stopped criminals from defrauding the 2004 presidential campaign... Given the recent recount-fraud convictions in ohio (see here, here, and here) it doesn't look like he succeeded.
That is interesting but that raises another interesting point. Strictly speaking that isn't "the law" in that it was set or is administered by courts, except in cases of civil challenge. Practically speaking it affects the students in the same way but it wasn't established by politicians in any capitol or subjected to a vote nor is it something that gets challenged by legislative candidates. Commenting that it is "the law" and putting it on par with the proposed statewide legislation is entirely illogical in my opinion.
I find this occurs a great deal with accusations of government overreaching. One school teacher somewhere says that students shouldn't pray in her class (which is patently unconstitutional) and then people are flinging around the idea that "the law" bans prayer in schools so we need to exercise our Second Amendment rights. And we're off the loony races.
Your link I notice talks about prescription meds. I would imagine that the requirement is there to ensure that they don't get sued for not taking enough care to "protect" kids. Basic paranoia, the hallmark of underfunded school districts.
But then again the other responder is right, you did know the wrong kids in Jr High:)
Where and when was a law passed mandating that parental consent was required for Asprin? This isn't the same mythical set of laws that also bans prayer in schools and mandates that all teenagers play violent video games is it? Is it Federal? State? Local to idiotville?
In looking over the list of complaints this article has he makes some good points I think that his complaint is not about Gentoo so much as specific tools he would like to see:
1-2 Gentoo is too time consuming to install. Basically he is complaining about the lack of a redhat-like or debian-like graphical installer. While such a thing does exist for Gentoo it is in the earlier stages. Moreover for anyone seeking to exploit the power of the system you will have to take time. One of the primary time-sinks in the install process is the setting up of use flags which the author lauds just a few paragraphs earlier.
From past experience both with RedHat and Debian they were easier to install but lacked the fine-point control that came with thinks like the use flags.
3-4 Update Everything Again this is more of a complaint about specific tools and not quiote true in my opinion. Firstly Gentoo does not require that you update everything either for security or simple maintenance. The profile system does not "force" a change every day or even every year. Profiles have a long-term use and a support cycle much like a Debian release. After a specified period (most recently 4 years) I was informed that I should upgrade my profile or lose some support. That is no different than the messages that I received from RedHat back when I used them.
Similarly, emerge allows you to specify packages on a finer level than "world". This means that yoy do not have to upgrade everything or nothing in a single go. Yes some packages (e.g. Mysql, and Xorg) carry a heavy burden of dependencies with them and will cause a large number of dependencies to come with them but it is up to the sysadmin to update them if they so wish.
Gentoo has existing features (consistent with its package system) to enable a sysadmin to freeze some or all of the packages. These include the packages.unmask, packages.mask, packages.use, and portage overlays whick allow you to freeze the individual packages at a set version and prevent them from being upgraded automatically.
With the specific security updates, I will grant you that gentoo does not, yet, have a single tool for simply "executing security updates at the commandline". There is ongoing work on integrating the GLSA tools with emerge. It would be nice to have them.
While I do think that this guy tested Gentoo before using it I think that he missed a few details in his study.
So efforts to promote science to the general public by making the product of science available for the general public (improving scientific education, etc) are "government censorship" while locking things in overproced journals (Acta Chemica has a $1300/year price tag) is not? They look more and more like the RIAA every day.
Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.
This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.
This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.
Hu Jintao knows how to say absolutely nothing and say it well. That sentence is a masterpiece of meaningless airy drivel. You can read it and reread it and there just isn't anything there. Any speechwriter worth his salt should be envious of that hot air.
The problem with using Google tools is that the data that goes into them is no longer "yours" in that it resides soley on your servers, your systems, etc. Google may claim to use this only for special needs, etc but the bottom line is that businesses live and die by their internal info and a combination of good sense and securities laws forces most of them to keep internal documents internally. As such using external storage of docs or google storage is limited by the extent to which they can trade that data away without losing their jobs.
Try telling your boss in a publicly traded (or worse yet private) company that what you should do is put your corporate secrets into someone else's hands, and that someone else specializes in mining and sharing information.
You'd be surprised what can happen when drug companies and patents come to town. Suppose for example the delivery agent is patented or the prescriptuion levels (it has been done with AZT). Then even though the "drug" itself is cheap the medicine made from it is not. IP again to the rescue. Keep in mind that IP has been leveraged on crops that grow in the wild. Wheat and Soy that goes for a few cents per bushel in other parts of the world just happens to be patented under U.S. las by the companies that "discovered" them.
The downside is that the more any given university gets obsessed with IP Payoffs (especially those covered by time-limited protections like patents) the less that they engage in any of the basic research that is necessary for long-term improvements. The pattern has long been the bane of most publicly traded companies and is now becoming the bane of some IP-obsessed universities. Large amounts of local search (i.e. variants of existing things that make money) stifles the far search (i.e. basic theories of molecular structure) that are needed down the road. Indeed the patent beuraucracy of a university can become so stifling that it stands in the way of actual research.
