Well, scientists for one. It might explain why so many of them have switched to OSX as their *NIX of choice. I remember a lot of Linux desktop managers struggled with doing basic things like properly rendering Mathematica and allowing it to accelerate graphics with open GL whereas on OSX and Windows, it just "worked" pretty much 99.9% of the time.
Linux itself (the actual kernel) is very stable, maybe even more stable than the base Windows NT kernel. But as a desktop operating system? There's a reason why most people shell out good money for OSX or Windows, and it is not just because they look pretty (which many Linux desktops do these days as well).
Yeah, I remember how the United States surrendered to the Japanese when the first woman was killed at Perl Harbor.
I also remember when New York City shut down its subway system back at the turn of the century when the first woman was killed by a subway train.
And remember the government program to build interstate highways across the US? Shut down in its first 100 miles after the first female was killed in a freeway accident.
My phrase "near absolute" in context to the rest of my writings could be interpreted in many different ways. I clarified what I meant. The fact that you are still stuck on debating the semantics of my original post demonstrates you have nothing of actual value to contribute to the conversation.
The right to swing firsts was an analogy made by Zechariah Chafee. The point is, no man has absolute rights or absolute liberties. They end when another person is substantially harmed or the rights of another person infringed upon.
Also, you really want a society where it is legal to give false testimony to a police officer or a court? Maybe someone who doesn't like you makes up a story about you, gets others to go along with it and gets you thrown into prison. After all, there is no disincentive to lying, because they cannot get in trouble for filing false police reports, obstruction of justice, or perjury in a world where freedom of speech is an absolute right.
How about someone who purposefully defrauds you out of thousands of dollars. Normally, they could be thrown in prison, but in a world where freedom of speech is absolute, oral and written contracts are meaningless, because I have the freedom to say or write anything I want without any criminal repercussions.
Limits on freedom of expression are a balance between the liberties of one individual and the rights and liberties of another. Most people would agree that the right to swing my first ends where another man's nose begins. Likewise, most people would agree that my freedom of religion ends when I begin sacrificing virgins, that my freedom of expression ends when my performance art involves blowing up a dam, et cetera.
Is it my right to lie? Not when it involves fraud. Is it my right to give false testimony in court or to a police officer? Absolutely not. We recognize that there are limits to the freedom of expression. No right is completely absolute.
I'm not "walking back" from anything. While I understand your first post may have been a response engendered by a legitimately different interpretation of what I meant by, "near absolute", I did clarify what point and at this point you are purposefully arguing against a strawman you created rather than my actual argument.
Also, your comment about "natural rights" is not pedantry. It is sophistry. The Supreme Court and the populace recognizes that freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Trying to impose your vocabulary on others by "correcting" them is nothing more than a superciliousness born not out of actual superior knowledge but out of ignorance and self-delusion.
Since the Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court has pretty consistently overturned future cases that relied on the doctrine, such as in Gooding v. Wilson. The court has not come right out and completely overturned the doctrine, but the high court has consistently not upheld it as valid in such a wide variety of cases that it is pretty close to effectively dead, the latest being the cases against the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members would shout obscenities at the relatives of service-members killed in combat.
In my opinion, the US courts are quite good at this. That is why I hold them up as a standard.
Nobody sane wants absolute freedom of expression. Libel laws, as they exist in the US, in my opinion strike the right balance between allowing someone recourse when their lives or businesses are utterly decimated by vicious lies spread by others while ensuring that it is very, very difficult to abuse the libel laws to stifle legitimate freedom of expression.
The differences in British and American libel laws would make such an interpretation tricky.
In the US, impersonating someone for the purpose of satire is generally well-protected. Furthermore, in order to prove a libel case, the plaintiff not only has to prove that the defendant intended to defame him for not legitimate purpose other than to cause him harm, but they also have to prove that they suffered real damages (an example might be a restaurant owner who falsely accused a competitor of having a rat infestation in a successful attempt to drive business to his establishment). Under US law, the plaintiff would have to prove not only that the accusation was falsely made to run off his business, but that it did indeed result in proven pecuniary losses.
