Mozilla 1.4 is considered STABLE? It crashes on me fairly frequently; locks up and refuses to respond to keyboard input even more frequently; and after running for a day or so suddenly becomes painfully, glacially slow and unresponsive. Mozilla 1.4 was a giant step BACKWARD from Mozilla 1.0-1.1.
I just hope that Mozilla 1.7 actually fixes some of 1.4's bugs, instead of just cramming more features in.
Among XFree86's other problems is the apparent lack of any sort of regression testing. I only upgrade XFree86 when I'm forced to because of upgrading my Linux distribution, and over the years, about half the time this has caused something to break that used to work, causing me to lose many hours and days over the course of weeks trying to fix the problem.
"a replacement that maintains network transparency while adding many of the features that people desire "
Is one of those added features, perhaps, reliability? (It seems that every other new XFree86 release introduces some ingenious bug that sucks up several days of my life.)
> don't expect a great deal of > political support for laws to help keep > programming jobs in the U.S.
I should damn well hope not. That is the solution of the coward and a thug -- "thug" because it involves using the threat of violence (all laws are ultimately enforced by men with guns) to take out the competition, and "coward" because those proposing such thuggish methods hide behind their proxies in the legislature and law enforcement.
I have a wife and four kids and have been out of work for 2-1/2 months, but I'll clean toilets for a living before I'll stoop to threatening someone with violence to get a job.
There are 280 million people in the U.S. 50 million handicapped would mean that nearly 18% -- that is, between 1 in 6 and 1 in 5 -- of all people in the U.S. are handicapped. This number is clearly absurd.
The lecturer who quoted this figure was either a liar or mentally handicapped.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love (Robert A. Heinlein)
The inventor thinks this thing can replace cars for transportation within the city, and even talks about banning cars from the downtown area. Is he nuts? How do you bring home the groceries on one of those things? How do you take the family someplace? What about when it's raining, snowing, or just freezing cold outside?
I see them only as useful in good weather when you have only one person who has to go somewhere and doesn't have to carry much.
Typical Katz. Here we have the U.S. federal government lightly tossing the Constitution aside and turning the country into a police state with
secret military tribunals for civilians;
arbitrary search and seizure in utter disregard of the Fourth Amendment, without notification, warrant, or probable cause;
over 1000 people being arrested and held incommunicado without benefit of counsel or even being charged of any crime;
all businesses now drafted as spies for the Feds; and
torture being seriously considered as an acceptable means of extracting information from detainees.
So what is Katz worried about? U.S. businesses selling filtering software! It seems that Katz is only capable of seeing evil committed by corporations, and utterly incapable of seeing the far greater evils committed by the good ol' U.S. government.
> > I can't think of many people who have worse
> > records when it comes to undermining the Bill
> > of Rights than those two.
> Oh that's easy: Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar
> Hoover. But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with
> another two.
Well, here's one: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or have you forgotten about all the Japanese-Americans he had interned? In my reading on the subject, I was very surprised to find out that Hoover was actually on the right side of this civil liberties issue. He opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans, and told FDR that he had found no evidence of subversive activity among them. So FDR is double-damned -- he KNEW there was no danger from the Japanese-American community.
People like Ellison, with their efforts to bring us an American police state, are far more dangerous to the freedom and safety of most Americans than Bin Laden ever will be. Once the restraints of the Constitution and Bill of Rights are removed from the government, the horrors to follow will make you pine for the good old days when terrorists were all you had to worry about. Ellison and his ilk are the enemies of American freedom, and it is the patriotic duty of all Americans to oppose them in whatever way we can.
Don't buy from Oracle and don't sell to Oracle. Steer the companies you work for away from Oracle products. Dump your Oracle stock. Make a big stink if your organization is thinking of inviting Ellison to speak. If you work for Oracle, you work for the enemy; find another job. From now on, anyone who works for Ellison should be considered a social pariah.
The article sounds good to me, except for this bit:
> I'm not talking about searches at airports here.
> Searches of people or baggage for weapons, as
> long as they check only for weapons and keep no
> records about you if you have no weapons, are
> just an inconvenience; they do not endanger
> civil liberties.
