To a point. Beyond a certain point, however, an organization of people can amass the ability to speak at sufficient volume (both in loudness and in quantity) to effectively drown out dissenting voices. Thus, in order to guarantee free speech for the individual, to some degree, the speech of large groups must be kept in check.
Similarly, commercial speech (e.g. advertising) has limits that require a degree of truthfulness.
Clearly you weren't paying a lot of attention to the ads associated with the presidential campaign that just concluded in the US.
The Supreme Court was pretty clear in Citizens United opinion (Google it) that an organization's right to free speech/expression cannot be limited by government in the form of limits placed on donor contributions, or how those contributions are used. This case essentially gives any non-corporeal legal entity the protected right to say whatever the hell it wants.
the gov'ment has the correct licensing for the tunes they are using? Last time I checked, ASCAP/BMI gets kind of pissed off when you use a CD you bought at Wally-world in your coffee shop. Something about it only being licensed for private home use. Me thinks Gitmo is neither private, nor home, for anyone there. Ergo, the artists should sue under the notion that the the Gov't is using their IP illegally. Of course, they run the risk of ending up in a cell right next to Osama's assistants, but it might be worth a shot. Might be interesting to see if the RIAA is willing to bite the other hand that feeds.
But don't be surprised if the a lawyer/law school faculty at your university doesn't want to give you advise. Most student legal service offices at universities won't help students where one of the parties in the dispute is the university itself, because of the conflict of interest this presents.
Wrong. You don't have to vote for anyone on the ballot. You can vote a write-in! Your guy/gal/cartoon character may not win, but at least you voted instead of sitting on your ass and waving the waving the Constitution like a flag. Get out and try to change the system instead of just moaning about it!
Doesn't matter. Because being virtually killed in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are only as dead as you think you are.
But that only begs the question...who would go to Delaware for a vacation?
Mr. Tony that's who!
Of course, he got a speeding ticket on his way there and he was kvetching about the Eastern European ice cream parlor employees, but otherwise, he seems to like it.
Looking at PR stuff, I can't find anything about keeping your number if you are changing carriers. I thought they had to support this. Am I mistaken? I'm considering taking the iPlunge when my verizon contract ends, but if I can't keep my number, moving to AT&T/cingular/etc is kind of a non-starter. How can/could Apple/ATT handle this in iTunes, anyway?
...that similar laws at the Federal level ( CDA, for example ) are unconstitutional, because they make no exception for adult patrons of libraries. Like it or not, the states and the federal government have a lot of leeway where minors or concerned, but this law is DOA because they catch adults in the same net. The Supreme Court has already ruled this is a no-no.
My folks always told me that you should vote because if you don't you give up your right to complain. If you don't vote, and the guys in office do something you don't like, you shouldn't complain because you didn't do anything to keep them out. If you do vote, and they do something you don't like, you get to A) say you voted for the other guy or B) say this guy didn't do what he said he would, which was why you voted for him in the first place. Then you vote him out during the next election cycle. Or if you live in California, find an actor willing to run and don't wait for the next election cycle.
I live in Virginia, which was subject to one of the ugliest campaign cycles in memory. I almost didn't vote because I didn't think either one of the main Senate candidates deserved to be elected. But then I remembered how easy the electronic widgets make write-in voting...heh,heh.
Of course, without paper ballot audit trails, it doesn't matter, because the results of the election were determined before the voting machines left the factory...
"Webmasters should be able to cater to whomever they choose."
Retailers, be they virtual or brick and mortar, are places of public accommodation, and as such have to make themselves available to everyone. By this logic, Target could exclude <insert your minority of choice here>, which would be patently illegal.
And as far as this:
"Maybe webmasters should make their sites accessable to people that are unable to read as well....", webmasters can't help if you can't read, but they CAN help you to read if you have difficulty seeing the screen. That's a big difference.
