I would guess that the contracts allow Bell Canada to use the space for any "communications service." I seriously doubt they would have limited themselves by specifying just "phone service."
I'm just glad that's one place I haven't seen pasted over with advertising.
If you printed up a bunch of pamphlets falsely claiming I was a sex offender that had moved into the area and distributed them to all of my neighbors, don't you think you'd be treading on my constitutional right to pursue happiness? Sure I can still pursue it, but it will be much harder.
As well, it completely removes my right to have a fair trial at which I would be found innocent for lack of a crime altogether.
Granted it isn't as extreme as putting a bullet into my face, but it sure would suck! In that case it would be covered by your state's libel law, if it has one.
I'm not talking about science here, I'm talking about legislation.
Did you completely miss the list that included slavery, segregation, and women's suffrage?
I'm talking about the day-to-day business of passing laws.
Laws begin as opinions, and most opinions start on the fringe. 100 million men didn't wake up one day and think, "Y'know, women should get to vote, too." It took about 50 years to go from a single local ordinance allowing women to vote in school board elections to becoming the nineteenth amendment. If they had quit because they were fringe -- or as you seem to be supporting, pushed out of the discussion -- it would never have happened.
Giving the Communists and the Greens and the Libertarians and the Snake-Handler party five seats each in the legislature isn't going to help that
Where did you get that from? I certainly didn't claim that we should just give each party equal representation in Congress or the Senate! I'm saying they should be allowed an equal voice not determined by how much money they have. Money buys votes, and votes buys voice; thus money buys voice, and I believe that is corrupt.
Woah, I am talking about free speach. I dont believe tv/radio ads are speach.
Well, the Supreme Court sure does. They ruled that political contributions constitute the exercise of free speech (I disagree with this ruling). Since this money (free speech) is used to buy print, TV, and radio commercials, clearly political commercials represent speech.
When you talk about freedom of the press, that is not free speech, otherwise they wouldn't have been separated in the first amendmant. Freedom of the press means that reporters are allowed to report facts and events without government interference. Note, however, that the Court has placed limits on what exactly the press are allowed to print: you are not allowed to print known falsehoods (libel) about persons, for example.
Now Congress is saying you may not make political endorsements -- which are not facts but opinions ("I recommend that you should vote for Foo.") -- during certain periods before the election. Whether or not the Court will uphold this law remains to be seen. Prior to this posting, I was only discussing campaign finance reform.
In the end, we are still left with the same conclusion: the freedom of the press is not an absolute right. There are no absolute rights as every right may impinge on the rights of others, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It is the job of the courts to balance the rights of these disparate groups.
The point of the American system isn't diversity, it's consensus. Fringe ideas are generally useless in a democratic government (if it's only going to get 10% of the vote, why even debate it?), so they're intentionally marginalized.
This view is why it became so difficult to shift the cultural worldview from flat-earth to round-earth and from earth-centric to sun-centric to a whole universe of star systems. If you marginalize the unpopular views, you often stunt the growth of a society.
Need more examples?
Slavery
Segregation
Women's Suffrage
Universal Human Rights
Empires vs. Cooperating Nations (still working on this one)
Flight
Sound Barrier
Manned Space Missions
All of the above faced serious pushback and incredulity from society, yet would you want to roll back the clock on any of the benefits we've gained from them?
If you need more evidence, look at nature. To ensure that life survives, many varied forms exist, grow, change, and die off. If you factor in too much similarity, the system is vulnerable to extinction.
I'm not necessarily advocating 157 parties like Italy (as one Republican political commentator said was the only other solution to two parties, thus invalidating multiparty systems as a whole), but 5 to 10 healthy viable parties would be a good start. As someone else pointed out, the Instant Runoff Voting would help a lot here. More people would have voted for Nader, showing his true support, without fearing they were throwing away their votes.
