Oh, and one last comment, these so called XP pirates that would use Linux to pirate XP? Nope. They are too stupid to figure out how to use Linux just to get free winbloz.
I think the more pertinent question is, how many semi-geeky folks (ie, those who DO use linux and CAN use it to get Windows if they so desired) dual boot? Because I'm willing to bet a fair portion of those copies aren't legitimate. I wouldn't go as far as 40% though.
Oh, and if Linux is such an easy to use pirating tool, why is it that M$ is the number one delivery system for pirated warez?
Well my first thought would be "where did you get your stats from?" because I suspect you just made it up. I'm sure you're right, of course, but it's not a fair comparison. An OS with 80-90% market share is used more often to steal software (80-90% of which is made exclusively for it)? Well go figure.
1) nothing should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Hey, cool! I've always wanted to know where every CIA agent in the world was stationed, what name he was going by and where I might be able to find him after business hours. Err... purely for a social visit, you understand.
I would love to be able to FOIA our governments defense plans and publish them to the world. Or to demand the Army tell me exactly how they were going to move in Iraq before they ever went. I'm sure Saddam would have paid a pretty penny.
It would be fun to know the exact specifications of new technology the government may be working on. I wouldn't want the rest of the world to fall behind.
Or... perhaps you should be careful with words like "nothing."
Point 2 means that a duplicitous government that lies about things like the presence of WMDs or the level of civilian casualties or the amount of an area under control will be able to lie without anyone being able to verify or disprove what they say.
By that logic, CNN should be able to buy photos from these satellites right now before any such restriction bill passes, and tell me exactly how many people died. Right? Or have bought it two years ago and said "no, sorry George, our pictures show no WMDs?"
Or more likely, they were just shots at the war in a story they didn't belong.
People who don't understand these concepts have a right to vote. But why are we encouraging them?
Well, the HOPE is that they would become at least mildly informed about the candidates before casting their vote. We can argue about whether or not that is the case.
But really, I think everybody who is eligible should be encouraged to vote. Whether they really see it or not, they have a stake in the elections the same way better informed voters do. I have some degree of trouble saying the people of the United States elected Bush president (or whomever, just using the most recent) when only half the country bothers to even cast a vote. Realistically, half of the half of the population who chose to vote are the ones who elected him. 25% of the people who could be out there voting. That's really rather patheic.
As far as theories go, I theorize that not much would change. I mean sure, we might have ended up for example with Gore instead of Bush from the last election, but it's still likely to be somebody from one of the two major parties. (As an aside, I'm not sure how "informed" that is--do we really believe no highly qualified individual could possibly be from any other party?) In short, it would really be the status quo, but at least the president, whomever it is and whatever his/her party, would have the support of more of the people he's been elected to lead.
And as something way off the base subject --
Do states have any individual power anymore? Not really, everything is Federal now because not enough voters know the difference. So much for the United States of America.
-- you obviously feel there is a "right" and a "wrong" decision in issues like these. And that's cool; I'm glad you feel strongly whichever way you feel, so long as you understand that equally informed people may very well feel equally strongly in the opposite direction. Informed people disagree all the time. (And please don't take my saying this to be a position statement. I'm simply not interested in debating the issue at all.)
What really surprises me is the last half of what you quoted: "that were not tested or approved nationally or in California."
Who could authorize the move to Diebold's system, the Sec of State? And how the hell did he manage to let a fact like not being approved in his own state slip by? How did the people funding the change not realize it?
Somebody's head should be chopped for that alone, nevermind Diebold's other faults. That is just incompetence as far as I'm concerned, and a basic lack of fact-checking.
The phrase serves some sort of purpose and if you are correct that it is simply a stand-in for "user" then why is it used and not the simpler word "user"?
He didn't say it was a stand-in for user. He said it was a stand-in for a type of user with the characteristics he outlined. Whether not caring about the inner workings of a computer is bad or not is an individual judgment call. Around here, you'd probably find lots of arguments that it is; in the outside world, not so much.
Hardly a model of clarity? It's one of the few license agreements that IANAL can understand without legal help!
I don't know about that. I see a half dozen debates about the GPL on slashdot in threads like these whenever people start trying to comment on what situations require what.
Maybe the view is somewhat naive, but this is slashdot, and most of the people here tend to be pro OSS and many pro-GPL: If there is disagreement in a community like this over the license terms, I can only imagine what interpretation problems there might be in the outside world, perhaps in a business environment where a Suit instead of a Tech is the one making the final decision on whether or not this GPL thing is for them.
Judges have the authority to fine a lawyer for filing frivolous lawsuits (or false statements, etc) and to subsequently dismiss those cases with prejudice. (Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.)
They just don't. It's hard to call a lawsuit frivolous, legally-speaking. For the record, I don't think this guy should be suing anybody, but all that's required for libel is that the people who were posting about him say something malicious and knowingly false. And oddly, that's what you prove, not what you require going in. (IANAL)
Most Americans before the war thought that the majority of the 9/11 highjackers were from Iraq.
That's partly true. Many Americans immediately after 9/11 wondered if Iraq was involved. It was a massive loss of innocent life and the vast majority of people were dumbfounded. It was natural to assume that such a profound strike would require state sponsorship, and Iraq--the last country we had gone to war with, and one that had been shooting at us in the no-fly zones since--made sense. As the details were fleshed out, those numbers dropped. Unscientifically, everybody I spoke to about the case for going to war, regardless of whether they ultimately supported it or not, said that the link between Iraq and terrorists was the weakest case they made.
