Others fear this may lead to 'cruel and unusual punishments'
No, it leads to excessive sentences. Those may be unreasonable and, unfortunately, quite usual, but there's nothing cruel and unusual about them, as that term is defined.
No, excessive prison sentences can be found to be 'cruel and unusual'. See Solem v Helm.
The SCOTUS held that:
The Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments prohibits not only barbaric punishments, but also sentences that are disproportionate to the crime.
But hey, electrocuting people is OK, and that's cruel and must have been unusual the first time it was done!
Evidently, Amazon's starting to stick their "adult" shit in a virtual back room behind a virtual curtain, and his book got fingered in the first wave.
But the books are still available even. It's just that Amazon decided to cordon off adult material into a different section, like many brick and mortar stores. This article should have never been on Slashdot in the first place.
No, you are missing the point (not difficult from the somewhat hysterical FA and inaccurate summary).
Amazon have not stripped sales rankings from adult books, they have stripped ranking from gay and lesbian books.
So 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' which has been mistakenly added to the 'Gay and Lesbian' section has no ranking, but 'Naked Lunch' is not is in the 'Gay and Lesbian' section (despite its content being both 'adult' and in many places 'gay'), so gets a ranking.
'Heather has two Mommies' is a children's book, and has no ranking. Whether or not you agree that this book is offensive, you must agree that it is not an 'adult' book.
According to Google Scholar and Yokohama National University, Dr. Itoh has not published any work in the area of climate change in peer-reviewed science journals.
*sighs* The Saddam9/11 crowd was never that large a subset of bush supporters.
*sighs*
9/6/2003: WASHINGTON (AP) â" Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.
Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.
Why would you link the IPCC report when it's common knowledge that 650 of the scientists whose work was used for the report have come out publicly and said that the entire report is pretty much a fabrication and false in nearly every aspect?
Because the content of your link is a crock of shit? (As is the rest of the site: "If Barack Obama Becomes the President Prepare for Marxism", "Bristol Palin Pregnant, but Makes Brave Choice", "Sarah Palin: A Conservatives Dream Come True"!)
Your link quotes TV weathermen, people who claim the sea levels are falling, that the global climate is *cooling* (despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Classic myths (teh Sun is causing the warming!) sit side by side with quotes that claim the planet is cooling.
Why don't you link to the debunking of your... erm... bunk?
I run Ubuntu on my AA1. Wireless works fine once you've updated the installed packages (you will have to connect to the net using the built-in ethernet or a usb modem), as does my 3G cellular modem. Sound works, webcam works, everything works.
I later installed the MadWiFi drivers instead because I wanted to run the wireless in managed mode (in order to share the 3G connection over wifi), but you don't need to do this.
So much better than Linpus, which I dumped because there is no support for iptables in their kernel, and it's impossible to build a working kernel from the 'sources' they supply.
The first game to use WASD was the 1992 first person role playing game Ultima Underworld, which used the elaborate WASDX2 default control setup (with X as backpedal and 2 as run), but the scheme wasn't popularized until John Romero implemented it in 1996 for Quake.[citation needed] This has led to the nickname "Romero Key Controls".
Except your 'answer' does not explain these contradictions.
In fact, your link says:
"Proof that it is not a creative account is found in the fact that animals aren't even mentioned until after the creation of Adam."
So it appears to me to be saying "because these accounts are contradictory, it proves that they are not contradictory."
Of course, this is slashdot, and anything pro religion is wrong, anything anti-religion is right.
Maybe everything pro-religion should be right? Vishnu has ten avatars, Xenu destroyed the slave races in a volcano, God chose to give the book of Mormon to a 14 year-old boy on a set of gold plates which later conveniently disappeared.
But I'm guessing you're an atheist about everyone else's religion, just not the one you happen to be have been indoctrinated into.
Maybe I'm wrong and you converted as an adult from Zoroastrianism.
The field was surprisingly diverse despite the fact that the offerings are so stripped down that they really don't have more than three major commands: Insert, Update, and Delete.
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
And Peter is talking about why the second coming is slow to appear, not about the creation myth.
Yes, already he is reinterpreting the theory to fit the data.
