I'd wanted to post the actual figures, but ofcourse Slashdot's _brilliant_ lameness filter blocked it.
Heh, funny - Slashdot these days seems to block more content than it allows for.
That's what you get for trying to present the figures in an easy to read tabular format. What you should have done is what everyone else does: scatter them throughout a long sputtering diatribe full of misspellings, typos, and bad punctuation; being sure to call everyone else fucktard and asswipe; and ending with a few choice links simply cut-n'-pasted into the body of the message without an [A HREF=] tag so they are not only unclickable, but unpasteable because the "no long lines" filter has put a space in them.
Seems to me the lameness filter is more of a lameness ensurer.
They are regulated. How well is an exercise left to the reader.
Well, since the American Bar Association is as much a government regulatory body as the American Automobile Association, the answer to "how well" is "only well enough to keep the government from actually regulating us". The ABA is a professional association of lawysers run by lawyers and really has no business being the regulatory body in charge of lawyer certification.
We paid for that appearance, according to press reports. As usual, the public pays for Bush's presidential campaign appearances, but enforces "private event" rules when the loyalty oaths aren't enough.
What press reports? I can't find anything that describes it a publicly funded. Everything I've seen so far describes it as being run by the Bush-Cheney Campaign (private, funded by donations) and local Republican parties. The only publicly funded aspects I've seen were the Secret Service bodyguard for the first lady.
It is literally impossible for a _public_ official to be at a private event.
No it's not. What gives you that idea? The only thing it's impossible for a public official to do is claim certain privacy rights, e.g. photographers don't have to ask their permission to publish photos of them in certain circumstances where, were they private citizens, they'd have to obtain a release. I don't know where you get the idea that every event a public official attends somehow becomes a public event just because they are there! Private property remains private no matter who happens to be standing on it.
_Public_ officials even have the word "Public" in their name. They are our servants and they should have to listen to what we have to say, even if they don't want to listen.
Are you on crack? Following that logic, any of us should be able to walk into the president's bedroom at 3am and demand a full accounting of his knowledge of (insert scandalous event here). While I'm all for raking politicians over the coals, there's no rational justification for that sort of behavior. The word "public" being in the name of their general job category doesn't grant us some special right to control their lives.
Free Speach Zones are the most troubling to me. A razor wire enclosure that holds maybe a 1000 people at a time that you have to enter to protest anywhere the president is at the time. Typically a 1/4 mile away behind the dumpsters and the uninals.
I'm with you there.
If you attempt to stand with an anti bush sign along the parade route, even with hundreds of other people around you with signs at the same time, you will be singled out and arrested if you do not remove yourself and your sign.
They did the same thing when the DNC was in town here. Yep, it's a crock of shit.
1> Laura Bush, despite her obvious intellectual superiority to her husband, isn't the president.
Duly noted, but largely immaterial to the point.
2> It's hardly common to be arrested for heckling someone at a campaign speech.
No, but if you shout loudly enough and upset the sheeple in the audience, it will happen. Campaign events aren't public forums. They're travelling commercials held as private, invitation only events. There is plenty of free speech on the sidewalk, but there is no free speech in there. Calling it denial of rights is as asinine as demanding rebuttal time at the end of every Viagra commercial on TV because you don't think erections should come in pill form. It's their dime, so it's their show.
You can't refuse to leave a private event because you want to shout at the featured speaker, ticket or not.
Four words for you:
Protect Our Civil Liberties
That's more like it, but unfortunately it was still a (two words for you) private event. It's perfectly within their rights to throw people out that don't conform to their particular happy-happy joy-joy theme. Those teachers were perfectly free to stand outside with their T-shirts and even wave signs and talk to news crews. Campaign events aren't public forums. They're travelling road shows designed to advertise a certain product. You can no more demand the opportunity to air your opposing viewpoint there than you can demand to sell your own wares in someone else's store. It's basic property rights. It's not that hard.
Where can I read more about this DHS abuse of which you speak?
google?
Nope. That's the first thing I tried. If you'd tried it yourself, you'd have found the same thing I did: 3 Delay aides under indictment for campaign funding shenanigans, and little else.
Sounds like the usual craziness that goes on in Texas. Figures they'd have a law allowing state law enforcement to drag back legislators who don't show up when there's no quorum. As for the DHS angle, all I saw was this:
"One federal agency that became involved early on was the Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center, based in Riverside, Calif. -- which now falls under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department.
The agency received a call to locate a specific Piper turboprop aircraft. It was determined that the plane belonged to former House Speaker Pete Laney, D-Hale Center.
The location of Laney's plane proved to be a key piece of information because, Craddick said, it's how he determined that the Democrats were in Ardmore."
