Because Google is offering an equivalent of a good that costs a lot for news services to provide, and which drives a lot of their business.
The way that people use a comprehensive news service like a newspaper, or CNN's web site, is something like this - they skim the headlines to get an idea of what the big stories are, and then they read the one or two articles that look particularly interesting. So there are two distinct types of good here - (1) the overview provided by the "front page" and (2) the details provided by the individual articles. You are right that Google is not significantly taking or replacing the second type of good. But they are replacing the first good, and given the way that consumption of the first good drives consumption of the second type of good, that is a real problem for comprehensive news services.
If the Google approach to news aggregation catches on then comprehensive news services will lose their advantage over more specialised services, and die out.
Subtracting the spin put on this by alternet, what exactly is so bad about this memo? Ashcroft told federal officials that they should consider privacy rights when dealing with FOIA requests, and "even more disturbingly" that they should make sure their decisions have a sound legal basis.
Sure. Here is a CNN article on the shortfalls in the 1990s. Here are some articles on recruiting for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
The concerns about recruiting and reenlistment have all been based on opinion polls that predicted that shortfalls would arise. So far there is no sign of those shortfalls actually arising. I guess the polls are not reliable predictors of what people will actually do.
As for the stop-loss orders, this is reasonably informative. The orders only apply to units that are deployed, so they make no difference to the task of meeting yearly recruitment and reenlistment goals.
(1) Every branch of the military is meeting or exceeding recruitment and re-enlistment goals (unlike in the 1990s). (2) The all volunteer military used to be twice the size it is now (prior to cuts at the end of the cold war), so there is every reason to think that the military could double in size without a draft. (3) The politicians warning of a return of the draft are in fact the sponsors of the bills that would bring back the draft. In other words the *only* people showing an interest in the draft are opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (4) And (3) is no surprise because most of the opposition to the Vietnam war was really opposition to the draft. The last thing that the Bush administration wants is to bring back the draft.
Opponents of these wars think that if the draft is brought back then opposition to the wars will grow. Which in turn is why the Bush administration has no interest in the draft whatsoever. In fact Donald Rumsfeld resisted an expansion of the military by a mere 30,000 volunteer troops. The idea that he would want to expand the military with hundreds of thousands of conscripts is nonsense.
What always strikes me as interesting about this topic is that people find it so "interesting" - as though there is something surprising or inconsistent about it. In fact most conservatives are quite explicit about the fact that male homosexuality is worse than female homosexuality.
Religious conservatives take this view because of the bible. Setting asside the question of whether the bible really condemns male homsexuality (there are good reasons to think that it does not). The bible certainly appears to condemn male homosexuality in some places, but never says anything that even appears to condemn female homosexuality.
Political conservatives tend to take this view because of their understanding of why marriage is good for society. Roughly speaking they think that the influence of women through marriage has a civilizing effect on men. So it is a bad thing if men don't get married to women - they remain uncivilized (more prone to promiscuity and violence). If women don't get married it just doesn't matter as much because they are already civilized in the relevant sense (i.e. inclined to monogamy and a peaceful life). The only downside is that they will not be able to exert their influence on men.
I'm an athiest so I don't buy the religious argument, and I am a libertarian so I don't buy the political argument. But at least I know what the arguments are. The fact that so many liberals are surprised to find that conservatives take different lines on male and female homosexuality indicates that most of them don't even know what the conservative arguments are.
I'm not a conservative, but I do know what their response would be.
(1) These are primarily books that have been banned (actually the numbers are based on complaints received not the number of successful complaints) from school libraries, or childrens books that have been banned from public libraries. From the ALA web-site:
Seventy-one percent of the challenges were to material in schools or school libraries.2 Another twenty-four percent were to material in public libraries (down two percent since 1999). Sixty percent of the challenges were brought by parents, fifteen percent by patrons, and nine percent by administrators, both down one percent since 1999).
In otherwords this is mostly a matter of what kids get to read, not a matter of what adults get to read.
(2) Schools and public libraries are mostly government institutions, and what conservatives object to is the government deciding how and what their children will learn about issues like sex, religion, drugs, and so on. In short they would like the freedom to raise their children without interference from the government.
The liberal response is that children should not be subject to the control of their parents in this way. If you think one side or the other is obviously right, or obviously more interested in freedom then you need to think about the issue more carefully. The fundamental problem is that children can not be free because they are naturally subject to the influence of others. Hence the dispute over who gets to do the influencing.
Don't do business in France (sure), and don't travel to France (even better), or anywhere in the EU (hmm, not so good), or anywhere that has an extradition treaty with France and no equivalent of the first ammendment (what's that - about half the world?).
