They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.
I believe you are mistaken on this point. International law and the current US ROE most certainly allow one to fire on a retreating enemy target until they law down their arms and equipment and surrender. A duty to allow enemy troops to retreat with their weapons and equipment intact in order to regroup and attack again at some future time makes absolutely no sense. Customary international law (according to the Red Cross) states it this way:
http://www.icrc.org/IHL.nsf/WebART/612-047?OpenDocument Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognised as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:
(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;
(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or
(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender; provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape
All of this is moot, of course, if the man is not properly an enemy target to begin with, a question I take no position on here because it is a factual dispute and I just wanted to post on the law as I understand it. I'm not at all claiming that it was proper to attack these folks, only that armed retreat is not and has never been grounds for protection under the laws of war. To claim protection, a combatant must lay down his arms and cease trying to escape.
(1) limit our granting of civil rights to actual, real people, and
Are you sure you want to do this? There are a lot of important civil rights ruling regarding corporations. Just off the top of my head.
Dartmouth College v. Woodward -- asserting that the College has the right to a binding charter that the government cannot alter at will New York Times v. United States -- asserting the first amendment right to publish the Pentagon Papers New York Times v. Sullivan -- asserting that defamation/libel has to be for willful or deliberate falsehood Near v. Minnesota -- "Morally scandalous" not a good reason to shut down a newspaper Hustler Magazine v. Falwell -- parodies of public figures which could not reasonably be taken as true are protected by the First Amendment
In all those cases, it would be pretty laughable if the government asserted that because the plaintiff is not an 'actual real person' they don't have constitutional rights.
And none of these are more important than my time. Sure, they're useful to have in the background, but the priority should always be where the user's attention is.
And I'm saying that the first time you have to spend 45 seconds thinking about which folder you put that document in or where that configuration file is, you will already be losing (timewise) to the OS that indexes and lets the user just type the name into a search bar. That's a huge productivity gain.
I don't care about performance, I care about UI latency. Whatever I'm doing at the computer only I use is by definition the most important job the computer has at the moment. Shame nobody in the OS design business realizes this.
Which is why Linux, Windows and OSX recently included IO priority scheduling. OS designers care, but they aren't going to sacrifice functionality to make it happen.
UI latency is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, it's just not the *only* thing that should inform design choices. I reckon most users would prefer a full-featured system with indexing and VSC than one that's a bit faster.
I'm serious. If MS-DOS has a faster response time on 4 MHz than your OS on a dual core, you fucked up.
Or, MS-DOS isn't indexing my files, grabbing my RSS feeds, making snapshot backups, checking for updates, seeding the iso I downloaded using bittorrent, compositing a desktop, staying logged into chat applications and folding a protein for science in the background. I *like* all these things, that's why I have them running.
Most of the time, the priority system means that the response time isn't too harshly affected by these background tasks but yes, occasionally I'll open Photoshop while something else is thrashing the disk and it will take a few seconds longer than usual. To me, this is a small price to pay, especially because of the immense amount of time that automated indexing & backup saves me ("where is that file? I don't care, type the name into the search box and there it is" saves more than application launch time could ever cost).
I have no idea why "modern" operating systems would want to revert back to the stone age just to satisfy your desire for a slightly better performance when even the most bloated (cough, Vista, cough) perform acceptably and are just so much more useful. Slashdot sometimes feels like a bizarre neo-luddite convention -- the kind of folks that in the 80s railed against structured programming in favor of their original FORTRAN66 because C was too fancy for them. Feature-rich OSes are a Good Thing, we like the features (of course, you are free to roll your own Gentoo install if you want that super-clean feel, I do that for a few performance critical servers actually)./rant (sorry, mod me into oblivion if you want, but the OP was +4 insightful and I can't let that slide).
So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.
Hardware is generally cheaper than developers -- especially the really rare MySQL wizard that groks the SELECT procedure deeply enough to be able to rewrite them to use fewer disk seeks. That kind of talent is expensive if you can even find and hire it (and pray you don't get some poser that has no idea what he's doing).
I was just casually browsing this article because I don't know much about DBs, but if you tell me that there's a problem that can be solved by throwing more hardware at the problem or hiring a very skilled optimizing DBA, I would take hardware 19 times out of 20. I'm not disputing the software solution is technically feasible, just that it seems like a risky bet.
You cannot keep creating law after law that go against the wishes of the majority of the people without unwanted consequences.
Truth be told, these laws aren't as unpopular IRL as we here on/. might like. Opposition runs deep but not particularly wide, especially when talking about violent video games and pornographic material (as distinguished from the short-lived attempt to censor anonymous political speech).
I think we all (myself included) have an unfortunate tendency to imagine that the majority of people agree with our most deeply held positions because we want to believe it. Regretfully, it ain't always so. The sooner we acknowledge that fact, the sooner we can get on the real business of trying to forge an opposition consensus that can make a real difference. Doing so requires articulating an alternative compromise position that is capable of getting widespread support, even if it means tepid support from the more committed -- broad and shallow usually wins against narrow and deep (as it should in a democratic situation -- feeling strongly on an issue does not grant you more votes).
In concrete terms, the creation of an 'AO' analog for Aussie video game ratings (with appropriate strictures on sale to minors) is probably the first step. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to buy games you like, this would make it legal to post screenshots and other related content online. Such an arrangement is very far from ideal, of course, but it's a realistic short-term goal and has the dual benefits that it's an easy consensus builder while letting us test the waters to see how far we can go in the long term.
[Move to Canada] and enjoy universal health care for about $100 per month for a family of 4, unless you can show economic hardship, and then it's free.
