When the judge issues an arrest warrant for someone preventing someone boarding an airplane due to being on a no fly list, I'll believe it will make a difference.
Actually it will be respected when a judge requires the government to either explain why a person is on the list or take his name off. The government has been claiming that the reasons must be kept secret for reasons of national security and that this does not violate the "due process of law" requirement of the constitution because the persons on the list are not being deprived of "life or liberty".
The judge has just ruled at these persons are being "deprived of liberty" and that the appeal process does not constitute "due process of law". Thus, it is unconstitional. The judge has said in effect: "I understand your concerns about national security, but what you are doing is illegal. I don't care how you fix it, just fix it."
The appeals process does not constitue due process of law because the party on the list is not informed of the accusations which he is to refute. The government expects him to guess what information might alay their fears. For a truly innocent person about whom completely nonsensical accusations have been lodged, this is impossible. No one has ever been able to get off this way. Only one person has gotten his name removed from the list and that was by getting an FBI agent to admit that he had checked the wrong box on the form nominating the person for the list. Even then it took a sternly worded court order.
I'm just baffled as to how IT managed to avoid being lynched by the cube drones if their standards for data retention and redundancy are in fact that low.
People hate losing data, and storing it the employee's HDD (except as an expendable cache purely for speed and bandwidth purposes) is roughly equivalent, once you have a decent number of people in the office, to just randomly deleting some sucker's email every week or two. Even in complete absence of any legal requirements, the users would either switch to unofficially using some shit webmail service or rise up with pitchforks in short order.
Actually, I am surprise by how accepting users can be of data loss. People frequenly accept the loss of things far more important than an bunch of boring e-mail messages. I have know people to format hard drives with hundreds of family pictures because they really want to get the computer working again.
These people were not engaged in a creative endevor and did not lose an irreplacable work product. Without this investigation, what they lost would be junk.
I believe that we should examine the evidence of whether life is natural or artificial make an informed our choice of theism or atheism, not the other way around. In other words, we should not chose atheism or theism and then use that as a basis for deciding whether life is artificial or natural. I suspect that evolutionists who claim that our prescence on Earth proves a natural origin of life are doing just that.
It's only when the school is presenting any religiously influenced doctrine as true when the scientific consensus disagrees that we have problems.
I for one would like to see good scientific evidence for whether the Earth and life on it are natural or artificial. I don't see how dismissing any assertion that they are artificial as "religiously influenced" helps. Furthur, the scientific concensus to which you refer seems to be a result of the influence of atheists who pretty much have to conclude that the Earth is of natural origin.
Examination of human communities and their beliefs tells us nothing about whether the Earth is of natural or of artificial origin.
I find the idea that science teachers must assert that the Earth is of natural origin because the idea that it is artificial is forever tainted by superstituious belief systems incomprehensible.
To put it simply, in science classes you're taught science, and in religion classes you're taught religion. How complicated can that be?
This doesn't work because "science" and "religion" are contentious labels which dualing sides are trying to attach to or detach from ideas. Decisions need to be based on substance, not labels.
"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution."
Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).
Evolutionists frequently express confidence that as scientific knowledge advances it will inevitably become clear by what natural processes life arose and arrived at is present diversity and complexity. They don't generally claim that this is complety clear how it happened. The standard quoted above implies either that it is already completely clear or that it is wrong to be skeptical about claims that it will soon be.
Prominant aethists such as Richard Dawkins offer us a false diacotomy. They see a choice between a naturalistic world with no god or a magical freudian god who is the product our emotional needs after molding by social and political forces. This is a false diacotomy because educated theists tend to believe in a natural world with a natural god.
Think about it this way. Is it possible that the the Earth was terraformed by an advanced extraterrestial civilization? Could bioengineers from that civilization have played a major role in producing the "present diversity and complexity" of life? Is it possible that this hypothetical civilization sent representatives to Earth on rare occasions? If you admit that this is even barely possible, then you cannot say that the core concepts of Christianity and similiar religions are illogical or impossible.
What you can argue is that it is unlikely. Scientific evidence is very relevant here. If it can be shown that evolution is highly likely to occur under favorable circumstances, then the aethists win the argument. On the other hand if it can be shown that evolution is incredibly, absurdly, unlinkely, so unlikely that belief in it is comparable to belief in magic, then the theists win. As far as I know, neither of these things has happened yet.
I agree that science class is not the place to discuss claims of divine revelation. But, it is definely the place to discuss whether life on Earth is natural or artificial. This standard quoted above forbids such discussion and requires the teaching of the views of a particular philosophical school as fact. That philisophical school may not technically be religious, but the fact that it is aligned against religion makes a mokery of the concept of separation between church and state.
I know what "sanctity" means, thank you. I'm pointing out that the word doesn't apply at all. You are using someone else's computer system (for free) who has used someone else's computer systems (for free) to gather and index someone else's data (for free), and you think there is some "sanctity" to your ability to search for it? Sorry. If Google indexes something I didn't want them to and I tell them to remove the index, that's my right, and your "sanctity" is irrelevant.
