How do shield laws figure into 'freedom of the press'? It's a long standing principle that save for very well-defined circumstances anyone within a jurisdiction may be compelled to testify. If I see a crime happen, I am forbidden to refuse to testify (save in those well-defined circumstances); if a reporter sees that crime happen, he's just as bound to do so as I am. Freedom of the press is about being free to publish; it's not about being free from compelled testimony. You might argue that such a freedom is important (I disagree), but if so at least get your argument straight.
You may also wish to consider the case of a defendant subpoenaing (sp) a journalist with information to exonerate him--should the journalist be compelled to testify?
Yes, I'm familiar with the Fifth Amendment, and with the fact that spouses are (or were, anyway) considered to be exempted from testifying against one another. But the Fifth Amendment doesn't prevent me from being compelled to testify against Jimmy down the street, regardless of whether or not I'm a reporter--and the First Amendment doesn't enter into it either.
The First Amendment doesn't enter into it--freedom of the press is about being free to publish what you want--it's not about being free not to reveal your sources. In support of this, we are specifically exempted from testifying against ourselves by the Fifth Amendment, which has no 'and reporters need not testify about anything they've reported' provision.
Why should reporters be free not to testify when the rest of us can be compelled to do so? Why should they be able to refuse to testify to illegal activities?
Personally, I love backslash--it's a human-edited review of excellent comments and threads. Essentially, it brings to a website what editors bring to the publishing industry, and so far as I know is the first site to do so. It's rather a brilliant little innovation, and it belongs right here.
I think I should go back to the days of plain-jane HTML and just deal with it
Because that wasn't even more of a mess??
Nested tables, embedded styles everywhere... sure, it works now, but only because the browser developers had so much time to get it to work, and developers have gotten used to it.
I think that the OP meant real plain-Jane HTML: no colours, no fonts, no backgrounds, no styles, tables only used for honest-to-God tabular data &c. I rather miss those days, to tell the truth: back then HTML was the HyperText Markup Language, and that's it. It was kinda nice.
The USA has the exact same thing - even being arrested for a crime (not convicted, and even if your record is expunged) can/will prevent you from sitting as a juror.
To be more accurate, anything may prevent one from sitting as juror, since both parties can dismiss a certain number of prospectives at will, and since jurors can be dismissed for cause as well. But believe it or not, it's not uncommon for those convicted of misdemeanors to sit on juries. They're jsut misdemeanors after all!
Being arrested will get you your very own FBI file.
I've never heard that, but it neither surprises nor worries me.
Being arrested for a felony will cause tons of problems if you decide to try and get secret or top secret clearance down the line.
Which is as it should be. Remember that felonies are those offences which once carried the death penalty; the state out of its mercy is allowing one to continue to live, thus one should expect certain hassles--e.g. felons can't own weapons or vote.
Seizures of "drug money" (cars, houses, etc) without trial are an everyday occurence.
Now there I agree with you that it's absurd. Property seizures without a proper conviction are a very worrisome development, and one which should be addressed ASAP. The 'drug war' is the source of far, far too many infringements on our liberties, and should be terminated ASAP.
There aren't many courses that focus more heavily on highly abstracted languages, such as Lisp.
I'll just note that while Lisp can be highly abstract, it need not be. I'd post the full disassembly listing for a function I just wrote, but the accursed lameness filter won't let it remain. So here're the first few opcodes anyway: mov ebx, esp; mov edx, [#xA8CFE04]; mov edi, [#A8CFE08].
Further, fewer than 1% of SUV owners actually take their cars offroad.
How many drive them on snowy roads? Everyone who owns one and lives where it snows, I bet.
An SUV does nothing for one on snowy roads--if anything, it has more mass, thus more inertia, thus slides more. Yes, many SUVs have all-wheel drive; so do many sedans & vans. Yes, many SUVs have good tyres; so do many sedans & vans.
How many people need to tow something? Not a huge percentage, but they won't be doing it in a honda civic.
Why not? It depends on what you need to tow. And certainly, if one has a need for an SUV then one should own one; my argument is that very few people need one, and that they are in fact making a mistake when they purchase one, as they are paying too much money for a vehicle which doesn't properly serve their actual needs--and are also negatively impacting the rest of us while they're at it.
How many people have a couple of kids and have to fit a car seat? A lot. Sure they could drive a minivan, but the mileage isn't too much different in a lot of cases.
You can have a fair number of kids in a sedan, for pete's sake! I think the point at which a minivan or SUV becomes worth looking at is three or more--and even then, it depends on ages, sizes and travel patterns.
I don't think SUVs should be illegal or over-taxed; I just think that purchasers need to think about what they're purchasing. Do they really need a 20 mpg vehicle for commuting in the city?
"Everyone live like you're outdoors" addresses energy conservation in the same way that "Everyone stop having sex" addresses the AIDS crisis.