With all due respect, and I really don't mean this as a troll, but you aren't just paying $100 a month -- you simply cannot afford any medical system for that sum (even if you weren't screwed like the States into paying stupid large administrative costs) . In reality, a large fraction of the money for the health care system comes from taxes which you are ultimately going to pay.
I am a big proponent of some form of public healthcare but I dislike the fact that many of the people here in the US that are arguing for it will not acknowledge that it's simply going to expensive. They point to the naive out-of-pocket expense in Canada or The Netherlands without acknowledging the true cost of the system in the form of higher taxes. My position is that we can and should afford such expense but one does not do any favors to the debate by dissembling about the cost. If anything, it's ammunition to opponents that can point to your dishonesty in selling the plan.
There is no free lunch and there is definitely no first-world healthcare for $100/family/month. The closer figure it probably $650/family/month. Again, I believe it's a fine way to spend that money (and we are affluent enough to afford it) so I'm not approaching this from a position of ideological opposition, only one of demanding honesty from everyone.
Unless you wear gloves whenever you are out in public, your fingerprints are widely available -- on door handles, coffee cups, newspapers, pens, resumes, handrails, elevator buttons, ATM keypads... Modern techniques are amazingly effective at reconstructing very detailed prints from sources that you would think would be compromised (see, e.g. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/22/1245243), especially if they can collect a few of them.
The conceit that this is private information does not at all compute in my mind. How can something that you literally leave everywhere you go be private? Fingerprints are no different that the outside of your clothes or the shape of your face -- they are freely observable to anyone that wants to know them. Nor are they particularly personal in any sense, being just a random collection of ridges that don't reveal any intimate details about your life (palm readers notwithstanding).
Finally, these factors go against using them as any kind of 'secure' biometric authentication. If anyone can grab my prints just by following me an picking up my trash, I would prefer that they can't make a mold to deplete my bank account. Iris scanning seems much more appropriate in situations where we want verifiable authentication.
Sorry, I was unclear and you are absolutely correct -- efficiency often makes sense if the cost of the upgrade is less than the price of expected future energy saved. I really didn't mean to insult your work which is surely (long-run) profitable for the company -- in fact, as you said it was good business even without CO2 markets.
I was referring to the sort of government "green jobs" programs like that in Spain in which there are subsidies/penalties/carbon-taxes that distort the market and cause industries to spend money on efficiency programs that are not favorable solely based on the cost of energy (or, more likely, move to a more friendly jurisdiction). In the case of Spain, this was partially accomplished by regulatory measures that greatly increased the cost of electrical power over the price it would have otherwise been.
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation? One of the good things about "doing something about climate change" is that even if we turn out to be wrong (and it doesn't look like we are, but just for the sake of argument) then all of those things haven;t done any harm whatsoever, unless you count breaking the grip of the fossil fuel industry and energy companies who are relying on super cheap coal.
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently. We will have build carbon-capture facilities that are entirely useless. We will have researched efficiency technologies of less utility than we thought. We will have built homes/businesses/cars that are more expensive than they needed to be because we improperly calculated the cost of future energy input. We will have made our major industries less competitive by pointlessly reducing their carbon output.
These technologies that don't come for free -- any effort expended in making something less carbon-intensive necessarily either raises the price (thus denying us the money to spend elsewhere) or reduces some other desirable trait (houses with less open space, cars with less HP). To the extent that efficiency is favorable, there's no reason that consumers wouldn't already go for it (indeed, with rising energy prices that problem has solved itself to a large extent).
Secondly, it's not "energy companies" that rely on super cheap coal but rather it's the consumers that do. Energy companies are only an intermediary who respond to market pressure to provide what the consumer demands. I happen to be quite grateful for the fossil fuel industry -- they have made possible the largest increase in human utility in the history of mankind. Each washer/dryer, for instance, saves thousands of man-hours of effort per year -- allowing us to spend more time on other things. I was talking to my mother the other day (yeah yeah, stupid anecdote follows) and she was remembering how her mother used to sew together torn socks when she was a child (1940s). Think about that for a second -- our time is so much more valuable now that we wouldn't dream of repairing a sock. It's a testament to how much "wealthier", in relative terms, we've become that repairing socks is now beneath us -- made possible of course by the use of a fossil-fuel powered economy.
Finally, looking practically at the experience in Spain gives me shudders. They lost 2 manufacturing jobs for every green job they created and they artificially priced electrical power way over market price which drove business elsewhere. http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf [PDF WARNING]
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
On that, I can agree with you, but for geopolitical, not environmental reasons. That said, no reason not to form a coalition, eh?
Yes, living wills, and informing your loved ones to remove you from life support in such cases are very important. But as the Schivo case proved, it doesn't really matter when religious politics become involved. Your living will is only as valid as the willingness of your relatives to honor it.
Schiavo did NOT have a living will, which was the cause of the interminable legal wrangling. Had she clearly designated someone to exercise medical power of attorney, there would have been no controversy. Instead, the Florida default rules it fell to her husband who claimed that she had orally represented to him that she did not want to be kept alive in such a case. Her parents claimed that she would not have, given her religious faith. "Religious politics" had nothing to do with it. Quoting Wikipedia (my emphasis)
Given the lack of a living will, a trial was held during the week of January 24, 2000, to determine what Schiavo's wishes would have been regarding life-prolonging procedures. Testimony from eighteen witnesses regarding her medical condition and her end-of-life wishes was heard. Michael claimed that Schiavo would not want to be kept on a machine where her chance for recovery was minuscule, her parents claimed that Schiavo was a devout Roman Catholic who would not wish to violate the Church's teachings on euthanasia by refusing nutrition and hydration.