No mention of Delay, nor indictment, nor that Texas officials were overstepping authority in consulting them. In fact, the only mention of Delay in the entire article was a reference to him being quoted as saying that the Texas House Speaker had asked for FBI and/or US Marshals help in picking up the truant legislators. The Speaker later denied that he had asked that. But even if he had, the point (as the article says) is moot:
"Jorge Martinez, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said the matter "falls squarely within the purview of state authority, and it would not warrant investigation by federal authorities."
I'm not sure how you read into the article that this was abuse of the DHS, that Delay played any substantial role in the matter, or that there is an indictment. Seems to me like just a bunch of crazy Texas politicians chasing around another bunch of crazy Texas politicians and everyone else saying "yep, they're allowed to do that: it's Texas law!"
Tom Delay, (R-TX), is under indictment in Texas for abusing his power as leader of the majority in the House of Representatives (ie, a powerful man) to sic Homeland Security on a group of Democrats state assemblymembers as part of a bitter redistricting battle.
When did this happen? From what I've seen so far it was only 3 aides of his under indictment and Delay himself under investigation; and not for using DHS, but for shenanigans related to TRMPAC contributions. Where can I read more about this DHS abuse of which you speak?
How about getting arrested for wearing a T-shirt in public? That's not silly, it's scary. And that's the point of arresting people, to scare them. We call that terrorism, whether the terror is political intimidation by threat of bombs or arbitrary arrest.
It wasn't the T-shirt, it was the interrupting of the president's speech. From the CBS News article: "she said she had a ticket and asked why she was being arrested. She was told by police she had entered a private event and had refused to leave... Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released."
You can't refuse to leave a private event because you want to shout at the featured speaker, ticket or not. You may stand outside and shout all you want. You may even wear a "Bush killed my son" shirt. You can apparently even wear such a shirt inside such a private event, so long as you're not stupid enough to try to shout down the freakin' president.
Simple, write legislation to ban pornographic sites unless they're in.xxx.
Uh huh. In what country are you going to pass this legislation?
If they don't comply then sue them or bring them up on criminal charges like child endangerment.
Ignoring the fact that porn sites don't lurk outside schoolyards waiting for the bell to ring so they can disgorge bestiality and BDSM pics at the feet of schoolchildren and really shouldn't bear the burden of protecting everyone else's children from (cough)parents responsibility(cough), how do you propose the government of a country that has criminalized non-.xxx porn sites prosecute the unknown operators of a web site in (for example) the Cayman Islands?
They're clearly just doing this to be assholes and try to further put control on what people can record and keep even though the material in question, along with their profits, is completely irrelevant.
Or, more likely, they're doing it to stave off possible legal challenges from the purveyors of PPV movies and NFL football. Said purveyors may have already made an issue of it behind the scenes.
No, immigrate is better. They're both usable, but the context leans more towards "immigrate". The difference is subtle: Emigrate means to leave one's home country for another, emphasis on the country being left; Immigrate means to move to a different country where one is not a native, emphasis on the destination country. Since his statement specifies a destination and makes no particular statement about country of origin, immigrate is more appropriate.
The point of each story was to show how the robots used the three rules to accomplish the goals in different ways. One believed it was worshipping God, but got the job done.
God forbid (pardon the pun!) that they should ever have to get those robot-church zealots to change the way they do things! The usefulness of those robots is severly lessened because they cannot by "reprogrammed" for a new task.
Another was simply overloaded so his task load was to be simpified.
The 3 laws put an additional burden on the human masters by forcing them to devise special orders in order to satisfy the robot's need to follow the laws. It would've been safer to have a robot that just does as it's told.
Yet another just couldnt make a sound decision, not due to the 3 laws but in my opinion due to poor programming as the robot did not learn and ended up going crazy due to it.
Which one, the mind reading robot? In that case, the programming was fine. It was the intersection of the programmed orders with the 3 laws that caused trouble. The robot's programmed purpose was viciously monkey-wrenched by an irrational adherence to the 3 laws, essentially rendering it useless. If the application doesn't work because of something, that something isn't a feature, it's a BUG.
The final story shows that when the 3 laws are used to their fullest the robots end up being the ultimate slaves by ruling over us all so we can be happy.
Ugh. That's not my idea of a happy ending.
But you know this since you read the book.
We read the same book, but we sure got different things out of it. What I saw was an illustration of how Rules are not a suitable replacement for Ethics, Reason, and Responsibility. Robots who simply follow orders given by ethical, reasonable, and responsible human masters are far less dangerous and more useful than robots who follow the 3 laws. It's meant to show how it's better to instill ethics and responsibility in people by educating them, rather than posting a list of Laws and using the threat of punishment to make them obey. The former enriches all, while the latter is a road to nowhere.