Yes, it's a slight majority, but to make a statement like "the reason the majority of Americans are not in support...has to do with the fact they didn't expect as many American soldiers to die" is unfair. I think these numbers clearly show that nearly half of Americans did not support the war before it started and only roughly 10% (or less, with margins of error) have since changed their minds and withdrawn their support.
Of course we're tired of Americans dying. That is as we should be, but I think those who supported the war believe it's a cause worth fighting and dying for. Yes, there are casualty levels where one needs to pause and wonder if the benefits outweigh the costs, but I think it's much more likely that the inability to locate the WMDs was the greater cause of the 10% shift than the mounting casualties.
Most right now probably don't know the difference between Casey Kasem and Osama bin Laden.
That is by far the most stupid, ridiculous thing you have said. Just because our president is off playing war with Iraq does NOT mean Americans have forgotten bin Laden. In fact one of the major criticisms about going to war with Iraq by those who didn't support it is that it would distract us from hunting bin Laden. He will get his, and it will be most unpleasant for him.
there is enough internal willingness in the U.S. to use a military superiority to bully other nations, even friendly ones.
What friendly nations have we bullied militarily? I can't think of any case where we've turned to an ally and threatened to hit them if they didn't support us in something.
No, it's not. Yes, Jefferson was the first one to use the words "wall of separation between Church and State," and one can argue strongly for either side of the debate about whether or not that is what the Founding Fathers intended.
But you know what? The power of judicial review--determining if laws are constitutional or not--isn't in the Constitution either. It was a concept invented by the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, during Jefferson's administration. The how's and why's aren't all that important, but that's how it is. Does that mean judicial review is a "myth?" Seems pretty damn real to me from where I sit. Seems to me we have a handful of controversies raging around that very concept right now (is the pledge constitutional? are bans against gay marriage constitutional? is affirmative action constitutional?). It's an adaptation, but it's certainly not a myth. Likewise the wall of separation. Also, in 1878, the Supreme Court used Jefferson's "wall of separation" in Reynolds v. United States, making it a perfectly apt phrase. In was used again in 1948 in McCollum v. Board of Education where they stated, "in the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'" [Source, incidentally: http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html] Even if they were a "myth" prior to these cases, they became constitutional precedent thereafter.
And incidentally, the comment from the grandparent was about secular GOVERNMENT structures. He didn't say the American people were secular, so pointing to an article about how many people think the world is better off without religion proves very little.
the American beside me pouring his coffee proudly proclaimed, "I say kill 'em all, fucking A-Rabs."
Oh please. Not even commenting on how you consider a handful of people in a hotel representative of the majority of the nation, do you honestly believe statements like that are meant to be taken at their word? He just heard about more American boys dead and he's pissed. But let's even assume he completely meant it, literally, and so did everybody else: More than half of the American people do not support the Iraq war, so do you really beleive even half would support "kill[ing] 'em all?" Do you even believe half of the people who DO support the war would support that sort of genocide? I say "half," of course, because anything under that is entirely unfair to attribute to "the Americans." Maybe that guy's bigoted, but if you believe that of Americans at large, you've got your own bigotries to deal with too.
As to your original point, saying "X is not as bad as Y" does not mean it is condoned. It's a matter of proportion. Petty theft is not as bad as murder, but it doesn't mean I condone either one. It simply means what it says: One is more serious, and one should be dealt with more seriously.
One idiot doesn't make a government. (It takes a lot of idiots for that.) There are fools in every government, and foolish things said by everybody. The bottom line is that whatever that person may have said (Rumsfeld, was it?), there are still court-martials going on. We can argue forever about whether or not they're deserved (ie, whether or not those soldiers are the ones to blame), whether they go high enough, whether the actions were somehow encouraged by somebody in government--but there is still some sort of accountability going on. It's not as though he said "it's not as bad as what went on under Saddam, so we're calling off the investigation."
Besides, the government will be held accountable for its actions shortly. It's called the presidential election, and I guarantee Iraq and Abu Ghraib are things that will factor into the decisions of the voters.
Re:I'm sick of the wannebe oppressed
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P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wow, that was a fascinating examination of corporate bullshit. But let's talk about slashdot user bullshit too, shall we?
Let's start with the "everything that touches Microsoft becomes tainted with evil" attitude. It reminds me of the attitude ten year olds have. Or hell, from the Simpsons:
Marge: How could you BOTH miss the bus? Bart: We touched hands and had to wash the cooties off!
But tell me. What, precisely, gives you any right to take what this man says and insert whatever words into his mouth that you wish? Have you ever even heard of this man before you read the article? Because... unless you're longtime friends and know exactly who he is and what he's about, you've slung more than enough bullshit yourself already. And apparently convinced moderators to mod you Insightful for putting words into somebody's mouth.
Is it not possible this man means exactly what he says? Maybe he really does want to build the best browser he can. Maybe he really does value feedback on the products he creates; hell, most programmers I know enjoy knowing that people are using their software and what they think of it. Could it be that the Higher Ups who drive the company's direction might be the ones at fault for some of the things IE lacks?