Moreover, a recent study out of California showed that when researchers have a stake in the profits of a development they are more likely to "fudge" the data or at least seek sunner characterizations which you absolutely cannot have if you want safe medicines.
The problem really is that *we* don't recoup the costs of research. Its not as if the Drug companies give back the money to the funding agency. It typically goes to the university or the individual researchers. Many of the drugs purchased do not make their way out into the mainstream as claimed but rather are kept hidden. AZT for example was purchased and sat on for quite some time until after the AIDS Epidemic had started to rise and the drug became more profitable.
Moreover much of our public health costs and private health costs are spent paying the market rate of these drugs. When you think about the amount of dollars on AIDS treatment that is going to a company that didn't spend a dime to make the drugs it becomes a vicious cycle. First our taxes are used to invent them. Then our taxes and out private monies are used to pay a mint for them and the only winners are the drug companies.
Even if the companies do turn it down they will get a further crack at it. Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors. It is this law that allows both AZT and Viagra (developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health) to be considered "private" property and for the companies to charge the people who invested in their development for their use.
The practical upshot of this is that if the drug does go to the universities to be developed it would be following the normal track of most medical research. And if any patentability (say on dosage levels) does show up the companies can always buy it then.
I remeber that in 2002 or so George Cloony wrote an article for Brill's Content in which he pushed exactly the same line of reasoning. To paraphrase his basic thesis: "I am an actor (unless you count Batman and Robin) and there is no reason to assume that I have an inherently greater knowlege of world politics or science than any other human being. Unless I have taken the time to study it my views are not expert."
Which is a rational point to make in my opinion. We often forget that fame is not expertise. I think that part of the problem also results from the way news is reported. As has been pointed out by others few if any news reporters, even those tasked to cover science, are not scientifically trained. I have heard similar comments about business reporters and indeed reporters in any other area. As such their understanding of the topics and how science is defined (i.e. logical argument not screaming matches) is poor leading to a tendency to search for articles that "show both sides" even if one side has scientific backing and the other does not and to look for famous names that get readers.
Quite easily when that species includes arctic seals that use ice to protect them from attacks, and as a resting place. Or aquatic species such as Polar bears which live and hunt on said ice. One shouldn't ignore whales which also make heavy use of it in their survival. Then again perhaps they're mythical, or legendary.
Hardly but that is a gross oversimplification of the issues at hand. What I am talking about is the fact that the Yangtse river is a major industrial port, one with few if any protections for nesting or feeding until very recently. No thought was really given to the welfaire of the dolphin or the health of the river let alone the pollution.
With respect to the issue of cost I would argue that inexpensive or not, if what you are doing puts the river on which you depend for food, and water as well as transportation at risk then yes you should reconsider alternate methods.
Incidentally, Baiji is not a regional name, it is the Dolphin's name See here
Quite easily when that species inclides arctic seals that use Ice to protect them from attacks, and as a resting place. Or aquatic species such as Polar bears which live and hunt on said ice. One shouldn't ignore whales which also make heavy use of it in their survival. Then again perhaps they're mythical, or legendary.
I agree. In the book he gives a poiniant description of the environment of the Baiji. Due to heavy traffic the river itself contains constant mechanical noise. For a creature that uses sonar to see and move life in white noise is blindness. He compared it sleshwere eloquently to spending your life in a snowstorm able to see but seeing nothing.
As much as people may want to celebrate this, or at least gloat, about the weak dying off and this being part of the "natural cycle" I say that's just a bit sick and way too short sighted.
I'm an environmentalist for many reasons chief among them is that I'm selfish. No matter how much we may like to hide in our offices we depend, completely depend, upon the life on the earth around us. Between Dolphins dying in the Yangtse, to the sheer number of ocean species that will die as the ice retreats the web we depend on is, strand by strand, being cut. Sitting around and saying "I told you so" to each other will do no good. Either we all (all animals) survive or we don't but resorting to simple stories gets us nowhere.
The real question is what this will mean down the road. While the support contracts are soley for paying customers (who as it has been noted would probably be on supported enterprises anyway) that still directs the future of the DB.
The Mysql support staff are still a major force in the open-source aspects of the Database submitting bugs, patches, etc. If they cease doing Q&A on other distros then either the rest of the community will have to pick up testing their patches. Over tim I expect that this will, at least, bias the systems patchsets in favor of the "supported" distros.
The real issues won't show up today but 2 to 3 years down the road.
depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues,
Right now the U.S. is still locked in a long-term struggle with Mexico over the fate of the columbia river which no longer makes it to Mexico but disappears into the sand somewhere in the southwest. China's plan to build the 3 Gorges Dam has lead to severe drought in some of the neighboring areas and many people cite global warming when talking about the scarcity of fresh water in the tropics.