Honestly, the case really boils down to that -- who do we believe is best qualified to take an essentially random guess about what a person would want. Ideologues on both sides tried to make it into more than that but it just wasn't. If she was genuinely religious and would have wanted to be kept alive, we should have kept her alive. If she would have wanted to die, we should have let her die. The resolution of this essentially factual question (in the absence of any reliable evidence) neatly solves the entire affair.
To summarize, if we can learn anything from the whole shitfest, please leave notarized documentation of your desires. Not even for yourself (although that should be motivation enough) but so your loved ones can feel confident in your wishes instead of being forced to guess. That is not a burden I would wish on the people that care about me, nor do I think it's fair to give them that responsibility. The document does not have to be complicated or expensive -- it can be as simple as designating a person to chose for you.
You do NOT turn off the car - this could lock your wheel
Steering wheels do not lock until you remove the key from the car altogether. Try it when you get into your car next. Pull the key out, turn the wheel until it locks and then put the key back and turn to the ACC position (not the ON position where it would be during normal operation) and see that it unlocks the wheel. Maybe Toyotas are different, but I doubt it.
The problem with putting the car in neutral with the throttle stuck is that you are going to be redlining your engine with no resistance, which is less than good for it. I'd rather not damage or destroy my engine if not absolutely necessary (although I suppose Toyota would kick in for a new one). Plus, if the engine blows a seal or seizes, you aren't going to have power steering or brakes anyway.
Finally, a person of moderate strength is still capable of braking from highway speeds without power assist. It's not an easy as with assist but neither does it require superhuman strength.
First, of course get your car serviced if it's part of the official recall. That's a gimme.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE. Yes, you will lose power steering and brakes -- this is still preferable to attempting to drive the car at 100MPH until it runs out of gas. This didn't seem too difficult to me, but apparently a State Trooper in CA decided to call 911 before taking this rather obvious step.
The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego. The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: "We're in a Lexus... we're going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck... we're in trouble... there's no brakes... we're approaching the intersection... hold on... hold on and pray... pray..." The call ended with the sound of a crash.
I know it's not kind to speak ill of the dead, and I understand that it wasn't their fault that their car was fatally defective (and Toyota is completely at fault) but it's hard for me to comprehend how someone could fail to deduce the rather straightforward solution to their problem -- car is going too fast => stop the engine. This has really been boggling my mind for the past week as these incidents pile up -- if someone can explain this to me, I'll be eternally grateful.
As the games are BROADCASTED to the PUBLIC open and free, doesn't that make any copyright null and void?
Whatever the intellectual merits of that theory, it is most certainly not the case under the current state of US law that public broadcast necessarily implies release to the public domain.
As for sports bars, they're a business encouraging a large number of willing viewers to watch someone else's advertising revenue supported content. Of course they should be compensated.
There. Fixed that for ya.
No, you didn't. Trademark (and any economic right) is not contingent upon what you judge will be beneficial for the holder of the trademark even if your judgment is the best possible one given the empirical evidence. So the argument "but it's good for them", no matter how true, is simply inapt -- it is not the right criterion on which to judge the legality of the action.
For instance, the term "Linux" is trademarked to the Linux foundation, meaning I cannot use it commercially to designate my product unless that foundation appropriately sub-licenses it (see, e.g. http://www.linuxmark.org/faq.php). I cannot call my product WrathLinux and sell it for a profit without a license, irrespective of any arguments, true or otherwise, about whether the distribution of this product is "good" for Linux or not. The same goes for copyrights. I may not violate the GPL in redistributing WrathLinux irrespective of arguments that doing so is beneficial for Linux.
Instead, I must convince the proper rights holder that what I'm doing really is to their benefit, in which case that can grant me a license (in the case of the GPL this is practically impossible but dual-licensing of some software is seen). That is, the rights holder has the final say about whether that behavior is actually beneficial.
In the Super Bowl case, it's evident the NFL does not consider this beneficial. Whether or not that is wise, that is properly their decision to make. Arguments that they are deciding poorly are not equivalent to arguments that they do not have the right to make the decision.
One should not have to be tolerant against the religious myths of our ancestors taught as "the truth" and "real history".
In 1943, a group of Jehovah's witnesses sued that State of West Virginia for the right not to salute the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=319&invol=624#Scene_1). The State responded, much as you have here, that it has every right to reeducate those backwards religious nuts 'for the purpose of teaching, fostering and perpetuating the ideals, principles and spirit of Americanism, and increasing the knowledge of the organization and machinery of the government.' For those not familiar with the history of JW in the US, there was a longstanding hostility towards their religion on the grounds that it is insufficiently patriotic. The fact that this law was passed in 1940, in the middle of a World War in which JWs were refusing to be drafted should give some context.
Anyway, the reason I get into this whole long spiel is that it was in this case that Justice Jackson wrote what might be the most stirring defense of the US right to conscience ever written:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
I do not agree with every belief that animates HSers (that's not even possible, having known socialist HSers that believed the schools were controlled by corporate interests and capitalist HSers that believed the schools were controlled by socialist teacher's unions) but I do believe strongly in their right to educate their children according to their beliefs.
I also happen to work in life-sciences and I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the creationist story taught to some home-schooled children is quite simply untrue. On the other hand, it seems quite clear to me that just because I have a degree and wear a lab coat does not entitle me to dictate by force to others what to teach their children. The best I can do (and continue to do) is develop the evidence that drives reasonable men towards the best conclusion. Ultimately, since my position is quite likely correct, such force will not be necessary. Meanwhile, bearing the burden of persuasion is a strong incentive to stay honest.
