The current administration is the most incompetent since the Hoover presidency, and incorporates the worst elements of the Nixon and Reagan years on top of it. I don't disallow the possibility that Bush et. al. is capable of making real strides in preventing terrorism, but if they're making such a claim, and using that claim to justify taking away some of my rights as a citizen of this republic, then I want proof that what they're doing is going to work. I want to at least see what mechanism they believe is at play that would cause the policy to function as they intend. I want examples of cases where the policy has had the intended effect. If the entire executive branch is made secret, then we have no way to evaluate to president's claims. The result, and we're seeing this, is a president who gives press conferences where he tells us that "he believes" he has the right to do things, and "he is optimistic" about his policies. I couldn't care less what he believes, I want proof that he has the right to do things, I want proof that his policies are working, and if he can't give me that, then he shouldn't be doing it.
The law is not just simply because it is the law - this is first. Apartheid was the law in South Africa, but many companies and governments decided, rightly so, that it was better to leave than be obliged to obey laws that are at odds with the behavior of civlized men. Second, the law in China is whatever the junta says it is. There is such a thing as the Chinese Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press, of speech, of religion, and a whole raft of rights that your or I would recognize. But neither the courts nor the legislature exist as independent bodies, and both are controlled by the CCP. And if the CCP decides that you are violating the security of the state, then you are, and no one can say otherwise. This isn't law as I understand it, it's rule by fiat, what the Chinese call "ren zhi," and it seriously saps any claim to legitimate authority that Yahoo! can hide behind.
You can't fully hear the sounds outside the car. When you're on the highway going 80 mph, you've got the windows up. You can't feel or hear the loud, howling, fierce, blistering wind, the loud, raw sound of the tires grinding down the pavement. The shrieks of cars and trucks passing you by. You hear and feel maybe 20% of that, with the windows rolled up.
I hear about 80% of all of that stuff in my MGB. The result is that I always know exactly what's going on around me, in the engine compartment, and what kind of road surface I'm on. I am also, however, slowly going deaf.
NTP's primary business is licensing patents that it owns. It makes no products.
This by itself should mean automatic invalidation. The purpose of patents is to encourage progress - what part of patent parking acheives this goal again please?
If you're doing something wrong then so am I - I had to downgrade to vlc 0.7.something to get OS X stability back. I don't see anything in the changelog about stability fixes.
Afraid that you're engaging in a common rhetorical fallacy there. When someone says, "My iPod screen is scratched up and I'm going to do something about it," they're not saying *anything* about the homeless, or voting, or anything else. They're just talking about their iPod. The problem with your line of reasoning is that it can be applied to anything: A: I think we should fix the environment! B: Why are you spending time on that? Don't you care about breast cancer?
See? If we actually accepted arguments like this then we'd be unable to commit to any course of action.
Please be more careful about who you tell to learn more about Chinese history - I studied Chinese history in university for years, and in all likelihood know far more about Chinese history than you do. I can also read ancient documents in their original, which is more than you're probably capable of doing - did you get your information from fourth-hand Communist-authored textbooks? No wonder you have no idea what you're talking about.
OK - Tibet was a client state of the Mongol empire, and later was part of the Qing empire. Tibet, before the Communist invasion, was never administered by a Chinese-controlled dynasty - the Ming, for instance, were not able to establish control, and before the Yuan Tibet was an independant kingdom that nearly conquered the Tang capital.
Taiwan was basically ignored by the Qing until the Japanese took an interest in it. Before then, the Qing claimed that Taiwan was outside of their territory. The island's population was mostly Aboriginal peoples, and the Chinese weren't interested.
When you say, "China was set up," do you mean Qin? Because Qin wasn't China (although that's where we stupid Westerners got the name) - Qin was Qin Guo, an empire established by violent semi-barbaric people from (what was then) the West. And as far as I can tell, back then people didn't talk about Zhongguo - they talked about Tianxia, which really just mean "everything we are interested in."
