Well, do you want news for nerds, or do you want a leaflet from your local supermarket? If you want to take an interest in the newest technological developments, then you'll have to accept that the market presence will follow the technical breakthrough.
I think you are conflating constitutional or human rights with rules of polite society. In essence the GP asks people to learn about a subject before voicing an opinion about it - nowhere does he indicate that he wants the US constitution changed to accomplish that. He is as much entitled to ask for that behaviour as others are entitled to ignore his request.
So why was this included in distributions? Including 4.1 in Kubuntu and other distros was a huge mistake IMO. I don't see how it could have been the users mistake though - the user didn't select 4.1.
It's an international treaty - this gives the US rights against other countries, as well as providing rights to other countries against the US. Both sides should be able to rely on the treaty to be fulfilled by the other side. There is even an agreed method to arbitrate conflicts, and the US used that agreed method.
We will have a daughter in March, so we looked into that topic, too. We went to a few presentation by hospitals in our area (they show you the facilities, introduce their staff, answer questions). In each presentation we asked about private cord blood banking - each time the doctors told us it was basically a scam. If your child needs stem cells at some point, the stem cells she will need will probably not be her own. So donating the blood to a state-run facility makes sense (it can help someone else). Storing it for your own use doesn't make sense (won't help someone else, and likely not yourself either). Where I live (Munich, Germany) the state-run cord blood bank doesn't need any donations currently - there are sufficient numbers of parents who choose to donate already. So it's not likely that the doctors were trying to push us in that direction for some ulterior motive.
These calculations are usually not meant as "predictions", but as warnings. You identify a problem - if we continue using resource R without replacing it, we are going to run out in Y years. The idea is not to try and predict the future ("there'll be no R in Y years) but to prevent R to run out.
As for all the posters believing government can't identify and solve problems - take the London sewers. Or for more modern examples look at Singapore, Japan or Taiwan. All countries which have private enterprise and states which are heavily involved in infrastructure, yet they have managed to develop in a very short time.
It doesn't matter which of the two big parties is in office.
If you still think that after the past 8 years, then you have very poor observation skills. Both parties being far less than ideal doesn't mean they are similarly bad.
Or do we now need some sort of scientist to gather them up and publish the anecdotes and his or her conclusion before the general public should pay heed to it.
Sorta. A scientific study would start with identifying what you want to accomplish. Say you want to investigate whether ingesting substance X has a detrimental effect on your lungs. Then you wouldn't just see how many people ingest X on a regular basis, and count how many of them develop lung problems - you would instead try to come up with measures to prevent other factors to distort your result. For example it might be that smokers are particular fond of X because it makes your breath smell fresh. Or maybe X is very popular in a part of your country which has a lot of industrial pollution. If the study is good it will acquire data in a way which ensures that these other factors don't distort the result.
Now when you have anecdotal data, it's very difficult to ensure your samples aren't distorted. You might hear from a lot of people ingesting X and having lung problems, but not realize that they are all near a heavily polluted area. If you haven't thought about this factor beforehand you probably won't think about asking about this in time.
Furthermore, a scientist would provide not just conclusions, but also his methods. This allows you to investigate the study itself and evaluate whether it was done properly. He'd also publish in a peer-reviewed publication - so other scientists from the same field would already check whether his methodology was sound.
So yeah, in general it's good practice to be wary of anecdotal data. Nothing wrong with using anecdotal data as a motivation to conduct a study, though.
Some problems can be fixed with laws others can't. If you think government is fictional because it's an abstract complex organization, then you have either extremely bad observation skills, or you choose to be deliberately ignorant. If what you said were true, then there should be areas of the world in which people do well but don't have any form of government. Of course there is no such area - if there was, then better organized neighbors would easily take their stuff as well as their territory. Being able to organize ourselves in complex organizations is a vital evolutionary advantage which humans have - it has enabled us to rise to the top of the food chain.
But hey - prove us wrong, set up a community of a few dozen people somewhere which lives without any government. Let it run for a few years. If you are not starving by then, and if you don't have switched to having a government by then - then you might have a point.