At the time the Jewish people believed that a day ended/begun at sunset, contrary to our system where a day's boundary is at 12:00 AM midnight.
A difference in duration of about 2 minutes around the equinoxes in the Middle East.
If you read Genesis again you'll notice that it says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Then it goes on to describe the Earth's condition and then the process of the six creative days in which God made Earth habitable for life.
Yes, I notice that God created the Sun on the fourth 'day', the day/year/millenium/unspecified period-of-time after he created grass and fruit-bearing trees.
And I don't doubt you will find a way of interpreting that impossible statement to fit the data.
Each creative day is about 1,000 years totaling up to about 6,000 years.
[bible citation needed]
It says 'day' in the bible. There is no footnote explaining this actual means '1,000' years.
At least not in the King James version.
For some reason people go on the assumption that a creative day is a literal 24-hours
Could the reason perhaps be that the Bible says 'day'?
despite the fact that when Genesis was written no such calender system existed.
Good Lord! They had no days when Genesis was written?
They could write and everything, but hadn't noticed the sun is the highest in the sky on a reliably repeatable period?
With all do respect sir, please learn a little more about the Bible before making a critical review of it.
With all due respect, it is perfectly clear to anyone not trying to reinterpret the theory to fit the data that it does say that the Earth -- and everything in it -- was created in six days.
In fact, the victim has a Duty to Retreat, sometimes even within their own homes.
In fact, the whole test for self-defence -- including the duty to retreat -- is whether the defendant acts 'reasonably'. The test of reasonableness is what would appear reasonable to 'the man on the Clapham omnibus'. Do you think that people should be allowed to act unreasonably?
I am not aware of any cases where a defence of 'self-defence' has failed due to the defendant not retreating in their own home. Are you?
The defence only fails when the defendant acts unreasonably.
Unfortunately, modern legal systems do not recognise this, and will judge the honest man who strikes first far more harshly than the career criminal who does so.
This is a ridiculous assertion. The career criminal attacks me, and I may have a defence of 'self-defence' even if I kill him, and even if I strike first; it will depend on whether or not I have acted reasonably. The criminal will have no defence at all.
And because you are from the Mac world this is ok by you, you are so used to being told exactly what you can and can't do by Apple you know no other way.
While everything else in your post is correct, this part isn't. It's an attack on mac users, where the attack should be on Jobs/Apple.
I can run any software I damn well like on my mac; if I couldn't I wouldn't have one.
So despite being a mac (as well as linux and windows) user, I'm not buying an iphone because I'm *not* used to being told what I can and can't do by Apple, and it's *not* OK by me.
* The government can ban any groups it labels 'terrorist' (Terrorism Act 2000)
* The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
* Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
* Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
* Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
* The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
* Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence (Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
* British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
* Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
* Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)
Note that some of this predates 9/11.
The government is not-so-gradually putting in place all the mechanisms that a totalitarian police state needs.
What's sickening is that this is largely supported by or ignored by the public.
Every letter I wrote to my MP was replied to by a "we need it to keep people safe, and the public support this measure" fob-off.
In theory I should stick around to try and change things, but it's like staying in a pool that other people are shitting in. --
I first left for France, now I'm living in Spain. These countries are not Utopias, but they are a hell of a lot better than the UK. There are no moral panics about predatory paedophiles, and the 'content industries' are not so powerful. And it doesn't rain so much.
...the jury cannot convict you unless they find beyond a reasonable doubt that you committed the charged crime. Juries take this very seriously. "Every lawyer" knows that. Juries can be stupid, sometimes, but they very often are stupid on behalf of the defendant. In other words, if they're not sure then they cut the defendant a break. "Every lawyer" who actually does trials knows that, too.
Strange, because in my two experiences as a juror, the entire jury with the exception of me was of the opinion that "they arrested him and he's here so he must be guilty".
They were unwilling to even consider the evidence for the defence.
This was in the UK, not the US. Maybe it's different over your side of the pond, but I somehow doubt it.
In terms of health care, haven't you heard the expression "British Teeth"? I'm English and I grew up in the UK and travelled extensively and I have to say that British teeth from the NHS era are a on average lot worse than the teeth of Americans from the private healthcare era.
