I can imagine a lot of things which one can do "during my free time" and "off campus" which should get you fired from school, even if there is no crime which can be persecuted.
"Fired from school?" Sorry, but in the civilized world we consider education both a requirement and a right. Unless this student is a danger to others or disrupting his school environment so much that other students are unable to learn, there is no reason to "fire him from school." Neither of these are the case. This is about a YouTube video that pissed off school administrators, nothing more.
contacting or ridiculing teachers in an inappropriate way
Contacting teachers in an inappropriate way can be handled by harassment laws. Ridiculing them in inappropriate ways? If it is not done in school, interfering with other students' education, then the proper response is to suck it the hell up. You have no right whatsoever not to be offended. If it crosses into libel, it can be handled that way.
contacting or ridiculing teachers in an inappropriate way
Correction: These are humans and they have rights, no more and no less than anybody else simply because they are teachers. If the exact same situation could not be handled by the legal system, then it should not be magically protected because the person is a teacher.
Again, the school has a right to enforce discipline -- but that is inside of its walls, and it's because it can't let one disruptive student ruin the education of others. A YouTube video does not meet this criteria.
Now that said, I would like to see schools have the ability to offer to discipline students, with the students' permission, in lieu of the legal or civil system for minor or school-related offenses that take place off campus. I don't think the best course of action is to have 15, 16, 17 year old kids arrested or sued. But that should be an option only if having them arrested or sued is an option. If they have committed no crime, committed no tort, and are not interfering with anybody else's education, leave them the hell alone. You don't get magical powers or magical rights simply because you are a teacher or administrator.
Yaknow, a lot of people can--and did--defend the Sony hacks. Some could probably defend the "FBI" hack, though when I hear words like "FBI-affiliated" I just cringe at what they're hiding behind that term.
But how do you defend hacking PBS? These people are obviously just scumbags with too much time on their hands, and articles like this are exactly what they want. Ignore them. They're not worth the attention.
"The community" isn't fighting back. "The community" is deliberately setting out to hurt you in an attempt to make the mafia feel bad enough to stop.
How does that sort of thing usually end up? Innocent people hurt, vigilantes in jail, new police powers to oppress every party involved and oh yeah, the mafia is still being the mafia.
You expect this situation to be somehow different? You think the people who did nothing wrong but disagree with you and got their identity stolen are going to be mad at Sony? Or at the people who did it to them?
Have to love somebody who issues ultimatums to their friends and family to fit some sort of software ideology.
Personally I bend over backward to accomodate my friends who want to talk with me, including the ones on the other side of the world for whom I maintain a SkypeIn number and am quite happy to pay for them to talk to me.
But see, that's because I value them more than I value whether or not the source code or algorithm to a service is open or not.
I can respect wherever one falls in the free software debate; I am not a zealot in either direction. But the idea of putting that position ahead of people, ahead of so-called friends, is just disgusting. My friendship is not conditional upon what software a person chooses to use.
All it says is that the President has to sign the bill for it to become law
Not that I like the PATRIOT Act or particularly care about the autopen, but if we're going strictly by the Constitution then it is actually pretty clear that he did NOT sign the bill. He never even saw the bill (the actual bill; hopefully he has seen the text, but even that is up for debate). It was a machine that replicates his signature that signed it. He never signed it any more than a really good forgery would mean he signed it. He directed that it be signed, and the document now bears his signature.
The Constitutional question, then, is whether it is the actual act of signing that matters, or the authority of the signing. Really just going to come down to whether or not one buys into strict constructionalism, like most constitutional questions.
Me, I'd prefer the president be required to actually sign -- but it's not something I'm going to get up in arms about either way.
It may be a very good investment. It depends on how the details shake out.
The rumors a few weeks ago was that the investor was going to buy a 49% share of the team -- not enough to control anything (though the owners indicated they may give this new partner a limited veto over contracts), but as big a share as you can get without that. The Mets are valued by Forbes at $747MM, meaning if all these assumptions hold to be true that he bought something at one quarter of its value. That's pretty smart for anybody, not even including inflation moving forward.
He'll also be given first chance to buy the team if the current owners falter, which is not exactly out of the realm of possibility given how close they are right now, their involvement in the Bernie Madoff scandal and pending the resolution of the lawsuit for one billion (yes, one billion) dollars against them for their involvement. Even if he buys the rest of the team at full market value, he still comes out ahead -- and the owner of the Mets.
