And in an ideal society, you would be held directly accountable for your votes by having your ability to vote revoked from that point on.
A concept that rather directly goes against the Constitution itself. There is no "smartness test" attached to voting. In fact they tried that to keep blacks away from the polls. It was thrown out. I'm not going to even guess what that means about whether or not you should be voting given your own position.
Not to mention that it is a dangerous precedent that, at just about every turn in our history, has been tried--to oppress some "undesirable" minority. The sad reality is that people with power work to maintain and increase that power, often at the expense of others.
In the absolutely perfect society, you may be right. Maybe people without a good understanding of the issues should not be allowed to vote. That is probably the ideal.
But we've had thousands of years of experience in knowing that we are most certainly not that ideal society, and that in all liklihood there will never be such a perfect society. Given that, it's considerably better to let people vote who should not be able to under non-existant "ideal" condititions than it is to deny the vote to people who should be able to.
Pursuing ideals is, in general, a good thing--and I think that's what you're getting at. At the same time, though, it's a waste if it's an ideal you can never reach. Better to deal with what we have now and how we might be able to make it better than to pursue something we can almost certainly never attain. It's entirely possible that the best possible circumstance we can acheive is on an entirely different path from the ideal situation we can not.
Uhh... no, it doesn't. For many reasons, among them:
1. You think politicians don't do anything useful now? Imagine the levels of inactivity you are going to force them into if you tell them that if they mess up too many times, their career is over. Nobody is going to take chances. Nobody is going to pass controversial measures. And it bears reminding that some things we find to be absolute no-brainers (civil rights, etc) were highly controversial when they were passed.
2. There seems to be a tacit insinuation that "legal" means "right," which is an issue of morality. There's no such link, and while I would like my politicians to adhere as best they can to the Constitution, I also understand that we need a new type of government if we're not going to let them vote the way they think is right.
3. Voters really ought to be able to elect whomever they please, as many times as they please. I don't believe in term limits for just this reason--but at least they did that one right; they amended the Constitution to include such a limit. Nobody should tell me I can't vote for somebody for any reason, including "he's fucking awful." What if I don't care that he's passed three unconstitutional laws? What if I like the stands he was taking, the points he was making with the laws? What if I supported the laws? My candidate is no longer eligible because he represented me?
Look, passing unconstitutional laws really shouldn't happen, but if there's going to be a penalty attached to such activity, I will attach it as a voter. And if voters are too dumb to take these things into consideration (and they probably are), too bad. That's one of the consequences of living in a republic.
4. Constitutionality is not a simple subject. You can take just about any Constitutional issue, post about it here on slashdot, and get a tremendous flamefest over what it means, how it pertains, etc. And that phenomena is not limited to discussion forums. You can probably take ANY Supreme Court decision--certainly EVERY decision that was not made unanimously, by the very definition--and find some judge somewhere in the country who disagrees with it. It's hard to determine these issues. We dedicated a third of our federal government to doing nothing BUT deciding these issues. A lot of people here, as elsewhere, take their own interpretations of the Constitution to be the end-all-be-all, and that's fine. I'm glad they have strong opinions. But it means absolutely nothing to a court, and it shouldn't.
5. Taking #3 into account, you're going to polticize the judicial process even more than it is already politicized. In states where judges have to run for office (is that all of them?), how kindly do you think the Republican party will take to a Republican judge kicking one of their guys out of office because of such a three-strike law? Is a Democratic judge kicking a Republican out of office going to be seen as a polticial move? Do we really want to essentially give impeachment powers to the judiciary at all?
6. And while we're here, in most states, and the federal government, this would need to be enacted as a constitutional amendment. A law to this effect would almost certainly be struck down, which would be the epitome of irony.
7. As another mini-irony, not only does the Constitution not include any such punishment scheme for violating the Constitution, it really doesn't include any provisions for declaring laws unconstitutional at all. It's something Justice Marshall took upon himself to piss off Thomas Jefferson in the opening years of our country, and we just sort of said "yeah, that makes sense." Could it be that declaring laws unconstitutional is unconstitutional? Hmmmm.
So no. It doesn't seem like a very good idea to me at all.
While it would be simple to allow Google in a whitelist scheme, it would largely render it useless because of the impossibility of whitelisting all the results.
Why do I bring up Google, you ask? Well aside from being an excellent way to find information, I also don't think it could hurt school-aged kids to get some extra experience using search engines and more importantly, learning to cull out good, authoritative sources from some kid with a geocities website.
Increasingly, the ability to find information is becoming as important or moreso than the knowledge you have in your head for just quick recall. In the words of Albert Einstein, "never memorize what you can look up." A little training in that regard during school seems like a great idea. Hell, I'd like to see them take a day and teach people how to search better as well--things like +- or quoted phrases (for Google).
I just bought a Thinkpad a few months ago (late May-ish) and it's a real beaut. It's a T60; it runs great, there is absolutely no heat issues which I was a little worried about with the dual cores, battery time is good. All in all I'm very happy with the purchase and I wouldn't recommend you worry at all about the ownership change. It's a great laptop.
My laptop isn't running SuSE so I can't comment on that.
It's anybodys guess at this point. PS3 is so overpriced at launch that it's no longer a done deal by a longshot.
I agree, but does that matter in context?
At least right now, I don't believe that the Wii or the 360 play HD or Blu-Ray discs, so any amount that PS3 sells will exert an influence on the "format war."
