Well, we could always do something crazy and try to look at what little data there is out there about people carrying weapons. Take a state like Florida, where the CCW process isn't exactly hard. And, fortunately enough, the state law requires that statistics on permit revocations and crimes by CCW holders be tracked.
Looking at the published statistics, Florida has roughly 664,000 people currently running around with concealed weapons. Of the 1,647,823 licenses issued, since October 1987, 5,139 have been revoked (about 0.3%). Of those revocations, 4,420 of them were for crimes committed after the person received their license, and 167 of those involved a fire used in a crime. And, it would seem that Florida's average life expectancy is just over 77.
Now, what I want to know is: people like you keep predicting blood in the streets if average, law abiding, citizens are allowed to legally carry firearms anywhere they go. But, so far we've waited for 22 years for Florida to erupt into an all-out bloodbath of gunfire, when is it going to happen? I've been waiting 22 fucking years to see the news reports of Florida imploding in violence, I want my gory news clips now!
While I agree that this type of thing is worth shouting about, I think you may have just gone off half-cocked at the wrong person.
Here, take these:
<Sarcasm>
</Sarcasm>
and apply as needed.
I may just not know how to get it to do it, but it seems to be missing vector based graphics. While this isn't a big deal most of the time, when you are trying to do logos or other graphics which you want to be able to scale up and down, rasters suck.
That said, I still love Gimp. I don't do anywhere near enough graphics work to justify buying Photoshop, and Gimp can usually get anything I want done.
And trying to figure out why autocad runs so slow in a mac VM.
Does it? I have a few users who run ESRI's ArcGIS in a Windows session in Parallels and it actually runs pretty well. Given that it's pretty much AutoCAD with spatial data and metadata attached (even to the point of relying on OpenGL) Iwould have expected that the performance would have been similar.
Of course, this still goes back to the question I have, "you are buying a Mac, to run Windows, why?" It's the same hardware, and you're still dealing with the Windows OS for your primary applications, what is the extra layer of complexity getting you? For a little less, I'll get you a Dell and even put an apple sticker on it to make you feel special.
I just spent four f***ing days reinstalling Windows XP because Vista figured Autocad was either already installed, couldn't be installed, or shouldn't be installed.
It took you four days to fail to clean up a borked program in the MSI cache, and then re-install the OS? What the hell where you doing?
And if it was bundled MS would end up being sued by Faronics for abusing their monopoly position, the EU would sanction MS until they removed it, and everyone would complain about how evil MS is for trying to take over another sector of the computer business.
Of the two options, I like the unbundled, doesn't bloat my OS further, option.
It's a shame that so many people in the US think that "free speech" means "I can say anything I want".
Yes, that is exactly what it means. There are no a priori restriction on speech. You want to say something go ahead and say it, you will never be prosecuted for the content of your speech. However, as with all freedoms there are responsibilities which come along with it. You are responsible for the results of your speech. If your speech defames or otherwise causes harm to another you will be held civilly, and possibly criminally, responsible for the effects of your speech. At that point, the content of the speech may come into question, such as, whether or not its true or obvious satire. But, it is not the speech itself which is being prosecuted, but the results of that speech.
Take the ever popular shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. There is no restriction on doing so. In fact, if there is a fire, we'd all probably want someone to shout "fire!" However, if there is not a fire and the point of shouting, "fire" is to incite a panic or riot, you will be charged with incitement to riot and will not be able to hide behind the protection of the First Amendment. Yes, shouting "fire" is protected speech, but you did so with the intention of causing a panic or riot and that incitement is not protected.
If you're going in for bypass surgery do you want the General Practitioner or the Cardiologist to be the one with the scalpel?
We are a very highly specialized society for a reason, specialists usually know the tiny little intricacies of their chosen field, while the general folks will know just enough to be dangerous. It is occasionally useful to have some generalized knowledge, as it can help one get outside the box, and to bring different ideas together; but, you are still going to need a specialist to tell you how to do that crazy idea, or to tell you that, "no, that's just a dumb idea."
The problem, though, is A) defining "rights", and B) delineating what scope of this protection we the citizens should expect/want. Obviously B is dependent on A. Sadly I haven't seen anyone actually give a coherent example of what a "right" is, or where the hell they come from, and most of what would fall under the B column is generally inchoate party dogma, and second hand mouth noise (all people subscribing to a proper-noun political ideology are generally guilty of this).
I agree that defining what are rights and where they come from is a problem, I would even go so far as to say that it really is intractable. Most arguments for any rights eventually breakdown to either a direct appeal to authority or an appeal to consensus, which is the inbreed cousin of an appeal to authority. Even in my own attempts to define my own position, I fall back to the Natural Rights theory, which ultimately rests on an appeal to consensus (or appeal to authority "endowed by his creator" and all that). It assumes that there are certain rights that we can all agree that we all have.
Consider the "right to life" for a moment. Why should anyone have a "right to life"? And just to make the example more concrete, let us restrict the "right to life" to mean that a person should be able to expect that a random stranger won't just stop in and kill him. Really try to defend this right without falling back on any sort of appeal to authority. I personally can see one avenue which I think can avoid it, but I'm not completely sure of it.
In the end, this is why public (and hopefully civil) discourse and trying to reach a consensus is helpful in defining rights. Because our rights are defined by the consensus, even if that is a really horrible way of doing it; it is what we have been doing in the US since its inception, and I don't think there is really any other way. On the other hand, we have to be careful not to simply go with a majority rules system. Pure democracies sound great, until the majority figures out that they can screw a minority. The end result of this is always bad and usually ends in bloodshed.
