What's the difference between preventing minors from getting M-rated games and preventing them from getting porn, cigarettes, or alcohol? It makes sense to have consistent standards about keeping questionable materials out of the hands of children.
First, you must accept the premise that the detrimental effects of M-rated games, porn, alcohol, and cigarettes are identical. I don't.
Then, you must accept the premise that the rights of people, particularly children, to access M-rated games, porn, alcohol, and cigarettes are identical. I don't.
Then, you must accept that the post is not a troll. I haven't.
Society is fundamentally unprepared for the powerless to have a bully pulpit. In times past, the only people who could get themselves heard by a large audience were those who had a base of supporters. Pulpits were scarce and competition for them was fierce. Only the leaders of groups, the wealthy, and those who had a message people wanted to hear could get published or broadcast. The young, among many other classes, could not get heard.
Society has relied on this scarcity to suppress viewpoints that the majority disagreed with. The scarcity created a barrier to entry blocking access to the marketplace of ideas. While far from impenetrable, it was a particularly fine barrier because it was passive -- it achieved a moderate level of suppression without overt acts of censorship. That barrier is falling.
Today, most people have the means to publish (i.e., a computer) in their homes. In a decade or two, everyone will the means to publish in their pocket. To get a message heard today, it does not need to be popular with a large group; it does not need to be popular with a small group; it can be broadcast by as few as one person. A message can now get heard first and then gather support.
Society will have to adapt to a world where the powerless are heard. This business of suppressing student opinion is one part of that. School officials used to be able to force a dissenting student to stop speaking. If nothing else, they could stop him from communicating by barring him from the school property. No longer. You can't stop the signal.
Today, students can easily congregate and speak to each other in fora (online) that are not under school control. School officials are going to have to learn to win arguments on their merits rather than by making dissenters "shut up". And, what we see in student speech is being repeated by all kinds of other formerly voiceless groups. It's a brave new world.
They SETTLED - the Board came up with the offer and the kid and his parents accepted it.
That $117,500 is an amount that could very easily represent the kid's attorney's fees. As for whether the board members will get the boot, that'll be up to the voters at the next election. Maybe today, in fact.
"Gee, Mr. Voter, I tried to stomp on a student's rights and lost, costing the district about $200000-300000 in settlement costs and attorney's fees. But you're still gonna vote for me, right?"
Those who spend time pitting revealed truth against observable truth are missing a question that, especially within their belief system, is pretty damned important. Namely, "why?"
Consider the facts as a IDer-creationist perceives them: 1. There is an omnipotent creator. 2. There is a large body of evidence suggesting (falsely) that life arrived in its present form via evolution. 3. But evolution was not (per the IDer-creationist's beliefs) the mechanism.
From these, it appears that the creator at least wanted people to think that evolution had happened. Why go to all that trouble? Was the creator trying to convey some message by making evolution appear to have been the mechanism? If so, what is the message?
1. Assume an omnipotent being, i.e. one who can alter any observable evidence. 2. Consider the assertion: "the world was created yesterday". 3. Exercise: disprove the assertion using only observable evidence.
So far, the PTO has done nothing bad here. Let's review: 1. Some guy files a patent application. 2. PTO publishes application where every can see it 3. much shouting ensues
The thing you're complaining about hasn't happened yet: 4. PTO grants patent to guy anyway
The purpose of calling for federal regulation is to keep costs down, not to protect privacy.
In more ways than one! Note that a Federal law would preempt all state laws, reducing the number of bribes needed to 51% * (435 + 100 + 1) = ~274 people. That's much cheaper than controlling the legislatures of 50 states.
Would people please stop modding up happy-making but completely false disinformation like the grandparent? The immediate parent has it right and provides his citations (which I shall not repeat). The grandparent, in an attempt to oversimplify, leads readers astray.
We have this copyright discussion every few _days_ here on/. Are we ever going to get it right? I'm not surprised that there should be some one as confused as the grandparent, but I am surprised that the collective wisdom (i.e. moderation) of the group also remains so confused.
The parent is right: Separation of powers is probably best described as a French idea with Greek roots. The United States could be described as the first deployment of a system using separation of powers and checks and balances. (Powers are not well-separated in the English system, with most functions being controlled by Parliament.)
And certainly the U.S. framers were well aware of French thought at the time. For instance, Thomas Jefferson participated in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution only by correspondence . . . because he was ambassador to France at the time.
1. Screen names are important to users. 2. IPSs will summarily tread upon individual users to enforce their will and/or rules. They will avoid communicating with users whenever possible. 3. An individual user has no leverage to change this.
