a 2003 Jetta TDI) and I drive places...:-)
I wish I knew more. It's basically a replacement for dino-diesel with a few caveats. It has slightly higher detergent values than dino so they suggest you replace your fuel filter after your first couple of tanks if you've been running (that's an easy $30 do-it-yourself job). Depending on the source (e.g. Palm oil, soy oil, grease, etc.) the cloud point can vary (cloud point = the temperature where the fuel stops being a beautiful golden liquid and turns into a cloudy gel). The co-op was still running a palm-oil based B99 (99% bio / 1% dino) as of November and a few people had trouble with gelling. They've switched to a K50B50 (50% kerosene, 50% soy bio) for the winter and haven't seen any problems.
The conversation so far has been purely about the environment. As far as I'm concerned the far more pressing issue is National Security. It makes me sick that every time I fill up my tank* a fraction of that cost is going to fund Madrassas to train suicide bombers to blow up friends of mine in Iraq. Now, personally, I don't think we should be in Iraq, but that doesn't mean I'm happy giving money to those regimes.
Anyway, even if you don't care about the CO2 issues or do care but don't think this is the way to do it, reducing our oil dependencies in this country is a worthwhile goal. And, national security is definitely under the purvue of the government.
* Just joined a Bio-diesel co-op here in Baltimore (at Mill Valley if anyone is interested). This is my 2nd "terrorist free" fill up. I'm not saying that it's been completely problem free (you should probably have a 2nd fuel filter on hand, just in case) but I'm learning about my car and I'm still getting where I need to go.
Dammit, KDE, we're buying these fancy new computers and you want us to use less memory? I've just upgraded to 2GB RAM and I want to use ALL of it!
Reminds me of the boss who was really disappointed -- almost angry -- that the SLOC decreased by hundred of lines in a dot release. The mindset seemed to be, "I'm paying you bums to write negative lines of code?"
You think I was complaining about GWT? I like GWT and I thought I made it clear with the whole "GWT is very powerful and very cool" comment . But, anyway, your response technique was very clever and added immensely to the conversation. Thanks!
Unable to focus on it to the exclusion of other Java development, I found GWT very hard to get used too. My fingers and brain want to write Java, but when in GWT you're really only writing a sub-set of Java 1.4. The lack of generics (which have become second-nature; I can't write "Set" without instinctively putting a "" after it) and of Java 5 support in general was very difficult to get over. For me it was harder than working in another language where I expect things to be different.
Maybe, if GWT was re-released for OCaml (or some other language that I'd learn in conjunction with GWT) I might have an easier time working with it.
That being said, GWT is a very powerful and very cool system and you can do a "single page" AJAX app that's fairly cross-browser compatible and never have to leave your Java environment. A little work with the existing maven plugins and you can deploy your complete app just like you'd build a Swing application (almost;-)
(P.S. My experience with GWT was last spring which is probably about 10 versions old so things may have changed...)
Slashdot Mirror
Touché...
However, so long as CS remains a cerebral rather than physical career we need more women in CS.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way; you shouldn't need a "good argument" to release government information, you should have to have a good argument to keep it secret.
Our outlook towards government information should be patterned after the "presumption of innocence" of our common law. In other words, "taxpayer funded information should be free unless an independent body determines it must be secret for the common good". Currently, the assumption of too many people is that "taxpayer funded information should be secret unless a bureaucrat allows it to be released to the public". I think that's the wrong attitude in a free society.
Now, as far as this specific anecdote is concerned (taking off my devil's advocate hat now), it's likely that a independent panel would determine that street level views of a military base might be worthy of censorship, but don't leave that decision to some unknown and unnamed functionary.
I willing to play devil's advocate and say that it is a bad thing. Or, at least, the presumption that everything associated with the U.S. government should be kept secret from her citizens. In a democracy, everything paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open unless there is a real national security reason that it should be kept secret. And, I'm not convinced that there was a national security reason for Google to take down those images; it was probably some "cover my ass" action.
Every scandal in the last 7 years has been accompanied by a chorus from the right telling us that public exposure to incompetence (Walter Reed) or malfeasance (billions of dollars lost to contractors in Iraq) or law breaking (torture and warrantless wiretaps) are giving "aid and comfort" to the enemies. But, it is obvious that the real desire for secrecy is not to protect America but to protect the careers and reputations of the people who fucked up in the first place.
No, it will be sexy when the football jocks start hanging around the Engineering library trying to pick up all the sexy CS babes. No career will be "sexy" so long as it remains 80-90% male.