I find it rather depressing that I'm so happy about agreeing with people of almost opposite politics these days. It seems our public discourse has turned into: "I, as a x, completely disagree with you because YOU ARE NOT an x!", where "x" is whatever political dogma you self-identify with.
It's sad, really, that we have lost the ability to hold rational discussions and to agree to disagree on issues. Very little in this world is black and white, and while we do need to create bright line distinctions in law, and will likely not agree on where those lines should be, we should at least be able to agree that we need to have rational discussions about them. But then, we have become a nation more concerned with who is winning "American Idol" than who is representing us in the legislature. In a way, we are victims of the success of our government's design. It has been setup in such a way that it does a pretty good job of protecting our rights, and not trampling them too much, that we have become apathetic about it. The only way to get us excited about the political process is to turn it into a circus. Long winded, carefully thought out positions are seen as boring, and so we ignore these in favor of the loud and obnoxious. So that, ultimately, the discussion is driven by the loudest and most entertaining.
I doubt that there would be a legal problem with slapping a GPS tracking device on a car which the driver has already used to break the law, in view of the police. At the very least, I think this would be covered under probable cause. In an actual court, I think the argument would be covered by the judge's derisive laughter.
Of course, there is that whole getting a GPS device attached to a car doing 100 mph problem, but that is more of an engineering problem.
I'm going to hope I'm not getting trolled here...
I consider myself libertarian, and I agree that the role of government includes criminal law and policing. Of course, you and I might disagree on what policing means, but that is an entirely different argument. Generally speaking, I think the easiest description of the role of government is "securing the rights of the people". However, like many quick throw-away phrases this really misses the depth and nuance that a real discussion of the role of government should have. It's intended as a starting point and as a way to help establish the basis of my beliefs with others. If you start digging into it, and I think this is common among libertarians, you will find a set of beliefs which go back to the Natural Rights theory of morality and a belief that civil rights come from those Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, and Property).
I have yet to figure out why non-libertarians seem to insist on equating libertarianism with anarchism, I guess it's just the stupidity of the anti-libertarian dogma. The two are not the same, though they do share many tenets and many people who are anarchists but don't want to be called out as such will claim to be libertarian.
Just to use the examples you cited: To deter murder. - Without a government to imprison a murderer, people will take the law into their own hands by killing people they suspect of murder. Whether they are actually guilty or not. A process with soon escalates to feud. Libertarian utopia = everyone else's hell.
Absolutely this is the role of government. Part of the reason that written laws and formalized systems of criminal punishment were created was the fallout from blood feuds. A person has a right to life, if that is violated by another the violator should be punished. Without a formal system of government and criminal law, this would quickly turn into a mess (Hatfields and McCoys, anyone?). That said, if a person really wants to kill themselves in a way which does not harm others, well, it's their body. I agree that they may have mental issues which need resolving, and perhaps we should try to convince (not force) them to change their mind. This includes the use of drugs (be it nicotine, alcohol, or heroin) all of them are dumb, but it's your body to destroy if you want to.
As a less obvious example, you want the government to have no role in firearm control. So there's absolutely nothing to stop your neighbours giving guns to their children to play with as they feel like.
Quick question, what is stopping my neighbor from doing that now? "The Law" is not stopping it, it can't. If my neighbor was to get a sudden itch to hand my child a firearm, and neither I nor an adult with some sense was there to stop him, the laws of physics aren't going to suddenly stop the transfer because we have a law against it. You could try "The Police" as your answer; however, there are not enough resources to have a police officer standing over every child 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Quite simply, if my neighbor wanted to hand my child a firearm to play with, and I wasn't around to stop it, nothing would stop it. And this is where you and I will likely begin to digress in our view of the police. The police do not exists to stop crimes. They can't, there are simply not enough of them and probably never will be. The role of the police is to investigate crimes after they happen, arrest the person whom the evidence points to as the guilty party, and bring them to the justice system to be tried.
How are you going to feel when the kids next door are playing cowboys and indians with real guns? You may not care about them, but what about when the stray bullets come on your side of the fence?
Again, what's stopping this now? It's not the government, it's their parents. The government has a pretty poor track record of stopping this behavior. Take a look at places like Oakland or Los Angeles where the gangs have gotten out of hand. The gove
Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only one here who had ever tried to pull data out of SharePoint. While I'll agree with many of the posters in this thread that SharePoint can be as much trouble as a help, the idea that it is some vendor lock-in fortress is just stupid.
Hell, you can drag and drop your files out of a document library using Windows Explorer, this is hard? Or, for single items, left-click the down arrow, click Send To, click Download a copy, fuck this is hard! BTW, this even works in FireFox, though you do have to disable NoScript, which I guess can be hard if you have a room temperature IQ.
Oh ya, and as someone else has already pointed out, you could always dig into the SDK and write programs against it to move data in and out.
But yes, SharePoint is a fortress which eats your data, pollutes the environment, and kicks puppy dogs.
Come on guys, MS's software has enough problems, without us making shit up.
First off, naturally occurring Uranium isn't all that radioactive. For the most part its U238, which doesn't give off much radiation. And, spent reactor fuel is even more skewed towards U238, otherwise known as Depleted Uranium, the stuff the military uses for armor piercing bullets. You can hold either of this stuff in your bare hands and not have any ill effects. One thing to keep in mind with radioactive materials, the stuff which has half lives of millions or billions of years (U238 is 4.46 billion years, U235 is 703 Million years) isn't producing a heck of a lot of ionizing radiation. The problem with Uranium is that it is a toxic heavy metal, and like other toxic heavy metals (lead, thorium) it will deposit in your internal organs, build up and eventually kill you.