Hell Maryland and Virginia are or were locked in a court case involving the water rights to the Potomic river, rights that referenced land grants made at the time of the Jamestown and Roanoke Colonies (circa 1690).
A brief glance over the map of the middle east shows the supreme value of watering sites and the extent to which they formed nations.
At what point "might" water become political exactly? And how will we know, since wars apparently aren't any indication?
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." -- Mark Twain
But if you are suggesting that suppression of free speech and violence is epidemic and the default strategy for the authorities, then surely (apologies to Shirley), given this country's history, a million black men marching on Washington is the ultimate provocation. Yet no violence ensued. In fact, it was quite peaceful and orderly.
Exaclty. No violence was planned and none ensued. The difference here is that unlike the protests of 40 years ago they were not met with riot cops on the ready they were met with welcome arms. That is because the political winds changed and now WTO protestors get the enemy treatment while the NAACP does not.
As for providing evidence; all I have is my recollection. This is because I have a life and it is not spent compiling lists of citations to support opinions I post on the internet. Harsh, truly harsh. I wasn't aware that we were going to get so snippy with each other. Should I go somewhere and cry?
Yes. I've seen the same dynamic at other events. There is a clear difference between the local cops and those who don't wear the plexiglass and those who do. The cops who are not so heavily armed tend to be the ones who don't separate themselves like a military from the public. The ones who show up with guns, batons and armour on the other hand do.
I've seen even small-scale actions that should never have gotten violent descend because the riot cops got so restrictive or violent (causing pain is violence, even if it is "nonlethal" as far as I am concerned) that the critical mass hits, and gets ugly.
Conversely I've seen good situations where the cops are careful and make it clear that they don't have oppression on their minds. In those cases the few who do want violence are quicky ostracized and free speech continues. These are usually the cases where the riot team is not involved and/or kept on a tight leash off to the side.
Did the protesters bring this upon themselves? Sure. People are ultimately responsible for their own actions.
This I'm not so sure about. The reason being is that there is a difference between the ones who get ugly and the ones who do not. It is difficult to distinguish in a Mob but I have seen far too many cases of cops going after everyone, or just the wrong ones who didn't 'bring it on themselves' just because they are there.
Case in point, at a sit in last year outside an Army Recruitment center the riot dogs were used to menace (and I believe in one case bite) people just walking down the sidewalk as well as the people engaged in the entirely nonviolent protest with little rhyme or reason. Clearly the people handling the dogs didn't care to make the distinction.
Sone WTO protestors showed up planning to riot some did not. The quality of their information in this regard was dubious. The events in both Seattle, Miami, and Italy were marked in large measure by an unwillingness on the part of police to draw the distinction or to wait until there was actual evidence of crimes being committed before "swooping in". In some cases the justification for tear-gassing an otherwize nonviolent and legal group was the claim that they had 'intended to' commit crimes. This is not a legal justification. Similarly the claim was made that such groups were, like Iraqi houses, harbouring would-be attackers. This is also a dubious claim given that many of the nonviolent groups (e.g. United Auto Workers) drew a clear policy of *not* harbouring any of the destructive crowd.
If you have evidence to the contrary by all means share it with me but the evidence that has been provided in the past has been litte more than post-hoc claims and does nothing to change the fact that in most cases nonviolent groups were attacked not the other way around.
There is also a related strain in this with the "Free Speech Zones" that have eruped around the Presdent lately. Now because of "evidence of likely crimes" protestors (especially those oppositional to the President) have been locked into large steel cages at his events. This same thing was done for both the DNC and RNC events befoee the last election. The claim was that since unspecified evidence existed that some people might do bad things everyone who opposed the star of the show needed to be jailed (in this case jailed en-masse for a fixed period of time) even though they had not committed any crime.
Such actions do nothing to enhanse free speech or protect people. All that they do is futher segregate society and draw a line between the cops and the population. All they do is give meat to the arguments of the violent crowd that, since we will be jailed either way what does it matter?
Since you mention the Million Man March consider this. 40 years ago when similar marches were attempted they were met with the tear gas, the guns, the firehoses, and the senseless attacks. At that time they were being locked up or attacked because the cops 'had information' that some of them were planning violence. Said actions only raised levels of violence on both sides and made the arguments of people who advocated violence seem that much more attractive.
People often forget that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, for all their nonviolence, still spent a lot of time in jail, and a lot of time getting attacked by people in uniform.
The catch is, at what point does one group become a "rampaging Mob" and does preparation for "crowd control" feed into that.
In recent years there has been an ever increasing milarization of domestic police forces in the U.S. More and more money has gone to swat teams with armoured everything and less and less to programs like Community Policing which actually make people safe. This has produced two intertwining problems: 1) Police have grown ever more violent with a greater tendency to respond with swat teams, and for politicans to call out the swat teams, and 2) Protestors and other groups have found themselves more and more marginalized which lends itself to violent responses.
