If you compel the president to associate with those he doesn't want to, then he has no freedom of association. He would be compelled to associate. Compel != freedom.
Ah - but nobody is compelling him to be president! Also he is still free to not associate with the press at all. All this is saying that he must associate with all press equally. There already are laws like this. For example an employer can't say "I only want to associate with white men" and get away with it (at least I really hope not!).
I would also argue that a better test is what is in the public interest and if you accept that then it suggests limiting the president's freedom in order to give the public a less biased (not unbiased!) view of government.
This is beginning to get scary: serious political discussions on Slashdot, what is the world coming to!
Even the President has freedom of association, and he can use that freedom to not invite or stay away from members of the press who piss him off.
Yes, but the point which you are missing is that this freedom of association is being used to effectively limit the freedom of the press. So which "freedom" has priority?
He just has to make a choice- does he want the prestige of being in the whitehouse press corp, or does he want to say what his conscience dictates?
That is not always an easy decision to make. Sure, if you had clear, irrefutable evidence that the president was doing something illegal then of course you would stand up and say so. But supposing you don't think that he has properly though through the consequences of his actions and want to ask some hard-to-answer questions about his current policy which may enjoy overwhelming popular support? Do you risk the livelihood of your family just to ask a question? That is a HUGE amount to risk for a low chance of payback.
That is exactly why the US system is so insidious. It looks free at a glance but behind the scenes serious pressure can be brought to bear to at least make small (but not huge) problems "go away".
That's a pretty easy choice for any man or woman with a shred of character, and in the US it doesn't end with you being posioned at some foriegn hotel with some 'hot' tea.
Only because they don't need to. It is far, far more effective to let you simply fade into obscurity.
I'm also living in Canada, though I am not, yet, a Canadian, and I agree with your assessment of the current US media (although I rarely if ever watch them). However that is because it is now "fashionable" in the US to dislike Bush.
When I was living in the US at the start of Gulf War 2.0 it was a very different situation. Despite the rest of the world, including some of the US's allies like the UK, asking very serious questions of their politicians about whether this was REALLY justified. The White House press core was asking questions that sounded more like fan worship than serious journalism e.g. "is it true our tanks can drive at 60mph through the desert and shoot Iraqis 3 miles away?".
In the current climate they can certainly get away with more aggressive questions, afterall the president cannot refuse access to the entire White House press core....but back then he could easily have made life very difficult for 1 or 2 reporters had they started to ask serious questions. For comparison just look at what happened in Canada and the UK when Harper and Blair tried to get into the same game of controlling access to the PM. The press rebelled and eventually such plans were dropped. In the US nobody even seems to care.
Finally I wish you would not characterise me as a Gore-lover. I cannot stand the man. However he serves as an excellent example of how undemocratic the US political system is.
And before someone wants to criticize me by saying that the US is just as bad, I suggest you understand the meaning of the degrees of difference. Bush has abused the laws and now has a ~30% approval rating and is now a lame duck. Putin has abused the laws and has a >70% approval rating...
Then could you explain what the difference is between censorship laws and censorship by the back door because the press don't want to loose their privileged access to the president? At least with censorship laws you know that you can't trust the press. I find the voluntary censorship of the US press far more insidious.
The approval rating argument just doesn't carry weight...afterall it was only a few years ago that the candidate with the highest approval rating in the actual polls lost the election in the US. I've yet to see that happen in modern Russia.
Plus it has been ages since I actually got dodgy sites back from Google. It used to be that searching for LaTeX (the mathematical typesetting language) would return very interesting results. Not to mention searching for beyond the standard model physics which is typically abbreviated to "BSM" physics....but even those searches never turn up anything dodgy now.
Indeed, if by "a few types of radiation" you mean, "no types of radiation at all."
Not correct: it will not work for neutral radiation (neutron and gamma) but will deflect charged particle radiation just fine.
And doesn't technically deflect anything away, but instead traps stuff. causing the particles to precipitate at specific locations (which can be more heavily shielded) at the poles.
It is a real shame that nobody thought to tell us physicists about this because we have been using magnetic fields to deflect charged particles for years. Whether or not a particle is trapped (or where it is deflected to) depend entirely on the shape of the magnetic field and the momentum and charge of the incoming particle. You can trap particles but it is by no means a requirement.
