Liars like to claim Al Gore "won" the popular vote, but that is a false claim; he had less than 1% difference, and the average error rate of voting machines across the US is somewhere between 2-3%
"Liars" like to claim that? Wow, biased much?
Yes, there is a rate of error in voting machines and there is a rate of error in hand-counting. For starters, let's call it 3% for argument and make this point: Margin of error means it's just as likely that Al Gore won the popular vote by 4% as it is that he lost the popular vote by 2%. This has nothing to do with "lying."
Further, recounts are subject to the same types of errors, in addition to the lack of uniformality in determining what votes are ultimately counted the next time around. There's nothing to say that it can't end up Gore +1%, Bush +2%, Gore +1%, Gore +4% if you recount it three times after the election. In fact if you harken back to the Florida recounts, I'm fairly certain it changed several times during the recounts (yes, plural) before the USSC finally stepped in and said "seriously, just stop."
In other words, you're never going to get a TRULY accurate count on a scale like this. At some point you need to simply accept that there will always be a margin of error, that it may at times completely change outcomes, and simply decide that you've been as thorough, fair and accurate as possible and this is the result. Calling people liars for using the official, certified election results just makes you look like an ass, and all this nonsense about margins of error makes it seem like you have an axe to grind. Against both Gore and Franken. Put those two together and it paints an altogether unflattering portrait of your impartiality.
I stopped believing in democracy once I realised that after a certain point, it becomes mob rule by the LEAST informed.
You say that, seemingly with some certainty that that is a bad thing. It's a perfectly valid opinion to have, of course; I think a lot of people are of the mind that the best and brightest should be the ones in charge.
The problem is it's a balancing act on all sides. Let me throw out just a couple of potential issues with the "enlightened oligarchy"-style approach:
1. Who determines who is "smart enough" to vote/rule?
2. Being smart might mean you make better decisions than somebody of below-average intelligence. It's certainly no guarantee.
3. Related to #2 above, even if smart people DID always make better overall decisions, those decisions might not be better FOR ME. So if I'm below-average intelligence, why should I not be permitted a say in who rules me and the kind of decisions they're going to make?
4. Intelligence tends to lead to strong idealism -- but idealism seldom works in the real world, in my observation. Libertarians, to throw out an example, worship the free market's ability to fix just about everything. In reality (at least in my opinion) it doesn't work that way, and true free markets rarely exist at all. Where, after all, is everybody truly, completely informed about all of their product choices? How often is a market completely dominated by pure logic and efficiency instead of "fashion" or the shininess of a particular brand?
5. Smart people aren't necessarily decisive people. Being the smartest person in the world matters very little if you're unable to render timely decisions.
6. People tend to be self-interested. The fact that a system sets up the smart people to rule over the dumb inherently means the dumb are likely to be poorly represented. We can argue the merits of smart people making decisions, but hopefully we can all agree that a government should work equally well for all its citizens? If we're just going to go Darwin on their asses, then there's very little reason for them not to simply kill their ever-so-smart rulers. They'll surely have them outnumbered.
That's just a handful off the top of my head; I'm sure with some real thought we could come up with many, many more.
There's a saying, something along the lines of "half the people are below average" (which I assume if we're being pedantic and caring about peoples' "smartness," should be changed to "below median.") These are not lesser people, why should they be permitted little or no voice in their rulers, little or no say in decisions, with little or no recourse? Democracy is mob rule by average people, yes, but that's what it's intended to be. Philosophically, most people contend that's the most fair approach.
What would be nice is if only people who were truly well informed about a particular topic weigh in (and who decides that? heh), but it's not particularly practical. Fairness is important in politics, even if it means we're never likely to reach some ideal state.
This is exactly why we have an electoral college - because the founders couldn't figure out a better way to allow smaller, lesser represented areas and states have a stake in the Presidency.
Actually, the Electoral College was intended to protect against uneducated people and stupid decisions. If you follow the history, the original electors were under no obligation whatsoever to vote the way their state did. That only came along later by various state laws; indeed, you can see that in this very proposal. If electors were under a constitutional obligation to vote one way or another, Iowa would have no authority to have them vote with the national majority regardless of their own state's voting. Or look at the other discrepancy: Most states throw all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state, but there are several (3 I believe?) states who apportion their electoral votes proportionally to their state vote.
Using your population number and this Wikipedia article for the population of states, we can see that the least populous state has 621,270 people or 0.20% of the population, and 3/538 or 0.55% of the electoral votes. I wouldn't exactly call this overwhelming, much less the point the system was created. And in fact, the reality is exactly opposite: Califorina has 12% of the population and 9.9% of the electoral vote. That means that any given candidate would need to receive 9.9/12 or 82.5% of the vote in California to receive the equivilant electoral votes as they state has population (please feel free to check my math there). In fact, though, they simply need to receive 1 vote more than 50%. This does not increase the power of the smaller states by any means; it makes them essentially irrelevant. Popular votes tend to be relatively close, within a couple million of each other -- certainly in the territory of where the 620,000 people in Vermont really can have a decent impact on the election. Instead, though, candidates simply focus on a handful of key states and essentially ignore the rest. Any attention Iowa gets is purely related to their caucuses being the first primary stop, not due to their actual influence on the final presidential elections. Use Vermont as your example and see how much attention the Electoral College affords this small state.
but changing this law in some peacemeal fashion only stops your state's citizens from being represented
They're not, as the summary indicated. The law goes into effect when enough states have passed similar laws to have 270 electoral votes; enough votes to elect a president. At that point, the people who get screwed are the ones living in states who have not signed up, whose electoral votes are, quite literally, meaningless, and who are essentially voting only in the national vote whether they realize it or not. I'm not sure I support the law, but I do have to recognize it's fairly clever--and equally doomed.
If I were a voter in Iowa, I simply wouldn't vote because I now realize that the entire election, at least for my state, is being decided by California, New York, Pennsylvania, etc.
