It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.
Causing blindness is not a combat function of this weaponry; it's a side-effect of the other side trying to subvert the weapon. They were also not specifically designed to have such an effect. Their goal is to blow shit up from the air, with a particular emphasis on fired projectiles but probably used for vehicles as well (as per this example). In most cases there won't even be anybody around to get blinded.
A bullet through the eye can cause blindness too, that doesn't make it banned. Intent matters.
You also have a much higher chance of getting hit by lightning than you do drowning while standing in a parking lot in Las Vegas.
Statistics are meaningless without context. Drunk driving accidents happen a lot because there are lots of cars all over the place, and altogether too many people getting drunk and operating them. Cannon accidents are rare because there simply aren't that many people fucking around with cannons.
That doesn't mean that if there's some 11 year old kid with a working cannon a block or two down that the odds don't shift. Does that mean we should take it away? Not necessarily, but this kid and his parents had better hope nothing bad ever happens. It stands a fantastic chance of ruining their lives as well as other peoples'.
The problem is that these all have varying degrees of potential failure. Jumping off Half Dome or skydiving and not pulling the chute? Pretty good chance you'll die, and quickly--but if you don't, there's also a high risk you live in agony for hours, probably destroyed so bodily that you couldn't even do anything to finish the job. And god help you if somebody saw it happen and called an ambulance that ended up saving your life. There was a story just a few days ago about an Australian quadraplegic getting a court to acknowledge his right to die--but of course nobody can help him, so he has to waste away by starvation.
Drowning? I don't know. I've heard it said that drowning is actually a pretty horrible way to die. A bullet isn't surefire either, of course, but a sufficiently high-caliber weapon in the proper location comes awfully close.
Either way, if somebody's going to commit suicide they should couple whatever action they choose with a Do Not Resuscitate order. Of course the best solution is for us as a society to get over this "ZOMG LIFE IS TOO SACRED TO HELP SOMEBODY DIE, HE'LL HAVE TO DO IT HIMSELF AND SUFFER IN AGONY!" thing and just provide ways of helping people end their lives.
Are you truly willing to retroactively put a country through a guilt trip for having had a different opinion, what, almost a hundred years ago?
Yes.
I ordinarily agree with you about things in history. I don't pass moral judgments about all the wars fought for control or expansions of lands in antiquity.
But those, at least, have some logic to them. Land is money and power and strength and whatever comes with it. Regardless of the morality of it, it's a fight for a clear reason. This isn't that. This is codified homophobia. Preventing gay people from having sex doesn't help anybody. It doesn't suddenly turn them straight. On the flip side, it actively hurts them. It's not a victor and a loser, just losers. All the supporters of this sort of law won is a smug self-assurance that hurting people they don't like somehow makes them right.
Nor is this simply an opinion. I find it repugnant, but I'm not going to make a big deal out of people who believe gays are bad. I do have a problem with people who decide that the law needs to hurt people for being something they don't approve of. The fact that you think that's okay at any point in history, much less a mere 50-100 years ago, is something I find sad.
If so, will you be willing to pay the price should we ever come to the conclusion that paedophiles are just another natural part of human sexuality?
Yep. Then again I'm not one of those people who get hysterical about pedophiles to begin with. Frankly, that's one of the reasons. Whether we find it's a normal part of human sexuality or something actively different in the brains of these people, I think ultimately what we will find out is that it's something largely outside of their control.
Before anybody goes and accuses me of supporting adults raping children, no: Rape is rape, sexual abuse is sexual abuse, and children are children. There's more at hand than simply whether or not sexual attraction to children should be illegal.
Seeing as nobody responsible for those laws back then is still in power, how does it make sense to demand an apology of today's government and thus of today's society?
I would agree if this was something that took a lot of money, time or resources to fulfill. In that sense it's simply not worth it.
But it's a couple hours of time to write up a nice little speech, maybe some time to put it up for a vote so you can say everybody supports it, and you're done. It's an acknowledgment that we understand what was done was wrong, and that we're committed to not letting it happen again. It's unfortunate that such an apology comes 50 years too late for a high-profile example and the motivation for the entire movement to hear, but that doesn't make it worthless.
In this case, the better question is what sense does it make to block or demean such an apology? There's obviously a value to the people asking for it, and seemingly no harm in granting it. It is, in essence, the exact opposite of those old laws they're condemning.
No. More like "prostitutes are demanding that the government stop paying other prostitutes to have sex with anybody who asks."
The issue isn't "free vs. paid," because in both cases somebody is paying. He's arguing that the government paying for one group makes it nearly impossible for groups that aren't government-subsidized to compete.
Rather than throwing out crass Slashdot idioms as if they're insightful, why not try actually debating what was said on its own merits? The questions should be "is he right and to what degree?" and "do we really care as a society?" Not "ZOMG CORPORATIONS WANT MONEY LULZ."
Even if that weren't a silly position, "needs a new organ" does not instantaneously mean "genetically weak." In fact I would be willing to bet that more people need organ transplants due to trauma or disease than do because of any genetic problems*.
So sign the damn card.