Except that, as this studyhas shown, paper trails are no guarantee of accuracy either, unless a paper is receipt is generated for EVERY SINGLE VOTER, and kept as a backup. And even then, there has to be some sort of trigger for someone to think that the vote needs to be reviewed. If the vote isn't close, most states don't recount, and if there is no recount, any inaccuracies are likely never to be discovered because no one will have reason or desire to look. Certain there is no state election official in the US that wants to be the one that steps up to the mic at a press conference three months after the general election to say "Sorry folks, just kidding. The results the machines reported don't match the paper receipt tally. Ms. X won the election, rather than Mr. Y, who was sworn in last week." There are only a fewer worse ways to spell "Constitutional Crisis".
The judge should have instead called for an extension of the ADA, with explicit description of what sites it applies to and what it means to be accessible.
This is not the judge's job. The judge is suppose to interpret the laws as written by Congress. If the interpretation is then disliked by the people or the legislature, it is up to the legislature to spell it out more explicitly. The main issue as I see it is that Congress has not revisited the ADA in re: the current extent of internet commerce and community and what you end up with is a court making a ruling based on a law that doesn't differentiate between electronic and brick-and-mortar stores.
EDS can't say Linux is good because that would mean that they were agreeing with their main competitor, IBM, which has drunk the Linux kool-aid with both fists. Can't have that. They have to maintain some perceived difference.
If they say Linux is good, then people start asking why Windows has been their choice for the backend on 2 major contracts ( in the $Billions with B ) one which failed ( British Inland Revenue ), and one that is on the verge of failing ( Navy/Marines intranet).
than worrying about IE vs Firefox users. Have you noticed that while they say 4x as many IE users are clicking ads than Firefox users, they're still only talking about 0.5 PERCENT?!?! If they really means that 99.89% of all Firefox users are not clicking, vs 99.5% of IE users, then their problems are much bigger than who is using what browser. The bust showed that internet ads were not a viable revenue stream, but this crazy.
The studios should accept this for what it is: A marketing opportunity. All they need to do is start selling the airplane versions of films on DVD. If they start selling more than a few of these players, that ought to be a signal to the studios that there is a market out there for "clean" versions of their films.
Or better yet, maybe they will make better movies. I don't have any problem with films that have sex, violence, etc, if it makes sense to the story. But there is a whole raft of crap that is stuck in films because the "filmmakers" don't think we as an audience will stay focused on the film without someone on screen using "F***" in all of its grammatical forms every 10 seconds. Its unnecessary and shows a lack of creativity on the writers' part.
When Hollywood actually starts doing something artistic again, then maybe I'll give "artistic integrity" thought again. Since most of the stuff that comes out now is remakes of films done 30 years ago ( and mostly the earlier ones are better...I give you the Marky Mark Planet of the Apes as a prime example of just because you can doesn't mean you should. ), I hardly think that it requires much artistry to remake something that has already been done. A decent painter could reproduce the Mona Lisa with paint by numbers, but that doesn't require much artistry.
The IRS IT and devopment divisions will consist of career IT people who are not very good and have built themselves into ivory towers. The reason they use a multitude of data formats and code from the 60s is because that is what they knew when they entered - they got a cushy earner and don't see the point in continual learning or development.
This is a crock of shit on so many levels that it barely deserves comment. The vast majority of the folks who work for the Fed. Govt, and that includes the IRS, are decent folks who are very skilled at what they do, and muddle through in a broken system that is primarily imposed upon them by Congress. Of course they try to do new things the improve the system, but unless you get a chance to do it all over at the same time, its impossible to ever really fix everything. Just ask the FAA. It only took them 3 trys and about $20 Billion to redo the air traffic control system in the US.
The reason it costs 45 cents to collect a dollar of revenue is the byzantine tax code that has been generated over the 80+ years we have had a federal income tax. We could fix that with a flat tax on ALL income over $25k a year, but that is a different thread all together.