Notwithstanding the above, the only difference between then and now is which states are deciding the election. California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania are the most populous states. What are considered the "swing states" in just about every election? Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Ohio. Ironically, if you go down the most populated list two more entries they are Ohio and Michigan. California and Texas are basically a wash, since California always breaks for the Dems and Texas always for the Republicans, which is why they're not on the swing state list (as opposed to not having enough influence). The difference appears to be whether you'd prefer New York and Illinois, or Michigan an
In the US, you have a lot more protection when you do things like that than many other countries. What I'm saying pertains to US law. (And of course, IANAL.)
The best way to do so is to state your idea as an opinion. Silly though it may seem, "I think XYZ is a pedophile" is legally distinct from "XYZ is a pedophile." Following that, give your reasoning. Libel in the US means you knew what you were saying was false (sometimes the judge/jury will also call it libel if you have no good reason to believe it was true). "I think XYZ is a pedophile because I saw him pull his van up and talk to little children" is infinitely more defensible than even "I think XYZ is a pedophile" was. Of course if you're making any of that up you'll be worse off than you started, but your question was one about having a legitimate discussion about legitimate beliefs.
Libel also requires that your comments be maliciously intended. A discussion format itself is going to put you in a better legal situation than simply one-line trolls about how evil somebody is. It's going to be fairly hard to convince most people that you and some other people going back and forth about what you think and what you saw to make you think it is all an elaborate setup to libel somebody.
Assuming you're not a participant in the case and are under no sort of gag order, there should be no difference if you discuss one pre- or post-trial. I'd probably tread lightly on people found not guilty though; I don't know if a court making a finding of fact gets you in more hot water if you rail against it. The OJ situation wasn't a great one to bring up in this regard; he was found not guilty, yes, but also liable for their deaths. It was basically a split decision.
Of course, the bottom line in the US is this: Anybody has the right to sue you for anything. If it doesn't pass some basic sniff tests or the statute of limitations has expired, it might be thrown out immediately -- but it still means that the suit was filed, there's a record and you probably had to pay for a few hours of a lawyers' time to make the motions. Being victorious legally doesn't mean you haven't also been ruined financially. So, I think the best advice is that you need to be sure what you're doing is worth the potential headaches. In most cases it's probably not.
How much does it cost to build, staff, maintain and jail these people we aren't willing to spend $500k to educate? How much to hire the extra police offers to handle the increase in crime when an uneducated populace is forced into poverty and finds itself with no other means to support themselves? And how much of a total drain is that on society, considering they may have had jobs and made at least SOME money (even if it was minimum wage) and now they're purely leeches on the taxpayers who contribute absolutely nothing back?
I have absolutely no problem spending $500k per student on education, even if that number weren't horribly inflated by, you know, building places to teach students and hiring people to teach them. (In reality I suspect the number is closer to about $20k spent per student, assuming something like $1500/year/student for 13 years of education. Even if that number were 5x's higher, we'd still be 5x's lower than the number you quoted. Of course there are construction costs and other costs to education, but folding them in and claiming "ZOMG YOU CAN'T DO IT WITH $500K PER STUDENT OMGWTF!" seems rather disingenuous to me.)
In fact, I'd have little problem spending more. The only issue I have is that I don't think it will help. I honestly don't know what the problems are in public education, and I suspect most slashdotters don't really know either. The vast majority of us here were likely to be the "smart kids," who, whether we liked school or not, had very little trouble doing well. Most of us probably went to college, and a significant portion of us probably are earning fairly high salaries (or at least we were before the economy tanked). This doesn't provide us a great perspective into figuring out why other children are failing, and leads to the idiocy I've seen some other people post in this thread ("maybe children are just stupid." Really? Then stop bitching about their test scores). Some of it is probably bad teachers, in turn caused at least in part by teachers unions; I think a large portion of it is parents foisting their own responsibilities for their children's education and well-being onto the schools. I'm sure there's even more problems with even more blame to go around.
Regardless, I think we can all agree that there are schools in this nation, particularly in poor urban areas, that literally are falling apart; that have to modify school buses into "mobile classrooms" and stick children outside just to have another room for them to learn in. Maybe all of that would go away if they just fixed other inefficiencies, but until that day comes I'm not willing to throw away the futures of those children and I'm certainly not willing to do so without maning up and taking responsibility for it. I don't know what the larger education problems are or what to do about them, but I know we can fix THAT nonsense pretty fast. So let's do it. It WILL help children, at least a little; it WILL have a long-term positive impact; it WILL create short-term jobs--simply put, it will do all of the things this stimulus bill is hoping to do. It probably won't bring test scores up. That's a shame, and it's something we need to look at very careful and work on very diligently, but it's another discussion.
Folding all of this crap together is why nothing gets done. So many of us here have an engineering-type mindset, so let's use it: Let's break the problem down into manageable pieces and tackle them. Surely teaching students outside in buses being bad is something we can get together on?
It doesn't tell you whether the article is truthful or not; there's no automated system that will do that, since it would have to be pre-programmed by people to know what "truth" is anyway (in addition to all of the other complications of actually getting such a task done).
However, if there is some sort of edit war on a page, regardless of whether or not it's only between one nut with an agenda and the rest of the sane world, it still means that at any given moment, as I hit a wikipedia page, there's a greater chance that I've hit the nutjob's edits instead of the sane world's compared to a page with no such conflict going on. That's still good to know. Hopefully they've built some sort of timer into the algorithm such that if the edit war has been over for a year, it doesn't raise as much of a stink over it.
What would be even more useful is if it checked what the changes were. Revert-revert-revert-revert is a different issue than newstuff-newstuff-newstuff-newstuff is different than newstuff-revert-newstuff-revert even though all three are comprised of four edits.
And there will still be a business incentive to do is if that's what police departments and local governments want to drive up their own revenue. Taking a cut of the tickets away from manufacturers is a good first step, but only a first step to a problem that, short of abolishing the cameras altogether, I don't see a way to solve.
I can't speak for anybody else, but around here (Chicago) the stations are still screaming February 17th from the rooftops. It looks like they plan on throwing the switch on that date anyway, which makes a lot of sense. I suspect a lot of other stations in other markets will follow suit, and for all intents and purposes this bill will be meaningless.
I wonder if Slashdot should allow anonymous article submissions? Isn't it useful information to know if the submitter is also the subject of the article or its reference source? Shouldn't we be allowed to know that, so we can better judge the credibility of the article and its source(s)? Transparency is ALWAYS good.