I agree that you have a right to keep search engines from indexing what is on your web servers if you want to. You as the publisher have some right to decide what to make available for public consumption. This does not violate "sanctity" of search.
But the facts in the court decision which she claims "interferes with the santity of search" are very different. They are something like this:
A man filed for bankrupcy
An article about his bankrupcy was posted on a website
Google indexed this website
People searched for his name years later and found this article
This caused problems for him.
He could not get the publisher to take the article down
He asked Google to exclude it from search results
Google refused
He took Google to court and got an order requiring Google to do it
So this case has nothing to do with keeping search bots off your site. It is about whether a 4th party (after the reader, the publisher, and the search engine) can elbow in and interfere with the search process. By calling this a "volation of sanctity" she is using charged language, but I can't really say she is misusing the word.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the man who brought the case. The Internet tends to prevent unflattering information from fading with time. Finding a general solution will be difficult.
We had a problem like this where I work. For several years some students published an online magazine. The old issues were archived and remain online even though the magazine is no longer published. Years later we started getting regular requests to delete articles from the archive. Often these were from the authors who did not want to be known for their youthful writings. Because web magazine has some historical significance, we were reluctant to start chopping articles out. The solution we came up with was to create robot exclusion rules which allow them to index the top page and nothing else. Now those who search for the magazine by name can still find it and read it, but it doesn't come up when the names of people mentioned in it are searched for.
It would be nice if there were a way to mark certain words in HTML as unsuitable for indexing. Maybe then he could have reached a compromise with the publisher to so mark his name. That way people who searched for information about bankrupcies in his town could still find it, but his name alone would not bring it up.
How is this even news? AT&T clearly publishes their international roaming rates, their international calling rates, and their international data roaming rates. Cell phones have been in existence for 40+ years. If you can't read your own calling plan nor your own contract details, and if you can't afford the roaming rates, please turn your cell phone off, and while you're at it, please turn off your tendency to flame technology news sites when you pull a dipshit maneuver.
$750 for 50mb of data transfer is highly exploitive. It is about 50 times even the usual sucker rates. It is exploitive even if most users know about it.
This is like buying a coke in an airport with a credit card expecting to pay something unreasonable such as $7 and coming home to find a bill for $750. Most people would consider that fraud even if the price had been posted on the menu.
When I read that, I almost fell off my chair. Sanctity?
Sanctity here means freedom from intrusion, inviolability. Think of "the sanctity of the home". Or think of a "sanctum", a space where someone can go when he wants to be alone to think or study. Applied to search engines it is the idea that nobody should intrude upon you while you are using it. Examples of intrusion would be paid ranking, spam, and the hiding of the results you seek because someone does not want you to see them. (We could also argue that the search company intrudes on the sanctity of search if it spies on your queries.)
Note that not all manipulations of search results are intrusions. For example, the search companies frequently tweak their algorithms to better identify and lower the rank of intrusive results (spam). The search engines which did this poorly are gone now because they showed pages and pages of noise as their results. They let the sanctum became a market place filled with shouting hawkers.
Perfect is the enemy of good. If your workflow benefits from spreadsheets? Then just ignore the jerk in TFA which frankly smacks of elitist BS. Why the fuck should my customer NEED to use a dedicated program for each task if the work gets done fast and correct with a spreadsheet?
He doesn't say you shouldn't use spreadsheets at all. He acknowledges that they are fine for the tasks for which they were designed such as computing overall grades. What bothers him is the use of large, complicated, difficult to audit spreadsheets to make important decisions. They are difficult to audit because generally all you see is the input and the output. To see the "code" you have to poke around.
Instead he probably wants researchers to put the data into files and write small batch programs to process it and spit out results. You do not need to be a programming wiz to write programs like that. Certainly anyone who can create a large spreadsheet with formulas can learn to do it.
This approach has huge advantages. One is that humans can easily see the program and understand what it does. (If they cannot, then the results are not to be trusted.) You can also create test files containing amounts of data small enough that a human can grasp it and know what the correct result should be.
So no, this is not elitist. He is saying that if you intend to publish your results or have others verify them you should not use opaque tools just because you already know how to use them. If you can't to learn to use simple appropriate tools, why are you doing it at all?
The supremacy clause in the constitution will require the companies, utilities, and universities to play ball. The state law will have to take a back seat because you cannot violate a law when compelled to comply with a law. Or in other words, if California law made something federal law enforces illegal, then the California law cannot be in force in conflict with the federal law.
I am sure the authors of this bill know that the feds will still be able to force the utilities and universities to comply. But to protect themselves from sanctions under state law recipients of federal orders would probably have to show that they really were forced. That might mean that they would have to go to court to oppose the federal order. If they submitted to an order which they could have gotten dismissed or narrowed, they might well be liable under state law.
In effect, the intent of this law is to motivate the holders of information to make the feds work for it. I suppose the feds could go for an injunction against its enforcement, but I am not sure they would get it. In effect they would be argueing that the law hampered them because it forced them to use only clearly justified, narrowly tailored orders in California. That would not play well.
