That there is a (often extreme) liberal bias in the US academic world is only arguable or argued by extremist liberals who see that bias as representing their views and therefore not biased
Right, all those math and science and engineering professors whose research is funded by the DOD are a bunch of extremist liberal peaceniks.
Just like all the agricultural science professors figuring out how to run more efficient battery cage operations are a bunch of radical animals rights advocates, and the criminal justice departments are full of future social workers, and the folks teaching the MBA program are all labor union activists.
you don't perceive them as biased and therefore have to come up with bizarre conspiracy theories to discount all the evidence of that bias
It's not a bizarre conspiracy theory, it's a criticism of a poor study. Read the fine article I linked. AEI, the far-right thinktank that claimed to have indisputable evidence of liberal bias in academia, cherrypicked their data.
Really, it's the other way around: Since the first Red Scares of the early 20th century, the right wing has been so successful in biasing discussion that anything considered "moderate" in the rest of the world seems leftist here.
As the perfect example, the whole "Politically Correct" movement is a left wing matic attack on free speech originating in the academic world.
Yes, it is a perfect example. Because there is no such thing. The "PC movement" is 10% a couple of isolated actions by boneheads on the authoritarian extreme of the left, and 90% a pure fiction of the right's propaganda machine.
In my opinion there's plenty of idiocy, in different areas, on both side's views of the world.
There is certainly plenty of idiocy. But since the 1980s when the conservative moment allied itself with fundamentalist religion and made biology a campaign issue, to today's White House attempts to quash climate science, the Republican political machine has deliberately moved toward ignorance. (So much so, that many of them can't properly distinguish the noun from the adjective forms of the name of the other major party...if I hear one more idiot talk about the "Democrat Party" I swear I'm going to hit something.)
Sure, I hear a lot of stupid, wrong, and ignorant stuff from Democratic politicians, but you don't see any of the Democratic presidential candidates denying the reality of biological evolution.
Your "theory" is completely refuted by the actions at Duke University during the Lacrosse hoax.
First, the idea that one incident refutes or proves anything about trends in bias is ridiculous. Second, what actions? A bunch of people did a bunch of stuff during that farce. The primary enablers of the hoaxer were Nifong and the Durham Police Department, who were not affiliated with the university. And I note that DAs and cops are not known for liberal bias.
There's nothing that says you can't sell free software. Put up a web page, say "send me $X and I'll mail you a CD-ROM. (Or let you on to the area of my site where you can download a zipfile.)" Beside binaries, the CD-ROM (or zipfile) has a source tarball and a copy of the GPL (or whatever license) on it; these extras will be ignored by 99% of your users.
Some users will make copies for their friends. Fine. That will happen whether you make source available or not.
Somebody might resell copies at $(X-delta). If you want to preserve your uniqueness, trademark a name and a logo; see Red Hat verus CentOS for an example. Include a nice printed manual or other premium for customers of the "official" version. (And if the knockoff company starts selling a whole bunch more copies than you do and raking in the cash, make a deal with 'em to join forces, your development plus their marketing.)
way too much compression to start with, whereas the vinyl records can't be overly compressed in that matter due to the nature of the medium.
The nature of the medium doesn't affect the application of dynamic range compression. You can squeeze the hell out of the audio information, making the whole of every track the same loudness, regardless of what media you ultimately write it to. I'll bet you dance music EPs are as compressed as anything.
the ACLU doesn't usually pick up the kinds of cases that FIRE is interested in, because the cases often involve public academic institutions suppressing religious speech and conservative political speech.
(Academic institutions in general tend to carry a liberal bias in their administration and faculty, which makes it more likely that conservatives will run afoul of such bias.)
This idea of academic political bias is based on deliberately slanted "research", from the sort of priviledged conservatives who, for some bizarre reason, like to view themselves as a persecuted minority. (I suppose it has its roots in the sort of twisted, martyrdom-centered Christianity they tend to practice.)
But even though most of the far right's whining about "liberal bias" in education is based on restricting their surveys of academics' party affiliations to the women's studies department, perhaps there is an inherent bias. After all, academic institutions tend to carry a bias toward knowledge, while the contemporary conservative movement continually allies itself with ignorance.
The US Constitution has no control over the states per se; that is one of the peculiarities of the US system.
The federal Constitution has several controls on the states: the restrictions of Article 1 Section 10, the "full faith and credit" clause, the extradition clause. But most relevant here is that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protection of the Bill of Rights - including freedom of speech - against actions by state governments. Which is why, according to TFA, the lawsuit is being brought against the state under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
One might make an argument for Congress having NIST create a physical standard for photo IDs based on their power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". I'm willing to consider it.
