The 2nd Amendment is not just about protecting yourself from government. It's also about having the freedom to protect yourself from harm. If you are entirely dependent on the government to protect yourself from physical harm, you aren't really free.
If I remember correctly, I read that there are something like 200 million guns in the United States. The military may have tanks and helicopters and such, but it would be very hard to occupy the U.S. even if there was a conspiracy in the military.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, so let me take two of your statements and reverse the order:
NYT is actually closer to the average than Fox News is
Consumers select media that aligns with their beliefs.
My logic would say that if those two statements are true, FNC would be marginalized and shrinking, and the NYT would be prominent and growing. However, the facts are the opposite (I don't know what the exact subscriber base is for the NYT, or how that compares to TV ratings, or even whether those things can be effectively compared, but the rate of change should tell us something).
Are you saying that there are still more viewers of liberal-biased media than conservative-bias media if you take them as a total? That's the only thing I can think of to reconcile those two points. That would sort of be saying that FNC fills a niche, and I think they might be a little bigger than that, but it's plausible because I don't have all the numbers. As far as I can tell, FNC is growing and pretty much all the liberal ones are shrinking.
Also, I'm a little skeptical of any report that claims to be able to tell the difference between a consumer demanding reports skewed to his beliefs, and a consumer demanding objective coverage. That seems loaded from the start.
Why the fuss over one outlet that is not as far left as you are?
The fact is, after years and years of dominance in the broadcast, print, and cable news, the liberals can't handle one conservative outlet. Americans were tired of the liberal message, and the viewers went to FNC.
Nobody wants to read, listen to, or watch the liberal message. Air America is failing. CNN is in decline. The NYT is losing influence and employees.
If liberals are concerned that they aren't getting their message across in America, perhaps it's because American people disagree.
The selection of facts, and the prominence of those facts can indicate bias.
If you keep saying that Abu Ghraib (sp?) and Gitmo are important national issues that should occupy our minds on a daily basis, that's a perspective that I disagree with. They matter, I'm not saying we shouldn't avoid abuses, but I just don't care much about a few non-citizens locked up in a prison someplace. If abuses are happening, correct them (investigate, fire people, whatever) and shut up.
Wouldn't it be bias if some news source only reported horrible crimes by illegal aliens? Every time an illegal alien did something wrong, you could make it a front-page article. I bet you could skew your readers' perspective about immigration policy if you do that for long enough (they might even... *gasp* advocate enforcing the laws that we already have).
Objective is when you look at something without perspective, which is pretty much impossible. People generally consider it to be more objective if a prominent view in favor and a prominent view against are both presented, but often times there are many viewpoints. And also you can sort of set up one side to look stupid by picking a stupid advocate.
To me, the worst kind of bias is when you inject opinion into news in creative ways. Consider the following hypothetical "news" story: "Senator A introduced bill B today. The bill does C, but critics say D, E, F, G, H...". How many times do you see that pattern to a story? They introduce something they are against, and then to argue against it they say "critics say...". It's pretty obvious to me that they are the critics, and they just want to editorialize on the front page.
Anonymous sources get kind of rediculous also. In 2008, I fully expect to see as a headline somewhere "Candidate X is a poopy-head, sources say.".
How can you say that viewers follow the shows that align with their beliefs, yet say that NYT is closer to most Americans than FNC? FNC is wildly successful, so if viewers demand coverage skewed to their perspective, Americans must be more like FNC than the liberal outlets.
So it takes an integer operation 15 or so cycles to be complete in an Athlon, and 30 cycles in a P4.
I want to add that a long pipeline isn't as bad as you make it seem. Assuming the branch prediction and cache are working effectively (and there aren't too many data hazards, etc), there will be several instructions in the same pipeline at the same time in different stages.
One integer operation may take 30 cycles on a P4 and 15 on an Athlon. But one million integer operations might approach 1 integer operation per cycle on both processors. This is under very ideal circumstances, and realistically there will always be fewer instructions in the pipeline than there are stages.
I can understand that some part of the kernel still needs heavy development (ReiserFS, VM,...
Speaking of VMs, I'm a little confused about the topic. Can anyone direct me to some good material that explains the differences between various VM systems? Specifically, I'm concerned about overcommitting memory and the OOM killer in linux. Do any other OSes have an OOM killer? Why or why not? If an OS overcommits memory, how can it not have an OOM killer? Does setting "vm.overcommit_memory = 2" disable the OOM killer, or just make it less likely?
Software producers should be open to lawsuits for not providing quick, free, and easy security updates to all their products.
OSS would disappear in the U.S., and commercial software would be more expensive.
What you are suggesting yourself is a way to duck responsibility. Most consumers understand that software is not going to work perfectly, and they don't hold the vendor accountable. In return, they pay a lower price. The consumer should have the freedom to negotiate either arrangement in a way that benefits them.
I mostly like linux, but one thing I still don't understand is the OOM Killer. If you're out of memory, the OOM Killer picks a process and kills it, regardless of which process asked for too much memory. It has a nasty habbit of killing the database server rather than the leaky or out-of-control program.
I have never heard an explanation of how this is better than other VMs. From what I understand, that type of thing would never happen in any BSD.
Because I haven't heard any justification for that, I'm trying to learn BSD right now so that I can avoid weird stuff like that. If someone has an explanation, please let me know.
I'm not saying we should provide Christian perspectives. I'm saying that it is not unconstitutional to do so. Just like it's not unconstitutional to provide the secular left perspective.
Socialists have been associated with far worse (20 million Russians dead, 40-50 million Chinese dead).
You can make all kinds of groupings and claim that a class of people is bad. That's called prejudice, unless you're talking about Christianity, in which case it's called "politically correct".
The left belief system is alive and well in public schools, with nobody claiming that it's unconstitutional.
"A teacher can't preach about his beliefs" when that teacher is acting as a representative of the government.
Really? Because nobody claims that it's unconstitutional when a teacher preaches about diversity or some other liberal belief system. It's only unconstitutional when they preach about Christianity.
Preaching dogma does nothing beneficial for anyone.
That's your opinion. It certainly is removed from logic, but does hold meaning and benefit some.
Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell should never be elected again
Agreed. I disagree with people like that, and I don't think it's the right venue for those kinds of ideas, but it's not unconstitutional.
It's a justifiable belief set.
There's no way you're going to be able to differentiate between justifiable and unjustifiable in a consistent way. You can't say one is constitutional and another is not.
We agree that some speech has no place in government. I say that we can't differentiate, and we just have to take it up with school boards and our votes. We can't say that some speech is Constitutional and some is unconstitutional, and try to make a line for religion between them.
they could well be metaphysical enough that they cross that line
So now there's a "line"? Free speech so long as it doesn't cross a line into religion?
Politicians can speak about religion. You'd be hard pressed to find a president who hasn't mentioned God in an official address. I don't know why you think that's Unconstitutional, when the language is as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...
Where in there does it say that the government can't talk about religion? It doesn't even seem to prohibit the states from establishing state religions. Maybe it should, but that's not what it says.
I don't see why schools can preach all day about diversity and approving behavior that we may not want to approve of, yet a Christian can't preach about his beliefs.
As a disclaimer, I'm not Christian. I just see an incredible double-standard on acceptable speech, and I sympathize with the people who can't express their beliefs because their beliefs are called "religion" while other people's beliefs aren't.
This law seems reasonable to me. Perhaps a good parent would normally harshly limit the time a child can spend on the internet, and try to supervise the child herself.
This seems like a reasonable way that the parent can request that the ISP provide some simple blocking and the parent could be more permissive of the child's internet use.
I wouldn't vote for that to be law, because I think it places an undue burden on ISPs, particularly small ISPs (although the burden isn't much, all they have to do is offer software, which could be 3rd party). Also, it seems like most parents can already find a simple solution to that problem. However, the law is reasonable, and Constitutional (since it's the customer's opt-in option).
By your logic, to have freedom of speech you need freedom from speech.
You don't have freedom from other people's speech or beliefs. Nobody can harass you or disturb the peace or prevent you from walking past. But if someone has a message, and they say it in a peaceful way, they can express their message. Unless, of course, that's a Christian message, in which case it's an illegal violation of the separation of Church and state, and the person must be silenced.
Many belief systems avoid calling themselves religion so that they aren't in the path of the ACLU. Environmentalism, PETA, the moral relativists, and advocates of diversity are all belief systems, but they call themselves secular and magically the ACLU doesn't attack them.
That's because they're both religious. Just because some group tells you that they aren't religious doesn't mean they aren't. They're just trying to avoid associating themselves with the modern criticisms of religion.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Agreed!
There are two cases: (1) You application's data needs are simple. Any ol' database will be more than good enough, it doesn't need to be an RDBMS. In this case, just develop for and bundle SQL-Lite and then you don't care what people have installed or not.
(2) Your application requires a Relational Database Management System. Choose one, and program for it. Don't chase phrases like "DB-Agnostic" by reimplementing features and capabilities in your application that are already implemented in your database of choice. Those features are in the database for a reason.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2
There are reasons for database-specific code: not all databases are the same.
The "lowest common denominator" data storage/retrieval does not actually mean you can use your database like a Relational Database Management System.
If you don't want your database to do what Relational Database Management Systems do, and you're just going to use it for flatfile-like queries, why not just use SQL-Lite? SQL-Lite has familiar syntax, but can be bundled with the application. You don't have to worry about what database the user has installed.
If you want a RDBMS, get a good one, and code specifically for it if you want. It will save a huge amount of application code. The ideal application does not redesign all of the features that it needs at the application level just to achieve the mystical "db-agnosticism". The ideal application design says: "These features already work in my database. I'm going to use my database."
You could make the same argument about walking on public roads. How would you feel if you were trying to walk from your house to the supermarket and a police officer decided to do a body cavity search on you?
Sorry, but breathing is not a right but a privilege granted by the powers that be. We have to implicitly give up all the odd Amendments and all of the Amendments divisible by two in order to be allowed to breathe.
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The 2nd Amendment is not just about protecting yourself from government. It's also about having the freedom to protect yourself from harm. If you are entirely dependent on the government to protect yourself from physical harm, you aren't really free.
If I remember correctly, I read that there are something like 200 million guns in the United States. The military may have tanks and helicopters and such, but it would be very hard to occupy the U.S. even if there was a conspiracy in the military.
I didn't say far left, I said left of FNC.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying, so let me take two of your statements and reverse the order:
NYT is actually closer to the average than Fox News is
Consumers select media that aligns with their beliefs.
My logic would say that if those two statements are true, FNC would be marginalized and shrinking, and the NYT would be prominent and growing. However, the facts are the opposite (I don't know what the exact subscriber base is for the NYT, or how that compares to TV ratings, or even whether those things can be effectively compared, but the rate of change should tell us something).
Are you saying that there are still more viewers of liberal-biased media than conservative-bias media if you take them as a total? That's the only thing I can think of to reconcile those two points. That would sort of be saying that FNC fills a niche, and I think they might be a little bigger than that, but it's plausible because I don't have all the numbers. As far as I can tell, FNC is growing and pretty much all the liberal ones are shrinking.
Also, I'm a little skeptical of any report that claims to be able to tell the difference between a consumer demanding reports skewed to his beliefs, and a consumer demanding objective coverage. That seems loaded from the start.
Why the fuss over one outlet that is not as far left as you are?
The fact is, after years and years of dominance in the broadcast, print, and cable news, the liberals can't handle one conservative outlet. Americans were tired of the liberal message, and the viewers went to FNC.
Nobody wants to read, listen to, or watch the liberal message. Air America is failing. CNN is in decline. The NYT is losing influence and employees.
If liberals are concerned that they aren't getting their message across in America, perhaps it's because American people disagree.
The selection of facts, and the prominence of those facts can indicate bias.
...". How many times do you see that pattern to a story? They introduce something they are against, and then to argue against it they say "critics say...". It's pretty obvious to me that they are the critics, and they just want to editorialize on the front page.
If you keep saying that Abu Ghraib (sp?) and Gitmo are important national issues that should occupy our minds on a daily basis, that's a perspective that I disagree with. They matter, I'm not saying we shouldn't avoid abuses, but I just don't care much about a few non-citizens locked up in a prison someplace. If abuses are happening, correct them (investigate, fire people, whatever) and shut up.
Wouldn't it be bias if some news source only reported horrible crimes by illegal aliens? Every time an illegal alien did something wrong, you could make it a front-page article. I bet you could skew your readers' perspective about immigration policy if you do that for long enough (they might even... *gasp* advocate enforcing the laws that we already have).
Objective is when you look at something without perspective, which is pretty much impossible. People generally consider it to be more objective if a prominent view in favor and a prominent view against are both presented, but often times there are many viewpoints. And also you can sort of set up one side to look stupid by picking a stupid advocate.
To me, the worst kind of bias is when you inject opinion into news in creative ways. Consider the following hypothetical "news" story: "Senator A introduced bill B today. The bill does C, but critics say D, E, F, G, H
Anonymous sources get kind of rediculous also. In 2008, I fully expect to see as a headline somewhere "Candidate X is a poopy-head, sources say.".
How can you say that viewers follow the shows that align with their beliefs, yet say that NYT is closer to most Americans than FNC? FNC is wildly successful, so if viewers demand coverage skewed to their perspective, Americans must be more like FNC than the liberal outlets.
You could say the exact same thing about the NYT editorial page, since they call themselves a newspaper.
So it takes an integer operation 15 or so cycles to be complete in an Athlon, and 30 cycles in a P4.
I want to add that a long pipeline isn't as bad as you make it seem. Assuming the branch prediction and cache are working effectively (and there aren't too many data hazards, etc), there will be several instructions in the same pipeline at the same time in different stages.
One integer operation may take 30 cycles on a P4 and 15 on an Athlon. But one million integer operations might approach 1 integer operation per cycle on both processors. This is under very ideal circumstances, and realistically there will always be fewer instructions in the pipeline than there are stages.
I can understand that some part of the kernel ...
still needs heavy development
(ReiserFS, VM,
Speaking of VMs, I'm a little confused about the topic. Can anyone direct me to some good material that explains the differences between various VM systems? Specifically, I'm concerned about overcommitting memory and the OOM killer in linux. Do any other OSes have an OOM killer? Why or why not? If an OS overcommits memory, how can it not have an OOM killer? Does setting "vm.overcommit_memory = 2" disable the OOM killer, or just make it less likely?
Software producers should be open to lawsuits for not providing quick, free, and easy security updates to all their products.
OSS would disappear in the U.S., and commercial software would be more expensive.
What you are suggesting yourself is a way to duck responsibility. Most consumers understand that software is not going to work perfectly, and they don't hold the vendor accountable. In return, they pay a lower price. The consumer should have the freedom to negotiate either arrangement in a way that benefits them.
I mostly like linux, but one thing I still don't understand is the OOM Killer. If you're out of memory, the OOM Killer picks a process and kills it, regardless of which process asked for too much memory. It has a nasty habbit of killing the database server rather than the leaky or out-of-control program.
I have never heard an explanation of how this is better than other VMs. From what I understand, that type of thing would never happen in any BSD.
Because I haven't heard any justification for that, I'm trying to learn BSD right now so that I can avoid weird stuff like that. If someone has an explanation, please let me know.
I'm not saying we should provide Christian perspectives. I'm saying that it is not unconstitutional to do so. Just like it's not unconstitutional to provide the secular left perspective.
Socialists have been associated with far worse (20 million Russians dead, 40-50 million Chinese dead).
You can make all kinds of groupings and claim that a class of people is bad. That's called prejudice, unless you're talking about Christianity, in which case it's called "politically correct".
The left belief system is alive and well in public schools, with nobody claiming that it's unconstitutional.
"A teacher can't preach about his beliefs" when that teacher is acting as a representative of the government.
Really? Because nobody claims that it's unconstitutional when a teacher preaches about diversity or some other liberal belief system. It's only unconstitutional when they preach about Christianity.
Grammatically, "an" is an indefinate article, and I think that it can't be followed by a verb. Correct me if I'm wrong with some kind of source.
Preaching dogma does nothing beneficial for anyone.