But nahh, he works at Microsoft so he must be Tainted. After all, nobody with ethics would really work for the devil. There can't be any legitimately good people who want to do their best working at Microsoft.
As long as you're challenging people to say what they mean, why don't you follow your own lead? Stop pretending you're doing a public service by putting words into somebody's mouth, and just announce your painfully-clear bias outright. Maybe say why. This is Slashdot, after all. Saying "M$ iz st00pid" is usually good for a +3 at least.
But during the installation, I appreciate having choices.
I appreciate choices too, but at the same time it can be rather annoying if one chooses wrong. It may not even be that what I chose was bad, but maybe it just wasn't what I expected. Example from the windows world: You have editors like Notepad that do plain-text stuff, then you have Wordpad which does the formatted text stuff, but then there are also things like Office which can do any of the text-formatting things the others can do and more, and on top of that has the ability to do things like spreadsheets.
If somebody goes through the install thinking they are selecting something like Office and get something like Notepad, I can see where they would be miffed, especially the more novice users who might have trouble dealing with (even simple) installations of products from websites or the install discs or whatever. For those who are compltely new to linux, they might assume it doesn't even get any better.
I suppose letting installers go with what they consider best isn't a bad approach, but then we're sort of back to the point of not having (or in this case using) choice.
Honestly, do you think AT&T has the right to listen-in to your conversations, just because they aren't the government? In reality, they have LESS legal standing to invade your privacy, NOT MORE.
AT&T has no right because the government says they don't. The Constitution limits and defines the power of government, not what private citizens can do to one another. You take every law off the books and the government would still be restricted from tapping your lines, but AT&T would not be prohibited from listening in on all of your conversations.
If you're asking if I think they SHOULD have a right to listen in on anything, absolutely not. But what people should do and what they are legally allowed to or prohibited from doing are not always the same thing.
Most obvious example: Phone conversations cannot be tapped without a court order because people have a reasonable assumption of privacy.
Which is one of the privacy guidelines established by the Supreme Court in determining government encroachments of your privacy. And with your specific example, there are also guiding wiretap laws.
However your privacy "rights" where it regards interaction with other private citizens are not nearly so developed. For instance, with very little reason, your employers can monitor your email, search your company-supplied desk drawers, etc. If you let me in your house, I'm not aware of any law that would prevent me from ruffling through your filing cabinet.
Now granted, there are some related restrictions. For example if I found your credit card number in one of those cabinets I couldn't go billing things to your card--but that's credit card fraud, not an issue of privacy. If I broke into your house to search, that's breaking and entering, not really an issue of privacy. (Breaking and entering laws might exist in part to protect our privacy, but breaking and entering is illegal because state legislatures say so.) Little by little, legislatures and courts are beginning to more narrowly define privacy rights with regards to interactions with other people (especially employer/employee relationships), but it is by no means as established as when the government may or may not tap your phones.
The grandparent's post, in its proper context, remains largely accurate; I have no idea how you got onto wiretaps. We're not talking about the government here, we're talking about movie theater people with NV goggles searching out movie pirates. Not only do I see absolutely no way it matters whether you expect they're doing that or not, but while we could argue all day about whether or not it is right, good for business or even effective, I see it as the fundamental right of theater owners to protect their revenues by stopping pirates. If they choose to use NV goggles to help them do so, that's their business.
In short, you were way too quick to try and pounce.
Doesn't this fly in the face of the cherished "right to remain silent"?
No. You have the right to remain silent when you are under arrest or are no longer free to leave. But even beyond that, your right to remain silent is to allow you to prevent incriminating yourself. Police do not have to mirandize you if 1) the information is non-incriminating in nature or 2) the information you've given is given voluntarily. Giving your name says nothing about your guilt or innocence. This is what the justices have ruled, as indicated in their holdings:
Held: Petitioner's conviction does not violate his Fourth Amendment rights or the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on self-incrimination.
For those who are concerned about the ruling, however, take solace in the fact that the decision was 5-4 which means, historically, that the decision is prone to be overturned. After a very cursory examination of the dissents, Justice Stevens' opinion seems to be that that the Fifth Amendment does not provide for even a narrow exception like this. The other three dissenting justices (Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) seem more interested in why the justices reserved judgment about why answers to "what is your name?" can be compelled if it might lead to conviction on a different offense. As he puts it, "I would not begin to erode a clear rule with special exceptions."
I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, the willingness to kill or die for something is a sure sign of that you have simply become too fanatical.
Every time I see sentiment like this expressed, it reminds me of a quote:
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill
The willingness to lay down one's life for something is not, of necessity, fanaticism; it is not inherantly unreasonable or outlandish. It is simple recognition that there are more important things out there than yourself. For some, that something is an idea: freedom, liberty, equality, religion. For others it is quite tangible: family or friends.
In my case it is both. I would die for my friends, not only because I couldn't bear to see them come to any harm, but because I only end up making friends with people in whom I see something valuable. Something in their mind or their spirit touches me and I realize that it is more important to me than my own life.
I would also die to protect my ideals and my freedoms. I take exception to a lot of what this administration is doing and am doing what I can: trying to bring others to my point of view, supporting alternate candidates for the upcoming elections, writing congressmen. If I thought it would serve any logical purpose, I would happily die to bring about the changes I want to see. , but your supposition that being prepared to kill or die for something must mean that non-violent alternatives are overlooked is simply wrong.