But a standard for the cards themselves isn't the problem; the problem is the federally mandated procedures for issuing them, and the federally mandated ID checks before getting on a plane.
theres nothing wrong with have a solid method of making sure people are who they say they
Except that it's none of your business who I am when I get on a plane for a domestic flight. If you have enough evidence to put me on a meaningful "no fly" list, you have enough evidence to arrest me.
Nor should making sure I am who I say I am, be tied to the certificate that attests that the person I say I am is licensed to operate a motor vehicle on the public roads. Two very different problems.
If I can validate my voting, my boss can tell me to vote for his buddy or find another job.
This can already happen with absentee ballots. "Bring in your ballot, show it to me, and let's walk down to the post office and I'll watch you mail it."
And the way to prevent it is the same way we prevent other types of voting fraud - strict, no nonsense laws. Your boss is unlikely to think that rigging you vote is worth, say, 20 years in the pen.
If we trust them enough to make laws for the state, can't we trust them enough to select Senators?
Who says we trust them enough to make laws for the state? The 17th Amendment was a reaction to bribery, corruption, and partisanship in state legislatures; I see no evidence that these have left.
it's in the Constitution itself, not a separate statute.
No, it's not. RTFA and you'll learn that the method has been changed several times. RTFConstitution and you'll see that it only says "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State", but does not describe how to deal with the mathematic problem of fractional Congresscritters.
I think it would take an effort of willful blindness to buy the notion that they weren't drinking alcoholic beverages.
If you had a photo of people in a room with containers of alcoholic beverages, it would be highly likely, perhaps beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone there was drinking. (To which the only proper and sane response is, big fscking deal, just don't overdo it and don't drive until you've sobered up. The crusade against underage drinking creates far more alcohol abuse than it prevents - prohibition is always a failure.)
It would be difficult to impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that any specific person was drinking. "No sir, I wasn't drinking, I was the designated driver. That can in my hand in that photo? I was helping clean up empties, sir."
Underage drinking is illegal, yes; it's also a "crime" that those doing the enforcement most probably engaged in, and yet another example of the total failure of prohibition laws.
And it's not the job of schools to enforce laws, that's why we have courts with trials and an adversarial process.
Given the rapidly diminishing aquifers and the increasing demand for surface water, saying land "just needs irrigation" to be fertile is sort of like saying I "just need to grow wings" to be able to fly.
They aren't worried. This is typical of a "full disclosure" of risks that companies give to their investors.
Exactly. I don't think this is new or unique to McAffee. I used to have McAfee stock (via a chain of options from a former employer, buyouts, and restructuring) and I think I remember seeing a similar warning.
Annual reports are full of "the sky might fall and negatively affect earnings" sort of disclaimers. Toyota's annual report, for example, warns that "Toyota may be adversely affected by political instabilities, fuel shortages or interruptions in transportation systems, natural calamities, wars, terrorism and labor strikes."
It's like asking..."Who owns your shirt?" Of course me. I repeat...I own my property. Period.
Way to miss the point. The issue is, is your data (data about you and/or data provided by you) your property?
The fact that something may be "yours" in one usage, does not mean that it is your property, that you own it. Consider "your wife", "your child", "your liver", "your poem", "your likeness", or "your apartment". Other people are not your property; your relationship to your body transcends property; poems may be copyrighted but copyright is different than property; a photograph with your likeness is not owned by you (though you may have rights related to it) but may be copyrighted by the photographer; and someone else likely owns your apartment. Yet we use the same construction "your X" in each case.
I'm pretty sure public accommodation applies only to the disabled.
You need to review your civil rights history. The passage of laws guaranteeing equal access to public accommodation was a huge victory for the movement.
There are numerous and diverse state laws, which apply different definitions of "public accommodation". In Maryland, according to the Maryland Commission on Human Relations, "[r]etail establishments offering goods, services, entertainment, recreation or transportation are...considered public accommodations," and "[i]t is unlawful for an owner or operator of a place of public accommodation to deny a person any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges because of his/her race, creed, sex, age, color, national origin, marital status, or physical or mental disability." (Pardon me for not digging up the actual statute, but I trust this citation from a state agency suffices.)
Here's the federal one about discrimination in places of public accommodation, though they use a more limited scope of what makes a public accommodation:
(a) Equal access
All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
Oh well, add it to the list of things that Ron Paul will solve within 1 week.;-)
No, he'll be too busy overturning Roe v. Wade and destroying the seperation of church and state. Ron Paul is a loon, and it's high time for people to get over their crush on him.
A business is and should be private property, but, that is fading along with other good things.
A business is a very different sort of "property" from a home. A home is a natural right, even gorillas make nests. But having the state enforce control over a piece of land so that you can do business there is a privilege, not a right. It's quite sensible that the privilege be granted only with conditions that make it beneficial to all.