Yes, everybody knows the British have bad teeth and dental care, don't they?
Except cursory examination of the statistics shows British children have better oral health than American children.
If you built a custom SQL library that PHP/Perl/* linked into that would return an error and do nothing if it detects more than one command or a comment start character anywhere in a command, injection attacks would become dramatically harder, if not impossible.
PHP's database drivers already kind-of work this way: they only run the first statement of a multi-statement query.
eg:
"SELECT * FROM foo; DROP TABLE foo"
Only the select statement will be passed to the database by the driver. The successive statements are quietly ignored.
Of course, this only protects against one class of injection attacks, and doesn't help if the first statement is targetted.
>>They used anti-terror laws against Iceland, who are not at all terrorists.
>When? Do you have a cite on this?
It's well known.
Well 'known', but incorrect. The freezing order was under the 'security' part of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, not the 'anti-terrorism' part.
(1) The Treasury may make a freezing order if the following two conditions are satisfied.... (a) action to the detriment of the United Kingdom's economy (or part of it) has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons...
Slashdot Mirror
Others fear this may lead to 'cruel and unusual punishments'
No, it leads to excessive sentences. Those may be unreasonable and, unfortunately, quite usual, but there's nothing cruel and unusual about them, as that term is defined.
No, excessive prison sentences can be found to be 'cruel and unusual'. See Solem v Helm.
The SCOTUS held that:
But hey, electrocuting people is OK, and that's cruel and must have been unusual the first time it was done!
What do you really expect from Amazon.
A patent application for one-click book-burning?
Evidently, Amazon's starting to stick their "adult" shit in a virtual back room behind a virtual curtain, and his book got fingered in the first wave.
But the books are still available even. It's just that Amazon decided to cordon off adult material into a different section, like many brick and mortar stores. This article should have never been on Slashdot in the first place.
No, you are missing the point (not difficult from the somewhat hysterical FA and inaccurate summary).
Amazon have not stripped sales rankings from adult books, they have stripped ranking from gay and lesbian books.
So 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' which has been mistakenly added to the 'Gay and Lesbian' section has no ranking, but 'Naked Lunch' is not is in the 'Gay and Lesbian' section (despite its content being both 'adult' and in many places 'gay'), so gets a ranking.
'Heather has two Mommies' is a children's book, and has no ranking. Whether or not you agree that this book is offensive, you must agree that it is not an 'adult' book.
Photoshop this mock-up of a submarine's maneuvering Room..
Your point would be compelling if those numbers weren't from five and a half years ago.
I'd think the overall mindset of the electoral base has changed just a wee bit, no?
That's irrelevant. The OP said that the Saddam9/11 crowd was never that large a subset of bush supporters.
I am simply pointing out that that is not true. My point stands and I have no need to make it compelling.
I have no comment on the 'zombie' stuff, I just have this revisionist crap.
From your own link, Dr Kiminori Itoh in his own words:
And in other people's words:
Maybe you missed step 2?
*sighs* The Saddam9/11 crowd was never that large a subset of bush supporters.
*sighs*
Source.
So no, not a large subset, but a MAJORITY of Republican supporters (and Democrat supporters too, for that matter) were part of the 'Saddam/911 crowd'.
Why would you link the IPCC report when it's common knowledge that 650 of the scientists whose work was used for the report have come out publicly and said that the entire report is pretty much a fabrication and false in nearly every aspect?
Because the content of your link is a crock of shit? (As is the rest of the site: "If Barack Obama Becomes the President Prepare for Marxism", "Bristol Palin Pregnant, but Makes Brave Choice", "Sarah Palin: A Conservatives Dream Come True"!)
Your link quotes TV weathermen, people who claim the sea levels are falling, that the global climate is *cooling* (despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
Classic myths (teh Sun is causing the warming!) sit side by side with quotes that claim the planet is cooling.
Why don't you link to the debunking of your... erm... bunk?
IT IS NOT THEIRS TO USE.
Waaaah! They're reading the content we give away for free and linking to it under their 'fair use rights', thus driving traffic to our sites!