Interestingly with a high enough magnetic field you can actually affect neutral atomic matter through: see this video of a floating frog. This is due to an effect called diamagnetism (not paramagnetism which the video claims it is). It is certainly the case that the fields they are considering are no where near enough for this to be a noticeable effect but if they could increase the strenght a few orders of magnitude (and shield the astronauts) you might start being able to have something a little more Star Trek like.
I'm just saying that the human brain is a thing made by god, and we can't copy it.
We certainly don't want god coming after us for IP infringment...the MAFIA is bad enough and they only have lawyers!
On a more serious note though why not? Pretty much everything we have done as a species to date is copying some process which occurs naturally in the universe. Since we learn by copying why not learn from the best?
Firstly nobody really believed he Los Alamos results principly because some of the collaborators removed their names from the original results paper and published another paper in the same journal issue in which they voiced considerable concern over the validity of the results. If you can't convince your own collaborators it is very hard to convince anyone else.
Secondly neutrino oscillations are not in the Standard Model and the problem with the LSND result was that it could not be reconciled with the other neutrino mising results from SNO and SuperK. So while this results is still very interesting it simply confirms that a simple neutrino mixing EXTENSION to the the Standard Model may be sufficien without needing to invoke more exotic alternatives.
...don't shoot missiles! The only thing scary here is that someone's first reaction on hearing about increased sunspot activity is to worry about a missile's guidance system. Exactly whom are you planning to blow up or are you just concerned that should the whim take you tomorrow you won't be able to?
Hmmm....Mr. Bush you really shouldn't be depending on Slashdot for technical advice!
They tested this on Mythbusters and had difficulty getting phones to interfere even in contrived scenarios such as at point blank range, with very old navigation equipment.
So supposing the FAA/FCC removed the cell phone ban on planes tomorrow citing that Mythbusters had shown it was safe in their TV programme would you feel happy flying? There is a lot more rigourous testing involved than any TV programme is likely to do. For example what about resonance effects of the fuselage enhancing the signal? Long wires in the cabin enhancing the pickup? Single point of shielding failure? (you do know that planes are designed to withstand at least one failure in all major systems?)
Wifi on planes will be MUCH less of a problem in terms of annoyance to other passengers.
Provided that you also ban VOIP and video conferencing. When Lufthansa were doing inflight tests of WiFi on transatlantic flights we had someone video conferencing from the middle of the atlantic. Most of his fellow passengers though it was really cool...but I imagine when it becomes aregular feature and you are trying to get to sleep it will be REALLY annoying.
Seriously, if that was really the reason then you'd have to ask why planes have reclining seats and music via headphones. Each of those is equally capable of being annoying.
I agree with the reclining seats but how on earth is music via headphones annoying? I travel a lot and have never managed to hear the music of the person sitting next to me over the roar of the engines. I would imagine that by the time they have it loud enough to be heard in the seat next to them over the engine noise their eardrums will be history.
I understand that but this is clearly extremely inapropriate for the GPL. Why should a programmer who has never visited the US release his code under a license which is based on those laws? Especially when that programmer does not get to vote for the government which can change them. In fact I wonder whether that is even legally possible - the examples you gave seem to suggest that the deal was signed in the location specified.
Majority (noun): the greater part or number; the number larger than half the total.
Just in case there is any remaining confusion to have a majority you have to more that 50%. In the case in question you have a majority of Americans being non-Christian.
Actually this incident is an example of unintelligent design. Apparently Fermilab did not test the structural loads experienced when the magnet quenches (goes superconducting to normal conducting) and their cryostat design cannot withstand this load....at least that was my understanding from the email which got sent out last week by the two DGs.
Actually that is a very good example, but for exactly the opposite of what you are trying to say. Webster's dictionary presumably defines "rubber" as a contraceptive device whereas in the UK it is defined as a device which rubs out pencil marks. You can try to make people use the US definition but it simply is not going to happen (and you will really irritate a lot of people if you try).
Apply that to legal definition and I can't see how including a definition in the license will override an existing legal definition used in that country no matter how much legalese you add.
Unfortunately your argument fails for two reasons.