I mean, you *DO* have a choice whether to be a patron or employee there, if you don't like smoking, don't go.
Banning smoking in bars is just another workplace safely law. I suppose you'd prefer a jungle where workers have no protection at all?
common sense - whether or not there should be an expectation of privacy.
The best way to align the use of recording devices with the "expectation of privacy" is to allow recording devices only when carried on a human being.
Steve Mann notes that privacy has two aspects: being apart from the company of other people, and being apart from observation. He suggests that we ought to combine them, and only allow recording systems to be attached to people. I think it's an excellent idea.
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Right, all those math and science and engineering professors whose research is funded by the DOD are a bunch of extremist liberal peaceniks.
Just like all the agricultural science professors figuring out how to run more efficient battery cage operations are a bunch of radical animals rights advocates, and the criminal justice departments are full of future social workers, and the folks teaching the MBA program are all labor union activists.
It's not a bizarre conspiracy theory, it's a criticism of a poor study. Read the fine article I linked. AEI, the far-right thinktank that claimed to have indisputable evidence of liberal bias in academia, cherrypicked their data.
Really, it's the other way around: Since the first Red Scares of the early 20th century, the right wing has been so successful in biasing discussion that anything considered "moderate" in the rest of the world seems leftist here.
Yes, it is a perfect example. Because there is no such thing. The "PC movement" is 10% a couple of isolated actions by boneheads on the authoritarian extreme of the left, and 90% a pure fiction of the right's propaganda machine.
There is certainly plenty of idiocy. But since the 1980s when the conservative moment allied itself with fundamentalist religion and made biology a campaign issue, to today's White House attempts to quash climate science, the Republican political machine has deliberately moved toward ignorance. (So much so, that many of them can't properly distinguish the noun from the adjective forms of the name of the other major party...if I hear one more idiot talk about the "Democrat Party" I swear I'm going to hit something.)
Sure, I hear a lot of stupid, wrong, and ignorant stuff from Democratic politicians, but you don't see any of the Democratic presidential candidates denying the reality of biological evolution.
First, the idea that one incident refutes or proves anything about trends in bias is ridiculous. Second, what actions? A bunch of people did a bunch of stuff during that farce. The primary enablers of the hoaxer were Nifong and the Durham Police Department, who were not affiliated with the university. And I note that DAs and cops are not known for liberal bias.
There's nothing that says you can't sell free software. Put up a web page, say "send me $X and I'll mail you a CD-ROM. (Or let you on to the area of my site where you can download a zipfile.)" Beside binaries, the CD-ROM (or zipfile) has a source tarball and a copy of the GPL (or whatever license) on it; these extras will be ignored by 99% of your users.
Some users will make copies for their friends. Fine. That will happen whether you make source available or not.
Somebody might resell copies at $(X-delta). If you want to preserve your uniqueness, trademark a name and a logo; see Red Hat verus CentOS for an example. Include a nice printed manual or other premium for customers of the "official" version. (And if the knockoff company starts selling a whole bunch more copies than you do and raking in the cash, make a deal with 'em to join forces, your development plus their marketing.)
Nor if analog mastered, can it capture anything that wasn't in the analog master. So?
The nature of the medium doesn't affect the application of dynamic range compression. You can squeeze the hell out of the audio information, making the whole of every track the same loudness, regardless of what media you ultimately write it to. I'll bet you dance music EPs are as compressed as anything.
The ACLU often comes to the defense of religious expression and of conservative political speech.
This idea of academic political bias is based on deliberately slanted "research", from the sort of priviledged conservatives who, for some bizarre reason, like to view themselves as a persecuted minority. (I suppose it has its roots in the sort of twisted, martyrdom-centered Christianity they tend to practice.)
But even though most of the far right's whining about "liberal bias" in education is based on restricting their surveys of academics' party affiliations to the women's studies department, perhaps there is an inherent bias. After all, academic institutions tend to carry a bias toward knowledge, while the contemporary conservative movement continually allies itself with ignorance.
The federal Constitution has several controls on the states: the restrictions of Article 1 Section 10, the "full faith and credit" clause, the extradition clause. But most relevant here is that the Fourteenth Amendment extends the protection of the Bill of Rights - including freedom of speech - against actions by state governments. Which is why, according to TFA, the lawsuit is being brought against the state under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
One might make an argument for Congress having NIST create a physical standard for photo IDs based on their power to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". I'm willing to consider it.
But a standard for the cards themselves isn't the problem; the problem is the federally mandated procedures for issuing them, and the federally mandated ID checks before getting on a plane.