My dad supervised most of the development work done at the IRS that supports the master file. The tax code is so complex that the only people who actually understand are the IT group at IRS, because they are the ones that actually have to implement it. Reading the article, and from first hand experience, the attempts had moderization have failed because Congress and the higher ups in Treasury and the IRS thought contractors could do it better than the in-house folks. Not a big surprise that the project fails when the folks who know the context of the system are not asked to participate in the development of the replacement.
If some group of folks came in and tried to tell me that they knew my job better than I did, but they understand the work did, or why we did it the way we did, I'd be pissed off too.
BTW, if you are wondering, every taxpayer in the US has about 3/4" of tape that contains their entire tax history. The master file lives in a huge vault at the IRS's data center in Martinsburg, WV, which has the biggest damn door I have ever seen. Not quite Cheyanne Mt big, but still pretty good sized.
It's the Total Perspective Vortex, a hedious device that reveals how insignificant you are by showing the entire infinity of the universe, and a little sign saying "You Are Here."
The main problem with Morningstar's article is that he completely dismisses all of the literary criticism, simply because the postmodernists got it wrong. Like most other disciplines, there are a wide variety of ways of studying a problem, postmodernism being just one of them. Just because the postmodernists have been discredited doesn't mean that all of literary analysis and criticism is equally bankrupt. The latest trend is to include a broad analysis of the literary, political, history and economic context of both the piece and the author. Some of it is very compelling and easily accessible.
The rumor here on campus is that Apple is going to let them trade the G5 towers for G5 XServes, 1:1. So if you are wondering where the first 1100 XServes are going, look no further than Blacksburg.
There is some question as to whether they are going install more nodes than the 1100 they have. Given that there are 96 52-U racks currently housing the 1100 towers, they will have plenty of space for more XServes. We did get an email saying the info systems building will be without power over the coming weekend as new power lines are installed...Coincidence? I think not.
It does beg the question of how this will impact those cases where the info in the NCIC is/has been used to justify a search warrant or the like. IANAL, nor do I play one on TV, but it seems to me that if erroneous data from NCIC is used to support a warrant of some kind, then the warrant itself is illegal, since it must be based on truthful information. I wouldn't think the "good-faith" exception would apply now that the FBI has essentially said the data they have is a steaming pile of crap. Which means that there may be a ton of people in prison (both guilty and innocent ) who may now have grounds for appeal...
One of the reasons Apple rewrote the display engine from its roots as DisplayPostscript to it's current incarnation in OS X, where it is based on the PDF standard, was to avoid any of the licensing for DisplayPostscript. So they went with an open standard that was royalty-free and open.
I used to work for EDS. Back in the day ( c.1997 ) it only had 105,000 employees in 45 countries, and was only doing $20 Billion ( with a 'B' as in beer ) worth of business a year. This is a company that spent $25,000 each for fake palm trees in the atrium of it's HQ in Plano, TX.
This sort of contract has the been the bread and butter for the gov't services groups of all the large consulting houses for some time. Their sale force uses their contacts throughout the Pentagon to suggest these programs to the appropriate Admiral/General, who then says "That sound's good! Do it." with out talking to the people in the trenches who actually have to deal with the results.
My best friend works for the Navy as a SysAdmin, and he has nothing good to say about this program. It is working out to cost the Navy MORE than it otherwise would at his facility, because they have lots of specialized apps for their work, and EDS is only under contract to support a certain list of apps, and guess what, the special apps are not on the list. ( AutoCAD is one of the apps not on the list, which is odd, considering all to the engineering design the Navy does.). So the Navy has to pay EXTRA to keep those apps available.
Bottom line, this proposal to the OMB would not have the huge impact is seems it might, because the DoD is only marginally subject to OMB procurement procedures. Each of the service branches, as well as the office of the secretary have their own procurement procedures. So, until they optimize the procurement so that the OMB really is over all the Cabinet departments, this will only get part of the way there.
Also, Sony is in a catch-22 on this...If they don't release the info, they are opening themselves up to accusations of a cover-up, --insert conspiracy theories here--, etc. And if they do give up the info, they could be perceived as admitting guilt, as Lendrick points out. Also, they run the risk of alienating their users by a perceived violation of their privacy statement.