If two stories are submitted on the same subject, one with an anonymous submitter and one without, then they should use the non-anonymous one. This I can agree with; as you say, transparency is good.
But if it's a choice between seeing a story with an anonymous submitter and not seeing it at all, I'd rather we see it. Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with bias. The only issue is whether or not it affects the information. So, look at the information and judge for yourself. If there's not enough to make a guess, default to whatever position you prefer. In this particular case I don't see how somebody saying there's a security hole in a product suffers from bias; there's a security hole or there's not. If there's not, well, that's not bias, that's an outright lie, and it's an entirely different problem--one that wouldn't have been fixed by knowing the Internet alias of the person who submitted it. (Surely you're not suggesting people be forced to give their actual names if they aren't comfortable with that, right?)
What if the anonymous reader who submitted this was Roland P.? Wouldn't we wanna know that?
Nope. In a case like that, I think it being anonymous would actually be a good thing. I never understood the furor; I'm interested in what someone's posting or I'm not, and the answer to that has absolutely nothing to do with who that someone is.
Spyware? Are you kidding now? Because it tells you what version of.NET is installed on a system and lets you launch a.NET program as easily as you would with IE?
Well holy hell boys, you'd better all uninstall all of your web browsers. Do you know those damn things are spyware? They report what version of your browser and operating system you use! And your IP address, so that the evil hacker groups know where to find you.
There are plenty of problems with what MS did and the way they did it. This is not one of them. This is hyperbolic bullshit, plain and simple.
If by "closer to official" you mean "closer to Beta" which for Google means "yeah, it's official, we just cannot claim it's 100% without flaw"
Nobody claims something is 100% without flaw. Read your licenses, disclaimers and terms of service sometime. Google's "beta" products work better and more consistently than most of the "real" releases out there, regardless of what they choose to call it.
I suppose this was just meant to be another "zomg all of Google is in beta!" joke, which hasn't been particularly funny for years. Kudos on somehow getting an interesting mod for it.
I think you've missed an option. They're doing this with roughly the same intent as the RIAA is: They're trying to scare filesharers into stopping.
There's little doubt that illegal filesharing takes a decent chunk of bandwidth, and also little doubt that, so far as problems with having oversold capacity goes, filesharers contribute a lot there as well. (I'm not saying they're the only cause by any stretch of the imagination; YouTube, Hulu, increasingly media-rich websites, and good old porn are just a handful of things that also have huge impacts.)
The RIAA described their actions as "educating the public," which is half of the sentence, the other half being "of the consequences of filesharing." In other words, scaring them. Problem is, it was a really convoluted process for them. They'd hire some investigators, find you, then have to file a bunch of bullshit lawsuits to get your name, then send you bogus settlement offers, and possibly sue you individually. It worked a little bit, but the problem is now judges are wising up to what a bunch of crooks they're being. They're frowning on these John Doe lawsuits that exist for no purpose other than to find out who IP 1.2.3.4 was at 5:18 PM GMT on June 15th.
But now if the ISPs are helping, that barrier is much lower. They just pick up the phone and ask--or hell, depending on the nature of the help maybe they don't even need their own investigators anymore. Maybe the ISPs are going to grab the people with the highest usage and turn them over for "re-education." Maybe now, if the RIAA's campaign picks up steam, even more people than they turn over will be scared into stopping, or at least cutting back.
Yes, they'll lose some customers -- the ones actually (gasp!) using their connections. The ones that aren't worth it to them anyway. Maybe their usage falls enough that they don't have to make those pesky infrastructure investments.
I dunno. Seems like a decent plan. They're obviously not concerned with being bastards, they have been pretty much their entire existence in every possible way. Might as well give it a shot. Combined with your previous point about a lack of competition, they don't really have that much to lose and quite a bit to gain.
What I did find though was that the average person did what they had to do to get along in life. If it meant duplicating a song or a data file then it was not a problem for them... I must reiterate that their values were neither greater nor less than mine but rather that they did what they had to do to survive in the economy of that era.
This is a... strange couple of sentences for me. You're really equating "surviv[ing] in the economy of that era" to copying a song or program? If we're really going to count a right to have a particular song or piece of data among the things needed for survival, I think we've lost all sense of what surviving means. I suspect a trip to most countries in Africa would refresh the mind as to what it means to do what one needs to do to survive. It certainly has nothing to do with putting a pirated song on your knockoff iPod.
You should have simply left it at a difference of opinion. Everybody likes to believe their set of opinions are superior--after all, that's why they're our opinions right?--but many people at least will be able to superficially recognize that they're not necessarily universal. The Chinese don't care all that much about copyright? No biggie for me (though I do have a problem with pretending to abide by rules that they don't). No need to make it more than that.
Why Win7 is not purely 64 bit is beyond me - any recent machine can run the 64 bit version, any older machine should be running XP anyway.
Well, because it's not Microsoft's job to promote technology; their job is to maximize shareholder value. Whether we like that or not, as soon as they became a publicly-traded company that pretty well became their #1 goal--according to the law.
I don't know how much work is involved in developing an OS to support 64 bit versus 32 bit, but obviously Microsoft's numbers indicate to them that there is a non-trivial amount of 32-bit users, the potential profit of which outweighs the cost of developing multiple flavors
Perhaps there are other monetary benefits to shifting people to 64-bit, but obviously they're either minor or nobody did the job of convincing Microsoft's bosses of them. Their OS will be 64-bit only when it is no longer worth the cost to create a 32-bit version. I don't see that for quite a few years, though.
Quick question - why am *I*, as a taxpayer, paying for this?
Because you forgot option F: Through no fault of their own, a homeowner is now hosed by the economy falling on its face. Home prices don't exist in a vacuum; the fact that Person A might be able to make their mortgage doesn't mean their home magically retains its value and only Person B, who can't make the mortgage, suffers from their bad decisions. Nor, frankly, does it mean the home was overpriced to begin with. Given the housing bubble it probably was, but inflation and deflation happen all the time.
