Read it again, you've got it backward. The amendment that they struck down was to remove the Habeas changes, sponsored by the senator from Vermont. That was effectively the last hope to keep the changes from going into law, since they have the votes to pass the undiluted house version.
There was an amendment to the bill from the Democrats that would have resotred to the House version of the bill the removed protections. It's the amendment that was killed.:-(
Basically, some of the Senate said "Woah, that house version goes too far!" and they tried to tone it down. But once it got out of committee, the Senate as a whole smashed it and has gone on to procedure regarding the full-strength House version of the bill.
You can read both at senate.gov (see the right-hand column).
As I quoted to another poster, this is the most important bit:
"SEC. 6. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and
(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001."
You'll notice that the bill claims to apply to aliens. But once you're picked up as an alien, no court has jurisdiction to review your status. So if they come by your house to pick you as a citizen up, there is no way for you to say "No way, dude, I'm a citizen!" because the moment you're picked up, the courts lose jurisdiction.
If they decide you're an alien, not a citizen, that's it under the law. And who is they? At the top of the bill it spells out clearly: the Secretary of Defense or anyone he designates. So, basically: party members.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and
(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001."
It applies to "aliens," yes. But all they have to do is call you an "alien" and pick you up. Even if you HAVE a passport, a social security card, a driver's license, and a medal of honor, NO COURT would have the jurisdiction to hear your case saying: "Yes, but I'm a citizen!"
There would be no place for you to assert that you weren't an alien!
I think few Americans right now realize that congress is working, yesterday and today, on passing (not just writing or introducing, but passing, it's already through the house and now up for vote in the senate) a bill that will end habeas corupus and legalize torture:
Habeas corpus is one of the oldest tenets of western civilization, predating the U.S. Constitution and even the Magna Carta, and it says, simply, that if someone is to be held in custody by the state, there must be a demonstrable reason for their imprisonment. It is the basis of "probable cause," "warrants" of arrest, and your right to a trail to establish your guilt or innocence.
This bill not only legalizes torture acts against enemy combatants by the U.S. government, it also gives the president and the secretary of defense the authority to unilaterally decide who is an enemy combatant, without review, oversight, process, or documentation of any kind, and to act on that decision, without trial, documentation, or any means of appeal. The standard for being an enemy combatant is essentially that you don't "support" America in some way or another, not according to some objective standard of evidence, but again according to the personal impression of either the president or the secretary of defense. This includes American citizens.
Once they decide you are an enemy combatant, you can be picked up, with no warrant or probable cause, no evidence, and no process other than "the feds said you don't support America." They no longer need evidence. Under this statute no right to trail or judicial review will exist (because you are now like those at Gitmo, rather than a citizen), and you can be tortured at will.
This is what the senate is working on YESTERDAY AND TODAY. It's likely already too late to affect the outcome, but if you haven't yet it might be a good day to call your senator and say that you OPPOSE the bill that legalizes arbitrary indefinite detention at the whim of the president and the legalization of torture.
You're assuming that I want to get paid more. Not true. I think they should be paid less. The game is what's broken; people shouldn't be rewarded for doing harm. And nobody should earn a salary more than 150k or so, no matter what.
Trouble is, the CEOs who promote this crap can jump from ship to ship-- not all of us can do that.
Seriously. Over the years I've worked in software, networks, and publishing, and I've never had the pleasure of working under any person for longer than about a year. Invariably when I've been hired, I've had the feeling that my new boss wasn't quite on top of things.
But on top of things or not, sure enough, within a couple of months of my being hired there's always an announcement that congratulations are in order because boss will be leaving us for much bigger and better things, or has been promoted to a new and more ridiculous level of abstraction within the organization. Then there's a party and some cake and silly goodbyes.
Then, the new guy comes in. He's always groomed, young-middle-age-ish, clearly an MBA or someone who's read a few too many business books and has been wearing a tie since he was four. He wrings his hands a lot and speaks in a worried-measured-reassuring tone and holds "orientation interviews" (or some variation thereon) with everyone during which he asks a lot of dumb, general, or both questions and says that he'll appreciate help in getting up to speed and he's really excited to have the opportunity to work with everyone.
Within the first two-three months, he'll fuck everything up, miss a pile of obligations or responsibilities, implement a whole slew of unworkable programs, misrepresent nearly everything we're doing in meetings with upper management, and then after a few months, just as everyone gets the feeling that he might finally be having to face the realities of the business, pull his head out of his ass, learn and scale back a little, and roll back some of the stupid changes he made, there will be an announcement... and a goodbye party...
And in will come a new guy, pick up all the old guy's stuff that wasn't quite working anyway, and soon there will be the meetings again... and the initiatives and changes again...