First because it is not established how "bill" is defined. In English it translates as a demand for money i.e. "Please pay me the sum of $1 to cover the time I spent reading your post". I realize that the American meaning refers to a unit of paper currency, something that in English we would call a "note". However it is not clear which language the original poster is using. If English then I have no doubt whatsoever that he could send out "unlimited" bills for $1.
Secondly "unlimited" clearly cannot exceed the entire population of the planet so it is bounded to ~$6 billion.
From this we can conlcude that the original poster is either an American named Bill or comes from outside the US.
I now have two concerns about the GPLv3 after trying to wade through that document:
1) Will I be able to understand the license? (and if not do I really want to release code under it?) I would strongly suggest a non-legalase summary be included in the final version.
2) Will it actually be worth anything outside the US? Every single legal reference pointed to US law, they take definitions from existing US laws and they comment that certain provisions are compatible with US law. I'm beginning to wonder if RMS and co. realize that a majority of the world lives outside the US.
Perhaps they are attempting to concentrate on US law and then branch out into the rest of the world later but to me that seems a somewhat dubious tactic since the thing looks so complex at the moment that I'm not convinced that it can be compatible with multiple countries' laws all at once. So I also wonder if there will end up being multiple versions of GPLv3 as you go around the world.
...will point out that the number of flaws found is not a reliable measure of how secure an OS is because it depends on how hard you looked and how easy it is to find flaws for a given OS. For example having access to the source code will undoubtedly make it a lot easier to find flaws but Windows probably has more people looking.
Not if the manufacturing process, occuring at a fixed location, used hydro-electric power while the Hummer's energy usage requires burning fossil fuel.
I'm not saying that this is the case but it is the source of energy which is important, not just the amount.
To paraphrase a common saying: "you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time". So as long as MS continues to try to fool people with pop psychology rather than actually listen to complaints and address them (as Open Source generally does) it will only benefit Linux.
Of course this assumes that the site is genuine which I must admit I'm not really convinced of.
Slashdot Mirror
If you compel the president to associate with those he doesn't want to, then he has no freedom of association. He would be compelled to associate. Compel != freedom.
Ah - but nobody is compelling him to be president! Also he is still free to not associate with the press at all. All this is saying that he must associate with all press equally. There already are laws like this. For example an employer can't say "I only want to associate with white men" and get away with it (at least I really hope not!).
I would also argue that a better test is what is in the public interest and if you accept that then it suggests limiting the president's freedom in order to give the public a less biased (not unbiased!) view of government.
This is beginning to get scary: serious political discussions on Slashdot, what is the world coming to!
Even the President has freedom of association, and he can use that freedom to not invite or stay away from members of the press who piss him off.
Yes, but the point which you are missing is that this freedom of association is being used to effectively limit the freedom of the press. So which "freedom" has priority?
He just has to make a choice- does he want the prestige of being in the whitehouse press corp, or does he want to say what his conscience dictates?
That is not always an easy decision to make. Sure, if you had clear, irrefutable evidence that the president was doing something illegal then of course you would stand up and say so. But supposing you don't think that he has properly though through the consequences of his actions and want to ask some hard-to-answer questions about his current policy which may enjoy overwhelming popular support? Do you risk the livelihood of your family just to ask a question? That is a HUGE amount to risk for a low chance of payback.
That is exactly why the US system is so insidious. It looks free at a glance but behind the scenes serious pressure can be brought to bear to at least make small (but not huge) problems "go away".
That's a pretty easy choice for any man or woman with a shred of character, and in the US it doesn't end with you being posioned at some foriegn hotel with some 'hot' tea.
Only because they don't need to. It is far, far more effective to let you simply fade into obscurity.
I'm also living in Canada, though I am not, yet, a Canadian, and I agree with your assessment of the current US media (although I rarely if ever watch them). However that is because it is now "fashionable" in the US to dislike Bush.
When I was living in the US at the start of Gulf War 2.0 it was a very different situation. Despite the rest of the world, including some of the US's allies like the UK, asking very serious questions of their politicians about whether this was REALLY justified. The White House press core was asking questions that sounded more like fan worship than serious journalism e.g. "is it true our tanks can drive at 60mph through the desert and shoot Iraqis 3 miles away?".