It's a bit like here, except that you get XP (experience points) instead of karma.
I think the point is that we are currently not free-market and we are, in fact, intensely protectionist. The problem is that our protectionist policies are all directed towards bailing out huge corporations and banks and not the individual jobs of normal Americans. It's not necessarily hypocritical to say U.S. priorities are backwards and to believe that we should be protecting the poor citizens and not the billion dollar corporations. There's really four options:
1. Free market
2. Socialist
3. Free market towards U.S. citizens and socialist towards corporations
4. Socialist towards U.S. citizens and free market towards corporations
Currently, the U.S. follows a #3 world view and many liberals think we should move to a #4.
You called me a shitstain? I'm going to come over to your high school and beat you up! Ha, ha, just kidding, kid. I realize that all the freedom and anonymity of the internet can go to your head and make you say things that you would never say at the dinner table so I forgive you.
But, seriously, when you grow up you will eventually realize that attacking a political opponent using non-political leverage (e.g. Hillary's gender, Barack's race, Mitt's religion, McCain's age) just makes you sound like a uneducated hayseed. You don't want to sound like an uneducated hayseed do you?
Well, Mr. Some-of-the-Candidates-I-Support-are-Black-Women-Therefore-I'm-Very-PC, unless the GPP was claiming that Mrs. Clinton was engaging in non-evil Wiccan magic spells* by calling her a "White Witch" -- a possibility that I didn't consider and for which I am very sorry -- the slur was based on her gender and not on her policies or personality. You should ask your mommy if she like being called a "witch" and get back to me. Kthxbi
* Which would be pretty cool. If she calls upon her forest friends to defend the nation from terrorists and brews love potions that the special forces can sprinkle in Osama's falafel, I will definitely give her my vote.
Slashdot: News for Nerds. With an Undercurrent of Misogyny.
I bet most of the basement-dwelling, high school students here don't even know why they hate Clinton; other than their mommy didn't buy them a new Alienware computer for Christmas.
Am I the only person who is sad that the word "invention" seems to have disappeared in favor of "innovation".
As far as I'm concerned, innovation is what happens when the marketing department slaps a "cool evergreen scent" sticker on the latest jug of Tide detergent.
Invention is what happens when someone develops a new idea -- via a lot of thought and hard work -- into an invention.
Actually, you've lied -- twice (actually, call you a liar seems awfully harsh, perhaps you're just misinformed). Clinton's plan is actually very similar to Flopping Mitt's Massachusetts plan. And, Flopping Mitt has disavowed many aspects of his statewide plan for fear of alienating his "fuck the poor" conservative base.
Of course here's Flopping Mitt's current stance:
Source: Reuters
You're right. I was describing the basic GoDaddy price for a .com address and, as you point out, other TLDs can be much more expensive.
But, I guess I don't see your point. Whether it's $9 or $90, there is no law that says you automatically get a right for "backsies" on a purchase. Either you're buying the domain for yourself in which case you will probably make an extra effort not to make a mistake. Or, you're buying the domain for a client in which case you'll explain the pricing structure to your client and pass it on; all your competitors will be doing exactly the same thing.
ICANN says it pretty eloquently:
In other words, your experience has become the exception (by a factor of millions) not the rule and a few bad apples have ruined it for the rest of us.
I'm not so sure about that. Many of us like our NIH, DoD, DoE, or univeristy grants. Many of us would be for a new orbiting space telescope, or a new Internet backbone (that isn't all filled up with random commercial crap and pr0n), or a manned trip to Mars, or a new super-collider, or a thousand other basic science projects that corporations are less likely to fund.
I'm sure there are some scientists who are libertarian enough to only work for corporations that are not receiving subsidies from the government, but I doubt it's the majority.
It was modded insightful because the post advocated maiming, torture, and THEN murder. Simple murder would have been too obvious.
Just for the hell of it, I did some domain searches on yahoo! today. I'll be checking on them to see if they coincidentally get registered in the near future (they're unusual, but not just random).
This is a second-degree anecdote, but a friend of mine seems to have run into the same issue. He's not a technical guy so I can't vouch for the details. But, apparently his business web site is hosted on Yahoo! and he was looking at domains on November 8th. A few hours later the one he wanted was registered. He's already been solicited to purchase the domain from this company. It may be a coincidence, but the timing was so close that it's my opinion that there was fraudulent activity somewhere.