No, the point is that atheism isn't a faith. There are no atheist doctrines. There is no atheist holy book. Faith means believing in something. Not believing something (like existence of a God) doesn't constitute a faith. Lack of faith is not a faith.
I think it depends on how you define "faith". It seems that many atheists use it in a pejorative sense to refer to beliefs which they regard as baseless and silly. (Some theists do too and see their own "faith" in things they know to be absurd as a badge of honor.) But that is not what the word is supposed to mean. Strictly speaking "faith" refers to loyalty or trust. For example, a patient may have faith in a surgeon and consent to an operation. A lender might have faith in the borrower's ability to repay the loan. Such faith may be justified, or it may be misplaced.
A belief in the obvious (such as that the sky is blue) is not a faith. Faith is a confidence in future performance based on past performance. In the Bible "faith" refers not to a religion but to confidence that God will fulfill his promises made to believers based on a record of fulfilling such promises in the past. In Hebrews chapter 11 well-known figures from the Hebrew Bible are described as "men of faith" because they sacrificed present comfort or even their lives because they had faith (confidence) that God would make it up to them later.
If we ignore the modern religious definition and use either the everyday or the biblical definition, then atheism is a faith. It is a faith because the atheist seems no sign that god is acting and so is confident that god does not exist and intends to make life decisions on that basis.
Atheism does not and cannot have a book purporting to contain divine revelation. But it does have beliefs. It answers many of the same questions which religions answer: where did we come from, why are we here, what happens to us when we die, how can we attain immortality. (The answers are very different.) Their are also atheistic philosophies which give guidance on questions of behavior and ethics.
So, I understand why many atheists dislike the application of the term "faith" to their belief systems, but I don't think it is actually incorrect.
You are right, strictly speaking athiesm is not a faith. But Daviskw isn't talking about athiesm as an abstract idea. He is talking about it as an idea around which people build philisophical systems which they use to guide their lives. These may not be religions, but those who subscribe to them tend to guide their lives by them, may promote them, and identify other belief systems as defective or even dangerous. In other words, there are athiests who behave like religionists.
This is exactly what they want! If you do this, you follow their frame, their method, and you (or congress) approve of it. If congress approves of this, they don't have to hide it anymore. Mission accomplished! And thanks for your helpful suggestion!
Only if he called the bluff by showing up for his schedualed waterboarding session, climbing onto the table and lying down. More likely he would lawyer up and start trying to explain why waterboarding is not appropriate for congressional investigations but is for terrorism investigations. This would be difficult to explain. That of course is the whole point of the exercise.
Another problem with transliteration is that standard systems often produce results which look very odd to English speakers. For example, under the 1997 passport system would be transliterated Mariya. Under the 2010 system it would be Mariia which is even worse. But there already is a standard spelling of this name in English: Maria.
I know of two people who asked the workers in an Eastern European passport office to transliterate their names in a particular way. Both requests were accepted without argument.
Tsarnayev is an example of such an odd result which one might wish to change to Tsarnaev.
For a general discussion about the ways actual people's names can cause problems for computer programmers, see:
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
It would not be worth the effort for one website or even ten. But what is proposed is an improvement to the most commonly used JPEG implementation in the world. The cost will be amortized over millions of websites as software is upgraded over the next few years.
To see how this works, let's make up some numbers. Lets say that the whole effort will consume $100,000 worth of labor. Let's guess that within five years it will be installed on one million websites. That means it will cost $0.10 per website. Is it worth spending $0.10 per website to reduce the bandwidth use (and increase speed of loading) by a few percent?
As others have pointed out, improvements to this JPEG compressor would not reduce the size of existing static images. But it would help with images which are under the control of some kind of content managment system which recompress the images. Nowadays almost all non-trivial websites fit that description.
An averagely skilled engineer, faced with the same problem could solve the problem in under the time it takes to do a full patent search, and apply for the patent including all the time to write the patent and get it through all the steps - patents are not actually fostering innovation at all.
You are basically implying that an engineer of average skill is unable to develop anything innovative. I fundamentally disagree with your premise. Length of time it takes to solve a problem has little to do with the level of innovation involved. Some problems take longer to solve than others but it does not automatically follow that those are more difficult problems. Many extremely valuable insights do not require years of effort to develop into something useful. Conversely, many insights that do require years of effort ultimately aren't all that valuable. Time is a poor proxy for difficulty.
Some inventions come about because the inventor had an insight which his contemporaries did not. Others come about because someone financed a long course of trial and error. But you shouldn't be able to get a patent just because you paid an engineer to implement an idea which half of his peers could have described to you during a preliminary consultation.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?
Have you ever taken a bite of the Creationism Musuem? Now try some of this Whole Foods bread with a little cheese. Do you understand the difference now?
Admittedly, the positions taken in these essays are not as strong as those of certain religions organizations, but they are definitly arguments against gay marriage.
It is not all or nothing. When rights conflict a balance must be struck. To refuse blacks service in McDonald's would clearly be illegal because any freedom of association argument would be frivilous. (A white person's argument that he is being forced to associate with black people because he can see some of them at another table while he is eating his Big Mac is pretty silly.)
