Personally, at my school, they have a policy that if you violate a policy outside of school grounds within sight of a school official, or a school official is latter reported of the policy you broke, you will be reprimanded as if you were on school premise.
Is the a public or private school. Very different cases those. If a public school, could you provide some documentation? I find this somewhat hard to believe.
Parents don't choose where to send their kids to school 98% of the time; public schools have a monopoly. The "we're protecting our school's reputation in order to save funding" argument is so transparently ridiculous that even the school admins didn't attempt it.
This raises a very important point. I read TFA and nowhere did the article mention whether the school in question is a public or private school. If it is indeed a private school, there is no issue. Private schools have the right to admit or deny anyone so long as no federal anti-discrimination laws are violated. Many private schools have morals clauses by which they prohibit certain activities outside of school on the penalty of expulsion. The reputation argument is a perfectly valid one in the context of a private school.
If we were to extend that line of reasoning to public schools, then public schools could conceivably discipline their students for writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the quality of the food in the school cafeteria, for instance. Clearly this would be a violation of the student's First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
At issue here is the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. Can you be punished at school for attending a non-school party where some possibly illegal activity is taking place? Again the article is light on details. The article mentions that some students were athletes participating in extra-curricular activities for which they had to sign a no drinking pledge. The article doesn't say whether the disciplined students were limited to those athletes. What standard of evidence, if any, did school officials use to determine which students were engaging in illegal activity? Were students punished for having a bottle in their hand or just being at the party? Where did the party take place? Again, the article omits too many important details to make a real judgment here.
Anyone who has done any work with barcodes knows they are encoding schemes, not encrypting schemes. A barcode is simply a way of representing data (may be alphanumeric or binary), in a way that is easily read by scanning equipment. The commonly used algorithms are well publicized and it is easy to obtain software to read or write them. If security is important, encryption must be applied before the data is encoded in a barcode. I've scanned many barcodes on many things, and if money is involved, such as tickets or postage, I've generally found that they decode to seemingly random binary data, which means that most likely, encryption was applied first.
True, but wouldn't it be simpler if there were one family rather than three? The muon was the first particle discovered that wasn't in the first (lightest) family. Stable matter seems to be made up of quarks and gluons coming from the first family (up and down quarks, and electrons). That being said, the existence of the other families does affect the rates of certain processes involving particles of the first family, and I do recall reading an article once that star formation couldn't occur without these extra families, but unfortunately, I can't recall where I read the article. So it might be that the anthropic principle does require three families after all.
If you had spent a couple of years using a C64 with a tape drive first, you would have loved the disk drives, believe me.
Yes, but the 1541 disk drive was agonizingly slow for those who had previously been used to the Commodore PET with a 2031 disk drive. I loved my old C64, but there were two things about it that frustrated the hell out of an old PET user like me. One was the painfully slow floppy disk drive (at least 4x slower than the 2031) and the other was the C64 reverted to an older version of BASIC than the PET 4032, which did not include disk commands. So, whereas on a PET you could simply type DIRECTORY to display a listing of the contents of a floppy disk, on the newer C64, you had to type LOAD "$",8 followed by LIST, which had the unfortunate side effect of clobbering any program in memory!
Of course, the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics compared to the PET, so I used the C64 virtually all the time, but as I sat waiting for games to load from my 1541, I looked frustratedly at my old 2031 drive gathering dust in a corner.
Here's a rule that would lead to some restraint: no police officer should be allowed to carry a taser until they've experienced being at the wrong end of one.
By this logic, police should not be allowed to carry a gun unless they've been shot.
As a Canadian, I'd be curious to know of the wireless access to the amazon store would work in Canada. Has anyone tried to use one in Canada yet? I'm thinking a Kindle might make a good Christmas gift to myself or others, but I don't want to get it home, turn it on, and find no service available. Anyone with experience or information care to comment?
Apologies for this US-centric post, but I don't remember "reporter" being on the last ballot I cast.
