Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.
Where else did you think all the crap loans that the CRA forced the banks to make would wind up,
So I keep hearing, but where did you think all the crap loans that the CRA didn't force the unregulated non-banks to make would wind up? You know, the 50% of the subprime loans made by mortgage brokers and non-bank companies like GM (ditech.com)? What about all the CDOs that were bought up by investment firms like Lehman Brothers?
If companies that the CRA didn't apply to did it, why should I assume that the banks the CRA applied to did it because of the CRA, and not because everyone else was doing it and making shitloads of money (on paper, which is all that matters on the next quarterly report)?
I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.
After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).
The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.
If you were looking for a collection of laws to be enforced then you won't, nor should you expect to, find that in the Constitution
I'm simply pointing out that having rules is meaningless if nothing happens when they are ignored. It's a very nice suggestion on how a government should be run, but that's all it is. All it's missing is enough honest men willing to follow the instructions on the honor system to put it into practice, or a way to deal with the people who aren't willing that doesn't involve waiting years for their terms to expire while hoping they don't screw it up too much.
Case in point, recently the House of Reps threatened to cut funding for the military actions going in on Libya
How exactly would the reps have forced the president not to cut checks from some other account to cover the cost? What if Medicare decides to pay for medically necessary surgical strikes like it decided to pay for end-of-life care counselling?
Someone with enough time and energy could probably go through the court records and figure out how many people in a given jurisdiction were arrested for resisting arrest with no other charges. Shows up in the news every now and then, usually when the cops decided they had to tase someone.
If there is a flaw in the Constitution, it is a lack of checks on the court.
There are plenty of flaws in the Constitution. The fact that there is no mechanism at all to enforce the Constitution so the courts ended up taking that power for themselves in Marbury v. Madison being the very first one. The second being that the Constitution, having no penalties for violating it, is merely the highest "suggestion" in the land (the supreme court's power to whine about the actions of the government does not count, see Lincoln's behavior in Ex parte Merryman). The third, leading directly from the first in that the courts are the only recourse for unconstitutional acts, is that 1) someone must be harmed and 2) that harm must be repairable before a court would consider taking the case. Take, for instance, bills of attainder. If Congress and the President called for your execution (or Congress passed the bill over the President's veto), you have not been harmed until after the firing line pulls the trigger, and any case you might have to claim that Congress and the President are not allowed to do this would not be "ripe". Once the bullets have pierced your heart, suing the government will not undo the harm that has been done, your case is now "moot" (consider the cases of Padilla, which was finally declared moot before the supreme court ever got to decide whether it violates the Constitution for the Executive branch to order an American citizen to be detained without charge for years and subjected to "environmental stresses"). Fourth, also deriving from the first issue, combined with Congress's power to regulate the courts, means that the government gets to define what a "grievance" is. If you don't have one, you don't have the right to petition the government for a redress of it.
This is just scratching the surface of what's missing from the Constitution. I haven't even gotten to the problems of what is actually in it.
Any infringing software can be modified to work around just about any software patent. For example, if you have a patent on quicksort, I'll use merge-sort.
I have the patent on quicksort, and your application sorts, so it looks to me like it's infringing. I guess I'm going to have to sue you and then we'll see if the jury thinks you're using quick sort or just trying to blow them over with your fancy merge sort talking.
The difference between so-called "business method" or "software" patents and real patents is that when I have a real object, it's trivial to inspect or dismantle it to determine whether it's infringing or not. When you patent a process, often the only visible part is the output of that process, so if it outputs the same thing, you must be infringing.
Now, add in bullshit like the Doctrine of Equivalents and see how far your philosophy reaches before you're bankrupted by court costs.
If the ratio of Representatives to represented is returned to George Washington's 1:40000 ideal, we'd need about 7000 reps.
It'd be tough to continue to bribe half of 7000 people. Returning to state appointment of Senators would probably do more to reduce the hyper-partisianship though. When you don't have to spend half of your time on the job running for election, you can focus on actually doing what your state needs rather than what some party boss thinks the party needs, and there's a whole lot less advertising to pay for.
These generic privileges are defined system wide, whereas capabilities are specific to a single file, device, etc. If you have access to files a,b, and c, it's not possible to give another process access to only a and c with privileges, but it's trivial with capabilities.
I think you're running into a name conflict here. "Linux Capabilities" exists, but is separate from the filesystem and is basically a set of flags like "can reboot the system" and "can increase process priority".