That said, even though the PS3 is horribly overpriced, I'm going to end up buying one. Stupid Final Fantasy series.:(
But then again, it's all just a bunch of statistics. Who cares about the children, unless they are American brats, right?
A government's first responsibility is to its own people. If my citizens are getting slaughtered by a terrorist group in your country, you damn well better do something about it or I will do it for you. It's really that simple.
Re:South Americans? Arabs? Whats the difference
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Cyberwar on NASA Websites
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you guys didn't have contempt for peaceful forms of protest like this
We have contempt for forms of protest that break the law.
You want to protest in the streets of Chile? Go ahead. You want to march on Washington? Be my guest. You want to call the president nasty names? I'll join you.
You want to do something productive, like start up your own site with the side of this that we're likely not seeing, at least not much, in the US? Please do.
You want to break into a server because you can and deface it? No, you deserve to go to jail. And you deserve to have the shit kicked out of you while you're there, since regardless of whether or not you may have had some point to make, you made your entire cause look stupid in the process--not to mention the fact that NASA has absolutely nothing to do with anything going on in Lebanon.
Do you think this stunt made me any more sympathetic to their cause? It didn't. And most reasonable people feel the same.
Since you're going as far as to question Linus suitability for his job (architecting his hobby project that conquered the world) - where's your wildly succesful open source project?
One needs a wildly successful open source project to criticize somebody's leadership of some other wildly successful open source project?
I suppose that one would also need to be the leader of a country with population of 300 million to criticize the job performance of the US president. Or perhaps be a highly respected engineer with specialty in safety to know that the Ford Pintos bursting into flame at the slightest provocation a couple decades ago wasn't a good thing.
You're making the assumption that the only calls which have been monitored/recorded are those with a known terrorist as one of the parties.
No, I'm not assuming anything. I asked if they had a specific reason to believe they in particular had been spied on, and thus would have the standing to sue. "A spying program exists that spies on some people, therefore I must have been spied on" just can't cut it. Even if it DOES spy on every single person who has ever placed a call anywhere, we don't know that yet, so they cannot have any reasonable belief of it from a legal sense. (Remember, we're dealing with courts: "Reasonable" is a legal term, even though it's hardly ever specifically defined.)
Obviously, if they talked to terrorist buddies, they would have such reason. Is there any other way they would? I really can't think of anything, without somebody else with the authority releasing more information (such as Congress investigating or the president releasing information).
I'm not trying to accuse anybody of associating with terrorists or whatever. I'm just trying to come up with a way where any person would have a strong reason to believe their calls were monitored that's better than "well, there's a spying program..."
It's a Catch-22.
Absolutely, but the legal system is full of these. Whether we like it or not, effective or not, it's Congress' job to check into these programs right now. The fact that they're mostly a bunch of morons content to sit on their hands doesn't transfer that responsibility elsewhere. I wish it did, or that people actually took things like this seriously enough to vote in a new bunch of morons. But it's unlikely.
Let me disclaim some things before I make a comment, mostly in the devils advocate sense. I'm not sure how I feel about this decision, but I know how I feel about Bush and his domestic spying programs and I hate them both. That said:
So how can the judge say "you don't KNOW that you were wiretapped, so you can't sue" with a straight face?
Well, because I think that's how the law works. If I punch you in the face and break a bone, your third cousin twice removed doesn't get to sue me for medical expenses related to it. The person suing has to be the person who was wronged (or have legal status to file on their behalf--such as guardians in the case of minors, or people with power of attorney). This is the same thing that happened in the whole "the Pledge is unconstitutional" ruling a year or two ago. The Supreme Court threw the ruling out because the father, suing on behalf of his child, did not have legal custody at the time. Is it a legal cop-out? Well, yes, but the legal system is also a very formal establishmentwith very set rules.
In this case, it's obviously a harder thing to understand. Yeah, it's about a secret spying program--but do these guys who were suing actually have any reason to believe their calls in specific were actually monitored/recorded? I guess they could admit talking to their terrorist friends and that would probably give them the status to sue, but it would also get them into a bit of hot water. Failing that, CAN they even have any such reasonable belief?
Does that mean there's no recourse to this sort of action? No. Anybody charged based in any part with evidence obtained through this program would have the status to sue. Likewise, Congress could step in and put a stop to it, including, if they had the spine, demanding all such evidence gathered to date through the program be destroyed. (Of course that would be "helping the terrorists" so most Congressmen wouldn't do it.)
Does it suck? Well, yeah, it does, but that's the nature of the beast when we're dealing with anything clandestine. Otherwise any wackjob who wants to could claim some massive government conspiracy is being perpetuated, with absolutely no proof, and tie up the courts trying to force them to reveal it.
And no, I'm not saying that's what this is.
Isn't Bush getting in front of a podium and denouncing the liberal media for revealing state secrets enough of an "official confirmation"?
I would think so, but did the plaintiffs actually argue this point during their case?
Honestly, the "you don't have the status to sue" part of the ruling didn't bother me. The whole "OMG NATIONAL SECURITY!!!" thing was what really rubbed me the wrong way. This has to be one of the worst kept secrets in politics today. If any harm would actually be done to national security by exposing it, it's already been done -- and in my opinion, it's greatly overshadowed by the fact that this program is very likely illegal to begin with. Sorry, G-Dub, you don't get to re-write laws at whim from your study--and that includes your bullshit "signing statements."
We shouldn't judge too quickly, because the government deserves the benefit of the doubt. To presume that he's innocent would just be knee-jerk tinfoil-hat paranoia.
All the grandparent said was that the conspiracy theories about him being arrested so the government could shut him up were premature. Even if you took that to mean "the government deserves the benefit of the doubt," it means they deserve the benefit of the doubt that they actually have probable cause to make the arrest. This has precisely NOTHING to do with whether or not he is actually guilty or innocent of any charges that may be filed.
But thanks for the unnecessary alarmism. We appreciate all you've done--making it harder to get people to take us seriously when we raise legitimate questions about abuses of government authority.
there is little evidence that good "CEO-sense" (whatever that means) has much to do with success.
Well, that depends on the nature of the business I suppose. Let's take iTunes for example. It's a vastly simple concept and probably half of the people who come to/. could code their own--perhaps even better--version of it. But would it ever have happened without somebody like Steve Jobs, with good managerial skills and relationships to bring the record companies into the fold?
The more a company relies on contracts, the more the "CEO-sense" matters. Being able to do the work in no way implies that you're going to be able to GET the work. I'm not surprised so many on this website ignore that fact, being as we (yes, I'm including myself) have a reputation as somewhat anti-social and rather... shall we say, ignorant, of the value of things like good communications skills, good professional relationships, etc.
But as a predictor, as they always say in the buz, "past performance is not a guide to future performance".
That may well be a bit misleading.
According to industrial/organizational psychologists (the sorts who devise hiring tests and the like), past behavior is THE BEST indicator of future behavior. Whether or not it is a GOOD indicator is a bit irrelevant in that sense, don't you think? If it's the best piece of information available to making a decision, it's the best piece of information available--whether it's 1% accurate or 99.9999% accurate. Obviously you hope for more rather than less, but there's only one "best."
If I'm on a board of a company who just endured a nosedive, looking for a new CEO, you can bet the most important thing I'm going to look for is somebody who has done well in that type of situation before. If I have to shell out big bucks to get somebody like that--and you can be pretty sure that I will--well, that's the price of business I guess. It's cheaper than going bankrupt.
Re:"The encyclopedia that Slashdot built."
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When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 0, Troll
Aren't there an awful lot of parentheticals in your post to be complaining about other peoples' writing styles? (You know what I'm talking about.) Parentheticals are, after all, typically unimportant to the sentence and (to people reading them) they tend to be somewhat distracting from the point.
Futhermore, the founding fathers didn't say that most people are unfit to vote.
I admit it has been quite some time since I studied American history in any depth, but I do think there's something to saying they did; some of them, at least. My recollection is that was the reason they created the whole electoral college, which, at the time, was under NO obligation to vote for the person their state (or whatever) voted for. I think the founders hoped that some day everybody would be fit to vote--and who knows if they would believe everybody was today--but back in their time... maybe it's not too far off base.
I suppose the harranging is over the word "most." I'm not sure it was ever used, but being that blacks and women were banned from voting, and the electoral college was set up at least in part (hopefully we can both agree to that!) to prevent the people who COULD vote (white males) from making "mistakes," it seems like they were definitely concerned about a majority of people. Again, some of them.
A website does not cause child abductions. Get over this "OMG teh kiddies!!" bullshit and take some responsibility for yourself and your kids. Not only will they be safer, the world will be a better place for it.
Of course, this will never happen. Why? Because for the ISPs, its NOT about money, its about CONTROL.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your point, that is not why it won't happen. It will not happen because of something economists refer to as a "flat rate bias." People prefer to pay a fixed rate and not have to worry about how much they're using rather than pay any sort of rate per unit or any sort of overages like you describe. This holds true most of the time even if it can be demonstrated to that consumer that they would actually pay less money under the per-unit system than they would with the flat rate.
It's kind of like what happens a lot of times in the US with cellphones, which are still, largely, a "pay for X in advance, pay more if you go over" system like you describe (although it slowly seems to be moving away from that). People are so afraid of those overage fees that many will end up purchasing a plan way bigger than they need 95% of the time out of fear of that 5% of the time they might have had to pay extra. Their fear and discomfort having to worry about the concept led them to create a sort of artifical flat rate for themselves, by purchasing a plan which has limits so huge they'll never hit them. This is a concept that goes back to the beginnings of the US telephone network for sure, and very likely way before that. (I guess if you wanted to argue about it, the concept always existed and I should say it was one "identified as far back as" instead. But I digress.)
While it's true that there is limited competition in the whole phone company/broadband provider field, there is still competition enough to give consumers things like this that they want, and any agreement between companies to artificially restrain competition by agreeing amongst themselves to do this whether people want it or not would very likely be an illegal practice in the US.
Was it you who said later in this thread that you're from Australia? I have a number of Aussie friends, so I'm passingly familiar with the whole "limited transfer then throttle" system. I think it's absolutely ridiculous, and I'm not sure Americans would go for that.
A death threat (even if only displayed in own home) is worse than that.
You answered your own question. It's essentially a years-old debate about how far a school's authority should extend beyond its doors. I recall once when I was in sixth grade, I believe, I called some girl a bitch as we were walking home (she hit one of my friends with her bike as we were walking along the sidewalk). We were practically home. It was about three blocks away from school at the time. The next day, of course, I was called into the principal's office. (On another sort of annoying point, I seem to have been called in because the girl happened to be black. Now come on, if it had been race related, I could have come up with a better word than "bitch" yaknow?)
Nothing ultimately happened, but I still question whether the school should have been involved at all. It's the same issue here.
Is a death-threat against a teacher bad? Yes. But it obviously was not really serious. If it had been, when he was handed over to the police, they wouldn't have concluded it was a joke--and he likely would have been expelled, as well, if they truly thought it serious and not a joke (which their own psychologist also determined). After all, if a student was seriously threatening a teacher's life, he would just be more pissed off and more likely to make good on his threats when he came back from a suspension for it. So let's be honest with ourselves: It wasn't the death threat that got him in trouble, it was the age-old "you have to be nice to your teachers" rule in the form of a "death threat."
Assuming I were a student in this school/class, if a friend and I are talking in my room about this teacher and, using your words, I suggest he should go suck donkey balls, should he be able to report me and get me suspended? At what point does their jurisdiction end? Surely they are not the police force of the Internet, are they? I think the proper reaction would be to turn it over to the police--which they did--and then butt out and let them handle it.
They essentially held this kid back because of what both the police force and their own psychologist concluded was a joke. That is well beyond excessive, even if they should have some right to suspend him for something he says on the Internet to begin with--which I don't think they should.
f you won't provide source, you got nothing from me"
To which I wish Google would reply: "Then don't download the program you pains in the asses." If you ask me, that would be the proper response. Hell, it might even be too nice.
I run linux, I like open source--but I don't have a public cry about it if somebody who puts a ton of work into giving me a native port of their already-free software doesn't feel it is in their best interests to also release the source.
They'll whine in considerable detail about security issues and how Google might be searching their entire hard drive and sending the content back for analysis or something. You know what? Could be. If you don't trust the company, DON'T INSTALL THEIR SOFTWARE. Simple.
You are already paying for net access. Now your telecoms aren't quite satisfied with your payment and want to double dip by collecting on the other side of the pipe.
Actually, they want to triple-dip. You are paying for your own personal Internet access. Whomever is on the other end at the site you're visting is paying as well--it may not be the person directly responsible for the website (think free hosting providers and the like), but SOMEWHERE on that end, bandwidth is being paid for.
Now, seemingly, they're upset that the company receiving the profits might not be them on both sides. gasp. Call Congress!--which is exactly what they did.
If you wanted to go a little farther... if we're talking about the phone companies, isn't what they want pretty close to a quadruple dip? A good portion of the lines they have were subsidized by tax dollars, which they now use to provide customers with Internet access. I don't know how much of the actual Internet backbone may have been subsidized, but I would not be at all surprised to find out it's a lot.
Or perhaps they feel the value of having a place, public or not, where they can vent themselves is worth the price of a couple missed jobs due to employers who demand that people they consider for jobs be identically stiff at work and away from work.
Honestly, I would not want to work for any employer who thought that they should have any control whatsoever over my personal life when it is not affecting my work, nor one who considered me incapable of conducting myself professionally based on completely unrelated situations.
And as for Office, if it's on a pay-as-you-go model, no business will stand for that for the same reasons. Again, they're competing against earlier releases of Office. And OpenOffice. Soon as a halfway competent accountant runs the numbers, the pay-as-you-go model will be avoided.
It depends on how they go about it, and whether or not the company is currently established. For example, if they let you buy office for $500 (just throwing out a number--no idea if it's high or low compared to current) or rent it for $50/year, the model makes some sense. Not only might it very likely be the cheaper option, but it permits you to always have the latest copy of a piece of software for no extra cost. And after the 10 years it takes to equal out, it doesn't seem unreasonable that a company would be updating Office every 10 years or less anyway--so it's not quite equal.
For established companies, who have already (perhaps recently) shelled out for their copies of Office or what-have-you, it might make less sense--but suddenly it's a great option for startups. $500 a copy is a lot for a small company to shell out, but $50 is much more reasonable. When it comes time for those established companies to upgrade once again, though, the benefits of the pay-as-you-go model crop back up.
It won't work if the pricing is too high, and probably won't work if it's too frequent. I think a company would be happier to pay $60/year than $5/month, just as an issue of conveinience.
In short... it MIGHT work, but it will have to be done right.
To blame the US intelligence services for the Iraq war is to believe that Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't want to go to war, that they felt they had to because of the intelligence.
I don't blame them for the Iraq war. But if they said "yes, they have WMDs" and they didn't, that's an awfully big mistake.
If, on the other hand, they said "we don't think so" and Bush heard "of course they do, invade!! INVADE!!" then that's an entirely different story.
Unless you're Iran, in which case only 50 centrifuges is enough to put you "a few months away" from a nuclear weapon, according to Olmert. Or, y'know, 10 years at best, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate.
I would be significantly more likely to trust the Israeli intelligence services than the American, particularly after the Iraq fiasco. I think it's generally accepted that Israel has one of if not the best intelligence services in the world.
(Before anybody says it, I'm aware that the Israelis were very happy to nod in agreement with everything we said about Iraq--whether that was because they believed it or because they just wanted us to do it is up for debate.)
That is not to say, of course, that I trust either.
Re:I seem to be saying this a lot lately...
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The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
If you are prepared to spend some time and have some time practicing compiling from CVS (and it's not all that hard to do) then bonus! You get fixes a little early
CVS is as likely to break your application and introduce new bugs as it is to fix bugs from previous releases. You're quick to point out how it can be good, but somehow I expect you'd be one of those people going "it's CVS you dumbass, deal with the bugs!!!" if some new user compiled from CVS for the bug fixes and complained about the new bugs breaking old features.