Finally (since the post was meant to be a short citation and exploded into a morning-killer), here's another oldie-but-goodie from the Supreme Court on what the protection of liberty means. In this instance, the State of Nebraska made it a crime to teach a child under the grade of 8 in any language other than English (motivated by a desire to Americanize recent German immigrants that had this inexplicable preference for their mother tongue over the obviously superior English language):
Without doubt, it [the liberty protected by the Constitution] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
The only reasonable solution to reduce vulnerability in the wild is to publicly expose the issues to force vendor resolution more quickly. Seems counterintuitive, but it does work.
While that seems reasonable if the vendor either doesn't care or is dragging along on a fix, in this case they didn't even tell the vendor in the first place. Perhaps it's unlikely that DLINK would have responded to the security company but it seems they deserved a chance to do the right thing. It's not that disclosure is wrong, it's just that it's wrong at that stage of the game -- they would have lost nothing by trying to cooperate with D-Link and only disclosing if those lesser steps failed (or took too long). Plus, think about how much worse it sounds:
"Here's a huge vulnerability that we discovered but didn't tell anyone until now. Surprise!"
versus
"Here's a huge vulnerability that we discovered. We went to D-Link 3-4 weeks ago and they wouldn't give us the time of day. Finally, we go through to someone that assigned it a low-priority and has been promising a fix but not delivering. At this point, we are tired of hearing their excuses and we don't think they are interested in fixing it so we are disclosing it."
TL;DR version: Public disclosure is the last resort, not the first. Carrot first, stick second.
dlink wouldve done jack shit like every other company without being publicly humiliated.
Yes, but it would have been even more humiliating to say "We provided them with an exploit 4 weeks ago and they still haven't done shit, so now we are going public". That has the added advantage of giving them the chance to do the right thing, even if they don't take it and makes them look like douches instead of the security company.
Who cares what the American law says ? Its built by CERN, its in the France-Switzerland border...
A US Court could: (1) Order all US citizens (over which there is personal jurisdiction) to immediately cease work on it. (2) Order US funding agencies not to release money to the project. (3) Order US-based suppliers not to provide supplies. (4) Order non-US-based suppliers with significant assets in the US not to provide supplies.
Of course, I don't think that any court would do such things, but courts in all countries have always found ways to leverage their power. The British kangaroo system of libel law is a prime example.
In real terms, that involves raising the level of education and the quality of life in all parts of the globe to the point where there are no large groups of people who are still so poor that they have nothing to lose, or so ignorant that they have nothing to believe in beyond what their local preacher tells them.
It's hard to square this advice with the fact that most terrorists are college-educated. Bin laden was an engineer from a wealth family, Mohamed Atta had a PHD in urban engineering, KSM has a degree in mechanical engineering, Ayman al-Zawahiri was a surgeon from a wealthy family, Abdulmutallab was a mechanical engineer from a very wealthy family. The Israelis have had the same experience with the PLO & Hamas -- the more educated and affluent tend to be over-represented, especially engineers and doctors (this was discussed on/. a little while ago). When in the Global Attitudes Project, respondents who were more educated or higher income were more likely to say that suicide bombings carried out against Westerners were justified.
Even more bizarrely, most terrorists come from the wealthier nations in the area, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, despite the fact that they enjoy a much higher per-capita GDP, standard of living and education systems than places like Somalia, Sudan or Indonesia. The better their lives, the more they seem to gravitate towards violent extremism. There are a number of plausible explanations for this, my favorite is that military/political influence is luxury good and those that are in abject poverty are effectively apolitical since they have no labor to spare from making ends meet. There is also the point that since terrorist networks are fragile they must only recruit the most competent and self-sufficient.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't promote education and economic growth as worth goals, but the idea that terrorism is born from a lack of opportunity is plainly in conflict with the facts. Terrorists tend to be educated (quite often Western-educated which not a good mark on our schools) and more wealthy than then unwashed, apolitical, masses in the third world.
Seems to me then that they should require a warrant for anything that it wouldn't be out of place or illegal for a normal citizen to use on someone else's house, which I think would be a good place to put the line.
That would be less protection that you currently have, though. For instance, it is entirely legal for a citizen to use a thermal imager on anyone's house (provided they did so from the street without trespassing) while it is illegal for the police to do so (without a warrant).
A good parallel technology would be binoculars or a telescope. Which is likely legal for police to use in many areas, but of questionable legality if a citizen uses it on someone else's home.
Nope, it's perfectly legal for anyone to point binoculars at your house, again, provided they do so from a place they are legally entitled to be. Same for parabolic microphones.
You just made it illegal for the cops to use their eyes.
Indeed. The legal position that the police may observe from a public vantage point goes back way back in Anglo common law.
Visual surveillance was unquestionably lawful because " `the eye cannot by the laws of England be guilty of a trespass.' " Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 628 (1886) (quoting Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K. B. 1765)).
More wryly put:
"[t]he Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares."
Any theory of the 4A that does not reach the result is at odds with history and highly unlikely to be adopted by an US Court.
Slashdot Mirror
Using condoms isn't a crime for anyone
is a crime for >80% of the high school students in your state.
See 948.02 for the under-16 case and 940.09 for the over-16 but under-18 case.
http://www.legis.state.wi.us/statutes/Stat0948.pdf [PDF]
http://law.marquette.edu/lawreview/Spring%202006/Olszewski.pdf [PDF]
They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.
I believe you are mistaken on this point. International law and the current US ROE most certainly allow one to fire on a retreating enemy target until they law down their arms and equipment and surrender. A duty to allow enemy troops to retreat with their weapons and equipment intact in order to regroup and attack again at some future time makes absolutely no sense. Customary international law (according to the Red Cross) states it this way:
http://www.icrc.org/IHL.nsf/WebART/612-047?OpenDocument
Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognised as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:
(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;
(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or
(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender; provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape
All of this is moot, of course, if the man is not properly an enemy target to begin with, a question I take no position on here because it is a factual dispute and I just wanted to post on the law as I understand it. I'm not at all claiming that it was proper to attack these folks, only that armed retreat is not and has never been grounds for protection under the laws of war. To claim protection, a combatant must lay down his arms and cease trying to escape.