* I'm not including things like being an alcoholic here, because being so makes you ineligible to receive a new organ. To put it in an overly-simplistic way, if you've caused the problems yourself you're typically disqualified from a replacement organ.
Amazon shouldn't restrict reviews. There's simply too many other places to buy books, music, appliances, etc etc and the reviews of those purchasers have the potential to be every bit as valid and useful as people who bought it directly from Amazon. Assuming that "didn't purchase from Amazon" means "didn't actually buy the product" is naive in that case.
Apple, on the other hand, I agree with you on. So long as their system is so locked down that you basically can't buy things anywhere but through them, restricting reviews to purchasers makes perfect sense. There may be a very small number of people who got the app someplace else and has a legitimate review, but most likely these are people who never bought it.
The only question, I suppose, is whether or not blocking people who didn't buy the product is worth losing potentially legitimate reviews from people who didn't personally buy it but have legitimately used it. Those who use it on a friend's or companies' phone or the like.
O I know they aren't going to put it back.. which is why everyone will be downloading this via torrent and feeling good about it...
Yeah, that's why. Whine and cry and then pirate a game because you don't get your way. You sure showed them, they'll be positively clamoring to give you everything you want next time!
You know what claiming you're going to pirate a game because the Big Bad Creators didn't give you something you want says? It says "I love your game so much I can't live without it, despite you not giving me what I want. Therefore I am going to be a petulant child."
Good luck with that. Whatever moral justifications you try to shroud it in, you're just a self-entitled brat crying because he doesn't get his way.
You want to make a point about how important LAN play is to their game? Don't play their fucking game.
What makes it illegal? The only reason Comcast has a monopoly is due to a deal with your municipality. Raise hell and get some competition.
That's true only insofar as you said "monopoly" instead of "duopoly."
Yes, these kinds of deals are regulated by the municipality, but the reality is that something like cable television service is essentially a natural monopoly. Not only do you not want multiple people running lines to your house, either pragmatically or from an economic efficiency standpoint, it's not like there's some backlog of companies with billions of dollars in capital eager to rush right into the market but for those pesky municipal governments. So long as these companies are allowed to own the lines, that's all that will ever be possible.
What is far more likely is a situation like we have with the wireless companies or record labels: Technically there's competition, and occasionally that even helps out, but in bulk everything looks suspiciously the same between "competitors."
The "average American" needs cable?
Judging by the number of houses with cable, the "average American" certainly seems to think so. Who are you to judge for them?
Because the people who can currently afford to and do pay for it would feel slighted?
No. Because "tear down the paywall" is accompanied by "and find some other way to pay for it." That probably means tax dollars, or chances are you haven't actually solved the problem you set out to solve.
In other words, you're subsidizing the use of people who not only can afford to pay, but make a living related to it: Lawyers and judges who need to use it in the course of their highly-lucrative businesses; media outlets who are using it to research for a story that they then sell to you, directly or via advertising; and bulk-aggregators, who are likely just taking the information to present it to you in a different way that they hope to make money from.
Maybe that's worth it to save the idly-curious or academic types money in accessing it. That's a decision we have to make as a society. But no longer charging for access doesn't actually make it free. Somebody's paying. At issue is who that should be.
MS claiming linux violates 235 patents without telling which ones, is not patent trolling?
Nope. So many people think like you seem to: That "patent troll" means "somebody doing something with patents that I don't like." That's not at all what it is.
Patent trolls are companies who exist to do nothing but create patents. These companies never produce anything, they just hope to either force licensing fees from people who are actually creating or, if that company is particularly rich, they wait around for the product in question to become popular, sue them for huge damages and then force licensing fees going forward.
As somebody else said, Microsoft's claims about linux violating its patents is excellent FUD--whether it turns out to be true or not--but they're not patent trolling. Not even close.
Besides, for the crybabies who keep repeating the "Slashdot hates microsoft" story. Look at the rating parent earned.
He's rated a four and you're rated a five, as of this writing. If we insist on drawing something from that I'd say it goes more to prove the point than disprove it. Though in the interest of, you know, logic and reasonableness instead of red herrings, I feel obligated to point out that "Slashdot hates microsoft[sic]" is in no way disproven by a post getting modded up.
But this ignores the constitutional requirement that it promote progress
Is there such a requirement? Can you point to case law indicating one way or another? I could easily see there being rulings that "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts" is merely explanatory, and does not impose any requirements on the patent process.
dozens of comments suggesting that this should not be done by the ISP but in the browser get modded +5 and are generally agreed with.
Other than you, I've never seen anybody suggest that.
Error messages mean something. They shouldn't be hijacked by anbybody from anywhere. True, it's worse at the ISP level because it would even interfere with, for example, a shell script that was relying on the error codes to decide what to do, but that doesn't mean it's good at the browser level either.
I shouldn't have to scan around a search engine's page to determine what the hell just happened to me, assuming it even bothers to say anywhere that I typed something wrong instead of just dumping me there or "helpfully" providing a list of things I might have meant (sorted by advertising dollars and then relevancy, of course). An error code response should come up as an error, plain and simple.