That's your opinion. It certainly is removed from logic, but does hold meaning and benefit some.
Pat Robertson or Jerry Fallwell should never be elected again
Agreed. I disagree with people like that, and I don't think it's the right venue for those kinds of ideas, but it's not unconstitutional.
It's a justifiable belief set.
There's no way you're going to be able to differentiate between justifiable and unjustifiable in a consistent way. You can't say one is constitutional and another is not.
We agree that some speech has no place in government. I say that we can't differentiate, and we just have to take it up with school boards and our votes. We can't say that some speech is Constitutional and some is unconstitutional, and try to make a line for religion between them.
they could well be metaphysical enough that they cross that line
...
So now there's a "line"? Free speech so long as it doesn't cross a line into religion?
Politicians can speak about religion. You'd be hard pressed to find a president who hasn't mentioned God in an official address. I don't know why you think that's Unconstitutional, when the language is as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Where in there does it say that the government can't talk about religion? It doesn't even seem to prohibit the states from establishing state religions. Maybe it should, but that's not what it says.
I don't see why schools can preach all day about diversity and approving behavior that we may not want to approve of, yet a Christian can't preach about his beliefs.
As a disclaimer, I'm not Christian. I just see an incredible double-standard on acceptable speech, and I sympathize with the people who can't express their beliefs because their beliefs are called "religion" while other people's beliefs aren't.
This law seems reasonable to me. Perhaps a good parent would normally harshly limit the time a child can spend on the internet, and try to supervise the child herself.
This seems like a reasonable way that the parent can request that the ISP provide some simple blocking and the parent could be more permissive of the child's internet use.
I wouldn't vote for that to be law, because I think it places an undue burden on ISPs, particularly small ISPs (although the burden isn't much, all they have to do is offer software, which could be 3rd party). Also, it seems like most parents can already find a simple solution to that problem. However, the law is reasonable, and Constitutional (since it's the customer's opt-in option).
By your logic, to have freedom of speech you need freedom from speech.
You don't have freedom from other people's speech or beliefs. Nobody can harass you or disturb the peace or prevent you from walking past. But if someone has a message, and they say it in a peaceful way, they can express their message. Unless, of course, that's a Christian message, in which case it's an illegal violation of the separation of Church and state, and the person must be silenced.
Many belief systems avoid calling themselves religion so that they aren't in the path of the ACLU. Environmentalism, PETA, the moral relativists, and advocates of diversity are all belief systems, but they call themselves secular and magically the ACLU doesn't attack them.
That's because they're both religious. Just because some group tells you that they aren't religious doesn't mean they aren't. They're just trying to avoid associating themselves with the modern criticisms of religion.
Agreed!
There are two cases:
(1) You application's data needs are simple. Any ol' database will be more than good enough, it doesn't need to be an RDBMS. In this case, just develop for and bundle SQL-Lite and then you don't care what people have installed or not.
(2) Your application requires a Relational Database Management System. Choose one, and program for it. Don't chase phrases like "DB-Agnostic" by reimplementing features and capabilities in your application that are already implemented in your database of choice. Those features are in the database for a reason.
There are reasons for database-specific code: not all databases are the same.
The "lowest common denominator" data storage/retrieval does not actually mean you can use your database like a Relational Database Management System.
If you don't want your database to do what Relational Database Management Systems do, and you're just going to use it for flatfile-like queries, why not just use SQL-Lite? SQL-Lite has familiar syntax, but can be bundled with the application. You don't have to worry about what database the user has installed.
If you want a RDBMS, get a good one, and code specifically for it if you want. It will save a huge amount of application code. The ideal application does not redesign all of the features that it needs at the application level just to achieve the mystical "db-agnosticism". The ideal application design says: "These features already work in my database. I'm going to use my database."
You could make the same argument about walking on public roads. How would you feel if you were trying to walk from your house to the supermarket and a police officer decided to do a body cavity search on you?
A breath test is a search. There does not need to be any probable cause, or even evidence that a crime took place, yet they can search you.
Sorry, but breathing is not a right but a privilege granted by the powers that be. We have to implicitly give up all the odd Amendments and all of the Amendments divisible by two in order to be allowed to breathe.