Well, we have no idea, but there is little point in critiquing a plan based on the assumption it won't be followed.
"If you wanted to do something useful with abandoned homes, you could use them to house people who are losing theirs."
The abandoned homes are not generally habitable. They have no plumbing, electrical wiring, or windows. They would need extensive restoration, which you have just assured us won't be done in the relatively less blighted areas.
While I'm sympathetic to your cause, and don't expect to ever be buying one either...
You appear to be waiting for a legal agreement to make a technologically different product will have the same properties. It's not going to happen.
Personally, if I don't care about having a hardback that looks nice on the shelf, I can make some judgment about the likelihood of getting my moneys worth before Amazon goes under. An ebook, particularly one infected with DRM idiocy, is not the same as a paper book. It has upsides and downsides, and some of the downsides are stupid and unnecessary from my point of view. But I don't always care.
"The problem comes when one notes that generating enjoyment for attendees (and thus drawing huge numbers of them) is quite possibly the single most effective tactic for generating press for the exhibitors."
I'm not sure that's true, though I agree that the rise of blogs moves things more in this direction.
Industry big-wigs making a lot of announcements about the fabulous things they are going to do in the coming year, even if it is half vaporware, makes great fodder for people who want to talk about the game industry.
Fun for attendees chiefly means playable games. Barring massive changes to the industry, Games aren't fun for lots of people to play on the same day the press first hears of them.
PAX is great for letting people play your game and go tell the world how great it is. E3 is better for showing a mocked up demo and telling the world how great it will be. The former is perhaps a more honest strategy, but I don't expect marketing departments to reject the latter on that basis.
Well, what one random Anonymous Coward has heard of may not be the best standard. Just FYI,
The impressive E3 attendance being reported here: 41,000 2008 PAX attendance: 58,500
I'm not sure why E3 is described as trying to "escape" defeat at the hands of PAX. How about, Can E3 recover from the defeat PAX has dealt it?
More to the point though, E3 and PAX have different goals. E3 tries to generate press for it's exhibitors. PAX tries to generate enjoyment for it's attendees. So your having heard of E3 while PAX is better attended may indicate the success of both shows.
I'm going to go out on a limb, and assume you actually can see why murder would hurt the victim even if it weren't against the law. If you couldn't figure that out, you'd be too stupid to breathe, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I know I'm troll-feeding, but I'm curious...
What is it you find amusing about pretending you're an idiot? Do you worry it will erode your actual intelligence to act so stupid? Assuming you're actually against legalization, does it occur to you that someone reading your post might well be motivated to support it, just to not be on the same side as you? What is your life like such that it seems like a fun way to pass the time to go on slashdot and pretend you have the IQ of an eggplant?
Wait, don't tell me... Are you incredibly baked? Because that would actually be funny.
"Like I said, you can interpret what her record means."
Fair enough. I have, and I get "almost boringly moderate".
"As soon as she is confirmed, the 'mainstream' law is whatever she and four other people say it is."
To my mind, this is the key to understanding the situation. What she thinks isn't as relevant as what five of the nine can agree on. Some conservatives are trying to paint her as a wildly liberal radical, and they look stupid, because her record just doesn't reflect that. Many liberals are so busy arguing with the conservatives, they don't notice she's not nearly as liberal as they might have wanted.
But deeper-thinking liberals might reflect: Do we want an ideologue crafting outraged dissents on every case? Or someone mildly left of center who Kennedy can find himself agreeing with? A more centrist judge may well make a more liberal court.
"Just because the voice of the crowd in this instance happens to be a bunch of stoners that doesn't mean we should dismiss it offhand"
But you already did by calling them "a bunch of stoners". I support legalization, and know a lot of other people who do too. Most of us don't smoke pot.
"So, something hurts people because said something is illegal, so we should make said something legal."
Obviously. If it would hurt people less if it were legal, it should be legal. Is your goal to hurt more people?
"Shall we do that with robbery, burglary, murder, rape, child molestation,"
Which of those do you think would hurt people less if they were legal? More to the point, are you intentionally making an incredibly stupid analogy, or are you just an incredibly stupid person?
"or just crimes you like commit?"
Personally, I'd just like people to get hurt less. I don't have much interest in pot, but if other people do, I don't see why we should pointlessly fuck up our society over it. And neither do you, or you wouldn't make such incoherent arguments.
Well, obviously you're not pulling one line out of context, so you mean if a white male had said something resembling the entire speech? So paraphrasing it down to one sentence, and making the substitution you suggest, I get something like
"Judges must strive to be impartial, but since our experiences help us to reach understanding, I would hope someone who is a white male might be better able to understand what it is like to be disadvantaged and discriminated against than a hispanic woman"
I don't think I'd call that racist, so much as incoherent.
The Supreme Court gets to decide what cases they want to hear, and hearing one you don't think you might overturn is a waste of time. So it's true that opinions that get reviewed by the Supreme Court don't fare well in the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor has a long record of generally concurring with other Judges on her panels regardless of their political slant, and of opinions the Supremes declined to review. She's just not an extremist by any reasonable measure.
"By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses."
Sounds to me like someone said "Sometimes kids get on the wrong bus", which is true in all school districts, and will be regardless of what you do to prevent it. You just need to make sure it get's straightened out as quickly as possible, which it sounds like it was, if not before the submitter worked himself into a froth.
You run Windows. You don't want to do research. You run Windows update. You are outraged that MS installs what they think best on your computer. In this context, you call other people "retard". Someone thinks that's "Insightful", but it isn't me.
I don't know why that got posted as Anonymous Coward. I don't think I checked "post anonymously" the box, but what do you expect from an admitted atheist drunkard like myself... well OK, previously I've only admitted the atheist part, but in any case, it's me, I swear.
I know who Anonymous is. Well, I mean, I don't know who they are in the sense of knowing who they are, I know who they are in the sense of I got the joke.
A) Read the whole speech that line is pulled from, and your opinion of what she is saying might be different. I'm not telling you what to believe, but I read the whole speech, and I don't think that statement means what you think it means. Most people don't engineer every statement they make to sound reasonable entirely divorced from what else they are saying. Having been told you ought to read the whole thing, please refrain from calling anyone racist until you have, unless you want to just admit (to yourself at least) that you don't care if you're right.
B) For those in the audience who have read the whole speech: Obviously she was being more nuanced than the quote out of context would imply, but am I the only one that reads that line as funny? Her hope that a Latina woman might be a better Judge than someone else sounds roughly analogous to my hope that a geeky programmer might be a better lover than someone else. That line ends a whole speech about how while our experiences obviously and inescapably affect our judgment, Judges must do their utmost to set aside prejudices and reach correct conclusions. And then at the end she says that gee, if some sorts of experiences do make one a better or worse judge, she hopes being a latina woman makes you a better one. Ha-ha-ha?
There's a "terms of service" link at the bottom of this page. Did you click it and review the contents before making your post? If you look now and it says you've agreed to something objectionable, will you feel bound?
If you can get what you want from a web page, do you scroll down to see if there is a hyperlink going to some fine print? Before you posted, did you scroll to the bottom of this comment page to see if there was any such link?
On a paper document, the fine print comes before the place you sign. You might not read it, but you know it is there. If you want people bound by your terms, online or on paper, you don't have to make sure they read them, but it is up to you to make sure they know they are there.
In any case, there's no lack of knowledge here. She knew exactly how accessible the terms were, whether you disagree about the legal implications of that accessibility or not.
"One way it changes is due to the infamous non-falsifiability of systems like religions that make metaphysical claims. The Santa hypothesis in its usual American form, doesn't fall into that category. One all-nighter on 24 December will decide it."
Oh come on, everybody knows Santa won't come if you don't go to bed!
"The only reasonable basis I can think of for saying that 'those who really do believe are not OK' is that there really is no God of any kind."
I'm assuming Santa does not exist. Adults who truly believe in Santa are "not OK", that is, they are irrational, unless you believe it is potentially rational to truly believe in Santa. In which case I can make up a more ridiculous example.
Those who truly believe are asserting conclusions which they claim are extremely important to their lives. These conclusions are not made rational by the existence of a God of "any kind". They are made rational only by having good rational reasons to conclude the existence of a God of the specific kind they believe in. So I'm not assuming that God doesn't exist. I'm assuming that believers don't have good rational reasons for believing in the specific God they favor.
"When we talk about what is or is not reasonable to believe, we're basically mucking about at the foundations of human belief where everything is either circular or arbitrary. Usually both. That goes for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and even agnostics alike."
Well, since I haven't offended you yet, let me try again by saying that's horseshit. It is reasonable to believe things for which one has good evidence and it is reasonable to disbelieve things for which one does not. Irrational beliefs must rest on circularity, arbitrariness, or bad ideas of what constitutes evidence; in short, on irrationality. Rational belief and rational disbelief has no such need.
I took a bunch of undergraduate Philosophy. I can navel-gaze and question the ability to know anything (beyond ones own existence) with the best of them. So when I say something is "rational" please assume I mean to stipulate the assumption that it is possible to perceive an independently existing world and form accurate conclusions based upon those perceptions. If that's not true, I just don't care, no matter how much it makes Maxwell spin about in his grave.
In that context, I say athiesm is rational. There is no evidence for God, so I don't believe it. Those who do are not, in this matter, rational.
"No, it means they have to use other IP addresses"
Which can then be banned.
"It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything."
It stops Scientology from acting as an IP address anonymizer for it's members. Wikipedia bans edits from anonymized IP addresses (e.g. TOR), so that when a problem editor has their IP address banned it may hopefully be some hindrance to them. It's kind of like all of Wikipedia in the first place: It doesn't need to be perfect, or even close to it, to be worth doing.
"If you use TOR, you are shielding your public IP address from whatever systems you are connecting to. That is providing you anonymity, in that nobody could identify you or your location based on the IP address."
TOR hides your identity, but intentionally and helpfully makes clear it is doing so. Wikipedia blocks edits coming via TOR. They also block edits coming from known "open relays"; i.e. IP address anonymizers, whether intentional or not. The decision in question was to treat all Scientology-owned IPs as effectively open relays, because they anonymize the IPs of trouble-making editors.
No doubt some Scientologists will attempt to circumvent the ban, but it will be harder than just "use an anonymous IP"
Comic books are just a medium to tell a story. A medium that most people (wrongly) do not take seriously, or consider capable of telling stories of significant literary import. I have heard many contradictory descriptions of what makes a comic a "graphic novel", even just in this thread. From what I can tell, when someone calls a comic a "graphic novel" they mean it is attempting to be serious and tell a story of significant literary import. Comics don't need to be legitimized in your (or my) view, but they sure do in the view of a lot of people who might enjoy some grafic novels if they could get past their current perceptions of "comic books".
It has jack to do with democracy, one way or the other. It is a way for people to have their browser perform in ways they like. If you put information up where anyone who wants to can access it with their own software, and your business model depends on their software acting how you want, and not how they want, you have a poor business model. If you think software should stop doing what users want it to in order to support a particular business model, I respectfully disagree. If you think there is any chance in the world it will happen, I not so respectfully question your intelligence. There are many browsers supporting many plugins. If people want a piece of simple functionality, one of them will provide it. If people want content, a way to pay for it will be found. That way will not depend on rolling back existing technological progress.
Slashdot Mirror
"Little restoration will ever be done"
Well, we have no idea, but there is little point in critiquing a plan based on the assumption it won't be followed.
"If you wanted to do something useful with abandoned homes, you could use them to house people who are losing theirs."
The abandoned homes are not generally habitable. They have no plumbing, electrical wiring, or windows. They would need extensive restoration, which you have just assured us won't be done in the relatively less blighted areas.
While I'm sympathetic to your cause, and don't expect to ever be buying one either...
You appear to be waiting for a legal agreement to make a technologically different product will have the same properties. It's not going to happen.
Personally, if I don't care about having a hardback that looks nice on the shelf, I can make some judgment about the likelihood of getting my moneys worth before Amazon goes under. An ebook, particularly one infected with DRM idiocy, is not the same as a paper book. It has upsides and downsides, and some of the downsides are stupid and unnecessary from my point of view. But I don't always care.
"The problem comes when one notes that generating enjoyment for attendees (and thus drawing huge numbers of them) is quite possibly the single most effective tactic for generating press for the exhibitors."
I'm not sure that's true, though I agree that the rise of blogs moves things more in this direction.
Industry big-wigs making a lot of announcements about the fabulous things they are going to do in the coming year, even if it is half vaporware, makes great fodder for people who want to talk about the game industry.
Fun for attendees chiefly means playable games. Barring massive changes to the industry, Games aren't fun for lots of people to play on the same day the press first hears of them.
PAX is great for letting people play your game and go tell the world how great it is. E3 is better for showing a mocked up demo and telling the world how great it will be. The former is perhaps a more honest strategy, but I don't expect marketing departments to reject the latter on that basis.
Well, what one random Anonymous Coward has heard of may not be the best standard. Just FYI,
The impressive E3 attendance being reported here: 41,000
2008 PAX attendance: 58,500
I'm not sure why E3 is described as trying to "escape" defeat at the hands of PAX. How about, Can E3 recover from the defeat PAX has dealt it?
More to the point though, E3 and PAX have different goals. E3 tries to generate press for it's exhibitors. PAX tries to generate enjoyment for it's attendees. So your having heard of E3 while PAX is better attended may indicate the success of both shows.
I'm going to go out on a limb, and assume you actually can see why murder would hurt the victim even if it weren't against the law. If you couldn't figure that out, you'd be too stupid to breathe, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I know I'm troll-feeding, but I'm curious...
What is it you find amusing about pretending you're an idiot? Do you worry it will erode your actual intelligence to act so stupid? Assuming you're actually against legalization, does it occur to you that someone reading your post might well be motivated to support it, just to not be on the same side as you? What is your life like such that it seems like a fun way to pass the time to go on slashdot and pretend you have the IQ of an eggplant?
Wait, don't tell me... Are you incredibly baked? Because that would actually be funny.
"Like I said, you can interpret what her record means."
Fair enough. I have, and I get "almost boringly moderate".
"As soon as she is confirmed, the 'mainstream' law is whatever she and four other people say it is."
To my mind, this is the key to understanding the situation. What she thinks isn't as relevant as what five of the nine can agree on. Some conservatives are trying to paint her as a wildly liberal radical, and they look stupid, because her record just doesn't reflect that. Many liberals are so busy arguing with the conservatives, they don't notice she's not nearly as liberal as they might have wanted.
But deeper-thinking liberals might reflect: Do we want an ideologue crafting outraged dissents on every case? Or someone mildly left of center who Kennedy can find himself agreeing with? A more centrist judge may well make a more liberal court.
"Just because the voice of the crowd in this instance happens to be a bunch of stoners that doesn't mean we should dismiss it offhand"
But you already did by calling them "a bunch of stoners". I support legalization, and know a lot of other people who do too. Most of us don't smoke pot.
"So, something hurts people because said something is illegal, so we should make said something legal."
Obviously. If it would hurt people less if it were legal, it should be legal. Is your goal to hurt more people?
"Shall we do that with robbery, burglary, murder, rape, child molestation,"
Which of those do you think would hurt people less if they were legal? More to the point, are you intentionally making an incredibly stupid analogy, or are you just an incredibly stupid person?
"or just crimes you like commit?"
Personally, I'd just like people to get hurt less. I don't have much interest in pot, but if other people do, I don't see why we should pointlessly fuck up our society over it. And neither do you, or you wouldn't make such incoherent arguments.
Yeah, Princeton gives out Summa Cum Laude to just anyone.
I assume 2) refers to the Ricci case, where she decided against the only Hispanic involved. Don't know what that does to your theory.
Well, obviously you're not pulling one line out of context, so you mean if a white male had said something resembling the entire speech? So paraphrasing it down to one sentence, and making the substitution you suggest, I get something like
"Judges must strive to be impartial, but since our experiences help us to reach understanding, I would hope someone who is a white male might be better able to understand what it is like to be disadvantaged and discriminated against than a hispanic woman"
I don't think I'd call that racist, so much as incoherent.
Six out of how many hundred?
The Supreme Court gets to decide what cases they want to hear, and hearing one you don't think you might overturn is a waste of time. So it's true that opinions that get reviewed by the Supreme Court don't fare well in the Supreme Court.
Sotomayor has a long record of generally concurring with other Judges on her panels regardless of their political slant, and of opinions the Supremes declined to review. She's just not an extremist by any reasonable measure.
"By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses."
Sounds to me like someone said "Sometimes kids get on the wrong bus", which is true in all school districts, and will be regardless of what you do to prevent it. You just need to make sure it get's straightened out as quickly as possible, which it sounds like it was, if not before the submitter worked himself into a froth.
You run Windows.
You don't want to do research.
You run Windows update.
You are outraged that MS installs what they think best on your computer.
In this context, you call other people "retard".
Someone thinks that's "Insightful", but it isn't me.
I don't know why that got posted as Anonymous Coward. I don't think I checked "post anonymously" the box, but what do you expect from an admitted atheist drunkard like myself... well OK, previously I've only admitted the atheist part, but in any case, it's me, I swear.
You said "Putting the joke aside..." so I did.
I know who Anonymous is. Well, I mean, I don't know who they are in the sense of knowing who they are, I know who they are in the sense of I got the joke.
Anyway, we agree, yay.
A) Read the whole speech that line is pulled from, and your opinion of what she is saying might be different. I'm not telling you what to believe, but I read the whole speech, and I don't think that statement means what you think it means. Most people don't engineer every statement they make to sound reasonable entirely divorced from what else they are saying. Having been told you ought to read the whole thing, please refrain from calling anyone racist until you have, unless you want to just admit (to yourself at least) that you don't care if you're right.
B) For those in the audience who have read the whole speech: Obviously she was being more nuanced than the quote out of context would imply, but am I the only one that reads that line as funny? Her hope that a Latina woman might be a better Judge than someone else sounds roughly analogous to my hope that a geeky programmer might be a better lover than someone else. That line ends a whole speech about how while our experiences obviously and inescapably affect our judgment, Judges must do their utmost to set aside prejudices and reach correct conclusions. And then at the end she says that gee, if some sorts of experiences do make one a better or worse judge, she hopes being a latina woman makes you a better one. Ha-ha-ha?
There's a "terms of service" link at the bottom of this page. Did you click it and review the contents before making your post? If you look now and it says you've agreed to something objectionable, will you feel bound?
If you can get what you want from a web page, do you scroll down to see if there is a hyperlink going to some fine print? Before you posted, did you scroll to the bottom of this comment page to see if there was any such link?
On a paper document, the fine print comes before the place you sign. You might not read it, but you know it is there. If you want people bound by your terms, online or on paper, you don't have to make sure they read them, but it is up to you to make sure they know they are there.
In any case, there's no lack of knowledge here. She knew exactly how accessible the terms were, whether you disagree about the legal implications of that accessibility or not.
"One way it changes is due to the infamous non-falsifiability of systems like religions that make metaphysical claims. The Santa hypothesis in its usual American form, doesn't fall into that category. One all-nighter on 24 December will decide it."