Nearly every chapter in the book was its own little story about how yet another robot goes haywire because of its slavish adherence to the three laws.
The reason why they went haywire is because the laws worked. They were ment to cease if they were to disobey any of the laws.
But the problem with the laws is that frequently they require more information than the robots had in order to properly obey them. For example, when they sent the speedy robot out to get selenium it got stuck in an oscillating condition where one law would overpower another and vice-versa because the robot overrated the danger to itself and did not fully comprehend the danger to its human masters. It would be better to have a robot that just gets the damn selenium because it's been told to rather than have to remember beforehand to tell the robot how important it is to the humans' survival to complete the mission. The laws are a nice philosophical idea, but engineering-wise they're an accident waiting to happen. The whole book is about the pitfalls of unintended consequences.
Gee gods, don't have to worry about terrain and collisions and such when flying?
Calm down. He means that dealing with a hill when flying is a simple matter of gaining altitude. Figuring out if passing over a hill is possible when you have wheels requires some pretty serious hill-analysis.
I know, and I was going to buy a Roomba, too. Now I guess I'll just have to use an ordinary vacuum for a while longer. Oh well, I guess the exercise is good for me....
Just so you know, iRobot was making robots for the military long before it came up with the Roomba. URBIE, the testbed that eventually led to the PackBot, was built under a DARPA grant in '97, fivr years before Roomba. If you're going to avoid a company for doing business with the military, you need to research more thoroughly. Otherwise, it's just posturing.
Asimov will twist and turn in his grave, what about the Laws of Robotics?!
BattleBot and Robot.. they don't mix!
What the hell are you talking about? If you'd actually read the book "I, Robot" you'd understand Asimov's point with the so-called "laws of robotics". They were a not meant to be taken seriously. Nearly every chapter in the book was its own little story about how yet another robot goes haywire because of its slavish adherence to the three laws. He wasn't trying to present his laws as the end-all be-all of robotic ethics. On the contrary, he was showing the folly of depending on something as simplistic as the three laws. People need to quit parroting something they heard third hand and actually read from the source.
In fact I think that those soldiers who need a lot of shouting should be kicked out. They are the kind of soldiers that cause vietnam. Totally lacking in any self-discipline. Wich soldier would you rather have beside you. Someone with self-discipline or someone who needs shouting and punishment to do anything?
The shouting and punishment isn't to make them do the job, it's to encourage them to quit or get squared away. These aren't conscripts anymore. They can leave any time they want during basic training, no questions asked, no black mark on their record. The high stress environment is necessary to weed out those that can't handle the stress of combat. The military ain't nuthin' like it was in the bad ol' days of vietnam. It attracts a lot more "softies" than it used to, and there has to be a way to get rid of the softest of them. There are no "stress cards" under fire, and if bad language upsets one of those guys, I'd hate to see how they'd handle seeing their friends blown up when their hummer rolls over a mine. Basic training is ALL ABOUT stress-- it teaches you to handle it, and sends you home if you can't. And really, basic is NOTHING compared to REAL combat training. There's no reason for it to be even easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, funny - Slashdot these days seems to block more content than it allows for.
That's what you get for trying to present the figures in an easy to read tabular format. What you should have done is what everyone else does: scatter them throughout a long sputtering diatribe full of misspellings, typos, and bad punctuation; being sure to call everyone else fucktard and asswipe; and ending with a few choice links simply cut-n'-pasted into the body of the message without an [A HREF=] tag so they are not only unclickable, but unpasteable because the "no long lines" filter has put a space in them.
Seems to me the lameness filter is more of a lameness ensurer.
Well, since the American Bar Association is as much a government regulatory body as the American Automobile Association, the answer to "how well" is "only well enough to keep the government from actually regulating us". The ABA is a professional association of lawysers run by lawyers and really has no business being the regulatory body in charge of lawyer certification.
What press reports? I can't find anything that describes it a publicly funded. Everything I've seen so far describes it as being run by the Bush-Cheney Campaign (private, funded by donations) and local Republican parties. The only publicly funded aspects I've seen were the Secret Service bodyguard for the first lady.
No it's not. What gives you that idea? The only thing it's impossible for a public official to do is claim certain privacy rights, e.g. photographers don't have to ask their permission to publish photos of them in certain circumstances where, were they private citizens, they'd have to obtain a release. I don't know where you get the idea that every event a public official attends somehow becomes a public event just because they are there! Private property remains private no matter who happens to be standing on it.