Essentially you "cast your ballot" when choosing which newspapers to subscribe to or which television news programs you watch, etc. It's a market driven approach. But I do agree with much of the rest of your post.
The free trade rules enforced by the WTO are between governments basically agreeing not to apply tariffs to imported goods. They do not apply to corporations which sell the products. They are free to sell to whomever they please at whatever prices the markets will bear. There is no requirement that the price be the same for everyone.
Kinda. It's more like a gamma-ray (and neutrino) light source. The electron-positron annihilation releases a tad over a MeV mainly as two photons that fly off in opposite directions - plus a neutrino, so the photons are somewhat under half the energy each.
I was unaware that an e+e- interaction could produce a single neutrino along with two gammas. Can you explain how that doesn't violate lepton number conservation? Also, I was under the impression that e+e- is an electromagnetic, not a weak interaction. How is it that neutrinos are involved?
About the VOIP tax: is it applied where the call originates or where it is terminated. I'm thinking particularly about the SkypeOut service which I use regularly. I pay an annual fee, and I get unlimited calls within the continental U.S. and Canada. Here's the catch: I live in Canada, so would a new VOIP tax apply to me? Is it added to the annual fee, or would Skype have to start charging a tax on each call? If calls aren't charged based on the destination, how exactly are they charged? Is it based on whatever state you happen to be in when you sign up for the annual plan? Is there even a way for them to know what state that happens to be? Is it based on the billing address of your credit card? (I have a card whose bills are sent to a PO box in another state.) How will this work?
From the various things I read, her attorney questioned her for about three minutes. Add to this all the soon to be repeated evidence against her, plus the fact she put on no expert witnesses at all, and I have to wonder, why the heck did she go to trial with this dog of a case? Reportedly, she spent $60k on attorney fees.
I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, and it isn't very likely, but it is possible: perhaps this was all set up by the RIAA, so they could win a case at trial to encourage others to settle. It's not unheard of for a party who wants a precedent set a certain way to arrange for someone to act as defendant and put up a really weak defense. Behind the scenes, they could supply her with the money to pay the judgment, and perhaps some other kind of bonus. Like I said, it may not be the most probable explanation, but it would explain the really weak defense. Of course, if the lawyer is in on it, it is probably grounds for disbarment if it is ever discovered.
Typically you download it and burn a DVD (a regular non-HD one) with a standard filesystem and a magic filename (like FIRMWARE.DAT or whatever) in the root directory, then stick the DVD in the drive. If you don't have a burner, you have them mail the disc to you.
That's a horribly dangerous feature as it leaves you wide open to viruses which could render your player inoperable. I know many devices that upgrade this way, and the vast majority do not ask for user confirmation before upgrading the firmware. It would seem to me it would be very simple to design the player so that the player would read a firmware upgrade disk only if, for example, a certain combination of keys were held down as the disk was inserted. Most do not, however. I don't know why.
Tell you what you need to do: go to Somalia. Now, set up competition in the gun running business. Or drug running. Or hell, making eye openers for the Wal Mart crowd Let's see how long you last.
While we're doing that, you might want to look up the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist".
It would be different if this was just a hosting provider who provided service in good faith that someone took advantage of, this is someone running something INTENTIONALLY untrackable.
Built into that statement is the implicit assumption that law enforcement has an inherent right to track any Internet traffic back to its source, and that any intermediate service providers have the obligation to build their systems in such a way that this tracking is possible. Essentially you are saying that no one has the right to anonymous speech.
Like any technology, however, the anonymizing power of Tor can be used for both good or evil. It can be used by whistle-blowers to expose government corruption, and it can be used by pedophiles to distribute kiddy porn. It can be used by Chinese dissidents to criticize their government, and it can be used by terrorists to disseminate instructions on manufacture of explosive devices. So the question is, do we punish those who provide the technology because it can be used for evil? Evidently the German government has decided the answer is "yes". It's hard to argue for one side or the other because I think it comes down to personal values. I value free speech including anonymous speech, but I grew up in the American culture. Thomas Paine distributed his widely influential document Common Sense anonymously and it is possible the American Revolution would have ended differently had he not done so. One does wonder if highly oppressive regimes like the Nazis would have been able to hold power so long if the citizens had easy access to anonymous speech.