Has Stallman not heard of the Fourth Amendment? According to the Fourth Amendment, government officials are only supposed to be able to search you if
1) they have probable cause, i.e., there are *specific* reasons to suspect *you* of criminal behavior;
2) they have a warrant;
3) the evidence providing probable cause for the warrant is supported by oath; and
4) the warrant describes what particular person or place is to be searched, and what *particular* things are expected to be found and seized.
Since the Constitution is the highest law of the land, any other sort of search is simply illegal.
And any time government gets away with simply ignoring one part of the Bill of Rights, this weakens the entire Bill of Rights.
Furthermore, let me point out what should be obvious: all the humiliating searches and violations of our rights that we are already enduring DIDN'T WORK. The only thing that did work -- for one of the airplanes -- was when the men on the spot resisted the terrorists instead of simply submitting as we in this cowardly society are trained to do.
So arm the pilots, arm the stewardesses, put a plainclothes air marshall on board, and if you really, truly believe in human liberty and the value of human life, allow the passengers to carry the means to defend their own lives. Only in a thoroughly disarmed and emasculated society such as ours could three or four criminals so easily prevail against an entire planeload of people.
Encryption is, of course, an important tool in the defense against out-of-control governments.
During the course of the Twentieth Century, governments deliberately killed over 170 MILLION civilians -- for the most part, their own citizens. This does not include military casualties.
In the last ten years, the U.S. government has killed 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five with its sanctions against Saddam.
The terrorists who attacked on Tuesday killed 5000.
So from which pack of murderers do we need protection the most -- terrorists or governments?
"Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of resumes but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a
``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants."
Let me shed some light on this with my own experiences. A few years ago I was working in Silicon Valley for Excite (now Excite@Home). We spent months trying to find a *qualified* person to work with me on the NewsTracker project. And, yes, we probably rejected 100 applicants without ever interviewing them. The reasons fell into these categories:
a. Lack of experience. (Eventually we had to compromise on this one).
b. Lack of qualifications for serious programming work. There are hordes of people out there who think that just because they know a little bit of HTML or have written a few Perl programs, they qualify as software engineers.
c. Lack of desired background and skills specific to the position. (Eventually we had to compromise on this, too.)
Category (b) was the most common reason for tossing applications. Most of the applicants simply weren't qualified by a long shot for the position.
According to algorithmic information theory, a bit sequence is random if the binary representation of every program that outputs the bit sequence is longer than the bit sequence itself. By this criterion, the first N digits of PI are highly non-random because there is exists a short program to compute all of them. Another way of looking at this is that the sequence of the first N digits of PI are highly compressible -- you can compress the whole thing down to the binary representation of a small program to compute those digits, and the size of this program grows at most logarithmically with N (const + representation of N).
I find these indirect indications of neutrino mass quite amusing, as they seem to be tiptoeing around some odd results found about a decade ago. I originally read about this in a science fact column by physicist John G. Cramer in Analog magazine. Some experiments were run that measured the square of the neutrino rest mass. The initial experiments had an error bar that overlapped zero, but was mostly negative. Later experiments had an error bar that lay entirely below zero. That is, within experimental error, they had measured a negative squared rest mass for the neutrino, implying an imaginary rest mass for the neutrino, which would mean that neutrinos are in fact tachyons. (Tachyons are hypothetical particles that can only go faster than light, and the higher their energy, the slower they go, so that high-energy tachyons approach the speed of light from above.)
Cramer quotes an anonymous source as saying that if the sign of these numbers had been reversed (positive instead of negative), there would have been a big press conference announcing that they had shown the neutrino to have a nonzero rest mass.
I sent email to Cramer maybe five years or so later, asking what had happened with these results. He told me that nothing had happened; there has been no followup, and nobody has shown them to be wrong.
The super-Kamiokande experiment seems to have been carefully designed to show nonzero rest mass for at least one kind of neutrino while yielding no information on the actual value of the squared rest mass (in particular, its sign.) This experiment measured only the difference in squared rest masses between two types of neutrinos. (If this difference is nonzero, then one of the two neutrino types must have a nonzero squared rest mass.) It is consistent with either a positive or negative squared rest mass.