Plus, the Mets are not like a condo building or another typical investment. They won't simply fail and your money poofs; it is a franchise, and like any other franchise the commissioner can step in and seize control (ask Frank McCourt and the Dodgers). Again, if this happened, Einhorn would be first in line to buy -- because of his investment, and because he lived next door to the commissioner in Milwaukee and they're close.
And hell, it may not even be intended as an investment -- it may simply be a rich man playing with rich men's toys.
All of this is ignoring the fact that even if buying a share of the Mets was a 100% investment decision, and the stupidest thing he ever did in his entire life, and comes back to bite him worse than anything in the history of the world--your absolute best case scenario--that it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Steve Ballmer is the right man to lead Microsoft, or whether he is able to see whether or not Ballmer is the right man to lead Microsoft.
So the very person filing this lawsuit has publicly acknowledged that the earthquake could not have been predicted and that the people could not have been evacuated?
I don't know how Italy's legal system works, but it would be laughed out of court at this point in the US. They've already admitted that even if the scientists and politicians did something horribly wrong, that their doing so was not the proximate cause of the damages. Case dismissed.
If I get bad enough service anywhere, I will post a review somewhere [. ..] I almost never do this with my real name.
This probably bothers me more than anything else I have read in this entire thread, on both sides of the issue.
You're willing to do something that will damage somebody's business, based entirely on your own opinions, and yet you're not willing to stand behind those opinions by signing your name? There's something about this that strikes me as just plain wrong.
But these companies are getting their money offering services they don't completely provide
I hesitate to use words like "every," but I can think of no ISPs who advertise their plans as anything other than "up to X Mbps." Why you believe that not getting that is somehow a service they don't provide eludes me, particularly when the reason you are not receiving it is legitimate shaping activity*.
And second, they put a cap just in case you get away with it.
I tend to agree with you on this one, for a lot of reasons. In particular I object to the limits being buried in the terms and conditions somewhere rather than being open about it. Stil, your conclusion is that you're paying for it and they're not delivering it which is false. You're paying for what your contract says you're paying for, and somewhere in that fine print--at least nowadays--is a limit.
There are a lot of things to object about the state of Internet service in the US. The limits are going to quickly become a burden on growing Internet-based industries. The monopoly status of most providers means they are uninterested in serving their customers or competing for their business. They oversell their services far more than they should and pocket dollars intended to improve their networks. That's off the top of my head. "I'm not getting what I pay for," meh. Not so much.
* Admitting that not all shaping activity is legitimate, especially based on source/destination.
Opportunity costs? They could be significant. PSN was obviously a part of the sale of PS3, which was released November 11th. If they take the extra time, do they miss the Christmas shopping season altogether? I believe XBox 360 was already out. The Wii was coming out one week later. Could they really afford to wait and let people make their console purchasing decisions without them even a choice? It's easy to say "they made $X, they could have made $X a few months from now when it was ready and saved $170MM" but I'm not sure that is the reality.
If the equation is just the $170MM, they probably made the right call. It's not, of course; there are issues involved with the bad publicity and lack of trust moving forward that will likely affect them, but that is awfully hard to quantify to bring into the discussion.
Carrier locked, walled garden, locked-down out of the box = Little choice, little freedom
Ah, sort of, but not quite. Android is open. Much like a BSD license, when one puts essentially no restrictions on something, one of the things that may happen is that people seek to close it up. You could argue that Google could have gone out of their way to prevent it, but you can hardly blame them for it happening. Ultimately this is just another version of the BSD vs. GPL debate. Whose freedom do you protect?
Further, there are phones and carriers that have these open versions of Android installed, meaning you DO have a choice. Vote with your wallet.
- When you root, you are locked out of other important features
A movie store? Which at this point merely SAYS you're "locked out" of it? Do you not think that somebody will devise a way to have a rooted Android phone go "yeah man, I'm completely locked down! Movie please?" Assuming such is even necessary as we speak.
- Fewer apps than iOS = Less choice = less freedom
Fewer apps = less choice = less freedom eh?
Well, shit. I hope linux users read your post so that they can understand how their operating system has less freedom than Windows. Poor deluded souls!
- Less polished user interface, more fragmentation = less flexibility, smaller userbase, less choice = less freedom
Oh I get it. You're an Apple fanboi.
I didn't particularly agree with anything you had to say, but at least up until now they've been facts (albeit ones spun to your liking). Now you're annointing your opinion as fact. Not only that, you've wandered so far into the realm of ridiculous that I hope you have a fucking rope tied to your waist to find your way back. How good a UI is has to do with user freedom? Give me a break.
Fragmentation? It's an issue -- for developers. Even if we're going to let you have a pass on this one without spinning it in the opposite direction, you've already included it. It means less apps. Maybe.
All of these being simple flaws in your own argument, without making a counter-argument at all and taking most of your points without contention. Obviously it is quite easy to contend pretty much every single one of them if somebody who actually cares about the Android vs. iPhone pissing contest were so inclined.
In short: Your post is nothing but your opinions, presented as facts. In your terms, it is a fiasco in every way.
Honestly, all I took away from your post is that you don't like e-books. That's perfectly fine, of course; I prefer the tactile sensation of a real book myself, and I certainly understand and agree with your point about old books and preserving history.
But honestly, none of that is keeping me from getting a Kindle and buying e-books. My issue is the price. I am getting less rights to my property (or should I say licensed acquistion), have to pay a $100+ premium in terms of buying a Kindle to begin with to realize any sort of portability comparable to a real book, and can only lend it one time for 14 days--if the publisher allows it. (That last one is a particular problem for me, since my brother and I often share books.) In return, I am asked to pay the same price as the paperback I would otherwise buy, and that doesn't sit well with me.
Still, as I struggle more and more to find room for my books the Kindle and e-books are looking better and better.
look at the way (certain) Americans look at foreign policy: "Someone needs to do something about $COUNTRY, so we'll do it, even though we've got no justification and no permission for intervening."
Contrast that with the majority of the rest of the world's foreign policy: "Someone needs to do something about $COUNTRY, so we'll twiddle our thumbs until America steps in."
I'd respect "leave other countries alone" as a foreign policy, but it rarely exists. The real contrast (among those on the same side of the argument) is those who want to do something and those who want to issue sternly-worded press releases and resolutions and sit back and see how it goes.
America can't, and shouldn't, be the world's policeman. But once we agree that something needs to be done, I'd prefer to be among those who think the best course of action is to do something. That something will vary on the situation at hand, of course.
I'm not saying there are no problems with linux, or that it is more user-friendly than Windows in this (or any other) case, but you're hardly treating the situations equally.
For example:
Open doc versus find the doc. System-level configuration options tend to be quite well documented. How are you magically going to know where the documentation for an obscure feature is in Windows but have to look it up in linux? What the hell would you even search for? "My Windows machine seems to be pinging the Internet randomly and I want it to stop?"
Apparently "open terminal" deserves its own step, yet we're magically typing regedit. Where do we do that? Equality dictates there should be AT LEAST one more step in the Windows instructions at this stage, to open Start Menu -> Run or Ctrl-R (I think, anyway).
If you're allowed to edit system-level properties in Windows without Administrator credentials, you have an entirely different problem or, more likely, you're running as one constantly. If it's the latter, consistency once again dictates you've added an unnecessary step in the linux instructions. You're free to run linux as root if you want to vastly increase your chances of getting owned, just like you're free to do so with Windows.
b3 (sudo) and b4 (open the file) are one in the same instruction. You'll do sudo/path/to/config.file which will simultaneously get your appropriate privileges and open the file. You can have B3b if you want, subject to the above.
"Change the key as indicated" is pretty much no different than "edit as per the doc," even though you try to make it seem as if it is. In either case you're looking at documentation, finding the appropriate configuration value and changing its value. You may or may not have to add the line; if it's a feature defaulting to on, as is the situation in Windows, it will almost certainly be there. Likewise, where you add the key almost never matters other than for organizational purposes. And you have to be careful of typos either way. If the value in Windows is 0 or 1 it's likely to be the same in linux. You can fuck typing it up as easily on one system as the other.
In other words, if you're not deliberately trying to make Windows seem superior by fabricating the scenario to be simpler for Windows than linux, the steps are pretty much identical. You need to make sure the have appropriate privileges. You need to know what to edit, whether that is a key buried in the registry or a confgiruation file buried in a directory tree. You have to actually edit it, and you have to not fuck it up while you do so.
And that's without even touching the rest of your "steps," which even you admit are exaggerated.
I don't care what operating system you use; I'm not a zealout either way. I used linux for years. My PC primarily runs Windows (it has a linux distribution on a second partition that has gone from Red Hat to Gentoo to Kubuntu over the years, but it hasn't been used in several years now). I'm typing this reply on a Mac. But if you're going to make comparisons, let's be intellectually honest and make valid ones.
Temporarily owned by us, yeah; not necessarily temporarily owned. Most property can be passed along to others even after the technical owner is dead. Patents, on the other hand, have an expiration date. The number of owners in that time is not relevant.