I think the value of services like Tor outweigh the disadvantages, so I do hope the German policy is not emulated by other countries.
Encryption, my friends. Govt can't censor what they can't read.
Why not? They can simply censor everything they can't read, i.e. block all encrypted traffic except SSL connections to known businesses like banks, etc.
All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic
Why are you assuming they block BitTorrent traffic because they believe the content is illegal? Isn't is possible they block BitTorrent because of the typically high bandwidth BitTorrent users consume?
They didn't 'leave their back door open' to a thief... they effectively put a table on the front lawn piled high with music with a big sign saying 'come on in, copy all you want!'.... and they shall get what they deserve.
Isn't that what public libraries do? They have bookshelves stacked with (mostly) copyrighted books, they generally have one or more public-use Xerox machines right next to said bookshelves, and they open their doors to the public.
I know with cable television, in many jurisdictions, if you let your neighbors hook up to your cable, both you and the neighbor could be charged with a crime. Just because it's okay with you that random people use "your" bandwidth, doesn't mean it's okay with your ISP. My analogy probably isn't perfect, but just because someone opens up their wireless router and doesn't mind if people drive by and use their access point doesn't mean it's legal. I'm not sure what the law says about this. There are laws about stealing computer services, but whose are you stealing? The ISP or the owner of the access point? I think it would hinge on that question. It would probably depend on whether you pay by the gigabyte, or have an unlimited rate. If you are eating at an all you can eat restaurant, you aren't allowed to share your food with a non-paying friend. Generally, however, you can share if you pay for a fixed size meal.
Since slashdotters have typically IQ in the range of 160 to 220, the will remain virgins till age 72 or so by my extrapolation.
So you're saying that based on the average Slashdot post, you would assign an IQ of 160 to 220 to the general Slashdot population. I assume you're joking. (People with Mod points, however, are actually extremely intelligent and discerning.)
I could be way off on this, but...I always understood time symmetry to mean that laws of physics obedient to time symmetry are invariant relative to the direction of the arrow of time.
You're talking about two different symmetries: time translation symmetry, and time reversal invariance. Not all physical laws obey time reversal invariance (CP violation in weak interactions imply violation of time reversal invariance if we assume CPT invariance, for instance), but time translation symmetry (the laws of physics don't change over time), is generally accepted, and leads, via Noether's theorem, to conservation of energy.
Unfortunately most of Canada's best doctors move to the USA so they can get rich instead.:(
And this is the side of the equation that is overlooked by most who compare the U.S. and Canadian systems. Part of the way the government keeps the cost of health care affordable is to put an annual salary cap on physicians. Many of the best and brightest do head south of the border. Try getting a family doctor in Canada. It's like going to a job interview; they select only those patients they want and the typically have to meet very stringent criteria. 12 hour wait times are typical in hospital emergency rooms for all but the most critical patients. And when people need serious surgery in a timely fashion, they are typically sent to the States. As a Canadian, who's lived in both Canada and the United States, I'll take the American system any day.
No, I don't wish any harm to the scientists or their reputations. However, I think it would be fun if Gravity didn't fit so nicely in the Standard Model like everyone is hoping it will.
Your point is well taken in that in some ways it would be more interesting if the Higgs were not found, but in fact the Higgs does nothing to bring gravity into the Standard Model. Instead it would explain the symmetry breaking in the Electroweak interaction. (I.e. why the W and Z are massive while the photon in massless.) Without a Higgs, a new mechanism would be necessary to explain this.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, at my school, they have a policy that if you violate a policy outside of school grounds within sight of a school official, or a school official is latter reported of the policy you broke, you will be reprimanded as if you were on school premise.