Take the WTO protests as a test case. In Seattle and Florida the cities and states began by surrounding buildings with chain link, calling out heavily armoursed cops and evn changing the laws in the downtown areas so that protesters were banned "for their own protection." The resulting air of tension led to exteme overreactions on the part of the police. In the case of Seattle legal nonviolent marchers were tear-gassed and in Florida a legally sanctioned non-violent parade was broken up by police firing bean-bag guns which are "non-lethal but painful".
This in turn has led to some groups seriously talking about and preparing for violence. If they feel that protesting bad policy will get you gassed, shot (it still is being shot whether the armarment kills or not) and jailed for your trouble why not throw some molotovs?
There was a study some time ago done by a New York-based criminology professor. In it he looked at the effects of militarizing (i.e. via swat weapons and training) police forces. His conclusion was that it was bad, very bad, and he was one of the people who taught swat teams.
You see military training is about dealing with "the enemy". And training to use weapons like tear gas to "take out dangerous crowds" actually increases the odds that you will resort to it. And increasingly training for these weapons requires a demonization of the enemy. The psychological separation between you the "good guys" and the enemy, protestors, anarchists, etc. "the bad guys" makes it easier to actually resort to force against them, and more likely that said resort will be taken. After all, they are "bad" and you are "good".
As a result the heavier use of military style training actually increases the level of violence due to this cycle of overreaction.
You may say that I am oversimplifying things but anyone who has actually gone outside and protested anything, even with no violence and legal permits can attest that things have changed. I have seen people menaced by dogs while obeying the law, seen armoured assault vehicles purchased for local police forces, I've even had undercover cops infiltrate (very poorly) anti-war groups just to keep an eye on what the grandmas were planning. When you scale this up and see film of a 40 year old woman cowering behind her cardboard sign as a line of swat police shoot, non-lethat but painful, guns at her for being where she had a legal right to be, and you arrive to protest outside the whitehouse (with legal permits and no violence) and see lines of cops with assault rifles waiting, and have some rent-a-cop demand to know what you are writing because he sees you as the "enemy" you begin to realize that "non-lethal" techniques still stifle speech and that the idea that you can have non-violent swat teams is a complete insult to the intelligence.
The cycle of violence isn't just domestic. It occurrs in our society and futher blurs the line to the point where there is little ot no distinction beteen 'the enemy' abroad and 'the enemy' at home. Either way it is someone with a gun pointed at them by someone in a uniform. The fact that that gun is "painful but not lethal" doesn't mean anything. And the more money we spend on arming people whose job it is to protect us, and the more we train them to see themselves as good and "the enemy" as b
Firstly the separation of Church and state is not one way. Students are free to believe as they want in schoold but that belief can be neither coercive or disruptive. With that in mind head scarves, personal prayer, jewish Students associations, etc. are all legal. Attemtpts to force classes about religion or to isolate or intimidate other students for their beliefs are not. Typically we think of the force of schools on students because they
It works this way outside of schools as well. The state is not free to mandate religion or to enforce any aspect of it on them. Religions are not free to coerce the state either by spending state dollars on religious purposes or attempting to force the state to respect them in one way shape or form.
Religion is fundamentally a private matter between you and your god, gods, or lack thereof. Any social aspects of it must be free and unencumbered by state power.
That is why the Constitution of the United States deals with religion in two places, article 6 paragraph 2 "There shall be no religious test for public office in the United States of America." And the first Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free excercize therof." The reason it says both prohibitingand respectingis to prevent both raisig one religion (e.g. Christianity) above others by law, or bringing one low (e.g. atheism) by banning it.
So to get back to this issue yes you can make it about religion and religious freedom in as much as about all free speech. The student, minor or not is a U.S. Citizen and entitled to the rights of free speech and free religion. As such the school cannot freely censor him in the public sphere. While the school has in-loco-parentis within the school grounds a) that power is not absolute, and b) this was not on school grounds but in the public sphere If ILC was absolute then the schools would be free to restrict all student actions in excess of the amount for their task. To do so would be to make schools more restrictive than prisons. Similarly if they could freely restrict student activities outside of school then they would be extended far too much control over the students and be free to regulate activities like who students may see or what they may do when not in the school. That is more than the school should have rights to do and serves no essential purpose.
Essentially, as I see it the School District's position is that it was a school activity and therefore the student's actions affected the school activity. While the student's reply is that it was an act of free speech in the public sphere and as such protected by law. The competing principles at stake here are a) the school having sufficient ability to police their students and if they cannot being unable to have out of school activities and b) the need to protect the fundamental right of free speech and prevent schools from being so restricive that students never learn to use their rights and get too accustomed to draconian measures.