The second problem with the mutated E. Coli of Death is that the vast majority of mutations will result death fairly quickly. Of the ones which don't, they will probably just result in death slowly. Yes, the E. Coil could get some sort of useful mutation out of it, but it's not really more likely to happen in this cleanup site than anywhere else.
One question, who gets to pick the rules?
One advantage of having decentralized government is that if you don't like it in one area, you can move to another. Yes, this has its faults, again we can use North Korea. However, with a single, unified entity making the rules, if you don't like it, tough. At the very least, the folks in North Korea currently have the possibility of getting somewhere else. I'll agree that it's not a great option, and the risks are very high, but it exists. In a unified, one world government, no one has that option. If I disagree with the way the government is run, I don't have the option of leaving. It's just eat whatever shit they hand out or die. And with the UN as the closest proxy to what a world government might look like, no thank you.
The best "textbook" I ever had in college was in my Multi-variable Calculus class. The instructor had reviewed the available options and came to the conclusion that they were all overpriced junk. So, he (hand) wrote up all of the notes for the semester, with charts, graphs, and everything else. He even had a few sample problems for each lesson. He then bundled the whole thing up and had the bookstore copy it and sell if for $5, basically to cover reproduction costs. The entire thing was loose-leaf paper pre-punched for a standard three ring binder. In the end, that entire book was about $7.
The thing is, without the massive costs which go into textbooks, they can be cheap. And, even better, if my book gets lost, damaged, or stolen who cares? It's five bucks. I also have the option to mark up my book in any way I want, and I am not worried about the resale value at the end of the class (which will be about a tenth of the books original cost to me, unless the school changes editions and the bookstore staff just laughs at me).
For K-12 schools, this will be even better. Instead of handing a kid a $50 book, which he is going to destroy; you give him a $5 reproduction, and require him to put it in his own $2 three ring binder. When he loses it, you just give him another copy. He can even write in the book, and keep it at the end of the year. If your students have computers, you can even go so far as to give them digital copies.
The only thing which needs to be checked is the quality and accuracy of the information. But, the State (at least California) is already doing that. And, like many Open Source projects, you can have the advantage of lots of people looking at it before hand. There just isn't a downside to having Open Source books, unless you are a textbook publisher, in which case they suck. But, as far as I care, they can join the buggy whip manufacturers on the sidelines of history.
How exactly do you design a project of this size, and somehow screw up the electrical connections? It isn't rocket science; you just make sure every connection is specced for more than the peak current that will be flowing through it.
And then hire the cheapest technician you can find to make that solder joint. Good solder work is hard, and while just about any idiot with a solder iron can glob a few wires together (as I have proved on occasion), it takes someone really good at it to make a connection which can be put under a microscope and called good.
That was painful to watch. I had been thinking about picking up a copy of R6:Vegas just to see if it was any better. That thought is now dead, thank you for saving me the money.
My X Box controller doesn't have those 100 odd keys
I do realize that, and that is why R6:Lockdown felt so dumbed down. In many ways the PC port of R6:Lockdown was Ubisoft's way telling PC gamers, "thank you for giving us all this money, but now you can go fuck yourselves." It was bad, very bad. Other than graphics it was a huge step backwards, in every way. R6 went from a good tactical shooter with, god forbid, mission planning, to a run and gun FPS with little to differentiate itself from every other FPS out there.
When playing Lockdown, my friends and I finally discovered that our normal, slow, careful tactics which has served us so well in previous titles were pointless. It was far easier to simply throw open the door, rush in and shoot anything which moved. Planning and careful execution didn't make a difference.
Going prone has never been an option in any of the Rainbow Six games I played. It has been an option in every Ghost Recon that I have played.
I suspect that this was because you played R6: Raven Shield on the console. I know Ubisoft ported it over and stripped out a good bit of the game to make it work. I can only guess that the ability to go prone was lost in translation as well.
Heartily seconded. R6: Lockdown murdered the franchise for me. Why in the world do I have a weapon toggle button? I have 100-odd keys at my disposal, maybe I could just, you know, map each weapon to one? And then the couch toggle button? WTF? And how do I go prone, goodness knows I spent enough time in the previous games crawling along like a worm.
The latest R6 game even had a climactic boss battle where you, on foot, have to take down an attack helicopter while dodging left and right on a tennis court to avoid its missiles.
If we're going to bring in old games, I want ECA to finally release the sequel to Sentinel Worlds I.I must have hung on to my save games for that for nearly a decade before I gave up and realized that Hard Nova was about as close to a sequel as I was ever going to get. I still haven't seen a game which blended ship to ship fighting, planet exploration and outright fun so well. Then again, that may just be the rose tint of the memory of my youth.
While I am skeptical about how a Warcraft movie will come off, I actually have hope for it. The folks at Blizzard, and a few dedicated writers have put together a fairly good fantasy world (if a bit cliche) which has any number of good plot lines to use for a movie. I'm not really expecting that it will be World of Warcraft: The Movie, I'm expecting that it will either lift one of the plot lines from the existing series of games, or simply carry one of the plots currently in the game to conclusion. There's a small piece of me which thinks that Blizzard may use this as a vehicle to tell the story of the final defeat of the Lich King Arthas, but that could just be wishful thinking.