Sure, if a party and its candidates hold unpopular stances, they'll need to work to gain support, but that must be done by sharing facts and ideas, not by producing brand-building TV commercials. Doesn't it seem odd to anyone that the methods used to sell candidates to the masses are those used by the folks on Madison Avenue to sell consumer goods? When I'm buying peanut butter, I quite frankly could not care any less about which brand appeals to me more by watching their ad spots; instead, I go by taste. Similarly, when I choose a representative, I'm going to evaluate their stand on issues and voting record, not how polished their speeches sound nor how parental they look holding someone else's kid.
At the recent antiwar protest in SF, I saw many people carrying the U.S. flag with its stars replaced by corporate logos. But that image of logo-wearing politicians racing around the halls of Capitol Hill working deals is hilarious!
If you're still in touch with your ex-coworker, give them a big high-five for me.:D
Senator Sam believes that the majority of his constituents are in favor of environmental protection. Since he represents them, he votes for sensible reforms like minimizing strip mining, polution controls, etc.
One of his constituents sends him a polite letter stating that he has changed his mind and now thinks we should log every tree. This is one vote, and therefore doesn't sway Sam's opinion nor responsibility of representation, for there are still far more people that want to limit logging. Sam replies with a nice thank you note explaining that he will not be changing his votes.
Logging, Inc. donates $500,000 to Sam's campaign. Sam realizes that money will pay for commercials that will sway 50,000 people to vote for him. In his mind he twists this around to believe that this means that the people he serves have changed their collective will. Now Sam votes for unlimited logging.
Sam argues that his vote wasn't bought per se. Rather, that more people will vote for Sam (due to more commercial air time) somehow implies that more people now want unlimited logging.
That's why I don't understand how people can accept that money equates with political speech. The money is used to directly alter the votes of people -- not to change their minds on issues. The main problem is that most people don't investigate their politician's voting records and financing sources. Instead, they vote for whomever grabs their attention thirty seconds at a time.
I think freedom of the press is absolute, should be absolute, and was intended to be absolute. The (sic) was the whole point of the 1st amendment.
No, that's not the whole point of the first amendmant. Let's look at what the founders actually wrote.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I'm not picking nits; there is more to that amendmant than just free speech or freedom of the press. Regardless, the founders knew that they could not think of all possibilities. They created the court system to clarify the law.
Currently, political advertisements represent free speech, and corporations are natural persons and thus granted free speech rights. This is the core of my disagreement. I believe that corporations are not natural persons, and I believe that advertisements are not speech.
The problem stems from definitions. Does "speech" mean speaking of all forms? Does "the press" include anything printed in a newspaper or other media outlet? Can you claim to know what the founders believed? Did the founders foresee radio, TV, the internet, mass psychic communication, etc.?
If Congress passes a law that is unconstitutional (which would be an opinion anyway), it is the job of the president to veto it or the courts to reject it. That is what the founders intended with the Constitution. They knew they couldn't just write "Congress shall make no law respecting..." and make it happen. Thus we have a system of checks and balances.
In a capitalistic society, what could possibly be a better means of measuring contributions to the economic well-being of that society?
Why should people that make larger contributions to the economic well-being of the state have greater say in how the state is governed? Why should economics factor into it at all?
That we live in a capitalist society makes using money a convenient barometer, but that does not make it ethically valid.
Irony would be if the women had voted to reject women's suffrage. What happened made perfect sense for the cultural climate at the time. However, if it's the same as in the U.S., enough voters had to sign a petition to even get it on the ballot, so clearly many men felt it was a good thing for women to get a vote -- just not enough to pass the referendum.
Caspean Sea? Natural Gas?
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
The best route for a pipeline happens to be right through Kosovo. Coincidence? Maybe...
As for Iraq, you forgot 4) continue with weapons inspections, and if they fail, 5) seek approval for an attack from the U.N., following the charter that we developed and signed. As well, perhaps there should be U.N. inspection teams in Israel and the U.S. to ensure there are no chemical weapons. We could also pretend to be moving towards nuclear disarmament as we agreed.