Wash, rinse, repeat as these jackasses earn six figures and get promoted up, up, and away in their beautiful balloons while the people at the bottom do the real work *in spite of* their idiotic tie-speak, with nary a reward year over year.
As though the observation of life as an object is the same as living life as a subject.
This is not a breakthrough. If it is used as a body of data, rather than as entertainment, then it is just a bigger archaeological record, but it is not transformative in any way.
If it is used as entertainment (as it no doubt will be), then this is just the new "reality entertainment" mechanism with six billion channels of reality TV on all the time. If you thought biography, autobiography, and reality TV were bad, just wait for Totality Multimedia. In the most banal sense, given how much entertainment we already consume, you will finally get to spend you life watching other people watch TV. And then, you'll get to read about what they thought as they did it, and listen to the sound of them not speaking over the sound of the radio. It's so postmodern it's primitive.
So you can observe an entire recorded world in all its banality... Or you can turn toward the window and observe an entire world being recorded in all its banality. Life reduces to itself. Yay.
It does create an interesting paradox, though: with this much data, to absorb the entirety of another's life as object, you must indeed sacrifice a good percentage of your own life as subject (assuming that it would take something on the order of your natural life to view the entire record [if possible at all] of another's). Actually, that's not even very interesting, as it merely telescopes down to "if someone else wastes their life, and you are passively there for the entirety, contributing nothing, doing nothing, then you also waste yours."
Sort of goes without saying. I suppose there's a kind of performance art in being born, living, and dying only to watch someone else being born, living, and dying. But that's about it.
True. In the world of electronic devices in which I've gone through far more than 6 PDAs in 10 years just due to use and wearing components out, it's easy to imagine "running out" of instances for such ebooks. When you buy a paper book, it can "stay in the family" for generations. Your kids/grandkids (if you are so inclined) can someday read it. If an ebook is accessible only for a decade or two at most, I'd rather have the paper. It can easily be transformed into whatever e-format I want if I need to read some or all of it on the go.
In some branches of philosophy and relateds (where I study these days), a single sentence can be very singular and dense indeed and long enough to be defensible for copyright. I think there is some precedent for this, but I can't remember off the top of my head. Just an aside.:-)
And you're teaching at the college level? No wonder there's such miseducation and cluelessness about.
The moment you write a sentence, take a photo, paint a picture, or create any other kind of copyrightable work, you already own the copyright under law. You created it, it is copyright by you, and if anyone uses it without permission afterward and you can prove that you created it first, you have a court case.
Registration of copyright does nothing but offer one way to demonstrate this proof--by registering your newly created item immediately with a government agency, they have a record that as of date X/Y/Z you had already called this thing into existence and claimed it to be yours.
More to the point, at the college level a student's work isn't just classwork, but potentially the basis for a career in ideas. It is morally indefensible to force them to cede rights to these ideas before they are prepared to publish on their own accord. It could seriously compromise a career if the clearinghouse was sloppy with security or if it made mistakes in misidentifying plagiarism (for example, even clerical errors--my paper #234533 was reported to be plagiarized, but that's actually because some other kid's paper ended up overwriting mine at #234533 due to a filesystem or programming error). I as graduate student working on a Ph.D. absolutely wouldn't consider attending such an institution.
Walmart isn't any worse than any other department store. Just because they sell more product, does not make them evil.
Um, yes, yes they are/yes it does. This is not a response about the ethics of the situation, but about mere language and quantity.
"Just because Stalin buried more bodies, does not make him more deadly." Wrong. "Just it has more pages, does not make it longer." Wrong. "Just because it has more hair, does not make it hairier." Wrong.
If poor labor practices are to you an evil, and Wal-Mart sells (and thus produces using such labor practices) more goods than anyone else, then it does indeed make Wal-Mart more evil, by any common-sense definition of "more."
With that said, I do wish Americans would learn the truth about the entire basis of their consumer society, i.e. all major department stores and the ethical vacuum in which they work, both within borders and without.
Tried it. No, something else is at work. ldd shows that both are linked to pango, BTW.
But I'm not talking about render speed alone, I'm talking about basic responsiveness. In the standard Fedora Firefox builds, for example, just the scrolling is sluggish. Whip the scroll wheel up or down... there's maybe a half-second delay before it starts to scroll the page, then it gradually accelerates until it's done scrolling, feeling generally sluggish the entire time. This is with the environment variable you mentioned set. Clicking on the scroll bar and moving up and down, the scrolling content struggles to keep up with your movements.