Either way, Sony looks bad in the general media, which means they will get their checkbook out to make this go away, and thus remove the possibility of a judge finally putting this liability question to bed.
I feel bad for this lady, but she needs to come to terms with the fact that her son was broken.
Simply put, my instructor can't give up my property rights.
For college students, I agree completely, but what about high school students? I didn't think that minors could enforce property rights because they have no legal standing to enter into contracts. Some industrious lawyer might make the argument that by the student attending school, the students' guardian has de facto granted the school the right to do with their child's work product anything they want.
Of course, this means that some other industrious lawyer is going to sue a school system for not abiding by an EULA for the student's work....
Essentially, a biology teacher in Kansas used the free trial of this site to check the final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project, and thus gave them zero's, which meant they all failed her class. One of the parents of the cheaters raised cain with the school board, which instructed the teacher to reverse her grading decision. The teacher resigned rather than make the change.
What does this all mean? Fear not. Stupid school boards will alway defend the rights of cheaters!
Slashdot Mirror
To a point. Beyond a certain point, however, an organization of people can amass the ability to speak at sufficient volume (both in loudness and in quantity) to effectively drown out dissenting voices. Thus, in order to guarantee free speech for the individual, to some degree, the speech of large groups must be kept in check.
Similarly, commercial speech (e.g. advertising) has limits that require a degree of truthfulness.
Clearly you weren't paying a lot of attention to the ads associated with the presidential campaign that just concluded in the US. The Supreme Court was pretty clear in Citizens United opinion (Google it) that an organization's right to free speech/expression cannot be limited by government in the form of limits placed on donor contributions, or how those contributions are used. This case essentially gives any non-corporeal legal entity the protected right to say whatever the hell it wants.
the gov'ment has the correct licensing for the tunes they are using? Last time I checked, ASCAP/BMI gets kind of pissed off when you use a CD you bought at Wally-world in your coffee shop. Something about it only being licensed for private home use. Me thinks Gitmo is neither private, nor home, for anyone there. Ergo, the artists should sue under the notion that the the Gov't is using their IP illegally. Of course, they run the risk of ending up in a cell right next to Osama's assistants, but it might be worth a shot. Might be interesting to see if the RIAA is willing to bite the other hand that feeds.
But don't be surprised if the a lawyer/law school faculty at your university doesn't want to give you advise. Most student legal service offices at universities won't help students where one of the parties in the dispute is the university itself, because of the conflict of interest this presents.
Wrong. You don't have to vote for anyone on the ballot. You can vote a write-in! Your guy/gal/cartoon character may not win, but at least you voted instead of sitting on your ass and waving the waving the Constitution like a flag. Get out and try to change the system instead of just moaning about it!
--with apologies to D. Adams.
Mr. Tony that's who!
Of course, he got a speeding ticket on his way there and he was kvetching about the Eastern European ice cream parlor employees, but otherwise, he seems to like it.
Looking at PR stuff, I can't find anything about keeping your number if you are changing carriers. I thought they had to support this. Am I mistaken? I'm considering taking the iPlunge when my verizon contract ends, but if I can't keep my number, moving to AT&T/cingular/etc is kind of a non-starter. How can/could Apple/ATT handle this in iTunes, anyway?
...that similar laws at the Federal level ( CDA, for example ) are unconstitutional, because they make no exception for adult patrons of libraries. Like it or not, the states and the federal government have a lot of leeway where minors or concerned, but this law is DOA because they catch adults in the same net. The Supreme Court has already ruled this is a no-no.
I live in Virginia, which was subject to one of the ugliest campaign cycles in memory. I almost didn't vote because I didn't think either one of the main Senate candidates deserved to be elected. But then I remembered how easy the electronic widgets make write-in voting...heh,heh.
Of course, without paper ballot audit trails, it doesn't matter, because the results of the election were determined before the voting machines left the factory...
