Actually in this case the rules were made by an international convention in Geneva which pretty clearly defines the status of fighters dressed as civilians...
It also clearly defines a due process for determining that status. Which is not being followed.
It's ironic that all of this concern is being focussed on the Al-Queada prisoners who are among the best treated prisoners in Cuba.
Nonsense. Not only is it questionable who's eing better or worse treated, but the accused Al-Queada (and I emphasized "accused") prisoners are being held by the American government in the name of the American people; even in these undemocratic times, we Americans might hope to have some small influence on the process. We have several orders of magnitude less influence over how political prisoners are treated in Cuba.
Doing this prevents the recipiant from saving a plain text version on their
disks
...providing you trust the recipiant.
If I trust the recipient, all I need do is write "Please to not save a plain-text version of this document." Which, essentially, is all that this option can do - ask. Not prevent.
These digital-rights management tools work much like copy-protection systems being developed for music, movies and e-books
And we all know how overwhelmingly successful those have been at preventing copying...
The old bromide that "information wants to be free" is not just a statement about copyright. It's a statement about privacy as well - whether you want it to spread or not, once you set information in a digital form and send it to someone else, controlling it becomes well-nigh impossible.
These reflectors are neither litter, nor discarded. They were set there quite deliberately, for the exact purpose for which they are being used - precise measurements of distance via laser pulses.
You don't have to shop there. You act like they are forcing you to shop there.
Nonsense. jsldub pointed out corporate behavior that he/she takes into account when deciding whether or not to shop there, and suggested that we might find such behavior offensive and make the same choice.
Ever heard of wellfare? Taxes? Roads built by the government?
I do wish people would get a basic grasp of socialism before they talk about it.
Welfare, taxation, and public works all predate both socialism and capitalism by millennia. You could find them all in ancient Rome.
Socialism is an economic system in which resources (capital) are controled by those who use them to do the work, as opposed to a government-appointed minority of owners, aka "capitalists". It comes in both statist and libertarian flavors.
It has nothing to do with welfare (socialists would argue that it's a band-aid solution for a problem in need of complete revolution), taxation (which has been a feature of every government in history), or public works (likewise).
"Argues well?" No. Forcefully, and perhaps eloquently, but very badly.
His central thesis is that government "sight" will not be abused if there is citizen "oversight". He completely ignores the fact that, again and again, the majority of citizens have proven quite willing to allow the state to run roughshod over the rights of the minority.
Brin writes from the position of a supporter of the general political and social status quo - his outlook is basically that our society is the best that's ever been. In this article, he claims we're both the safest and the freest, making no mention at all of such facts as our absurdly high incarceration rate. I've read other essays where he's quite exhuberant about his praise for modern western culture.
Now that's all well and good. While his praise of the system is sometime more emotional than rational, he does have some good points. But he seems keenly unaware of the nature (maybe even the existance) of dissent, and of the sociopolitical reaction against it.
Would citizen oversight have protected leaders like Martin Luther King and Huey Newton against the FBI's COINTELPRO? Would it have protected anti-globalization protestors who were pre-emptively raided before WTO protests in Seattle, IMF protests in D.C., and the RNC in Philadelphia? No. The system had done an excellent job of convincing the masses that these people were a threat to The Very American Way Of Life.
Brin's a smart guy. I like a lot of his fiction, and on many issues he's pretty right on. This, however, is not one of them. He argues from either ignorance of, or deliberate refusal to acknowledge, the attitudes of the majority toward political dissent.
I mean, is this literally a flowchart menu with various diagnostic paths or does it actually try and understand a sentance?
Somewhere in between, but more the former than the latter.
TuxVox uses Nuance to perform the speech reco; I'm currently integrating Nuance into a new product for the division of IBM that originally developed Sprint's "Voice Command" voice dialing system.
In this sort of speaker-independent voice reco system, you provide a grammar of the utterances you expect the caller to say at each step of the way. For example (in JSGF format, which isn't what Nuance uses but is more BNF-like):
It's fancier than a menu, but it's far from free-form speech. For example, the above would understand "please destroy Redmond", but not "let's nuke New Jersey". Still, with clever grammars, you can do pretty well.
Has anyone seen this advertising? It's certainly not in the form of banners...
If you search on certain words or phrases, they'll be things labeled "sponsored links". For example, if you search on "advertising", four sponsored links related to the topic show up. Search on "foo bar baz", though, and none show up.
(1) Stallman is lying
(2) Stallman is out-of-touch with what-is-gnome
How about (3) "Karma Sucks" is unable to parse the English language?
Gnome is part of the GNU project... True.
...and is free software... True.
...(some times referred to as open source software.)
True. Gnome is sometimes refered to as open source software - the Register did just that. RMS pointed out that while this is accurate in that it may meet the Open Soruce people's guidelines, GNOME has no connection with them.
Why can you charge what you wish for a car, a stereo, or a pair of shoes, but for an appartment?
First, shelter is a basic necessity, while cars (and even shoes) are not.
Second, my ownership of a stereo or pair of shoes that I sell you doesn't (directly) depend on a government deed; my ownership of a plot of land that I rent you, does. It's only sensible that the government regulate the exercise of property rights that it creates.