To my mind this turns on a) whether this was indeed a school activity or the schools were just "closed" for the function, and b) whether the sign actually "disrupted" anything in a meaningful sense or just made the teachers feel that the moment was spoiled. To my mind I would err on the side of protecting the student's speech because the sign was just a sign and didn't apparently cause a stampede or prevent the torch itself from being carried.
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stopped criminals from defrauding the 2004 presidential campaign... Given the recent recount-fraud convictions in ohio (see here, here, and here) it doesn't look like he succeeded.
That is interesting but that raises another interesting point. Strictly speaking that isn't "the law" in that it was set or is administered by courts, except in cases of civil challenge. Practically speaking it affects the students in the same way but it wasn't established by politicians in any capitol or subjected to a vote nor is it something that gets challenged by legislative candidates. Commenting that it is "the law" and putting it on par with the proposed statewide legislation is entirely illogical in my opinion.
:)
I find this occurs a great deal with accusations of government overreaching. One school teacher somewhere says that students shouldn't pray in her class (which is patently unconstitutional) and then people are flinging around the idea that "the law" bans prayer in schools so we need to exercise our Second Amendment rights. And we're off the loony races.
Your link I notice talks about prescription meds. I would imagine that the requirement is there to ensure that they don't get sued for not taking enough care to "protect" kids. Basic paranoia, the hallmark of underfunded school districts.
But then again the other responder is right, you did know the wrong kids in Jr High
Where and when was a law passed mandating that parental consent was required for Asprin? This isn't the same mythical set of laws that also bans prayer in schools and mandates that all teenagers play violent video games is it? Is it Federal? State? Local to idiotville?
In looking over the list of complaints this article has he makes some good points I think that his complaint is not about Gentoo so much as specific tools he would like to see:
1-2 Gentoo is too time consuming to install.
Basically he is complaining about the lack of a redhat-like or debian-like graphical installer. While such a thing does exist for Gentoo it is in the earlier stages. Moreover for anyone seeking to exploit the power of the system you will have to take time. One of the primary time-sinks in the install process is the setting up of use flags which the author lauds just a few paragraphs earlier.
From past experience both with RedHat and Debian they were easier to install but lacked the fine-point control that came with thinks like the use flags.
3-4 Update Everything
Again this is more of a complaint about specific tools and not quiote true in my opinion. Firstly Gentoo does not require that you update everything either for security or simple maintenance. The profile system does not "force" a change every day or even every year. Profiles have a long-term use and a support cycle much like a Debian release. After a specified period (most recently 4 years) I was informed that I should upgrade my profile or lose some support. That is no different than the messages that I received from RedHat back when I used them.
Similarly, emerge allows you to specify packages on a finer level than "world". This means that yoy do not have to upgrade everything or nothing in a single go. Yes some packages (e.g. Mysql, and Xorg) carry a heavy burden of dependencies with them and will cause a large number of dependencies to come with them but it is up to the sysadmin to update them if they so wish.
Gentoo has existing features (consistent with its package system) to enable a sysadmin to freeze some or all of the packages. These include the packages.unmask, packages.mask, packages.use, and portage overlays whick allow you to freeze the individual packages at a set version and prevent them from being upgraded automatically.
With the specific security updates, I will grant you that gentoo does not, yet, have a single tool for simply "executing security updates at the commandline". There is ongoing work on integrating the GLSA tools with emerge. It would be nice to have them.
While I do think that this guy tested Gentoo before using it I think that he missed a few details in his study.
So efforts to promote science to the general public by making the product of science available for the general public (improving scientific education, etc) are "government censorship" while locking things in overproced journals (Acta Chemica has a $1300/year price tag) is not? They look more and more like the RIAA every day.
Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.
This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.
This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.
Viva XXX and PLOS.
Hu Jintao knows how to say absolutely nothing and say it well. That sentence is a masterpiece of meaningless airy drivel. You can read it and reread it and there just isn't anything there. Any speechwriter worth his salt should be envious of that hot air.
Ahem: Privacy.
The problem with using Google tools is that the data that goes into them is no longer "yours" in that it resides soley on your servers, your systems, etc. Google may claim to use this only for special needs, etc but the bottom line is that businesses live and die by their internal info and a combination of good sense and securities laws forces most of them to keep internal documents internally. As such using external storage of docs or google storage is limited by the extent to which they can trade that data away without losing their jobs.
Try telling your boss in a publicly traded (or worse yet private) company that what you should do is put your corporate secrets into someone else's hands, and that someone else specializes in mining and sharing information.
You'd be surprised what can happen when drug companies and patents come to town. Suppose for example the delivery agent is patented or the prescriptuion levels (it has been done with AZT). Then even though the "drug" itself is cheap the medicine made from it is not. IP again to the rescue. Keep in mind that IP has been leveraged on crops that grow in the wild. Wheat and Soy that goes for a few cents per bushel in other parts of the world just happens to be patented under U.S. las by the companies that "discovered" them.