Scroll in Swiftfox is instantaneous, no appreciable delay between a click of the scroll wheel and scrolling the page by a notch. Spin the scroll wheel and the page instantly scrolls with it. Grab the scroll bar and whisk the mouse up and down, the content scrolls smoothly up and down also. Simply amazingly better interactivity.
The same with menus... click on a menu in Firefox and there's a noticable delay between the click and the appearance of the menu, and when navigating submenus, each also has such a delay. In Swiftfox, much different; menus instantly appear upon click, and you can navigate a menu tree very rapidly. I used to avoid using bookmarks in Firefox because of the 5-6 seconds necessary to open the bookmark menu and get a click to take, CPU cranking the entire time. In Swiftbox, it's a 1 second operation to visit a bookmark.
Even closing the application--an exit in Firefox takes several seconds. In Swiftfox, the window just goes down instantly. If it's not down to CPU optimizations or linking (they both appear to be similarly linked to me, no glaring problem relationships) then something about Fedora's build is seriously broken. What leads me to wonder about CPU optimization, though, is that I also have an Athlon (thunderbird) desktop that I use with Fedora Core 5. It's only 800MHz (my laptop is 1.2GHz PIII-M), yet Firefox on the Athlon is clearly more responsive. I had wondered about the X driver's performance on the laptop, but the Swiftfox experience puts that question mark to rest; the X driver is clearly fast enough to run a browser nicely. Both systems were installed with the same package set and have the same updates installed. So I wonder what it is about Fedora's firefox build that likes an Athlon 800MHz but hates a PIII-M 1.2GHz laptop with twice as much RAM...
The respect of others creates real economic and political benefits that can't simply be written off with a sweep of the "if they don't like me, damn them, I'm me!"
The "herd mentality" doesn't arise from simple moral weakness and the desire to be loved, it arises becuase we are social beings in a social world. You can build rapport with people and get better service, a better chance of being hired for the job, a better deal on your new car, a more beautiful wife...
That rapport consists in large part of sharing likes and dislikes or at the very least not radically contradicting the personal prejudices and preferences of those whose favor you hope to gain.
I'm not saying you should kiss ass always and pretend to love everything the boss loves in order to get a raise. Far from it, I'm more the type to speak my mind and suffer for it later, while watching someone else climb the ladder in my place, sometimes with regret, sometimes not. I don't make a value judgment about that or try to wear it like a badge of honor, my point is to say that the construction of personal cool isn't simply a neurosis that happens in a vacuum, it's a deliberate strategy based on the specific network of social relationships and interaction that surrounds a person, and each person would do better to consider it as such rather than to simply take a position in the "Either you're a member of the herd or you're a rebel!" dichotomy and stake it out like dogma, though of course your position on the "herd mentality" is also another such social marker that will endear you to some and not to others as well.
That's a publisher problem. When distros were shipping mainly as several CD iso files instead of a single DVD image as they're most popular now, publishers were "trimming" distributions to reduce the number of glue-in CDs that they had to ship with their Linux books. They'd cut out stuff that they figured nobody would use, like the source packages, either GNOME or KDE, maybe some of the services and more obscure administration tools, TeX/LaTeX, or whatever their "media" people decided could go to trim a distro from, say 4 CDs to 2, to make the book cheaper to manufacture.
The theory was that this wouldn't affect anyone since they'd trim out stuff that the book didn't cover and most people didn't use, and you'll notice that they all say things like "Includes complete Red Hat Linux 7.3*" and then down at the bottom "*Publisher's edition!" or whatever.
The trouble was twofold:
- Several major titles from several different publishers were shipped with packages chopped out but without a modified installer, meaning that the user could easily find themselves with an installer asking for (as you found out) either nonexistent CDs or packages missing from the CD even though the right number was inserted.
- At least one major title spent a whole chapter on a package that had been trimmed out of the install media by the publisher.
This was during the "golden age of Linux trade paperbacks" from maybe 1997-2003, I don't know if that sort of hijinks still goes on, but I worked on some of them from a major publisher and got caught up in some of the politics/cock-ups that embarrassed all and led to finger-pointing.
I'm pretty much looking at benefits from compiling for a given architecture. I have piles of RAM and never get into paging/swap, and really there's not much I *want* to turn off. I like KDE, the whole thing. I still have custom.twmrc and.fvm2rc files hanging around from the old days when I LOVED TWM and later FVWM, and a GNUstep directory from the intermediate days when I was running WindowMaker, but these days I like the fully-fledged desktop model.
There's no difference that I can see between Swiftfox and Firefox, it really is just a CPU-specific binary... and it made a huge difference for me in FC5, so I'm very tempted now by Gentoo, since I *can* build an Xorg.conf file by hand or race through a kernel config from scratch without needing to first do a "make oldconfig" to take advantage of the distro shipper's default configuration.