# robots.txt
#
# Stop Google from using our content
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
I run Ubuntu on my AA1. Wireless works fine once you've updated the installed packages (you will have to connect to the net using the built-in ethernet or a usb modem), as does my 3G cellular modem. Sound works, webcam works, everything works.
I later installed the MadWiFi drivers instead because I wanted to run the wireless in managed mode (in order to share the 3G connection over wifi), but you don't need to do this.
So much better than Linpus, which I dumped because there is no support for iptables in their kernel, and it's impossible to build a working kernel from the 'sources' they supply.
What's the history behind the silly WASD choice?
From Wikipedia:
The first game to use WASD was the 1992 first person role playing game Ultima Underworld, which used the elaborate WASDX2 default control setup (with X as backpedal and 2 as run), but the scheme wasn't popularized until John Romero implemented it in 1996 for Quake.[citation needed] This has led to the nickname "Romero Key Controls".
Except your 'answer' does not explain these contradictions.
In fact, your link says:
"Proof that it is not a creative account is found in the fact that animals aren't even mentioned until after the creation of Adam."
So it appears to me to be saying "because these accounts are contradictory, it proves that they are not contradictory."
Of course, this is slashdot, and anything pro religion is wrong, anything anti-religion is right.
Maybe everything pro-religion should be right? Vishnu has ten avatars, Xenu destroyed the slave races in a volcano, God chose to give the book of Mormon to a 14 year-old boy on a set of gold plates which later conveniently disappeared.
But I'm guessing you're an atheist about everyone else's religion, just not the one you happen to be have been indoctrinated into.
Maybe I'm wrong and you converted as an adult from Zoroastrianism.
FTA:
The field was surprisingly diverse despite the fact that the offerings are so stripped down that they really don't have more than three major commands: Insert, Update, and Delete.
There's a write-only database now?
2nd Peter 3:8, from the King James:
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
And Peter is talking about why the second coming is slow to appear, not about the creation myth.
Yes, already he is reinterpreting the theory to fit the data.
At the time the Jewish people believed that a day ended/begun at sunset, contrary to our system where a day's boundary is at 12:00 AM midnight.
A difference in duration of about 2 minutes around the equinoxes in the Middle East.
If you read Genesis again you'll notice that it says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Then it goes on to describe the Earth's condition and then the process of the six creative days in which God made Earth habitable for life.
Yes, I notice that God created the Sun on the fourth 'day', the day/year/millenium/unspecified period-of-time after he created grass and fruit-bearing trees.
And I don't doubt you will find a way of interpreting that impossible statement to fit the data.
Each creative day is about 1,000 years totaling up to about 6,000 years.
[bible citation needed]
It says 'day' in the bible. There is no footnote explaining this actual means '1,000' years.
At least not in the King James version.
For some reason people go on the assumption that a creative day is a literal 24-hours
Could the reason perhaps be that the Bible says 'day'?
despite the fact that when Genesis was written no such calender system existed.
Good Lord! They had no days when Genesis was written?
They could write and everything, but hadn't noticed the sun is the highest in the sky on a reliably repeatable period?
With all do respect sir, please learn a little more about the Bible before making a critical review of it.
With all due respect, it is perfectly clear to anyone not trying to reinterpret the theory to fit the data that it does say that the Earth -- and everything in it -- was created in six days.
It is a good idea, however it's real purpose will be above U.S. cities to spy on the locals.
Aww, c'mon.
It's real purpose is to shovel more of your (descendents') money into the pockets of the defence industry!
In Britain we converted coal to gas up until about 50 years ago when we discovered a gas field in the North Sea.
Yes, but not to methane.
The old 'town gas' produced from coal was a mix of:
* hydrogen 50%
* methane 35%
* carbon monoxide 10%
* ethylene 5%
wiki entry on coal gas.
It was poisonous, and the production process was an environmental nightmare.
In fact, the whole test for self-defence -- including the duty to retreat -- is whether the defendant acts 'reasonably'. The test of reasonableness is what would appear reasonable to 'the man on the Clapham omnibus'. Do you think that people should be allowed to act unreasonably?