Saddam is certainly a brutal tyrant, but if we neglect international law in dealing with him, that encourages law-breaking on all sides. As well, most people forget that he was most brutal when he had U.S. support, using chemical weapons internally agains the Kurds and externally against Iran (whom we were funding simultaneously). This was before the invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. State Department happily mailed the checks and sent the military equipment and chemicals for producing weapons.
Yeah, I thought the other posting was saying that it was Lenny that killed his wife. God that was such a good movie. Definitely required multiple viewings to catch everything. I also liked the use of black-n-white versus color to merge the two timelines (one going forward, the other backward) at the end. Brilliant!
That's not censoring; it's refusing service. If the library computers are set up in such a way that everyone can see what everyone is surfing, then it isn't appropriate for people to be surfing pr0n, based on our cultural standards of not allowing minors access to it. Therefore, if you want to use the public computing resources, you must adhere to the public rules and standards. That's called living in society.
Similarly, while I believe various soft drugs should be decriminalized, I also feel that it would be inappropriate to use them in certain instances. I wouldn't want to see people snorting lines of coke at the library, for example. That's called being personally responsible, and as long as we make the State responsible for enforcing good behavior, we will never learn to be responsible ourselves.
Freedom includes the right to learn to be personally responsible, often by making mistakes.
I don't understand how FUBAR, an old military acronym got changed to foobar, by the Unix community
Apparently it didn't. A quick Google came up with this info on foo and foobar.
In short, "it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have been the original form." "Foo" seems to have a pre-war history, its "earliest documented uses were in the 'Smokey Stover' comic strip published from about 1930 to about 1952."
So if UIA wins the contract, VeriSign will give them $5 million to set up their infrastructure which only needs to forward the registration request on to VeriSign's back-end servers.
If some other organization wins, VeriSign loses out on $13.8M a year with a possible one-time loss of $5M. That's a big incentive to ensure that UIA wins the contract. Sure, VeriSign still loses some of its revenue ($3.80 per 2.3M equals $8.74M/year), but not all of it. As well, UIA could use some of its now tax-free revenue on VeriSign's behalf.
Whoever wins, I truly hope that it is not UIA. Network Solutions and VeriSign have shaken us down for enough cash already. It's time for someone else -- like the public -- to benefit from the dot-org domain. So far from my very limited reading I favor Internet Multicasting Service simply based on its organization being completely non-profit, public, and open.
I might be missing something, so please correct if this is off base. From the article I gathered that there is a single wholesale supplier of dot-org domain names: VeriSign, Inc. While I can choose from any number of retail registrars that can compete on price and services, they all must pay VeriSign $6 per domain name.
The end result is that they can only compete on price down to $6 before they start losing money. What's to stop VeriSign from charging $20 per wholesale domain name from each registrar? In other words, there really is no competition within the dot-org TLD. Sure, whoever runs the dot-info TLD can try to compete on price, but that's why people are clammoring for hundreds if not thousands of TLDs.
A dot-com domain name is valuable simply because there are only a few alternatives. If there were thousands of alternatives for foo.*, foo.com wouldn't be that much more valuable than foo.bar. The problem is that many TLDs are more valuable (dot-tv, dot-com, dot-xxx) because DNS continues to be used as a keyword system.
I don't have anything against commercial interests, but in this case I can't see any reason to not let a non-profit run the.org domain. It's not like the internet doesn't provide enough commercial opportunities already.
As well, I noted in the article that if a non-profit wins the bid, VeriSign has agreed to give them a $5 million endowment. Given the amount of politics going on within ICANN, can we be sure that VeriSign isn't campaigning for a commercial winner to save them some cash?
Add to that the declaration that, while he used to regard all violence as unjustified, he now sees how some violence is understandable.
I don't see a problem here at all. I don't condone violence and feel it is unjustified. However, I do understand what pushes people to act out violently. If you cannot understand what drives some Palestinians to blow themselves up in Israel, you must not be paying attention. That does not mean that you should accept it as right.