Repeat after me: China does not have 5000, 3000, or 2500 years of history. The country of China did not exist until the Qing Empire was overthrown in 1911-1912. Before that there was simply no. such. place. What we now call China was a succession of empires controlled by hereditary dictatorships (many of them, such as Qin, Tang, Yuan, Northern Sung, Qing, etc from so-called "barbarian" territories) with often long periods of total chaos interrupting them.
What traditional attitudes towards personal freedom, economic developement, and foreign relations brought those empires was often spectacular early growth brought on by little more than a return to stability followed by long slow declines into absolute corruption followed by conquest or chaos. Tell my why this is different from any other place in the world and you get a cookie.
Finally, as for your absurd statement that the US uses force to resolve disputes but China somehow doesn't: China threatens to invade Taiwan, an independant polity that poses no credible threat to it whatsoever; China invaded Tibet and massacred its inhabitants, though the Tibetans also posed no threat to China; China tried to invade Vietnam as punishment for toppling the evil Khmer Rouge regime (Mao's ally), and got its head handed back to it - probably because they'd become too used to fighting people who couldn't fight back. China used horrific force to disperse the Tiananmen protests in the '89 (which the rest of the world calls "Tiananmen Massacre" but China calls the "Six/Four Incident"). Don't talk to us about China's restraint.
Even if I was inclined towards ID hokum, I have one factor in my life that prevents me from believing in an intelligent creator. My fiancee is a pathologist, and almost every night she comes home with lovely stories about how poorly designed the human body is. We're basically a sack of skin filled with squishy tubes that are horribly inefficient, prone to breaking down for any or sometimes no reason at all, and can't easily repair themselves. This doesn't sound like intelligent design to me, it sounds like either design with a sense of humor, stupid design (SD!) or no design at all.
I used to be a mid-level manager. I hate listening to people talking about "forces" (did you mean soldiers?) and "resources" (did you mean employees? workers?). I agree with Watson that this kind of talk is deeply dehumanizing.
So at a monthly meeting, when my boss asked me if I needed more resources to complete a project, I said, "I don't think I need any more coal or lumber for this project. I could use some more people though." I think I nearly got fired that day.
A headhunter once sent me out to a famous luxury goods corporation for a desktop support job. I wasn't really interested, but the headhunter encouraged me to go and check it out anyway. The interview went very well, but afterwords I did some research and discovered that a large part of their business was in very expensive leather goods. I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, and I don't wear or use any leather products, so I felt compelled to decline when they called me in for a second round. The headhunter went BERSERK, yelling at me for making him look foolish (read: losing business), but I felt good about my decision and never regretted it. In my experience, unless you have extreme financial need, you should never take a job that you find morally repugnant.
while browsing macslash.org, oddly enough. Fortunately there's nothing really interesting enough to justify the annoyance. The best way to fight this is to stop using pages that have these, and to let the owners know why you're not giving them your eyeballs any more. Scratch that, the BEST way is to find out what's powering these new ads and kill it on the browser. Ad arms race (again), here we come!
Looks nice. Would be even nicer if they worked with brands other than Motorola. Hasn't this site been in "other phones real soon now" mode for a while?
Classic flawed logic. The right to do something is not the same as the obligation to do it. I have the right to mock the elderly, but I don't HAVE to. I just CHOOSE to.
We could, but it would take an international effort. If engineers and construction crews from the large countries which would be affected (Spain, USA, Canada, UK, Mexico, etc.) could be assembled we might have a shot. La Palma is not a small island at 706 km/sq. The rock in question is in an inaccessable, seismically unstable area at high elevation. The problem here is that no government official is in power for long enough to make long-range planning like this (and at great expense) attractive, ESPECIALLY if, if the effort is successful, the result is that nothing happens. Remember Y2K, when everyone thought all of the remediation was a waste of time when there was no disaster? We're looking at the same thing, but on a moon-landing scale.