I'm sure of it. Americans consistently are the most productive overall, and they rank #2 in value-added-per-hour worked to Norway. Our productivity growth per new worker is the highest in the world. All of this according to the UN. Granted it was in late 2007 and the recession may have taken a bite out of the numbers, but it's the most recent data I could find. This is the first link I found about it, though it's a much more shallow analysis than I remember reading some time ago. You may want to search some more.
You can debate the relative merits of each approach for yourself, I'm merely supplying the data. Personally I tend to lean toward the European approach, and while I consider myself as patriotic as the next guy I'm not sure what all the dick-waiving over things like GDP is supposed to be about. To quote Robert Kennedy:
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
His attacks on Intelligent design serve as a front for him to attack religion as a whole.
I don't really know Dawkins or his positions, but if he's anything like me you probably need to separate faith and religion to understand the point.
Like you, I don't believe in a god. Like you, I don't find evolution and belief in a god to be mutually exclusive. And hey, maybe there's even some religions out there that believe in both. But they're not the mainstream Christian religions. They're certainly not the Catholic religion in which I was raised, and though I'm certainly no religious scholar, I don't believe they're the Jewish or Muslim religions either. Their beliefs are more along the lines of "God did it, shut up" than any attempt to jive their beliefs with what science has come to teach us.
In fact, maybe it's my personal biases but that's how intelligent design sounds to me. "Oh, everything we've been saying for the past 100 years is wrong? Well then. God did it, shut up." I don't think you can really reconcile those religions with evolution. If intelligent design is intended to be that bridge, I find it a farce.
That's not to say that I don't think there are men and women of faith out there who came to those conclusions on their own. Who, in a sense, invented their own religion by taking the parts of various religions that they liked and the parts of various science that they liked. I'm not sure that's a great approach if there IS a god, but I have no particular problem with it. I would even tend to admire their willingness to logically and thoughtfully evaluate something on its merits rather than just throwing their hands up and saying "it's the word of God!!!" But these are a minority, and it's their faith that comes through. Not their religion.
Even science, even though it is evidence based, does rely on a certain amount of faith (that earlier theories are correct, that scientists in fields you're not familiar with are correct).
That's half true and half wrong. I see another poster already pointed out some differences between faith and trust, so I'll avoid that part. But consider this: Science is built on the assumption of being wrong. A good scientist will never say he has proven anything; he'll merely say his evidence supports it. On the flip side, they'll happily tell you that their evidence disproves something. Science relies on predicting the future reliably with some set of information. "If A and B, then according to my theory, C." Over and over again, until there is a body of evidence that leads us to believe strongly that it is correct. Religion is exactly the opposite. It sits in the holes of our knowledge. Aside from some "ZOMG END OF THE WORLD!!" parts, it makes no predictions. It is, simply put, that if we don't know how or why something happens, it's God, and we should shut up. Over and over again as we've filled those holes in our knowledge, the response of major religions is akin to "oh. Oops. Forget we said that. But you'd better believe all the rest or you'll burn in a fiery hell for all of eternity." That's simply not intellectually honest. And as the "oh, oops, forget we said that's" build up it really does discredit those religions as a whole.
Again, separate religion and faith. One I have no problem with, though I don't personally hold. One I would join Thomas Jefferson in calling "tyranny over the mind of man." It's easy to tell which is which.
I'm not the OP, but I think I understand what he's saying.
In FF, the tabs are rounded at the bottom. In other words, they're "attached" to the browser on the top end, facing your URL bar, and then they extend into the dead space that is the tab bar.
What I think he's saying is that he feels it should attach the other way, at the bottom. The active tab would therefore blend into the page you're viewing while the other tabs would jut out of the top of that page. It would literally look as though the active tab was part of the page.
Personally I don't care that much. I'm just trying to articulate his point.
You're certainly free to distribute your software however you please, but if these were your feelings about open source software --
I used to open-source everything I do. No more. [. ..] No forking either - you don't get to take the results of my work, add a few things and distribute, creating confusion and incompatibility, which lead users to other products all together and hurt me
-- then I honestly don't understand why you ever decided to open source anything to begin with. You seem actively bitter about the possibility of forks while explicitly choosing a license that not only allows them, but makes it so simple that it basically encourages them.
I read this story earlier on CNN and I'm frankly shocked that it made it on Slashdot.
That said, I wouldn't say the title is accurate. While I agree that the lawsuit is ridiculously stupid, the submitter definitely put his own slant on things. Calling somebody "unemployable" for having a 2.7 GPA is both stupid and foolish, and frankly, since we're in the realm of lawsuits already, it borders on slanderous. Hell, even calling her a C student isn't particularly accurate; she's neither a C nor a B student, but she's closer to the latter. It's roughly the average of three B's and a C per term. Not stellar, but not poor. And certainly not unemployable.
The person who filed the lawsuit certainly seems to me to be a self-entitled whiner, but the submitter isn't much better. He's just a self-important ass who feels good about himself by putting down others. "Look everybody! A C student! Point and laugh, point and laugh!" Grow up buddy. </rant>
Maybe teachers could be more interesting; certainly some of them could. The more important issue at stake is that these children aren't taking their educations seriously and they're using "but he's boring!" as an excuse. We've all had boring teachers, and the vast majority of us still managed to pass the class. Most of us probably even did well. Are we somehow immune to boringness?