Obviously, we've heard one side of the story and cannot hope to understand what happened. If the facts are as Dr. Wallace wrote, it does seem strange that a friend of 20 years would suddenly fear for his life after getting an email saying the friend understood why some people resorted to political violence. None of my friends feel I am a danger to them when I speak about the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict. As well, being a friend for such a long time, I expect Dr. Wallace had at some point explained the full extent of his depression to Dr. Goldberg and that he posed no danger to his friends.
Either way, it's sad when relationships fracture so completely that long term damage results (being banned from the UCB CS department in this case).
It's like saying that "evolution" planned for microscopic bacteria to turn into advanced multi-cellular organisms that would eventually evolve into homo sapiens sapiens. I can't think of anything that could be more opposite of what natural selection is all about.
What if it weren't so explicit to begin with? Perhaps "life" manifested itself as single-cell organisms as a first attempt at a creature capable of reacting to its surroundings. The next step was to create a creature that interacted with its environment, and through natural selection arrived at multi-cellular organisms. The further goal -- intelligent creatures capable of understanding and manipulating their environment -- drove the process to humans.
I wonder what the next evolutionary goal is. By observing history, one might conclude the next step is eradicating our environment.;)
In Felton's case, they sent a letter ambiguously threatening legal action if he gave his presentation. He canceled his presentation, but after the conference they said that they hadn't threatened anything. They claimed to merely be warning him that someone view his actions as illegal under the DMCA.
It was worse, then, as they got their cake and ate it too: he didn't give the talk, and they didn't have to take him to court. Totally fscked up.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just glad that's one place I haven't seen pasted over with advertising.
2. You can play for free.
3. You can pay to get stuff or you can kill and steal from others, making you an outlaw.
I'm not sure if it will work, and it's not a new concept, but I'm very curious to see how it pans out.
As well, it completely removes my right to have a fair trial at which I would be found innocent for lack of a crime altogether.
Granted it isn't as extreme as putting a bullet into my face, but it sure would suck! In that case it would be covered by your state's libel law, if it has one.
Did you completely miss the list that included slavery, segregation, and women's suffrage?
Laws begin as opinions, and most opinions start on the fringe. 100 million men didn't wake up one day and think, "Y'know, women should get to vote, too." It took about 50 years to go from a single local ordinance allowing women to vote in school board elections to becoming the nineteenth amendment. If they had quit because they were fringe -- or as you seem to be supporting, pushed out of the discussion -- it would never have happened.
Where did you get that from? I certainly didn't claim that we should just give each party equal representation in Congress or the Senate! I'm saying they should be allowed an equal voice not determined by how much money they have. Money buys votes, and votes buys voice; thus money buys voice, and I believe that is corrupt.
Well, the Supreme Court sure does. They ruled that political contributions constitute the exercise of free speech (I disagree with this ruling). Since this money (free speech) is used to buy print, TV, and radio commercials, clearly political commercials represent speech.
When you talk about freedom of the press, that is not free speech, otherwise they wouldn't have been separated in the first amendmant. Freedom of the press means that reporters are allowed to report facts and events without government interference. Note, however, that the Court has placed limits on what exactly the press are allowed to print: you are not allowed to print known falsehoods (libel) about persons, for example.
Now Congress is saying you may not make political endorsements -- which are not facts but opinions ("I recommend that you should vote for Foo.") -- during certain periods before the election. Whether or not the Court will uphold this law remains to be seen. Prior to this posting, I was only discussing campaign finance reform.
In the end, we are still left with the same conclusion: the freedom of the press is not an absolute right. There are no absolute rights as every right may impinge on the rights of others, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It is the job of the courts to balance the rights of these disparate groups.
...that Bill Shatner's responses were transcribed from a telephone conversation by a Slashdot editor?
This view is why it became so difficult to shift the cultural worldview from flat-earth to round-earth and from earth-centric to sun-centric to a whole universe of star systems. If you marginalize the unpopular views, you often stunt the growth of a society.
Need more examples?
All of the above faced serious pushback and incredulity from society, yet would you want to roll back the clock on any of the benefits we've gained from them?
If you need more evidence, look at nature. To ensure that life survives, many varied forms exist, grow, change, and die off. If you factor in too much similarity, the system is vulnerable to extinction.