Retailers, be they virtual or brick and mortar, are places of public accommodation, and as such have to make themselves available to everyone. By this logic, Target could exclude <insert your minority of choice here>, which would be patently illegal.
And as far as this: "Maybe webmasters should make their sites accessable to people that are unable to read as well....", webmasters can't help if you can't read, but they CAN help you to read if you have difficulty seeing the screen. That's a big difference.
Except that, as this study has shown, paper trails are no guarantee of accuracy either, unless a paper is receipt is generated for EVERY SINGLE VOTER, and kept as a backup. And even then, there has to be some sort of trigger for someone to think that the vote needs to be reviewed. If the vote isn't close, most states don't recount, and if there is no recount, any inaccuracies are likely never to be discovered because no one will have reason or desire to look. Certain there is no state election official in the US that wants to be the one that steps up to the mic at a press conference three months after the general election to say "Sorry folks, just kidding. The results the machines reported don't match the paper receipt tally. Ms. X won the election, rather than Mr. Y, who was sworn in last week." There are only a fewer worse ways to spell "Constitutional Crisis".
This is not the judge's job. The judge is suppose to interpret the laws as written by Congress. If the interpretation is then disliked by the people or the legislature, it is up to the legislature to spell it out more explicitly. The main issue as I see it is that Congress has not revisited the ADA in re: the current extent of internet commerce and community and what you end up with is a court making a ruling based on a law that doesn't differentiate between electronic and brick-and-mortar stores.
If they say Linux is good, then people start asking why Windows has been their choice for the backend on 2 major contracts ( in the $Billions with B ) one which failed ( British Inland Revenue ), and one that is on the verge of failing ( Navy/Marines intranet).
than worrying about IE vs Firefox users. Have you noticed that while they say 4x as many IE users are clicking ads than Firefox users, they're still only talking about 0.5 PERCENT?!?! If they really means that 99.89% of all Firefox users are not clicking, vs 99.5% of IE users, then their problems are much bigger than who is using what browser. The bust showed that internet ads were not a viable revenue stream, but this crazy.
Or better yet, maybe they will make better movies. I don't have any problem with films that have sex, violence, etc, if it makes sense to the story. But there is a whole raft of crap that is stuck in films because the "filmmakers" don't think we as an audience will stay focused on the film without someone on screen using "F***" in all of its grammatical forms every 10 seconds. Its unnecessary and shows a lack of creativity on the writers' part.
When Hollywood actually starts doing something artistic again, then maybe I'll give "artistic integrity" thought again. Since most of the stuff that comes out now is remakes of films done 30 years ago ( and mostly the earlier ones are better...I give you the Marky Mark Planet of the Apes as a prime example of just because you can doesn't mean you should. ), I hardly think that it requires much artistry to remake something that has already been done. A decent painter could reproduce the Mona Lisa with paint by numbers, but that doesn't require much artistry.
This is a crock of shit on so many levels that it barely deserves comment. The vast majority of the folks who work for the Fed. Govt, and that includes the IRS, are decent folks who are very skilled at what they do, and muddle through in a broken system that is primarily imposed upon them by Congress. Of course they try to do new things the improve the system, but unless you get a chance to do it all over at the same time, its impossible to ever really fix everything. Just ask the FAA. It only took them 3 trys and about $20 Billion to redo the air traffic control system in the US.
The reason it costs 45 cents to collect a dollar of revenue is the byzantine tax code that has been generated over the 80+ years we have had a federal income tax. We could fix that with a flat tax on ALL income over $25k a year, but that is a different thread all together.
My dad supervised most of the development work done at the IRS that supports the master file. The tax code is so complex that the only people who actually understand are the IT group at IRS, because they are the ones that actually have to implement it. Reading the article, and from first hand experience, the attempts had moderization have failed because Congress and the higher ups in Treasury and the IRS thought contractors could do it better than the in-house folks. Not a big surprise that the project fails when the folks who know the context of the system are not asked to participate in the development of the replacement.