I'm hoping I won't have much difficulty since I've been using Linux since 1993 and have done my fair share of source compiling, even back when half of the sources were hackjobs from HPUX or AIX or [insert UNIX here] that required you to get an alternate version of make or Imake in order to compile. Somewhere I still have a textfile on building modelines from scratch that I used to use to get fixed frequency monitors too display graphics modes with PC video cards.
But why the switch?
I've been using Fedora Core and before it Red Hat since version 5 (when I swtiched away from Slackware, for good, it would seem). I like it a lot. Fedora Core, in particular, is a no-brain-necessary sort of Linux. I haven't had to touch a configuration file in god only knows how long.
BUT... It's slow. I've had the inkling that it seemed to make my PIIIM 1.2GHz machine just a bit sluggish for my tastes. Gentoo has tempted me for several years as a result, but I always thought to myself: "Well, for a 10% increase in speed as the result of recompiling an entire system, it's probably not worth it..." I've always built my own kernel with proper CPU optimizations and just left it at that.
Then the other day I stumbled on to Swiftfox (do a Google search), which is basically a set of precompiled Linux Firefox builds for specific CPU architectures. I downloaded the PIII Mobile version and launched it in place of the Fedora Core 5 Firefox build.
WOW. The speed and interactivity benefits sure feel like more than 10%. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but my subjective impression is that Swiftfox is maybe 80% faster than the Fedora Core Firefox build on my personal machine (a Thinkpad T23). It's not just obvious, it's the sort of thing that will make me want to gnash my teeth if I have to go back to the standard Fedora Firefox build.
And now I'm thinking to myself: that's just one app. What about glibc? What about kdebase? X.org? Could I be missing out not on 10% speed gains, but on 40-50% speed gains, or more? I don't know, but I think maybe it's time I dust off my inner geek and find out, and Gentoo seems like the place to do it.
Right, so rather than do something preventative just in case likely global warming is occurring, it's clear that we should instead WAIT AND SEE if our species dies out and mass extinctions radically alter the face of the planet. Then, and only then will we know who is right, which is what REALLY MATTERS.
Of course, that will still leave the question of WHOSE FAULT IT IS, man or nature, so clearly since the whole thing will never prove someone right, we should simply not worry about it at all, because it's ONLY WHO'S RIGHT that matters.
How is the quality of the bootleg DVD rips of the original trilogy from LD?
I have a set of bootlegs acquired on eBay (don't know if these are the same or different from the ones that others have). They're clearly from LD. They look great on a normal interlaced tube TV, which is the last TV I owned. Excellent, even.
Now I own only a laptop (and I watch my TV and my movies there). I'd say the bootlegs give a slightly better quality than the NTSC TV signal on a high-resolution display but much worse than an anamorphic DVD. But of course if the versions on these new releases are just pulled from LD and not anamorphic then they're likely very similar in quality to the bootlegs.
Ahhh, once again someone suggests that we should all hide our personhood behind the facade of "vanilla-flavored, grey-colored worker" in order to sustain a living. Well you don't live forever, folks. So if you make nothing to leave behind you now but the pinstripes on your suit, that's all that will remain of you once you're gone.
I got on the subway this morning with just such a pack of yes-men. I couldn't tell them apart. Suits, hairdos, shiny little shoes, bland ties. They are all dead, unimportant, lost to history, no matter how big their bank accounts. They don't even matter to their friends or families beyond being "breadwinner." They could just as easily be any other hollow suit.
No thanks. If you want me to be a hollow suit, I don't want to work for you. Take your money and go rape the third world somewhere.
What's wrong about discriminating against people with a history of making bad choices?
Because they're still people, they didn't ask to be born, and they have a right to work somewhere in the economy so that they can live in shelter and feed themselves. Or do you think we should just check everyone's credit rating, then send those with "poor risk management" skills to the gas chamber as a drag on society, because otherwise they're just going to end up on welfare anyway, since we won't let them work.
Thanks, Hitler. And if you make a mistake at some point, I'll be happy to kill you as "inferior" as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Read it again, you've got it backward. The amendment that they struck down was to remove the Habeas changes, sponsored by the senator from Vermont. That was effectively the last hope to keep the changes from going into law, since they have the votes to pass the undiluted house version.
There was an amendment to the bill from the Democrats that would have resotred to the House version of the bill the removed protections. It's the amendment that was killed. :-(
Basically, some of the Senate said "Woah, that house version goes too far!" and they tried to tone it down. But once it got out of committee, the Senate as a whole smashed it and has gone on to procedure regarding the full-strength House version of the bill.