In general, CVS should be considered unstable and the majority of users--encompassing pretty much all novice users and anybody running important systems--should stay away. It's not that you "get fixes a little early." It's that you get an unpolished, in-development version which may include a fix for your problem and may well introduce 10 more bugs that are going to drive you batty. Which of course, compiling from CVS isn't going to help in any short order.
Slashdot Mirror
And in an ideal society, you would be held directly accountable for your votes by having your ability to vote revoked from that point on.
A concept that rather directly goes against the Constitution itself. There is no "smartness test" attached to voting. In fact they tried that to keep blacks away from the polls. It was thrown out. I'm not going to even guess what that means about whether or not you should be voting given your own position.
Not to mention that it is a dangerous precedent that, at just about every turn in our history, has been tried--to oppress some "undesirable" minority. The sad reality is that people with power work to maintain and increase that power, often at the expense of others.
In the absolutely perfect society, you may be right. Maybe people without a good understanding of the issues should not be allowed to vote. That is probably the ideal.
But we've had thousands of years of experience in knowing that we are most certainly not that ideal society, and that in all liklihood there will never be such a perfect society. Given that, it's considerably better to let people vote who should not be able to under non-existant "ideal" condititions than it is to deny the vote to people who should be able to.
Pursuing ideals is, in general, a good thing--and I think that's what you're getting at. At the same time, though, it's a waste if it's an ideal you can never reach. Better to deal with what we have now and how we might be able to make it better than to pursue something we can almost certainly never attain. It's entirely possible that the best possible circumstance we can acheive is on an entirely different path from the ideal situation we can not.
That seems like a great idea
Uhh... no, it doesn't. For many reasons, among them:
1. You think politicians don't do anything useful now? Imagine the levels of inactivity you are going to force them into if you tell them that if they mess up too many times, their career is over. Nobody is going to take chances. Nobody is going to pass controversial measures. And it bears reminding that some things we find to be absolute no-brainers (civil rights, etc) were highly controversial when they were passed.
2. There seems to be a tacit insinuation that "legal" means "right," which is an issue of morality. There's no such link, and while I would like my politicians to adhere as best they can to the Constitution, I also understand that we need a new type of government if we're not going to let them vote the way they think is right.
3. Voters really ought to be able to elect whomever they please, as many times as they please. I don't believe in term limits for just this reason--but at least they did that one right; they amended the Constitution to include such a limit. Nobody should tell me I can't vote for somebody for any reason, including "he's fucking awful." What if I don't care that he's passed three unconstitutional laws? What if I like the stands he was taking, the points he was making with the laws? What if I supported the laws? My candidate is no longer eligible because he represented me?
Look, passing unconstitutional laws really shouldn't happen, but if there's going to be a penalty attached to such activity, I will attach it as a voter. And if voters are too dumb to take these things into consideration (and they probably are), too bad. That's one of the consequences of living in a republic.
4. Constitutionality is not a simple subject. You can take just about any Constitutional issue, post about it here on slashdot, and get a tremendous flamefest over what it means, how it pertains, etc. And that phenomena is not limited to discussion forums. You can probably take ANY Supreme Court decision--certainly EVERY decision that was not made unanimously, by the very definition--and find some judge somewhere in the country who disagrees with it. It's hard to determine these issues. We dedicated a third of our federal government to doing nothing BUT deciding these issues. A lot of people here, as elsewhere, take their own interpretations of the Constitution to be the end-all-be-all, and that's fine. I'm glad they have strong opinions. But it means absolutely nothing to a court, and it shouldn't.
5. Taking #3 into account, you're going to polticize the judicial process even more than it is already politicized. In states where judges have to run for office (is that all of them?), how kindly do you think the Republican party will take to a Republican judge kicking one of their guys out of office because of such a three-strike law? Is a Democratic judge kicking a Republican out of office going to be seen as a polticial move? Do we really want to essentially give impeachment powers to the judiciary at all?
6. And while we're here, in most states, and the federal government, this would need to be enacted as a constitutional amendment. A law to this effect would almost certainly be struck down, which would be the epitome of irony.
7. As another mini-irony, not only does the Constitution not include any such punishment scheme for violating the Constitution, it really doesn't include any provisions for declaring laws unconstitutional at all. It's something Justice Marshall took upon himself to piss off Thomas Jefferson in the opening years of our country, and we just sort of said "yeah, that makes sense." Could it be that declaring laws unconstitutional is unconstitutional? Hmmmm.
So no. It doesn't seem like a very good idea to me at all.
While it would be simple to allow Google in a whitelist scheme, it would largely render it useless because of the impossibility of whitelisting all the results.
Why do I bring up Google, you ask? Well aside from being an excellent way to find information, I also don't think it could hurt school-aged kids to get some extra experience using search engines and more importantly, learning to cull out good, authoritative sources from some kid with a geocities website.
Increasingly, the ability to find information is becoming as important or moreso than the knowledge you have in your head for just quick recall. In the words of Albert Einstein, "never memorize what you can look up." A little training in that regard during school seems like a great idea. Hell, I'd like to see them take a day and teach people how to search better as well--things like +- or quoted phrases (for Google).
I just bought a Thinkpad a few months ago (late May-ish) and it's a real beaut. It's a T60; it runs great, there is absolutely no heat issues which I was a little worried about with the dual cores, battery time is good. All in all I'm very happy with the purchase and I wouldn't recommend you worry at all about the ownership change. It's a great laptop.