It isn't an abstract problem, and it isn't a problem you can shuffle away under the rug. 20% of homeowners now owe more money than their home is worth, and that number will only keep rising as the economy keeps tanking. These people are instantly in debt, and their only way out is to hope to hell they can tread water long enough that their home value rises, then they can cut and run. No matter how good their credit, these people suddenly have no credit because they owe too much money, and the banks are scared out of their minds to lend it anyway.
Why are you footing the bill? Because it will cost you far more to have empty homes start popping up in your neighborhoods than it will to help these people out. Because every person treading that water (or failing to tread it any longer) means one more person who has no money to spend, which means one more item goes unsold, one more company goes under, hundreds more people unemployed. Which means more people treading water, who can't spend, who can't buy.
Aside from it being the right thing to do, do you really want to wait and declare they deserve what they get, all the while hoping you don't get hit yourself? Do you think your circumstances are immune? Don't you think they did too?
"When your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the hose." There's plenty to discuss about what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again, and more than enough blame to go around -- but now's not the time. Let's put out the fire first and worry about our water bill later.
Users with a high level of vandalism in their contributions would be banned.
They would just come back under a different account. There's no "reputation" to hold people to a now-banned account, since that reputation would be "worthless contributor." Better to simply be "guy nobody knows anything about" at that point. Karma needs to be positive; it needs to be something that people want, and care about keeping. It would probably work better in the reverse: People with good karma, perhaps in the topic in question, could bypass proposed edit approval queues. Or perhaps send it to the queue for approval, but default to adding the change in and have the queue revert it instead of defaulting it out and having the queue put it in. It's still guaranteed to be looked at at some point, as opposed to the current system where it may or may not be depending on who happens on the page, its subject matter, edit history, etc etc.
Why? I probably don't support their agenda (though I know nothing about it other than what you described), nor would I support any violence on their part to achieve it. I do support their right to say it, however, and if they can convince people to go along with it then I say the people get what they deserve. Some people are going to find that a particularly harsh viewpoint, but I hold the same one about the United States: If we vote for idiots and criminals to run our government, we deserve it when we get them. If they sweep tyrants into power, they deserve it when they get them.
I've posted this quote over and over again, but it remains relevant:
The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.
We either believe in free speech and free association or we do not, particularly when we're talking about political or religious speech. "I do, unless you say something I don't like" is, well, cowardly.
Since the companies cannot comply with your requests, they have to block access from your country.
I was following you up until then. Why would Facebook (as one example) "have to block access from [their] country?" Maaaaybe if the social networking company had an office in the country we're talking about, but the vast majority of them will not -- and even if one did, that wouldn't stop all those pesky rebels from hopping on the sites that don't instead.
If I were in charge of a social networking site and some country tried that, I wouldn't be helping them out. I'd laugh my ass off. I certainly wouldn't block anybody from my site for them; if they want to control their people and disallow accessing my site, that's their problem. Not only am I not obligated to help them, it's actually against my economic (not to mention moral) interests to do so.
So far as the "main cause of child rape" thing, yeah, that's usually how governments manage censorship: They claim they're protecting you. Whether or not the people actually buy that story I'm not sure. Obviously it would depend on what the story was, who the people were and what country we're talking about. They'd have to be pretty convincing though; taking away something people care about is tricky business, particularly if the government is scared of pissing those same people off to begin with.
It should be about competency, but in reality it's about some mythical measure of (competency / salary), which actually isn't entirely unreasonable. However, since it's difficult and near impossible to measure competency in a precise way, that will tend to be boiled down to just the salary part, unless the discrepancy between the competencies are outrageous (and sometimes even then).
Since the reality is also that H1-B workers are mostly about cheaper labor and much less about filling some need the company just can't fill at home, the end result will be as we're seeing: Overwhelmingly, the H1-B workers stay and the American workers go.
Good? Bad? *shrugs* Definitely against the spirit of the system, though. It wasn't meant to be a source of cheap labor, it was meant to be a source to fill positions companies couldn't fill domestically. At least ostensibly.
I'm not a big fan of teachers requiring notes; it just smacks to me of a teacher unnecessarily dictating to me how I should learn. For the record, I did take notes in classes -- but if I didn't, and still managed to learn the material as evidenced by my exam scores and other work, I fail to see how it is any of the teachers' concern how I managed it. But, especially given that we're talking about a high school teacher here, I can at least see the validity of the other position that teachers should do what they can to encourage all students to learn the material.
As far as forcing me to destroy my notes afterward? Sorry, no. She does not own knowledge, and she certainly has no copyright claim on my notes -- I own the copyright on my notes, and she has absolutely no right to try to threaten me into destroying my own work. Frankly, if she's so concerned with learning that she forces me to take notes in the first place she should be thrilled that I care enough to want to keep them. The only reason to be otherwise is if she's too damn lazy to learn anything about her students (like, oh, say, handwriting?) or change up the assignments.
I can't speak for anybody else, but I can say this: I simply don't care if that's the case.
We have principles and we have laws, and both say this nonsense needs to stop. You're simply not allowed to spy on anybody in the United States without the approval of the judiciary. We don't get to throw out checks and balances at our convenience, nor should we ever contemplate doing so.
Of course this may save a few lives from time to time. So would putting troops in every house in the country (take THAT, gangbangers!) So would tracking every citizens' location every minute of every day. So would torturing anybody you suspect of knowing something. Oh, sure, you'll get a lot of people who squeal and tell you whatever they think you want to hear, but every once in a while you're going to get somebody who actually does know something too.
Being a police state would save countless lives, but that isn't who we are. It isn't what this country was founded on. It's not what our Constitution tells us is permissible. If they really have such a great reason to wiretap these specific people, take it to the FISA court; they're essentially a rubber stamp anyway, and it guarantees some degree of checks and balances remain in the system. We're so far removed from the days of understanding tyranny in this country that we're willing to return to them for nothing more than false promises of potential safety. If we really need a reminder of what it's like when some supreme executive authority can do whatever they wish with no oversight and no approval, we need only look around the world to the countless countries where that's still the case -- or to our own founders' writings, as they determined that a chance to be free was worth sacrificing all guarantees of safety.