See also:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19910227&id=rnQfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OPEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5146,4465272
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19910227&id=7k8eAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XscEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1239,3716450
(1) limit our granting of civil rights to actual, real people, and
Are you sure you want to do this? There are a lot of important civil rights ruling regarding corporations. Just off the top of my head.
Dartmouth College v. Woodward -- asserting that the College has the right to a binding charter that the government cannot alter at will
New York Times v. United States -- asserting the first amendment right to publish the Pentagon Papers
New York Times v. Sullivan -- asserting that defamation/libel has to be for willful or deliberate falsehood
Near v. Minnesota -- "Morally scandalous" not a good reason to shut down a newspaper
Hustler Magazine v. Falwell -- parodies of public figures which could not reasonably be taken as true are protected by the First Amendment
In all those cases, it would be pretty laughable if the government asserted that because the plaintiff is not an 'actual real person' they don't have constitutional rights.
And none of these are more important than my time. Sure, they're useful to have in the background, but the priority should always be where the user's attention is.
And I'm saying that the first time you have to spend 45 seconds thinking about which folder you put that document in or where that configuration file is, you will already be losing (timewise) to the OS that indexes and lets the user just type the name into a search bar. That's a huge productivity gain.
I don't care about performance, I care about UI latency. Whatever I'm doing at the computer only I use is by definition the most important job the computer has at the moment. Shame nobody in the OS design business realizes this.
Which is why Linux, Windows and OSX recently included IO priority scheduling. OS designers care, but they aren't going to sacrifice functionality to make it happen.
UI latency is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, it's just not the *only* thing that should inform design choices. I reckon most users would prefer a full-featured system with indexing and VSC than one that's a bit faster.
I'm serious. If MS-DOS has a faster response time on 4 MHz than your OS on a dual core, you fucked up.
Or, MS-DOS isn't indexing my files, grabbing my RSS feeds, making snapshot backups, checking for updates, seeding the iso I downloaded using bittorrent, compositing a desktop, staying logged into chat applications and folding a protein for science in the background. I *like* all these things, that's why I have them running.
Most of the time, the priority system means that the response time isn't too harshly affected by these background tasks but yes, occasionally I'll open Photoshop while something else is thrashing the disk and it will take a few seconds longer than usual. To me, this is a small price to pay, especially because of the immense amount of time that automated indexing & backup saves me ("where is that file? I don't care, type the name into the search box and there it is" saves more than application launch time could ever cost).
I have no idea why "modern" operating systems would want to revert back to the stone age just to satisfy your desire for a slightly better performance when even the most bloated (cough, Vista, cough) perform acceptably and are just so much more useful. Slashdot sometimes feels like a bizarre neo-luddite convention -- the kind of folks that in the 80s railed against structured programming in favor of their original FORTRAN66 because C was too fancy for them. Feature-rich OSes are a Good Thing, we like the features (of course, you are free to roll your own Gentoo install if you want that super-clean feel, I do that for a few performance critical servers actually). /rant (sorry, mod me into oblivion if you want, but the OP was +4 insightful and I can't let that slide).
So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.
Hardware is generally cheaper than developers -- especially the really rare MySQL wizard that groks the SELECT procedure deeply enough to be able to rewrite them to use fewer disk seeks. That kind of talent is expensive if you can even find and hire it (and pray you don't get some poser that has no idea what he's doing).
I was just casually browsing this article because I don't know much about DBs, but if you tell me that there's a problem that can be solved by throwing more hardware at the problem or hiring a very skilled optimizing DBA, I would take hardware 19 times out of 20. I'm not disputing the software solution is technically feasible, just that it seems like a risky bet.
You cannot keep creating law after law that go against the wishes of the majority of the people without unwanted consequences.
Truth be told, these laws aren't as unpopular IRL as we here on /. might like. Opposition runs deep but not particularly wide, especially when talking about violent video games and pornographic material (as distinguished from the short-lived attempt to censor anonymous political speech).
I think we all (myself included) have an unfortunate tendency to imagine that the majority of people agree with our most deeply held positions because we want to believe it. Regretfully, it ain't always so. The sooner we acknowledge that fact, the sooner we can get on the real business of trying to forge an opposition consensus that can make a real difference. Doing so requires articulating an alternative compromise position that is capable of getting widespread support, even if it means tepid support from the more committed -- broad and shallow usually wins against narrow and deep (as it should in a democratic situation -- feeling strongly on an issue does not grant you more votes).
In concrete terms, the creation of an 'AO' analog for Aussie video game ratings (with appropriate strictures on sale to minors) is probably the first step. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to buy games you like, this would make it legal to post screenshots and other related content online. Such an arrangement is very far from ideal, of course, but it's a realistic short-term goal and has the dual benefits that it's an easy consensus builder while letting us test the waters to see how far we can go in the long term.
[Move to Canada] and enjoy universal health care for about $100 per month for a family of 4, unless you can show economic hardship, and then it's free.
With all due respect, and I really don't mean this as a troll, but you aren't just paying $100 a month -- you simply cannot afford any medical system for that sum (even if you weren't screwed like the States into paying stupid large administrative costs) . In reality, a large fraction of the money for the health care system comes from taxes which you are ultimately going to pay.