I have to disagree about the reasons for the failure of the Dungeons and Dragons movie. If it were the case that the D&D game didn't translate well to static media, the books would not be doing well. But that is not the case, between the Dragonlance novels and the Forgotten Realms novels, D&D as a static form of entertainment has done quite well. However, in spite of great writing by the likes of Weiss and Hickman, Ed Greenwood, or some of Salvatore's stuff, the folks who put together the movie decided that what a D&D movie needed was more Marlon Wayans. And not even well written SNL Marlon Wayans, but a bad rendition of Chris Tucker's character from the Fifth Element, which was intentionally annoying and over the top, and then Marlon Wayans took that character over the top. His character was so annoying and awful that the audience in the theater cheered when he died, literally let out a loud cheer. The only sad thing about that scene was that it was special effects and we, the audience, were not being treated to a well deserved snuff film of Marlon Wayans actually being killed. Add to that horrid character an arch-nemesis who's entire shtick is "I'm blue and EVIL!!11!one!" No development, no background, no motivation, just EVIL. Granted, that is pretty common in D&D games, but I was expecting slightly better from a movie. We also had dragons which were just the bastard love children of a tyrannosaurus and a pterodactyl, with no ancient intelligence, and computer graphics so bad it was physically painful. While I will agree that a good D&D movie would be very hard, I don't think it's impossible, it would just look a hell of a lot like the Lord of the Rings movies, largely because D&D stole very heavily from Tolkien.
Now, as for the Warcraft movie, I do see one huge problem: styling. Take a good look at the armor, weapons and equipment most Warcraft characters and creatures wear. It's ridiculous. It's a case of "let's see how large we can make it! Now add a few spikes, a few more spikes, fuck it add a bucket full of spikes! And make it Glow! Oh, and make sure it has spikes." You could use the word "impractical" to describe it, but that would be like describing the universe as "big." It fails to capture the true extent of the situation. It's fine in a video game, as video gamers we're more interested in looking cool versus practicality. Inside each of us there is that ten year old who wants to see the Flaming Sword of Awesomeness and Fire with a dragon's head pommel, a bat-wing crossguard and intricate etched runes and filigree down a jagged lightning bolt shaped blade, on fire. And in a video game, we're willing to suspend disbelief just enough that we ignore the obvious implications of the wielder tearing up his own hand, not being able to sheath the damn thing because of the shape and fire, and gods help the wielder if he actually hits something, because it's going to be stuck. But on a big screen, with the hero looking like a ridiculous twat with sholderpads which would have made Madonna in the '80's laugh; armor which is catching on everything, and stabbing him when he ties to itch his nose; we're just not going to buy it. The ridiculousness is going to be obvious, and because we'll have some pretty boy actor in it, it will just be wrong. About the only way out of it I see is for a CG movie ala Toy Story. I don't know why, but when a movie is animated we seem more willing to let the ridiculous go.
Tracking that back a bit, the 90% is probably an overestimation and even admittedly (by the guy who made the claim) prone to error. From the orginal thread where the claim was made (Kyle Gabler):
We arrived at the 90% figure by looking at unique ipâ(TM)s that have contacted our leaderboard server for any reason, at least once. So, this should rule out âoemultiple profiles per computerâ. Of course, there is a lot of opportunity for error, like ipâ(TM)s that change, playing at work/home/wherever, multiple copies being played from the same ip, etc, but it seems like a good enough fast and decent estimate. Then we divided that number into the total number of PC copies sold, giving us the percentage.
So every time a user with a dynamic IP address's DHCP lease expires, zomg! it's a pirate! Avast the swabbing and beat to quarters!
Oh, and playing on a laptop from different locations...Run out the cannon we'll board them in the smoke!
While I agree that piracy is an issue which doesn't present a clear solution, muddying the waters with such bad statistics isn't helping.
Amazingly enough, MS did learn something from the fiasco which is Vista. I'm running the release candidate on an old system and it runs just as well as XP in most cases and better in a few. While I wouldn't recommend running out and buying it if you have and are happy with XP, I don't see any reason to not get new PC's with it. And, I would suspect, this is what most of the businesses are planning to do. If you have a refreshment cycle of 3-5 years, it makes no sense to run out and buy a new OS for an existing system which will be replaced soon enough and get the current OS version with the replacement.
For the curious, my system specs are:
Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz
Intel 845 chipset
eVGA Nvidia 6200 AGP
1GB RAM (DDR)
Definately time to build a new system, but that has to wait just a bit longer.
oh really? there is an rs232 NEMA stream coming out the the butt of the iphone?
Not sure about the iPhone (iDoubt it) but my little HTC TouchPro has a USB interface. Going from that to RS-232 should be easy, the cable already exists. Pushing data out that cable wouldn't be hard with an application.
The real problem isn't the interface, nor even the operating system (hint: ArcPad runs on Windows Mobile). The problem is that the accuracy for most smartphone based GPS sucks. I think my TouchPro will get me to within about 30 feet, and not much closer. For most situations that is good enough (driving, finding a restaurant, etc). For actual spatial data collection, that is so horridly poor as to be almost worthless. For that, you are still going to need something like this which will do sub-foot readings without a monster antenna. And will do sub-decimeter with a monster antenna. Of course, I could always get a similar result on my phone with something like this and a bluetooth connection back to my phone, but that would just be silly.
While I agree that specialized GPS isn't going anywhere any time soon (or at least until someone figures out how to do decimeter level GPS in a smartphone) TomTom or other consumer level GPS units are probably going to have trouble staying afloat.
the development of tools is in OUR hands and the infrastructure is essentially beyond the control of individual governments.
Unfortunately, the bullets are still in their hands. While we can whargarbl all day long on the internet, if a government really is concerned about shutting you down they will resort to the simplest, most effective, technological trick in the book: killing you. Take a good look at North Korea or China, these are examples of governments who have decided to keep control and aren't afraid to drive over a few piss-ant protesters with tanks.