The downside is that the more any given university gets obsessed with IP Payoffs (especially those covered by time-limited protections like patents) the less that they engage in any of the basic research that is necessary for long-term improvements. The pattern has long been the bane of most publicly traded companies and is now becoming the bane of some IP-obsessed universities. Large amounts of local search (i.e. variants of existing things that make money) stifles the far search (i.e. basic theories of molecular structure) that are needed down the road. Indeed the patent beuraucracy of a university can become so stifling that it stands in the way of actual research.
Moreover, a recent study out of California showed that when researchers have a stake in the profits of a development they are more likely to "fudge" the data or at least seek sunner characterizations which you absolutely cannot have if you want safe medicines.
However if subsequent work is done in the U.S. then that work, i.e. variants of the drug or dosage levels would come under Byah-Dole.
The problem really is that *we* don't recoup the costs of research. Its not as if the Drug companies give back the money to the funding agency. It typically goes to the university or the individual researchers. Many of the drugs purchased do not make their way out into the mainstream as claimed but rather are kept hidden. AZT for example was purchased and sat on for quite some time until after the AIDS Epidemic had started to rise and the drug became more profitable.
Moreover much of our public health costs and private health costs are spent paying the market rate of these drugs. When you think about the amount of dollars on AIDS treatment that is going to a company that didn't spend a dime to make the drugs it becomes a vicious cycle. First our taxes are used to invent them. Then our taxes and out private monies are used to pay a mint for them and the only winners are the drug companies.
Even if the companies do turn it down they will get a further crack at it. Courtesy of the Byah-Dole act most publicly funded research (especially drug research) in the U.S. can later be "bought" by private companies who may then claim "intellectual property" on the fruits of the public's labors. It is this law that allows both AZT and Viagra (developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health) to be considered "private" property and for the companies to charge the people who invested in their development for their use.
The practical upshot of this is that if the drug does go to the universities to be developed it would be following the normal track of most medical research. And if any patentability (say on dosage levels) does show up the companies can always buy it then.
I remeber that in 2002 or so George Cloony wrote an article for Brill's Content in which he pushed exactly the same line of reasoning. To paraphrase his basic thesis: "I am an actor (unless you count Batman and Robin) and there is no reason to assume that I have an inherently greater knowlege of world politics or science than any other human being. Unless I have taken the time to study it my views are not expert."
Which is a rational point to make in my opinion. We often forget that fame is not expertise. I think that part of the problem also results from the way news is reported. As has been pointed out by others few if any news reporters, even those tasked to cover science, are not scientifically trained. I have heard similar comments about business reporters and indeed reporters in any other area. As such their understanding of the topics and how science is defined (i.e. logical argument not screaming matches) is poor leading to a tendency to search for articles that "show both sides" even if one side has scientific backing and the other does not and to look for famous names that get readers.
Not to my knowledge. It is my understanding that almost all conservation efforts are fairly recent and none went to that large-scale extent.
Quite easily when that species includes arctic seals that use ice to protect them from attacks, and as a resting place. Or aquatic species such as Polar bears which live and hunt on said ice. One shouldn't ignore whales which also make heavy use of it in their survival. Then again perhaps they're mythical, or legendary.
Hardly but that is a gross oversimplification of the issues at hand. What I am talking about is the fact that the Yangtse river is a major industrial port, one with few if any protections for nesting or feeding until very recently. No thought was really given to the welfaire of the dolphin or the health of the river let alone the pollution.
With respect to the issue of cost I would argue that inexpensive or not, if what you are doing puts the river on which you depend for food, and water as well as transportation at risk then yes you should reconsider alternate methods.
Incidentally, Baiji is not a regional name, it is the Dolphin's name See here
Quite easily when that species inclides arctic seals that use Ice to protect them from attacks, and as a resting place. Or aquatic species such as Polar bears which live and hunt on said ice. One shouldn't ignore whales which also make heavy use of it in their survival. Then again perhaps they're mythical, or legendary.
I agree. In the book he gives a poiniant description of the environment of the Baiji. Due to heavy traffic the river itself contains constant mechanical noise. For a creature that uses sonar to see and move life in white noise is blindness. He compared it sleshwere eloquently to spending your life in a snowstorm able to see but seeing nothing.
As much as people may want to celebrate this, or at least gloat, about the weak dying off and this being part of the "natural cycle" I say that's just a bit sick and way too short sighted.
I'm an environmentalist for many reasons chief among them is that I'm selfish. No matter how much we may like to hide in our offices we depend, completely depend, upon the life on the earth around us. Between Dolphins dying in the Yangtse, to the sheer number of ocean species that will die as the ice retreats the web we depend on is, strand by strand, being cut. Sitting around and saying "I told you so" to each other will do no good. Either we all (all animals) survive or we don't but resorting to simple stories gets us nowhere.
The real question is what this will mean down the road. While the support contracts are soley for paying customers (who as it has been noted would probably be on supported enterprises anyway) that still directs the future of the DB.