This latest result also carefully avoids the issue of the actual value (and sign) of the squared rest mass. It appears that everybody wants to get their Nobel for showing that the neutrino has a nonzero rest mass, but nobody wants to be labeled as a crank for presenting data that would indicate the neutrino has an imaginary rest mass!
But can you debug your programs?
on
GCC 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
My problem with gcc's C++ compiler has been that there is no workable compiler for it. Gdb just falls to pieces when you try to debug C++ code (it can't find symbols, it can't handle user-defined operator overloads, sometimes it gets mixed up and gives you the wrong values for variables, etc.) Is there an update to gdb to go with the new gcc that provides reasonable support for C++?
Maybe the net magazines that Katz reads are faltering, but WorldNetDaily is doing great. The problem with Suck and Feed is that they were just more of the same old media monoculture, recycling the same old worldviews and biases of the Old Media. WorldNetDaily, on the other hand, has been
- reviving investigative journalism,
- covering many stories the "mainstream" media
won't cover,
- providing an alternative voice that has long
been missing in the Establishment media, and
- delivering more genuine political and
idealogical diversity in its columnists than
any Old Media publication.
How relevant is WorldNetDaily? It cost Al Gore the election! Its series of articles investigating law-enforcement corruption in Tennessee, and Gore's connections to the same, were widely reprinted and discussed in Tennessee, causing Gore to lose his own home state.
> However, the bad news is that the First
> Amendment's protection of speech is not
> absolute and not all speech gets the same
> amount of First Amendment protection.
>
> The amount of protection given particular
> speech depends upon it's content.
What part of "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" doesn't the Supreme Court understand? When the Constitution prohibits any law that so much as "abridges" the freedom of speech, that sounds pretty damned absolute to me.
All of these exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has carved out have no basis whatsoever in the actual text of the Constitution. You can go over the Constitution with a magnifying glass, and you won't find any trace of them. They are simply craven excuses for outright usurpation.
If anyone wants to challenge this patent, I believe I can show prior art (I haven't actually read the patent yet.) I used an MD5 checksum to check if a page had changed for the Excite Newstracker service in 1996. As virtually any competent programmer would have done...
Actually, the problem is harder than that, because you have to filter out things that change every time you access the page, like embedded banner ads, counts of how many times the page has been accessed, and so forth. Another approach I considered was to compare a vector of word counts, and consider the document unchanged if the new vector was sufficiently close to the old one.
Get a clue, and learn some statistics. One sample point tells you nothing, especially when the sample point is not randomly chosen but is instead chosen to promote a viewpoint.
> 1.That petition has been taken apart by several
> reputable Journalists
Given the rampant bias of today's journalists, especially when it comes to PC topics like global warming, I don't think this counts for much. I also note that you say "reputable" Journalists. Does this mean good ol' boy establishment journalists who always spout the party line?
> 2. I can only refer you to recent research
> results reached by European scientists studying
> ice core samples from the Greenland glacier.
And what in the world is this going to tell you
about whether or not there has been global warming over the last several decades, and whether or not any such supposed warming is due to CO2 emissions?
> 3. Not true there have been numerous "mini
iceages"
Are you incapable of simple logic? I did not say that current temperatures are colder than they have been during the ENTIRE previous 10,000 years; I said they are colder than they have been in 7,500 of the previous 10,000 years. This statement is entirely compatible with the occurrence of things like the Little Ice Age.
> 4. The Viking settlements in Greenland were
> destroyed by a rapid climate change that
> resulted in significantly colder weather than
> today. [...] The weather was warmer than to day
> when Greenland was settled.
Yes, I know all of this. The whole point is that Greenland would never have been settled in the first place under today's, colder climate. So how is any of this a rebuttal of point 4?
> 5. Partly true.
Entirely true! McCarthy's statement, so prominently featured in SlashDot (with nary a retraction), was 100% verifiably false. And which part of "during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent" are you claiming is false?