This is why it's important to fight this stuff while we still have a government which we can effect with noise and votes, and not end up with an extra hole or two. It is far better to fight while the fighting is easy and winning very possible, because eventually you may reach a point where the fighting is hard and victory impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we could always do something crazy and try to look at what little data there is out there about people carrying weapons. Take a state like Florida, where the CCW process isn't exactly hard. And, fortunately enough, the state law requires that statistics on permit revocations and crimes by CCW holders be tracked.
Looking at the published statistics, Florida has roughly 664,000 people currently running around with concealed weapons. Of the 1,647,823 licenses issued, since October 1987, 5,139 have been revoked (about 0.3%). Of those revocations, 4,420 of them were for crimes committed after the person received their license, and 167 of those involved a fire used in a crime. And, it would seem that Florida's average life expectancy is just over 77.
Now, what I want to know is: people like you keep predicting blood in the streets if average, law abiding, citizens are allowed to legally carry firearms anywhere they go. But, so far we've waited for 22 years for Florida to erupt into an all-out bloodbath of gunfire, when is it going to happen? I've been waiting 22 fucking years to see the news reports of Florida imploding in violence, I want my gory news clips now!
While I agree that this type of thing is worth shouting about, I think you may have just gone off half-cocked at the wrong person.
Here, take these:
<Sarcasm>
</Sarcasm>
and apply as needed.
I may just not know how to get it to do it, but it seems to be missing vector based graphics. While this isn't a big deal most of the time, when you are trying to do logos or other graphics which you want to be able to scale up and down, rasters suck.
That said, I still love Gimp. I don't do anywhere near enough graphics work to justify buying Photoshop, and Gimp can usually get anything I want done.
And trying to figure out why autocad runs so slow in a mac VM.
Does it? I have a few users who run ESRI's ArcGIS in a Windows session in Parallels and it actually runs pretty well. Given that it's pretty much AutoCAD with spatial data and metadata attached (even to the point of relying on OpenGL) Iwould have expected that the performance would have been similar.
Of course, this still goes back to the question I have, "you are buying a Mac, to run Windows, why?" It's the same hardware, and you're still dealing with the Windows OS for your primary applications, what is the extra layer of complexity getting you? For a little less, I'll get you a Dell and even put an apple sticker on it to make you feel special.
I just spent four f***ing days reinstalling Windows XP because Vista figured Autocad was either already installed, couldn't be installed, or shouldn't be installed.
It took you four days to fail to clean up a borked program in the MSI cache, and then re-install the OS? What the hell where you doing?
And if it was bundled MS would end up being sued by Faronics for abusing their monopoly position, the EU would sanction MS until they removed it, and everyone would complain about how evil MS is for trying to take over another sector of the computer business.
Of the two options, I like the unbundled, doesn't bloat my OS further, option.
It's a shame that so many people in the US think that "free speech" means "I can say anything I want".
Yes, that is exactly what it means. There are no a priori restriction on speech. You want to say something go ahead and say it, you will never be prosecuted for the content of your speech. However, as with all freedoms there are responsibilities which come along with it. You are responsible for the results of your speech. If your speech defames or otherwise causes harm to another you will be held civilly, and possibly criminally, responsible for the effects of your speech. At that point, the content of the speech may come into question, such as, whether or not its true or obvious satire. But, it is not the speech itself which is being prosecuted, but the results of that speech.
Take the ever popular shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. There is no restriction on doing so. In fact, if there is a fire, we'd all probably want someone to shout "fire!" However, if there is not a fire and the point of shouting, "fire" is to incite a panic or riot, you will be charged with incitement to riot and will not be able to hide behind the protection of the First Amendment. Yes, shouting "fire" is protected speech, but you did so with the intention of causing a panic or riot and that incitement is not protected.
If you're going in for bypass surgery do you want the General Practitioner or the Cardiologist to be the one with the scalpel?
We are a very highly specialized society for a reason, specialists usually know the tiny little intricacies of their chosen field, while the general folks will know just enough to be dangerous. It is occasionally useful to have some generalized knowledge, as it can help one get outside the box, and to bring different ideas together; but, you are still going to need a specialist to tell you how to do that crazy idea, or to tell you that, "no, that's just a dumb idea."
The problem, though, is A) defining "rights", and B) delineating what scope of this protection we the citizens should expect/want. Obviously B is dependent on A. Sadly I haven't seen anyone actually give a coherent example of what a "right" is, or where the hell they come from, and most of what would fall under the B column is generally inchoate party dogma, and second hand mouth noise (all people subscribing to a proper-noun political ideology are generally guilty of this).
I agree that defining what are rights and where they come from is a problem, I would even go so far as to say that it really is intractable. Most arguments for any rights eventually breakdown to either a direct appeal to authority or an appeal to consensus, which is the inbreed cousin of an appeal to authority. Even in my own attempts to define my own position, I fall back to the Natural Rights theory, which ultimately rests on an appeal to consensus (or appeal to authority "endowed by his creator" and all that). It assumes that there are certain rights that we can all agree that we all have.
Consider the "right to life" for a moment. Why should anyone have a "right to life"? And just to make the example more concrete, let us restrict the "right to life" to mean that a person should be able to expect that a random stranger won't just stop in and kill him. Really try to defend this right without falling back on any sort of appeal to authority. I personally can see one avenue which I think can avoid it, but I'm not completely sure of it.