Here's the whois on this particular entity:
Registrant:
Transure Enterprise Ltd
Host Master (hostmaster@transureent.com)
Mill Mall Suite 6 PO Box 3085 Wickhams Cay 1 Road Town
Tortola
Tortola,3085
VG
Tel. +00.12676535381
Creation Date: 09-Nov-2007
Expiration Date: 09-Nov-2008
Domain servers in listed order:
pns2.trellian.com
pns1.trellian.com
Administrative Contact:
Transure Enterprise Ltd
Host Master (hostmaster@transureent.com)
Mill Mall Suite 6 PO Box 3085 Wickhams Cay 1 Road Town
Tortola
Tortola,3085
VG
Tel. +00.12676535381
Technical Contact:
Transure Enterprise Ltd
Host Master (hostmaster@transureent.com)
Mill Mall Suite 6 PO Box 3085 Wickhams Cay 1 Road Town
Tortola
Tortola,3085
VG
Tel. +00.12676535381
Billing Contact:
Transure Enterprise Ltd
Host Master (hostmaster@transureent.com)
Mill Mall Suite 6 PO Box 3085 Wickhams Cay 1 Road Town
Tortola
Tortola,3085
VG
Tel. +00.12676535381
Status:ACTIVE
It sounds like you are far ahead in terms of planning and knowledge. Good luck!
Just curious. How cold does it get where you'll be running this generator?
One last point: Do not confuse "biodiesel" (diesel that happens to be made from renewable sources) with vegetable oil / grease. While my understanding is that most diesel engines can theoretically run filtered waste vegetable oil, to reliably run it in your car you need fuel line heaters and a whole conversion kit. I personally have no experience with that.
My biodiesel use? I put it in my car (a 2003 Jetta TDI) and I drive places... :-)
I wish I knew more. It's basically a replacement for dino-diesel with a few caveats. It has slightly higher detergent values than dino so they suggest you replace your fuel filter after your first couple of tanks if you've been running (that's an easy $30 do-it-yourself job). Depending on the source (e.g. Palm oil, soy oil, grease, etc.) the cloud point can vary (cloud point = the temperature where the fuel stops being a beautiful golden liquid and turns into a cloudy gel). The co-op was still running a palm-oil based B99 (99% bio / 1% dino) as of November and a few people had trouble with gelling. They've switched to a K50B50 (50% kerosene, 50% soy bio) for the winter and haven't seen any problems.
I belong to this group...
http://www.baltimorebiodiesel.org/
The conversation so far has been purely about the environment. As far as I'm concerned the far more pressing issue is National Security. It makes me sick that every time I fill up my tank* a fraction of that cost is going to fund Madrassas to train suicide bombers to blow up friends of mine in Iraq. Now, personally, I don't think we should be in Iraq, but that doesn't mean I'm happy giving money to those regimes.
Anyway, even if you don't care about the CO2 issues or do care but don't think this is the way to do it, reducing our oil dependencies in this country is a worthwhile goal. And, national security is definitely under the purvue of the government.
* Just joined a Bio-diesel co-op here in Baltimore (at Mill Valley if anyone is interested). This is my 2nd "terrorist free" fill up. I'm not saying that it's been completely problem free (you should probably have a 2nd fuel filter on hand, just in case) but I'm learning about my car and I'm still getting where I need to go.
Dammit, KDE, we're buying these fancy new computers and you want us to use less memory? I've just upgraded to 2GB RAM and I want to use ALL of it!
Reminds me of the boss who was really disappointed -- almost angry -- that the SLOC decreased by hundred of lines in a dot release. The mindset seemed to be, "I'm paying you bums to write negative lines of code?"
You think I was complaining about GWT? I like GWT and I thought I made it clear with the whole "GWT is very powerful and very cool" comment . But, anyway, your response technique was very clever and added immensely to the conversation. Thanks!
Unable to focus on it to the exclusion of other Java development, I found GWT very hard to get used too. My fingers and brain want to write Java, but when in GWT you're really only writing a sub-set of Java 1.4. The lack of generics (which have become second-nature; I can't write "Set" without instinctively putting a "" after it) and of Java 5 support in general was very difficult to get over. For me it was harder than working in another language where I expect things to be different.
;-)
Maybe, if GWT was re-released for OCaml (or some other language that I'd learn in conjunction with GWT) I might have an easier time working with it.
That being said, GWT is a very powerful and very cool system and you can do a "single page" AJAX app that's fairly cross-browser compatible and never have to leave your Java environment. A little work with the existing maven plugins and you can deploy your complete app just like you'd build a Swing application (almost
(P.S. My experience with GWT was last spring which is probably about 10 versions old so things may have changed...)