You can read both at senate.gov (see the right-hand column).
As I quoted to another poster, this is the most important bit:
"SEC. 6. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and
(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001."
You'll notice that the bill claims to apply to aliens. But once you're picked up as an alien, no court has jurisdiction to review your status. So if they come by your house to pick you as a citizen up, there is no way for you to say "No way, dude, I'm a citizen!" because the moment you're picked up, the courts lose jurisdiction.
If they decide you're an alien, not a citizen, that's it under the law. And who is they? At the top of the bill it spells out clearly: the Secretary of Defense or anyone he designates. So, basically: party members.
This is the important part, near the end.
"SEC. 6. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended--
(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and
(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who--
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001."
It applies to "aliens," yes. But all they have to do is call you an "alien" and pick you up. Even if you HAVE a passport, a social security card, a driver's license, and a medal of honor, NO COURT would have the jurisdiction to hear your case saying: "Yes, but I'm a citizen!"
There would be no place for you to assert that you weren't an alien!
I think few Americans right now realize that congress is working, yesterday and today, on passing (not just writing or introducing, but passing, it's already through the house and now up for vote in the senate) a bill that will end habeas corupus and legalize torture:
+ habeas&hl=en&hs=GCv&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox&rl s=Swiftfox:en-US:unofficial&sa=X&oi=news&ct=titleo nID=40&ItemID=11071r yID=20060924-060744-4556rc le/2006/09/26/AR2006092601475.html
http://news.google.com/news?q=torture+bill+senate
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Secti
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?Sto
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Habeas corpus is one of the oldest tenets of western civilization, predating the U.S. Constitution and even the Magna Carta, and it says, simply, that if someone is to be held in custody by the state, there must be a demonstrable reason for their imprisonment. It is the basis of "probable cause," "warrants" of arrest, and your right to a trail to establish your guilt or innocence.
This bill not only legalizes torture acts against enemy combatants by the U.S. government, it also gives the president and the secretary of defense the authority to unilaterally decide who is an enemy combatant, without review, oversight, process, or documentation of any kind, and to act on that decision, without trial, documentation, or any means of appeal. The standard for being an enemy combatant is essentially that you don't "support" America in some way or another, not according to some objective standard of evidence, but again according to the personal impression of either the president or the secretary of defense. This includes American citizens.
Once they decide you are an enemy combatant, you can be picked up, with no warrant or probable cause, no evidence, and no process other than "the feds said you don't support America." They no longer need evidence. Under this statute no right to trail or judicial review will exist (because you are now like those at Gitmo, rather than a citizen), and you can be tortured at will.
This is what the senate is working on YESTERDAY AND TODAY. It's likely already too late to affect the outcome, but if you haven't yet it might be a good day to call your senator and say that you OPPOSE the bill that legalizes arbitrary indefinite detention at the whim of the president and the legalization of torture.
Or, I can post to Slashdot in the meantime as a way of venting frustration in agreement with an earlier poster
-and-
work to change the system. You're wrong about the universe, by the way, this is merely the way capitalism works.
You're assuming that I want to get paid more. Not true. I think they should be paid less. The game is what's broken; people shouldn't be rewarded for doing harm. And nobody should earn a salary more than 150k or so, no matter what.
Trouble is, the CEOs who promote this crap can jump from ship to ship-- not all of us can do that.
Seriously. Over the years I've worked in software, networks, and publishing, and I've never had the pleasure of working under any person for longer than about a year. Invariably when I've been hired, I've had the feeling that my new boss wasn't quite on top of things.
But on top of things or not, sure enough, within a couple of months of my being hired there's always an announcement that congratulations are in order because boss will be leaving us for much bigger and better things, or has been promoted to a new and more ridiculous level of abstraction within the organization. Then there's a party and some cake and silly goodbyes.
Then, the new guy comes in. He's always groomed, young-middle-age-ish, clearly an MBA or someone who's read a few too many business books and has been wearing a tie since he was four. He wrings his hands a lot and speaks in a worried-measured-reassuring tone and holds "orientation interviews" (or some variation thereon) with everyone during which he asks a lot of dumb, general, or both questions and says that he'll appreciate help in getting up to speed and he's really excited to have the opportunity to work with everyone.
Within the first two-three months, he'll fuck everything up, miss a pile of obligations or responsibilities, implement a whole slew of unworkable programs, misrepresent nearly everything we're doing in meetings with upper management, and then after a few months, just as everyone gets the feeling that he might finally be having to face the realities of the business, pull his head out of his ass, learn and scale back a little, and roll back some of the stupid changes he made, there will be an announcement... and a goodbye party...