Therefore, cheer on our champion: CmdrTaco. He has a bully pulpit and he is using it. Perhaps he can make things better for all of us. We must remember that we are his leverage and he is our lever -- we must support him.
I hope Taco will not be satisfied if Blizzard only fixes his problem. If they don't change their practices, then this same thing will just happen to some one else tomorrow. And that person will have no leverage at all.
Can anyone explain what the connection is between the "Princess Bride," and something a typical Slashdot reader would be interested in?
You may have heard The Princess Bride being called a "cult classic"? Well, this horde of/.ers clustered around you, they are the cultists. They take no survivors.
And if that's not enough to scare you, their assets also include a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow.
The Princess Bride, from a certain point of view, is the story of a lad born of low station in life who takes to a life of piracy and eventually wins the girl of his dreams by stealing her from the prince of the land.
One can argue for a right to anonymous speech as an unenumerated right guaranteed by Amendment IX, but this is a weak basis.
Instead, one should base an argument for a right to anonymous speech based on Amendment I. The first amendment doesn't say that free speech is only guaranteed where the speaker is known. It says that free speech is guaranteed. For a bunch of historical, logical, and policy reasons that other courts have described at great length, it turns out that that means both anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech.
The argument that the first amendment doesn't mention anonymity and must not therefore protect anonymous speech is based on a method of dividing speech in half and then declaring arbitrarily that only one half or the other is protected. The anonymous/known division is no more sensible that public/private, child/parent, man/woman, oral/written, or verbal/gesture.
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The problem is, defensive patents really only work against large corporations, . . . Actually, patents only work (as a counterstrike weapon) against those who make, use, or sell something. Companies small and large are equally susceptible. It's these patent pirates -- file-drawer companies that produce nothing -- who are immune to countersuit.
(Of course, defensive patents work as prior art against anybody, but a journal article does that job just as well and is cheaper to write.)
the New York Times has an article about what to take when you have to leave home in a big hurry
Step One: Move away from the coast now.
For those U.S. residents now fretting over the recent hurricanes, consider this. All those states in the middle don't get hurricanes. They don't get big earthquakes. They don't get big floods (except, gasp, along the big rivers). They get the occassional tornado (which are highly localized) and the occassional blizard (which you can wait out).
If you must live in a big city, move to Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Columbus, Denver, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Birmingham, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Nashville, Vegas, etc.
Your B amendment merely shifts more legislative power to the President, which means that Congress will have to kowtow to the President's every desire if they want to get anything of theirs passed. I suppose if you have absolute trust the President's motivation & competence, then that'd be fine - but if you had THAT much trust, then you might as well go to a dictatorship.
I do not understand your objection. There is already a veto and a method of override for whole bills. This proposal would extend the same veto and method of override to line items in bills.
While it would without doubt reduce congress's ability to confound the president's existing veto power by wrapping many items into a conglomerate bill, it is a far cry from 'kowtowing', 'absolute trust', or 'dictatorship'. One can observe that from use of this proposal in several states already. Additionally, it is limited to spending items only, not other laws.
This amendment would address a systemic ill that encourages over spending. Electing a competent, honest president is a separate problem.
AMENDMENT A: Congress shall pass no law exceeding in length this Constitution.
In essence, this is a rule against unrelated amendments. Unrelated amendments prevent debating an idea on its merits. They are also the main method of passing pork. I suggest word count as the mechanism because it replaces the subjective arguments over what is or is not 'related' with an objective metric.
If forced to vote on their laws 10000* or so words at a time, legislators would have a much harder time explaining their voting records to their constituents. To be sure, one can pack more than one subject into 10000 words, but there are practical limits.
-- *The bare Constitution is ~4600 words and the Amendments add another ~6000 words. This length is selected because (1) it's a manageable size and (2) because the laws of today can't claim to be important enough to merit more words than were needed to design the whole system of government. By constrast, the omnibus budget bill passed in Nov 2004 was 3000 pages long and weighed 14 pounds.
As variants on the idea of a line item veto, wcdw's proposal seems fine to me. The variant I put in the grandparent is just one way of coding a line item veto.
In the courts, if your claim is denied and you bring the same claim again, it will be denied immediately because it is a thing decided ("res judicata").
In congress, if your request is denied and you bring the same request again, it will require more contributions.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between preventing minors from getting M-rated games and preventing them from getting porn, cigarettes, or alcohol? It makes sense to have consistent standards about keeping questionable materials out of the hands of children.
First, you must accept the premise that the detrimental effects of M-rated games, porn, alcohol, and cigarettes are identical. I don't.
Then, you must accept the premise that the rights of people, particularly children, to access M-rated games, porn, alcohol, and cigarettes are identical. I don't.
Then, you must accept that the post is not a troll. I haven't.