Right there, way before the first ammendment, is the delegation of power to the federal government to enforce copyrights.
You mean this? "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Yeah, that gives them the right to legislate rules on copyright, but I'm not sure it gives them any right to become an enforcer. Let's remember that a copyright secures rights of "the author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work." It does no such thing for the federal government.
In other words, the way I see it, the federal government is either usurping your right to your copyrighted work and protection thereof by telling you they're going to enforce it for you--or, the more likely case, the RIAA, MPAA and others are essentially assigning enforcement rights of copyright to the federal government, leaving it nothing but a corporate enforcer for the highest bidder.
Do you think that if I wrote a song that I found pirated on the Internet, that I could call up 'ole John Ashcroft and get some prosecutors working on the case for me? If not, this law is bullshit. If the government is going to take over enforcement of YOUR copyright they should be doing it to protect the little guys who can't afford to enforce it themselves, not multi-billion dollar conglomerates of record companies.
"An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought." -- Simon Cameron
Does anybody else find this to be too highly exaggerated at best (complete BS at worst)?
How can an 83% on something worth 10% of the final grade bring down his grade "significantly?" If he had a 100%, he would end up 98%. Hardly significant. If he had a 91%, he'd end up at 90%. Also not significant. In fact the only (integer) number that would make a difference, at least according to my high school grading scale, is if he was sitting right on 90% to begin with, in which case he'd slide down to 89.3%, a little too low for most teachers to round back up. He shifted down 2% at most. Even if that DID move him down a grade, I can hardly consider a drop of no more than 2% to be significant. It means he was on the border to begin with and this toppled him over.
He'll be trying to give a lecture and they'll be leaning over, giggling at each others screens as they pull up random pages on the Web. And these are *college students*, let alone high school age kids or younger.
This may be true--in fact as a college student I can tell you it is true for a lot of people--but that's the fault of the students, not the technology.
In high school and grade school, maybe you're right that computers should be kept out of classrooms. A certain amount of hand-holding is to be expected for students who are there largely, or solely, because their parents and/or the state tells them they have to be. But by the time one gets to college, if ones has not yet figured out how to succeed in school (which generally begins by listening to the teacher!), I just chalk that up as a "too damn bad" learning experience. Take their money and give them the F they probably deserve. And hell, if they can goof off in class and still do the work well, more power to them.
As to the article itself, one thought was in my head most of the way: It's the students, not the computers. Students are ultimately responsible for learning the material; good teachers and good technology merely facilitate that. Likewise, students are responsible for determing what they need to do to get the grade they want. As I said above, at least at the college level, students should be free to be absolute morons so long as it doesn't disturb anybody else. They're either doing enough work to get the grade they want or they're going to be very unhappy come the end of the semester.
As for this quote from the article --
One English teacher could readily tell which of her students essays were conceived on a computer. "They don't link ideas," the teacher said. "They just write one thing, and then they write another one, and they don't seem to see or develop the relationships between them.
-- that is a matter of people being poor writers. There are always a few exceptions, but unfortunately that seems to be the rule nowadays. Interestingly, I had an absolutely astoundingly talented writer in my high school sophomore year English class; by the time I got into my first two college-level English classes, few people there could write well enough, in my opinion, to even get out of the course. (Naturally most did; this, too, must say something about our educational system. Or maybe just my expectations. *shrugs*)
Do computers make people write worse than they otherwise would? The simple answer is that computers are tools and they do what their operator tells them to. In my case, my writing is probably twice as good on the computer than if I were to hand write it for the simple reason that I am a much quicker typist than I am a writer. That in mind, I am much more willing to expand more on ideas on the computer where I can write twice as much in half the time. On paper, I generally expand only as much as I feel necessary to make my point clear. Computers can be an excellent practice if they're used as practice. Since you're online anyway, writing emails, posting to message boards and slashdot, sitting in chatrooms, rifling through IM windows--why not write properly in those? The practice is immense and as they say, practice makes perfect.
Then again, there are the "AIM speak" people. (That's what it's called now, it seems, despite predating AIM.) In that case though, idk wtf u r thinking when u do that. Of course that's not going to help you--but again, the operator, not the computer, is the one making the decisions.
So it seems I've rambled my way to a simple point: Computers are merely tools that do what the operator tells them to. Like all tools, they can be used well or they can be used poorly. What's that saying? 90% of computer problems are caused by a loose nut between the chair and the keyboard.
I'm not really a Sega person... speaking of which... Sega? When was the last time you saw a Sega?
Not a game for a Sega. It's a game made by the company Sega. If I recall correctly, they gave up the console work many years ago but have stuck around making games.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and one last comment, these so called XP pirates that would use Linux to pirate XP? Nope. They are too stupid to figure out how to use Linux just to get free winbloz.
I think the more pertinent question is, how many semi-geeky folks (ie, those who DO use linux and CAN use it to get Windows if they so desired) dual boot? Because I'm willing to bet a fair portion of those copies aren't legitimate. I wouldn't go as far as 40% though.
Oh, and if Linux is such an easy to use pirating tool, why is it that M$ is the number one delivery system for pirated warez?