I agree with what you wrote but not what you meant; both are excellent solutions. You complain that the outside temperatures where you live regularly exceed 100F, and that this can be deadly. Yes, it can--and yet somehow man has been living there for quite a long time. In fact, man has lived in a low-tech fashion just about everywhere from the Arctic to the equator. Now, one can't dress like a New Yorker in Arizona without modifying one's environment, true. But where is it written that one must follow Yankee fashions in the desert? Why not try dressing like a Berber or one of the Masai?
Yes, a Colonial-style home is very poor in Arizona (or here in Denver). What about a thick-walled adobe? What about a yurt? We carry assumptions on housing from a country with lots of cold, wet winds--those assumptions don't hold when living where it's hot, dry and still. Rather than trying to live like Englishmen, Europeans or Yankees, why not try living like natives of our area?
I'm not actually arguing for a duplication of aboriginal or primitive clothing and living arrangements; I'm arguing that we should study them and learn therefrom. For example, I really can't see many modern Americans living in cloth-walled dwellings, simply because solid homes are too deeply ingrained in our culture. But I can imagine more intelligently-designed homes becoming fashionable; I can even imagine more locally-appropriate clothing becoming the thing. Even now clothing styles vary between LA and Minnesota; why could they not vary still more?
However I do agree with your suggestions for energy conservation. That's why I keep the A/C at 81*F in the summer and the heat at 68*F in the winter, have compact fluorescents everywhere in my house, and drive a small diesel powered car.
Ha! I don't even bother running my AC (Saturday was 100F here in Denver); in the winter I keep the heater at 56 most of the day (raising it to 64 in the morning, 'cause 56 is miserable when getting out of the shower); I drive a 15-year-old car which gets 35 mpg. Oh, and I normally cycle to work (in fact, I recently completed a month without driving to the office).
I'm like the Green Avenger or something. Only thing is they won't let me into the local environmentalist meetings since I always vote a Republican/Libertarian mixed ticket:-(
We actually do use our medics and corpsmen to treat Iraqi civilians. We also use our engineers to build them power stations, bridges, schools and the like. Which the Islamists then blow up.
The fact is that everywhere there is a desert, that desert is growing. We know this and we have been watching it happen for a long long time. We plant crops, which eats topsoil, but we don't have a way of replacing the soil. Or we have cows that eat all of the grass such that it can't regrow.
The reason is pretty simple: we take the plants, or the animals which eat the plants; we then eat them, use some of their mass for energy and building our bodies, then excrete the remainder. Which we then drop into perfectly good drinking water and ship off to a sewage plant, where the water is repurified, the wastes removed and then dumped into a landfill. Millions of tons of perfectly good organic mass dumped into landfills every year.
If we composted all the human wastes produced and used them as fertiliser, we'd go a good way towards replenishing the soil. We should also not be burning our dead, or burying them in concreate vaults--bury them in the earth, and let their bodies rot naturally and return to the soil.
You ought to get yourself a gigging spear (a multi-pronged, barbed spear usef for gigging frogs, fish and eels)--it'd work better than a shovel, and could be pretty fun.
Actually, this would be a perfect use of GMO organisms. They could, perhaps, arrange for a strain of plant or animal which dies out after a few generations--giving it enough time to reduce the toad population, but not becoming an issue in itself. Or yes, one with a chemical sensitivity which can be used to control it.
According to Yahoo! Finance, Google has a P/E of 68.28, which is insanely high. Now, it's possible that it's worth that, for the guys at Google are brilliant--but are they that brilliant?
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works.
That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. The mere fact that thing A preceeded thing B doesn't mean that A caused B.
And even if affirmative action did bring more women into the workplace, it'd still be wrong, for exactly the same reason that bias against men would be wrong: it's unjust and unfair. And, more importantly, it's foolish: the best candidate should get the job, period. A racist company which discriminates against blacks will lose out because it doesn't have the best employees possible; a sexist company which discrimates against men will lose out for the exact same reason.
That is possibly the stupidest thing I've seen all week. English is--like many languages--gendered. In English, we use the male gender for non-neuter things whose actual gender is unknown. Women getting annoyed over this is like men getting annoyed that there is no way to unequivocally state the gender of a man (since masculine gender means both masculine and unknown-but-not-neuter).
And those made-up pronouns are--like all made-up pronouns--ugly as sin.
LISP may have been elegant (if by elegant you mean "improbably difficult to read to the point of being obfuscated"), and perhaps the language is simple, but the programs themselves were not. From what I've been able to see over the years, LISP has been favored only by people that found using HP RP-notation calculators to be a fun and rewarding experience.
Intelligent people? Lord knows I wouldn't want to use a tool they like!
Regarding LISP syntax, what's so different between func(a, b, c) and (func a b c)? Yes, Lisp programs can be difficult to read at first--that changes pretty quickly. It was hard to ride a bike at first too, right? And yet once you've learnt, it's never a problem again!