However, the KKK absolutely can refuse to accept black people as members. If they have a clubhouse with a lunch counter, they absolutely can prohibit black people from eating at it just by making a members-only rule.
Maybe this should be changed. If it were, then we could find a KKK chapter with a clubhouse and 50 members. We could then find 51 black volunteers who would join up. At the next club business meeting they could all come and vote to disband the chapter or amend its charter to support racial equality.
In theory this would be a good thing since it deprives an obnoxious organization of its clubhouse. But remember how it goes: "First they came for the KKK, but I did not speak up because I am not a racist." all the way down to "Then they came for me and no one spoke up because there was no one left."
People certainly have a choice about whether to attend a particular church or not. But I am not sure religious belief is something you can just turn off. I suppose you could drive them into the um... closet.
To say that it is OK to discriminate against ideas is dangerous because then someone has to decide which ideas are incorrect and thus fair game. If that had been the way things worked, then the gay rights movement would never have gotten off the ground.
>Is it OK to refuse service to someone from the Westboro Baptist church? The Catholic church? How about a Neo-Nazi? Because if your answer is yes, you cannot rationally support a veto.
I think that would depend a lot on the nature of the service. There is a big difference between seating the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in your restaurant as part of the lunch crowd and renting him the banquet hall for a dinner celebrating his organization's programs.
Similiarly, I think there is a difference between a photographer taking a picture of two men who come into his or her studio and say that they want a family portrait just like the man and woman before them got and going to their wedding with the express purpose of memorializing it.
I think the difference that in the second parts of the examples above is that speach is the central element of the event. Furthure, the person providing the service is expected to stand in the view of the audiance and smile and provide services supporting the speakers including (in the case of our hypothetical photographer) services which amplify and transmit that speach.
I don't think making people pretend to support speach which they find repugnant is fair or reasonable. On the other hand, it is not right to deny unpopular speakers a meaningful way to express their views. I am not sure how to balance this.
(If you are wondering why I have implied that a wedding is speech, that is because a declaration is the central defining element of a wedding in all cultures of which I am aware. It has sometimes taken the form of a solomn oath pronounced in front of one or more witnesses, sometimes it has been the signing of a document, in some ancient cultures the groom went to the bride's father's home and led her pompously through the streets to his home in the company of friends and relations.)
Should a business be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way?
Yes, definitely. A business should be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way unless it can prove that this would cause undue hardship, and infringing on "sincerely held religious beliefs" most certainly does not qualify.
Interesting. What would you do if you were a graphic artist and someone came into your shop and asked you to design a poster for an anti-gay campaign? Do you believe the situations are the same or different?
I am pretty sure that would fall under an abuse clause in the warranty.
The 'abuse' we are talking about is basically "turning the volume up too high". That might make sense if a high-powered audio system had been damaged where the "too high" means deafening. But this is a laptop. Frequently "all the way up" still isn't high enough to hear clearly.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have to deal with compromise. What you call bad design, others call a bargain. Not every component is designed for every workload; even bridges are designed with load assumptions. It is not economically viable to make everything to the greatest durability possible. If it is important to you that every single thing be as min/max'ed as possible, you are welcome to find a manufacturer that obliges such tastes and fork over a premium for it.
He is not saying that everything should be designed for maximum durability. He is saying that things should be designed so that they don't break the first itme something a little unusual happens. A bridge which collapses under a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam is defective. A laptop computer sound system which breaks if certain sounds are played with the volume all the way up is also defective. (After all, laptops are frequently operated with he volumn all the way up.) Here Dell is claiming that VLC filtered the sound in a certain way and that their speakers are not designed to play that sound. That is just silly. It is as silly as a highway bridge designer who says that he didn't know that his bridge was suppose to be able to handle bumper-to-bumper traffic.
That is asinine. It is the speaker that draws power; it is not up to some "rating" to determine how much power is given to the speaker. If you plug a 200W speaker into a 100W amplifier and open the amplifier up to full, that 200W speaker will try to draw 200 watts of power, likely overwhelming and destroying the amplifier.
Actually, no, higher wattage speakers do not automatically draw more power. The power rating on a speaker specifies the amount of power which the amplier can pump through the speaker without damaging it. How much power actually goes into the speaker is determined by the number of volts which the amplifier puts on the line and the impediance of the speaker (which is generally 4 or 8 ohms). With the volume control set to zero there are zero volts on the line and the speaker is consuming zero power, no matter what its rating. As we raise the volume the voltage rises and the speaker starts consuming power and producing sound. As we raise the volume the amplifier will get to a point where it is producing the maximum voltage of which it is physically capable. That may be less than the speaker could endure, but so what?
Saying that speakers with a too-high power rating will blow an amplifier is like saying that tires with a too-high speed rating will cause a car to go too fast. How fast the car goes depends on how strong the engine is and how much you press the gas pedal, not no how strongly the tires are constructed.
Slashdot Mirror
When the judge issues an arrest warrant for someone preventing someone boarding an airplane due to being on a no fly list, I'll believe it will make a difference.