As to the separate assertion that "it is a recorded fact that the N-polar ice cap is progressively thinning," this is more science by press conference. One group of scientists funded by an agency with a vested interest in promoting global warming does a study making a claim, and it hits the headlines. Other studies may or may not back it up, or may outright contradict it, but those studies never make it into the newspapers or onto SlashDot.
I think you guys must have an axe to grind here, as you are constantly throwing so-called "proofs" of global warming at us, but you never present anything -- nothing, absolutely nothing -- of the other side of the issue. Here are some facts worth pondering:
1. In 1998, 17,000 scientists signed a petition saying, in part, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
2. Claims of global warming are based on ground-based sensors largely located near urban areas. No such temperature rise is seen in data obtained from weather stations isolated from local urban heating effects, nor in data from weather balloons nor in satellite measurements of atmosphere temperature.
3. For more than 7,500 of the last 10,000 years, temperatures have been higher than they are today.
4. Present-day temperatures are about 1 degree cooler than they were when the Vikings settled Greenland in medieval times.
5. The Times story Slashdot recently promoted about the ice pack at the North Pole melting for the first time in 50 million years was utterly wrong. The person making this claim (oceanographer James J. McCarthy) did see open water, but was speaking outside of his area of expertise. Times later ran a retraction after scientists more familiar with the Arctic's climate history pointed out that, during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent.
Finally, let's not forget that he who pays the piper calls the tunes. Global warming is the fad nowadays, and research that doesn't show the results desired by governmental or UN agencies doesn't get funded.
Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, etc. are all non-zero sum games. The players usually find that working together works out a lot better than fighting over the loot.
> The Orwellian phobia has been a staple of the
> most venal political systems in the 20th
> Century, from Nazism to fascism to Communism.
> [...]
> If a teen or a parent becomes aware that a
> classmate has a gun and plans to use it, there
> are plenty of cops and law enforcement
> officials they can call.
Why should someone call the cops just because a student "has a gun and plans to use it"? The vast majority of gun uses are entirely legitimate (hunting, target practice, self-defense). Assuming that someone is dangerously violent just because they have and use guns is exactly the kind of stereotyping and witch-hunting that Katz decries elsewhere in his article.
It's the kids who have guns and use them a lot---those who are immersed in the much-maligned "gun culture"--- who are least likely to do something stupid with a gun. Gun enthusiasts as a group are very big on gun safety rules, and many cases of police "accidentally" killing people could be avoided if police followed the same safety rules.
Slashdot Mirror
> will replace 1.4 as the new stable branch
Mozilla 1.4 is considered STABLE? It crashes on me fairly frequently; locks up and refuses to respond to keyboard input even more frequently; and after running for a day or so suddenly becomes painfully, glacially slow and unresponsive. Mozilla 1.4 was a giant step BACKWARD from Mozilla 1.0-1.1.
I just hope that Mozilla 1.7 actually fixes some of 1.4's bugs, instead of just cramming more features in.
Among XFree86's other problems is the apparent lack of any sort of regression testing. I only upgrade XFree86 when I'm forced to because of upgrading my Linux distribution, and over the years, about half the time this has caused something to break that used to work, causing me to lose many hours and days over the course of weeks trying to fix the problem.
"a replacement that maintains network transparency while adding many of the features that people desire "
Is one of those added features, perhaps, reliability? (It seems that every other new XFree86 release introduces some ingenious bug that sucks up several days of my life.)
> don't expect a great deal of
> political support for laws to help keep
> programming jobs in the U.S.
I should damn well hope not. That is the solution of the coward and a thug -- "thug" because it involves using the threat of violence (all laws are ultimately enforced by men with guns) to take out the competition, and "coward" because those proposing such thuggish methods hide behind their proxies in the legislature and law enforcement.
I have a wife and four kids and have been out of work for 2-1/2 months, but I'll clean toilets for a living before I'll stoop to threatening someone with violence to get a job.
The lecturer who quoted this figure was either a liar or mentally handicapped.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love (Robert A. Heinlein)
The inventor thinks this thing can replace cars for transportation within the city, and even talks about banning cars from the downtown area. Is he nuts? How do you bring home the groceries on one of those things? How do you take the family someplace? What about when it's raining, snowing, or just freezing cold outside?