The Mysql support staff are still a major force in the open-source aspects of the Database submitting bugs, patches, etc. If they cease doing Q&A on other distros then either the rest of the community will have to pick up testing their patches. Over tim I expect that this will, at least, bias the systems patchsets in favor of the "supported" distros.
The real issues won't show up today but 2 to 3 years down the road.
Right now the U.S. is still locked in a long-term struggle with Mexico over the fate of the columbia river which no longer makes it to Mexico but disappears into the sand somewhere in the southwest. China's plan to build the 3 Gorges Dam has lead to severe drought in some of the neighboring areas and many people cite global warming when talking about the scarcity of fresh water in the tropics.
Hell Maryland and Virginia are or were locked in a court case involving the water rights to the Potomic river, rights that referenced land grants made at the time of the Jamestown and Roanoke Colonies (circa 1690).
A brief glance over the map of the middle east shows the supreme value of watering sites and the extent to which they formed nations.
At what point "might" water become political exactly? And how will we know, since wars apparently aren't any indication?
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." -- Mark Twain
Exaclty. No violence was planned and none ensued. The difference here is that unlike the protests of 40 years ago they were not met with riot cops on the ready they were met with welcome arms. That is because the political winds changed and now WTO protestors get the enemy treatment while the NAACP does not.
I've seen even small-scale actions that should never have gotten violent descend because the riot cops got so restrictive or violent (causing pain is violence, even if it is "nonlethal" as far as I am concerned) that the critical mass hits, and gets ugly.
Conversely I've seen good situations where the cops are careful and make it clear that they don't have oppression on their minds. In those cases the few who do want violence are quicky ostracized and free speech continues. These are usually the cases where the riot team is not involved and/or kept on a tight leash off to the side.
This I'm not so sure about. The reason being is that there is a difference between the ones who get ugly and the ones who do not. It is difficult to distinguish in a Mob but I have seen far too many cases of cops going after everyone, or just the wrong ones who didn't 'bring it on themselves' just because they are there.
Case in point, at a sit in last year outside an Army Recruitment center the riot dogs were used to menace (and I believe in one case bite) people just walking down the sidewalk as well as the people engaged in the entirely nonviolent protest with little rhyme or reason. Clearly the people handling the dogs didn't care to make the distinction.
Sone WTO protestors showed up planning to riot some did not. The quality of their information in this regard was dubious. The events in both Seattle, Miami, and Italy were marked in large measure by an unwillingness on the part of police to draw the distinction or to wait until there was actual evidence of crimes being committed before "swooping in". In some cases the justification for tear-gassing an otherwize nonviolent and legal group was the claim that they had 'intended to' commit crimes. This is not a legal justification. Similarly the claim was made that such groups were, like Iraqi houses, harbouring would-be attackers. This is also a dubious claim given that many of the nonviolent groups (e.g. United Auto Workers) drew a clear policy of *not* harbouring any of the destructive crowd.
If you have evidence to the contrary by all means share it with me but the evidence that has been provided in the past has been litte more than post-hoc claims and does nothing to change the fact that in most cases nonviolent groups were attacked not the other way around.
There is also a related strain in this with the "Free Speech Zones" that have eruped around the Presdent lately. Now because of "evidence of likely crimes" protestors (especially those oppositional to the President) have been locked into large steel cages at his events. This same thing was done for both the DNC and RNC events befoee the last election. The claim was that since unspecified evidence existed that some people might do bad things everyone who opposed the star of the show needed to be jailed (in this case jailed en-masse for a fixed period of time) even though they had not committed any crime.
Such actions do nothing to enhanse free speech or protect people. All that they do is futher segregate society and draw a line between the cops and the population. All they do is give meat to the arguments of the violent crowd that, since we will be jailed either way what does it matter?
Since you mention the Million Man March consider this. 40 years ago when similar marches were attempted they were met with the tear gas, the guns, the firehoses, and the senseless attacks. At that time they were being locked up or attacked because the cops 'had information' that some of them were planning violence. Said actions only raised levels of violence on both sides and made the arguments of people who advocated violence seem that much more attractive.
People often forget that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, for all their nonviolence, still spent a lot of time in jail, and a lot of time getting attacked by people in uniform.
The catch is, at what point does one group become a "rampaging Mob" and does preparation for "crowd control" feed into that.
In recent years there has been an ever increasing milarization of domestic police forces in the U.S. More and more money has gone to swat teams with armoured everything and less and less to programs like Community Policing which actually make people safe. This has produced two intertwining problems:
1) Police have grown ever more violent with a greater tendency to respond with swat teams, and for politicans to call out the swat teams, and
2) Protestors and other groups have found themselves more and more marginalized which lends itself to violent responses.