I am not aware of any cases where a defence of 'self-defence' has failed due to the defendant not retreating in their own home. Are you?
The defence only fails when the defendant acts unreasonably.
This is a ridiculous assertion. The career criminal attacks me, and I may have a defence of 'self-defence' even if I kill him, and even if I strike first; it will depend on whether or not I have acted reasonably. The criminal will have no defence at all.
And because you are from the Mac world this is ok by you, you are so used to being told exactly what you can and can't do by Apple you know no other way.
While everything else in your post is correct, this part isn't. It's an attack on mac users, where the attack should be on Jobs/Apple.
I can run any software I damn well like on my mac; if I couldn't I wouldn't have one.
So despite being a mac (as well as linux and windows) user, I'm not buying an iphone because I'm *not* used to being told what I can and can't do by Apple, and it's *not* OK by me.
Next chance I get, I'm off.
Shamefully reposted from the last time we had a story like this:
--
I left in 2007.
There wasn't one single thing that made me go, but the accumulative weight of paranoia and illiberalism.
Shamelessly ripped off from here:
* The government can ban any groups it labels 'terrorist' (Terrorism Act 2000)
* The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
* Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
* Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
* Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
* The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
* Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence (Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
* British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
* Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
* Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)
Note that some of this predates 9/11.
The government is not-so-gradually putting in place all the mechanisms that a totalitarian police state needs.
What's sickening is that this is largely supported by or ignored by the public.
Every letter I wrote to my MP was replied to by a "we need it to keep people safe, and the public support this measure" fob-off.
In theory I should stick around to try and change things, but it's like staying in a pool that other people are shitting in.
--
I first left for France, now I'm living in Spain. These countries are not Utopias, but they are a hell of a lot better than the UK. There are no moral panics about predatory paedophiles, and the 'content industries' are not so powerful. And it doesn't rain so much.
...the jury cannot convict you unless they find beyond a reasonable doubt that you committed the charged crime. Juries take this very seriously. "Every lawyer" knows that. Juries can be stupid, sometimes, but they very often are stupid on behalf of the defendant. In other words, if they're not sure then they cut the defendant a break. "Every lawyer" who actually does trials knows that, too.
Strange, because in my two experiences as a juror, the entire jury with the exception of me was of the opinion that "they arrested him and he's here so he must be guilty".
They were unwilling to even consider the evidence for the defence.
This was in the UK, not the US. Maybe it's different over your side of the pond, but I somehow doubt it.
I found it both depressing and frightening.
In terms of health care, haven't you heard the expression "British Teeth"? I'm English and I grew up in the UK and travelled extensively and I have to say that British teeth from the NHS era are a on average lot worse than the teeth of Americans from the private healthcare era.
Yes, everybody knows the British have bad teeth and dental care, don't they?
Except cursory examination of the statistics shows British children have better oral health than American children.
http://www.whocollab.od.mah.se/amro.html
Decayed, missing or filled teeth for 12 year-olds:
UK: 0.7
US: 1.19
Actually, in the UK the police can stop any driver with *no* reason. They don't need reasonable suspicion of anything.
On the plus side, you don't need to carry your licence with you.
If you built a custom SQL library that PHP/Perl/* linked into that would return an error and do nothing if it detects more than one command or a comment start character anywhere in a command, injection attacks would become dramatically harder, if not impossible.
PHP's database drivers already kind-of work this way: they only run the first statement of a multi-statement query.
eg:
"SELECT * FROM foo; DROP TABLE foo"
Only the select statement will be passed to the database by the driver. The successive statements are quietly ignored.
Of course, this only protects against one class of injection attacks, and doesn't help if the first statement is targetted.
>>They used anti-terror laws against Iceland, who are not at all terrorists.
>When? Do you have a cite on this?
It's well known.
Well 'known', but incorrect. The freezing order was under the 'security' part of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, not the 'anti-terrorism' part.
Specifically Section 4(2)(a):
(1) The Treasury may make a freezing order if the following two conditions are satisfied. ...
(a) action to the detriment of the United Kingdom's economy (or part of it) has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons...