So the author submits a book which he doesn't believe is legally required to be submitted. Then when changes are suggested he cries "censorship" and ignores the changes, with apparently no legal ramifications whatsoever. That doesn't sound much like censorship to me. The case involving the Progressive was indeed censorship (and prior restraint at that), but this seems more like an attempt to garner some publicity and "authenticity" for the book. But then again maybe I'm too old and cynical about these things.
That was generally considered to be the Soviet plan as well. Probably the Chinese, too. Deterrence still worked. I would prefer no Iranian bomb, but it's most likely use isn't a strike on the continental United States or even Israel, but rather use on Iranian territory if invaded.
US doctrine has never been "no first use," unlike that of some other countries (USSR during the Cold War, China). Heck, we haven't even promised not to use them against nonnuclear states, attempting to retain their use as an option in the event of CBW attacks.
Part of David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series portrays pedophilia as something understandable given the context -- from the perspective of our protagonist. He changes his mind, but molests his boys and others along the way. (Can't remember which book does this -- it's been more than 20 years since I last read the series).
Sigh. We've known for a long time that in autocratic regimes of any type, levels of interpersonal trust are lowered. After all, your neighbor might be an informer, and the state itself is a liar and propagandist. Similarly, low levels of social trust correlate with all sorts of antisocial behavior, from cheating and intolerance to distrust of democracy itself. So all this experiment really proves is something we already know: living a long time under an oppressive regime generates distrust which legitimizes cheating and so forth. Capitalism and "socialism" have little to do with it.
Sounds like a recipe for special interest groups to dominate politics. The same is true of initiative measures in the United States -- they are largely used by well-funded narrow interest groups to advance their agendas at the expense of the public. Indeed, the whole point of the signature requirements is to keep one person (of modest means) from making a difference. As Olson predicted, these schemes lead to the victory of highly committed, well-organized, resource-rich minority positions over the larger but diffuse interests of the public,
Re:He got a little over two years out of that live
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
THIS. 1. By putting himself on ALL the lists, he gained an advantage over others. 2. There were almost certainly people below him whose lives could have been extended by many more years by that liver.
Most people would do the same, but it's still wrong. It's like shoving someone out of the way to get on the remaining lifeboat. Except that in the analogy, your odds of living given the boat are much less than theirs -- and you know this.
In fairness to the parent, Opera used to require payment. Then they gave you the choice to download a free but ad-supported client. There could still be some cruft from that edition hanging around in the current code.
if you had seen french revolutionaries in 1789, you would want to spray them with insecticide. it was a total stampede of barbarians. but then, in 2-3 years' time, it has become the very thing that awarded your sorry ass with the modern social guidelines about human rights, civil conduct we know today....and in one more year the Great Terror began. Indeed, we can thank the revolutionaries for introducing the word "terrorism" to our modern vocabulary.
That means that prices will simply be raised until many consumers simply cannot afford it (arguments like the original articles claims about economies of scale simply indicate lack of economic understanding; less piracy would mean _higher_ price, monopoly pricing limits are completely driven by customer dropoff, economies of scale apply to competitively enforced pricing).
Yup. The claims that piracy results in higher prices are generally false. It results in lower prices for any given piece of software. Its real negative consequence is the result of the lower prices -- some niche software becomes uneconomical to develop since it cannot be sold for a price that will recoup development costs. So we get cheaper mass-market games and a dearth of niche games because of pirates (it seems that no game is too obscure to be pirated). The funny thing is that those who complain about the homogenization of culture by the RIAA may actually be contributing to it by making it unprofitable to sell lesser-known artists (or pieces of software) at any price.
One last comment: There might be a price rise in some areas, where two pieces of software compete against one another. If both are pirated, the duopoly might collapse into a monopoly, with concomitant higher pricing. In theory, a new entrant might emerge -- but it may be that everyone knows duopoly pricing is unprofitable given the competition from pirates.
Interesting. My interpretation was that she found a way to send an email through the university faculty listserv despite having no authorization to do so. It seems that if she actually had simply compiled email addresses by hand she would be OK. As the official said, it's about process, not content. Of course, TFA is terribly vague about these things.
That's the unofficial name for the agency. They have no problem allowing fragile scrubland to be overgrazed without compensation to the public or environmental protection. They have no problem with coal companies removing the tops of entire mountains and dumping the waste into nearby river valleys. But now that someone wants to build a solar plant, they're up in arms over the environmental risks. Ugh. The BLM is the most worthless part of a worthless Interior Department, long since captured by ranchers and the coal industry.
The MPAA doesn't prosecute anyone. This isn't France, where private citizens or organizations can prosecute. In the US, it is the government that prosecutes. Indeed, the press release didn't even mention the MPAA, and it appears thjey had little (if anything) to do with the case. Even the law that was used (the No Electronic Theft Act) wasn't an MPAA creation (although I'm sure they were supportive). It was largely a BSA/RIAA creation back in 1997, before movie piracy was common.
I hate the MPAA as much as the next guy, but this is our elected government prosecuting this case. If we disagree, then perhaps all you "small government" people ought to vote on who persecutes little guys the least, rather than who'll give you the biggest tax breaks.
Spluch http://spluch.blogspot.com/rss.xml Always something interesting. Similar material to the extremely popular Boing Boing, but with fewer posts per day.
That's a good point -- I was looking at the NYT article. Table I of the summary says that scores increased by 1.6 for top students in accountable states vs 2.5 in non-accountable states. For bottom students the increase was 5.7 (accountable) vs 1.9 (non-accountable). I'd like to see the significance levels for these results, since n=36 (16 accountable and 20 non-accountable). I'm nearly positive that the "difference" between top students in accountable vs nonaccountable states is indistinguishable from random noise. So the result is that bottom students gain but top students remain the same. It's still not a loss, however, even if we impute statistical significance to the results. It is, at best, less of a gain than we might otherwise have.
I know no one actually RTFA, but it actually says that scores have gone up for all levels of students. Scores have gone up HIGHER for lower students, but they've still gone up for higher students as well. It's just that raising the very top is much harder than raising the bottom, so there's been more progress on the latter. There is NOTHING in the article that says top students are WORSE off now than before NCLB (as asinine as the law is in other ways).
I suspect there are several good answers here. I don't have a problem with creating CG kiddie porn from one's own personal use. However, once commerce becomes involved (or possibly even trading) there are secondary effects to consider: 1. Existing CG porn uses real faces and Photoshop. This creates real privacy problems, since people have some minimal right to control their image (i.e. to prevent others from thinking they really are sexually active) 2. When it comes to entirely CG kiddie porn, the average Joe can't make it. He doesn't have the skills, the modeling tools, the time, etc. So if there is a market for kiddie porn (or if it can be acquired through trading one's own kiddie porn to others) then there are incentives to make the real thing (especially given the premium that porn viewers place on having new images). 3. Allowing the CG stuff makes it extremely difficult to enforce a ban on the real stuff. The more realistic the CG stuff becomes, the more difficult it will be to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant has real kiddie porn. Note that even videos showing the DEFENDANT HIMSELF molesting kids may be challenged as simulations, if CG tech really makes fantasy indistinguishable from reality. This undermines the "but real kiddie porn is still illegal" argument, even if you don't agree with #1 and #2 above.
I seem to recall that one limit was simply the ceramic nature of most superconductors. If it isn't ductile, you can't use it for wires -- which are kind of important for most superconducting applications. Am I wrong about this?
My thoughts exactly -- except that would add that one benefit of the MS initiative is that it used some different libraries, with different collections. Many older books are quite rare, and these are the ones I care about. I wish more libraries would work with Google. Actually I wish the LoC would scan every out-of-copyright work and offer them up at taxpayer expense on the web. After all, it's out intellectual and cultural heritage.
A quick check of Google Groups shows that soc.history (my favorite USENET group back in 1994) has 42477 topics, while soc.history.moderated has only 7482, around one-sixth as many topics. But I would never pick soc.history over soc.history.moderated. The quality of posts in the latter is much better. Indeed, I had to abandon soc.history entirely around 1995 or so due to the flooding of the group by "Serdar Argic" (a semi-automated genocide-denier that argued that the rest of the world had it all wrong and that the starving Armenians had massacred the poor defenseless Ottoman Turks during World War I). The number of posts is far less important than the content of those posts, and some forms of censorship (restrained moderation) end up producing a much more interesting and intelligent discussion than a free-for-all.
The number of Cabinet members and Cabinet-level departments is much less important in the US than in parliamentary systems.
Our Cabinet is one in name only. The President has authority over all executive branch decisions, and no Cabinet head can go against his wishes. He can remove them at his leisure and appoint new ones. Although the Senate confirms appointments, it usually does so regardless of whether Senators agree with the policies of the nominee. Instead, it is expected that as long as the nominee isn't scandalous or completely incompetent, he or she will be confirmed.
Moreover, our Cabinet doesn't really have meetings anymore. It just isn't the case that the heads of the Departments of Veterans Affairs, the Treasury, and the Interor sit around with the President and discuss policy. The executive branch really does its business in smaller groups, many of them wholly distinct form the Cabinet (the National Security Council, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
So the author submits a book which he doesn't believe is legally required to be submitted. Then when changes are suggested he cries "censorship" and ignores the changes, with apparently no legal ramifications whatsoever. That doesn't sound much like censorship to me. The case involving the Progressive was indeed censorship (and prior restraint at that), but this seems more like an attempt to garner some publicity and "authenticity" for the book. But then again maybe I'm too old and cynical about these things.
Oops -- "its" not "it's."
That was generally considered to be the Soviet plan as well. Probably the Chinese, too. Deterrence still worked. I would prefer no Iranian bomb, but it's most likely use isn't a strike on the continental United States or even Israel, but rather use on Iranian territory if invaded.
US doctrine has never been "no first use," unlike that of some other countries (USSR during the Cold War, China). Heck, we haven't even promised not to use them against nonnuclear states, attempting to retain their use as an option in the event of CBW attacks.
Part of David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series portrays pedophilia as something understandable given the context -- from the perspective of our protagonist. He changes his mind, but molests his boys and others along the way. (Can't remember which book does this -- it's been more than 20 years since I last read the series).
Sigh. We've known for a long time that in autocratic regimes of any type, levels of interpersonal trust are lowered. After all, your neighbor might be an informer, and the state itself is a liar and propagandist. Similarly, low levels of social trust correlate with all sorts of antisocial behavior, from cheating and intolerance to distrust of democracy itself. So all this experiment really proves is something we already know: living a long time under an oppressive regime generates distrust which legitimizes cheating and so forth. Capitalism and "socialism" have little to do with it.
Sounds like a recipe for special interest groups to dominate politics. The same is true of initiative measures in the United States -- they are largely used by well-funded narrow interest groups to advance their agendas at the expense of the public. Indeed, the whole point of the signature requirements is to keep one person (of modest means) from making a difference. As Olson predicted, these schemes lead to the victory of highly committed, well-organized, resource-rich minority positions over the larger but diffuse interests of the public,
THIS.
1. By putting himself on ALL the lists, he gained an advantage over others.
2. There were almost certainly people below him whose lives could have been extended by many more years by that liver.
Most people would do the same, but it's still wrong. It's like shoving someone out of the way to get on the remaining lifeboat. Except that in the analogy, your odds of living given the boat are much less than theirs -- and you know this.
In fairness to the parent, Opera used to require payment. Then they gave you the choice to download a free but ad-supported client. There could still be some cruft from that edition hanging around in the current code.
if you had seen french revolutionaries in 1789, you would want to spray them with insecticide. it was a total stampede of barbarians. but then, in 2-3 years' time, it has become the very thing that awarded your sorry ass with the modern social guidelines about human rights, civil conduct we know today. ...and in one more year the Great Terror began. Indeed, we can thank the revolutionaries for introducing the word "terrorism" to our modern vocabulary.
That means that prices will simply be raised until many consumers simply cannot afford it (arguments like the original articles claims about economies of scale simply indicate lack of economic understanding; less piracy would mean _higher_ price, monopoly pricing limits are completely driven by customer dropoff, economies of scale apply to competitively enforced pricing).
Yup. The claims that piracy results in higher prices are generally false. It results in lower prices for any given piece of software. Its real negative consequence is the result of the lower prices -- some niche software becomes uneconomical to develop since it cannot be sold for a price that will recoup development costs. So we get cheaper mass-market games and a dearth of niche games because of pirates (it seems that no game is too obscure to be pirated). The funny thing is that those who complain about the homogenization of culture by the RIAA may actually be contributing to it by making it unprofitable to sell lesser-known artists (or pieces of software) at any price.
One last comment: There might be a price rise in some areas, where two pieces of software compete against one another. If both are pirated, the duopoly might collapse into a monopoly, with concomitant higher pricing. In theory, a new entrant might emerge -- but it may be that everyone knows duopoly pricing is unprofitable given the competition from pirates.
Interesting. My interpretation was that she found a way to send an email through the university faculty listserv despite having no authorization to do so. It seems that if she actually had simply compiled email addresses by hand she would be OK. As the official said, it's about process, not content. Of course, TFA is terribly vague about these things.
That's the unofficial name for the agency. They have no problem allowing fragile scrubland to be overgrazed without compensation to the public or environmental protection. They have no problem with coal companies removing the tops of entire mountains and dumping the waste into nearby river valleys. But now that someone wants to build a solar plant, they're up in arms over the environmental risks. Ugh. The BLM is the most worthless part of a worthless Interior Department, long since captured by ranchers and the coal industry.
...in other ways. See this set of T shirts, which would be appropriate to any such lessons on "intelligent design."
The MPAA doesn't prosecute anyone. This isn't France, where private citizens or organizations can prosecute. In the US, it is the government that prosecutes. Indeed, the press release didn't even mention the MPAA, and it appears thjey had little (if anything) to do with the case. Even the law that was used (the No Electronic Theft Act) wasn't an MPAA creation (although I'm sure they were supportive). It was largely a BSA/RIAA creation back in 1997, before movie piracy was common.
I hate the MPAA as much as the next guy, but this is our elected government prosecuting this case. If we disagree, then perhaps all you "small government" people ought to vote on who persecutes little guys the least, rather than who'll give you the biggest tax breaks.
I'll leave out really common feeds and a few that won't interest many people, but here are the top 25% or so of my feeds:
A Gentleman's C http://gentlemansc.blogspot.com/rss.xml
An Angry Professor gripes about stuff
Armchair Generalist http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/index.rdf
Blog by a moderate-left military analyst
Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/rss/rss.xml
Three interesting links every day (actually usually one or two INTERESTING ones)
Breaking News (History News Network) http://hnn.us/roundup/rss_full/41.xml
Stories about History with a slight conservative bias
Consumerist http://consumerist.com/excerpts.xml
Shoppers bite back.
indexed http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Note card humor, usually featuring Venn diagrams
Inside Higher Ed http://feeds.feedburner.com/insidehighered/OxmP
Stories from academe, with fairly grumpy comments
Junk Charts http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/rss.xml
Redraws charts to make data analysis easier
Obscure Store and Reading Room http://obscurestore.typepad.com/obscure_store_and_reading/index.rdf
Well-known wierd news site with comments
PostSecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Secrets on postcards, every Sunday. Fascinating.
ReelViews New Reviews http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReelviewsNewReviews
My favorite currently-active film reviewer
SCOTUSblog http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/index.xml
Get the skinny on the latest Supreme Court actions
Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com/rss.xml
Because I love food
Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/rss/
The best of the online political mags; lefty bias
Spluch http://spluch.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Always something interesting. Similar material to the extremely popular Boing Boing, but with fewer posts per day.
The Monkey Cage http://www.themonkeycage.org/atom.xml
Analysis from political scientists. Much better than the usual partisan approach.
The Onion http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/daily
Most of the humor is usually contained in the headlines, so I seldom read more
That's a good point -- I was looking at the NYT article. Table I of the summary says that scores increased by 1.6 for top students in accountable states vs 2.5 in non-accountable states. For bottom students the increase was 5.7 (accountable) vs 1.9 (non-accountable). I'd like to see the significance levels for these results, since n=36 (16 accountable and 20 non-accountable). I'm nearly positive that the "difference" between top students in accountable vs nonaccountable states is indistinguishable from random noise. So the result is that bottom students gain but top students remain the same. It's still not a loss, however, even if we impute statistical significance to the results. It is, at best, less of a gain than we might otherwise have.
I know no one actually RTFA, but it actually says that scores have gone up for all levels of students. Scores have gone up HIGHER for lower students, but they've still gone up for higher students as well. It's just that raising the very top is much harder than raising the bottom, so there's been more progress on the latter. There is NOTHING in the article that says top students are WORSE off now than before NCLB (as asinine as the law is in other ways).
Ack, that should be FOR one's personal use rather than FROM one's personal use. Quite a shift in meaning from that typo....
I suspect there are several good answers here. I don't have a problem with creating CG kiddie porn from one's own personal use. However, once commerce becomes involved (or possibly even trading) there are secondary effects to consider:
1. Existing CG porn uses real faces and Photoshop. This creates real privacy problems, since people have some minimal right to control their image (i.e. to prevent others from thinking they really are sexually active)
2. When it comes to entirely CG kiddie porn, the average Joe can't make it. He doesn't have the skills, the modeling tools, the time, etc. So if there is a market for kiddie porn (or if it can be acquired through trading one's own kiddie porn to others) then there are incentives to make the real thing (especially given the premium that porn viewers place on having new images).
3. Allowing the CG stuff makes it extremely difficult to enforce a ban on the real stuff. The more realistic the CG stuff becomes, the more difficult it will be to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant has real kiddie porn. Note that even videos showing the DEFENDANT HIMSELF molesting kids may be challenged as simulations, if CG tech really makes fantasy indistinguishable from reality. This undermines the "but real kiddie porn is still illegal" argument, even if you don't agree with #1 and #2 above.
I seem to recall that one limit was simply the ceramic nature of most superconductors. If it isn't ductile, you can't use it for wires -- which are kind of important for most superconducting applications. Am I wrong about this?
Qoqsuqqers qan't even respeqt basiq spelling qonventions!
My thoughts exactly -- except that would add that one benefit of the MS initiative is that it used some different libraries, with different collections. Many older books are quite rare, and these are the ones I care about. I wish more libraries would work with Google. Actually I wish the LoC would scan every out-of-copyright work and offer them up at taxpayer expense on the web. After all, it's out intellectual and cultural heritage.
A quick check of Google Groups shows that soc.history (my favorite USENET group back in 1994) has 42477 topics, while soc.history.moderated has only 7482, around one-sixth as many topics. But I would never pick soc.history over soc.history.moderated. The quality of posts in the latter is much better. Indeed, I had to abandon soc.history entirely around 1995 or so due to the flooding of the group by "Serdar Argic" (a semi-automated genocide-denier that argued that the rest of the world had it all wrong and that the starving Armenians had massacred the poor defenseless Ottoman Turks during World War I). The number of posts is far less important than the content of those posts, and some forms of censorship (restrained moderation) end up producing a much more interesting and intelligent discussion than a free-for-all.
The number of Cabinet members and Cabinet-level departments is much less important in the US than in parliamentary systems.
Our Cabinet is one in name only. The President has authority over all executive branch decisions, and no Cabinet head can go against his wishes. He can remove them at his leisure and appoint new ones. Although the Senate confirms appointments, it usually does so regardless of whether Senators agree with the policies of the nominee. Instead, it is expected that as long as the nominee isn't scandalous or completely incompetent, he or she will be confirmed.
Moreover, our Cabinet doesn't really have meetings anymore. It just isn't the case that the heads of the Departments of Veterans Affairs, the Treasury, and the Interor sit around with the President and discuss policy. The executive branch really does its business in smaller groups, many of them wholly distinct form the Cabinet (the National Security Council, for example).