1. Will people please stop writing about the illegal stuff they've done?
2. First, grasshopper, you must master "1". Until then, there is no "2".
Society is fundamentally unprepared for the powerless to have a bully pulpit. In times past, the only people who could get themselves heard by a large audience were those who had a base of supporters. Pulpits were scarce and competition for them was fierce. Only the leaders of groups, the wealthy, and those who had a message people wanted to hear could get published or broadcast. The young, among many other classes, could not get heard.
Society has relied on this scarcity to suppress viewpoints that the majority disagreed with. The scarcity created a barrier to entry blocking access to the marketplace of ideas. While far from impenetrable, it was a particularly fine barrier because it was passive -- it achieved a moderate level of suppression without overt acts of censorship. That barrier is falling.
Today, most people have the means to publish (i.e., a computer) in their homes. In a decade or two, everyone will the means to publish in their pocket. To get a message heard today, it does not need to be popular with a large group; it does not need to be popular with a small group; it can be broadcast by as few as one person. A message can now get heard first and then gather support.
Society will have to adapt to a world where the powerless are heard. This business of suppressing student opinion is one part of that. School officials used to be able to force a dissenting student to stop speaking. If nothing else, they could stop him from communicating by barring him from the school property. No longer. You can't stop the signal.
Today, students can easily congregate and speak to each other in fora (online) that are not under school control. School officials are going to have to learn to win arguments on their merits rather than by making dissenters "shut up". And, what we see in student speech is being repeated by all kinds of other formerly voiceless groups. It's a brave new world.
They SETTLED - the Board came up with the offer and the kid and his parents accepted it.
That $117,500 is an amount that could very easily represent the kid's attorney's fees. As for whether the board members will get the boot, that'll be up to the voters at the next election. Maybe today, in fact.
"Gee, Mr. Voter, I tried to stomp on a student's rights and lost, costing the district about $200000-300000 in settlement costs and attorney's fees. But you're still gonna vote for me, right?"
Those who spend time pitting revealed truth against observable truth are missing a question that, especially within their belief system, is pretty damned important. Namely, "why?"
Consider the facts as a IDer-creationist perceives them:
1. There is an omnipotent creator.
2. There is a large body of evidence suggesting (falsely) that life arrived in its present form via evolution.
3. But evolution was not (per the IDer-creationist's beliefs) the mechanism.
From these, it appears that the creator at least wanted people to think that evolution had happened. Why go to all that trouble? Was the creator trying to convey some message by making evolution appear to have been the mechanism? If so, what is the message?
Why is falsifiability important?
1. Assume an omnipotent being, i.e. one who can alter any observable evidence.
2. Consider the assertion: "the world was created yesterday".
3. Exercise: disprove the assertion using only observable evidence.
So far, the PTO has done nothing bad here. Let's review:
1. Some guy files a patent application.
2. PTO publishes application where every can see it
3. much shouting ensues
The thing you're complaining about hasn't happened yet:
4. PTO grants patent to guy anyway
The purpose of calling for federal regulation is to keep costs down, not to protect privacy.
In more ways than one! Note that a Federal law would preempt all state laws, reducing the number of bribes needed to 51% * (435 + 100 + 1) = ~274 people. That's much cheaper than controlling the legislatures of 50 states.
Would people please stop modding up happy-making but completely false disinformation like the grandparent? The immediate parent has it right and provides his citations (which I shall not repeat). The grandparent, in an attempt to oversimplify, leads readers astray.
/. Are we ever going to get it right? I'm not surprised that there should be some one as confused as the grandparent, but I am surprised that the collective wisdom (i.e. moderation) of the group also remains so confused.
We have this copyright discussion every few _days_ here on
Yeeesh! Fer'gimminnees!
The parent is right: Separation of powers is probably best described as a French idea with Greek roots. The United States could be described as the first deployment of a system using separation of powers and checks and balances. (Powers are not well-separated in the English system, with most functions being controlled by Parliament.)
And certainly the U.S. framers were well aware of French thought at the time. For instance, Thomas Jefferson participated in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution only by correspondence . . . because he was ambassador to France at the time.
1. Screen names are important to users.
2. IPSs will summarily tread upon individual users to enforce their will and/or rules. They will avoid communicating with users whenever possible.
3. An individual user has no leverage to change this.
Therefore, cheer on our champion: CmdrTaco. He has a bully pulpit and he is using it. Perhaps he can make things better for all of us. We must remember that we are his leverage and he is our lever -- we must support him.
I hope Taco will not be satisfied if Blizzard only fixes his problem. If they don't change their practices, then this same thing will just happen to some one else tomorrow. And that person will have no leverage at all.