I'm not necessarily advocating 157 parties like Italy (as one Republican political commentator said was the only other solution to two parties, thus invalidating multiparty systems as a whole), but 5 to 10 healthy viable parties would be a good start. As someone else pointed out, the Instant Runoff Voting would help a lot here. More people would have voted for Nader, showing his true support, without fearing they were throwing away their votes.
Sure, if a party and its candidates hold unpopular stances, they'll need to work to gain support, but that must be done by sharing facts and ideas, not by producing brand-building TV commercials. Doesn't it seem odd to anyone that the methods used to sell candidates to the masses are those used by the folks on Madison Avenue to sell consumer goods? When I'm buying peanut butter, I quite frankly could not care any less about which brand appeals to me more by watching their ad spots; instead, I go by taste. Similarly, when I choose a representative, I'm going to evaluate their stand on issues and voting record, not how polished their speeches sound nor how parental they look holding someone else's kid.
If you're still in touch with your ex-coworker, give them a big high-five for me. :D
One of his constituents sends him a polite letter stating that he has changed his mind and now thinks we should log every tree. This is one vote, and therefore doesn't sway Sam's opinion nor responsibility of representation, for there are still far more people that want to limit logging. Sam replies with a nice thank you note explaining that he will not be changing his votes.
Logging, Inc. donates $500,000 to Sam's campaign. Sam realizes that money will pay for commercials that will sway 50,000 people to vote for him. In his mind he twists this around to believe that this means that the people he serves have changed their collective will. Now Sam votes for unlimited logging.
Sam argues that his vote wasn't bought per se. Rather, that more people will vote for Sam (due to more commercial air time) somehow implies that more people now want unlimited logging.
That's why I don't understand how people can accept that money equates with political speech. The money is used to directly alter the votes of people -- not to change their minds on issues. The main problem is that most people don't investigate their politician's voting records and financing sources. Instead, they vote for whomever grabs their attention thirty seconds at a time.
No, that's not the whole point of the first amendmant. Let's look at what the founders actually wrote.
I'm not picking nits; there is more to that amendmant than just free speech or freedom of the press. Regardless, the founders knew that they could not think of all possibilities. They created the court system to clarify the law.
Currently, political advertisements represent free speech, and corporations are natural persons and thus granted free speech rights. This is the core of my disagreement. I believe that corporations are not natural persons, and I believe that advertisements are not speech.
The problem stems from definitions. Does "speech" mean speaking of all forms? Does "the press" include anything printed in a newspaper or other media outlet? Can you claim to know what the founders believed? Did the founders foresee radio, TV, the internet, mass psychic communication, etc.?
If Congress passes a law that is unconstitutional (which would be an opinion anyway), it is the job of the president to veto it or the courts to reject it. That is what the founders intended with the Constitution. They knew they couldn't just write "Congress shall make no law respecting ..." and make it happen. Thus we have a system of checks and balances.
Why should people that make larger contributions to the economic well-being of the state have greater say in how the state is governed? Why should economics factor into it at all?
That we live in a capitalist society makes using money a convenient barometer, but that does not make it ethically valid.
Irony would be if the women had voted to reject women's suffrage. What happened made perfect sense for the cultural climate at the time. However, if it's the same as in the U.S., enough voters had to sign a petition to even get it on the ballot, so clearly many men felt it was a good thing for women to get a vote -- just not enough to pass the referendum.
As for Iraq, you forgot 4) continue with weapons inspections, and if they fail, 5) seek approval for an attack from the U.N., following the charter that we developed and signed. As well, perhaps there should be U.N. inspection teams in Israel and the U.S. to ensure there are no chemical weapons. We could also pretend to be moving towards nuclear disarmament as we agreed.
Saddam is certainly a brutal tyrant, but if we neglect international law in dealing with him, that encourages law-breaking on all sides. As well, most people forget that he was most brutal when he had U.S. support, using chemical weapons internally agains the Kurds and externally against Iran (whom we were funding simultaneously). This was before the invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. State Department happily mailed the checks and sent the military equipment and chemicals for producing weapons.