If you want a truely laissez-faire system, first tear up all the land deeds...
The Mass-Market License. The license is the agreement that gives you the right to use the software (or other information)...
The fallacy being that I need a licence in order to possess such a right. Nonsense.
Unless I sign a contract prior to obtaining information (a NDA or somesuch), once I get my grubbly little brain on a string of bits there is no legal authority to prevent me from using it, except in some specific cases of making and distributing copies of that information.
It only works with firewalling that's inside the kernel - packet filtering and NAT. But what
if kernel modules were added to handle some of the features now run in user space?
Indeed, what if kernel modules were added to handle non-firewalling tasks instead? Could a kernel module provide a useful network service?
You start the machine up, it loads the kernel and "halts" but still provides the service. Something goes wrong? Just power cycle; there's no disk access, no way for an attack or malfunction to make a persistant alteration in the machine.
the general population is too stupid to take care of itself, so the government
will come to the rescue. - Thats not liberal. Thats being Socialist.
No, that's not being socialist. Socialism just says that the workers (as opposed to absentee owners) should control the means of production. There are libertarian forms of socialism as well as the statist forms. Google search on "libertarian socialism" (and ignore the Nazi trolls) for more info.
We're talking - or at least we were talking - about energy payoff (the myth that solar panels take more energy to create than they ever return), not cash payoff. There is no energy cost to purchase. Maybe a small one to transport and install. But that doesn't change the fact that more energy is produced then required for creation and setup.
If you want to talk cash payoff, it's cost of purchase and installtion. But in comparing on-the-grid to a complete PV system, 1) you have to include the cost of connecting to the grid - it can be very expensive to run copper to a house, and 2) you should include the externalized costs of both options - the pollution, the consumption of irreplacable resources, the social costs of centralized energy production versus distributed sytems, etcetera.
Taking 1) into account, my understanding is that photovoltaic will definitely pay off in cold hard cash if you're more than a certain distance from the grid - I think it's on the order of hundreds of meters. Also, for some large buildings (which can take advantage of economies of scale) with rooftop PV systems that are connected to the grid, there is a payoff in savings plus "running the meter backwards".
Could you please send a note to Home Power magazine, then? I'm sure they'd like to update their statistics.
If they can't be bothered to do their own research - like, say, five minutes with Google to find this, or this, or this - why should I do it for them?
But then, the last link I give above says "...a recent, very detailed study about solar panel energy payback time in the January 2001 issue of Home Power magazine...finds payback time for a standard module to be about 3.3 years, and 1.8 years on a thin-film panel." So maybe they are doing their research and you're reading back issues from the 1970s?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who runs any sort of desktop on a firewall or server box is living in a state of sin...
It also clearly defines a due process for determining that status. Which is not being followed.
Nonsense. Not only is it questionable who's eing better or worse treated, but the accused Al-Queada (and I emphasized "accused") prisoners are being held by the American government in the name of the American people; even in these undemocratic times, we Americans might hope to have some small influence on the process. We have several orders of magnitude less influence over how political prisoners are treated in Cuba.If I trust the recipient, all I need do is write "Please to not save a plain-text version of this document." Which, essentially, is all that this option can do - ask. Not prevent.
And we all know how overwhelmingly successful those have been at preventing copying...
The old bromide that "information wants to be free" is not just a statement about copyright. It's a statement about privacy as well - whether you want it to spread or not, once you set information in a digital form and send it to someone else, controlling it becomes well-nigh impossible.
The average age of the people in this study was late 50s.
I believe it's pretty well established that the need for sleep decreases with age.
So, don't start setting your alarm earlier just yet.
These reflectors are neither litter, nor discarded. They were set there quite deliberately, for the exact purpose for which they are being used - precise measurements of distance via laser pulses.
Nonsense. jsldub pointed out corporate behavior that he/she takes into account when deciding whether or not to shop there, and suggested that we might find such behavior offensive and make the same choice.
State socialism - a "workers state" controls the capital - is one theory of socialism. There are others.
Educate yourself.
I do wish people would get a basic grasp of socialism before they talk about it.
Welfare, taxation, and public works all predate both socialism and capitalism by millennia. You could find them all in ancient Rome.
Socialism is an economic system in which resources (capital) are controled by those who use them to do the work, as opposed to a government-appointed minority of owners, aka "capitalists". It comes in both statist and libertarian flavors.
It has nothing to do with welfare (socialists would argue that it's a band-aid solution for a problem in need of complete revolution), taxation (which has been a feature of every government in history), or public works (likewise).
"Argues well?" No. Forcefully, and perhaps eloquently, but very badly.
His central thesis is that government "sight" will not be abused if there is citizen "oversight". He completely ignores the fact that, again and again, the majority of citizens have proven quite willing to allow the state to run roughshod over the rights of the minority.
Brin writes from the position of a supporter of the general political and social status quo - his outlook is basically that our society is the best that's ever been. In this article, he claims we're both the safest and the freest, making no mention at all of such facts as our absurdly high incarceration rate. I've read other essays where he's quite exhuberant about his praise for modern western culture.