In the current climate they can certainly get away with more aggressive questions, afterall the president cannot refuse access to the entire White House press core....but back then he could easily have made life very difficult for 1 or 2 reporters had they started to ask serious questions. For comparison just look at what happened in Canada and the UK when Harper and Blair tried to get into the same game of controlling access to the PM. The press rebelled and eventually such plans were dropped. In the US nobody even seems to care.
Finally I wish you would not characterise me as a Gore-lover. I cannot stand the man. However he serves as an excellent example of how undemocratic the US political system is.
No you are not looking at this from a Russian point of view. America going down the tubes is good news there!
And before someone wants to criticize me by saying that the US is just as bad, I suggest you understand the meaning of the degrees of difference. Bush has abused the laws and now has a ~30% approval rating and is now a lame duck. Putin has abused the laws and has a >70% approval rating...
Then could you explain what the difference is between censorship laws and censorship by the back door because the press don't want to loose their privileged access to the president? At least with censorship laws you know that you can't trust the press. I find the voluntary censorship of the US press far more insidious.
The approval rating argument just doesn't carry weight...afterall it was only a few years ago that the candidate with the highest approval rating in the actual polls lost the election in the US. I've yet to see that happen in modern Russia.
Plus it has been ages since I actually got dodgy sites back from Google. It used to be that searching for LaTeX (the mathematical typesetting language) would return very interesting results. Not to mention searching for beyond the standard model physics which is typically abbreviated to "BSM" physics....but even those searches never turn up anything dodgy now.
Indeed, if by "a few types of radiation" you mean, "no types of radiation at all."
Not correct: it will not work for neutral radiation (neutron and gamma) but will deflect charged particle radiation just fine.
And doesn't technically deflect anything away, but instead traps stuff. causing the particles to precipitate at specific locations (which can be more heavily shielded) at the poles.
It is a real shame that nobody thought to tell us physicists about this because we have been using magnetic fields to deflect charged particles for years. Whether or not a particle is trapped (or where it is deflected to) depend entirely on the shape of the magnetic field and the momentum and charge of the incoming particle. You can trap particles but it is by no means a requirement.
Interestingly with a high enough magnetic field you can actually affect neutral atomic matter through: see this video of a floating frog. This is due to an effect called diamagnetism (not paramagnetism which the video claims it is). It is certainly the case that the fields they are considering are no where near enough for this to be a noticeable effect but if they could increase the strenght a few orders of magnitude (and shield the astronauts) you might start being able to have something a little more Star Trek like.
I'm just saying that the human brain is a thing made by god, and we can't copy it.
We certainly don't want god coming after us for IP infringment...the MAFIA is bad enough and they only have lawyers!
On a more serious note though why not? Pretty much everything we have done as a species to date is copying some process which occurs naturally in the universe. Since we learn by copying why not learn from the best?
I'd like to see them replace the desktop Web browser application with a webbased one!
Firstly nobody really believed he Los Alamos results principly because some of the collaborators removed their names from the original results paper and published another paper in the same journal issue in which they voiced considerable concern over the validity of the results. If you can't convince your own collaborators it is very hard to convince anyone else.
Secondly neutrino oscillations are not in the Standard Model and the problem with the LSND result was that it could not be reconciled with the other neutrino mising results from SNO and SuperK. So while this results is still very interesting it simply confirms that a simple neutrino mixing EXTENSION to the the Standard Model may be sufficien without needing to invoke more exotic alternatives.
...don't shoot missiles! The only thing scary here is that someone's first reaction on hearing about increased sunspot activity is to worry about a missile's guidance system. Exactly whom are you planning to blow up or are you just concerned that should the whim take you tomorrow you won't be able to?
Hmmm....Mr. Bush you really shouldn't be depending on Slashdot for technical advice!
They tested this on Mythbusters and had difficulty getting phones to interfere even in contrived scenarios such as at point blank range, with very old navigation equipment.
So supposing the FAA/FCC removed the cell phone ban on planes tomorrow citing that Mythbusters had shown it was safe in their TV programme would you feel happy flying? There is a lot more rigourous testing involved than any TV programme is likely to do. For example what about resonance effects of the fuselage enhancing the signal? Long wires in the cabin enhancing the pickup? Single point of shielding failure? (you do know that planes are designed to withstand at least one failure in all major systems?)