My laptop isn't running SuSE so I can't comment on that.
It's anybodys guess at this point. PS3 is so overpriced at launch that it's no longer a done deal by a longshot.
I agree, but does that matter in context?
At least right now, I don't believe that the Wii or the 360 play HD or Blu-Ray discs, so any amount that PS3 sells will exert an influence on the "format war."
That said, even though the PS3 is horribly overpriced, I'm going to end up buying one. Stupid Final Fantasy series. :(
But then again, it's all just a bunch of statistics. Who cares about the children, unless they are American brats, right?
A government's first responsibility is to its own people. If my citizens are getting slaughtered by a terrorist group in your country, you damn well better do something about it or I will do it for you. It's really that simple.
If you guys didn't have contempt for peaceful forms of protest like this
We have contempt for forms of protest that break the law.
You want to protest in the streets of Chile? Go ahead. You want to march on Washington? Be my guest. You want to call the president nasty names? I'll join you.
You want to do something productive, like start up your own site with the side of this that we're likely not seeing, at least not much, in the US? Please do.
You want to break into a server because you can and deface it? No, you deserve to go to jail. And you deserve to have the shit kicked out of you while you're there, since regardless of whether or not you may have had some point to make, you made your entire cause look stupid in the process--not to mention the fact that NASA has absolutely nothing to do with anything going on in Lebanon.
Do you think this stunt made me any more sympathetic to their cause? It didn't. And most reasonable people feel the same.
Since you're going as far as to question Linus suitability for his job (architecting his hobby project that conquered the world) - where's your wildly succesful open source project?
One needs a wildly successful open source project to criticize somebody's leadership of some other wildly successful open source project?
I suppose that one would also need to be the leader of a country with population of 300 million to criticize the job performance of the US president. Or perhaps be a highly respected engineer with specialty in safety to know that the Ford Pintos bursting into flame at the slightest provocation a couple decades ago wasn't a good thing.
Please.
You're making the assumption that the only calls which have been monitored/recorded are those with a known terrorist as one of the parties.
No, I'm not assuming anything. I asked if they had a specific reason to believe they in particular had been spied on, and thus would have the standing to sue. "A spying program exists that spies on some people, therefore I must have been spied on" just can't cut it. Even if it DOES spy on every single person who has ever placed a call anywhere, we don't know that yet, so they cannot have any reasonable belief of it from a legal sense. (Remember, we're dealing with courts: "Reasonable" is a legal term, even though it's hardly ever specifically defined.)
Obviously, if they talked to terrorist buddies, they would have such reason. Is there any other way they would? I really can't think of anything, without somebody else with the authority releasing more information (such as Congress investigating or the president releasing information).
I'm not trying to accuse anybody of associating with terrorists or whatever. I'm just trying to come up with a way where any person would have a strong reason to believe their calls were monitored that's better than "well, there's a spying program..."
It's a Catch-22.
Absolutely, but the legal system is full of these. Whether we like it or not, effective or not, it's Congress' job to check into these programs right now. The fact that they're mostly a bunch of morons content to sit on their hands doesn't transfer that responsibility elsewhere. I wish it did, or that people actually took things like this seriously enough to vote in a new bunch of morons. But it's unlikely.
Let me disclaim some things before I make a comment, mostly in the devils advocate sense. I'm not sure how I feel about this decision, but I know how I feel about Bush and his domestic spying programs and I hate them both. That said:
So how can the judge say "you don't KNOW that you were wiretapped, so you can't sue" with a straight face?
Well, because I think that's how the law works. If I punch you in the face and break a bone, your third cousin twice removed doesn't get to sue me for medical expenses related to it. The person suing has to be the person who was wronged (or have legal status to file on their behalf--such as guardians in the case of minors, or people with power of attorney). This is the same thing that happened in the whole "the Pledge is unconstitutional" ruling a year or two ago. The Supreme Court threw the ruling out because the father, suing on behalf of his child, did not have legal custody at the time. Is it a legal cop-out? Well, yes, but the legal system is also a very formal establishmentwith very set rules.
In this case, it's obviously a harder thing to understand. Yeah, it's about a secret spying program--but do these guys who were suing actually have any reason to believe their calls in specific were actually monitored/recorded? I guess they could admit talking to their terrorist friends and that would probably give them the status to sue, but it would also get them into a bit of hot water. Failing that, CAN they even have any such reasonable belief?
Does that mean there's no recourse to this sort of action? No. Anybody charged based in any part with evidence obtained through this program would have the status to sue. Likewise, Congress could step in and put a stop to it, including, if they had the spine, demanding all such evidence gathered to date through the program be destroyed. (Of course that would be "helping the terrorists" so most Congressmen wouldn't do it.)
Does it suck? Well, yeah, it does, but that's the nature of the beast when we're dealing with anything clandestine. Otherwise any wackjob who wants to could claim some massive government conspiracy is being perpetuated, with absolutely no proof, and tie up the courts trying to force them to reveal it.
And no, I'm not saying that's what this is.
Isn't Bush getting in front of a podium and denouncing the liberal media for revealing state secrets enough of an "official confirmation"?
I would think so, but did the plaintiffs actually argue this point during their case?
Honestly, the "you don't have the status to sue" part of the ruling didn't bother me. The whole "OMG NATIONAL SECURITY!!!" thing was what really rubbed me the wrong way. This has to be one of the worst kept secrets in politics today. If any harm would actually be done to national security by exposing it, it's already been done -- and in my opinion, it's greatly overshadowed by the fact that this program is very likely illegal to begin with. Sorry, G-Dub, you don't get to re-write laws at whim from your study--and that includes your bullshit "signing statements."