If students aren't taking their own education seriously for whatever reason, that's the problem of the student and that student's parents to work through. The teachers, at best, can aide the process along. They're not these students' mommies or daddies. Their job is to teach, the learning rests on the students.
You're right in theory, but I don't think it would happen in practice.
It seems to me that EULAs are legal or they're not. Obviously if they slip something in about your first born child being sacrified to Satan or something that's not going to hold up, but the entire point of an EULA is to restrict the user and/or limit the seller's liability. The user gets nothing from an EULA but the "right" to use the item they've already purchased subject to somebody else's terms.
To me, that just by itself crosses the line of being too one-sided to be conscionable. I'm not a judge, of course, and I don't get to make those decisions. But if it passes muster with that being the reality of what an EULA is, I don't see how dumping a few extra clauses in is going to tip the balance.
In other words, an EULA is one-sided to begin with. That's acceptable or it's not without really factoring in future hypothetical changes.
On Linux, Skype is buggy as hell. It would be actually good if they go away and someone like Google step in with something functional.
Yeah, it would be fantastic for the millions of Skype users if it went away.
Except no, it wouldn't. It might be good for you if they did, assuming Google or whoever replaces them actually cares any more about Linux than Skype/eBay did. For everybody else it's an unwanted hassle at best.
Seemingly unlike you, he's capable of reading entire sentences at a time. I'll help you out and complete the sentence you're selectively quoting:
There is also legislation in the works that would require states to impose a ban on text messaging while driving or lose a significant portion of their federal highway funding.
Or heck, if you want to keep with the linked source:
States would be required to ban driving while texting or face the loss of highway funds under legislation being pushed by a group of Democratic senators.
The only people who would have any cause to know about the federal legislation are state lawmakers, and believe me, if this passes, they're going to know in a hurry.
I'm not a big fan of the end-around around states' rights by essentially forcing them to pass the law the federal government wants by tying it to funding, but the world is what it is. States can't sit around whining about states' rights at the same time they're pocketing litereally billions of federal dollars. At least not if they're being intellectually honest.
Legality is almost irrelevant when the capability and desire is widespread.
True. But what does that have to do with attacking cell towers?
Put aside the other idiocies of the argument Apple is making. They're asking us to believe that somewhere out there is a hacker, willing and able to take down an entire provider's--and why not the entire nation's?--cell phone towers. And this dastardly plan would come to fruition if only they could figure out how to jailbreak their iPhones!!
Give me a break. If the networks ARE that staggeringly vulnerable I can guarantee it's not the "jailbreak iphone" step that's stopping it from happening.
but her employer did worse by firing her over it instead of a reprimand. People make mistakes -- Good managers understand that and work to correct the behavior. Bad managers paper over their own asses, and wind up costing their company/organization both human resources and morale
Let me start out by saying that I agree with the sentiment of what the press secretary posted. I think the entire situation is ludicrous, but primarily I think the fact that the President of the United States felt the need to stick his nose into what should be a local law enforcement issue at best pretty much takes the cake. That his non-apology, quivering-mass-of-indecision "apology" not only made everything worse, but made him look like an idiot.
I do agree with your sentiment as well, generally speaking. But not in this case. This is politics, where appearance is every bit as important as reality. These comments will hurt the borough president; it will affect his ability to do his job well. It will affect his relationships with people he needs. To have her simply resign (and it may well have been her idea; as a press secretary it certainly should have been) and get it behind him is the best thing for him and for his constituents.
Clearly, the action cost him whatever talent it can be said that this press secretary had. I highly doubt it will have any effect on morale though; more likely, everybody who continues to work for him is talking about how staggeringly stupid it was for these comments to be uttered. The world of politics and the real world don't always intersect where you would expect them to. These people more than any other know the damage those kind of comments could do; that they should never have been said, in public or semi-private. I suspect they all understand that with the way things unfolded, this was the only course of action. Heck, look at the trouble some Republicans got into for insulting Obama (Obama the Magic Negro and others)--and that's the OPPOSITION. The ones who are supposed to hate him and everything he stands for. Coming from a New York borough president who is undoubtedly a democrat... the outcome was predetermined.
Apparently, when people go online, they forget the social etiquette lessons they learned in grade school -- namely to ignore bullies, loud-mouths, and to have a thick skin, because there are not enough bullets in the world to kill every assh0le you're going to meet.
All fine advice, though I would suggest that "social etiquette lessons" would include not saying those sorts of things in the first place more than ignoring people who do.
Since when relying on a third party, closed, encrypted platform owned by an American company for communications is free speech?
It's not. Using a third-party, closed, encrypted platform owned by an American company for communications without government interference is freedom. The speech that takes place over such a system is free speech, at least until the government can prove its being used for something that doesn't fall under such purview. And no, "but but but what if!" doesn't count. I should be able to use whatever system I choose for my communications, and I should be free to encrypt or not encrypt such communication as it pleases me without having to justify those actions in advance. That is freedom.