Except that it's none of your business who I am when I get on a plane for a domestic flight. If you have enough evidence to put me on a meaningful "no fly" list, you have enough evidence to arrest me.
Nor should making sure I am who I say I am, be tied to the certificate that attests that the person I say I am is licensed to operate a motor vehicle on the public roads. Two very different problems.
This can already happen with absentee ballots. "Bring in your ballot, show it to me, and let's walk down to the post office and I'll watch you mail it."
And the way to prevent it is the same way we prevent other types of voting fraud - strict, no nonsense laws. Your boss is unlikely to think that rigging you vote is worth, say, 20 years in the pen.
Who says we trust them enough to make laws for the state? The 17th Amendment was a reaction to bribery, corruption, and partisanship in state legislatures; I see no evidence that these have left.
No, it's not. RTFA and you'll learn that the method has been changed several times. RTFConstitution and you'll see that it only says "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State", but does not describe how to deal with the mathematic problem of fractional Congresscritters.
If you had a photo of people in a room with containers of alcoholic beverages, it would be highly likely, perhaps beyond a reasonable doubt, that someone there was drinking. (To which the only proper and sane response is, big fscking deal, just don't overdo it and don't drive until you've sobered up. The crusade against underage drinking creates far more alcohol abuse than it prevents - prohibition is always a failure.)
It would be difficult to impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, however, that any specific person was drinking. "No sir, I wasn't drinking, I was the designated driver. That can in my hand in that photo? I was helping clean up empties, sir."
Underage drinking is illegal, yes; it's also a "crime" that those doing the enforcement most probably engaged in, and yet another example of the total failure of prohibition laws.
And it's not the job of schools to enforce laws, that's why we have courts with trials and an adversarial process.
Nah. You put the wind farms on the mountaintops, maybe some solar on the south flanks.
Quoth TFA,
And here I thought we'd driven a stake through the heart of Ada back in the 90s. It lives!
Given the rapidly diminishing aquifers and the increasing demand for surface water, saying land "just needs irrigation" to be fertile is sort of like saying I "just need to grow wings" to be able to fly.
You can't restore a mountain after you tear off its top.
Exactly. I don't think this is new or unique to McAffee. I used to have McAfee stock (via a chain of options from a former employer, buyouts, and restructuring) and I think I remember seeing a similar warning.
Annual reports are full of "the sky might fall and negatively affect earnings" sort of disclaimers. Toyota's annual report, for example, warns that "Toyota may be adversely affected by political instabilities, fuel shortages or interruptions in transportation systems, natural calamities, wars, terrorism and labor strikes."
Way to miss the point. The issue is, is your data (data about you and/or data provided by you) your property?
The fact that something may be "yours" in one usage, does not mean that it is your property, that you own it. Consider "your wife", "your child", "your liver", "your poem", "your likeness", or "your apartment". Other people are not your property; your relationship to your body transcends property; poems may be copyrighted but copyright is different than property; a photograph with your likeness is not owned by you (though you may have rights related to it) but may be copyrighted by the photographer; and someone else likely owns your apartment. Yet we use the same construction "your X" in each case.
You need to review your civil rights history. The passage of laws guaranteeing equal access to public accommodation was a huge victory for the movement.
There are numerous and diverse state laws, which apply different definitions of "public accommodation". In Maryland, according to the Maryland Commission on Human Relations, "[r]etail establishments offering goods, services, entertainment, recreation or transportation are...considered public accommodations," and "[i]t is unlawful for an owner or operator of a place of public accommodation to deny a person any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges because of his/her race, creed, sex, age, color, national origin, marital status, or physical or mental disability." (Pardon me for not digging up the actual statute, but I trust this citation from a state agency suffices.)
Here's the federal one about discrimination in places of public accommodation, though they use a more limited scope of what makes a public accommodation:
No, he'll be too busy overturning Roe v. Wade and destroying the seperation of church and state. Ron Paul is a loon, and it's high time for people to get over their crush on him.
A business is a very different sort of "property" from a home. A home is a natural right, even gorillas make nests. But having the state enforce control over a piece of land so that you can do business there is a privilege, not a right. It's quite sensible that the privilege be granted only with conditions that make it beneficial to all.
Banning smoking in bars is just another workplace safely law. I suppose you'd prefer a jungle where workers have no protection at all?
Not if you're using HTTPS.
Fundamentally, it's no more or less secure than setting a password in a browser cookie.
The best way to align the use of recording devices with the "expectation of privacy" is to allow recording devices only when carried on a human being.
Steve Mann notes that privacy has two aspects: being apart from the company of other people, and being apart from observation. He suggests that we ought to combine them, and only allow recording systems to be attached to people. I think it's an excellent idea.