No contract can require the signing parties to do something which is illegal. For instance, a contract which allows one party to take the other as a slave, or kill someone, or requires one party to drive 35 mph down an interstate, is not enforceable. In this case, the University is attempting to regulate the use of unlicensed spectrum, which is the EXCLUSIVE domain of the FCC. The University simply does not have the right to tell me that I can't use an AP, because federal law gives me the right in spite of what any landlord may say to the contrary. They can tell me that I'm not allowed the plug my AP into their network, but that's not what's happening here.
Where do people get this idea that rental contracts or student agreements can supercede federal law? If a landlord decideds to write into my lease that I'm not allowed to have any black roommates, that doesn't supercede federal anti-descrimination laws - they can't tell me that, whether they own the land or not. Likewise, if I decided to put a DirecTV antenna on my university owned house, there's not a thing the school could do about it no matter what the damned student agreement or rental contract says - the feds grant me that right in spite of any objections by my landlord.
The same companies that are trying to implement these policies "terminate" their employees in a manner that seems purpose-designed to piss those employees off as much as possible. You cannot give notice if you're working at a bank - as soon as you announce your intention to leave the job, you're escorted out by security. If you are fired for any reason, you are treated like a man trying to grab ass at a swanky nightclub minus the actual throw-you-to-the-curb action. If these companies really didn't want disgruntled former employees selling their secrets for pennies, they'd leave them feeling a little bit more... gruntled. I repeat: YOU CANNOT TREAT YOUR EMPLOYEES LIKE CATTLE AND EXPECT ANY DEGREE OF LOYALTY. That is all.
Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?
Slashdot Mirror
The current administration is the most incompetent since the Hoover presidency, and incorporates the worst elements of the Nixon and Reagan years on top of it. I don't disallow the possibility that Bush et. al. is capable of making real strides in preventing terrorism, but if they're making such a claim, and using that claim to justify taking away some of my rights as a citizen of this republic, then I want proof that what they're doing is going to work. I want to at least see what mechanism they believe is at play that would cause the policy to function as they intend. I want examples of cases where the policy has had the intended effect. If the entire executive branch is made secret, then we have no way to evaluate to president's claims. The result, and we're seeing this, is a president who gives press conferences where he tells us that "he believes" he has the right to do things, and "he is optimistic" about his policies. I couldn't care less what he believes, I want proof that he has the right to do things, I want proof that his policies are working, and if he can't give me that, then he shouldn't be doing it.
The law is not just simply because it is the law - this is first. Apartheid was the law in South Africa, but many companies and governments decided, rightly so, that it was better to leave than be obliged to obey laws that are at odds with the behavior of civlized men. Second, the law in China is whatever the junta says it is. There is such a thing as the Chinese Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press, of speech, of religion, and a whole raft of rights that your or I would recognize. But neither the courts nor the legislature exist as independent bodies, and both are controlled by the CCP. And if the CCP decides that you are violating the security of the state, then you are, and no one can say otherwise. This isn't law as I understand it, it's rule by fiat, what the Chinese call "ren zhi," and it seriously saps any claim to legitimate authority that Yahoo! can hide behind.
You can't fully hear the sounds outside the car. When you're on the highway going 80 mph, you've got the windows up. You can't feel or hear the loud, howling, fierce, blistering wind, the loud, raw sound of the tires grinding down the pavement. The shrieks of cars and trucks passing you by. You hear and feel maybe 20% of that, with the windows rolled up.
I hear about 80% of all of that stuff in my MGB. The result is that I always know exactly what's going on around me, in the engine compartment, and what kind of road surface I'm on. I am also, however, slowly going deaf.
That's like KFC advertising Big Macs but giving you a piece of chicken... ... It's still food, just not the food you wanted.
Um, neither of those things are "food."
NTP's primary business is licensing patents that it owns. It makes no products.
This by itself should mean automatic invalidation. The purpose of patents is to encourage progress - what part of patent parking acheives this goal again please?