Oh come on, everybody knows Santa won't come if you don't go to bed!
"The only reasonable basis I can think of for saying that 'those who really do believe are not OK' is that there really is no God of any kind."
I'm assuming Santa does not exist. Adults who truly believe in Santa are "not OK", that is, they are irrational, unless you believe it is potentially rational to truly believe in Santa. In which case I can make up a more ridiculous example.
Those who truly believe are asserting conclusions which they claim are extremely important to their lives. These conclusions are not made rational by the existence of a God of "any kind". They are made rational only by having good rational reasons to conclude the existence of a God of the specific kind they believe in. So I'm not assuming that God doesn't exist. I'm assuming that believers don't have good rational reasons for believing in the specific God they favor.
"When we talk about what is or is not reasonable to believe, we're basically mucking about at the foundations of human belief where everything is either circular or arbitrary. Usually both. That goes for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and even agnostics alike."
Well, since I haven't offended you yet, let me try again by saying that's horseshit. It is reasonable to believe things for which one has good evidence and it is reasonable to disbelieve things for which one does not. Irrational beliefs must rest on circularity, arbitrariness, or bad ideas of what constitutes evidence; in short, on irrationality. Rational belief and rational disbelief has no such need.
I took a bunch of undergraduate Philosophy. I can navel-gaze and question the ability to know anything (beyond ones own existence) with the best of them. So when I say something is "rational" please assume I mean to stipulate the assumption that it is possible to perceive an independently existing world and form accurate conclusions based upon those perceptions. If that's not true, I just don't care, no matter how much it makes Maxwell spin about in his grave.
In that context, I say athiesm is rational. There is no evidence for God, so I don't believe it. Those who do are not, in this matter, rational.
"No, it means they have to use other IP addresses"
Which can then be banned.
"It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything."
It stops Scientology from acting as an IP address anonymizer for it's members. Wikipedia bans edits from anonymized IP addresses (e.g. TOR), so that when a problem editor has their IP address banned it may hopefully be some hindrance to them. It's kind of like all of Wikipedia in the first place: It doesn't need to be perfect, or even close to it, to be worth doing.
"If you use TOR, you are shielding your public IP address from whatever systems you are connecting to. That is providing you anonymity, in that nobody could identify you or your location based on the IP address."
TOR hides your identity, but intentionally and helpfully makes clear it is doing so. Wikipedia blocks edits coming via TOR. They also block edits coming from known "open relays"; i.e. IP address anonymizers, whether intentional or not. The decision in question was to treat all Scientology-owned IPs as effectively open relays, because they anonymize the IPs of trouble-making editors.
No doubt some Scientologists will attempt to circumvent the ban, but it will be harder than just "use an anonymous IP"
In what sense was St. John the Divine not a scifi author?
Comic books are just a medium to tell a story. A medium that most people (wrongly) do not take seriously, or consider capable of telling stories of significant literary import.
I have heard many contradictory descriptions of what makes a comic a "graphic novel", even just in this thread. From what I can tell, when someone calls a comic a "graphic novel" they mean it is attempting to be serious and tell a story of significant literary import. Comics don't need to be legitimized in your (or my) view, but they sure do in the view of a lot of people who might enjoy some grafic novels if they could get past their current perceptions of "comic books".
It has jack to do with democracy, one way or the other.
It is a way for people to have their browser perform in ways they like.
If you put information up where anyone who wants to can access it with their own software, and your business model depends on their software acting how you want, and not how they want, you have a poor business model.
If you think software should stop doing what users want it to in order to support a particular business model, I respectfully disagree. If you think there is any chance in the world it will happen, I not so respectfully question your intelligence. There are many browsers supporting many plugins. If people want a piece of simple functionality, one of them will provide it.
If people want content, a way to pay for it will be found. That way will not depend on rolling back existing technological progress.