I am a big proponent of some form of public healthcare but I dislike the fact that many of the people here in the US that are arguing for it will not acknowledge that it's simply going to expensive. They point to the naive out-of-pocket expense in Canada or The Netherlands without acknowledging the true cost of the system in the form of higher taxes. My position is that we can and should afford such expense but one does not do any favors to the debate by dissembling about the cost. If anything, it's ammunition to opponents that can point to your dishonesty in selling the plan.
There is no free lunch and there is definitely no first-world healthcare for $100/family/month. The closer figure it probably $650/family/month. Again, I believe it's a fine way to spend that money (and we are affluent enough to afford it) so I'm not approaching this from a position of ideological opposition, only one of demanding honesty from everyone.
Cite: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_spe_per_per-health-spending-per-person. The exact numbers are highly debatable, especially since we don't know how much various plans will change the cost structure here in the US but $100/f/m is simply unreasonable.
Unless you wear gloves whenever you are out in public, your fingerprints are widely available -- on door handles, coffee cups, newspapers, pens, resumes, handrails, elevator buttons, ATM keypads ... Modern techniques are amazingly effective at reconstructing very detailed prints from sources that you would think would be compromised (see, e.g. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/22/1245243), especially if they can collect a few of them.
The conceit that this is private information does not at all compute in my mind. How can something that you literally leave everywhere you go be private? Fingerprints are no different that the outside of your clothes or the shape of your face -- they are freely observable to anyone that wants to know them. Nor are they particularly personal in any sense, being just a random collection of ridges that don't reveal any intimate details about your life (palm readers notwithstanding).
Finally, these factors go against using them as any kind of 'secure' biometric authentication. If anyone can grab my prints just by following me an picking up my trash, I would prefer that they can't make a mold to deplete my bank account. Iris scanning seems much more appropriate in situations where we want verifiable authentication.
Sorry, I was unclear and you are absolutely correct -- efficiency often makes sense if the cost of the upgrade is less than the price of expected future energy saved. I really didn't mean to insult your work which is surely (long-run) profitable for the company -- in fact, as you said it was good business even without CO2 markets.
I was referring to the sort of government "green jobs" programs like that in Spain in which there are subsidies/penalties/carbon-taxes that distort the market and cause industries to spend money on efficiency programs that are not favorable solely based on the cost of energy (or, more likely, move to a more friendly jurisdiction). In the case of Spain, this was partially accomplished by regulatory measures that greatly increased the cost of electrical power over the price it would have otherwise been.
How exactly will moving to renewable energy, building homes/businesses that are more energy efficient and better insulated, reducing the carbon output of of major industries and moving toward more sustainable resource use "ruin" the civilisation? One of the good things about "doing something about climate change" is that even if we turn out to be wrong (and it doesn't look like we are, but just for the sake of argument) then all of those things haven;t done any harm whatsoever, unless you count breaking the grip of the fossil fuel industry and energy companies who are relying on super cheap coal.
Broken window fallacy. If AGW is not correct but we focus on "green tech" then we will have spent society's resources inefficiently. We will have build carbon-capture facilities that are entirely useless. We will have researched efficiency technologies of less utility than we thought. We will have built homes/businesses/cars that are more expensive than they needed to be because we improperly calculated the cost of future energy input. We will have made our major industries less competitive by pointlessly reducing their carbon output.
These technologies that don't come for free -- any effort expended in making something less carbon-intensive necessarily either raises the price (thus denying us the money to spend elsewhere) or reduces some other desirable trait (houses with less open space, cars with less HP). To the extent that efficiency is favorable, there's no reason that consumers wouldn't already go for it (indeed, with rising energy prices that problem has solved itself to a large extent).
Secondly, it's not "energy companies" that rely on super cheap coal but rather it's the consumers that do. Energy companies are only an intermediary who respond to market pressure to provide what the consumer demands. I happen to be quite grateful for the fossil fuel industry -- they have made possible the largest increase in human utility in the history of mankind. Each washer/dryer, for instance, saves thousands of man-hours of effort per year -- allowing us to spend more time on other things. I was talking to my mother the other day (yeah yeah, stupid anecdote follows) and she was remembering how her mother used to sew together torn socks when she was a child (1940s). Think about that for a second -- our time is so much more valuable now that we wouldn't dream of repairing a sock. It's a testament to how much "wealthier", in relative terms, we've become that repairing socks is now beneath us -- made possible of course by the use of a fossil-fuel powered economy.
Finally, looking practically at the experience in Spain gives me shudders. They lost 2 manufacturing jobs for every green job they created and they artificially priced electrical power way over market price which drove business elsewhere. http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf [PDF WARNING]
Hell, if we swapped out every single coal plant for a nuclear one right now we would cut the amount of radioactivity released into the atmosphere by a gigantic amount, and the amount of CO2. Two birds with one stone.
On that, I can agree with you, but for geopolitical, not environmental reasons. That said, no reason not to form a coalition, eh?
Yes, living wills, and informing your loved ones to remove you from life support in such cases are very important. But as the Schivo case proved, it doesn't really matter when religious politics become involved. Your living will is only as valid as the willingness of your relatives to honor it.
Schiavo did NOT have a living will, which was the cause of the interminable legal wrangling. Had she clearly designated someone to exercise medical power of attorney, there would have been no controversy. Instead, the Florida default rules it fell to her husband who claimed that she had orally represented to him that she did not want to be kept alive in such a case. Her parents claimed that she would not have, given her religious faith. "Religious politics" had nothing to do with it. Quoting Wikipedia (my emphasis)
Given the lack of a living will, a trial was held during the week of January 24, 2000, to determine what Schiavo's wishes would have been regarding life-prolonging procedures. Testimony from eighteen witnesses regarding her medical condition and her end-of-life wishes was heard. Michael claimed that Schiavo would not want to be kept on a machine where her chance for recovery was minuscule, her parents claimed that Schiavo was a devout Roman Catholic who would not wish to violate the Church's teachings on euthanasia by refusing nutrition and hydration.