By contrast, the British system essentially puts the burden on someone accused of libel to prove their innocence and does not have the same strict standards the US does.
It probably would not fly as criminal law in the US (because libel cannot be criminalized to the best of my understanding of the court's interpretation of the first amendment), but under the British system, there seem to be very few restraints on the government making unpopular speech criminal, so in theory, even someone who makes a satirical impersonation could be subject to civil or criminal penalties, which should give anyone living in the UK pause.
Your response demonstrates that you failed to read and understand my points. There will always be limits to freedom of speech, but those limits are much more restrained in the US than the UK, just to go down the list:
1) Libel in the US is a civil matter (not criminal) and requires meeting very strict standards of proof, including proving both that the defendant knowingly made a false statement for the express purpose of defaming the plaintiff (and not as a matter of comedic, satirical, or other protected purpose) and that the plaintiff actually suffered real damages as a result. Libel cases in the US are very difficult to win.. By contrast, the British libel laws are so unfavorable to the defendant's right of free speech that many US States such as California have passed laws to protect their residents from action in British courts.
2) Inciting others to violence is only illegal if there is an imminent threat of lawless action, such as a mob gathered around someone's house who you incite to storm inside. By contrast, British law allows someone to be imprisoned simply for making disrespectful statements about someone or some group that might, at some hypothetical point in the future, incite others to commit violence against.
3) The fighting words doctrine has largely been overturned and, in any case, is not a criminal act in itself, merely recognized as a mitigating defense to a claim of assault or battery.
4) Disturbing the peace is not a charge that can be used as a workaround to target someone's freedom of expression. The courts have ruled on this time and again.
5) Emotional distress is damage in a civil case. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
I'm not going to even bother than the rest, because you clearly missed the point. No right is absolute, but the US Supreme Court guards the freedom of expression in the US much more fiercely than European Courts do.
. . . especially the ones behind using the internet to interfere with people's real lives, but I do not believe that mere trolling is criminal.
The EU, especially the UK's constant rolling back of the freedom of expression is downright concerning. If people go to prison for expressing an unpopular opinion I disagree with, how long before people go to prison for expressing an unpopular opinion I agree with?
Despite it's flaws, the near absolute interpretation of the constitutional right to the freedom of speech by the US Supreme Court is a godsend and makes me proud to be an American.
Hmm, the new Surface 3 has a very high resolution display (about the same size but with much more pixel real estate than my laptop) and it weighs about the same as the first generation of iPad.
Tablet PC's had a rough start, but advances in Intel's low power processors has made light and powerful tablet computers possible for the last five years or so and the Surface 3 and some of the similar units from Microsoft's hardware competitors seem to have finally hit the grand-slam that Microsoft was originally going for back in 2002.
I suspect if they are going to copy Microsoft, they will copy Window's 8's ability to switch between the "fat fingers" interface and desktop on the fly.
It's also possible they could put in an ARM chip to give you the option of booting to iOS and saving power, but I find that a bit wasteful and far-fetched.
Why would they need a new OS? When Microsoft introduced the concept in 2002, they simply added the features into XP. Over the years, they added more and more touch and digitizer friendly features to Windows. Ubuntu has been trying to copy the Microsoft model with its Unity desktop manager, and KDE has most of the basic XP-Tablet features built in.
Windows now ships with features that lets it adapt to tablet, workstation, laptop, or media center paradigms.
All Apple really has to do is add support for basic tablet PC features (digitizers, touchscreen, screen rotation, maybe some non-desktop interface similar to what Windows added with 8). Sure, it's a big task and there is no evidence that it is present in Yosemite, so perhaps it is just a rumor (or perhaps Apple is going to ship the features with the next version of OSX or some kind of kludge like Microsoft's original Tablet version of XP).