We shouldn't judge too quickly, because the government deserves the benefit of the doubt. To presume that he's innocent would just be knee-jerk tinfoil-hat paranoia.
All the grandparent said was that the conspiracy theories about him being arrested so the government could shut him up were premature. Even if you took that to mean "the government deserves the benefit of the doubt," it means they deserve the benefit of the doubt that they actually have probable cause to make the arrest. This has precisely NOTHING to do with whether or not he is actually guilty or innocent of any charges that may be filed.
But thanks for the unnecessary alarmism. We appreciate all you've done--making it harder to get people to take us seriously when we raise legitimate questions about abuses of government authority.
there is little evidence that good "CEO-sense" (whatever that means) has much to do with success.
Well, that depends on the nature of the business I suppose. Let's take iTunes for example. It's a vastly simple concept and probably half of the people who come to /. could code their own--perhaps even better--version of it. But would it ever have happened without somebody like Steve Jobs, with good managerial skills and relationships to bring the record companies into the fold?
The more a company relies on contracts, the more the "CEO-sense" matters. Being able to do the work in no way implies that you're going to be able to GET the work. I'm not surprised so many on this website ignore that fact, being as we (yes, I'm including myself) have a reputation as somewhat anti-social and rather... shall we say, ignorant, of the value of things like good communications skills, good professional relationships, etc.
But as a predictor, as they always say in the buz, "past performance is not a guide to future performance".
That may well be a bit misleading.
According to industrial/organizational psychologists (the sorts who devise hiring tests and the like), past behavior is THE BEST indicator of future behavior. Whether or not it is a GOOD indicator is a bit irrelevant in that sense, don't you think? If it's the best piece of information available to making a decision, it's the best piece of information available--whether it's 1% accurate or 99.9999% accurate. Obviously you hope for more rather than less, but there's only one "best."
If I'm on a board of a company who just endured a nosedive, looking for a new CEO, you can bet the most important thing I'm going to look for is somebody who has done well in that type of situation before. If I have to shell out big bucks to get somebody like that--and you can be pretty sure that I will--well, that's the price of business I guess. It's cheaper than going bankrupt.
Aren't there an awful lot of parentheticals in your post to be complaining about other peoples' writing styles? (You know what I'm talking about.) Parentheticals are, after all, typically unimportant to the sentence and (to people reading them) they tend to be somewhat distracting from the point.
Futhermore, the founding fathers didn't say that most people are unfit to vote.
I admit it has been quite some time since I studied American history in any depth, but I do think there's something to saying they did; some of them, at least. My recollection is that was the reason they created the whole electoral college, which, at the time, was under NO obligation to vote for the person their state (or whatever) voted for. I think the founders hoped that some day everybody would be fit to vote--and who knows if they would believe everybody was today--but back in their time... maybe it's not too far off base.
I suppose the harranging is over the word "most." I'm not sure it was ever used, but being that blacks and women were banned from voting, and the electoral college was set up at least in part (hopefully we can both agree to that!) to prevent the people who COULD vote (white males) from making "mistakes," it seems like they were definitely concerned about a majority of people. Again, some of them.
A website does not cause child abductions. Get over this "OMG teh kiddies!!" bullshit and take some responsibility for yourself and your kids. Not only will they be safer, the world will be a better place for it.
Of course, this will never happen. Why? Because for the ISPs, its NOT about money, its about CONTROL.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your point, that is not why it won't happen. It will not happen because of something economists refer to as a "flat rate bias." People prefer to pay a fixed rate and not have to worry about how much they're using rather than pay any sort of rate per unit or any sort of overages like you describe. This holds true most of the time even if it can be demonstrated to that consumer that they would actually pay less money under the per-unit system than they would with the flat rate.
It's kind of like what happens a lot of times in the US with cellphones, which are still, largely, a "pay for X in advance, pay more if you go over" system like you describe (although it slowly seems to be moving away from that). People are so afraid of those overage fees that many will end up purchasing a plan way bigger than they need 95% of the time out of fear of that 5% of the time they might have had to pay extra. Their fear and discomfort having to worry about the concept led them to create a sort of artifical flat rate for themselves, by purchasing a plan which has limits so huge they'll never hit them. This is a concept that goes back to the beginnings of the US telephone network for sure, and very likely way before that. (I guess if you wanted to argue about it, the concept always existed and I should say it was one "identified as far back as" instead. But I digress.)
While it's true that there is limited competition in the whole phone company/broadband provider field, there is still competition enough to give consumers things like this that they want, and any agreement between companies to artificially restrain competition by agreeing amongst themselves to do this whether people want it or not would very likely be an illegal practice in the US.
Was it you who said later in this thread that you're from Australia? I have a number of Aussie friends, so I'm passingly familiar with the whole "limited transfer then throttle" system. I think it's absolutely ridiculous, and I'm not sure Americans would go for that.
A death threat (even if only displayed in own home) is worse than that.
You answered your own question. It's essentially a years-old debate about how far a school's authority should extend beyond its doors. I recall once when I was in sixth grade, I believe, I called some girl a bitch as we were walking home (she hit one of my friends with her bike as we were walking along the sidewalk). We were practically home. It was about three blocks away from school at the time. The next day, of course, I was called into the principal's office. (On another sort of annoying point, I seem to have been called in because the girl happened to be black. Now come on, if it had been race related, I could have come up with a better word than "bitch" yaknow?)