If some group of folks came in and tried to tell me that they knew my job better than I did, but they understand the work did, or why we did it the way we did, I'd be pissed off too.
BTW, if you are wondering, every taxpayer in the US has about 3/4" of tape that contains their entire tax history. The master file lives in a huge vault at the IRS's data center in Martinsburg, WV, which has the biggest damn door I have ever seen. Not quite Cheyanne Mt big, but still pretty good sized.
It's the Total Perspective Vortex, a hedious device that reveals how insignificant you are by showing the entire infinity of the universe, and a little sign saying "You Are Here."
The main problem with Morningstar's article is that he completely dismisses all of the literary criticism, simply because the postmodernists got it wrong. Like most other disciplines, there are a wide variety of ways of studying a problem, postmodernism being just one of them. Just because the postmodernists have been discredited doesn't mean that all of literary analysis and criticism is equally bankrupt. The latest trend is to include a broad analysis of the literary, political, history and economic context of both the piece and the author. Some of it is very compelling and easily accessible.
There is some question as to whether they are going install more nodes than the 1100 they have. Given that there are 96 52-U racks currently housing the 1100 towers, they will have plenty of space for more XServes. We did get an email saying the info systems building will be without power over the coming weekend as new power lines are installed...Coincidence? I think not.
It does beg the question of how this will impact those cases where the info in the NCIC is/has been used to justify a search warrant or the like. IANAL, nor do I play one on TV, but it seems to me that if erroneous data from NCIC is used to support a warrant of some kind, then the warrant itself is illegal, since it must be based on truthful information. I wouldn't think the "good-faith" exception would apply now that the FBI has essentially said the data they have is a steaming pile of crap. Which means that there may be a ton of people in prison (both guilty and innocent ) who may now have grounds for appeal...
One of the reasons Apple rewrote the display engine from its roots as DisplayPostscript to it's current incarnation in OS X, where it is based on the PDF standard, was to avoid any of the licensing for DisplayPostscript. So they went with an open standard that was royalty-free and open.
This sort of contract has the been the bread and butter for the gov't services groups of all the large consulting houses for some time. Their sale force uses their contacts throughout the Pentagon to suggest these programs to the appropriate Admiral/General, who then says "That sound's good! Do it." with out talking to the people in the trenches who actually have to deal with the results.
My best friend works for the Navy as a SysAdmin, and he has nothing good to say about this program. It is working out to cost the Navy MORE than it otherwise would at his facility, because they have lots of specialized apps for their work, and EDS is only under contract to support a certain list of apps, and guess what, the special apps are not on the list. ( AutoCAD is one of the apps not on the list, which is odd, considering all to the engineering design the Navy does.). So the Navy has to pay EXTRA to keep those apps available.
Bottom line, this proposal to the OMB would not have the huge impact is seems it might, because the DoD is only marginally subject to OMB procurement procedures. Each of the service branches, as well as the office of the secretary have their own procurement procedures. So, until they optimize the procurement so that the OMB really is over all the Cabinet departments, this will only get part of the way there.
Either way, Sony looks bad in the general media, which means they will get their checkbook out to make this go away, and thus remove the possibility of a judge finally putting this liability question to bed.
I feel bad for this lady, but she needs to come to terms with the fact that her son was broken.
For college students, I agree completely, but what about high school students? I didn't think that minors could enforce property rights because they have no legal standing to enter into contracts. Some industrious lawyer might make the argument that by the student attending school, the students' guardian has de facto granted the school the right to do with their child's work product anything they want.
Of course, this means that some other industrious lawyer is going to sue a school system for not abiding by an EULA for the student's work....
Either way, the lawyers win. Bastards.
Also this morning's Morning Edition
Essentially, a biology teacher in Kansas used the free trial of this site to check the final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project, and thus gave them zero's, which meant they all failed her class. One of the parents of the cheaters raised cain with the school board, which instructed the teacher to reverse her grading decision. The teacher resigned rather than make the change.
What does this all mean? Fear not. Stupid school boards will alway defend the rights of cheaters!