I see them only as useful in good weather when you have only one person who has to go somewhere and doesn't have to carry much.
- secret military tribunals for civilians;
- arbitrary search and seizure in utter disregard of the Fourth Amendment, without notification, warrant, or probable cause;
- over 1000 people being arrested and held incommunicado without benefit of counsel or even being charged of any crime;
- all businesses now drafted as spies for the Feds; and
- torture being seriously considered as an acceptable means of extracting information from detainees.
So what is Katz worried about? U.S. businesses selling filtering software! It seems that Katz is only capable of seeing evil committed by corporations, and utterly incapable of seeing the far greater evils committed by the good ol' U.S. government."Send in the clones"!
> > I can't think of many people who have worse
> > records when it comes to undermining the Bill
> > of Rights than those two.
> Oh that's easy: Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar
> Hoover. But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with
> another two.
Well, here's one: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or have you forgotten about all the Japanese-Americans he had interned? In my reading on the subject, I was very surprised to find out that Hoover was actually on the right side of this civil liberties issue. He opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans, and told FDR that he had found no evidence of subversive activity among them. So FDR is double-damned -- he KNEW there was no danger from the Japanese-American community.
People like Ellison, with their efforts to bring us an American police state, are far more dangerous to the freedom and safety of most Americans than Bin Laden ever will be. Once the restraints of the Constitution and Bill of Rights are removed from the government, the horrors to follow will make you pine for the good old days when terrorists were all you had to worry about. Ellison and his ilk are the enemies of American freedom, and it is the patriotic duty of all Americans to oppose them in whatever way we can.
Don't buy from Oracle and don't sell to Oracle. Steer the companies you work for away from Oracle products. Dump your Oracle stock. Make a big stink if your organization is thinking of inviting Ellison to speak. If you work for Oracle, you work for the enemy; find another job. From now on, anyone who works for Ellison should be considered a social pariah.
The article sounds good to me, except for this bit:
> I'm not talking about searches at airports here.
> Searches of people or baggage for weapons, as
> long as they check only for weapons and keep no
> records about you if you have no weapons, are
> just an inconvenience; they do not endanger
> civil liberties.
Has Stallman not heard of the Fourth Amendment? According to the Fourth Amendment, government officials are only supposed to be able to search you if
1) they have probable cause, i.e., there are *specific* reasons to suspect *you* of criminal behavior;
2) they have a warrant;
3) the evidence providing probable cause for the warrant is supported by oath; and
4) the warrant describes what particular person or place is to be searched, and what *particular* things are expected to be found and seized.
Since the Constitution is the highest law of the land, any other sort of search is simply illegal.
And any time government gets away with simply ignoring one part of the Bill of Rights, this weakens the entire Bill of Rights.
Furthermore, let me point out what should be obvious: all the humiliating searches and violations of our rights that we are already enduring DIDN'T WORK. The only thing that did work -- for one of the airplanes -- was when the men on the spot resisted the terrorists instead of simply submitting as we in this cowardly society are trained to do.
So arm the pilots, arm the stewardesses, put a plainclothes air marshall on board, and if you really, truly believe in human liberty and the value of human life, allow the passengers to carry the means to defend their own lives. Only in a thoroughly disarmed and emasculated society such as ours could three or four criminals so easily prevail against an entire planeload of people.
Encryption is, of course, an important tool in the defense against out-of-control governments.
During the course of the Twentieth Century, governments deliberately killed over 170 MILLION civilians -- for the most part, their own citizens. This does not include military casualties.
In the last ten years, the U.S. government has killed 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five with its sanctions against Saddam.
The terrorists who attacked on Tuesday killed 5000.
So from which pack of murderers do we need protection the most -- terrorists or governments?
The author states,
"Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of resumes but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a
``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants."
