Isn't the Republican party traditionally the one that raises the biggest fuss about the Bill of Rights? No, the Republicans and the Democrats are just about even in raising a fuss over how inconvenient the Constitution is to their goals... oh, wait.
I think the reason it's happened is because the proceedings are ex parte: i.e., they're behind closed doors, without prior notice to the students or to the college. Had the discovery motion been made on notice, the university and students would have had a chance to educate the judge about FERPA and other privacy statutes. Certainly the RIAA isn't doing that. The fact that judges are issuing ruling without being knowledgeable of the pertinent laws kind of terrifies me. It also kind of gives lie to the whole "ignorance of the law is no excuse" line; if the judges don't know the law, how on earth are the rest of us supposed to?
Science needs to talk about science and not political agendas. The problem is that political agendas influence what science gets done. Someone whose entire belief system will crumble if they admit that it took slightly more than 144 hours to create the universe aren't going support spending money to research evolutionary medicine.
From my (evangelical) perspective, the best thing that can be done to bridge the gap between the scientific and religious communities is to start giving more time and attention to people who have already bridged that gap. There are plenty of us that have no trouble reconciling a belief in God with a belief in evolution. The fundamentalist community needs to be presented with people that have a vibrant, demonstrable faith, people that love God and live like they do, and who are also capable of explaining why it is entirely possible to interpret Genesis allegorically and still believe in the cross.
I think the point of the article is that evil works, if evil is also very good at what it does.
The whole point in allowing many different people to tackle a problem is to eliminate single-point-of-failure. If one company's product blows, we can choose another's. This is very important, both to the consumer, and to the market as a whole.
But when one company is the best at what they do, people stop thinking about choice. If apple makes the best mp3player/music store, why go anywhere else? If their operating system is so good, who cares if it only runs on their hardware... as long as their hardware is great, too?
Unfortunately, even evil geniuses sometimes fail. For instance, the iPhone SDK... I honestly don't see that going anywhere, unless the current license agreement is modified to something less draconian.
Apple has released more features and functions to developers and consumers than Google has, courtesy of a shipping iPhone in four countries vs none, a shipping SDK, and multiple firmware revisions. I would be hesitant to proclaim Android capable of grinding Apple into the dirt until after an Android phone exists. In Google's favor, I can already install just as many of my applications on an Android phone as I can on an iPhone, for the price I'm willing to pay for that privileged.
The electoral system worked as it was designed to. Saying it over rode the popular vote is sort of a misnomer, it isn't like the popular vote represented the entire country, it represented a few largely populated areas. And that is the intent of the electoral system, to negate this effect. The popular vote represented the will of millions of individual voters. Cities do not elect a president; people do. Or, at least, they should.
To frame it another way, should my vote count for less because I live in New York? Does moving to this area make me somehow less important to the democratic process?
I would understand the 'Informative' and 'Insightful' mods if he had at least given us an example of a time the electoral college had acted as "ace in the hole" instead of casting votes according to the rules. That's something of the wrong question. The electoral college acted according to the rules when they overrode the popular election and put Bush in office over Gore.
Also, FWIT, I am a registered Republican, and voted for Bush. Regretfully.
A presidential veto can then in return be overridden by a two-thirds majority. The Democrats intend to try and get the ban on waterboarding through a veto, I believe. The problem is that the Americans have a two-party system and the one the president belongs to generally has plenty votes to block the two-thirds thing easily. I think the real point of these bills is to show who is for torture, and who is against it, and who is for an open government, and who is against it. If they had passed, wonderful, but at least we're making people declare the fact that they are pro-torture and pro-big-brother.
Something slashdotters need to get a grip on is you are a tiny, extremely hard to please, demographic. I am not hard to please. I wanted two things:
1. A simple way to install an application. Hooking an iPhone up to my home Mac and dragging the.app to/volumes/iPhone/applictions would have been fine. That's how most software is installed on a Mac, anyway.
2. Java. Sun was willing to do this for them, for free.
Apple killed both of these in one move. This is not a matter of Apple failing to provide functionality to me, it is a matter of them actively denying functionality. They had to go out of their way to do this. They put in more work to make the iPhone less useful.
Even if all one wants to do as a programmer/hacker is learn, the cost of an iPhone & SDK is trivial. Learning isn't the only thing I want to do. I want to write tools that will be useful to me, and put them on my phone. I want to be able to write tools that will be useful to my friends, and put them on their phones. I want to use this ting. I actually had plans to do this, right up until the actual SDK was released.
I had my own software running on my mac within an hour of buying it. That simply isn't possible with an iPhone. More's the pity.
Protecting travelers from new attack vectors in real time based on an x-ray and basic visual inspection is not a job that can be performed reliably with any standard skill set. What the TSA actually appears to be aiming for is people who can identify a gun/knife/conventionally designed incendiary device... And they are failing miserably. Pretty much every penetration test that has been conducted says that the easiest way to get a gun/knife/conventionally designed incendiary device onto a plane is to put it in your bag and walk through security with it. Aitport security is a joke. The TSA's only mission is to hassle regular travelers.