Actually it will be respected when a judge requires the government to either explain why a person is on the list or take his name off. The government has been claiming that the reasons must be kept secret for reasons of national security and that this does not violate the "due process of law" requirement of the constitution because the persons on the list are not being deprived of "life or liberty".
The judge has just ruled at these persons are being "deprived of liberty" and that the appeal process does not constitute "due process of law". Thus, it is unconstitional. The judge has said in effect: "I understand your concerns about national security, but what you are doing is illegal. I don't care how you fix it, just fix it."
The appeals process does not constitue due process of law because the party on the list is not informed of the accusations which he is to refute. The government expects him to guess what information might alay their fears. For a truly innocent person about whom completely nonsensical accusations have been lodged, this is impossible. No one has ever been able to get off this way. Only one person has gotten his name removed from the list and that was by getting an FBI agent to admit that he had checked the wrong box on the form nominating the person for the list. Even then it took a sternly worded court order.
I'm just baffled as to how IT managed to avoid being lynched by the cube drones if their standards for data retention and redundancy are in fact that low.
People hate losing data, and storing it the employee's HDD (except as an expendable cache purely for speed and bandwidth purposes) is roughly equivalent, once you have a decent number of people in the office, to just randomly deleting some sucker's email every week or two. Even in complete absence of any legal requirements, the users would either switch to unofficially using some shit webmail service or rise up with pitchforks in short order.
Actually, I am surprise by how accepting users can be of data loss. People frequenly accept the loss of things far more important than an bunch of boring e-mail messages. I have know people to format hard drives with hundreds of family pictures because they really want to get the computer working again.
These people were not engaged in a creative endevor and did not lose an irreplacable work product. Without this investigation, what they lost would be junk.
A clarification to my own post:
I believe that we should examine the evidence of whether life is natural or artificial make an informed our choice of theism or atheism, not the other way around. In other words, we should not chose atheism or theism and then use that as a basis for deciding whether life is artificial or natural. I suspect that evolutionists who claim that our prescence on Earth proves a natural origin of life are doing just that.
It's only when the school is presenting any religiously influenced doctrine as true when the scientific consensus disagrees that we have problems.
I for one would like to see good scientific evidence for whether the Earth and life on it are natural or artificial. I don't see how dismissing any assertion that they are artificial as "religiously influenced" helps. Furthur, the scientific concensus to which you refer seems to be a result of the influence of atheists who pretty much have to conclude that the Earth is of natural origin.
Examination of human communities and their beliefs tells us nothing about whether the Earth is of natural or of artificial origin.
I find the idea that science teachers must assert that the Earth is of natural origin because the idea that it is artificial is forever tainted by superstituious belief systems incomprehensible.
To put it simply, in science classes you're taught science, and in religion classes you're taught religion. How complicated can that be?
This doesn't work because "science" and "religion" are contentious labels which dualing sides are trying to attach to or detach from ideas. Decisions need to be based on substance, not labels.
You could just read TFA:
"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution."
Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).
Evolutionists frequently express confidence that as scientific knowledge advances it will inevitably become clear by what natural processes life arose and arrived at is present diversity and complexity. They don't generally claim that this is complety clear how it happened. The standard quoted above implies either that it is already completely clear or that it is wrong to be skeptical about claims that it will soon be.
Prominant aethists such as Richard Dawkins offer us a false diacotomy. They see a choice between a naturalistic world with no god or a magical freudian god who is the product our emotional needs after molding by social and political forces. This is a false diacotomy because educated theists tend to believe in a natural world with a natural god.
Think about it this way. Is it possible that the the Earth was terraformed by an advanced extraterrestial civilization? Could bioengineers from that civilization have played a major role in producing the "present diversity and complexity" of life? Is it possible that this hypothetical civilization sent representatives to Earth on rare occasions? If you admit that this is even barely possible, then you cannot say that the core concepts of Christianity and similiar religions are illogical or impossible.
What you can argue is that it is unlikely. Scientific evidence is very relevant here. If it can be shown that evolution is highly likely to occur under favorable circumstances, then the aethists win the argument. On the other hand if it can be shown that evolution is incredibly, absurdly, unlinkely, so unlikely that belief in it is comparable to belief in magic, then the theists win. As far as I know, neither of these things has happened yet.
I agree that science class is not the place to discuss claims of divine revelation. But, it is definely the place to discuss whether life on Earth is natural or artificial. This standard quoted above forbids such discussion and requires the teaching of the views of a particular philosophical school as fact. That philisophical school may not technically be religious, but the fact that it is aligned against religion makes a mokery of the concept of separation between church and state.
Sanctity here means
I know what "sanctity" means, thank you. I'm pointing out that the word doesn't apply at all. You are using someone else's computer system (for free) who has used someone else's computer systems (for free) to gather and index someone else's data (for free), and you think there is some "sanctity" to your ability to search for it? Sorry. If Google indexes something I didn't want them to and I tell them to remove the index, that's my right, and your "sanctity" is irrelevant.