SELinux is more like what you are looking for (in fact, modern systems with it on by default drive people up the wall when they try to put DocumentRoot in some weird place like/usr/www/ instead of where the distribution told SELinux apache should be able to read), but it's not really a runtime kind of setting (ie if I want to run the program once with permission to access "a" and then a second time with permission to access "b" I'll need to reconfigure selinux/relabel the files/possibly reboot)
There are APIs, it's called a parameterized query. Depending on your language and API, using them adds anywhere from 1 to dozens (bindparam) of extra lines of code compared to the string concatenation version. Apparently nobody thinks anyone would ever want to query($database,"select * from foo where baz=:baz",$_POST); so one-off queries end up being several lines of step-by-step piecewise execution (oh, and don't forget the return value checks between each step!)
I think they tried to fix the "clicking anywhere opens parent comment" bug by blocking you from clicking anywhere. Not the first time they broke slashdot this way. Expect things to go back to the old brokenness in about 2 weeks, I think that's how long it took them last time.
If they want hardcore gamers, they're going to have to bring the hardcore games.
Anyone with any interest at all in RPGs has a PS3. Anyone with any interest at all in shooters has an xbox. Only people with an interest in party games, cooking mama, golf, or old school nintendo gaming have the Wii.
If Firefox would use an internal plugin API version number that plugins could check against so that users wouldn't have all their shit broken because FF and plugin devs are throwing hissy fits at each other, the entire problem would be solved.
IE sidesteps this by making sure all three plugins work in the new browser before deploying it.
2) unless the site backend is open source, you don't even know whether passwords are hashed unless it gets hacked
I tell it I forgot my password. If it emails the password back to me, it's stored as good as plain text. Then I change it to line noise and never go back.
A long time ago, slashdot used to do the same thing for people who did use www. It would print TCWWW over and over and over in really big letters (I think it stood for "The Cursed WWW").
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, something rather like homeopathy's ridiculous dilution does work for some food allergies. You start by taking a tiny bit of whatever it is you're allergic to. Then you take a tiny bit more. It's called oral immunotherapy.
Where else did you think all the crap loans that the CRA forced the banks to make would wind up,
So I keep hearing, but where did you think all the crap loans that the CRA didn't force the unregulated non-banks to make would wind up? You know, the 50% of the subprime loans made by mortgage brokers and non-bank companies like GM (ditech.com)? What about all the CDOs that were bought up by investment firms like Lehman Brothers?
If companies that the CRA didn't apply to did it, why should I assume that the banks the CRA applied to did it because of the CRA, and not because everyone else was doing it and making shitloads of money (on paper, which is all that matters on the next quarterly report)?
A lot of the examples look like something off of The Random Art Gallery.
I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.
After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).
The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.
If you were looking for a collection of laws to be enforced then you won't, nor should you expect to, find that in the Constitution
I'm simply pointing out that having rules is meaningless if nothing happens when they are ignored. It's a very nice suggestion on how a government should be run, but that's all it is. All it's missing is enough honest men willing to follow the instructions on the honor system to put it into practice, or a way to deal with the people who aren't willing that doesn't involve waiting years for their terms to expire while hoping they don't screw it up too much.
Case in point, recently the House of Reps threatened to cut funding for the military actions going in on Libya
How exactly would the reps have forced the president not to cut checks from some other account to cover the cost? What if Medicare decides to pay for medically necessary surgical strikes like it decided to pay for end-of-life care counselling?
Someone with enough time and energy could probably go through the court records and figure out how many people in a given jurisdiction were arrested for resisting arrest with no other charges. Shows up in the news every now and then, usually when the cops decided they had to tase someone.
It's harder to figure out if it's legit when they throw in an "assaulting the officer charge", especially when the perp is covered in bruises and the cop has a scuff mark on his shoe.
If there is a flaw in the Constitution, it is a lack of checks on the court.
There are plenty of flaws in the Constitution. The fact that there is no mechanism at all to enforce the Constitution so the courts ended up taking that power for themselves in Marbury v. Madison being the very first one. The second being that the Constitution, having no penalties for violating it, is merely the highest "suggestion" in the land (the supreme court's power to whine about the actions of the government does not count, see Lincoln's behavior in Ex parte Merryman). The third, leading directly from the first in that the courts are the only recourse for unconstitutional acts, is that 1) someone must be harmed and 2) that harm must be repairable before a court would consider taking the case. Take, for instance, bills of attainder. If Congress and the President called for your execution (or Congress passed the bill over the President's veto), you have not been harmed until after the firing line pulls the trigger, and any case you might have to claim that Congress and the President are not allowed to do this would not be "ripe". Once the bullets have pierced your heart, suing the government will not undo the harm that has been done, your case is now "moot" (consider the cases of Padilla, which was finally declared moot before the supreme court ever got to decide whether it violates the Constitution for the Executive branch to order an American citizen to be detained without charge for years and subjected to "environmental stresses"). Fourth, also deriving from the first issue, combined with Congress's power to regulate the courts, means that the government gets to define what a "grievance" is. If you don't have one, you don't have the right to petition the government for a redress of it.