Let's pretend this hypothetical developer needs a $500 monitor and has a $50,000 salary (which is pretty high for a monitor and pretty low for a developer). That's 1%, and it's a one-time cost. As you say, if it makes him even 1% more productive this is a win right away, much less looking long-term (gasp!) at a sustained higher productivity for a small one-time investment. Not to mention a happier employee who actually feels like his boss is trying to give him the tools he needs to do his job efficiently, rather than one who is running to Slashdot to call him a whiner and look for ways to refuse it to him.
While I agree that this sort of pre-filtered information over a societal level can become a problem, it's simply not the search engine's job to try to make us better rounded individuals. In fact it is against their interests.
Their job to return the results a user is most likely to be interested in, and whether we want to admit it or not that includes taking whatever biases into account that they can muster. That doesn't mean filtering the results, but it should definitely be a part of the weighting. If Google did not do this, they are likely to actually lose money. Users are not getting the links they want most near the top of their results, therefore it's "working poorly" and any search engine that gives them what they want is a better algorithm, meaning they take their searches and the advertising dollars that go with them to someplace else. I'm not sure "we have half the users we did before, but they all read from a diverse set of sources!" is something to brag about. (Nor does not factoring bias into the weighting necessarily mean that they're going to read a diverse set of sources. Maybe they're just patient in clicking through to find what they're looking for.)
It kind of reminds me of college. "You're treated like an adult! Everything is different!" That's what I heard going in, and I got there and was enraged to find out that I was going to spend two years dealing with "general education" requirements that have nothing to do with the things I want to learn. I spent the last 18 years of my life having people try to make me a well-rounded person. I'm an adult now, paying thousands of dollars a year in tuition. May I fucking choose what I see now? But that was years ago and I digress.
The point is, search engines aren't about rounding our lives or our political influences. It's about returning the best possible results for my search as near to the top of the results list as possible. If I think Fox News is nothing but a bunch of idiotic, anti-intellectual, hypocritical shills and don't place any value in their results, then returning them at the top is a horrendous waste of my time.
We should expose ourselves to a large variety of sources and influences, but it has to be by choice. I don't want anybody forcing it on me or deciding what those sources are.
Slashdot users spend half of every day bitching about how Joe Average just isn't discerning enough. They don't support the politicians and policies that Slashdot Joe supports, therefore the conclusion is that they just accept whatever is spoon-fed to them. Slashdot Joe is immune to advertising because he's just too smart, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry so the explanation must be that Joe Average just can't resist the urge to buy any shit they see on TV. Joe Average and everybody like him are "sheeple," a term that, if not invented here, certainly crops up everyday. It goes on and on and on, every single day.
Sometimes things can't be verified, or at least can't be verified with an average person's resources. Sometimes, it's as simple as dropping to a fucking shell and typing "ping thepiratebay.org" with a non-Comcast ISP and realizing that people are being "sheeple." Which do you figure this was?
Not everybody attached to this story was wrong. From the sounds of it, there was a progression where at some point, non-Comcast users could still reach the site while Comcasters couldn't. But by the time the story hit Slashdot, it was already bullshit and not one person in the entire chain of posting this story, including paid "editors," bothered to see if it was true. Then the vast majority of Slashdotters, many of whom posted some idiocy about how superior they are yesterday and will do so again tomorrow, jumped right on the bandwagon, unable to be bothered to spend literally ten seconds of their own time to verify what they're being told. Then there's people like you, defending it. Gosh, it can't be that you were in the wrong, it's just that Comcast sucks soooooo much that assuming they're wrong without spending ten seconds to see is the logical thing to do! No, sorry. Own up to the failure. Own up to this site, at least today, being no better than the "sheeple" they deride. This is a technology website for god's sake. If we can't be bothered to take ten seconds to see if we know what we're talking about... well, we deserve being put in our place by situations like this, don't we?
Defending this is just juvenile. This wasn't Comcast's failure--neither the problems with TPB nor everybody else jumping to conclusions because ten seconds of their life to verify fact and fiction is just too much to ask. It was the failure of the people jumping to those conclusions, period, and like the OP said, they should shut up and eat their crow.
So is pollution from coal power, which estimates say kills between 10,000 and 30,000 people per year (depending on which sources you want to believe).
Yet there are no news stories about that. Not even a mention in any of the fear-mongering stories about the "nuclear meltdown," not that I've heard. This was one of the worst nuclear power disasters in the history of the world. Does it even have a death toll yet?