I got modded all to hell for saying this in the last article, but whatever: Apple's decision regarding the SDK and iTunes distribution model have assured that I will not be buying an iPhone. I was holding out, waiting to see what the SDK had to offer, and I've come to the conclusion that it's better to wait for Android than to lock myself into Steve's phone. The Mac is probably the best development platform I've ever used, but the iPhone is useless to me. It flies in the face of the hacker/tinkerer ethic.
No. The "broken glass fallacy" tries to prove that breaking the window was a good thing for the economy. What I'm saying is that the junk mail you get through the post office isn't completely bad and, in fact, pays its way unlike spam. How is that any different from what I said?
It's nowhere near a broken glass fallacy. This isn't a case of an illegal act, it's a case of a legitimate business model that employs many. The broken glass fallacy doesn't presuppose an illegal act. The window could just as easily have been caused by clumsiness.
Yes. Sometimes there are things in the junk mail that are useful, such as ads from supermarkets. Also, people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them. If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down. You're right on both counts: junk mail does provide jobs, and it does subsidize regular mail. The thing is, this is pretty close to a "broken glass" fallacy.
the "broken glass" fallacy states that a broken window is good for the economy because someone has to make a new window, someone has to make a hammer and nails to hold in the new window, someone has to install the window, etc. This destructive act - breaking a window - is a boon.
The reason that it's a fallacy is that it assumes the money spent on repairing the window wouldn't have been spent somewhere else, somewhere more productive. In an economy, it is always better for a new thing to be created than for an old thing to be replaced.
This isn't exactly what we're talking about with junk mail, but it's close. Yes, regular mail would be more costly, but the post office would also be spending a lot less on gas to lug all that junk mail around. Yes, junk mail designers would be out of a job, but their skills could be employed somewhere else, potentially somewhere more productive. The fact - and it is a fact - that junk mail has positive benefits does not mean that it is optimally beneficial.
I'd learnt something in these years: we don't need powerfull fat heavy devices, we need smaller and lighter devices, we don't care about power. For power we have fat big desktop computers. For power, I have a fat big laptop, which I can still carry around when I need it. I'm thinking about getting an Eee just to have something to take quick notes on when I don't what to lug the "real" computer around. Best of both worlds, there.
Open standards, choice of platform, no vendor lock-in, release-early-release-often, user-modifiable programs, ability to fork... yeah, they've learned all kinds of stuff from Open Source.
You seem unclear on the concept of "rights". A "right" is something that a government has decided you may do. This government has decided that they do not have this "right". You can't wave a magic BS stick in the air and make it so that they do. They don't have the right because the EU government bloody well says they don't, and that's all there is to it. No. A right in inalienable, something that cannot be taken away, even if it is denied. We all have the intrinsic right to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, et cetera. Even if we are prevented from using these rights, by an evil government or an evil corporation, these rights still remain. The government does not grant rights, and it therefore cannot take them away.
Whether Microsoft has any rights in this situation is beside the point. Allowing a right to be defined as something which the government grants is evil, because it is the first step in rights being denied.
Isn't that just a fancy way of saying "I'm Guilty"? If you create enough laws, everyone is guilty. If you search long enough, if you try hard enough, you will be able to find, craft, or create a plausible excuse for ruining just about anyone's life. The various constitutional protections are set in place, in part, to establish at least some barrier to this.
Also, given our propensity to use "enhanced" interrogation, and then rely on that information as if it were in any way valid, I'd say a constitutional protection against self-incrimination is pretty damn important.
Unless, of course, you want to stand in a court where it is illegal to not confess. Think about that for a minute or two.
More to the point, why does Slashdot seem to be joining the whole "audio and video" trend? I had hopped that we were still a fairly literate group of people... if I want video and pics, I'll go to digg. I come here to read.
What happens when you have a piece of code that should fail to connect, but instead connects to the RoadRunner typo page? Bad and Wrong, that's what happens.
In the US, the first amendment only covers what the government does, not a nongovernmental entity like CNN. Of course, that does not mean that they aren't assholes for firing him, but it doesn't violate constitutional freedom of speech. Which is part of the problem. The corporations have more power over our lives today than the government. I believe one of the chief roles of government today should be to protect individual freedoms from corporate interference.
then he says: "I'm an insufferable wise-ass who doesn't mind being an occasional nuisance to authority figures." -- wow, I'm sure your bosses love that
"I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn't deported George Bush and Dick Cheney" -- Sure CNN producer, bash the president, your bosses won't care. --and I bet that's just the start, I'm sure if I bothered to read his blog their would be plenty of other BS opinions that CNN doesn't want to be associated with. Did his opinions affect his job performance? No. So CNN has no interest or right to limit what he does or says on his own time. This kind of thing should be illegal.