So you need to satisfy item (1) and (2) to qualify for the affirmative defence. Just the (likely) number of images probably works against them there. The "knowingly" exemption could protect them, though. Who want's to be in a position to argue that they didn't know, though?
If these teachers had seen the images and did *not* report it, then they would have committed a crime.
That's pretty scary. Teachers should note though: if you do look at student's cell phones and find something there you must report it - whether that is sufficient to exempt you from prosecution is unclear, however. You might be accused and may need to spend your money on a lawyer. It would be much safer not to search your student's cell phones. I'd be very wary of keeping a student's cell phone in possession, too. If you feel you must confiscate, then maybe just confiscate the battery and hand the phone back to its owner.
That is basically the point of these laws. Anyone can be convicted of distributing or possessing child pornography, regardless whether they are guilty or not. There is an obvious advantage to that: if the DA finds a case actually involving child porn he can bring the case quickly and convict efficiently. Since everybody is presumed guilty a DA can go through a much higher workload than would otherwise be possible.
This is one of the essential concepts in a fascist state: the state is by definition good, therefore safeguards against the state are not necessary. Since there are no safeguards it's easier to get things done. Some people find the latter so attractive that they are willing to put up with the former.
Well certainly this law by itself is now abusing children. (Actually adolescents, but I guess soon everybody under the age of 40 will be a child in the US...)
You could use MythTV - it has pretty good commercial detection. I timeshift everything, so I don't really need to wait while the ads are on - I just enable autoskip.
People believe what anonymous strangers say on internet about some products.
Makes sense, the majority of people are actually nice and honest. No matter how easy cynicism is: we are social animals and *want* to contribute to society, despite having selfish desires, too. Besides the proof is in the pudding: if you use the Amazon review system you get a lot of useful information. Of course you can't just look at the number of stars - if you look at the reviews you see the issues people had, you can also see whether a review is just fluff. If in doubt you can check the author's other reviews and look for bias.
Why does this surprise anyone that companies would put reviews of their own products ?
Does this surprise anyone? I doubt it. Nevertheless only very unethical companies would actually do it, and there is a price to pay (e.g. a lot of negative attention) once they are found out.
[...] has the same morality as a regular advertisement IMHO.
I suspect you are pretty much alone with that view. (Not counting Mike Bayard.)
What do you think that people in marketing department spend their time on, while idling ?
If they are smart they probably don't do somthing which smears their company's reputation and gets them fired or demoted. (Bad performance is a good way to get fired, regardless whether your company is ethical or not...)
Some mainboards support intrusion detection. If you want to make use of that, you need to include the mechanics of your case in you security concept, though.
if you take the effort tX to learn dvorak to the same level as your current skill in qwerty
if you then spend more effort tY to improve your typing on dvorak
then your overall typing speed is *less* than if you spent tY to improve your qwerty skills
There are other scenarios possible (starting to learn Dvorak as the first layout, using another layout altogether) but for most of us, there is no other option but taking the steps as in the study. Assuming the study is correct, you'd get much better typing speed if you had taken the effort tY for qwerty, and of course even more if you had used tX + tY to improve your qwerty.
One problem with using personal experience in this context, is that of course you've spend effort tZ on learning *and* improving your dvorak. After this effort now your dvorak skills are superior to your *previous* qwerty skills, but you can't determine how much better your qwerty skills would have been if you'd spent that time tZ on improving them.
The study gives that answer for the majority of us - i.e. qwerty typers are better off improving qwerty skills instead of learning dvorak. It does not give us an answer whether we should teach our kids dvorak.
No it's not really a EULA - it's more like a note acknowledging the general terms of service of that site. German law doesn't prohibit to hide payment demands in there, it just makes them unenforceable. BTW: the summary of this article is nonsense. Openoffice.org does not claim that the scammers' entire scheme was legal - they just say "Aufgrund des Open-Source-Gedankens gestattet unsere Lizenz jedoch auch den Verkauf" which means "Due to the OSS philosophy our license allows our product to be sold [by third parties]".
She didn't agree to a legal fee; she got duped into it!