This is just scratching the surface of what's missing from the Constitution. I haven't even gotten to the problems of what is actually in it.
goddamn.
Any infringing software can be modified to work around just about any software patent. For example, if you have a patent on quicksort, I'll use merge-sort.
I have the patent on quicksort, and your application sorts, so it looks to me like it's infringing. I guess I'm going to have to sue you and then we'll see if the jury thinks you're using quick sort or just trying to blow them over with your fancy merge sort talking.
The difference between so-called "business method" or "software" patents and real patents is that when I have a real object, it's trivial to inspect or dismantle it to determine whether it's infringing or not. When you patent a process, often the only visible part is the output of that process, so if it outputs the same thing, you must be infringing.
Now, add in bullshit like the Doctrine of Equivalents and see how far your philosophy reaches before you're bankrupted by court costs.
never think up anything that might even remotely be considered novel.
Worse, you have to never think up anything that some government employee didn't think was novel.
Welcome to the difference between a Democracy and a Republic. Enjoy being represented by one or two idiots.
Retry! Retry!
If the ratio of Representatives to represented is returned to George Washington's 1:40000 ideal, we'd need about 7000 reps.
It'd be tough to continue to bribe half of 7000 people. Returning to state appointment of Senators would probably do more to reduce the hyper-partisianship though. When you don't have to spend half of your time on the job running for election, you can focus on actually doing what your state needs rather than what some party boss thinks the party needs, and there's a whole lot less advertising to pay for.
These generic privileges are defined system wide, whereas capabilities are specific to a single file, device, etc. If you have access to files a,b, and c, it's not possible to give another process access to only a and c with privileges, but it's trivial with capabilities.
I think you're running into a name conflict here. "Linux Capabilities" exists, but is separate from the filesystem and is basically a set of flags like "can reboot the system" and "can increase process priority".
SELinux is more like what you are looking for (in fact, modern systems with it on by default drive people up the wall when they try to put DocumentRoot in some weird place like /usr/www/ instead of where the distribution told SELinux apache should be able to read), but it's not really a runtime kind of setting (ie if I want to run the program once with permission to access "a" and then a second time with permission to access "b" I'll need to reconfigure selinux/relabel the files/possibly reboot)
There are APIs, it's called a parameterized query. Depending on your language and API, using them adds anywhere from 1 to dozens (bindparam) of extra lines of code compared to the string concatenation version. Apparently nobody thinks anyone would ever want to query($database,"select * from foo where baz=:baz",$_POST); so one-off queries end up being several lines of step-by-step piecewise execution (oh, and don't forget the return value checks between each step!)
I think they tried to fix the "clicking anywhere opens parent comment" bug by blocking you from clicking anywhere. Not the first time they broke slashdot this way. Expect things to go back to the old brokenness in about 2 weeks, I think that's how long it took them last time.
Magnet links, how do they work?
Lobsters
If they want hardcore gamers, they're going to have to bring the hardcore games.
Anyone with any interest at all in RPGs has a PS3. Anyone with any interest at all in shooters has an xbox. Only people with an interest in party games, cooking mama, golf, or old school nintendo gaming have the Wii.
If Firefox would use an internal plugin API version number that plugins could check against so that users wouldn't have all their shit broken because FF and plugin devs are throwing hissy fits at each other, the entire problem would be solved.
IE sidesteps this by making sure all three plugins work in the new browser before deploying it.
2) unless the site backend is open source, you don't even know whether passwords are hashed unless it gets hacked
I tell it I forgot my password. If it emails the password back to me, it's stored as good as plain text. Then I change it to line noise and never go back.
how does one make connections to it since I would think that solder would burn paper?
Just tape the components to the paper ;)
A long time ago, slashdot used to do the same thing for people who did use www. It would print TCWWW over and over and over in really big letters (I think it stood for "The Cursed WWW").
It couldn't possibly be worse than Facebook
It could be Orkut.
Or "cam" as in "camera", which was what I first thought.
I'm guessing you were thinking this kind of CAM, since you only linked the mechanical one.
Well, except when they're liberals like Tipper Gore.