You can insert a Soviet Russia joke here if you would like, but it would probably be entirely too accurate.
we forget the security implications of using such solutions for business
I don't agree with your premise, but whatever security implications there may be for businesses should be evaluated and dealt with by those businesses.
If my information is sensitive to my business, then I need to evaluate that as part of a counter-balance against (presumably) the cost-savings involved in going with a solution like Skype. If my communications are sensitive for my government--direct government correspondence, top government contractors like aerospace companies, etc--then the government can be the one to make those evaluations and set their guidelines for the industries they deal with.
But if you think that's actually what this is about, you're deluding yourself.
"In a presentation posted on the lobby's Web site, Vice President of TTK, a telecoms unit of state-owned Russian Railways, Vitaly Kotov, called on regulators to stop VoIP services from causing 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators.'"
From their own mouths. The only "security" concern they care about is that a Russian industry might lose money to an American company. That's not security in any real sense of the word. When you see that, you can be pretty sure the rest of what they have to say is, at least, fear-mongering and lip service to potential concerns. And that's being generous.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read your own links? From the second:
Causing blindness is not a combat function of this weaponry; it's a side-effect of the other side trying to subvert the weapon. They were also not specifically designed to have such an effect. Their goal is to blow shit up from the air, with a particular emphasis on fired projectiles but probably used for vehicles as well (as per this example). In most cases there won't even be anybody around to get blinded.
A bullet through the eye can cause blindness too, that doesn't make it banned. Intent matters.
You also have a much higher chance of getting hit by lightning than you do drowning while standing in a parking lot in Las Vegas.
Statistics are meaningless without context. Drunk driving accidents happen a lot because there are lots of cars all over the place, and altogether too many people getting drunk and operating them. Cannon accidents are rare because there simply aren't that many people fucking around with cannons.
That doesn't mean that if there's some 11 year old kid with a working cannon a block or two down that the odds don't shift. Does that mean we should take it away? Not necessarily, but this kid and his parents had better hope nothing bad ever happens. It stands a fantastic chance of ruining their lives as well as other peoples'.
The problem is that these all have varying degrees of potential failure. Jumping off Half Dome or skydiving and not pulling the chute? Pretty good chance you'll die, and quickly--but if you don't, there's also a high risk you live in agony for hours, probably destroyed so bodily that you couldn't even do anything to finish the job. And god help you if somebody saw it happen and called an ambulance that ended up saving your life. There was a story just a few days ago about an Australian quadraplegic getting a court to acknowledge his right to die--but of course nobody can help him, so he has to waste away by starvation.
Drowning? I don't know. I've heard it said that drowning is actually a pretty horrible way to die. A bullet isn't surefire either, of course, but a sufficiently high-caliber weapon in the proper location comes awfully close.
Either way, if somebody's going to commit suicide they should couple whatever action they choose with a Do Not Resuscitate order. Of course the best solution is for us as a society to get over this "ZOMG LIFE IS TOO SACRED TO HELP SOMEBODY DIE, HE'LL HAVE TO DO IT HIMSELF AND SUFFER IN AGONY!" thing and just provide ways of helping people end their lives.
Yes.
I ordinarily agree with you about things in history. I don't pass moral judgments about all the wars fought for control or expansions of lands in antiquity.
But those, at least, have some logic to them. Land is money and power and strength and whatever comes with it. Regardless of the morality of it, it's a fight for a clear reason. This isn't that. This is codified homophobia. Preventing gay people from having sex doesn't help anybody. It doesn't suddenly turn them straight. On the flip side, it actively hurts them. It's not a victor and a loser, just losers. All the supporters of this sort of law won is a smug self-assurance that hurting people they don't like somehow makes them right.
Nor is this simply an opinion. I find it repugnant, but I'm not going to make a big deal out of people who believe gays are bad. I do have a problem with people who decide that the law needs to hurt people for being something they don't approve of. The fact that you think that's okay at any point in history, much less a mere 50-100 years ago, is something I find sad.
Yep. Then again I'm not one of those people who get hysterical about pedophiles to begin with. Frankly, that's one of the reasons. Whether we find it's a normal part of human sexuality or something actively different in the brains of these people, I think ultimately what we will find out is that it's something largely outside of their control.
Before anybody goes and accuses me of supporting adults raping children, no: Rape is rape, sexual abuse is sexual abuse, and children are children. There's more at hand than simply whether or not sexual attraction to children should be illegal.
I would agree if this was something that took a lot of money, time or resources to fulfill. In that sense it's simply not worth it.
But it's a couple hours of time to write up a nice little speech, maybe some time to put it up for a vote so you can say everybody supports it, and you're done. It's an acknowledgment that we understand what was done was wrong, and that we're committed to not letting it happen again. It's unfortunate that such an apology comes 50 years too late for a high-profile example and the motivation for the entire movement to hear, but that doesn't make it worthless.
In this case, the better question is what sense does it make to block or demean such an apology? There's obviously a value to the people asking for it, and seemingly no harm in granting it. It is, in essence, the exact opposite of those old laws they're condemning.