Wifi on planes will be MUCH less of a problem in terms of annoyance to other passengers.
Provided that you also ban VOIP and video conferencing. When Lufthansa were doing inflight tests of WiFi on transatlantic flights we had someone video conferencing from the middle of the atlantic. Most of his fellow passengers though it was really cool...but I imagine when it becomes aregular feature and you are trying to get to sleep it will be REALLY annoying.
Seriously, if that was really the reason then you'd have to ask why planes have reclining seats and music via headphones. Each of those is equally capable of being annoying.
I agree with the reclining seats but how on earth is music via headphones annoying? I travel a lot and have never managed to hear the music of the person sitting next to me over the roar of the engines. I would imagine that by the time they have it loud enough to be heard in the seat next to them over the engine noise their eardrums will be history.
I understand that but this is clearly extremely inapropriate for the GPL. Why should a programmer who has never visited the US release his code under a license which is based on those laws? Especially when that programmer does not get to vote for the government which can change them.
In fact I wonder whether that is even legally possible - the examples you gave seem to suggest that the deal was signed in the location specified.
Majority (noun): the greater part or number; the number larger than half the total.
Just in case there is any remaining confusion to have a majority you have to more that 50%. In the case in question you have a majority of Americans being non-Christian.
...and a majority of Americans are christians.
Apparently this problem extends to maths as well. Since when has 48% been a majority?
Actually this incident is an example of unintelligent design. Apparently Fermilab did not test the structural loads experienced when the magnet quenches (goes superconducting to normal conducting) and their cryostat design cannot withstand this load....at least that was my understanding from the email which got sent out last week by the two DGs.
Actually that is a very good example, but for exactly the opposite of what you are trying to say. Webster's dictionary presumably defines "rubber" as a contraceptive device whereas in the UK it is defined as a device which rubs out pencil marks. You can try to make people use the US definition but it simply is not going to happen (and you will really irritate a lot of people if you try).
Apply that to legal definition and I can't see how including a definition in the license will override an existing legal definition used in that country no matter how much legalese you add.
Unfortunately your argument fails for two reasons.
First because it is not established how "bill" is defined. In English it translates as a demand for money i.e. "Please pay me the sum of $1 to cover the time I spent reading your post". I realize that the American meaning refers to a unit of paper currency, something that in English we would call a "note". However it is not clear which language the original poster is using. If English then I have no doubt whatsoever that he could send out "unlimited" bills for $1.
Secondly "unlimited" clearly cannot exceed the entire population of the planet so it is bounded to ~$6 billion.
From this we can conlcude that the original poster is either an American named Bill or comes from outside the US.
I now have two concerns about the GPLv3 after trying to wade through that document:
1) Will I be able to understand the license? (and if not do I really want to release code under it?) I would strongly suggest a non-legalase summary be included in the final version.
2) Will it actually be worth anything outside the US? Every single legal reference pointed to US law, they take definitions from existing US laws and they comment that certain provisions are compatible with US law. I'm beginning to wonder if RMS and co. realize that a majority of the world lives outside the US.
Perhaps they are attempting to concentrate on US law and then branch out into the rest of the world later but to me that seems a somewhat dubious tactic since the thing looks so complex at the moment that I'm not convinced that it can be compatible with multiple countries' laws all at once. So I also wonder if there will end up being multiple versions of GPLv3 as you go around the world.
...will point out that the number of flaws found is not a reliable measure of how secure an OS is because it depends on how hard you looked and how easy it is to find flaws for a given OS. For example having access to the source code will undoubtedly make it a lot easier to find flaws but Windows probably has more people looking.
He wasn't that clever - he was off by about 5 years.
Not if the manufacturing process, occuring at a fixed location, used hydro-electric power while the Hummer's energy usage requires burning fossil fuel. I'm not saying that this is the case but it is the source of energy which is important, not just the amount.
To paraphrase a common saying: "you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time". So as long as MS continues to try to fool people with pop psychology rather than actually listen to complaints and address them (as Open Source generally does) it will only benefit Linux.
Of course this assumes that the site is genuine which I must admit I'm not really convinced of.