In the end, this is why public (and hopefully civil) discourse and trying to reach a consensus is helpful in defining rights. Because our rights are defined by the consensus, even if that is a really horrible way of doing it; it is what we have been doing in the US since its inception, and I don't think there is really any other way. On the other hand, we have to be careful not to simply go with a majority rules system. Pure democracies sound great, until the majority figures out that they can screw a minority. The end result of this is always bad and usually ends in bloodshed.
I find it rather depressing that I'm so happy about agreeing with people of almost opposite politics these days. It seems our public discourse has turned into: "I, as a x, completely disagree with you because YOU ARE NOT an x!", where "x" is whatever political dogma you self-identify with.
It's sad, really, that we have lost the ability to hold rational discussions and to agree to disagree on issues. Very little in this world is black and white, and while we do need to create bright line distinctions in law, and will likely not agree on where those lines should be, we should at least be able to agree that we need to have rational discussions about them. But then, we have become a nation more concerned with who is winning "American Idol" than who is representing us in the legislature. In a way, we are victims of the success of our government's design. It has been setup in such a way that it does a pretty good job of protecting our rights, and not trampling them too much, that we have become apathetic about it. The only way to get us excited about the political process is to turn it into a circus. Long winded, carefully thought out positions are seen as boring, and so we ignore these in favor of the loud and obnoxious. So that, ultimately, the discussion is driven by the loudest and most entertaining.
I doubt that there would be a legal problem with slapping a GPS tracking device on a car which the driver has already used to break the law, in view of the police. At the very least, I think this would be covered under probable cause. In an actual court, I think the argument would be covered by the judge's derisive laughter.
Of course, there is that whole getting a GPS device attached to a car doing 100 mph problem, but that is more of an engineering problem.
I'm going to hope I'm not getting trolled here...
I consider myself libertarian, and I agree that the role of government includes criminal law and policing. Of course, you and I might disagree on what policing means, but that is an entirely different argument. Generally speaking, I think the easiest description of the role of government is "securing the rights of the people". However, like many quick throw-away phrases this really misses the depth and nuance that a real discussion of the role of government should have. It's intended as a starting point and as a way to help establish the basis of my beliefs with others. If you start digging into it, and I think this is common among libertarians, you will find a set of beliefs which go back to the Natural Rights theory of morality and a belief that civil rights come from those Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, and Property).
I have yet to figure out why non-libertarians seem to insist on equating libertarianism with anarchism, I guess it's just the stupidity of the anti-libertarian dogma. The two are not the same, though they do share many tenets and many people who are anarchists but don't want to be called out as such will claim to be libertarian.
Just to use the examples you cited:
To deter murder. - Without a government to imprison a murderer, people will take the law into their own hands by killing people they suspect of murder. Whether they are actually guilty or not. A process with soon escalates to feud. Libertarian utopia = everyone else's hell.
Absolutely this is the role of government. Part of the reason that written laws and formalized systems of criminal punishment were created was the fallout from blood feuds. A person has a right to life, if that is violated by another the violator should be punished. Without a formal system of government and criminal law, this would quickly turn into a mess (Hatfields and McCoys, anyone?). That said, if a person really wants to kill themselves in a way which does not harm others, well, it's their body. I agree that they may have mental issues which need resolving, and perhaps we should try to convince (not force) them to change their mind. This includes the use of drugs (be it nicotine, alcohol, or heroin) all of them are dumb, but it's your body to destroy if you want to.
As a less obvious example, you want the government to have no role in firearm control. So there's absolutely nothing to stop your neighbours giving guns to their children to play with as they feel like.
Quick question, what is stopping my neighbor from doing that now? "The Law" is not stopping it, it can't. If my neighbor was to get a sudden itch to hand my child a firearm, and neither I nor an adult with some sense was there to stop him, the laws of physics aren't going to suddenly stop the transfer because we have a law against it. You could try "The Police" as your answer; however, there are not enough resources to have a police officer standing over every child 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Quite simply, if my neighbor wanted to hand my child a firearm to play with, and I wasn't around to stop it, nothing would stop it. And this is where you and I will likely begin to digress in our view of the police. The police do not exists to stop crimes. They can't, there are simply not enough of them and probably never will be. The role of the police is to investigate crimes after they happen, arrest the person whom the evidence points to as the guilty party, and bring them to the justice system to be tried.
How are you going to feel when the kids next door are playing cowboys and indians with real guns? You may not care about them, but what about when the stray bullets come on your side of the fence?
Again, what's stopping this now? It's not the government, it's their parents. The government has a pretty poor track record of stopping this behavior. Take a look at places like Oakland or Los Angeles where the gangs have gotten out of hand. The gove
Thank you, I was beginning to think I was the only one here who had ever tried to pull data out of SharePoint. While I'll agree with many of the posters in this thread that SharePoint can be as much trouble as a help, the idea that it is some vendor lock-in fortress is just stupid.
Hell, you can drag and drop your files out of a document library using Windows Explorer, this is hard? Or, for single items, left-click the down arrow, click Send To, click Download a copy, fuck this is hard! BTW, this even works in FireFox, though you do have to disable NoScript, which I guess can be hard if you have a room temperature IQ.
Oh ya, and as someone else has already pointed out, you could always dig into the SDK and write programs against it to move data in and out.
But yes, SharePoint is a fortress which eats your data, pollutes the environment, and kicks puppy dogs.
Come on guys, MS's software has enough problems, without us making shit up.
It's not really a worry.