Well my first thought would be "where did you get your stats from?" because I suspect you just made it up. I'm sure you're right, of course, but it's not a fair comparison. An OS with 80-90% market share is used more often to steal software (80-90% of which is made exclusively for it)? Well go figure.
That's what you get when you outsource code-development to 3rd-world countries.
Wait, wait, wait... are you trying to say that piracy is somehow the result of outsourcing?
Little too far, don't you think? Pirated software in all its various forms existed long before outsourcing was en vogue.
1) nothing should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Hey, cool! I've always wanted to know where every CIA agent in the world was stationed, what name he was going by and where I might be able to find him after business hours. Err... purely for a social visit, you understand.
I would love to be able to FOIA our governments defense plans and publish them to the world. Or to demand the Army tell me exactly how they were going to move in Iraq before they ever went. I'm sure Saddam would have paid a pretty penny.
It would be fun to know the exact specifications of new technology the government may be working on. I wouldn't want the rest of the world to fall behind.
Or... perhaps you should be careful with words like "nothing."
Point 2 means that a duplicitous government that lies about things like the presence of WMDs or the level of civilian casualties or the amount of an area under control will be able to lie without anyone being able to verify or disprove what they say.
By that logic, CNN should be able to buy photos from these satellites right now before any such restriction bill passes, and tell me exactly how many people died. Right? Or have bought it two years ago and said "no, sorry George, our pictures show no WMDs?"
Or more likely, they were just shots at the war in a story they didn't belong.
People who don't understand these concepts have a right to vote. But why are we encouraging them?
Well, the HOPE is that they would become at least mildly informed about the candidates before casting their vote. We can argue about whether or not that is the case.
But really, I think everybody who is eligible should be encouraged to vote. Whether they really see it or not, they have a stake in the elections the same way better informed voters do. I have some degree of trouble saying the people of the United States elected Bush president (or whomever, just using the most recent) when only half the country bothers to even cast a vote. Realistically, half of the half of the population who chose to vote are the ones who elected him. 25% of the people who could be out there voting. That's really rather patheic.
As far as theories go, I theorize that not much would change. I mean sure, we might have ended up for example with Gore instead of Bush from the last election, but it's still likely to be somebody from one of the two major parties. (As an aside, I'm not sure how "informed" that is--do we really believe no highly qualified individual could possibly be from any other party?) In short, it would really be the status quo, but at least the president, whomever it is and whatever his/her party, would have the support of more of the people he's been elected to lead.
And as something way off the base subject --
Do states have any individual power anymore? Not really, everything is Federal now because not enough voters know the difference. So much for the United States of America.
-- you obviously feel there is a "right" and a "wrong" decision in issues like these. And that's cool; I'm glad you feel strongly whichever way you feel, so long as you understand that equally informed people may very well feel equally strongly in the opposite direction. Informed people disagree all the time. (And please don't take my saying this to be a position statement. I'm simply not interested in debating the issue at all.)
What really surprises me is the last half of what you quoted: "that were not tested or approved nationally or in California."
Who could authorize the move to Diebold's system, the Sec of State? And how the hell did he manage to let a fact like not being approved in his own state slip by? How did the people funding the change not realize it?
Somebody's head should be chopped for that alone, nevermind Diebold's other faults. That is just incompetence as far as I'm concerned, and a basic lack of fact-checking.
The phrase serves some sort of purpose and if you are correct that it is simply a stand-in for "user" then why is it used and not the simpler word "user"?
He didn't say it was a stand-in for user. He said it was a stand-in for a type of user with the characteristics he outlined. Whether not caring about the inner workings of a computer is bad or not is an individual judgment call. Around here, you'd probably find lots of arguments that it is; in the outside world, not so much.
Hardly a model of clarity? It's one of the few license agreements that IANAL can understand without legal help!
I don't know about that. I see a half dozen debates about the GPL on slashdot in threads like these whenever people start trying to comment on what situations require what.
Maybe the view is somewhat naive, but this is slashdot, and most of the people here tend to be pro OSS and many pro-GPL: If there is disagreement in a community like this over the license terms, I can only imagine what interpretation problems there might be in the outside world, perhaps in a business environment where a Suit instead of a Tech is the one making the final decision on whether or not this GPL thing is for them.
Judges have the authority to fine a lawyer for filing frivolous lawsuits (or false statements, etc) and to subsequently dismiss those cases with prejudice. (Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.)
They just don't. It's hard to call a lawsuit frivolous, legally-speaking. For the record, I don't think this guy should be suing anybody, but all that's required for libel is that the people who were posting about him say something malicious and knowingly false. And oddly, that's what you prove, not what you require going in. (IANAL)
Most Americans before the war thought that the majority of the 9/11 highjackers were from Iraq.
That's partly true. Many Americans immediately after 9/11 wondered if Iraq was involved. It was a massive loss of innocent life and the vast majority of people were dumbfounded. It was natural to assume that such a profound strike would require state sponsorship, and Iraq--the last country we had gone to war with, and one that had been shooting at us in the no-fly zones since--made sense. As the details were fleshed out, those numbers dropped. Unscientifically, everybody I spoke to about the case for going to war, regardless of whether they ultimately supported it or not, said that the link between Iraq and terrorists was the weakest case they made.