So no, I really couldn't care less if there's a good reason for it. The process is more important than the outcome.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
-- Daniel Webster
Then base their "pass or fail" on how well they could move the mouse fast enough.
So if I open things in tabs and come back when I'm finished reading whatever I was reading, I'm guaranteed to fail the first CAPTCHA? Seems like a pretty good way to annoy visitors into leaving.
Using a human being to solve a CAPTCHA is not "cracking" the CAPTCHA, nor does it make the next blog or even the next CAPTCHA any less secure. If the CAPTCHAs are actually successful enough that the only solution is to hire third-worlders to do them for you, a large part of the battle is already won.
Will it stop all spam? No. Will all spam ever be stopped? Nope, so let's take what we can get while we can get it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Liars" like to claim that? Wow, biased much?
Yes, there is a rate of error in voting machines and there is a rate of error in hand-counting. For starters, let's call it 3% for argument and make this point: Margin of error means it's just as likely that Al Gore won the popular vote by 4% as it is that he lost the popular vote by 2%. This has nothing to do with "lying."
Further, recounts are subject to the same types of errors, in addition to the lack of uniformality in determining what votes are ultimately counted the next time around. There's nothing to say that it can't end up Gore +1%, Bush +2%, Gore +1%, Gore +4% if you recount it three times after the election. In fact if you harken back to the Florida recounts, I'm fairly certain it changed several times during the recounts (yes, plural) before the USSC finally stepped in and said "seriously, just stop."
In other words, you're never going to get a TRULY accurate count on a scale like this. At some point you need to simply accept that there will always be a margin of error, that it may at times completely change outcomes, and simply decide that you've been as thorough, fair and accurate as possible and this is the result. Calling people liars for using the official, certified election results just makes you look like an ass, and all this nonsense about margins of error makes it seem like you have an axe to grind. Against both Gore and Franken. Put those two together and it paints an altogether unflattering portrait of your impartiality.
You say that, seemingly with some certainty that that is a bad thing. It's a perfectly valid opinion to have, of course; I think a lot of people are of the mind that the best and brightest should be the ones in charge.
The problem is it's a balancing act on all sides. Let me throw out just a couple of potential issues with the "enlightened oligarchy"-style approach:
1. Who determines who is "smart enough" to vote/rule?
2. Being smart might mean you make better decisions than somebody of below-average intelligence. It's certainly no guarantee.
3. Related to #2 above, even if smart people DID always make better overall decisions, those decisions might not be better FOR ME. So if I'm below-average intelligence, why should I not be permitted a say in who rules me and the kind of decisions they're going to make?
4. Intelligence tends to lead to strong idealism -- but idealism seldom works in the real world, in my observation. Libertarians, to throw out an example, worship the free market's ability to fix just about everything. In reality (at least in my opinion) it doesn't work that way, and true free markets rarely exist at all. Where, after all, is everybody truly, completely informed about all of their product choices? How often is a market completely dominated by pure logic and efficiency instead of "fashion" or the shininess of a particular brand?
5. Smart people aren't necessarily decisive people. Being the smartest person in the world matters very little if you're unable to render timely decisions.
6. People tend to be self-interested. The fact that a system sets up the smart people to rule over the dumb inherently means the dumb are likely to be poorly represented. We can argue the merits of smart people making decisions, but hopefully we can all agree that a government should work equally well for all its citizens? If we're just going to go Darwin on their asses, then there's very little reason for them not to simply kill their ever-so-smart rulers. They'll surely have them outnumbered.
That's just a handful off the top of my head; I'm sure with some real thought we could come up with many, many more.
There's a saying, something along the lines of "half the people are below average" (which I assume if we're being pedantic and caring about peoples' "smartness," should be changed to "below median.") These are not lesser people, why should they be permitted little or no voice in their rulers, little or no say in decisions, with little or no recourse? Democracy is mob rule by average people, yes, but that's what it's intended to be. Philosophically, most people contend that's the most fair approach.
What would be nice is if only people who were truly well informed about a particular topic weigh in (and who decides that? heh), but it's not particularly practical. Fairness is important in politics, even if it means we're never likely to reach some ideal state.
Actually, the Electoral College was intended to protect against uneducated people and stupid decisions. If you follow the history, the original electors were under no obligation whatsoever to vote the way their state did. That only came along later by various state laws; indeed, you can see that in this very proposal. If electors were under a constitutional obligation to vote one way or another, Iowa would have no authority to have them vote with the national majority regardless of their own state's voting. Or look at the other discrepancy: Most states throw all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state, but there are several (3 I believe?) states who apportion their electoral votes proportionally to their state vote.
Using your population number and this Wikipedia article for the population of states, we can see that the least populous state has 621,270 people or 0.20% of the population, and 3/538 or 0.55% of the electoral votes. I wouldn't exactly call this overwhelming, much less the point the system was created. And in fact, the reality is exactly opposite: Califorina has 12% of the population and 9.9% of the electoral vote. That means that any given candidate would need to receive 9.9/12 or 82.5% of the vote in California to receive the equivilant electoral votes as they state has population (please feel free to check my math there). In fact, though, they simply need to receive 1 vote more than 50%. This does not increase the power of the smaller states by any means; it makes them essentially irrelevant. Popular votes tend to be relatively close, within a couple million of each other -- certainly in the territory of where the 620,000 people in Vermont really can have a decent impact on the election. Instead, though, candidates simply focus on a handful of key states and essentially ignore the rest. Any attention Iowa gets is purely related to their caucuses being the first primary stop, not due to their actual influence on the final presidential elections. Use Vermont as your example and see how much attention the Electoral College affords this small state.
They're not, as the summary indicated. The law goes into effect when enough states have passed similar laws to have 270 electoral votes; enough votes to elect a president. At that point, the people who get screwed are the ones living in states who have not signed up, whose electoral votes are, quite literally, meaningless, and who are essentially voting only in the national vote whether they realize it or not. I'm not sure I support the law, but I do have to recognize it's fairly clever--and equally doomed.