As for HP's reverse Polish notation, that is so nice for calculations, especially engineering calculations. Once you've become accustomed to it, you'll never go back, ever.
The idea that somehow a web browser and an interpreted language is equivalent to an operating system is something that will forever remain beyond my ken.
Why? A operating system provides an abstraction layer so that applications need not deal with the hardware directly. A web browser and an language running atop it (interpreted or not) provide an abstraction layer as well. In fact, given the very minimal role a real operating system plays, I'd argue that even Java--poor excuse for a language it is--fills that very same role.
One more thing: as much as it might pain the/. readership to see it, it is nevertheless true that a slavish kowtowing to standards inhibits advancement. Innovation is stifled, not promoted, by standards committees.
You're quite right about this. E.g. Lisp, which has stagnated since the Common Lisp standard--a standard which gets some things brilliantly right and others horribly wrong (generally the latter is for compatibility: standards again!).
Python? Logical blocking by indentation? Don't get me started.
What's wrong with that? Surely you indent your code to indicate its logical structure already, right? So what's the problem?
Now, I would prefer S-expressions (because then one is easily able to do some really cool syntactic manipulations, including real macros), but whitespace structure beats keyword structure, whether those keywords are 'begin/end' or '{}'.
The only place it falls down is web templating, but that's a discussion for another day.
There're more advantages to interpreted than simple portability--and in fact interpreted code can be just as unportable as native code (if I'm calling Win32 APIs on a Linux box, that's a Bad Thing). However, most interpreted environments provide at least some portability by their nature (bytecode or sourcecode), and most provide some portability layers.
There's another advantage, though: interpreted environments typically provide a great deal of introspection, reflection & dynamism. One can redefine functions & methods, extend classes, extend the environment and such at runtime.
And of course Common Lisp offers the portability & flexibility of an interpreted language with the speed of a compiled language: yes, it's a language as dynamic as Python or Perl (much more so, in fact) which is compiled down to native code. How's that for nifty?
Slashdot Mirror
You may also wish to consider the case of a defendant subpoenaing (sp) a journalist with information to exonerate him--should the journalist be compelled to testify?
Yes, I'm familiar with the Fifth Amendment, and with the fact that spouses are (or were, anyway) considered to be exempted from testifying against one another. But the Fifth Amendment doesn't prevent me from being compelled to testify against Jimmy down the street, regardless of whether or not I'm a reporter--and the First Amendment doesn't enter into it either.
The First Amendment doesn't enter into it--freedom of the press is about being free to publish what you want--it's not about being free not to reveal your sources. In support of this, we are specifically exempted from testifying against ourselves by the Fifth Amendment, which has no 'and reporters need not testify about anything they've reported' provision.
Why should reporters be free not to testify when the rest of us can be compelled to do so? Why should they be able to refuse to testify to illegal activities?
Personally, I love backslash--it's a human-edited review of excellent comments and threads. Essentially, it brings to a website what editors bring to the publishing industry, and so far as I know is the first site to do so. It's rather a brilliant little innovation, and it belongs right here.
I think that the OP meant real plain-Jane HTML: no colours, no fonts, no backgrounds, no styles, tables only used for honest-to-God tabular data &c. I rather miss those days, to tell the truth: back then HTML was the HyperText Markup Language, and that's it. It was kinda nice.
To be more accurate, anything may prevent one from sitting as juror, since both parties can dismiss a certain number of prospectives at will, and since jurors can be dismissed for cause as well. But believe it or not, it's not uncommon for those convicted of misdemeanors to sit on juries. They're jsut misdemeanors after all!
I've never heard that, but it neither surprises nor worries me.
Which is as it should be. Remember that felonies are those offences which once carried the death penalty; the state out of its mercy is allowing one to continue to live, thus one should expect certain hassles--e.g. felons can't own weapons or vote.
Now there I agree with you that it's absurd. Property seizures without a proper conviction are a very worrisome development, and one which should be addressed ASAP. The 'drug war' is the source of far, far too many infringements on our liberties, and should be terminated ASAP.
I'll just note that while Lisp can be highly abstract, it need not be. I'd post the full disassembly listing for a function I just wrote, but the accursed lameness filter won't let it remain. So here're the first few opcodes anyway: mov ebx, esp; mov edx, [#xA8CFE04]; mov edi, [#A8CFE08].
An SUV does nothing for one on snowy roads--if anything, it has more mass, thus more inertia, thus slides more. Yes, many SUVs have all-wheel drive; so do many sedans & vans. Yes, many SUVs have good tyres; so do many sedans & vans.
Why not? It depends on what you need to tow. And certainly, if one has a need for an SUV then one should own one; my argument is that very few people need one, and that they are in fact making a mistake when they purchase one, as they are paying too much money for a vehicle which doesn't properly serve their actual needs--and are also negatively impacting the rest of us while they're at it.