I agree that you have a right to keep search engines from indexing what is on your web servers if you want to. You as the publisher have some right to decide what to make available for public consumption. This does not violate "sanctity" of search.
But the facts in the court decision which she claims "interferes with the santity of search" are very different. They are something like this:
So this case has nothing to do with keeping search bots off your site. It is about whether a 4th party (after the reader, the publisher, and the search engine) can elbow in and interfere with the search process. By calling this a "volation of sanctity" she is using charged language, but I can't really say she is misusing the word.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the man who brought the case. The Internet tends to prevent unflattering information from fading with time. Finding a general solution will be difficult.
We had a problem like this where I work. For several years some students published an online magazine. The old issues were archived and remain online even though the magazine is no longer published. Years later we started getting regular requests to delete articles from the archive. Often these were from the authors who did not want to be known for their youthful writings. Because web magazine has some historical significance, we were reluctant to start chopping articles out. The solution we came up with was to create robot exclusion rules which allow them to index the top page and nothing else. Now those who search for the magazine by name can still find it and read it, but it doesn't come up when the names of people mentioned in it are searched for.
It would be nice if there were a way to mark certain words in HTML as unsuitable for indexing. Maybe then he could have reached a compromise with the publisher to so mark his name. That way people who searched for information about bankrupcies in his town could still find it, but his name alone would not bring it up.
How is this even news? AT&T clearly publishes their international roaming rates, their international calling rates, and their international data roaming rates. Cell phones have been in existence for 40+ years. If you can't read your own calling plan nor your own contract details, and if you can't afford the roaming rates, please turn your cell phone off, and while you're at it, please turn off your tendency to flame technology news sites when you pull a dipshit maneuver.
$750 for 50mb of data transfer is highly exploitive. It is about 50 times even the usual sucker rates. It is exploitive even if most users know about it.
This is like buying a coke in an airport with a credit card expecting to pay something unreasonable such as $7 and coming home to find a bill for $750. Most people would consider that fraud even if the price had been posted on the menu.
"It interferes with the sanctity of search,
When I read that, I almost fell off my chair. Sanctity?
Sanctity here means freedom from intrusion, inviolability. Think of "the sanctity of the home". Or think of a "sanctum", a space where someone can go when he wants to be alone to think or study. Applied to search engines it is the idea that nobody should intrude upon you while you are using it. Examples of intrusion would be paid ranking, spam, and the hiding of the results you seek because someone does not want you to see them. (We could also argue that the search company intrudes on the sanctity of search if it spies on your queries.)
Note that not all manipulations of search results are intrusions. For example, the search companies frequently tweak their algorithms to better identify and lower the rank of intrusive results (spam). The search engines which did this poorly are gone now because they showed pages and pages of noise as their results. They let the sanctum became a market place filled with shouting hawkers.
Perfect is the enemy of good. If your workflow benefits from spreadsheets? Then just ignore the jerk in TFA which frankly smacks of elitist BS. Why the fuck should my customer NEED to use a dedicated program for each task if the work gets done fast and correct with a spreadsheet?
He doesn't say you shouldn't use spreadsheets at all. He acknowledges that they are fine for the tasks for which they were designed such as computing overall grades. What bothers him is the use of large, complicated, difficult to audit spreadsheets to make important decisions. They are difficult to audit because generally all you see is the input and the output. To see the "code" you have to poke around.
Instead he probably wants researchers to put the data into files and write small batch programs to process it and spit out results. You do not need to be a programming wiz to write programs like that. Certainly anyone who can create a large spreadsheet with formulas can learn to do it.
This approach has huge advantages. One is that humans can easily see the program and understand what it does. (If they cannot, then the results are not to be trusted.) You can also create test files containing amounts of data small enough that a human can grasp it and know what the correct result should be.
So no, this is not elitist. He is saying that if you intend to publish your results or have others verify them you should not use opaque tools just because you already know how to use them. If you can't to learn to use simple appropriate tools, why are you doing it at all?
Not quite.
The supremacy clause in the constitution will require the companies, utilities, and universities to play ball. The state law will have to take a back seat because you cannot violate a law when compelled to comply with a law. Or in other words, if California law made something federal law enforces illegal, then the California law cannot be in force in conflict with the federal law.
I am sure the authors of this bill know that the feds will still be able to force the utilities and universities to comply. But to protect themselves from sanctions under state law recipients of federal orders would probably have to show that they really were forced. That might mean that they would have to go to court to oppose the federal order. If they submitted to an order which they could have gotten dismissed or narrowed, they might well be liable under state law.
In effect, the intent of this law is to motivate the holders of information to make the feds work for it. I suppose the feds could go for an injunction against its enforcement, but I am not sure they would get it. In effect they would be argueing that the law hampered them because it forced them to use only clearly justified, narrowly tailored orders in California. That would not play well.
No, the point is that atheism isn't a faith. There are no atheist doctrines. There is no atheist holy book. Faith means believing in something. Not believing something (like existence of a God) doesn't constitute a faith. Lack of faith is not a faith.