Notwithstanding the above, the only difference between then and now is which states are deciding the election. California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania are the most populous states. What are considered the "swing states" in just about every election? Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Ohio. Ironically, if you go down the most populated list two more entries they are Ohio and Michigan. California and Texas are basically a wash, since California always breaks for the Dems and Texas always for the Republicans, which is why they're not on the swing state list (as opposed to not having enough influence). The difference appears to be whether you'd prefer New York and Illinois, or Michigan an
In the US, you have a lot more protection when you do things like that than many other countries. What I'm saying pertains to US law. (And of course, IANAL.)
The best way to do so is to state your idea as an opinion. Silly though it may seem, "I think XYZ is a pedophile" is legally distinct from "XYZ is a pedophile." Following that, give your reasoning. Libel in the US means you knew what you were saying was false (sometimes the judge/jury will also call it libel if you have no good reason to believe it was true). "I think XYZ is a pedophile because I saw him pull his van up and talk to little children" is infinitely more defensible than even "I think XYZ is a pedophile" was. Of course if you're making any of that up you'll be worse off than you started, but your question was one about having a legitimate discussion about legitimate beliefs.
Libel also requires that your comments be maliciously intended. A discussion format itself is going to put you in a better legal situation than simply one-line trolls about how evil somebody is. It's going to be fairly hard to convince most people that you and some other people going back and forth about what you think and what you saw to make you think it is all an elaborate setup to libel somebody.
Assuming you're not a participant in the case and are under no sort of gag order, there should be no difference if you discuss one pre- or post-trial. I'd probably tread lightly on people found not guilty though; I don't know if a court making a finding of fact gets you in more hot water if you rail against it. The OJ situation wasn't a great one to bring up in this regard; he was found not guilty, yes, but also liable for their deaths. It was basically a split decision.
Of course, the bottom line in the US is this: Anybody has the right to sue you for anything. If it doesn't pass some basic sniff tests or the statute of limitations has expired, it might be thrown out immediately -- but it still means that the suit was filed, there's a record and you probably had to pay for a few hours of a lawyers' time to make the motions. Being victorious legally doesn't mean you haven't also been ruined financially. So, I think the best advice is that you need to be sure what you're doing is worth the potential headaches. In most cases it's probably not.
How much does it cost to build, staff, maintain and jail these people we aren't willing to spend $500k to educate? How much to hire the extra police offers to handle the increase in crime when an uneducated populace is forced into poverty and finds itself with no other means to support themselves? And how much of a total drain is that on society, considering they may have had jobs and made at least SOME money (even if it was minimum wage) and now they're purely leeches on the taxpayers who contribute absolutely nothing back?
I have absolutely no problem spending $500k per student on education, even if that number weren't horribly inflated by, you know, building places to teach students and hiring people to teach them. (In reality I suspect the number is closer to about $20k spent per student, assuming something like $1500/year/student for 13 years of education. Even if that number were 5x's higher, we'd still be 5x's lower than the number you quoted. Of course there are construction costs and other costs to education, but folding them in and claiming "ZOMG YOU CAN'T DO IT WITH $500K PER STUDENT OMGWTF!" seems rather disingenuous to me.)
In fact, I'd have little problem spending more. The only issue I have is that I don't think it will help. I honestly don't know what the problems are in public education, and I suspect most slashdotters don't really know either. The vast majority of us here were likely to be the "smart kids," who, whether we liked school or not, had very little trouble doing well. Most of us probably went to college, and a significant portion of us probably are earning fairly high salaries (or at least we were before the economy tanked). This doesn't provide us a great perspective into figuring out why other children are failing, and leads to the idiocy I've seen some other people post in this thread ("maybe children are just stupid." Really? Then stop bitching about their test scores). Some of it is probably bad teachers, in turn caused at least in part by teachers unions; I think a large portion of it is parents foisting their own responsibilities for their children's education and well-being onto the schools. I'm sure there's even more problems with even more blame to go around.
Regardless, I think we can all agree that there are schools in this nation, particularly in poor urban areas, that literally are falling apart; that have to modify school buses into "mobile classrooms" and stick children outside just to have another room for them to learn in. Maybe all of that would go away if they just fixed other inefficiencies, but until that day comes I'm not willing to throw away the futures of those children and I'm certainly not willing to do so without maning up and taking responsibility for it. I don't know what the larger education problems are or what to do about them, but I know we can fix THAT nonsense pretty fast. So let's do it. It WILL help children, at least a little; it WILL have a long-term positive impact; it WILL create short-term jobs--simply put, it will do all of the things this stimulus bill is hoping to do. It probably won't bring test scores up. That's a shame, and it's something we need to look at very careful and work on very diligently, but it's another discussion.
Folding all of this crap together is why nothing gets done. So many of us here have an engineering-type mindset, so let's use it: Let's break the problem down into manageable pieces and tackle them. Surely teaching students outside in buses being bad is something we can get together on?
It doesn't tell you whether the article is truthful or not; there's no automated system that will do that, since it would have to be pre-programmed by people to know what "truth" is anyway (in addition to all of the other complications of actually getting such a task done).
However, if there is some sort of edit war on a page, regardless of whether or not it's only between one nut with an agenda and the rest of the sane world, it still means that at any given moment, as I hit a wikipedia page, there's a greater chance that I've hit the nutjob's edits instead of the sane world's compared to a page with no such conflict going on. That's still good to know. Hopefully they've built some sort of timer into the algorithm such that if the edit war has been over for a year, it doesn't raise as much of a stink over it.
What would be even more useful is if it checked what the changes were. Revert-revert-revert-revert is a different issue than newstuff-newstuff-newstuff-newstuff is different than newstuff-revert-newstuff-revert even though all three are comprised of four edits.
As somebody who has lived in a suburb just a bit south of Chicago his entire life, I can say this is entirely false.
...we usually don't bother to accuse anybody of their wrongdoing.
And there will still be a business incentive to do is if that's what police departments and local governments want to drive up their own revenue. Taking a cut of the tickets away from manufacturers is a good first step, but only a first step to a problem that, short of abolishing the cameras altogether, I don't see a way to solve.
I can't speak for anybody else, but around here (Chicago) the stations are still screaming February 17th from the rooftops. It looks like they plan on throwing the switch on that date anyway, which makes a lot of sense. I suspect a lot of other stations in other markets will follow suit, and for all intents and purposes this bill will be meaningless.