Can anyone explain what the connection is between the "Princess Bride," and something a typical Slashdot reader would be interested in?
/.ers clustered around you, they are the cultists. They take no survivors.
You may have heard The Princess Bride being called a "cult classic"? Well, this horde of
And if that's not enough to scare you, their assets also include a holocaust cloak and a wheelbarrow.
The Princess Bride, from a certain point of view, is the story of a lad born of low station in life who takes to a life of piracy and eventually wins the girl of his dreams by stealing her from the prince of the land.
/.?
What could be more relevant to
slashdot does need a "Culture" section
Hear, hear!
One can argue for a right to anonymous speech as an unenumerated right guaranteed by Amendment IX, but this is a weak basis.
Instead, one should base an argument for a right to anonymous speech based on Amendment I. The first amendment doesn't say that free speech is only guaranteed where the speaker is known. It says that free speech is guaranteed. For a bunch of historical, logical, and policy reasons that other courts have described at great length, it turns out that that means both anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech.
The argument that the first amendment doesn't mention anonymity and must not therefore protect anonymous speech is based on a method of dividing speech in half and then declaring arbitrarily that only one half or the other is protected. The anonymous/known division is no more sensible that public/private, child/parent, man/woman, oral/written, or verbal/gesture.
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The problem is, defensive patents really only work against large corporations, . . .
Actually, patents only work (as a counterstrike weapon) against those who make, use, or sell something. Companies small and large are equally susceptible. It's these patent pirates -- file-drawer companies that produce nothing -- who are immune to countersuit.
(Of course, defensive patents work as prior art against anybody, but a journal article does that job just as well and is cheaper to write.)
One thing that differs about Miers from most of the court -- her undergraduate degree (mathematics).
The others are Roberts (liberal arts), *O'Connor (economics), *Rehnquist (political science), Breyer (liberal arts, math, science), Ginsburg (government), Kennedy (liberal arts, economics), Scalia (history), Souter (liberal arts), Stevens (english literature), Thomas (seminary, english).
the New York Times has an article about what to take when you have to leave home in a big hurry
Step One: Move away from the coast now.
For those U.S. residents now fretting over the recent hurricanes, consider this. All those states in the middle don't get hurricanes. They don't get big earthquakes. They don't get big floods (except, gasp, along the big rivers). They get the occassional tornado (which are highly localized) and the occassional blizard (which you can wait out).
If you must live in a big city, move to Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Columbus, Denver, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Birmingham, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Nashville, Vegas, etc.
I don't think they care whether you want one. After all, you are not their customer -- the pub is.
Info on the current capabilities of a patient care simulator can be found here and here.
Riverside Methodist Hospital in Ohio began using these patient care simulators earlier this summer (June 9, 2005).
Your B amendment merely shifts more legislative power to the President, which means that Congress will have to kowtow to the President's every desire if they want to get anything of theirs passed. I suppose if you have absolute trust the President's motivation & competence, then that'd be fine - but if you had THAT much trust, then you might as well go to a dictatorship.
I do not understand your objection. There is already a veto and a method of override for whole bills. This proposal would extend the same veto and method of override to line items in bills.
While it would without doubt reduce congress's ability to confound the president's existing veto power by wrapping many items into a conglomerate bill, it is a far cry from 'kowtowing', 'absolute trust', or 'dictatorship'. One can observe that from use of this proposal in several states already. Additionally, it is limited to spending items only, not other laws.
This amendment would address a systemic ill that encourages over spending. Electing a competent, honest president is a separate problem.
AMENDMENT A: Congress shall pass no law exceeding in length this Constitution.
In essence, this is a rule against unrelated amendments. Unrelated amendments prevent debating an idea on its merits. They are also the main method of passing pork. I suggest word count as the mechanism because it replaces the subjective arguments over what is or is not 'related' with an objective metric.
If forced to vote on their laws 10000* or so words at a time, legislators would have a much harder time explaining their voting records to their constituents. To be sure, one can pack more than one subject into 10000 words, but there are practical limits.
--
*The bare Constitution is ~4600 words and the Amendments add another ~6000 words. This length is selected because (1) it's a manageable size and (2) because the laws of today can't claim to be important enough to merit more words than were needed to design the whole system of government. By constrast, the omnibus budget bill passed in Nov 2004 was 3000 pages long and weighed 14 pounds.
As variants on the idea of a line item veto, wcdw's proposal seems fine to me. The variant I put in the grandparent is just one way of coding a line item veto.
In the courts, if your claim is denied and you bring the same claim again, it will be denied immediately because it is a thing decided ("res judicata").
In congress, if your request is denied and you bring the same request again, it will require more contributions.