Honestly, the case really boils down to that -- who do we believe is best qualified to take an essentially random guess about what a person would want. Ideologues on both sides tried to make it into more than that but it just wasn't. If she was genuinely religious and would have wanted to be kept alive, we should have kept her alive. If she would have wanted to die, we should have let her die. The resolution of this essentially factual question (in the absence of any reliable evidence) neatly solves the entire affair.
To summarize, if we can learn anything from the whole shitfest, please leave notarized documentation of your desires. Not even for yourself (although that should be motivation enough) but so your loved ones can feel confident in your wishes instead of being forced to guess. That is not a burden I would wish on the people that care about me, nor do I think it's fair to give them that responsibility. The document does not have to be complicated or expensive -- it can be as simple as designating a person to chose for you.
You might want to look at the timestamps or browse from oldest to newest.
You do NOT turn off the car - this could lock your wheel
Steering wheels do not lock until you remove the key from the car altogether. Try it when you get into your car next. Pull the key out, turn the wheel until it locks and then put the key back and turn to the ACC position (not the ON position where it would be during normal operation) and see that it unlocks the wheel. Maybe Toyotas are different, but I doubt it.
The problem with putting the car in neutral with the throttle stuck is that you are going to be redlining your engine with no resistance, which is less than good for it. I'd rather not damage or destroy my engine if not absolutely necessary (although I suppose Toyota would kick in for a new one). Plus, if the engine blows a seal or seizes, you aren't going to have power steering or brakes anyway.
Finally, a person of moderate strength is still capable of braking from highway speeds without power assist. It's not an easy as with assist but neither does it require superhuman strength.
First, of course get your car serviced if it's part of the official recall. That's a gimme.
More importantly, if your car starts accelerating uncontrollably as if the throttle is stuck all the way open, for the love of god grab the key and TURN OFF THE ENGINE. Yes, you will lose power steering and brakes -- this is still preferable to attempting to drive the car at 100MPH until it runs out of gas. This didn't seem too difficult to me, but apparently a State Trooper in CA decided to call 911 before taking this rather obvious step.
The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego. The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: "We're in a Lexus ... we're going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck ... we're in trouble ... there's no brakes ... we're approaching the intersection ... hold on ... hold on and pray ... pray ..." The call ended with the sound of a crash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/business/01toyota.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
I know it's not kind to speak ill of the dead, and I understand that it wasn't their fault that their car was fatally defective (and Toyota is completely at fault) but it's hard for me to comprehend how someone could fail to deduce the rather straightforward solution to their problem -- car is going too fast => stop the engine. This has really been boggling my mind for the past week as these incidents pile up -- if someone can explain this to me, I'll be eternally grateful.
As the games are BROADCASTED to the PUBLIC open and free, doesn't that make any copyright null and void?
Whatever the intellectual merits of that theory, it is most certainly not the case under the current state of US law that public broadcast necessarily implies release to the public domain.
As for sports bars, they're a business encouraging a large number of willing viewers to watch someone else's advertising revenue supported content. Of course they should be compensated.
There. Fixed that for ya.
No, you didn't. Trademark (and any economic right) is not contingent upon what you judge will be beneficial for the holder of the trademark even if your judgment is the best possible one given the empirical evidence. So the argument "but it's good for them", no matter how true, is simply inapt -- it is not the right criterion on which to judge the legality of the action.
For instance, the term "Linux" is trademarked to the Linux foundation, meaning I cannot use it commercially to designate my product unless that foundation appropriately sub-licenses it (see, e.g. http://www.linuxmark.org/faq.php). I cannot call my product WrathLinux and sell it for a profit without a license, irrespective of any arguments, true or otherwise, about whether the distribution of this product is "good" for Linux or not. The same goes for copyrights. I may not violate the GPL in redistributing WrathLinux irrespective of arguments that doing so is beneficial for Linux.
Instead, I must convince the proper rights holder that what I'm doing really is to their benefit, in which case that can grant me a license (in the case of the GPL this is practically impossible but dual-licensing of some software is seen). That is, the rights holder has the final say about whether that behavior is actually beneficial.
In the Super Bowl case, it's evident the NFL does not consider this beneficial. Whether or not that is wise, that is properly their decision to make. Arguments that they are deciding poorly are not equivalent to arguments that they do not have the right to make the decision.
One should not have to be tolerant against the religious myths of our ancestors taught as "the truth" and "real history".
In 1943, a group of Jehovah's witnesses sued that State of West Virginia for the right not to salute the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=319&invol=624#Scene_1). The State responded, much as you have here, that it has every right to reeducate those backwards religious nuts 'for the purpose of teaching, fostering and perpetuating the ideals, principles and spirit of Americanism, and increasing the knowledge of the organization and machinery of the government.' For those not familiar with the history of JW in the US, there was a longstanding hostility towards their religion on the grounds that it is insufficiently patriotic. The fact that this law was passed in 1940, in the middle of a World War in which JWs were refusing to be drafted should give some context.
Anyway, the reason I get into this whole long spiel is that it was in this case that Justice Jackson wrote what might be the most stirring defense of the US right to conscience ever written:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
I do not agree with every belief that animates HSers (that's not even possible, having known socialist HSers that believed the schools were controlled by corporate interests and capitalist HSers that believed the schools were controlled by socialist teacher's unions) but I do believe strongly in their right to educate their children according to their beliefs.