No. More like "prostitutes are demanding that the government stop paying other prostitutes to have sex with anybody who asks."
The issue isn't "free vs. paid," because in both cases somebody is paying. He's arguing that the government paying for one group makes it nearly impossible for groups that aren't government-subsidized to compete.
Rather than throwing out crass Slashdot idioms as if they're insightful, why not try actually debating what was said on its own merits? The questions should be "is he right and to what degree?" and "do we really care as a society?" Not "ZOMG CORPORATIONS WANT MONEY LULZ."
Even if that weren't a silly position, "needs a new organ" does not instantaneously mean "genetically weak." In fact I would be willing to bet that more people need organ transplants due to trauma or disease than do because of any genetic problems*.
So sign the damn card.
* I'm not including things like being an alcoholic here, because being so makes you ineligible to receive a new organ. To put it in an overly-simplistic way, if you've caused the problems yourself you're typically disqualified from a replacement organ.
Amazon shouldn't restrict reviews. There's simply too many other places to buy books, music, appliances, etc etc and the reviews of those purchasers have the potential to be every bit as valid and useful as people who bought it directly from Amazon. Assuming that "didn't purchase from Amazon" means "didn't actually buy the product" is naive in that case.
Apple, on the other hand, I agree with you on. So long as their system is so locked down that you basically can't buy things anywhere but through them, restricting reviews to purchasers makes perfect sense. There may be a very small number of people who got the app someplace else and has a legitimate review, but most likely these are people who never bought it.
The only question, I suppose, is whether or not blocking people who didn't buy the product is worth losing potentially legitimate reviews from people who didn't personally buy it but have legitimately used it. Those who use it on a friend's or companies' phone or the like.
Yeah, that's why. Whine and cry and then pirate a game because you don't get your way. You sure showed them, they'll be positively clamoring to give you everything you want next time!
You know what claiming you're going to pirate a game because the Big Bad Creators didn't give you something you want says? It says "I love your game so much I can't live without it, despite you not giving me what I want. Therefore I am going to be a petulant child."
Good luck with that. Whatever moral justifications you try to shroud it in, you're just a self-entitled brat crying because he doesn't get his way.
You want to make a point about how important LAN play is to their game? Don't play their fucking game.
That's true only insofar as you said "monopoly" instead of "duopoly."
Yes, these kinds of deals are regulated by the municipality, but the reality is that something like cable television service is essentially a natural monopoly. Not only do you not want multiple people running lines to your house, either pragmatically or from an economic efficiency standpoint, it's not like there's some backlog of companies with billions of dollars in capital eager to rush right into the market but for those pesky municipal governments. So long as these companies are allowed to own the lines, that's all that will ever be possible.
What is far more likely is a situation like we have with the wireless companies or record labels: Technically there's competition, and occasionally that even helps out, but in bulk everything looks suspiciously the same between "competitors."
Judging by the number of houses with cable, the "average American" certainly seems to think so. Who are you to judge for them?
No. Because "tear down the paywall" is accompanied by "and find some other way to pay for it." That probably means tax dollars, or chances are you haven't actually solved the problem you set out to solve.
In other words, you're subsidizing the use of people who not only can afford to pay, but make a living related to it: Lawyers and judges who need to use it in the course of their highly-lucrative businesses; media outlets who are using it to research for a story that they then sell to you, directly or via advertising; and bulk-aggregators, who are likely just taking the information to present it to you in a different way that they hope to make money from.
Maybe that's worth it to save the idly-curious or academic types money in accessing it. That's a decision we have to make as a society. But no longer charging for access doesn't actually make it free. Somebody's paying. At issue is who that should be.
Nope. So many people think like you seem to: That "patent troll" means "somebody doing something with patents that I don't like." That's not at all what it is.
Patent trolls are companies who exist to do nothing but create patents. These companies never produce anything, they just hope to either force licensing fees from people who are actually creating or, if that company is particularly rich, they wait around for the product in question to become popular, sue them for huge damages and then force licensing fees going forward.
As somebody else said, Microsoft's claims about linux violating its patents is excellent FUD--whether it turns out to be true or not--but they're not patent trolling. Not even close.
He's rated a four and you're rated a five, as of this writing. If we insist on drawing something from that I'd say it goes more to prove the point than disprove it. Though in the interest of, you know, logic and reasonableness instead of red herrings, I feel obligated to point out that "Slashdot hates microsoft[sic]" is in no way disproven by a post getting modded up.
Is there such a requirement? Can you point to case law indicating one way or another? I could easily see there being rulings that "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts" is merely explanatory, and does not impose any requirements on the patent process.
Other than you, I've never seen anybody suggest that.
Error messages mean something. They shouldn't be hijacked by anbybody from anywhere. True, it's worse at the ISP level because it would even interfere with, for example, a shell script that was relying on the error codes to decide what to do, but that doesn't mean it's good at the browser level either.
I shouldn't have to scan around a search engine's page to determine what the hell just happened to me, assuming it even bothers to say anywhere that I typed something wrong instead of just dumping me there or "helpfully" providing a list of things I might have meant (sorted by advertising dollars and then relevancy, of course). An error code response should come up as an error, plain and simple.