No problem as long as you don't plan to leave the US.
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border...
It's not. The people who copy textbooks in Mexico might not be breaking any Mexican laws, but the people who bring those unauthorized copies into the US certainly are breaking US law.
Circumvention might be a different matter though. Under US law you are entitled to make backups, but you are not entitled to circumvent copy protection. If the cicumvention takes place in another country, but you are entitled to own the resulting copy, then I think that would be all legal.
Another situation where this might make a difference is in fair use of textbooks. You are generally allowed to copy as much as a chapter of a book, but you have to make the copy yourself. If someone else, like a copy shop makes it for you then you have to pay licensing fees. Again, if you are entitled to have a copy, and the copying takes place outside the US, you might be all legal. Mexican copy shops might be able to get in on a lucrative mail-order coursepack business.
Those all sound like good ideas to me, but I think that a name check would still make the system a little more secure.
I can think of one reasonably easy way to improve on the current system. Keep the name-based blacklist but add a whitelist that uses more detailed information. For example, when your blacklist picks someone out you do a thorough background check and, if the person checks out, you add him to the whitelist with some added identifier like a drivers license number.
That would only be slighly more complicated than the current system, and no more intrusive, but it would greaterly reduce the inconvenience for the innocent.
With any security system, including the limiting case of no security system at all, it is easy to point out problems. What is hard is to come up with something better. And, to put it bluntly, it does not matter even slightly if a given system suffers from obvious and huge problems if it is still the best system anyone has come up with.
So what are the alternatives to a watch-list or no-fly list that uses names? We could have no identity check, so even if someone called Osama bin Laden shows up for a flight he gets waved through with all the rest. Sound good? We could have a list that uses universal unique ID's. Sound good? We could try to mash together a database that combines all the various existing forms of ID, like passports, drivers licenses, birth certificates, etc. Of course that would be more expensive, more intrusive, and only slightly harder to fool. Sound good?
Whose country? The landmines are in South Korea, with the permission of the South Korean government. I would have thought that was obvious. How could the US put landmines in North Korea?
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty...
No. The reason is that the US uses landmines to defend the border between North Korea and South Korea. Its easy for those 152 countries to claim that landmines are unecessary when they don't have 30,000 men and women standing in the way of 1,000,000 mental communists.
I suspect this is a negotiation move. MS complains to third world nation: "Do something about all the rampant piracy." Third world nation replies: "No one here can afford your software anyway, so the piracy is not cutting into your market." MS replies: "Now they can afford the starter/crippleware version, so it is cutting into our market."
I happened to mention that I think that all religions are equal, atleast at a higher level (as in if you ignore the minor details like forms of worship, etc) and that I think that they were created with a common goal of imposing "morality" and the "good" way of life back when law and order were difficult to maintain.
I agree with this view of religion. However I also see why no real Christian or Muslim would accept it. According to this view religion can be useful but it can not be true. Once you start thinking of religion as merely a useful way of organizing society you can not go back to believing that Christ was God in human form and that He died so that His blood could wash away your sin. Sure, you can still think of it as a metaphor for something or other, but you can't believe that it is literally true.
If everyone took your view of religion then yes, the world would be a more peaceful place, but it would also be a place where religion had lost 99.9% of its meaning.
Anyway, the point which I had wanted to make is that there are a *surprisingly* large number of people who refuse to believe that the best service to their religion that they can probably do is to increase tolerance towards other religions rather than denounce them and try to proselytize the masses under the guise of "saving them".
If you read the early proponents of toleration (like say John Locke) you find that what they had in mind had nothing to do with accepting that the beliefs of others are just as good, or that all ways to God are equal, or refraining from proselytizing. What they wanted to argue for was the peaceful promotion of religion. Toleration meant spreading your religious views by persuasion rather than force. Condemning other religions was just fine. Killing the adherents of other religions was not.
What you were arguing for is really agnosticism rather than toleration.
Yes, I just watched a Cacodemon and a Z-Sec (zombie Marine) fight to the death. But so far I have seen very few instances where making use of this would be worth the effort.
I'll tell you what is illegal in most democracies: having methods of voting that can't reliably be recounted - or counted it the first place.
That's not illegal. It's just unusual. If people think the method of voting is defective they usually complain about it before the election rather than after the election, when it doesn't go their way. Also, in most countries, if the courts decide that the method of voting failed often enough to cast the result of the election into doubt, then the prefered remedy is to order a new elections. That way they avoid any acusations of the courts determining the outcome (which would have happened in Florida no matter which way the courts had decided).
IOW if all the votes all over Florida had been counted correctly, Gore might have won. Good thing nobody ever expected that to happen.