I also happen to work in life-sciences and I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the creationist story taught to some home-schooled children is quite simply untrue. On the other hand, it seems quite clear to me that just because I have a degree and wear a lab coat does not entitle me to dictate by force to others what to teach their children. The best I can do (and continue to do) is develop the evidence that drives reasonable men towards the best conclusion. Ultimately, since my position is quite likely correct, such force will not be necessary. Meanwhile, bearing the burden of persuasion is a strong incentive to stay honest.
Finally (since the post was meant to be a short citation and exploded into a morning-killer), here's another oldie-but-goodie from the Supreme Court on what the protection of liberty means. In this instance, the State of Nebraska made it a crime to teach a child under the grade of 8 in any language other than English (motivated by a desire to Americanize recent German immigrants that had this inexplicable preference for their mother tongue over the obviously superior English language):
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=262&invol=390
I was going to do this but realized it solved exactly half my problem. What do you do about the evening commute back home?
The only reasonable solution to reduce vulnerability in the wild is to publicly expose the issues to force vendor resolution more quickly. Seems counterintuitive, but it does work.
While that seems reasonable if the vendor either doesn't care or is dragging along on a fix, in this case they didn't even tell the vendor in the first place. Perhaps it's unlikely that DLINK would have responded to the security company but it seems they deserved a chance to do the right thing. It's not that disclosure is wrong, it's just that it's wrong at that stage of the game -- they would have lost nothing by trying to cooperate with D-Link and only disclosing if those lesser steps failed (or took too long). Plus, think about how much worse it sounds:
"Here's a huge vulnerability that we discovered but didn't tell anyone until now. Surprise!"
versus
"Here's a huge vulnerability that we discovered. We went to D-Link 3-4 weeks ago and they wouldn't give us the time of day. Finally, we go through to someone that assigned it a low-priority and has been promising a fix but not delivering. At this point, we are tired of hearing their excuses and we don't think they are interested in fixing it so we are disclosing it."
TL;DR version: Public disclosure is the last resort, not the first. Carrot first, stick second.
dlink wouldve done jack shit like every other company without being publicly humiliated.
Yes, but it would have been even more humiliating to say "We provided them with an exploit 4 weeks ago and they still haven't done shit, so now we are going public". That has the added advantage of giving them the chance to do the right thing, even if they don't take it and makes them look like douches instead of the security company.
Who cares what the American law says ? Its built by CERN, its in the France-Switzerland border ...
A US Court could:
(1) Order all US citizens (over which there is personal jurisdiction) to immediately cease work on it.
(2) Order US funding agencies not to release money to the project.
(3) Order US-based suppliers not to provide supplies.
(4) Order non-US-based suppliers with significant assets in the US not to provide supplies.
Of course, I don't think that any court would do such things, but courts in all countries have always found ways to leverage their power. The British kangaroo system of libel law is a prime example.
In real terms, that involves raising the level of education and the quality of life in all parts of the globe to the point where there are no large groups of people who are still so poor that they have nothing to lose, or so ignorant that they have nothing to believe in beyond what their local preacher tells them.
It's hard to square this advice with the fact that most terrorists are college-educated. Bin laden was an engineer from a wealth family, Mohamed Atta had a PHD in urban engineering, KSM has a degree in mechanical engineering, Ayman al-Zawahiri was a surgeon from a wealthy family, Abdulmutallab was a mechanical engineer from a very wealthy family. The Israelis have had the same experience with the PLO & Hamas -- the more educated and affluent tend to be over-represented, especially engineers and doctors (this was discussed on /. a little while ago). When in the Global Attitudes Project, respondents who were more educated or higher income were more likely to say that suicide bombings carried out against Westerners were justified.
Even more bizarrely, most terrorists come from the wealthier nations in the area, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, despite the fact that they enjoy a much higher per-capita GDP, standard of living and education systems than places like Somalia, Sudan or Indonesia. The better their lives, the more they seem to gravitate towards violent extremism. There are a number of plausible explanations for this, my favorite is that military/political influence is luxury good and those that are in abject poverty are effectively apolitical since they have no labor to spare from making ends meet. There is also the point that since terrorist networks are fragile they must only recruit the most competent and self-sufficient.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't promote education and economic growth as worth goals, but the idea that terrorism is born from a lack of opportunity is plainly in conflict with the facts. Terrorists tend to be educated (quite often Western-educated which not a good mark on our schools) and more wealthy than then unwashed, apolitical, masses in the third world.
See, e.g:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Makes-Terrorist-Economics-Terrorism/dp/0691134383
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/terrorism2.pdf (PDF)
Seems to me then that they should require a warrant for anything that it wouldn't be out of place or illegal for a normal citizen to use on someone else's house, which I think would be a good place to put the line.
That would be less protection that you currently have, though. For instance, it is entirely legal for a citizen to use a thermal imager on anyone's house (provided they did so from the street without trespassing) while it is illegal for the police to do so (without a warrant).
A good parallel technology would be binoculars or a telescope. Which is likely legal for police to use in many areas, but of questionable legality if a citizen uses it on someone else's home.
Nope, it's perfectly legal for anyone to point binoculars at your house, again, provided they do so from a place they are legally entitled to be. Same for parabolic microphones.
You just made it illegal for the cops to use their eyes.
Indeed. The legal position that the police may observe from a public vantage point goes back way back in Anglo common law.
Visual surveillance was unquestionably lawful because " `the eye cannot by the laws of England be guilty of a trespass.' " Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 628 (1886) (quoting Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K. B. 1765)).
More wryly put:
"[t]he Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares."
Any theory of the 4A that does not reach the result is at odds with history and highly unlikely to be adopted by an US Court.