If two stories are submitted on the same subject, one with an anonymous submitter and one without, then they should use the non-anonymous one. This I can agree with; as you say, transparency is good.
But if it's a choice between seeing a story with an anonymous submitter and not seeing it at all, I'd rather we see it. Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with bias. The only issue is whether or not it affects the information. So, look at the information and judge for yourself. If there's not enough to make a guess, default to whatever position you prefer. In this particular case I don't see how somebody saying there's a security hole in a product suffers from bias; there's a security hole or there's not. If there's not, well, that's not bias, that's an outright lie, and it's an entirely different problem--one that wouldn't have been fixed by knowing the Internet alias of the person who submitted it. (Surely you're not suggesting people be forced to give their actual names if they aren't comfortable with that, right?)
Nope. In a case like that, I think it being anonymous would actually be a good thing. I never understood the furor; I'm interested in what someone's posting or I'm not, and the answer to that has absolutely nothing to do with who that someone is.
Oh. My. God.
Spyware? Are you kidding now? Because it tells you what version of .NET is installed on a system and lets you launch a .NET program as easily as you would with IE?
Well holy hell boys, you'd better all uninstall all of your web browsers. Do you know those damn things are spyware? They report what version of your browser and operating system you use! And your IP address, so that the evil hacker groups know where to find you.
There are plenty of problems with what MS did and the way they did it. This is not one of them. This is hyperbolic bullshit, plain and simple.
Nobody claims something is 100% without flaw. Read your licenses, disclaimers and terms of service sometime. Google's "beta" products work better and more consistently than most of the "real" releases out there, regardless of what they choose to call it.
I suppose this was just meant to be another "zomg all of Google is in beta!" joke, which hasn't been particularly funny for years. Kudos on somehow getting an interesting mod for it.
I don't know, I used to play a game where you rode around on a bicycle all day.
Though it did have the added benefit of letting me hurl newspapers through peoples' windows. Does that still count?
I think you've missed an option. They're doing this with roughly the same intent as the RIAA is: They're trying to scare filesharers into stopping.
There's little doubt that illegal filesharing takes a decent chunk of bandwidth, and also little doubt that, so far as problems with having oversold capacity goes, filesharers contribute a lot there as well. (I'm not saying they're the only cause by any stretch of the imagination; YouTube, Hulu, increasingly media-rich websites, and good old porn are just a handful of things that also have huge impacts.)
The RIAA described their actions as "educating the public," which is half of the sentence, the other half being "of the consequences of filesharing." In other words, scaring them. Problem is, it was a really convoluted process for them. They'd hire some investigators, find you, then have to file a bunch of bullshit lawsuits to get your name, then send you bogus settlement offers, and possibly sue you individually. It worked a little bit, but the problem is now judges are wising up to what a bunch of crooks they're being. They're frowning on these John Doe lawsuits that exist for no purpose other than to find out who IP 1.2.3.4 was at 5:18 PM GMT on June 15th.
But now if the ISPs are helping, that barrier is much lower. They just pick up the phone and ask--or hell, depending on the nature of the help maybe they don't even need their own investigators anymore. Maybe the ISPs are going to grab the people with the highest usage and turn them over for "re-education." Maybe now, if the RIAA's campaign picks up steam, even more people than they turn over will be scared into stopping, or at least cutting back.
Yes, they'll lose some customers -- the ones actually (gasp!) using their connections. The ones that aren't worth it to them anyway. Maybe their usage falls enough that they don't have to make those pesky infrastructure investments.
I dunno. Seems like a decent plan. They're obviously not concerned with being bastards, they have been pretty much their entire existence in every possible way. Might as well give it a shot. Combined with your previous point about a lack of competition, they don't really have that much to lose and quite a bit to gain.
This is a... strange couple of sentences for me. You're really equating "surviv[ing] in the economy of that era" to copying a song or program? If we're really going to count a right to have a particular song or piece of data among the things needed for survival, I think we've lost all sense of what surviving means. I suspect a trip to most countries in Africa would refresh the mind as to what it means to do what one needs to do to survive. It certainly has nothing to do with putting a pirated song on your knockoff iPod.
You should have simply left it at a difference of opinion. Everybody likes to believe their set of opinions are superior--after all, that's why they're our opinions right?--but many people at least will be able to superficially recognize that they're not necessarily universal. The Chinese don't care all that much about copyright? No biggie for me (though I do have a problem with pretending to abide by rules that they don't). No need to make it more than that.
Well, because it's not Microsoft's job to promote technology; their job is to maximize shareholder value. Whether we like that or not, as soon as they became a publicly-traded company that pretty well became their #1 goal--according to the law.
I don't know how much work is involved in developing an OS to support 64 bit versus 32 bit, but obviously Microsoft's numbers indicate to them that there is a non-trivial amount of 32-bit users, the potential profit of which outweighs the cost of developing multiple flavors
Perhaps there are other monetary benefits to shifting people to 64-bit, but obviously they're either minor or nobody did the job of convincing Microsoft's bosses of them. Their OS will be 64-bit only when it is no longer worth the cost to create a 32-bit version. I don't see that for quite a few years, though.
Because you forgot option F: Through no fault of their own, a homeowner is now hosed by the economy falling on its face. Home prices don't exist in a vacuum; the fact that Person A might be able to make their mortgage doesn't mean their home magically retains its value and only Person B, who can't make the mortgage, suffers from their bad decisions. Nor, frankly, does it mean the home was overpriced to begin with. Given the housing bubble it probably was, but inflation and deflation happen all the time.
It isn't an abstract problem, and it isn't a problem you can shuffle away under the rug. 20% of homeowners now owe more money than their home is worth, and that number will only keep rising as the economy keeps tanking. These people are instantly in debt, and their only way out is to hope to hell they can tread water long enough that their home value rises, then they can cut and run. No matter how good their credit, these people suddenly have no credit because they owe too much money, and the banks are scared out of their minds to lend it anyway.