Let me shed some light on this with my own experiences. A few years ago I was working in Silicon Valley for Excite (now Excite@Home). We spent months trying to find a *qualified* person to work with me on the NewsTracker project. And, yes, we probably rejected 100 applicants without ever interviewing them. The reasons fell into these categories:
a. Lack of experience. (Eventually we had to compromise on this one).
b. Lack of qualifications for serious programming work. There are hordes of people out there who think that just because they know a little bit of HTML or have written a few Perl programs, they qualify as software engineers.
c. Lack of desired background and skills specific to the position. (Eventually we had to compromise on this, too.)
Category (b) was the most common reason for tossing applications. Most of the applicants simply weren't qualified by a long shot for the position.
According to algorithmic information theory, a bit sequence is random if the binary representation of every program that outputs the bit sequence is longer than the bit sequence itself. By this criterion, the first N digits of PI are highly non-random because there is exists a short program to compute all of them. Another way of looking at this is that the sequence of the first N digits of PI are highly compressible -- you can compress the whole thing down to the binary representation of a small program to compute those digits, and the size of this program grows at most logarithmically with N (const + representation of N).
So, in other words, Linus is proposing an ABM (Annoying Boot Message) treaty?
Cramer quotes an anonymous source as saying that if the sign of these numbers had been reversed (positive instead of negative), there would have been a big press conference announcing that they had shown the neutrino to have a nonzero rest mass.
I sent email to Cramer maybe five years or so later, asking what had happened with these results. He told me that nothing had happened; there has been no followup, and nobody has shown them to be wrong.
The super-Kamiokande experiment seems to have been carefully designed to show nonzero rest mass for at least one kind of neutrino while yielding no information on the actual value of the squared rest mass (in particular, its sign.) This experiment measured only the difference in squared rest masses between two types of neutrinos. (If this difference is nonzero, then one of the two neutrino types must have a nonzero squared rest mass.) It is consistent with either a positive or negative squared rest mass.
This latest result also carefully avoids the issue of the actual value (and sign) of the squared rest mass. It appears that everybody wants to get their Nobel for showing that the neutrino has a nonzero rest mass, but nobody wants to be labeled as a crank for presenting data that would indicate the neutrino has an imaginary rest mass!
My problem with gcc's C++ compiler has been that there is no workable compiler for it. Gdb just falls to pieces when you try to debug C++ code (it can't find symbols, it can't handle user-defined operator overloads, sometimes it gets mixed up and gives you the wrong values for variables, etc.) Is there an update to gdb to go with the new gcc that provides reasonable support for C++?
Maybe the net magazines that Katz reads are faltering, but WorldNetDaily is doing great. The problem with Suck and Feed is that they were just more of the same old media monoculture, recycling the same old worldviews and biases of the Old Media. WorldNetDaily, on the other hand, has been
- reviving investigative journalism,
- covering many stories the "mainstream" media
won't cover,
- providing an alternative voice that has long
been missing in the Establishment media, and
- delivering more genuine political and
idealogical diversity in its columnists than
any Old Media publication.
How relevant is WorldNetDaily? It cost Al Gore the election! Its series of articles investigating law-enforcement corruption in Tennessee, and Gore's connections to the same, were widely reprinted and discussed in Tennessee, causing Gore to lose his own home state.
> However, the bad news is that the First
> Amendment's protection of speech is not
> absolute and not all speech gets the same
> amount of First Amendment protection.
>
> The amount of protection given particular
> speech depends upon it's content.
What part of "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" doesn't the Supreme Court understand? When the Constitution prohibits any law that so much as "abridges" the freedom of speech, that sounds pretty damned absolute to me.
All of these exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has carved out have no basis whatsoever in the actual text of the Constitution. You can go over the Constitution with a magnifying glass, and you won't find any trace of them. They are simply craven excuses for outright usurpation.
If anyone wants to challenge this patent, I believe I can show prior art (I haven't actually read the patent yet.) I used an MD5 checksum to check if a page had changed for the Excite Newstracker service in 1996. As virtually any competent programmer would have done...
Actually, the problem is harder than that, because you have to filter out things that change every time you access the page, like embedded banner ads, counts of how many times the page has been accessed, and so forth. Another approach I considered was to compare a vector of word counts, and consider the document unchanged if the new vector was sufficiently close to the old one.