Take the WTO protests as a test case. In Seattle and Florida the cities and states began by surrounding buildings with chain link, calling out heavily armoursed cops and evn changing the laws in the downtown areas so that protesters were banned "for their own protection." The resulting air of tension led to exteme overreactions on the part of the police. In the case of Seattle legal nonviolent marchers were tear-gassed and in Florida a legally sanctioned non-violent parade was broken up by police firing bean-bag guns which are "non-lethal but painful".
This in turn has led to some groups seriously talking about and preparing for violence. If they feel that protesting bad policy will get you gassed, shot (it still is being shot whether the armarment kills or not) and jailed for your trouble why not throw some molotovs?
There was a study some time ago done by a New York-based criminology professor. In it he looked at the effects of militarizing (i.e. via swat weapons and training) police forces. His conclusion was that it was bad, very bad, and he was one of the people who taught swat teams.
You see military training is about dealing with "the enemy". And training to use weapons like tear gas to "take out dangerous crowds" actually increases the odds that you will resort to it. And increasingly training for these weapons requires a demonization of the enemy. The psychological separation between you the "good guys" and the enemy, protestors, anarchists, etc. "the bad guys" makes it easier to actually resort to force against them, and more likely that said resort will be taken. After all, they are "bad" and you are "good".
As a result the heavier use of military style training actually increases the level of violence due to this cycle of overreaction.
You may say that I am oversimplifying things but anyone who has actually gone outside and protested anything, even with no violence and legal permits can attest that things have changed. I have seen people menaced by dogs while obeying the law, seen armoured assault vehicles purchased for local police forces, I've even had undercover cops infiltrate (very poorly) anti-war groups just to keep an eye on what the grandmas were planning. When you scale this up and see film of a 40 year old woman cowering behind her cardboard sign as a line of swat police shoot, non-lethat but painful, guns at her for being where she had a legal right to be, and you arrive to protest outside the whitehouse (with legal permits and no violence) and see lines of cops with assault rifles waiting, and have some rent-a-cop demand to know what you are writing because he sees you as the "enemy" you begin to realize that "non-lethal" techniques still stifle speech and that the idea that you can have non-violent swat teams is a complete insult to the intelligence.
The cycle of violence isn't just domestic. It occurrs in our society and futher blurs the line to the point where there is little ot no distinction beteen 'the enemy' abroad and 'the enemy' at home. Either way it is someone with a gun pointed at them by someone in a uniform. The fact that that gun is "painful but not lethal" doesn't mean anything. And the more money we spend on arming people whose job it is to protect us, and the more we train them to see themselves as good and "the enemy" as b
Firstly the separation of Church and state is not one way. Students are free to believe as they want in schoold but that belief can be neither coercive or disruptive. With that in mind head scarves, personal prayer, jewish Students associations, etc. are all legal. Attemtpts to force classes about religion or to isolate or intimidate other students for their beliefs are not. Typically we think of the force of schools on students because they
It works this way outside of schools as well. The state is not free to mandate religion or to enforce any aspect of it on them. Religions are not free to coerce the state either by spending state dollars on religious purposes or attempting to force the state to respect them in one way shape or form.
Religion is fundamentally a private matter between you and your god, gods, or lack thereof. Any social aspects of it must be free and unencumbered by state power.
That is why the Constitution of the United States deals with religion in two places, article 6 paragraph 2 "There shall be no religious test for public office in the United States of America." And the first Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free excercize therof." The reason it says both prohibitingand respectingis to prevent both raisig one religion (e.g. Christianity) above others by law, or bringing one low (e.g. atheism) by banning it.
So to get back to this issue yes you can make it about religion and religious freedom in as much as about all free speech. The student, minor or not is a U.S. Citizen and entitled to the rights of free speech and free religion. As such the school cannot freely censor him in the public sphere. While the school has in-loco-parentis within the school grounds a) that power is not absolute, and b) this was not on school grounds but in the public sphere If ILC was absolute then the schools would be free to restrict all student actions in excess of the amount for their task. To do so would be to make schools more restrictive than prisons. Similarly if they could freely restrict student activities outside of school then they would be extended far too much control over the students and be free to regulate activities like who students may see or what they may do when not in the school. That is more than the school should have rights to do and serves no essential purpose.
Essentially, as I see it the School District's position is that it was a school activity and therefore the student's actions affected the school activity. While the student's reply is that it was an act of free speech in the public sphere and as such protected by law. The competing principles at stake here are a) the school having sufficient ability to police their students and if they cannot being unable to have out of school activities and b) the need to protect the fundamental right of free speech and prevent schools from being so restricive that students never learn to use their rights and get too accustomed to draconian measures.
To my mind this turns on a) whether this was indeed a school activity or the schools were just "closed" for the function, and b) whether the sign actually "disrupted" anything in a meaningful sense or just made the teachers feel that the moment was spoiled. To my mind I would err on the side of protecting the student's speech because the sign was just a sign and didn't apparently cause a stampede or prevent the torch itself from being carried.