More to the point, the numbers right before the Iraq war began were a few points above 50% in support. Actually, just found an article: 58% -- http://www.latimes.com/la-na-iraqpoll17dec17,0,761 3324.story)
Yes, it's a slight majority, but to make a statement like "the reason the majority of Americans are not in support...has to do with the fact they didn't expect as many American soldiers to die" is unfair. I think these numbers clearly show that nearly half of Americans did not support the war before it started and only roughly 10% (or less, with margins of error) have since changed their minds and withdrawn their support.
Of course we're tired of Americans dying. That is as we should be, but I think those who supported the war believe it's a cause worth fighting and dying for. Yes, there are casualty levels where one needs to pause and wonder if the benefits outweigh the costs, but I think it's much more likely that the inability to locate the WMDs was the greater cause of the 10% shift than the mounting casualties.
Most right now probably don't know the difference between Casey Kasem and Osama bin Laden.
That is by far the most stupid, ridiculous thing you have said. Just because our president is off playing war with Iraq does NOT mean Americans have forgotten bin Laden. In fact one of the major criticisms about going to war with Iraq by those who didn't support it is that it would distract us from hunting bin Laden. He will get his, and it will be most unpleasant for him.
there is enough internal willingness in the U.S. to use a military superiority to bully other nations, even friendly ones.
What friendly nations have we bullied militarily? I can't think of any case where we've turned to an ally and threatened to hit them if they didn't support us in something.
The separation of church and state is a myth.
No, it's not. Yes, Jefferson was the first one to use the words "wall of separation between Church and State," and one can argue strongly for either side of the debate about whether or not that is what the Founding Fathers intended.
But you know what? The power of judicial review--determining if laws are constitutional or not--isn't in the Constitution either. It was a concept invented by the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, during Jefferson's administration. The how's and why's aren't all that important, but that's how it is. Does that mean judicial review is a "myth?" Seems pretty damn real to me from where I sit. Seems to me we have a handful of controversies raging around that very concept right now (is the pledge constitutional? are bans against gay marriage constitutional? is affirmative action constitutional?). It's an adaptation, but it's certainly not a myth. Likewise the wall of separation. Also, in 1878, the Supreme Court used Jefferson's "wall of separation" in Reynolds v. United States, making it a perfectly apt phrase. In was used again in 1948 in McCollum v. Board of Education where they stated, "in the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.'" [Source, incidentally: http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danbury.html] Even if they were a "myth" prior to these cases, they became constitutional precedent thereafter.
And incidentally, the comment from the grandparent was about secular GOVERNMENT structures. He didn't say the American people were secular, so pointing to an article about how many people think the world is better off without religion proves very little.
the American beside me pouring his coffee proudly proclaimed, "I say kill 'em all, fucking A-Rabs."
Oh please. Not even commenting on how you consider a handful of people in a hotel representative of the majority of the nation, do you honestly believe statements like that are meant to be taken at their word? He just heard about more American boys dead and he's pissed. But let's even assume he completely meant it, literally, and so did everybody else: More than half of the American people do not support the Iraq war, so do you really beleive even half would support "kill[ing] 'em all?" Do you even believe half of the people who DO support the war would support that sort of genocide? I say "half," of course, because anything under that is entirely unfair to attribute to "the Americans." Maybe that guy's bigoted, but if you believe that of Americans at large, you've got your own bigotries to deal with too.
As to your original point, saying "X is not as bad as Y" does not mean it is condoned. It's a matter of proportion. Petty theft is not as bad as murder, but it doesn't mean I condone either one. It simply means what it says: One is more serious, and one should be dealt with more seriously.
One idiot doesn't make a government. (It takes a lot of idiots for that.) There are fools in every government, and foolish things said by everybody. The bottom line is that whatever that person may have said (Rumsfeld, was it?), there are still court-martials going on. We can argue forever about whether or not they're deserved (ie, whether or not those soldiers are the ones to blame), whether they go high enough, whether the actions were somehow encouraged by somebody in government--but there is still some sort of accountability going on. It's not as though he said "it's not as bad as what went on under Saddam, so we're calling off the investigation."
Besides, the government will be held accountable for its actions shortly. It's called the presidential election, and I guarantee Iraq and Abu Ghraib are things that will factor into the decisions of the voters.
How about the right to privacy, now that the FBI can seize your financial records without a subpoena and without having to prove just cause?
Wow, that was a fascinating examination of corporate bullshit. But let's talk about slashdot user bullshit too, shall we?
Let's start with the "everything that touches Microsoft becomes tainted with evil" attitude. It reminds me of the attitude ten year olds have. Or hell, from the Simpsons:
Marge: How could you BOTH miss the bus?
Bart: We touched hands and had to wash the cooties off!
But tell me. What, precisely, gives you any right to take what this man says and insert whatever words into his mouth that you wish? Have you ever even heard of this man before you read the article? Because... unless you're longtime friends and know exactly who he is and what he's about, you've slung more than enough bullshit yourself already. And apparently convinced moderators to mod you Insightful for putting words into somebody's mouth.
Is it not possible this man means exactly what he says? Maybe he really does want to build the best browser he can. Maybe he really does value feedback on the products he creates; hell, most programmers I know enjoy knowing that people are using their software and what they think of it. Could it be that the Higher Ups who drive the company's direction might be the ones at fault for some of the things IE lacks?