While it probably would not be enough to get me to buy it, it would be something that was actually attractive to me (unlike the iPad) and I don't think that having a little more competition in the Tablet-ultrabook market is a bad thing, especially since it would allow the Apple aficionados to see what they have been missing out on for the last 12 years, things like taking notes on the screens of their laptops with a pen and having them synced up with the audio they are recording.
Supposedly you can install a full Linux distro alonside Android, accessible via VIM, but I could never get it to work and just gave up. I also never got SSH to work properly with an X-server on Android (not for the lack of trying).
As a last resort, I can always use Microsoft RD and VPN to Remote Control a Linux or Windows machine.
Yes, Android is Linux in the same sense that an ATM (which often run Win-embedded) is Windows, which is to say, way to completely miss the point so you can show off your pedantry skills while contributing absolutely nothing of pedagogical value.
Well, maybe someone has some uses for it, but the advantage of an x86 chip is that it can run a REAL operating system, specifically Windows, which Microsoft has been optimizing for tablets for over a decade.
Also, while Linux is woefully behind, the Ubuntu distribution has been making great strides in catching up to Windows as a desktop tablet OS.
If I am buying an x86 tablet it is to run Windows and maybe Ubuntu, not some lightweight toy OS.
Yes, KDE does certainly have some issues. No matter what I have tried, KATE simply does not seem to work well over SSH (and I've tried every Xwindows system under the sun: OSX, three different Windows X emulators, Ubuntu, et cetera).
That is an annoying bug that has been part of KDE as long as I can remember, which is too bad, because I love KATE.
Women are not going to start flocking to Computer Science classrooms, but at least it shows the industry is trying to change the huge gender imbalance, worse in CS than in physics and engineering.
Home users should be able to host their own personal email server. We are paying for an internet connection. So long as someone is hosting a server for their own personal use, the ISP's should butt out.
The onus of evidence is always on the person making the positive claim, not the skeptic. To suggest otherwise is a logical fallacy known as "shifting the burden of proof". If someone cannot back up a statement with a proper citation, the statement should be assumed false and rejected until such time as the claimant provides credible sources.
It is a discussion about science, so I am uncertain how it is not a scientific debate.
If I were to make a claim, for instance, "NASA conducted an experiment where astronauts tasted moon rocks and they tasted just like Gouda," the onus is on me to provide a proper citation to the experiment, not on someone else to disprove it.
Likewise, if you are going to reference studies, you need to cite them, otherwise you are just making an unsubstantiated claim and committing any number of logical fallacies.
Please provide proper citations to the peer reviewed journals this research was published in.
Also, an anomaly in one experiment (especially one that cannot be reproduced) is a long way from success.
In fact, if there really has been serious study put into similar research, the fact that nobody has been able to make it work properly in the last two decades reduces the prior probability of someone achieving success. It does not increase it, per the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem.
And yes, claiming to achieve cold fusion is something that is considered to be an extraordinary claim by nuclear physicists, somewhat less extraordinary than a perpetual motion machine but significantly more extraordinary than sustained hot fusion (which is also widely considered to be an extraordinary unlikely achievement in the foreseeable future).
There is a reason why pretty much everyone with a physics degree is extremely skeptical of these sorts of claims, and that is because they are extremely unlikely achievements that are never supported by commensurate evidence and almost always involve some sort of significant pecuniary motive .
I meant that they were fooled in the sense that a stage magician fools his audience. The audience probably is skeptical that the magician actually sawed someone in half, but they do not know how the trick was performed. In the CERN case, it took them the better part of a year to reveal the man behind the curtain, even though they had complete control over the experiment.
Similarly, in this case, I suspect the researchers were fooled. I don't believe necessarily that the researchers are not still skeptical of their own results, just that they were tricked (quite likely on purpose) and that they do not understand how they were tricked.
I think you just read a lot more into what I was writing than what I actually wrote, probably because you felt strongly about the subject and had encountered such arguments in the past.