Is the a public or private school. Very different cases those. If a public school, could you provide some documentation? I find this somewhat hard to believe.
Parents don't choose where to send their kids to school 98% of the time; public schools have a monopoly. The "we're protecting our school's reputation in order to save funding" argument is so transparently ridiculous that even the school admins didn't attempt it.
This raises a very important point. I read TFA and nowhere did the article mention whether the school in question is a public or private school. If it is indeed a private school, there is no issue. Private schools have the right to admit or deny anyone so long as no federal anti-discrimination laws are violated. Many private schools have morals clauses by which they prohibit certain activities outside of school on the penalty of expulsion. The reputation argument is a perfectly valid one in the context of a private school.
If we were to extend that line of reasoning to public schools, then public schools could conceivably discipline their students for writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the quality of the food in the school cafeteria, for instance. Clearly this would be a violation of the student's First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
At issue here is the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. Can you be punished at school for attending a non-school party where some possibly illegal activity is taking place? Again the article is light on details. The article mentions that some students were athletes participating in extra-curricular activities for which they had to sign a no drinking pledge. The article doesn't say whether the disciplined students were limited to those athletes. What standard of evidence, if any, did school officials use to determine which students were engaging in illegal activity? Were students punished for having a bottle in their hand or just being at the party? Where did the party take place? Again, the article omits too many important details to make a real judgment here.
Anyone who has done any work with barcodes knows they are encoding schemes, not encrypting schemes. A barcode is simply a way of representing data (may be alphanumeric or binary), in a way that is easily read by scanning equipment. The commonly used algorithms are well publicized and it is easy to obtain software to read or write them. If security is important, encryption must be applied before the data is encoded in a barcode. I've scanned many barcodes on many things, and if money is involved, such as tickets or postage, I've generally found that they decode to seemingly random binary data, which means that most likely, encryption was applied first.
True, but wouldn't it be simpler if there were one family rather than three? The muon was the first particle discovered that wasn't in the first (lightest) family. Stable matter seems to be made up of quarks and gluons coming from the first family (up and down quarks, and electrons). That being said, the existence of the other families does affect the rates of certain processes involving particles of the first family, and I do recall reading an article once that star formation couldn't occur without these extra families, but unfortunately, I can't recall where I read the article. So it might be that the anthropic principle does require three families after all.
If you had spent a couple of years using a C64 with a tape drive first, you would have loved the disk drives, believe me.
Yes, but the 1541 disk drive was agonizingly slow for those who had previously been used to the Commodore PET with a 2031 disk drive. I loved my old C64, but there were two things about it that frustrated the hell out of an old PET user like me. One was the painfully slow floppy disk drive (at least 4x slower than the 2031) and the other was the C64 reverted to an older version of BASIC than the PET 4032, which did not include disk commands. So, whereas on a PET you could simply type DIRECTORY to display a listing of the contents of a floppy disk, on the newer C64, you had to type LOAD "$",8 followed by LIST, which had the unfortunate side effect of clobbering any program in memory!
Of course, the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics compared to the PET, so I used the C64 virtually all the time, but as I sat waiting for games to load from my 1541, I looked frustratedly at my old 2031 drive gathering dust in a corner.
Here's a rule that would lead to some restraint: no police officer should be allowed to carry a taser until they've experienced being at the wrong end of one.
By this logic, police should not be allowed to carry a gun unless they've been shot.
As a Canadian, I'd be curious to know of the wireless access to the amazon store would work in Canada. Has anyone tried to use one in Canada yet? I'm thinking a Kindle might make a good Christmas gift to myself or others, but I don't want to get it home, turn it on, and find no service available. Anyone with experience or information care to comment?
Apologies for this US-centric post, but I don't remember "reporter" being on the last ballot I cast.
Essentially you "cast your ballot" when choosing which newspapers to subscribe to or which television news programs you watch, etc. It's a market driven approach. But I do agree with much of the rest of your post.