First off, naturally occurring Uranium isn't all that radioactive. For the most part its U238, which doesn't give off much radiation. And, spent reactor fuel is even more skewed towards U238, otherwise known as Depleted Uranium, the stuff the military uses for armor piercing bullets. You can hold either of this stuff in your bare hands and not have any ill effects. One thing to keep in mind with radioactive materials, the stuff which has half lives of millions or billions of years (U238 is 4.46 billion years, U235 is 703 Million years) isn't producing a heck of a lot of ionizing radiation. The problem with Uranium is that it is a toxic heavy metal, and like other toxic heavy metals (lead, thorium) it will deposit in your internal organs, build up and eventually kill you.
The second problem with the mutated E. Coli of Death is that the vast majority of mutations will result death fairly quickly. Of the ones which don't, they will probably just result in death slowly. Yes, the E. Coil could get some sort of useful mutation out of it, but it's not really more likely to happen in this cleanup site than anywhere else.
One question, who gets to pick the rules?
One advantage of having decentralized government is that if you don't like it in one area, you can move to another. Yes, this has its faults, again we can use North Korea. However, with a single, unified entity making the rules, if you don't like it, tough. At the very least, the folks in North Korea currently have the possibility of getting somewhere else. I'll agree that it's not a great option, and the risks are very high, but it exists. In a unified, one world government, no one has that option. If I disagree with the way the government is run, I don't have the option of leaving. It's just eat whatever shit they hand out or die. And with the UN as the closest proxy to what a world government might look like, no thank you.
The best "textbook" I ever had in college was in my Multi-variable Calculus class. The instructor had reviewed the available options and came to the conclusion that they were all overpriced junk. So, he (hand) wrote up all of the notes for the semester, with charts, graphs, and everything else. He even had a few sample problems for each lesson. He then bundled the whole thing up and had the bookstore copy it and sell if for $5, basically to cover reproduction costs. The entire thing was loose-leaf paper pre-punched for a standard three ring binder. In the end, that entire book was about $7.
The thing is, without the massive costs which go into textbooks, they can be cheap. And, even better, if my book gets lost, damaged, or stolen who cares? It's five bucks. I also have the option to mark up my book in any way I want, and I am not worried about the resale value at the end of the class (which will be about a tenth of the books original cost to me, unless the school changes editions and the bookstore staff just laughs at me).
For K-12 schools, this will be even better. Instead of handing a kid a $50 book, which he is going to destroy; you give him a $5 reproduction, and require him to put it in his own $2 three ring binder. When he loses it, you just give him another copy. He can even write in the book, and keep it at the end of the year. If your students have computers, you can even go so far as to give them digital copies.
The only thing which needs to be checked is the quality and accuracy of the information. But, the State (at least California) is already doing that. And, like many Open Source projects, you can have the advantage of lots of people looking at it before hand. There just isn't a downside to having Open Source books, unless you are a textbook publisher, in which case they suck. But, as far as I care, they can join the buggy whip manufacturers on the sidelines of history.
How exactly do you design a project of this size, and somehow screw up the electrical connections? It isn't rocket science; you just make sure every connection is specced for more than the peak current that will be flowing through it.
And then hire the cheapest technician you can find to make that solder joint. Good solder work is hard, and while just about any idiot with a solder iron can glob a few wires together (as I have proved on occasion), it takes someone really good at it to make a connection which can be put under a microscope and called good.
That was painful to watch. I had been thinking about picking up a copy of R6:Vegas just to see if it was any better. That thought is now dead, thank you for saving me the money.
My X Box controller doesn't have those 100 odd keys
I do realize that, and that is why R6:Lockdown felt so dumbed down. In many ways the PC port of R6:Lockdown was Ubisoft's way telling PC gamers, "thank you for giving us all this money, but now you can go fuck yourselves." It was bad, very bad. Other than graphics it was a huge step backwards, in every way. R6 went from a good tactical shooter with, god forbid, mission planning, to a run and gun FPS with little to differentiate itself from every other FPS out there.
When playing Lockdown, my friends and I finally discovered that our normal, slow, careful tactics which has served us so well in previous titles were pointless. It was far easier to simply throw open the door, rush in and shoot anything which moved. Planning and careful execution didn't make a difference.
Going prone has never been an option in any of the Rainbow Six games I played. It has been an option in every Ghost Recon that I have played.
I suspect that this was because you played R6: Raven Shield on the console. I know Ubisoft ported it over and stripped out a good bit of the game to make it work. I can only guess that the ability to go prone was lost in translation as well.
Heartily seconded. R6: Lockdown murdered the franchise for me. Why in the world do I have a weapon toggle button? I have 100-odd keys at my disposal, maybe I could just, you know, map each weapon to one? And then the couch toggle button? WTF? And how do I go prone, goodness knows I spent enough time in the previous games crawling along like a worm.
The latest R6 game even had a climactic boss battle where you, on foot, have to take down an attack helicopter while dodging left and right on a tennis court to avoid its missiles.
Please tell me you're kidding? Please?
If we're going to bring in old games, I want ECA to finally release the sequel to Sentinel Worlds I.I must have hung on to my save games for that for nearly a decade before I gave up and realized that Hard Nova was about as close to a sequel as I was ever going to get. I still haven't seen a game which blended ship to ship fighting, planet exploration and outright fun so well. Then again, that may just be the rose tint of the memory of my youth.
While I am skeptical about how a Warcraft movie will come off, I actually have hope for it. The folks at Blizzard, and a few dedicated writers have put together a fairly good fantasy world (if a bit cliche) which has any number of good plot lines to use for a movie. I'm not really expecting that it will be World of Warcraft: The Movie, I'm expecting that it will either lift one of the plot lines from the existing series of games, or simply carry one of the plots currently in the game to conclusion. There's a small piece of me which thinks that Blizzard may use this as a vehicle to tell the story of the final defeat of the Lich King Arthas, but that could just be wishful thinking.