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Well, scientists for one. It might explain why so many of them have switched to OSX as their *NIX of choice. I remember a lot of Linux desktop managers struggled with doing basic things like properly rendering Mathematica and allowing it to accelerate graphics with open GL whereas on OSX and Windows, it just "worked" pretty much 99.9% of the time.
Linux itself (the actual kernel) is very stable, maybe even more stable than the base Windows NT kernel. But as a desktop operating system? There's a reason why most people shell out good money for OSX or Windows, and it is not just because they look pretty (which many Linux desktops do these days as well).
Yeah, I remember how the United States surrendered to the Japanese when the first woman was killed at Perl Harbor.
I also remember when New York City shut down its subway system back at the turn of the century when the first woman was killed by a subway train.
And remember the government program to build interstate highways across the US? Shut down in its first 100 miles after the first female was killed in a freeway accident.
No, I rightly chose my vocabulary.
My phrase "near absolute" in context to the rest of my writings could be interpreted in many different ways. I clarified what I meant. The fact that you are still stuck on debating the semantics of my original post demonstrates you have nothing of actual value to contribute to the conversation.
The right to swing firsts was an analogy made by Zechariah Chafee. The point is, no man has absolute rights or absolute liberties. They end when another person is substantially harmed or the rights of another person infringed upon.
Also, you really want a society where it is legal to give false testimony to a police officer or a court? Maybe someone who doesn't like you makes up a story about you, gets others to go along with it and gets you thrown into prison. After all, there is no disincentive to lying, because they cannot get in trouble for filing false police reports, obstruction of justice, or perjury in a world where freedom of speech is an absolute right.
How about someone who purposefully defrauds you out of thousands of dollars. Normally, they could be thrown in prison, but in a world where freedom of speech is absolute, oral and written contracts are meaningless, because I have the freedom to say or write anything I want without any criminal repercussions.
Limits on freedom of expression are a balance between the liberties of one individual and the rights and liberties of another. Most people would agree that the right to swing my first ends where another man's nose begins. Likewise, most people would agree that my freedom of religion ends when I begin sacrificing virgins, that my freedom of expression ends when my performance art involves blowing up a dam, et cetera.
Is it my right to lie? Not when it involves fraud. Is it my right to give false testimony in court or to a police officer? Absolutely not. We recognize that there are limits to the freedom of expression. No right is completely absolute.
I'm not "walking back" from anything. While I understand your first post may have been a response engendered by a legitimately different interpretation of what I meant by, "near absolute", I did clarify what point and at this point you are purposefully arguing against a strawman you created rather than my actual argument.
Also, your comment about "natural rights" is not pedantry. It is sophistry. The Supreme Court and the populace recognizes that freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Trying to impose your vocabulary on others by "correcting" them is nothing more than a superciliousness born not out of actual superior knowledge but out of ignorance and self-delusion.
Since the Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court has pretty consistently overturned future cases that relied on the doctrine, such as in Gooding v. Wilson. The court has not come right out and completely overturned the doctrine, but the high court has consistently not upheld it as valid in such a wide variety of cases that it is pretty close to effectively dead, the latest being the cases against the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members would shout obscenities at the relatives of service-members killed in combat.
In my opinion, the US courts are quite good at this. That is why I hold them up as a standard.
Nobody sane wants absolute freedom of expression. Libel laws, as they exist in the US, in my opinion strike the right balance between allowing someone recourse when their lives or businesses are utterly decimated by vicious lies spread by others while ensuring that it is very, very difficult to abuse the libel laws to stifle legitimate freedom of expression.
The differences in British and American libel laws would make such an interpretation tricky.
In the US, impersonating someone for the purpose of satire is generally well-protected. Furthermore, in order to prove a libel case, the plaintiff not only has to prove that the defendant intended to defame him for not legitimate purpose other than to cause him harm, but they also have to prove that they suffered real damages (an example might be a restaurant owner who falsely accused a competitor of having a rat infestation in a successful attempt to drive business to his establishment). Under US law, the plaintiff would have to prove not only that the accusation was falsely made to run off his business, but that it did indeed result in proven pecuniary losses.