And in will come a new guy, pick up all the old guy's stuff that wasn't quite working anyway, and soon there will be the meetings again... and the initiatives and changes again...
Wash, rinse, repeat as these jackasses earn six figures and get promoted up, up, and away in their beautiful balloons while the people at the bottom do the real work *in spite of* their idiotic tie-speak, with nary a reward year over year.
As though the observation of life as an object is the same as living life as a subject.
This is not a breakthrough. If it is used as a body of data, rather than as entertainment, then it is just a bigger archaeological record, but it is not transformative in any way.
If it is used as entertainment (as it no doubt will be), then this is just the new "reality entertainment" mechanism with six billion channels of reality TV on all the time. If you thought biography, autobiography, and reality TV were bad, just wait for Totality Multimedia. In the most banal sense, given how much entertainment we already consume, you will finally get to spend you life watching other people watch TV. And then, you'll get to read about what they thought as they did it, and listen to the sound of them not speaking over the sound of the radio. It's so postmodern it's primitive.
So you can observe an entire recorded world in all its banality... Or you can turn toward the window and observe an entire world being recorded in all its banality. Life reduces to itself. Yay.
It does create an interesting paradox, though: with this much data, to absorb the entirety of another's life as object, you must indeed sacrifice a good percentage of your own life as subject (assuming that it would take something on the order of your natural life to view the entire record [if possible at all] of another's). Actually, that's not even very interesting, as it merely telescopes down to "if someone else wastes their life, and you are passively there for the entirety, contributing nothing, doing nothing, then you also waste yours."
Sort of goes without saying. I suppose there's a kind of performance art in being born, living, and dying only to watch someone else being born, living, and dying. But that's about it.
True. In the world of electronic devices in which I've gone through far more than 6 PDAs in 10 years just due to use and wearing components out, it's easy to imagine "running out" of instances for such ebooks. When you buy a paper book, it can "stay in the family" for generations. Your kids/grandkids (if you are so inclined) can someday read it. If an ebook is accessible only for a decade or two at most, I'd rather have the paper. It can easily be transformed into whatever e-format I want if I need to read some or all of it on the go.
...comes from Umberto Eco and I find it to be insightful. It is here.
In some branches of philosophy and relateds (where I study these days), a single sentence can be very singular and dense indeed and long enough to be defensible for copyright. I think there is some precedent for this, but I can't remember off the top of my head. Just an aside. :-)
Same for a copyright, if I understand.
And you're teaching at the college level? No wonder there's such miseducation and cluelessness about.
The moment you write a sentence, take a photo, paint a picture, or create any other kind of copyrightable work, you already own the copyright under law. You created it, it is copyright by you, and if anyone uses it without permission afterward and you can prove that you created it first, you have a court case.
Registration of copyright does nothing but offer one way to demonstrate this proof--by registering your newly created item immediately with a government agency, they have a record that as of date X/Y/Z you had already called this thing into existence and claimed it to be yours.
More to the point, at the college level a student's work isn't just classwork, but potentially the basis for a career in ideas. It is morally indefensible to force them to cede rights to these ideas before they are prepared to publish on their own accord. It could seriously compromise a career if the clearinghouse was sloppy with security or if it made mistakes in misidentifying plagiarism (for example, even clerical errors--my paper #234533 was reported to be plagiarized, but that's actually because some other kid's paper ended up overwriting mine at #234533 due to a filesystem or programming error). I as graduate student working on a Ph.D. absolutely wouldn't consider attending such an institution.
The thing is, is that al the stores sell the same crap,
Yes, and whoever is selling the most of it is the most evil. Quite simple.
Walmart isn't any worse than any other department store. Just because they sell more product, does not make them evil.
Um, yes, yes they are/yes it does. This is not a response about the ethics of the situation, but about mere language and quantity.
"Just because Stalin buried more bodies, does not make him more deadly." Wrong.
"Just it has more pages, does not make it longer." Wrong.
"Just because it has more hair, does not make it hairier." Wrong.
If poor labor practices are to you an evil, and Wal-Mart sells (and thus produces using such labor practices) more goods than anyone else, then it does indeed make Wal-Mart more evil, by any common-sense definition of "more."
With that said, I do wish Americans would learn the truth about the entire basis of their consumer society, i.e. all major department stores and the ethical vacuum in which they work, both within borders and without.
Tried it. No, something else is at work. ldd shows that both are linked to pango, BTW.