I'm sure of it. Americans consistently are the most productive overall, and they rank #2 in value-added-per-hour worked to Norway. Our productivity growth per new worker is the highest in the world. All of this according to the UN. Granted it was in late 2007 and the recession may have taken a bite out of the numbers, but it's the most recent data I could find. This is the first link I found about it, though it's a much more shallow analysis than I remember reading some time ago. You may want to search some more.
You can debate the relative merits of each approach for yourself, I'm merely supplying the data. Personally I tend to lean toward the European approach, and while I consider myself as patriotic as the next guy I'm not sure what all the dick-waiving over things like GDP is supposed to be about. To quote Robert Kennedy:
I don't really know Dawkins or his positions, but if he's anything like me you probably need to separate faith and religion to understand the point.
Like you, I don't believe in a god. Like you, I don't find evolution and belief in a god to be mutually exclusive. And hey, maybe there's even some religions out there that believe in both. But they're not the mainstream Christian religions. They're certainly not the Catholic religion in which I was raised, and though I'm certainly no religious scholar, I don't believe they're the Jewish or Muslim religions either. Their beliefs are more along the lines of "God did it, shut up" than any attempt to jive their beliefs with what science has come to teach us.
In fact, maybe it's my personal biases but that's how intelligent design sounds to me. "Oh, everything we've been saying for the past 100 years is wrong? Well then. God did it, shut up." I don't think you can really reconcile those religions with evolution. If intelligent design is intended to be that bridge, I find it a farce.
That's not to say that I don't think there are men and women of faith out there who came to those conclusions on their own. Who, in a sense, invented their own religion by taking the parts of various religions that they liked and the parts of various science that they liked. I'm not sure that's a great approach if there IS a god, but I have no particular problem with it. I would even tend to admire their willingness to logically and thoughtfully evaluate something on its merits rather than just throwing their hands up and saying "it's the word of God!!!" But these are a minority, and it's their faith that comes through. Not their religion.
That's half true and half wrong. I see another poster already pointed out some differences between faith and trust, so I'll avoid that part. But consider this: Science is built on the assumption of being wrong. A good scientist will never say he has proven anything; he'll merely say his evidence supports it. On the flip side, they'll happily tell you that their evidence disproves something. Science relies on predicting the future reliably with some set of information. "If A and B, then according to my theory, C." Over and over again, until there is a body of evidence that leads us to believe strongly that it is correct. Religion is exactly the opposite. It sits in the holes of our knowledge. Aside from some "ZOMG END OF THE WORLD!!" parts, it makes no predictions. It is, simply put, that if we don't know how or why something happens, it's God, and we should shut up. Over and over again as we've filled those holes in our knowledge, the response of major religions is akin to "oh. Oops. Forget we said that. But you'd better believe all the rest or you'll burn in a fiery hell for all of eternity." That's simply not intellectually honest. And as the "oh, oops, forget we said that's" build up it really does discredit those religions as a whole.
Again, separate religion and faith. One I have no problem with, though I don't personally hold. One I would join Thomas Jefferson in calling "tyranny over the mind of man." It's easy to tell which is which.
I'm not the OP, but I think I understand what he's saying.
In FF, the tabs are rounded at the bottom. In other words, they're "attached" to the browser on the top end, facing your URL bar, and then they extend into the dead space that is the tab bar.
What I think he's saying is that he feels it should attach the other way, at the bottom. The active tab would therefore blend into the page you're viewing while the other tabs would jut out of the top of that page. It would literally look as though the active tab was part of the page.
Personally I don't care that much. I'm just trying to articulate his point.
You're certainly free to distribute your software however you please, but if these were your feelings about open source software --
-- then I honestly don't understand why you ever decided to open source anything to begin with. You seem actively bitter about the possibility of forks while explicitly choosing a license that not only allows them, but makes it so simple that it basically encourages them.
I read this story earlier on CNN and I'm frankly shocked that it made it on Slashdot.
That said, I wouldn't say the title is accurate. While I agree that the lawsuit is ridiculously stupid, the submitter definitely put his own slant on things. Calling somebody "unemployable" for having a 2.7 GPA is both stupid and foolish, and frankly, since we're in the realm of lawsuits already, it borders on slanderous. Hell, even calling her a C student isn't particularly accurate; she's neither a C nor a B student, but she's closer to the latter. It's roughly the average of three B's and a C per term. Not stellar, but not poor. And certainly not unemployable.
The person who filed the lawsuit certainly seems to me to be a self-entitled whiner, but the submitter isn't much better. He's just a self-important ass who feels good about himself by putting down others. "Look everybody! A C student! Point and laugh, point and laugh!" Grow up buddy. </rant>
I think that's exactly the wrong attitude.
Maybe teachers could be more interesting; certainly some of them could. The more important issue at stake is that these children aren't taking their educations seriously and they're using "but he's boring!" as an excuse. We've all had boring teachers, and the vast majority of us still managed to pass the class. Most of us probably even did well. Are we somehow immune to boringness?