I think it depends on how you define "faith". It seems that many atheists use it in a pejorative sense to refer to beliefs which they regard as baseless and silly. (Some theists do too and see their own "faith" in things they know to be absurd as a badge of honor.) But that is not what the word is supposed to mean. Strictly speaking "faith" refers to loyalty or trust. For example, a patient may have faith in a surgeon and consent to an operation. A lender might have faith in the borrower's ability to repay the loan. Such faith may be justified, or it may be misplaced.
A belief in the obvious (such as that the sky is blue) is not a faith. Faith is a confidence in future performance based on past performance. In the Bible "faith" refers not to a religion but to confidence that God will fulfill his promises made to believers based on a record of fulfilling such promises in the past. In Hebrews chapter 11 well-known figures from the Hebrew Bible are described as "men of faith" because they sacrificed present comfort or even their lives because they had faith (confidence) that God would make it up to them later.
If we ignore the modern religious definition and use either the everyday or the biblical definition, then atheism is a faith. It is a faith because the atheist seems no sign that god is acting and so is confident that god does not exist and intends to make life decisions on that basis.
Atheism does not and cannot have a book purporting to contain divine revelation. But it does have beliefs. It answers many of the same questions which religions answer: where did we come from, why are we here, what happens to us when we die, how can we attain immortality. (The answers are very different.) Their are also atheistic philosophies which give guidance on questions of behavior and ethics.
So, I understand why many atheists dislike the application of the term "faith" to their belief systems, but I don't think it is actually incorrect.
You are right, strictly speaking athiesm is not a faith. But Daviskw isn't talking about athiesm as an abstract idea. He is talking about it as an idea around which people build philisophical systems which they use to guide their lives. These may not be religions, but those who subscribe to them tend to guide their lives by them, may promote them, and identify other belief systems as defective or even dangerous. In other words, there are athiests who behave like religionists.
This is exactly what they want! If you do this, you follow their frame, their method, and you (or congress) approve of it. If congress approves of this, they don't have to hide it anymore. Mission accomplished! And thanks for your helpful suggestion!
Only if he called the bluff by showing up for his schedualed waterboarding session, climbing onto the table and lying down. More likely he would lawyer up and start trying to explain why waterboarding is not appropriate for congressional investigations but is for terrorism investigations. This would be difficult to explain. That of course is the whole point of the exercise.
Another problem with transliteration is that standard systems often produce results which look very odd to English speakers. For example, under the 1997 passport system would be transliterated Mariya. Under the 2010 system it would be Mariia which is even worse. But there already is a standard spelling of this name in English: Maria.
I know of two people who asked the workers in an Eastern European passport office to transliterate their names in a particular way. Both requests were accepted without argument.
Tsarnayev is an example of such an odd result which one might wish to change to Tsarnaev.
For a general discussion about the ways actual people's names can cause problems for computer programmers, see:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
It would not be worth the effort for one website or even ten. But what is proposed is an improvement to the most commonly used JPEG implementation in the world. The cost will be amortized over millions of websites as software is upgraded over the next few years.
To see how this works, let's make up some numbers. Lets say that the whole effort will consume $100,000 worth of labor. Let's guess that within five years it will be installed on one million websites. That means it will cost $0.10 per website. Is it worth spending $0.10 per website to reduce the bandwidth use (and increase speed of loading) by a few percent?
As others have pointed out, improvements to this JPEG compressor would not reduce the size of existing static images. But it would help with images which are under the control of some kind of content managment system which recompress the images. Nowadays almost all non-trivial websites fit that description.
An averagely skilled engineer, faced with the same problem could solve the problem in under the time it takes to do a full patent search, and apply for the patent including all the time to write the patent and get it through all the steps - patents are not actually fostering innovation at all.
You are basically implying that an engineer of average skill is unable to develop anything innovative. I fundamentally disagree with your premise. Length of time it takes to solve a problem has little to do with the level of innovation involved. Some problems take longer to solve than others but it does not automatically follow that those are more difficult problems. Many extremely valuable insights do not require years of effort to develop into something useful. Conversely, many insights that do require years of effort ultimately aren't all that valuable. Time is a poor proxy for difficulty.
Some inventions come about because the inventor had an insight which his contemporaries did not. Others come about because someone financed a long course of trial and error. But you shouldn't be able to get a patent just because you paid an engineer to implement an idea which half of his peers could have described to you during a preliminary consultation.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?
Have you ever taken a bite of the Creationism Musuem? Now try some of this Whole Foods bread with a little cheese. Do you understand the difference now?
Have you ever heard a legitimate (i.e. excluding religious) argument against gay marriage?
How about arguments against it made by gays? There are at least some who believe that the gay-marriage movement is unnessary or counter-productive.
For example, this essay by a gay man can be found on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
And here is a blog by a gay man who disavows the gay marriage movement: http://nogaymarriage.wordpress...
Here is a site with lots of links on the subject: http://www.againstequality.org...
Admittedly, the positions taken in these essays are not as strong as those of certain religions organizations, but they are definitly arguments against gay marriage.