But I'm not talking about render speed alone, I'm talking about basic responsiveness. In the standard Fedora Firefox builds, for example, just the scrolling is sluggish. Whip the scroll wheel up or down... there's maybe a half-second delay before it starts to scroll the page, then it gradually accelerates until it's done scrolling, feeling generally sluggish the entire time. This is with the environment variable you mentioned set. Clicking on the scroll bar and moving up and down, the scrolling content struggles to keep up with your movements.
Scroll in Swiftfox is instantaneous, no appreciable delay between a click of the scroll wheel and scrolling the page by a notch. Spin the scroll wheel and the page instantly scrolls with it. Grab the scroll bar and whisk the mouse up and down, the content scrolls smoothly up and down also. Simply amazingly better interactivity.
The same with menus... click on a menu in Firefox and there's a noticable delay between the click and the appearance of the menu, and when navigating submenus, each also has such a delay. In Swiftfox, much different; menus instantly appear upon click, and you can navigate a menu tree very rapidly. I used to avoid using bookmarks in Firefox because of the 5-6 seconds necessary to open the bookmark menu and get a click to take, CPU cranking the entire time. In Swiftbox, it's a 1 second operation to visit a bookmark.
Even closing the application--an exit in Firefox takes several seconds. In Swiftfox, the window just goes down instantly. If it's not down to CPU optimizations or linking (they both appear to be similarly linked to me, no glaring problem relationships) then something about Fedora's build is seriously broken. What leads me to wonder about CPU optimization, though, is that I also have an Athlon (thunderbird) desktop that I use with Fedora Core 5. It's only 800MHz (my laptop is 1.2GHz PIII-M), yet Firefox on the Athlon is clearly more responsive. I had wondered about the X driver's performance on the laptop, but the Swiftfox experience puts that question mark to rest; the X driver is clearly fast enough to run a browser nicely. Both systems were installed with the same package set and have the same updates installed. So I wonder what it is about Fedora's firefox build that likes an Athlon 800MHz but hates a PIII-M 1.2GHz laptop with twice as much RAM...
The respect of others creates real economic and political benefits that can't simply be written off with a sweep of the "if they don't like me, damn them, I'm me!"
The "herd mentality" doesn't arise from simple moral weakness and the desire to be loved, it arises becuase we are social beings in a social world. You can build rapport with people and get better service, a better chance of being hired for the job, a better deal on your new car, a more beautiful wife...
That rapport consists in large part of sharing likes and dislikes or at the very least not radically contradicting the personal prejudices and preferences of those whose favor you hope to gain.
I'm not saying you should kiss ass always and pretend to love everything the boss loves in order to get a raise. Far from it, I'm more the type to speak my mind and suffer for it later, while watching someone else climb the ladder in my place, sometimes with regret, sometimes not. I don't make a value judgment about that or try to wear it like a badge of honor, my point is to say that the construction of personal cool isn't simply a neurosis that happens in a vacuum, it's a deliberate strategy based on the specific network of social relationships and interaction that surrounds a person, and each person would do better to consider it as such rather than to simply take a position in the "Either you're a member of the herd or you're a rebel!" dichotomy and stake it out like dogma, though of course your position on the "herd mentality" is also another such social marker that will endear you to some and not to others as well.
That's a publisher problem. When distros were shipping mainly as several CD iso files instead of a single DVD image as they're most popular now, publishers were "trimming" distributions to reduce the number of glue-in CDs that they had to ship with their Linux books. They'd cut out stuff that they figured nobody would use, like the source packages, either GNOME or KDE, maybe some of the services and more obscure administration tools, TeX/LaTeX, or whatever their "media" people decided could go to trim a distro from, say 4 CDs to 2, to make the book cheaper to manufacture.
The theory was that this wouldn't affect anyone since they'd trim out stuff that the book didn't cover and most people didn't use, and you'll notice that they all say things like "Includes complete Red Hat Linux 7.3*" and then down at the bottom "*Publisher's edition!" or whatever.
The trouble was twofold:
- Several major titles from several different publishers were shipped with packages chopped out but without a modified installer, meaning that the user could easily find themselves with an installer asking for (as you found out) either nonexistent CDs or packages missing from the CD even though the right number was inserted.
- At least one major title spent a whole chapter on a package that had been trimmed out of the install media by the publisher.
This was during the "golden age of Linux trade paperbacks" from maybe 1997-2003, I don't know if that sort of hijinks still goes on, but I worked on some of them from a major publisher and got caught up in some of the politics/cock-ups that embarrassed all and led to finger-pointing.
I'm pretty much looking at benefits from compiling for a given architecture. I have piles of RAM and never get into paging/swap, and really there's not much I *want* to turn off. I like KDE, the whole thing. I still have custom .twmrc and .fvm2rc files hanging around from the old days when I LOVED TWM and later FVWM, and a GNUstep directory from the intermediate days when I was running WindowMaker, but these days I like the fully-fledged desktop model.