No. Your use of "correctly" is unjustified. One of the points in contention was precisely what would constitute counting the votes "correctly". Counting under-votes or over-votes meant counting votes that were defective, engaging in a certain amount of speculation about voter intention, and modifying the rules of the election after the fact. None of those is obviously correct. In fact all are strictly illegal in most democracies.
Re:Not about our right to privacy
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My understanding of it was that after all the recounts, it was Gore that won.
No he didn't. There were various ways in which the Florida votes might have been recounted. Limited number of counties, vs. all counties, and under-votes only vs. under-votes and over-votes. On most of the scenarios Bush would have won (including all of the scenarios that had been proposed in court). On one scenario Gore might have won if the counting had gone his way (and this was a scenario that was not proposed in court). Details are here.
Democrat Al Gore likely would have narrowly lost last year's presidential election even if he had gained the partial recounts of Florida's uncounted ballots that he sought, a national news media consortium's review of the ballots has found.
But Gore might have eked out a win if a complete state recount of both undervotes and overvotes had been carried out, the review concluded.
Funny, I thought the constitution strictly forbids ex post facto laws...
It is unconstitutional to pass a law that makes a particular action illegal after the action was performed. So, if a copyright expires, and you copy the covered work, and then a law is passed that "restores" the copyright then you can't be sued for infringement under the law (because the law was passed after you did the copying) but anyone who later copies the work can be sued for infringement.
A trade war between the US and the EU is almost certain *not* to come. Both sides have far too much to lose from a trade war. What's more their global trade interests are almost identical. Both have extensive farm subsidies and want to keep them, both are major intellectual property producers and favour strong IP laws, both depend heavily on imported oil.
A trade war is about as likely as the US invading France again. Fun to joke about yes, but still obviously just a joke.
You probably should read the proposed EU constitution and then reconsider your views. It concerns far more than economic matters.
And even if this new constitution did concern merely economic matters there are two points you ought to consider: (1) A huge share of Federal legislation in the US is enacted under the commerce clause. (2) One of the most important lessons learned from political developments in the 20th century was that economic freedom and political freedom are inseparable.
I know this will come as a surprise to most people but the US has fewer restrictions on the content of what can be published, broadcast, or otherwise communicated than almost any country in the world. Certainly far fewer than any other industrialized nation.
You can be prosecuted in Canada for quoting the wrong parts of the bible in print. In Germany you can get prison time for singing pro-Nazi songs anywhere. In the UK you can be fined for making racist comments. In fact racist speech is illegal in most of the "free" world.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why the sites would complain.
Because Google is offering an equivalent of a good that costs a lot for news services to provide, and which drives a lot of their business.
The way that people use a comprehensive news service like a newspaper, or CNN's web site, is something like this - they skim the headlines to get an idea of what the big stories are, and then they read the one or two articles that look particularly interesting. So there are two distinct types of good here - (1) the overview provided by the "front page" and (2) the details provided by the individual articles. You are right that Google is not significantly taking or replacing the second type of good. But they are replacing the first good, and given the way that consumption of the first good drives consumption of the second type of good, that is a real problem for comprehensive news services.
If the Google approach to news aggregation catches on then comprehensive news services will lose their advantage over more specialised services, and die out.
Subtracting the spin put on this by alternet, what exactly is so bad about this memo? Ashcroft told federal officials that they should consider privacy rights when dealing with FOIA requests, and "even more disturbingly" that they should make sure their decisions have a sound legal basis.
Shocking. Not.
Sure. Here is a CNN article on the shortfalls in the 1990s. Here are some articles on recruiting for 2002, 2003 and 2004.
The concerns about recruiting and reenlistment have all been based on opinion polls that predicted that shortfalls would arise. So far there is no sign of those shortfalls actually arising. I guess the polls are not reliable predictors of what people will actually do.
As for the stop-loss orders, this is reasonably informative. The orders only apply to units that are deployed, so they make no difference to the task of meeting yearly recruitment and reenlistment goals.
It is worth noting several things:
(1) Every branch of the military is meeting or exceeding recruitment and re-enlistment goals (unlike in the 1990s).
(2) The all volunteer military used to be twice the size it is now (prior to cuts at the end of the cold war), so there is every reason to think that the military could double in size without a draft.
(3) The politicians warning of a return of the draft are in fact the sponsors of the bills that would bring back the draft. In other words the *only* people showing an interest in the draft are opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(4) And (3) is no surprise because most of the opposition to the Vietnam war was really opposition to the draft. The last thing that the Bush administration wants is to bring back the draft.