But nahh, he works at Microsoft so he must be Tainted. After all, nobody with ethics would really work for the devil. There can't be any legitimately good people who want to do their best working at Microsoft.
As long as you're challenging people to say what they mean, why don't you follow your own lead? Stop pretending you're doing a public service by putting words into somebody's mouth, and just announce your painfully-clear bias outright. Maybe say why. This is Slashdot, after all. Saying "M$ iz st00pid" is usually good for a +3 at least.
But during the installation, I appreciate having choices.
I appreciate choices too, but at the same time it can be rather annoying if one chooses wrong. It may not even be that what I chose was bad, but maybe it just wasn't what I expected. Example from the windows world: You have editors like Notepad that do plain-text stuff, then you have Wordpad which does the formatted text stuff, but then there are also things like Office which can do any of the text-formatting things the others can do and more, and on top of that has the ability to do things like spreadsheets.
If somebody goes through the install thinking they are selecting something like Office and get something like Notepad, I can see where they would be miffed, especially the more novice users who might have trouble dealing with (even simple) installations of products from websites or the install discs or whatever. For those who are compltely new to linux, they might assume it doesn't even get any better.
I suppose letting installers go with what they consider best isn't a bad approach, but then we're sort of back to the point of not having (or in this case using) choice.
Honestly, do you think AT&T has the right to listen-in to your conversations, just because they aren't the government? In reality, they have LESS legal standing to invade your privacy, NOT MORE.
AT&T has no right because the government says they don't. The Constitution limits and defines the power of government, not what private citizens can do to one another. You take every law off the books and the government would still be restricted from tapping your lines, but AT&T would not be prohibited from listening in on all of your conversations.
If you're asking if I think they SHOULD have a right to listen in on anything, absolutely not. But what people should do and what they are legally allowed to or prohibited from doing are not always the same thing.
Most obvious example: Phone conversations cannot be tapped without a court order because people have a reasonable assumption of privacy.
Which is one of the privacy guidelines established by the Supreme Court in determining government encroachments of your privacy. And with your specific example, there are also guiding wiretap laws.
However your privacy "rights" where it regards interaction with other private citizens are not nearly so developed. For instance, with very little reason, your employers can monitor your email, search your company-supplied desk drawers, etc. If you let me in your house, I'm not aware of any law that would prevent me from ruffling through your filing cabinet.
Now granted, there are some related restrictions. For example if I found your credit card number in one of those cabinets I couldn't go billing things to your card--but that's credit card fraud, not an issue of privacy. If I broke into your house to search, that's breaking and entering, not really an issue of privacy. (Breaking and entering laws might exist in part to protect our privacy, but breaking and entering is illegal because state legislatures say so.) Little by little, legislatures and courts are beginning to more narrowly define privacy rights with regards to interactions with other people (especially employer/employee relationships), but it is by no means as established as when the government may or may not tap your phones.
The grandparent's post, in its proper context, remains largely accurate; I have no idea how you got onto wiretaps. We're not talking about the government here, we're talking about movie theater people with NV goggles searching out movie pirates. Not only do I see absolutely no way it matters whether you expect they're doing that or not, but while we could argue all day about whether or not it is right, good for business or even effective, I see it as the fundamental right of theater owners to protect their revenues by stopping pirates. If they choose to use NV goggles to help them do so, that's their business.
In short, you were way too quick to try and pounce.
Hmm, I wonder...
Excuse me, Mr. Anderer? You know what would really make me faint? Somebody sticking a pen straight through their jugular!
*waits*
Damn.
Maybe it's the time for the US to join the metric world. At least we wouldn't loose that Mars probe!
We still wouldn't be able to spell "lose" though!
Doesn't this fly in the face of the cherished "right to remain silent"?
No. You have the right to remain silent when you are under arrest or are no longer free to leave. But even beyond that, your right to remain silent is to allow you to prevent incriminating yourself. Police do not have to mirandize you if 1) the information is non-incriminating in nature or 2) the information you've given is given voluntarily. Giving your name says nothing about your guilt or innocence. This is what the justices have ruled, as indicated in their holdings:
For those who are concerned about the ruling, however, take solace in the fact that the decision was 5-4 which means, historically, that the decision is prone to be overturned. After a very cursory examination of the dissents, Justice Stevens' opinion seems to be that that the Fifth Amendment does not provide for even a narrow exception like this. The other three dissenting justices (Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) seem more interested in why the justices reserved judgment about why answers to "what is your name?" can be compelled if it might lead to conviction on a different offense. As he puts it, "I would not begin to erode a clear rule with special exceptions."
IANAL, of course.
I came to the conclusion that whatever it is, the willingness to kill or die for something is a sure sign of that you have simply become too fanatical.
Every time I see sentiment like this expressed, it reminds me of a quote:
The willingness to lay down one's life for something is not, of necessity, fanaticism; it is not inherantly unreasonable or outlandish. It is simple recognition that there are more important things out there than yourself. For some, that something is an idea: freedom, liberty, equality, religion. For others it is quite tangible: family or friends.
In my case it is both. I would die for my friends, not only because I couldn't bear to see them come to any harm, but because I only end up making friends with people in whom I see something valuable. Something in their mind or their spirit touches me and I realize that it is more important to me than my own life.