There's no difference that I can see between Swiftfox and Firefox, it really is just a CPU-specific binary... and it made a huge difference for me in FC5, so I'm very tempted now by Gentoo, since I *can* build an Xorg.conf file by hand or race through a kernel config from scratch without needing to first do a "make oldconfig" to take advantage of the distro shipper's default configuration.
I'm hoping I won't have much difficulty since I've been using Linux since 1993 and have done my fair share of source compiling, even back when half of the sources were hackjobs from HPUX or AIX or [insert UNIX here] that required you to get an alternate version of make or Imake in order to compile. Somewhere I still have a textfile on building modelines from scratch that I used to use to get fixed frequency monitors too display graphics modes with PC video cards.
But why the switch?
I've been using Fedora Core and before it Red Hat since version 5 (when I swtiched away from Slackware, for good, it would seem). I like it a lot. Fedora Core, in particular, is a no-brain-necessary sort of Linux. I haven't had to touch a configuration file in god only knows how long.
BUT... It's slow. I've had the inkling that it seemed to make my PIIIM 1.2GHz machine just a bit sluggish for my tastes. Gentoo has tempted me for several years as a result, but I always thought to myself: "Well, for a 10% increase in speed as the result of recompiling an entire system, it's probably not worth it..." I've always built my own kernel with proper CPU optimizations and just left it at that.
Then the other day I stumbled on to Swiftfox (do a Google search), which is basically a set of precompiled Linux Firefox builds for specific CPU architectures. I downloaded the PIII Mobile version and launched it in place of the Fedora Core 5 Firefox build.
WOW. The speed and interactivity benefits sure feel like more than 10%. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but my subjective impression is that Swiftfox is maybe 80% faster than the Fedora Core Firefox build on my personal machine (a Thinkpad T23). It's not just obvious, it's the sort of thing that will make me want to gnash my teeth if I have to go back to the standard Fedora Firefox build.
And now I'm thinking to myself: that's just one app. What about glibc? What about kdebase? X.org? Could I be missing out not on 10% speed gains, but on 40-50% speed gains, or more? I don't know, but I think maybe it's time I dust off my inner geek and find out, and Gentoo seems like the place to do it.
Right, so rather than do something preventative just in case likely global warming is occurring, it's clear that we should instead WAIT AND SEE if our species dies out and mass extinctions radically alter the face of the planet. Then, and only then will we know who is right, which is what REALLY MATTERS.
Of course, that will still leave the question of WHOSE FAULT IT IS, man or nature, so clearly since the whole thing will never prove someone right, we should simply not worry about it at all, because it's ONLY WHO'S RIGHT that matters.
How is the quality of the bootleg DVD rips of the original trilogy from LD?
I have a set of bootlegs acquired on eBay (don't know if these are the same or different from the ones that others have). They're clearly from LD. They look great on a normal interlaced tube TV, which is the last TV I owned. Excellent, even.
Now I own only a laptop (and I watch my TV and my movies there). I'd say the bootlegs give a slightly better quality than the NTSC TV signal on a high-resolution display but much worse than an anamorphic DVD. But of course if the versions on these new releases are just pulled from LD and not anamorphic then they're likely very similar in quality to the bootlegs.
Sounds like somebody is little more than their own wallet. I'm glad I have actual feelings.
Ahhh, once again someone suggests that we should all hide our personhood behind the facade of "vanilla-flavored, grey-colored worker" in order to sustain a living. Well you don't live forever, folks. So if you make nothing to leave behind you now but the pinstripes on your suit, that's all that will remain of you once you're gone.
I got on the subway this morning with just such a pack of yes-men. I couldn't tell them apart. Suits, hairdos, shiny little shoes, bland ties. They are all dead, unimportant, lost to history, no matter how big their bank accounts. They don't even matter to their friends or families beyond being "breadwinner." They could just as easily be any other hollow suit.
No thanks. If you want me to be a hollow suit, I don't want to work for you. Take your money and go rape the third world somewhere.
A good reason to tune out, join alternate economies, and work for the end of this society and western capitalism.
What's wrong about discriminating against people with a history of making bad choices?
Because they're still people, they didn't ask to be born, and they have a right to work somewhere in the economy so that they can live in shelter and feed themselves. Or do you think we should just check everyone's credit rating, then send those with "poor risk management" skills to the gas chamber as a drag on society, because otherwise they're just going to end up on welfare anyway, since we won't let them work.
Thanks, Hitler. And if you make a mistake at some point, I'll be happy to kill you as "inferior" as well.