By contrast, the British system essentially puts the burden on someone accused of libel to prove their innocence and does not have the same strict standards the US does.
It probably would not fly as criminal law in the US (because libel cannot be criminalized to the best of my understanding of the court's interpretation of the first amendment), but under the British system, there seem to be very few restraints on the government making unpopular speech criminal, so in theory, even someone who makes a satirical impersonation could be subject to civil or criminal penalties, which should give anyone living in the UK pause.
Your response demonstrates that you failed to read and understand my points. There will always be limits to freedom of speech, but those limits are much more restrained in the US than the UK, just to go down the list:
1) Libel in the US is a civil matter (not criminal) and requires meeting very strict standards of proof, including proving both that the defendant knowingly made a false statement for the express purpose of defaming the plaintiff (and not as a matter of comedic, satirical, or other protected purpose) and that the plaintiff actually suffered real damages as a result. Libel cases in the US are very difficult to win.. By contrast, the British libel laws are so unfavorable to the defendant's right of free speech that many US States such as California have passed laws to protect their residents from action in British courts.
2) Inciting others to violence is only illegal if there is an imminent threat of lawless action, such as a mob gathered around someone's house who you incite to storm inside. By contrast, British law allows someone to be imprisoned simply for making disrespectful statements about someone or some group that might, at some hypothetical point in the future, incite others to commit violence against.
3) The fighting words doctrine has largely been overturned and, in any case, is not a criminal act in itself, merely recognized as a mitigating defense to a claim of assault or battery.
4) Disturbing the peace is not a charge that can be used as a workaround to target someone's freedom of expression. The courts have ruled on this time and again.
5) Emotional distress is damage in a civil case. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
I'm not going to even bother than the rest, because you clearly missed the point. No right is absolute, but the US Supreme Court guards the freedom of expression in the US much more fiercely than European Courts do.
. . . especially the ones behind using the internet to interfere with people's real lives, but I do not believe that mere trolling is criminal.
The EU, especially the UK's constant rolling back of the freedom of expression is downright concerning. If people go to prison for expressing an unpopular opinion I disagree with, how long before people go to prison for expressing an unpopular opinion I agree with?
Despite it's flaws, the near absolute interpretation of the constitutional right to the freedom of speech by the US Supreme Court is a godsend and makes me proud to be an American.
Hmm, the new Surface 3 has a very high resolution display (about the same size but with much more pixel real estate than my laptop) and it weighs about the same as the first generation of iPad.
Tablet PC's had a rough start, but advances in Intel's low power processors has made light and powerful tablet computers possible for the last five years or so and the Surface 3 and some of the similar units from Microsoft's hardware competitors seem to have finally hit the grand-slam that Microsoft was originally going for back in 2002.
I suspect if they are going to copy Microsoft, they will copy Window's 8's ability to switch between the "fat fingers" interface and desktop on the fly.
It's also possible they could put in an ARM chip to give you the option of booting to iOS and saving power, but I find that a bit wasteful and far-fetched.
Why would they need a new OS? When Microsoft introduced the concept in 2002, they simply added the features into XP. Over the years, they added more and more touch and digitizer friendly features to Windows. Ubuntu has been trying to copy the Microsoft model with its Unity desktop manager, and KDE has most of the basic XP-Tablet features built in.
Windows now ships with features that lets it adapt to tablet, workstation, laptop, or media center paradigms.
All Apple really has to do is add support for basic tablet PC features (digitizers, touchscreen, screen rotation, maybe some non-desktop interface similar to what Windows added with 8). Sure, it's a big task and there is no evidence that it is present in Yosemite, so perhaps it is just a rumor (or perhaps Apple is going to ship the features with the next version of OSX or some kind of kludge like Microsoft's original Tablet version of XP).