_Public_ officials even have the word "Public" in their name. They are our servants and they should have to listen to what we have to say, even if they don't want to listen.
Are you on crack? Following that logic, any of us should be able to walk into the president's bedroom at 3am and demand a full accounting of his knowledge of (insert scandalous event here). While I'm all for raking politicians over the coals, there's no rational justification for that sort of behavior. The word "public" being in the name of their general job category doesn't grant us some special right to control their lives.
Free Speach Zones are the most troubling to me. A razor wire enclosure that holds maybe a 1000 people at a time that you have to enter to protest anywhere the president is at the time. Typically a 1/4 mile away behind the dumpsters and the uninals.
I'm with you there.
If you attempt to stand with an anti bush sign along the parade route, even with hundreds of other people around you with signs at the same time, you will be singled out and arrested if you do not remove yourself and your sign.
They did the same thing when the DNC was in town here. Yep, it's a crock of shit.
Duly noted, but largely immaterial to the point.
2> It's hardly common to be arrested for heckling someone at a campaign speech.
No, but if you shout loudly enough and upset the sheeple in the audience, it will happen. Campaign events aren't public forums. They're travelling commercials held as private, invitation only events. There is plenty of free speech on the sidewalk, but there is no free speech in there. Calling it denial of rights is as asinine as demanding rebuttal time at the end of every Viagra commercial on TV because you don't think erections should come in pill form. It's their dime, so it's their show.
Four words for you:
Protect Our Civil Liberties
That's more like it, but unfortunately it was still a (two words for you) private event. It's perfectly within their rights to throw people out that don't conform to their particular happy-happy joy-joy theme. Those teachers were perfectly free to stand outside with their T-shirts and even wave signs and talk to news crews. Campaign events aren't public forums. They're travelling road shows designed to advertise a certain product. You can no more demand the opportunity to air your opposing viewpoint there than you can demand to sell your own wares in someone else's store. It's basic property rights. It's not that hard.
google?
Nope. That's the first thing I tried. If you'd tried it yourself, you'd have found the same thing I did: 3 Delay aides under indictment for campaign funding shenanigans, and little else.
"One federal agency that became involved early on was the Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center, based in Riverside, Calif. -- which now falls under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department. The agency received a call to locate a specific Piper turboprop aircraft. It was determined that the plane belonged to former House Speaker Pete Laney, D-Hale Center. The location of Laney's plane proved to be a key piece of information because, Craddick said, it's how he determined that the Democrats were in Ardmore."
No mention of Delay, nor indictment, nor that Texas officials were overstepping authority in consulting them. In fact, the only mention of Delay in the entire article was a reference to him being quoted as saying that the Texas House Speaker had asked for FBI and/or US Marshals help in picking up the truant legislators. The Speaker later denied that he had asked that. But even if he had, the point (as the article says) is moot:
"Jorge Martinez, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said the matter "falls squarely within the purview of state authority, and it would not warrant investigation by federal authorities."
I'm not sure how you read into the article that this was abuse of the DHS, that Delay played any substantial role in the matter, or that there is an indictment. Seems to me like just a bunch of crazy Texas politicians chasing around another bunch of crazy Texas politicians and everyone else saying "yep, they're allowed to do that: it's Texas law!"
Now all we need is an illogical diatribe about copywrites.
When did this happen? From what I've seen so far it was only 3 aides of his under indictment and Delay himself under investigation; and not for using DHS, but for shenanigans related to TRMPAC contributions. Where can I read more about this DHS abuse of which you speak?
Please substitute "president's wife" for "president" above. Point still stands.
It wasn't the T-shirt, it was the interrupting of the president's speech. From the CBS News article: "she said she had a ticket and asked why she was being arrested. She was told by police she had entered a private event and had refused to leave... Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released."
You can't refuse to leave a private event because you want to shout at the featured speaker, ticket or not. You may stand outside and shout all you want. You may even wear a "Bush killed my son" shirt. You can apparently even wear such a shirt inside such a private event, so long as you're not stupid enough to try to shout down the freakin' president.
Uh huh. In what country are you going to pass this legislation?
If they don't comply then sue them or bring them up on criminal charges like child endangerment.
Ignoring the fact that porn sites don't lurk outside schoolyards waiting for the bell to ring so they can disgorge bestiality and BDSM pics at the feet of schoolchildren and really shouldn't bear the burden of protecting everyone else's children from (cough)parents responsibility(cough), how do you propose the government of a country that has criminalized non-.xxx porn sites prosecute the unknown operators of a web site in (for example) the Cayman Islands?
More stupid rules are not the answer.
Why? Were you planning on building a huge library of PPV movies and blacked out NFL games?