Opponents of these wars think that if the draft is brought back then opposition to the wars will grow. Which in turn is why the Bush administration has no interest in the draft whatsoever. In fact Donald Rumsfeld resisted an expansion of the military by a mere 30,000 volunteer troops. The idea that he would want to expand the military with hundreds of thousands of conscripts is nonsense.
What always strikes me as interesting about this topic is that people find it so "interesting" - as though there is something surprising or inconsistent about it. In fact most conservatives are quite explicit about the fact that male homosexuality is worse than female homosexuality.
Religious conservatives take this view because of the bible. Setting asside the question of whether the bible really condemns male homsexuality (there are good reasons to think that it does not). The bible certainly appears to condemn male homosexuality in some places, but never says anything that even appears to condemn female homosexuality.
Political conservatives tend to take this view because of their understanding of why marriage is good for society. Roughly speaking they think that the influence of women through marriage has a civilizing effect on men. So it is a bad thing if men don't get married to women - they remain uncivilized (more prone to promiscuity and violence). If women don't get married it just doesn't matter as much because they are already civilized in the relevant sense (i.e. inclined to monogamy and a peaceful life). The only downside is that they will not be able to exert their influence on men.
I'm an athiest so I don't buy the religious argument, and I am a libertarian so I don't buy the political argument. But at least I know what the arguments are. The fact that so many liberals are surprised to find that conservatives take different lines on male and female homosexuality indicates that most of them don't even know what the conservative arguments are.
(1) These are primarily books that have been banned (actually the numbers are based on complaints received not the number of successful complaints) from school libraries, or childrens books that have been banned from public libraries. From the ALA web-site:
In otherwords this is mostly a matter of what kids get to read, not a matter of what adults get to read.
(2) Schools and public libraries are mostly government institutions, and what conservatives object to is the government deciding how and what their children will learn about issues like sex, religion, drugs, and so on. In short they would like the freedom to raise their children without interference from the government.
The liberal response is that children should not be subject to the control of their parents in this way. If you think one side or the other is obviously right, or obviously more interested in freedom then you need to think about the issue more carefully. The fundamental problem is that children can not be free because they are naturally subject to the influence of others. Hence the dispute over who gets to do the influencing.
Don't do business in France (sure), and don't travel to France (even better), or anywhere in the EU (hmm, not so good), or anywhere that has an extradition treaty with France and no equivalent of the first ammendment (what's that - about half the world?).
No problem as long as you don't plan to leave the US.
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border...
It's not. The people who copy textbooks in Mexico might not be breaking any Mexican laws, but the people who bring those unauthorized copies into the US certainly are breaking US law.
Circumvention might be a different matter though. Under US law you are entitled to make backups, but you are not entitled to circumvent copy protection. If the cicumvention takes place in another country, but you are entitled to own the resulting copy, then I think that would be all legal.
Another situation where this might make a difference is in fair use of textbooks. You are generally allowed to copy as much as a chapter of a book, but you have to make the copy yourself. If someone else, like a copy shop makes it for you then you have to pay licensing fees. Again, if you are entitled to have a copy, and the copying takes place outside the US, you might be all legal. Mexican copy shops might be able to get in on a lucrative mail-order coursepack business.
I kinda like the Borg icon, but the screwed up American flag always bugs me.
Each release should be supported for about 1.5 years, and possibly longer. Is that such a short time for non-production systems?
Those all sound like good ideas to me, but I think that a name check would still make the system a little more secure.
I can think of one reasonably easy way to improve on the current system. Keep the name-based blacklist but add a whitelist that uses more detailed information. For example, when your blacklist picks someone out you do a thorough background check and, if the person checks out, you add him to the whitelist with some added identifier like a drivers license number.
That would only be slighly more complicated than the current system, and no more intrusive, but it would greaterly reduce the inconvenience for the innocent.
With any security system, including the limiting case of no security system at all, it is easy to point out problems. What is hard is to come up with something better. And, to put it bluntly, it does not matter even slightly if a given system suffers from obvious and huge problems if it is still the best system anyone has come up with.
So what are the alternatives to a watch-list or no-fly list that uses names? We could have no identity check, so even if someone called Osama bin Laden shows up for a flight he gets waved through with all the rest. Sound good? We could have a list that uses universal unique ID's. Sound good? We could try to mash together a database that combines all the various existing forms of ID, like passports, drivers licenses, birth certificates, etc. Of course that would be more expensive, more intrusive, and only slightly harder to fool. Sound good?
Feel free to suggest your own scheme.
Whose country? The landmines are in South Korea, with the permission of the South Korean government. I would have thought that was obvious. How could the US put landmines in North Korea?