Why are you footing the bill? Because it will cost you far more to have empty homes start popping up in your neighborhoods than it will to help these people out. Because every person treading that water (or failing to tread it any longer) means one more person who has no money to spend, which means one more item goes unsold, one more company goes under, hundreds more people unemployed. Which means more people treading water, who can't spend, who can't buy.
Aside from it being the right thing to do, do you really want to wait and declare they deserve what they get, all the while hoping you don't get hit yourself? Do you think your circumstances are immune? Don't you think they did too?
"When your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the hose." There's plenty to discuss about what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again, and more than enough blame to go around -- but now's not the time. Let's put out the fire first and worry about our water bill later.
They would just come back under a different account. There's no "reputation" to hold people to a now-banned account, since that reputation would be "worthless contributor." Better to simply be "guy nobody knows anything about" at that point. Karma needs to be positive; it needs to be something that people want, and care about keeping. It would probably work better in the reverse: People with good karma, perhaps in the topic in question, could bypass proposed edit approval queues. Or perhaps send it to the queue for approval, but default to adding the change in and have the queue revert it instead of defaulting it out and having the queue put it in. It's still guaranteed to be looked at at some point, as opposed to the current system where it may or may not be depending on who happens on the page, its subject matter, edit history, etc etc.
Why? I probably don't support their agenda (though I know nothing about it other than what you described), nor would I support any violence on their part to achieve it. I do support their right to say it, however, and if they can convince people to go along with it then I say the people get what they deserve. Some people are going to find that a particularly harsh viewpoint, but I hold the same one about the United States: If we vote for idiots and criminals to run our government, we deserve it when we get them. If they sweep tyrants into power, they deserve it when they get them.
I've posted this quote over and over again, but it remains relevant:
We either believe in free speech and free association or we do not, particularly when we're talking about political or religious speech. "I do, unless you say something I don't like" is, well, cowardly.
I was following you up until then. Why would Facebook (as one example) "have to block access from [their] country?" Maaaaybe if the social networking company had an office in the country we're talking about, but the vast majority of them will not -- and even if one did, that wouldn't stop all those pesky rebels from hopping on the sites that don't instead.
If I were in charge of a social networking site and some country tried that, I wouldn't be helping them out. I'd laugh my ass off. I certainly wouldn't block anybody from my site for them; if they want to control their people and disallow accessing my site, that's their problem. Not only am I not obligated to help them, it's actually against my economic (not to mention moral) interests to do so.
So far as the "main cause of child rape" thing, yeah, that's usually how governments manage censorship: They claim they're protecting you. Whether or not the people actually buy that story I'm not sure. Obviously it would depend on what the story was, who the people were and what country we're talking about. They'd have to be pretty convincing though; taking away something people care about is tricky business, particularly if the government is scared of pissing those same people off to begin with.
It should be about competency, but in reality it's about some mythical measure of (competency / salary), which actually isn't entirely unreasonable. However, since it's difficult and near impossible to measure competency in a precise way, that will tend to be boiled down to just the salary part, unless the discrepancy between the competencies are outrageous (and sometimes even then).
Since the reality is also that H1-B workers are mostly about cheaper labor and much less about filling some need the company just can't fill at home, the end result will be as we're seeing: Overwhelmingly, the H1-B workers stay and the American workers go.
Good? Bad? *shrugs* Definitely against the spirit of the system, though. It wasn't meant to be a source of cheap labor, it was meant to be a source to fill positions companies couldn't fill domestically. At least ostensibly.
I'm not a big fan of teachers requiring notes; it just smacks to me of a teacher unnecessarily dictating to me how I should learn. For the record, I did take notes in classes -- but if I didn't, and still managed to learn the material as evidenced by my exam scores and other work, I fail to see how it is any of the teachers' concern how I managed it. But, especially given that we're talking about a high school teacher here, I can at least see the validity of the other position that teachers should do what they can to encourage all students to learn the material.
As far as forcing me to destroy my notes afterward? Sorry, no. She does not own knowledge, and she certainly has no copyright claim on my notes -- I own the copyright on my notes, and she has absolutely no right to try to threaten me into destroying my own work. Frankly, if she's so concerned with learning that she forces me to take notes in the first place she should be thrilled that I care enough to want to keep them. The only reason to be otherwise is if she's too damn lazy to learn anything about her students (like, oh, say, handwriting?) or change up the assignments.
I can't speak for anybody else, but I can say this: I simply don't care if that's the case.
We have principles and we have laws, and both say this nonsense needs to stop. You're simply not allowed to spy on anybody in the United States without the approval of the judiciary. We don't get to throw out checks and balances at our convenience, nor should we ever contemplate doing so.
Of course this may save a few lives from time to time. So would putting troops in every house in the country (take THAT, gangbangers!) So would tracking every citizens' location every minute of every day. So would torturing anybody you suspect of knowing something. Oh, sure, you'll get a lot of people who squeal and tell you whatever they think you want to hear, but every once in a while you're going to get somebody who actually does know something too.
Being a police state would save countless lives, but that isn't who we are. It isn't what this country was founded on. It's not what our Constitution tells us is permissible. If they really have such a great reason to wiretap these specific people, take it to the FISA court; they're essentially a rubber stamp anyway, and it guarantees some degree of checks and balances remain in the system. We're so far removed from the days of understanding tyranny in this country that we're willing to return to them for nothing more than false promises of potential safety. If we really need a reminder of what it's like when some supreme executive authority can do whatever they wish with no oversight and no approval, we need only look around the world to the countless countries where that's still the case -- or to our own founders' writings, as they determined that a chance to be free was worth sacrificing all guarantees of safety.
So no, I really couldn't care less if there's a good reason for it. The process is more important than the outcome.
So if I open things in tabs and come back when I'm finished reading whatever I was reading, I'm guaranteed to fail the first CAPTCHA? Seems like a pretty good way to annoy visitors into leaving.
Using a human being to solve a CAPTCHA is not "cracking" the CAPTCHA, nor does it make the next blog or even the next CAPTCHA any less secure. If the CAPTCHAs are actually successful enough that the only solution is to hire third-worlders to do them for you, a large part of the battle is already won.
Will it stop all spam? No. Will all spam ever be stopped? Nope, so let's take what we can get while we can get it.