The free trade rules enforced by the WTO are between governments basically agreeing not to apply tariffs to imported goods. They do not apply to corporations which sell the products. They are free to sell to whomever they please at whatever prices the markets will bear. There is no requirement that the price be the same for everyone.
Kinda. It's more like a gamma-ray (and neutrino) light source. The electron-positron annihilation releases a tad over a MeV mainly as two photons that fly off in opposite directions - plus a neutrino, so the photons are somewhat under half the energy each.
I was unaware that an e+e- interaction could produce a single neutrino along with two gammas. Can you explain how that doesn't violate lepton number conservation? Also, I was under the impression that e+e- is an electromagnetic, not a weak interaction. How is it that neutrinos are involved?
I very much doubt a retroactive tax would fly in court. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits that sort of thing.
Care to provide a reference?
About the VOIP tax: is it applied where the call originates or where it is terminated. I'm thinking particularly about the SkypeOut service which I use regularly. I pay an annual fee, and I get unlimited calls within the continental U.S. and Canada. Here's the catch: I live in Canada, so would a new VOIP tax apply to me? Is it added to the annual fee, or would Skype have to start charging a tax on each call? If calls aren't charged based on the destination, how exactly are they charged? Is it based on whatever state you happen to be in when you sign up for the annual plan? Is there even a way for them to know what state that happens to be? Is it based on the billing address of your credit card? (I have a card whose bills are sent to a PO box in another state.) How will this work?
From the various things I read, her attorney questioned her for about three minutes. Add to this all the soon to be repeated evidence against her, plus the fact she put on no expert witnesses at all, and I have to wonder, why the heck did she go to trial with this dog of a case? Reportedly, she spent $60k on attorney fees.
I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, and it isn't very likely, but it is possible: perhaps this was all set up by the RIAA, so they could win a case at trial to encourage others to settle. It's not unheard of for a party who wants a precedent set a certain way to arrange for someone to act as defendant and put up a really weak defense. Behind the scenes, they could supply her with the money to pay the judgment, and perhaps some other kind of bonus. Like I said, it may not be the most probable explanation, but it would explain the really weak defense. Of course, if the lawyer is in on it, it is probably grounds for disbarment if it is ever discovered.
Typically you download it and burn a DVD (a regular non-HD one) with a standard filesystem and a magic filename (like FIRMWARE.DAT or whatever) in the root directory, then stick the DVD in the drive. If you don't have a burner, you have them mail the disc to you.
That's a horribly dangerous feature as it leaves you wide open to viruses which could render your player inoperable. I know many devices that upgrade this way, and the vast majority do not ask for user confirmation before upgrading the firmware. It would seem to me it would be very simple to design the player so that the player would read a firmware upgrade disk only if, for example, a certain combination of keys were held down as the disk was inserted. Most do not, however. I don't know why.
Fucking libertarians.
Tell you what you need to do: go to Somalia. Now, set up competition in the gun running business. Or drug running. Or hell, making eye openers for the Wal Mart crowd Let's see how long you last.
While we're doing that, you might want to look up the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist".
It would be different if this was just a hosting provider who provided service in good faith that someone took advantage of, this is someone running something INTENTIONALLY untrackable.
Built into that statement is the implicit assumption that law enforcement has an inherent right to track any Internet traffic back to its source, and that any intermediate service providers have the obligation to build their systems in such a way that this tracking is possible. Essentially you are saying that no one has the right to anonymous speech.
Like any technology, however, the anonymizing power of Tor can be used for both good or evil. It can be used by whistle-blowers to expose government corruption, and it can be used by pedophiles to distribute kiddy porn. It can be used by Chinese dissidents to criticize their government, and it can be used by terrorists to disseminate instructions on manufacture of explosive devices. So the question is, do we punish those who provide the technology because it can be used for evil? Evidently the German government has decided the answer is "yes". It's hard to argue for one side or the other because I think it comes down to personal values. I value free speech including anonymous speech, but I grew up in the American culture. Thomas Paine distributed his widely influential document Common Sense anonymously and it is possible the American Revolution would have ended differently had he not done so. One does wonder if highly oppressive regimes like the Nazis would have been able to hold power so long if the citizens had easy access to anonymous speech.