Or, more likely, they're doing it to stave off possible legal challenges from the purveyors of PPV movies and NFL football. Said purveyors may have already made an issue of it behind the scenes.
No, immigrate is better. They're both usable, but the context leans more towards "immigrate". The difference is subtle: Emigrate means to leave one's home country for another, emphasis on the country being left; Immigrate means to move to a different country where one is not a native, emphasis on the destination country. Since his statement specifies a destination and makes no particular statement about country of origin, immigrate is more appropriate.
God forbid (pardon the pun!) that they should ever have to get those robot-church zealots to change the way they do things! The usefulness of those robots is severly lessened because they cannot by "reprogrammed" for a new task. Another was simply overloaded so his task load was to be simpified.
The 3 laws put an additional burden on the human masters by forcing them to devise special orders in order to satisfy the robot's need to follow the laws. It would've been safer to have a robot that just does as it's told.
Yet another just couldnt make a sound decision, not due to the 3 laws but in my opinion due to poor programming as the robot did not learn and ended up going crazy due to it.
Which one, the mind reading robot? In that case, the programming was fine. It was the intersection of the programmed orders with the 3 laws that caused trouble. The robot's programmed purpose was viciously monkey-wrenched by an irrational adherence to the 3 laws, essentially rendering it useless. If the application doesn't work because of something, that something isn't a feature, it's a BUG.
The final story shows that when the 3 laws are used to their fullest the robots end up being the ultimate slaves by ruling over us all so we can be happy.
Ugh. That's not my idea of a happy ending.
But you know this since you read the book.
We read the same book, but we sure got different things out of it. What I saw was an illustration of how Rules are not a suitable replacement for Ethics, Reason, and Responsibility. Robots who simply follow orders given by ethical, reasonable, and responsible human masters are far less dangerous and more useful than robots who follow the 3 laws. It's meant to show how it's better to instill ethics and responsibility in people by educating them, rather than posting a list of Laws and using the threat of punishment to make them obey. The former enriches all, while the latter is a road to nowhere.
The reason why they went haywire is because the laws worked. They were ment to cease if they were to disobey any of the laws.
But the problem with the laws is that frequently they require more information than the robots had in order to properly obey them. For example, when they sent the speedy robot out to get selenium it got stuck in an oscillating condition where one law would overpower another and vice-versa because the robot overrated the danger to itself and did not fully comprehend the danger to its human masters. It would be better to have a robot that just gets the damn selenium because it's been told to rather than have to remember beforehand to tell the robot how important it is to the humans' survival to complete the mission. The laws are a nice philosophical idea, but engineering-wise they're an accident waiting to happen. The whole book is about the pitfalls of unintended consequences.
Calm down. He means that dealing with a hill when flying is a simple matter of gaining altitude. Figuring out if passing over a hill is possible when you have wheels requires some pretty serious hill-analysis.
Just so you know, iRobot was making robots for the military long before it came up with the Roomba. URBIE, the testbed that eventually led to the PackBot, was built under a DARPA grant in '97, fivr years before Roomba. If you're going to avoid a company for doing business with the military, you need to research more thoroughly. Otherwise, it's just posturing.
BattleBot and Robot.. they don't mix!
What the hell are you talking about? If you'd actually read the book "I, Robot" you'd understand Asimov's point with the so-called "laws of robotics". They were a not meant to be taken seriously. Nearly every chapter in the book was its own little story about how yet another robot goes haywire because of its slavish adherence to the three laws. He wasn't trying to present his laws as the end-all be-all of robotic ethics. On the contrary, he was showing the folly of depending on something as simplistic as the three laws. People need to quit parroting something they heard third hand and actually read from the source.
FY04 goal was initially set at 71,400 and then increased to 77,000. So no, it wasn't reduced because of stop-loss.
You sound just like the Iraqi information minister!
Except that he's telling the truth
Link, please?
http://www.usarec.army.mil/hq/apa/goals.htm
The shouting and punishment isn't to make them do the job, it's to encourage them to quit or get squared away. These aren't conscripts anymore. They can leave any time they want during basic training, no questions asked, no black mark on their record. The high stress environment is necessary to weed out those that can't handle the stress of combat. The military ain't nuthin' like it was in the bad ol' days of vietnam. It attracts a lot more "softies" than it used to, and there has to be a way to get rid of the softest of them. There are no "stress cards" under fire, and if bad language upsets one of those guys, I'd hate to see how they'd handle seeing their friends blown up when their hummer rolls over a mine. Basic training is ALL ABOUT stress-- it teaches you to handle it, and sends you home if you can't. And really, basic is NOTHING compared to REAL combat training. There's no reason for it to be even easier.