Now that's all well and good. While his praise of the system is sometime more emotional than rational, he does have some good points. But he seems keenly unaware of the nature (maybe even the existance) of dissent, and of the sociopolitical reaction against it.
Would citizen oversight have protected leaders like Martin Luther King and Huey Newton against the FBI's COINTELPRO? Would it have protected anti-globalization protestors who were pre-emptively raided before WTO protests in Seattle, IMF protests in D.C., and the RNC in Philadelphia? No. The system had done an excellent job of convincing the masses that these people were a threat to The Very American Way Of Life.
Brin's a smart guy. I like a lot of his fiction, and on many issues he's pretty right on. This, however, is not one of them. He argues from either ignorance of, or deliberate refusal to acknowledge, the attitudes of the majority toward political dissent.
Very easily. I choose what to reveal and what not to reveal. That is privacy - the choice about what to disclose.
This is so clear I have to wonder if you are trolling.
Somewhere in between, but more the former than the latter.
TuxVox uses Nuance to perform the speech reco; I'm currently integrating Nuance into a new product for the division of IBM that originally developed Sprint's "Voice Command" voice dialing system.
In this sort of speaker-independent voice reco system, you provide a grammar of the utterances you expect the caller to say at each step of the way. For example (in JSGF format, which isn't what Nuance uses but is more BNF-like):
It's fancier than a menu, but it's far from free-form speech. For example, the above would understand "please destroy Redmond", but not "let's nuke New Jersey". Still, with clever grammars, you can do pretty well.
An IDE is not a feature of a language.
Define "advanced". Having done lots of C, and C++ pre-exception-handling, I think try-throw-catch is pretty neat...
I think most people have given up on operator overloading - and for good reason. Once you've seen it abused, you'll never want to go near it again.
If you search on certain words or phrases, they'll be things labeled "sponsored links". For example, if you search on "advertising", four sponsored links related to the topic show up. Search on "foo bar baz", though, and none show up.
How about (3) "Karma Sucks" is unable to parse the English language?
Gnome is part of the GNU project... True.
RMS has never been confrontational. But he has always stood his ground.
Unfortunately many "nutbags" seem unable to understand the difference.
First, shelter is a basic necessity, while cars (and even shoes) are not.
Second, my ownership of a stereo or pair of shoes that I sell you doesn't (directly) depend on a government deed; my ownership of a plot of land that I rent you, does. It's only sensible that the government regulate the exercise of property rights that it creates.
If you want a truely laissez-faire system, first tear up all the land deeds...
What do they profit? Lots and lots of money.
The word is slumlord. Try a Google search and look at some of the stories it turns up.
The fallacy being that I need a licence in order to possess such a right. Nonsense.
Unless I sign a contract prior to obtaining information (a NDA or somesuch), once I get my grubbly little brain on a string of bits there is no legal authority to prevent me from using it, except in some specific cases of making and distributing copies of that information.
EULAs and their ilk are null and void by nature.
This is a very interesting idea.
It only works with firewalling that's inside the kernel - packet filtering and NAT. But what if kernel modules were added to handle some of the features now run in user space?
Indeed, what if kernel modules were added to handle non-firewalling tasks instead? Could a kernel module provide a useful network service? You start the machine up, it loads the kernel and "halts" but still provides the service. Something goes wrong? Just power cycle; there's no disk access, no way for an attack or malfunction to make a persistant alteration in the machine.
Only in state socialism. Other arrangements are possible.
See some of these sites for more information:
http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/libsoc.html
http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/polemica.ht ml
http://www.impropaganda.net/old/zenarchy.html
No, that's not being socialist. Socialism just says that the workers (as opposed to absentee owners) should control the means of production. There are libertarian forms of socialism as well as the statist forms. Google search on "libertarian socialism" (and ignore the Nazi trolls) for more info.
We're talking - or at least we were talking - about energy payoff (the myth that solar panels take more energy to create than they ever return), not cash payoff. There is no energy cost to purchase. Maybe a small one to transport and install. But that doesn't change the fact that more energy is produced then required for creation and setup.
If you want to talk cash payoff, it's cost of purchase and installtion. But in comparing on-the-grid to a complete PV system, 1) you have to include the cost of connecting to the grid - it can be very expensive to run copper to a house, and 2) you should include the externalized costs of both options - the pollution, the consumption of irreplacable resources, the social costs of centralized energy production versus distributed sytems, etcetera.
Taking 1) into account, my understanding is that photovoltaic will definitely pay off in cold hard cash if you're more than a certain distance from the grid - I think it's on the order of hundreds of meters. Also, for some large buildings (which can take advantage of economies of scale) with rooftop PV systems that are connected to the grid, there is a payoff in savings plus "running the meter backwards".
If they can't be bothered to do their own research - like, say, five minutes with Google to find this, or this, or this - why should I do it for them?
But then, the last link I give above says "...a recent, very detailed study about solar panel energy payback time in the January 2001 issue of Home Power magazine...finds payback time for a standard module to be about 3.3 years, and 1.8 years on a thin-film panel." So maybe they are doing their research and you're reading back issues from the 1970s?