If you're doing something wrong then so am I - I had to downgrade to vlc 0.7.something to get OS X stability back. I don't see anything in the changelog about stability fixes.
And this is why I got my MA in the humanities.
Afraid that you're engaging in a common rhetorical fallacy there. When someone says, "My iPod screen is scratched up and I'm going to do something about it," they're not saying *anything* about the homeless, or voting, or anything else. They're just talking about their iPod. The problem with your line of reasoning is that it can be applied to anything:
A: I think we should fix the environment!
B: Why are you spending time on that? Don't you care about breast cancer?
See? If we actually accepted arguments like this then we'd be unable to commit to any course of action.
Please be more careful about who you tell to learn more about Chinese history - I studied Chinese history in university for years, and in all likelihood know far more about Chinese history than you do. I can also read ancient documents in their original, which is more than you're probably capable of doing - did you get your information from fourth-hand Communist-authored textbooks? No wonder you have no idea what you're talking about.
OK - Tibet was a client state of the Mongol empire, and later was part of the Qing empire. Tibet, before the Communist invasion, was never administered by a Chinese-controlled dynasty - the Ming, for instance, were not able to establish control, and before the Yuan Tibet was an independant kingdom that nearly conquered the Tang capital.
Taiwan was basically ignored by the Qing until the Japanese took an interest in it. Before then, the Qing claimed that Taiwan was outside of their territory. The island's population was mostly Aboriginal peoples, and the Chinese weren't interested.
When you say, "China was set up," do you mean Qin? Because Qin wasn't China (although that's where we stupid Westerners got the name) - Qin was Qin Guo, an empire established by violent semi-barbaric people from (what was then) the West. And as far as I can tell, back then people didn't talk about Zhongguo - they talked about Tianxia, which really just mean "everything we are interested in."
In sum, STFU.
Repeat after me: China does not have 5000, 3000, or 2500 years of history. The country of China did not exist until the Qing Empire was overthrown in 1911-1912. Before that there was simply no. such. place. What we now call China was a succession of empires controlled by hereditary dictatorships (many of them, such as Qin, Tang, Yuan, Northern Sung, Qing, etc from so-called "barbarian" territories) with often long periods of total chaos interrupting them.
What traditional attitudes towards personal freedom, economic developement, and foreign relations brought those empires was often spectacular early growth brought on by little more than a return to stability followed by long slow declines into absolute corruption followed by conquest or chaos. Tell my why this is different from any other place in the world and you get a cookie.
Finally, as for your absurd statement that the US uses force to resolve disputes but China somehow doesn't: China threatens to invade Taiwan, an independant polity that poses no credible threat to it whatsoever; China invaded Tibet and massacred its inhabitants, though the Tibetans also posed no threat to China; China tried to invade Vietnam as punishment for toppling the evil Khmer Rouge regime (Mao's ally), and got its head handed back to it - probably because they'd become too used to fighting people who couldn't fight back. China used horrific force to disperse the Tiananmen protests in the '89 (which the rest of the world calls "Tiananmen Massacre" but China calls the "Six/Four Incident"). Don't talk to us about China's restraint.
Even if I was inclined towards ID hokum, I have one factor in my life that prevents me from believing in an intelligent creator. My fiancee is a pathologist, and almost every night she comes home with lovely stories about how poorly designed the human body is. We're basically a sack of skin filled with squishy tubes that are horribly inefficient, prone to breaking down for any or sometimes no reason at all, and can't easily repair themselves. This doesn't sound like intelligent design to me, it sounds like either design with a sense of humor, stupid design (SD!) or no design at all.
I used to be a mid-level manager. I hate listening to people talking about "forces" (did you mean soldiers?) and "resources" (did you mean employees? workers?). I agree with Watson that this kind of talk is deeply dehumanizing.
So at a monthly meeting, when my boss asked me if I needed more resources to complete a project, I said, "I don't think I need any more coal or lumber for this project. I could use some more people though." I think I nearly got fired that day.