I think the value of services like Tor outweigh the disadvantages, so I do hope the German policy is not emulated by other countries.
Encryption, my friends. Govt can't censor what they can't read.
Why not? They can simply censor everything they can't read, i.e. block all encrypted traffic except SSL connections to known businesses like banks, etc.
All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic
Why are you assuming they block BitTorrent traffic because they believe the content is illegal? Isn't is possible they block BitTorrent because of the typically high bandwidth BitTorrent users consume?
They didn't 'leave their back door open' to a thief ... they effectively put a table on the front lawn piled high with music with a big sign saying 'come on in, copy all you want!'. ... and they shall get what they deserve.
Isn't that what public libraries do? They have bookshelves stacked with (mostly) copyrighted books, they generally have one or more public-use Xerox machines right next to said bookshelves, and they open their doors to the public.
I know with cable television, in many jurisdictions, if you let your neighbors hook up to your cable, both you and the neighbor could be charged with a crime. Just because it's okay with you that random people use "your" bandwidth, doesn't mean it's okay with your ISP. My analogy probably isn't perfect, but just because someone opens up their wireless router and doesn't mind if people drive by and use their access point doesn't mean it's legal. I'm not sure what the law says about this. There are laws about stealing computer services, but whose are you stealing? The ISP or the owner of the access point? I think it would hinge on that question. It would probably depend on whether you pay by the gigabyte, or have an unlimited rate. If you are eating at an all you can eat restaurant, you aren't allowed to share your food with a non-paying friend. Generally, however, you can share if you pay for a fixed size meal.
Since slashdotters have typically IQ in the range of 160 to 220, the will remain virgins till age 72 or so by my extrapolation.
So you're saying that based on the average Slashdot post, you would assign an IQ of 160 to 220 to the general Slashdot population. I assume you're joking. (People with Mod points, however, are actually extremely intelligent and discerning.)
I see. And are they planning something like the great firewall of China to prevent their citizens from accessing American sites?
I could be way off on this, but...I always understood time symmetry to mean that laws of physics obedient to time symmetry are invariant relative to the direction of the arrow of time.
You're talking about two different symmetries: time translation symmetry, and time reversal invariance. Not all physical laws obey time reversal invariance (CP violation in weak interactions imply violation of time reversal invariance if we assume CPT invariance, for instance), but time translation symmetry (the laws of physics don't change over time), is generally accepted, and leads, via Noether's theorem, to conservation of energy.
Unfortunately most of Canada's best doctors move to the USA so they can get rich instead. :(
And this is the side of the equation that is overlooked by most who compare the U.S. and Canadian systems. Part of the way the government keeps the cost of health care affordable is to put an annual salary cap on physicians. Many of the best and brightest do head south of the border. Try getting a family doctor in Canada. It's like going to a job interview; they select only those patients they want and the typically have to meet very stringent criteria. 12 hour wait times are typical in hospital emergency rooms for all but the most critical patients. And when people need serious surgery in a timely fashion, they are typically sent to the States. As a Canadian, who's lived in both Canada and the United States, I'll take the American system any day.
No, I don't wish any harm to the scientists or their reputations. However, I think it would be fun if Gravity didn't fit so nicely in the Standard Model like everyone is hoping it will.
Your point is well taken in that in some ways it would be more interesting if the Higgs were not found, but in fact the Higgs does nothing to bring gravity into the Standard Model. Instead it would explain the symmetry breaking in the Electroweak interaction. (I.e. why the W and Z are massive while the photon in massless.) Without a Higgs, a new mechanism would be necessary to explain this.