Just remember, it could have been yhou that developed this. Yes,it could have been me that developed this. It also could have been the guy in front of me, or the guy behind me, or the guy off to the side of me. It could have been my brother, who's dabbled in computer stuff, or it could have been my sister, who just learned how to do equations in Excel. It could have been anyone. And that's why it's obvious. And that's why it's a bad patent.
Slashdot Mirror
From my (evangelical) perspective, the best thing that can be done to bridge the gap between the scientific and religious communities is to start giving more time and attention to people who have already bridged that gap. There are plenty of us that have no trouble reconciling a belief in God with a belief in evolution. The fundamentalist community needs to be presented with people that have a vibrant, demonstrable faith, people that love God and live like they do, and who are also capable of explaining why it is entirely possible to interpret Genesis allegorically and still believe in the cross.
I think the point of the article is that evil works, if evil is also very good at what it does.
The whole point in allowing many different people to tackle a problem is to eliminate single-point-of-failure. If one company's product blows, we can choose another's. This is very important, both to the consumer, and to the market as a whole.
But when one company is the best at what they do, people stop thinking about choice. If apple makes the best mp3player/music store, why go anywhere else? If their operating system is so good, who cares if it only runs on their hardware... as long as their hardware is great, too?
Unfortunately, even evil geniuses sometimes fail. For instance, the iPhone SDK... I honestly don't see that going anywhere, unless the current license agreement is modified to something less draconian.
To frame it another way, should my vote count for less because I live in New York? Does moving to this area make me somehow less important to the democratic process?
Also, FWIT, I am a registered Republican, and voted for Bush. Regretfully.
1. A simple way to install an application. Hooking an iPhone up to my home Mac and dragging the
2. Java. Sun was willing to do this for them, for free.
Apple killed both of these in one move. This is not a matter of Apple failing to provide functionality to me, it is a matter of them actively denying functionality. They had to go out of their way to do this. They put in more work to make the iPhone less useful.
I had my own software running on my mac within an hour of buying it. That simply isn't possible with an iPhone. More's the pity.
I got modded all to hell for saying this in the last article, but whatever: Apple's decision regarding the SDK and iTunes distribution model have assured that I will not be buying an iPhone. I was holding out, waiting to see what the SDK had to offer, and I've come to the conclusion that it's better to wait for Android than to lock myself into Steve's phone. The Mac is probably the best development platform I've ever used, but the iPhone is useless to me. It flies in the face of the hacker/tinkerer ethic.
Well, that seals the deal... I'm buying an Android phone, whenever they come out.
the "broken glass" fallacy states that a broken window is good for the economy because someone has to make a new window, someone has to make a hammer and nails to hold in the new window, someone has to install the window, etc. This destructive act - breaking a window - is a boon.
The reason that it's a fallacy is that it assumes the money spent on repairing the window wouldn't have been spent somewhere else, somewhere more productive. In an economy, it is always better for a new thing to be created than for an old thing to be replaced.
This isn't exactly what we're talking about with junk mail, but it's close. Yes, regular mail would be more costly, but the post office would also be spending a lot less on gas to lug all that junk mail around. Yes, junk mail designers would be out of a job, but their skills could be employed somewhere else, potentially somewhere more productive. The fact - and it is a fact - that junk mail has positive benefits does not mean that it is optimally beneficial.
Open standards, choice of platform, no vendor lock-in, release-early-release-often, user-modifiable programs, ability to fork... yeah, they've learned all kinds of stuff from Open Source.
Whether Microsoft has any rights in this situation is beside the point. Allowing a right to be defined as something which the government grants is evil, because it is the first step in rights being denied.
Also, given our propensity to use "enhanced" interrogation, and then rely on that information as if it were in any way valid, I'd say a constitutional protection against self-incrimination is pretty damn important.
Unless, of course, you want to stand in a court where it is illegal to not confess. Think about that for a minute or two.
More to the point, why does Slashdot seem to be joining the whole "audio and video" trend? I had hopped that we were still a fairly literate group of people... if I want video and pics, I'll go to digg. I come here to read.
What happens when you have a piece of code that should fail to connect, but instead connects to the RoadRunner typo page? Bad and Wrong, that's what happens.
"I'm an insufferable wise-ass who doesn't mind being an occasional nuisance to authority figures."
-- wow, I'm sure your bosses love that
"I wake up every morning baffled as to why America hasn't deported George Bush and Dick Cheney"
-- Sure CNN producer, bash the president, your bosses won't care.
--and I bet that's just the start, I'm sure if I bothered to read his blog their would be plenty of other BS opinions that CNN doesn't want to be associated with. Did his opinions affect his job performance? No. So CNN has no interest or right to limit what he does or says on his own time. This kind of thing should be illegal.