It is not all or nothing. When rights conflict a balance must be struck. To refuse blacks service in McDonald's would clearly be illegal because any freedom of association argument would be frivilous. (A white person's argument that he is being forced to associate with black people because he can see some of them at another table while he is eating his Big Mac is pretty silly.)
However, the KKK absolutely can refuse to accept black people as members. If they have a clubhouse with a lunch counter, they absolutely can prohibit black people from eating at it just by making a members-only rule.
Maybe this should be changed. If it were, then we could find a KKK chapter with a clubhouse and 50 members. We could then find 51 black volunteers who would join up. At the next club business meeting they could all come and vote to disband the chapter or amend its charter to support racial equality.
In theory this would be a good thing since it deprives an obnoxious organization of its clubhouse. But remember how it goes: "First they came for the KKK, but I did not speak up because I am not a racist." all the way down to "Then they came for me and no one spoke up because there was no one left."
People certainly have a choice about whether to attend a particular church or not. But I am not sure religious belief is something you can just turn off. I suppose you could drive them into the um... closet.
To say that it is OK to discriminate against ideas is dangerous because then someone has to decide which ideas are incorrect and thus fair game. If that had been the way things worked, then the gay rights movement would never have gotten off the ground.
>Is it OK to refuse service to someone from the Westboro Baptist church? The Catholic church? How about a Neo-Nazi? Because if your answer is yes, you cannot rationally support a veto.
I think that would depend a lot on the nature of the service. There is a big difference between seating the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in your restaurant as part of the lunch crowd and renting him the banquet hall for a dinner celebrating his organization's programs.
Similiarly, I think there is a difference between a photographer taking a picture of two men who come into his or her studio and say that they want a family portrait just like the man and woman before them got and going to their wedding with the express purpose of memorializing it.
I think the difference that in the second parts of the examples above is that speach is the central element of the event. Furthure, the person providing the service is expected to stand in the view of the audiance and smile and provide services supporting the speakers including (in the case of our hypothetical photographer) services which amplify and transmit that speach.
I don't think making people pretend to support speach which they find repugnant is fair or reasonable. On the other hand, it is not right to deny unpopular speakers a meaningful way to express their views. I am not sure how to balance this.
(If you are wondering why I have implied that a wedding is speech, that is because a declaration is the central defining element of a wedding in all cultures of which I am aware. It has sometimes taken the form of a solomn oath pronounced in front of one or more witnesses, sometimes it has been the signing of a document, in some ancient cultures the groom went to the bride's father's home and led her pompously through the streets to his home in the company of friends and relations.)
Should a business be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way?
Yes, definitely. A business should be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way unless it can prove that this would cause undue hardship, and infringing on "sincerely held religious beliefs" most certainly does not qualify.
Interesting. What would you do if you were a graphic artist and someone came into your shop and asked you to design a poster for an anti-gay campaign? Do you believe the situations are the same or different?
I am pretty sure that would fall under an abuse clause in the warranty.
The 'abuse' we are talking about is basically "turning the volume up too high". That might make sense if a high-powered audio system had been damaged where the "too high" means deafening. But this is a laptop. Frequently "all the way up" still isn't high enough to hear clearly.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have to deal with compromise. What you call bad design, others call a bargain. Not every component is designed for every workload; even bridges are designed with load assumptions. It is not economically viable to make everything to the greatest durability possible. If it is important to you that every single thing be as min/max'ed as possible, you are welcome to find a manufacturer that obliges such tastes and fork over a premium for it.
He is not saying that everything should be designed for maximum durability. He is saying that things should be designed so that they don't break the first itme something a little unusual happens. A bridge which collapses under a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam is defective. A laptop computer sound system which breaks if certain sounds are played with the volume all the way up is also defective. (After all, laptops are frequently operated with he volumn all the way up.) Here Dell is claiming that VLC filtered the sound in a certain way and that their speakers are not designed to play that sound. That is just silly. It is as silly as a highway bridge designer who says that he didn't know that his bridge was suppose to be able to handle bumper-to-bumper traffic.
That is asinine. It is the speaker that draws power; it is not up to some "rating" to determine how much power is given to the speaker. If you plug a 200W speaker into a 100W amplifier and open the amplifier up to full, that 200W speaker will try to draw 200 watts of power, likely overwhelming and destroying the amplifier.
Actually, no, higher wattage speakers do not automatically draw more power. The power rating on a speaker specifies the amount of power which the amplier can pump through the speaker without damaging it. How much power actually goes into the speaker is determined by the number of volts which the amplifier puts on the line and the impediance of the speaker (which is generally 4 or 8 ohms). With the volume control set to zero there are zero volts on the line and the speaker is consuming zero power, no matter what its rating. As we raise the volume the voltage rises and the speaker starts consuming power and producing sound. As we raise the volume the amplifier will get to a point where it is producing the maximum voltage of which it is physically capable. That may be less than the speaker could endure, but so what?
Saying that speakers with a too-high power rating will blow an amplifier is like saying that tires with a too-high speed rating will cause a car to go too fast. How fast the car goes depends on how strong the engine is and how much you press the gas pedal, not no how strongly the tires are constructed.