I would also die to protect my ideals and my freedoms. I take exception to a lot of what this administration is doing and am doing what I can: trying to bring others to my point of view, supporting alternate candidates for the upcoming elections, writing congressmen. If I thought it would serve any logical purpose, I would happily die to bring about the changes I want to see. , but your supposition that being prepared to kill or die for something must mean that non-violent alternatives are overlooked is simply wrong.
You mean that the 55 unprovoked shark attacks in 2003 (source) weren't dangerous?
Who was it who said the price of liberty is constant vigilance?
Thomas Jefferson. Nitpick: "eternal vigilance," not constant.
Right there, way before the first ammendment, is the delegation of power to the federal government to enforce copyrights.
You mean this? "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Yeah, that gives them the right to legislate rules on copyright, but I'm not sure it gives them any right to become an enforcer. Let's remember that a copyright secures rights of "the author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work." It does no such thing for the federal government.
In other words, the way I see it, the federal government is either usurping your right to your copyrighted work and protection thereof by telling you they're going to enforce it for you--or, the more likely case, the RIAA, MPAA and others are essentially assigning enforcement rights of copyright to the federal government, leaving it nothing but a corporate enforcer for the highest bidder.
Do you think that if I wrote a song that I found pirated on the Internet, that I could call up 'ole John Ashcroft and get some prosecutors working on the case for me? If not, this law is bullshit. If the government is going to take over enforcement of YOUR copyright they should be doing it to protect the little guys who can't afford to enforce it themselves, not multi-billion dollar conglomerates of record companies.
"An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought." -- Simon Cameron
Does anybody else find this to be too highly exaggerated at best (complete BS at worst)?
How can an 83% on something worth 10% of the final grade bring down his grade "significantly?" If he had a 100%, he would end up 98%. Hardly significant. If he had a 91%, he'd end up at 90%. Also not significant. In fact the only (integer) number that would make a difference, at least according to my high school grading scale, is if he was sitting right on 90% to begin with, in which case he'd slide down to 89.3%, a little too low for most teachers to round back up. He shifted down 2% at most. Even if that DID move him down a grade, I can hardly consider a drop of no more than 2% to be significant. It means he was on the border to begin with and this toppled him over.
He'll be trying to give a lecture and they'll be leaning over, giggling at each others screens as they pull up random pages on the Web. And these are *college students*, let alone high school age kids or younger.
This may be true--in fact as a college student I can tell you it is true for a lot of people--but that's the fault of the students, not the technology.
In high school and grade school, maybe you're right that computers should be kept out of classrooms. A certain amount of hand-holding is to be expected for students who are there largely, or solely, because their parents and/or the state tells them they have to be. But by the time one gets to college, if ones has not yet figured out how to succeed in school (which generally begins by listening to the teacher!), I just chalk that up as a "too damn bad" learning experience. Take their money and give them the F they probably deserve. And hell, if they can goof off in class and still do the work well, more power to them.
As to the article itself, one thought was in my head most of the way: It's the students, not the computers. Students are ultimately responsible for learning the material; good teachers and good technology merely facilitate that. Likewise, students are responsible for determing what they need to do to get the grade they want. As I said above, at least at the college level, students should be free to be absolute morons so long as it doesn't disturb anybody else. They're either doing enough work to get the grade they want or they're going to be very unhappy come the end of the semester.
As for this quote from the article --
One English teacher could readily tell which of her students essays were conceived on a computer. "They don't link ideas," the teacher said. "They just write one thing, and then they write another one, and they don't seem to see or develop the relationships between them.
-- that is a matter of people being poor writers. There are always a few exceptions, but unfortunately that seems to be the rule nowadays. Interestingly, I had an absolutely astoundingly talented writer in my high school sophomore year English class; by the time I got into my first two college-level English classes, few people there could write well enough, in my opinion, to even get out of the course. (Naturally most did; this, too, must say something about our educational system. Or maybe just my expectations. *shrugs*)
Do computers make people write worse than they otherwise would? The simple answer is that computers are tools and they do what their operator tells them to. In my case, my writing is probably twice as good on the computer than if I were to hand write it for the simple reason that I am a much quicker typist than I am a writer. That in mind, I am much more willing to expand more on ideas on the computer where I can write twice as much in half the time. On paper, I generally expand only as much as I feel necessary to make my point clear. Computers can be an excellent practice if they're used as practice. Since you're online anyway, writing emails, posting to message boards and slashdot, sitting in chatrooms, rifling through IM windows--why not write properly in those? The practice is immense and as they say, practice makes perfect.
Then again, there are the "AIM speak" people. (That's what it's called now, it seems, despite predating AIM.) In that case though, idk wtf u r thinking when u do that. Of course that's not going to help you--but again, the operator, not the computer, is the one making the decisions.
So it seems I've rambled my way to a simple point: Computers are merely tools that do what the operator tells them to. Like all tools, they can be used well or they can be used poorly. What's that saying? 90% of computer problems are caused by a loose nut between the chair and the keyboard.
I'm not really a Sega person... speaking of which... Sega? When was the last time you saw a Sega?
Not a game for a Sega. It's a game made by the company Sega. If I recall correctly, they gave up the console work many years ago but have stuck around making games.