Perhaps that's part of why the US _isn't_ one of the 152 countries that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty...
No. The reason is that the US uses landmines to defend the border between North Korea and South Korea. Its easy for those 152 countries to claim that landmines are unecessary when they don't have 30,000 men and women standing in the way of 1,000,000 mental communists.
I suspect this is a negotiation move. MS complains to third world nation: "Do something about all the rampant piracy." Third world nation replies: "No one here can afford your software anyway, so the piracy is not cutting into your market." MS replies: "Now they can afford the starter/crippleware version, so it is cutting into our market."
I agree with this view of religion. However I also see why no real Christian or Muslim would accept it. According to this view religion can be useful but it can not be true. Once you start thinking of religion as merely a useful way of organizing society you can not go back to believing that Christ was God in human form and that He died so that His blood could wash away your sin. Sure, you can still think of it as a metaphor for something or other, but you can't believe that it is literally true.
If everyone took your view of religion then yes, the world would be a more peaceful place, but it would also be a place where religion had lost 99.9% of its meaning.
If you read the early proponents of toleration (like say John Locke) you find that what they had in mind had nothing to do with accepting that the beliefs of others are just as good, or that all ways to God are equal, or refraining from proselytizing. What they wanted to argue for was the peaceful promotion of religion. Toleration meant spreading your religious views by persuasion rather than force. Condemning other religions was just fine. Killing the adherents of other religions was not.
What you were arguing for is really agnosticism rather than toleration.
Will the monsters fight?
Yes, I just watched a Cacodemon and a Z-Sec (zombie Marine) fight to the death. But so far I have seen very few instances where making use of this would be worth the effort.
I'll tell you what is illegal in most democracies: having methods of voting that can't reliably be recounted - or counted it the first place.
That's not illegal. It's just unusual. If people think the method of voting is defective they usually complain about it before the election rather than after the election, when it doesn't go their way. Also, in most countries, if the courts decide that the method of voting failed often enough to cast the result of the election into doubt, then the prefered remedy is to order a new elections. That way they avoid any acusations of the courts determining the outcome (which would have happened in Florida no matter which way the courts had decided).
IOW if all the votes all over Florida had been counted correctly, Gore might have won. Good thing nobody ever expected that to happen.
No. Your use of "correctly" is unjustified. One of the points in contention was precisely what would constitute counting the votes "correctly". Counting under-votes or over-votes meant counting votes that were defective, engaging in a certain amount of speculation about voter intention, and modifying the rules of the election after the fact. None of those is obviously correct. In fact all are strictly illegal in most democracies.
No he didn't. There were various ways in which the Florida votes might have been recounted. Limited number of counties, vs. all counties, and under-votes only vs. under-votes and over-votes. On most of the scenarios Bush would have won (including all of the scenarios that had been proposed in court). On one scenario Gore might have won if the counting had gone his way (and this was a scenario that was not proposed in court). Details are here.
Funny, I thought the constitution strictly forbids ex post facto laws...
It is unconstitutional to pass a law that makes a particular action illegal after the action was performed. So, if a copyright expires, and you copy the covered work, and then a law is passed that "restores" the copyright then you can't be sued for infringement under the law (because the law was passed after you did the copying) but anyone who later copies the work can be sued for infringement.
It's lazy grammatical translation on the part of the slashdot submitter and editors.
Didn't read the license did you? It clearly stated...
By reading this far, you irrevocably agree to all the text that follows.
If you don't like the translation or the editing you should complain before you read it.
A trade war between the US and the EU is almost certain *not* to come. Both sides have far too much to lose from a trade war. What's more their global trade interests are almost identical. Both have extensive farm subsidies and want to keep them, both are major intellectual property producers and favour strong IP laws, both depend heavily on imported oil.
A trade war is about as likely as the US invading France again. Fun to joke about yes, but still obviously just a joke.
You probably should read the proposed EU constitution and then reconsider your views. It concerns far more than economic matters.
And even if this new constitution did concern merely economic matters there are two points you ought to consider:
(1) A huge share of Federal legislation in the US is enacted under the commerce clause.
(2) One of the most important lessons learned from political developments in the 20th century was that economic freedom and political freedom are inseparable.
I know this will come as a surprise to most people but the US has fewer restrictions on the content of what can be published, broadcast, or otherwise communicated than almost any country in the world. Certainly far fewer than any other industrialized nation.
You can be prosecuted in Canada for quoting the wrong parts of the bible in print. In Germany you can get prison time for singing pro-Nazi songs anywhere. In the UK you can be fined for making racist comments. In fact racist speech is illegal in most of the "free" world.