You can have a fair number of kids in a sedan, for pete's sake! I think the point at which a minivan or SUV becomes worth looking at is three or more--and even then, it depends on ages, sizes and travel patterns.
I don't think SUVs should be illegal or over-taxed; I just think that purchasers need to think about what they're purchasing. Do they really need a 20 mpg vehicle for commuting in the city?
I agree with what you wrote but not what you meant; both are excellent solutions. You complain that the outside temperatures where you live regularly exceed 100F, and that this can be deadly. Yes, it can--and yet somehow man has been living there for quite a long time. In fact, man has lived in a low-tech fashion just about everywhere from the Arctic to the equator. Now, one can't dress like a New Yorker in Arizona without modifying one's environment, true. But where is it written that one must follow Yankee fashions in the desert? Why not try dressing like a Berber or one of the Masai?
Yes, a Colonial-style home is very poor in Arizona (or here in Denver). What about a thick-walled adobe? What about a yurt? We carry assumptions on housing from a country with lots of cold, wet winds--those assumptions don't hold when living where it's hot, dry and still. Rather than trying to live like Englishmen, Europeans or Yankees, why not try living like natives of our area?
I'm not actually arguing for a duplication of aboriginal or primitive clothing and living arrangements; I'm arguing that we should study them and learn therefrom. For example, I really can't see many modern Americans living in cloth-walled dwellings, simply because solid homes are too deeply ingrained in our culture. But I can imagine more intelligently-designed homes becoming fashionable; I can even imagine more locally-appropriate clothing becoming the thing. Even now clothing styles vary between LA and Minnesota; why could they not vary still more?
Ha! I don't even bother running my AC (Saturday was 100F here in Denver); in the winter I keep the heater at 56 most of the day (raising it to 64 in the morning, 'cause 56 is miserable when getting out of the shower); I drive a 15-year-old car which gets 35 mpg. Oh, and I normally cycle to work (in fact, I recently completed a month without driving to the office).
I'm like the Green Avenger or something. Only thing is they won't let me into the local environmentalist meetings since I always vote a Republican/Libertarian mixed ticket:-(
We actually do use our medics and corpsmen to treat Iraqi civilians. We also use our engineers to build them power stations, bridges, schools and the like. Which the Islamists then blow up.
There's a reason traditional churches don't have pews--the mind focuses on the services much better standing than sitting.
No, they didn't. What they said was that in this case the lack of proper procedure was not grave enough to discard the evidence gathered thereby.
Or an SKS...
The reason is pretty simple: we take the plants, or the animals which eat the plants; we then eat them, use some of their mass for energy and building our bodies, then excrete the remainder. Which we then drop into perfectly good drinking water and ship off to a sewage plant, where the water is repurified, the wastes removed and then dumped into a landfill. Millions of tons of perfectly good organic mass dumped into landfills every year.
If we composted all the human wastes produced and used them as fertiliser, we'd go a good way towards replenishing the soil. We should also not be burning our dead, or burying them in concreate vaults--bury them in the earth, and let their bodies rot naturally and return to the soil.
You ought to get yourself a gigging spear (a multi-pronged, barbed spear usef for gigging frogs, fish and eels)--it'd work better than a shovel, and could be pretty fun.
Actually, this would be a perfect use of GMO organisms. They could, perhaps, arrange for a strain of plant or animal which dies out after a few generations--giving it enough time to reduce the toad population, but not becoming an issue in itself. Or yes, one with a chemical sensitivity which can be used to control it.
According to Yahoo! Finance, Google has a P/E of 68.28, which is insanely high. Now, it's possible that it's worth that, for the guys at Google are brilliant--but are they that brilliant?
That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. The mere fact that thing A preceeded thing B doesn't mean that A caused B.
And even if affirmative action did bring more women into the workplace, it'd still be wrong, for exactly the same reason that bias against men would be wrong: it's unjust and unfair. And, more importantly, it's foolish: the best candidate should get the job, period. A racist company which discriminates against blacks will lose out because it doesn't have the best employees possible; a sexist company which discrimates against men will lose out for the exact same reason.
And those made-up pronouns are--like all made-up pronouns--ugly as sin.
How does Wen Ho Lee say anything about Bush? He was an issue in 1996, under Clinton.
Ballmer was on the way to recovering, when Ted Kennedy offered him a ride home...
There's another advantage, though: interpreted environments typically provide a great deal of introspection, reflection & dynamism. One can redefine functions & methods, extend classes, extend the environment and such at runtime.
And of course Common Lisp offers the portability & flexibility of an interpreted language with the speed of a compiled language: yes, it's a language as dynamic as Python or Perl (much more so, in fact) which is compiled down to native code. How's that for nifty?