Which is why (under German law) no contract was agreed upon. Here is a decision by a court in Munich, in a similar case: http://www.dr-bahr.com/news/news_det_20050915080016.html (sorry, German only). So it's nothing to do with ethics: she just didn't enter a contract, that's it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, do you want news for nerds, or do you want a leaflet from your local supermarket? If you want to take an interest in the newest technological developments, then you'll have to accept that the market presence will follow the technical breakthrough.
I think you are conflating constitutional or human rights with rules of polite society. In essence the GP asks people to learn about a subject before voicing an opinion about it - nowhere does he indicate that he wants the US constitution changed to accomplish that. He is as much entitled to ask for that behaviour as others are entitled to ignore his request.
The server could be a tracker (like piratebay) the downloads would be via torrent. That should make it easy to track the number of downloads.
I didn't know that the US had brought back corporal punishment. I applaud it's use in this case, and wonder whether it will be televised?
So why was this included in distributions? Including 4.1 in Kubuntu and other distros was a huge mistake IMO. I don't see how it could have been the users mistake though - the user didn't select 4.1.
It's an international treaty - this gives the US rights against other countries, as well as providing rights to other countries against the US. Both sides should be able to rely on the treaty to be fulfilled by the other side. There is even an agreed method to arbitrate conflicts, and the US used that agreed method.
We will have a daughter in March, so we looked into that topic, too. We went to a few presentation by hospitals in our area (they show you the facilities, introduce their staff, answer questions). In each presentation we asked about private cord blood banking - each time the doctors told us it was basically a scam. If your child needs stem cells at some point, the stem cells she will need will probably not be her own. So donating the blood to a state-run facility makes sense (it can help someone else). Storing it for your own use doesn't make sense (won't help someone else, and likely not yourself either). Where I live (Munich, Germany) the state-run cord blood bank doesn't need any donations currently - there are sufficient numbers of parents who choose to donate already. So it's not likely that the doctors were trying to push us in that direction for some ulterior motive.
As for all the posters believing government can't identify and solve problems - take the London sewers. Or for more modern examples look at Singapore, Japan or Taiwan. All countries which have private enterprise and states which are heavily involved in infrastructure, yet they have managed to develop in a very short time.
It doesn't matter which of the two big parties is in office.
If you still think that after the past 8 years, then you have very poor observation skills. Both parties being far less than ideal doesn't mean they are similarly bad.
Here is another cool knitting project: http://whywouldyouknitthat.blogspot.com/2008/09/awesomely-funny-and-adding-labels.html
Sorta. A scientific study would start with identifying what you want to accomplish. Say you want to investigate whether ingesting substance X has a detrimental effect on your lungs. Then you wouldn't just see how many people ingest X on a regular basis, and count how many of them develop lung problems - you would instead try to come up with measures to prevent other factors to distort your result. For example it might be that smokers are particular fond of X because it makes your breath smell fresh. Or maybe X is very popular in a part of your country which has a lot of industrial pollution. If the study is good it will acquire data in a way which ensures that these other factors don't distort the result.
Now when you have anecdotal data, it's very difficult to ensure your samples aren't distorted. You might hear from a lot of people ingesting X and having lung problems, but not realize that they are all near a heavily polluted area. If you haven't thought about this factor beforehand you probably won't think about asking about this in time.
Furthermore, a scientist would provide not just conclusions, but also his methods. This allows you to investigate the study itself and evaluate whether it was done properly. He'd also publish in a peer-reviewed publication - so other scientists from the same field would already check whether his methodology was sound.
So yeah, in general it's good practice to be wary of anecdotal data. Nothing wrong with using anecdotal data as a motivation to conduct a study, though.
But hey - prove us wrong, set up a community of a few dozen people somewhere which lives without any government. Let it run for a few years. If you are not starving by then, and if you don't have switched to having a government by then - then you might have a point.
6 students ...
So you need to satisfy item (1) and (2) to qualify for the affirmative defence. Just the (likely) number of images probably works against them there. The "knowingly" exemption could protect them, though. Who want's to be in a position to argue that they didn't know, though?
If these teachers had seen the images and did *not* report it, then they would have committed a crime.
That's pretty scary. Teachers should note though: if you do look at student's cell phones and find something there you must report it - whether that is sufficient to exempt you from prosecution is unclear, however. You might be accused and may need to spend your money on a lawyer. It would be much safer not to search your student's cell phones. I'd be very wary of keeping a student's cell phone in possession, too. If you feel you must confiscate, then maybe just confiscate the battery and hand the phone back to its owner.
This is one of the essential concepts in a fascist state: the state is by definition good, therefore safeguards against the state are not necessary. Since there are no safeguards it's easier to get things done. Some people find the latter so attractive that they are willing to put up with the former.
Well certainly this law by itself is now abusing children. (Actually adolescents, but I guess soon everybody under the age of 40 will be a child in the US...)
Same argument for both proposals: has never been shown to work - and there is no apparent reason why it would.
You could use MythTV - it has pretty good commercial detection. I timeshift everything, so I don't really need to wait while the ads are on - I just enable autoskip.
Makes sense, the majority of people are actually nice and honest. No matter how easy cynicism is: we are social animals and *want* to contribute to society, despite having selfish desires, too. Besides the proof is in the pudding: if you use the Amazon review system you get a lot of useful information. Of course you can't just look at the number of stars - if you look at the reviews you see the issues people had, you can also see whether a review is just fluff. If in doubt you can check the author's other reviews and look for bias.
Why does this surprise anyone that companies would put reviews of their own products ?
Does this surprise anyone? I doubt it. Nevertheless only very unethical companies would actually do it, and there is a price to pay (e.g. a lot of negative attention) once they are found out.
[...] has the same morality as a regular advertisement IMHO.
I suspect you are pretty much alone with that view. (Not counting Mike Bayard.)
What do you think that people in marketing department spend their time on, while idling ?
If they are smart they probably don't do somthing which smears their company's reputation and gets them fired or demoted. (Bad performance is a good way to get fired, regardless whether your company is ethical or not...)
Some mainboards support intrusion detection. If you want to make use of that, you need to include the mechanics of your case in you security concept, though.
There are other scenarios possible (starting to learn Dvorak as the first layout, using another layout altogether) but for most of us, there is no other option but taking the steps as in the study. Assuming the study is correct, you'd get much better typing speed if you had taken the effort tY for qwerty, and of course even more if you had used tX + tY to improve your qwerty.
One problem with using personal experience in this context, is that of course you've spend effort tZ on learning *and* improving your dvorak. After this effort now your dvorak skills are superior to your *previous* qwerty skills, but you can't determine how much better your qwerty skills would have been if you'd spent that time tZ on improving them.
The study gives that answer for the majority of us - i.e. qwerty typers are better off improving qwerty skills instead of learning dvorak. It does not give us an answer whether we should teach our kids dvorak.
Yeah, I like his symphonies, but the guy should stay away from computers.
I asked my boss to read it. He said: "What do you want? We are doing all these things already."
No it's not really a EULA - it's more like a note acknowledging the general terms of service of that site. German law doesn't prohibit to hide payment demands in there, it just makes them unenforceable. BTW: the summary of this article is nonsense. Openoffice.org does not claim that the scammers' entire scheme was legal - they just say "Aufgrund des Open-Source-Gedankens gestattet unsere Lizenz jedoch auch den Verkauf" which means "Due to the OSS philosophy our license allows our product to be sold [by third parties]".
I'm German, too. I would recommend to follow the procedures outlined here: http://forum.computerbetrug.de/infos-und-grundsatzartikel/49511-internetfallen-rechnung-mahnung-mahnbescheid-inkassobrief.html (German only, sorry). I don't think it's worth getting a lawyer in this case, but I'm not one.
Which is why (under German law) no contract was agreed upon. Here is a decision by a court in Munich, in a similar case: http://www.dr-bahr.com/news/news_det_20050915080016.html (sorry, German only). So it's nothing to do with ethics: she just didn't enter a contract, that's it.