Nothing ultimately happened, but I still question whether the school should have been involved at all. It's the same issue here.
Is a death-threat against a teacher bad? Yes. But it obviously was not really serious. If it had been, when he was handed over to the police, they wouldn't have concluded it was a joke--and he likely would have been expelled, as well, if they truly thought it serious and not a joke (which their own psychologist also determined). After all, if a student was seriously threatening a teacher's life, he would just be more pissed off and more likely to make good on his threats when he came back from a suspension for it. So let's be honest with ourselves: It wasn't the death threat that got him in trouble, it was the age-old "you have to be nice to your teachers" rule in the form of a "death threat."
Assuming I were a student in this school/class, if a friend and I are talking in my room about this teacher and, using your words, I suggest he should go suck donkey balls, should he be able to report me and get me suspended? At what point does their jurisdiction end? Surely they are not the police force of the Internet, are they? I think the proper reaction would be to turn it over to the police--which they did--and then butt out and let them handle it.
They essentially held this kid back because of what both the police force and their own psychologist concluded was a joke. That is well beyond excessive, even if they should have some right to suspend him for something he says on the Internet to begin with--which I don't think they should.
f you won't provide source, you got nothing from me"
To which I wish Google would reply: "Then don't download the program you pains in the asses." If you ask me, that would be the proper response. Hell, it might even be too nice.
I run linux, I like open source--but I don't have a public cry about it if somebody who puts a ton of work into giving me a native port of their already-free software doesn't feel it is in their best interests to also release the source.
They'll whine in considerable detail about security issues and how Google might be searching their entire hard drive and sending the content back for analysis or something. You know what? Could be. If you don't trust the company, DON'T INSTALL THEIR SOFTWARE. Simple.
You are already paying for net access. Now your telecoms aren't quite satisfied with your payment and want to double dip by collecting on the other side of the pipe.
Actually, they want to triple-dip. You are paying for your own personal Internet access. Whomever is on the other end at the site you're visting is paying as well--it may not be the person directly responsible for the website (think free hosting providers and the like), but SOMEWHERE on that end, bandwidth is being paid for.
Now, seemingly, they're upset that the company receiving the profits might not be them on both sides. gasp. Call Congress!--which is exactly what they did.
If you wanted to go a little farther... if we're talking about the phone companies, isn't what they want pretty close to a quadruple dip? A good portion of the lines they have were subsidized by tax dollars, which they now use to provide customers with Internet access. I don't know how much of the actual Internet backbone may have been subsidized, but I would not be at all surprised to find out it's a lot.
Or perhaps they feel the value of having a place, public or not, where they can vent themselves is worth the price of a couple missed jobs due to employers who demand that people they consider for jobs be identically stiff at work and away from work.
Honestly, I would not want to work for any employer who thought that they should have any control whatsoever over my personal life when it is not affecting my work, nor one who considered me incapable of conducting myself professionally based on completely unrelated situations.
It depends on how they go about it, and whether or not the company is currently established. For example, if they let you buy office for $500 (just throwing out a number--no idea if it's high or low compared to current) or rent it for $50/year, the model makes some sense. Not only might it very likely be the cheaper option, but it permits you to always have the latest copy of a piece of software for no extra cost. And after the 10 years it takes to equal out, it doesn't seem unreasonable that a company would be updating Office every 10 years or less anyway--so it's not quite equal.
For established companies, who have already (perhaps recently) shelled out for their copies of Office or what-have-you, it might make less sense--but suddenly it's a great option for startups. $500 a copy is a lot for a small company to shell out, but $50 is much more reasonable. When it comes time for those established companies to upgrade once again, though, the benefits of the pay-as-you-go model crop back up.
It won't work if the pricing is too high, and probably won't work if it's too frequent. I think a company would be happier to pay $60/year than $5/month, just as an issue of conveinience.
In short... it MIGHT work, but it will have to be done right.
You're probably going to get a flamebait mod for that, but I have to applaud anyway. Insightful comment.
(I'm a dedicate linux user--but the attitudes of so many people particularly here on /. is just way too much.)
I don't blame them for the Iraq war. But if they said "yes, they have WMDs" and they didn't, that's an awfully big mistake.
If, on the other hand, they said "we don't think so" and Bush heard "of course they do, invade!! INVADE!!" then that's an entirely different story.
I would be significantly more likely to trust the Israeli intelligence services than the American, particularly after the Iraq fiasco. I think it's generally accepted that Israel has one of if not the best intelligence services in the world.
(Before anybody says it, I'm aware that the Israelis were very happy to nod in agreement with everything we said about Iraq--whether that was because they believed it or because they just wanted us to do it is up for debate.)
That is not to say, of course, that I trust either.
CVS is as likely to break your application and introduce new bugs as it is to fix bugs from previous releases. You're quick to point out how it can be good, but somehow I expect you'd be one of those people going "it's CVS you dumbass, deal with the bugs!!!" if some new user compiled from CVS for the bug fixes and complained about the new bugs breaking old features.
In general, CVS should be considered unstable and the majority of users--encompassing pretty much all novice users and anybody running important systems--should stay away. It's not that you "get fixes a little early." It's that you get an unpolished, in-development version which may include a fix for your problem and may well introduce 10 more bugs that are going to drive you batty. Which of course, compiling from CVS isn't going to help in any short order.