While it probably would not be enough to get me to buy it, it would be something that was actually attractive to me (unlike the iPad) and I don't think that having a little more competition in the Tablet-ultrabook market is a bad thing, especially since it would allow the Apple aficionados to see what they have been missing out on for the last 12 years, things like taking notes on the screens of their laptops with a pen and having them synced up with the audio they are recording.
Supposedly you can install a full Linux distro alonside Android, accessible via VIM, but I could never get it to work and just gave up. I also never got SSH to work properly with an X-server on Android (not for the lack of trying).
As a last resort, I can always use Microsoft RD and VPN to Remote Control a Linux or Windows machine.
Yes, Android is Linux in the same sense that an ATM (which often run Win-embedded) is Windows, which is to say, way to completely miss the point so you can show off your pedantry skills while contributing absolutely nothing of pedagogical value.
Well, maybe someone has some uses for it, but the advantage of an x86 chip is that it can run a REAL operating system, specifically Windows, which Microsoft has been optimizing for tablets for over a decade.
Also, while Linux is woefully behind, the Ubuntu distribution has been making great strides in catching up to Windows as a desktop tablet OS.
If I am buying an x86 tablet it is to run Windows and maybe Ubuntu, not some lightweight toy OS.
Yes, KDE does certainly have some issues. No matter what I have tried, KATE simply does not seem to work well over SSH (and I've tried every Xwindows system under the sun: OSX, three different Windows X emulators, Ubuntu, et cetera).
That is an annoying bug that has been part of KDE as long as I can remember, which is too bad, because I love KATE.
I'm just curious. I prefer KDE to Gnome, Windows to OSX, and coffee to tea.
If you prefer Gnome to KDE, why?
Women are not going to start flocking to Computer Science classrooms, but at least it shows the industry is trying to change the huge gender imbalance, worse in CS than in physics and engineering.
Home users should be able to host their own personal email server. We are paying for an internet connection. So long as someone is hosting a server for their own personal use, the ISP's should butt out.
Um, maybe because non-business customers use SMTP?
The onus of evidence is always on the person making the positive claim, not the skeptic. To suggest otherwise is a logical fallacy known as "shifting the burden of proof". If someone cannot back up a statement with a proper citation, the statement should be assumed false and rejected until such time as the claimant provides credible sources.
It is a discussion about science, so I am uncertain how it is not a scientific debate.
If I were to make a claim, for instance, "NASA conducted an experiment where astronauts tasted moon rocks and they tasted just like Gouda," the onus is on me to provide a proper citation to the experiment, not on someone else to disprove it.
Likewise, if you are going to reference studies, you need to cite them, otherwise you are just making an unsubstantiated claim and committing any number of logical fallacies.
Please provide proper citations to the peer reviewed journals this research was published in.
Also, an anomaly in one experiment (especially one that cannot be reproduced) is a long way from success.
In fact, if there really has been serious study put into similar research, the fact that nobody has been able to make it work properly in the last two decades reduces the prior probability of someone achieving success. It does not increase it, per the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem.
And yes, claiming to achieve cold fusion is something that is considered to be an extraordinary claim by nuclear physicists, somewhat less extraordinary than a perpetual motion machine but significantly more extraordinary than sustained hot fusion (which is also widely considered to be an extraordinary unlikely achievement in the foreseeable future).
There is a reason why pretty much everyone with a physics degree is extremely skeptical of these sorts of claims, and that is because they are extremely unlikely achievements that are never supported by commensurate evidence and almost always involve some sort of significant pecuniary motive .
I meant that they were fooled in the sense that a stage magician fools his audience. The audience probably is skeptical that the magician actually sawed someone in half, but they do not know how the trick was performed. In the CERN case, it took them the better part of a year to reveal the man behind the curtain, even though they had complete control over the experiment.
Similarly, in this case, I suspect the researchers were fooled. I don't believe necessarily that the researchers are not still skeptical of their own results, just that they were tricked (quite likely on purpose) and that they do not understand how they were tricked.
I think you just read a lot more into what I was writing than what I actually wrote, probably because you felt strongly about the subject and had encountered such arguments in the past.