Get a clue, and learn some statistics. One sample point tells you nothing, especially when the sample point is not randomly chosen but is instead chosen to promote a viewpoint.
> 1.That petition has been taken apart by several
> reputable Journalists
Given the rampant bias of today's journalists, especially when it comes to PC topics like global warming, I don't think this counts for much. I also note that you say "reputable" Journalists. Does this mean good ol' boy establishment journalists who always spout the party line?
> 2. I can only refer you to recent research
> results reached by European scientists studying
> ice core samples from the Greenland glacier.
And what in the world is this going to tell you
about whether or not there has been global warming over the last several decades, and whether or not any such supposed warming is due to CO2 emissions?
> 3. Not true there have been numerous "mini
iceages"
Are you incapable of simple logic? I did not say that current temperatures are colder than they have been during the ENTIRE previous 10,000 years; I said they are colder than they have been in 7,500 of the previous 10,000 years. This statement is entirely compatible with the occurrence of things like the Little Ice Age.
> 4. The Viking settlements in Greenland were
> destroyed by a rapid climate change that
> resulted in significantly colder weather than
> today. [...] The weather was warmer than to day
> when Greenland was settled.
Yes, I know all of this. The whole point is that Greenland would never have been settled in the first place under today's, colder climate. So how is any of this a rebuttal of point 4?
> 5. Partly true.
Entirely true! McCarthy's statement, so prominently featured in SlashDot (with nary a retraction), was 100% verifiably false. And which part of "during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent" are you claiming is false?
As to the separate assertion that "it is a recorded fact that the N-polar ice cap is progressively thinning," this is more science by press conference. One group of scientists funded by an agency with a vested interest in promoting global warming does a study making a claim, and it hits the headlines. Other studies may or may not back it up, or may outright contradict it, but those studies never make it into the newspapers or onto SlashDot.
I think you guys must have an axe to grind here, as you are constantly throwing so-called "proofs" of global warming at us, but you never present anything -- nothing, absolutely nothing -- of the other side of the issue. Here are some facts worth pondering:
1. In 1998, 17,000 scientists signed a petition saying, in part, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
2. Claims of global warming are based on ground-based sensors largely located near urban areas. No such temperature rise is seen in data obtained from weather stations isolated from local urban heating effects, nor in data from weather balloons nor in satellite measurements of atmosphere temperature.
3. For more than 7,500 of the last 10,000 years, temperatures have been higher than they are today.
4. Present-day temperatures are about 1 degree cooler than they were when the Vikings settled Greenland in medieval times.
5. The Times story Slashdot recently promoted about the ice pack at the North Pole melting for the first time in 50 million years was utterly wrong. The person making this claim (oceanographer James J. McCarthy) did see open water, but was speaking outside of his area of expertise. Times later ran a retraction after scientists more familiar with the Arctic's climate history pointed out that, during the summer, more than 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is free of ice and it is not rare that the North Pole is part of that 10 percent.
Finally, let's not forget that he who pays the piper calls the tunes. Global warming is the fad nowadays, and research that doesn't show the results desired by governmental or UN agencies doesn't get funded.
Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, etc. are all non-zero sum games. The players usually find that working together works out a lot better than fighting over the loot.
> The Orwellian phobia has been a staple of the
> most venal political systems in the 20th
> Century, from Nazism to fascism to Communism.
> [...]
> If a teen or a parent becomes aware that a
> classmate has a gun and plans to use it, there
> are plenty of cops and law enforcement
> officials they can call.
Why should someone call the cops just because a student "has a gun and plans to use it"? The vast majority of gun uses are entirely legitimate (hunting, target practice, self-defense). Assuming that someone is dangerously violent just because they have and use guns is exactly the kind of stereotyping and witch-hunting that Katz decries elsewhere in his article.
It's the kids who have guns and use them a lot---those who are immersed in the much-maligned "gun culture"--- who are least likely to do something stupid with a gun. Gun enthusiasts as a group are very big on gun safety rules, and many cases of police "accidentally" killing people could be avoided if police followed the same safety rules.