Yeah, I thought the other posting was saying that it was Lenny that killed his wife. God that was such a good movie. Definitely required multiple viewings to catch everything. I also liked the use of black-n-white versus color to merge the two timelines (one going forward, the other backward) at the end. Brilliant!
"It was him" doesn't actually cover Memento. For that one, "It *wasn't* him" is correct.
Does this mean people really do read Playboy and Penthouse for the insightful articles?
Similarly, while I believe various soft drugs should be decriminalized, I also feel that it would be inappropriate to use them in certain instances. I wouldn't want to see people snorting lines of coke at the library, for example. That's called being personally responsible, and as long as we make the State responsible for enforcing good behavior, we will never learn to be responsible ourselves.
Freedom includes the right to learn to be personally responsible, often by making mistakes.
Apparently it didn't. A quick Google came up with this info on foo and foobar.
In short, "it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have been the original form." "Foo" seems to have a pre-war history, its "earliest documented uses were in the 'Smokey Stover' comic strip published from about 1930 to about 1952."
If some other organization wins, VeriSign loses out on $13.8M a year with a possible one-time loss of $5M. That's a big incentive to ensure that UIA wins the contract. Sure, VeriSign still loses some of its revenue ($3.80 per 2.3M equals $8.74M/year), but not all of it. As well, UIA could use some of its now tax-free revenue on VeriSign's behalf.
Whoever wins, I truly hope that it is not UIA. Network Solutions and VeriSign have shaken us down for enough cash already. It's time for someone else -- like the public -- to benefit from the dot-org domain. So far from my very limited reading I favor Internet Multicasting Service simply based on its organization being completely non-profit, public, and open.
How about an interview with Carl Malamud?
The end result is that they can only compete on price down to $6 before they start losing money. What's to stop VeriSign from charging $20 per wholesale domain name from each registrar? In other words, there really is no competition within the dot-org TLD. Sure, whoever runs the dot-info TLD can try to compete on price, but that's why people are clammoring for hundreds if not thousands of TLDs.
A dot-com domain name is valuable simply because there are only a few alternatives. If there were thousands of alternatives for foo.*, foo.com wouldn't be that much more valuable than foo.bar. The problem is that many TLDs are more valuable (dot-tv, dot-com, dot-xxx) because DNS continues to be used as a keyword system.
Is there any way out of this mess?
Oh, wait. That's the same thing.
As well, I noted in the article that if a non-profit wins the bid, VeriSign has agreed to give them a $5 million endowment. Given the amount of politics going on within ICANN, can we be sure that VeriSign isn't campaigning for a commercial winner to save them some cash?
I don't see a problem here at all. I don't condone violence and feel it is unjustified. However, I do understand what pushes people to act out violently. If you cannot understand what drives some Palestinians to blow themselves up in Israel, you must not be paying attention. That does not mean that you should accept it as right.
Obviously, we've heard one side of the story and cannot hope to understand what happened. If the facts are as Dr. Wallace wrote, it does seem strange that a friend of 20 years would suddenly fear for his life after getting an email saying the friend understood why some people resorted to political violence. None of my friends feel I am a danger to them when I speak about the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict. As well, being a friend for such a long time, I expect Dr. Wallace had at some point explained the full extent of his depression to Dr. Goldberg and that he posed no danger to his friends.
Either way, it's sad when relationships fracture so completely that long term damage results (being banned from the UCB CS department in this case).
What if it weren't so explicit to begin with? Perhaps "life" manifested itself as single-cell organisms as a first attempt at a creature capable of reacting to its surroundings. The next step was to create a creature that interacted with its environment, and through natural selection arrived at multi-cellular organisms. The further goal -- intelligent creatures capable of understanding and manipulating their environment -- drove the process to humans.
I wonder what the next evolutionary goal is. By observing history, one might conclude the next step is eradicating our environment. ;)
It was worse, then, as they got their cake and ate it too: he didn't give the talk, and they didn't have to take him to court. Totally fscked up.