Yah, but he's got crazy competition from some dude named NETGEAR.
Of course, the weather we get now isn't hardly like the weather we used to get here in 1998. It's nice, mind you, but it's not REAL weather.
Everyone sing along!
Ooooooh, if it's meant to be possessive,
it's just I*T*S
But if it's meant to be a contraction,
it's I*T*APOSTRAPHE*S
Scallywag!
A headhunter once sent me out to a famous luxury goods corporation for a desktop support job. I wasn't really interested, but the headhunter encouraged me to go and check it out anyway. The interview went very well, but afterwords I did some research and discovered that a large part of their business was in very expensive leather goods. I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons, and I don't wear or use any leather products, so I felt compelled to decline when they called me in for a second round. The headhunter went BERSERK, yelling at me for making him look foolish (read: losing business), but I felt good about my decision and never regretted it. In my experience, unless you have extreme financial need, you should never take a job that you find morally repugnant.
while browsing macslash.org, oddly enough. Fortunately there's nothing really interesting enough to justify the annoyance. The best way to fight this is to stop using pages that have these, and to let the owners know why you're not giving them your eyeballs any more. Scratch that, the BEST way is to find out what's powering these new ads and kill it on the browser. Ad arms race (again), here we come!
Looks nice. Would be even nicer if they worked with brands other than Motorola. Hasn't this site been in "other phones real soon now" mode for a while?
Classic flawed logic. The right to do something is not the same as the obligation to do it. I have the right to mock the elderly, but I don't HAVE to. I just CHOOSE to.
Is here:3 963563. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/
A little bit less alarmist, but still doesn't sound good. A lot more recent, too.
We could, but it would take an international effort. If engineers and construction crews from the large countries which would be affected (Spain, USA, Canada, UK, Mexico, etc.) could be assembled we might have a shot. La Palma is not a small island at 706 km/sq. The rock in question is in an inaccessable, seismically unstable area at high elevation. The problem here is that no government official is in power for long enough to make long-range planning like this (and at great expense) attractive, ESPECIALLY if, if the effort is successful, the result is that nothing happens. Remember Y2K, when everyone thought all of the remediation was a waste of time when there was no disaster? We're looking at the same thing, but on a moon-landing scale.
No contract can require the signing parties to do something which is illegal. For instance, a contract which allows one party to take the other as a slave, or kill someone, or requires one party to drive 35 mph down an interstate, is not enforceable. In this case, the University is attempting to regulate the use of unlicensed spectrum, which is the EXCLUSIVE domain of the FCC. The University simply does not have the right to tell me that I can't use an AP, because federal law gives me the right in spite of what any landlord may say to the contrary. They can tell me that I'm not allowed the plug my AP into their network, but that's not what's happening here.
Where do people get this idea that rental contracts or student agreements can supercede federal law? If a landlord decideds to write into my lease that I'm not allowed to have any black roommates, that doesn't supercede federal anti-descrimination laws - they can't tell me that, whether they own the land or not. Likewise, if I decided to put a DirecTV antenna on my university owned house, there's not a thing the school could do about it no matter what the damned student agreement or rental contract says - the feds grant me that right in spite of any objections by my landlord.
Umm... I own an MGB, and before I replaced the whole damned rear axle this is EXACTLY what I had to do. One big nut. Seriously.
The same companies that are trying to implement these policies "terminate" their employees in a manner that seems purpose-designed to piss those employees off as much as possible. You cannot give notice if you're working at a bank - as soon as you announce your intention to leave the job, you're escorted out by security. If you are fired for any reason, you are treated like a man trying to grab ass at a swanky nightclub minus the actual throw-you-to-the-curb action. If these companies really didn't want disgruntled former employees selling their secrets for pennies, they'd leave them feeling a little bit more ... gruntled. I repeat: YOU CANNOT TREAT YOUR EMPLOYEES LIKE CATTLE AND EXPECT ANY DEGREE OF LOYALTY. That is all.
Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?