I have to disagree about the reasons for the failure of the Dungeons and Dragons movie. If it were the case that the D&D game didn't translate well to static media, the books would not be doing well. But that is not the case, between the Dragonlance novels and the Forgotten Realms novels, D&D as a static form of entertainment has done quite well. However, in spite of great writing by the likes of Weiss and Hickman, Ed Greenwood, or some of Salvatore's stuff, the folks who put together the movie decided that what a D&D movie needed was more Marlon Wayans. And not even well written SNL Marlon Wayans, but a bad rendition of Chris Tucker's character from the Fifth Element, which was intentionally annoying and over the top, and then Marlon Wayans took that character over the top. His character was so annoying and awful that the audience in the theater cheered when he died, literally let out a loud cheer. The only sad thing about that scene was that it was special effects and we, the audience, were not being treated to a well deserved snuff film of Marlon Wayans actually being killed. Add to that horrid character an arch-nemesis who's entire shtick is "I'm blue and EVIL!!11!one!" No development, no background, no motivation, just EVIL. Granted, that is pretty common in D&D games, but I was expecting slightly better from a movie. We also had dragons which were just the bastard love children of a tyrannosaurus and a pterodactyl, with no ancient intelligence, and computer graphics so bad it was physically painful. While I will agree that a good D&D movie would be very hard, I don't think it's impossible, it would just look a hell of a lot like the Lord of the Rings movies, largely because D&D stole very heavily from Tolkien.
Now, as for the Warcraft movie, I do see one huge problem: styling. Take a good look at the armor, weapons and equipment most Warcraft characters and creatures wear. It's ridiculous. It's a case of "let's see how large we can make it! Now add a few spikes, a few more spikes, fuck it add a bucket full of spikes! And make it Glow! Oh, and make sure it has spikes." You could use the word "impractical" to describe it, but that would be like describing the universe as "big." It fails to capture the true extent of the situation. It's fine in a video game, as video gamers we're more interested in looking cool versus practicality. Inside each of us there is that ten year old who wants to see the Flaming Sword of Awesomeness and Fire with a dragon's head pommel, a bat-wing crossguard and intricate etched runes and filigree down a jagged lightning bolt shaped blade, on fire. And in a video game, we're willing to suspend disbelief just enough that we ignore the obvious implications of the wielder tearing up his own hand, not being able to sheath the damn thing because of the shape and fire, and gods help the wielder if he actually hits something, because it's going to be stuck. But on a big screen, with the hero looking like a ridiculous twat with sholderpads which would have made Madonna in the '80's laugh; armor which is catching on everything, and stabbing him when he ties to itch his nose; we're just not going to buy it. The ridiculousness is going to be obvious, and because we'll have some pretty boy actor in it, it will just be wrong. About the only way out of it I see is for a CG movie ala Toy Story. I don't know why, but when a movie is animated we seem more willing to let the ridiculous go.
Tracking that back a bit, the 90% is probably an overestimation and even admittedly (by the guy who made the claim) prone to error. From the orginal thread where the claim was made (Kyle Gabler) :
We arrived at the 90% figure by looking at unique ipâ(TM)s that have contacted our leaderboard server for any reason, at least once. So, this should rule out âoemultiple profiles per computerâ. Of course, there is a lot of opportunity for error, like ipâ(TM)s that change, playing at work/home/wherever, multiple copies being played from the same ip, etc, but it seems like a good enough fast and decent estimate. Then we divided that number into the total number of PC copies sold, giving us the percentage.
So every time a user with a dynamic IP address's DHCP lease expires, zomg! it's a pirate! Avast the swabbing and beat to quarters!
Oh, and playing on a laptop from different locations...Run out the cannon we'll board them in the smoke!
While I agree that piracy is an issue which doesn't present a clear solution, muddying the waters with such bad statistics isn't helping.
For the curious, my system specs are:
Definately time to build a new system, but that has to wait just a bit longer.
oh really? there is an rs232 NEMA stream coming out the the butt of the iphone?
Not sure about the iPhone (iDoubt it) but my little HTC TouchPro has a USB interface. Going from that to RS-232 should be easy, the cable already exists. Pushing data out that cable wouldn't be hard with an application.
The real problem isn't the interface, nor even the operating system (hint: ArcPad runs on Windows Mobile). The problem is that the accuracy for most smartphone based GPS sucks. I think my TouchPro will get me to within about 30 feet, and not much closer. For most situations that is good enough (driving, finding a restaurant, etc). For actual spatial data collection, that is so horridly poor as to be almost worthless. For that, you are still going to need something like this which will do sub-foot readings without a monster antenna. And will do sub-decimeter with a monster antenna. Of course, I could always get a similar result on my phone with something like this and a bluetooth connection back to my phone, but that would just be silly.
While I agree that specialized GPS isn't going anywhere any time soon (or at least until someone figures out how to do decimeter level GPS in a smartphone) TomTom or other consumer level GPS units are probably going to have trouble staying afloat.
the development of tools is in OUR hands and the infrastructure is essentially beyond the control of individual governments.
Unfortunately, the bullets are still in their hands. While we can whargarbl all day long on the internet, if a government really is concerned about shutting you down they will resort to the simplest, most effective, technological trick in the book: killing you. Take a good look at North Korea or China, these are examples of governments who have decided to keep control and aren't afraid to drive over a few piss-ant protesters with tanks.
This is why it's important to fight this stuff while we still have a government which we can effect with noise and votes, and not end up with an extra hole or two. It is far better to fight while the fighting is easy and winning very possible, because eventually you may reach a point where the fighting is hard and victory impossible.