If students aren't taking their own education seriously for whatever reason, that's the problem of the student and that student's parents to work through. The teachers, at best, can aide the process along. They're not these students' mommies or daddies. Their job is to teach, the learning rests on the students.
You're right in theory, but I don't think it would happen in practice.
It seems to me that EULAs are legal or they're not. Obviously if they slip something in about your first born child being sacrified to Satan or something that's not going to hold up, but the entire point of an EULA is to restrict the user and/or limit the seller's liability. The user gets nothing from an EULA but the "right" to use the item they've already purchased subject to somebody else's terms.
To me, that just by itself crosses the line of being too one-sided to be conscionable. I'm not a judge, of course, and I don't get to make those decisions. But if it passes muster with that being the reality of what an EULA is, I don't see how dumping a few extra clauses in is going to tip the balance.
In other words, an EULA is one-sided to begin with. That's acceptable or it's not without really factoring in future hypothetical changes.
Yeah, it would be fantastic for the millions of Skype users if it went away.
Except no, it wouldn't. It might be good for you if they did, assuming Google or whoever replaces them actually cares any more about Linux than Skype/eBay did. For everybody else it's an unwanted hassle at best.
Seemingly unlike you, he's capable of reading entire sentences at a time. I'll help you out and complete the sentence you're selectively quoting:
Or heck, if you want to keep with the linked source:
The only people who would have any cause to know about the federal legislation are state lawmakers, and believe me, if this passes, they're going to know in a hurry.
I'm not a big fan of the end-around around states' rights by essentially forcing them to pass the law the federal government wants by tying it to funding, but the world is what it is. States can't sit around whining about states' rights at the same time they're pocketing litereally billions of federal dollars. At least not if they're being intellectually honest.
True. But what does that have to do with attacking cell towers?
Put aside the other idiocies of the argument Apple is making. They're asking us to believe that somewhere out there is a hacker, willing and able to take down an entire provider's--and why not the entire nation's?--cell phone towers. And this dastardly plan would come to fruition if only they could figure out how to jailbreak their iPhones!!
Give me a break. If the networks ARE that staggeringly vulnerable I can guarantee it's not the "jailbreak iphone" step that's stopping it from happening.
Rot in hell, Apple. You lying douchebags.
Let me start out by saying that I agree with the sentiment of what the press secretary posted. I think the entire situation is ludicrous, but primarily I think the fact that the President of the United States felt the need to stick his nose into what should be a local law enforcement issue at best pretty much takes the cake. That his non-apology, quivering-mass-of-indecision "apology" not only made everything worse, but made him look like an idiot.
I do agree with your sentiment as well, generally speaking. But not in this case. This is politics, where appearance is every bit as important as reality. These comments will hurt the borough president; it will affect his ability to do his job well. It will affect his relationships with people he needs. To have her simply resign (and it may well have been her idea; as a press secretary it certainly should have been) and get it behind him is the best thing for him and for his constituents.
Clearly, the action cost him whatever talent it can be said that this press secretary had. I highly doubt it will have any effect on morale though; more likely, everybody who continues to work for him is talking about how staggeringly stupid it was for these comments to be uttered. The world of politics and the real world don't always intersect where you would expect them to. These people more than any other know the damage those kind of comments could do; that they should never have been said, in public or semi-private. I suspect they all understand that with the way things unfolded, this was the only course of action. Heck, look at the trouble some Republicans got into for insulting Obama (Obama the Magic Negro and others)--and that's the OPPOSITION. The ones who are supposed to hate him and everything he stands for. Coming from a New York borough president who is undoubtedly a democrat... the outcome was predetermined.
All fine advice, though I would suggest that "social etiquette lessons" would include not saying those sorts of things in the first place more than ignoring people who do.
It's not. Using a third-party, closed, encrypted platform owned by an American company for communications without government interference is freedom. The speech that takes place over such a system is free speech, at least until the government can prove its being used for something that doesn't fall under such purview. And no, "but but but what if!" doesn't count. I should be able to use whatever system I choose for my communications, and I should be free to encrypt or not encrypt such communication as it pleases me without having to justify those actions in advance. That is freedom.
You can insert a Soviet Russia joke here if you would like, but it would probably be entirely too accurate.
I don't agree with your premise, but whatever security implications there may be for businesses should be evaluated and dealt with by those businesses.
If my information is sensitive to my business, then I need to evaluate that as part of a counter-balance against (presumably) the cost-savings involved in going with a solution like Skype. If my communications are sensitive for my government--direct government correspondence, top government contractors like aerospace companies, etc--then the government can be the one to make those evaluations and set their guidelines for the industries they deal with.
But if you think that's actually what this is about, you're deluding yourself.
"In a presentation posted on the lobby's Web site, Vice President of TTK, a telecoms unit of state-owned Russian Railways, Vitaly Kotov, called on regulators to stop VoIP services from causing 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators.'"
From their own mouths. The only "security" concern they care about is that a Russian industry might lose money to an American company. That's not security in any real sense of the word. When you see that, you can be pretty sure the rest of what they have to say is, at least, fear-mongering and lip service to potential concerns. And that's being generous.