If people want to talk about the safety of our power options, I'm all for it. But such discussion must be rational and honest. If all that people are trying to accomplish is fear-mongering, well, I guess that's their right, but nobody should take them seriously.
Yep. It's because people think they're better than they are. It's kind of like how Congress' approval rating is around 30%, and yet 90% of incumbents are re-elected.
You've likely heard some variation on the "80%* of people believe they are above average" line at some point. I went looking for that number for my reply and turned up what this is called: Illusory Superiority. And perhaps not surprisingly, there is a section on the Wikipedia article dealing with driving skills. In fairly small samples (~200), 93% of US drivers and 69% of Swedish drivers rated themselves in the top 50% with their driving skills; 88% of the US and 77% of the Swedish sample rated themselves as in the top 50% for safety. A second study five years later showed, in composite, that 80% of drivers rated themselves as above-average. (Yup, that's why I chose 80% there.)
In other words, it's because the average person is incapable of admitting that they're not very good drivers, even when it's true. Every time something goes wrong with an AI car, the vast majority of people are going to think that they would have avoided that accident. Sometimes it will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, but it won't stop the majority from thinking it either way.
This has nothing to do with fear of technology, by the way, as another reply claims. It's rather an inability to accurately judge our own skills, and it's just a fact of human nature.
* I made up the statistic because I honestly can't remember it; suffice to say, over 50%. And yes, I'm aware of the irony that depending on what we're talking about more than 50% of people CAN be above average.
They claim it is beneficial for companies to open source their products and keep customers by offering better services than others. It's an interesting claim from a company whose main product is closed.
That only applies to fields where you actually can offer better service. The value of a search engine is entirely based on the quality of the results. A company like Red Hat can open its code and yet still make a decent profit by offering support contracts and other custom services, while the open source nature, at least potentially, improves that core product.
If they release their code and all the data that helps their results be better, how, exactly, can Google differentiate themselves from the field? "We have a prettier website!" Yeah, no.
Open sourcing core products works for some fields, but not all of them. Pretending they're all equivalent doesn't make it so.
There's also a strange Slashdot phenomena where saying something along the lines of "I'm going to get modded down for this" tends to get you modded up.
You're missing the big one. God is simply unfalsifiable, because when you introduce an omnipotent, all-powerful being there always exists the chance that he doesn't want to be discovered and may be fucking with your results to prevent it.
As I've always said, people are free to believe in intelligent design if they so choose; I personally don't, but there is at least a logic to it. But pretending that opinion is science, whether it is ultimately right or wrong, is a ridiculous notion that devalues not just the theory and the topic, but science and education itself. Science is something where the process matters far more than the result, and teaching intelligent design in schools throws the process out because it doesn't help believers reach the conclusions they already reached.
Name one right being oppressed, and who grants it if applicable.
The right to due process, granted explicitly by the US Constitution, as well as the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty -- a tenant of the US judicial system pretty much since the beginning.
These seizures aren't part of any investigation, so it's not akin to a search warrant. They're seized because the government and a judge unilaterally decided their operators are guilty. The're not even bothering to try to prosecute the owners, a pretty clear indication that they don't feel they have a case capable of garnering convictions. These operators were given no notice of the investigation or the court hearings, no chance to defend themselves against the charges and, given that at least 80,000 of these seizures are on suspect grounds, it's pretty clear that it was done with no reliable evidence to begin with. When provided evidence that their seizure was in the wrong (a la dajaz1.com), ICE makes no move to so much as investigate it, much less return the property that they have stolen.
Moreover, it allows the US government to seize the property of non-US citizens who may not be violating any laws in their own jurisdiction, even with the attempts to ram silly treaties through their teeth. In several cases, the sites were already declared to be legal by their local court systems. But because the.com and.net registries happen to be here, the US feigns jurisdiction over these people and their actions, essentially declaring itself the sole world arbiter of legality.
Or for another explanation:
In contrast to ordinary copyright litigation, the domain name seizure process does not appear to give targeted websites an opportunity to defend themselves before sanctions are imposed. As you know, there is an active and contentious legal debate about when a website may be held liable for infringing activities by its users. I worry that domain name seizures could function as a means for end-running the normal legal process in order to target websites that may prevail in full court. The new enforcement approach used by Operation In Our Sites is alarmingly unprecedented in the breadth of its potential reach...
For the Administration's efforts to be seen as legitimate, it should be able to defend its use of the forfeiture laws by prosecuting operators of domain names and provide a means to ensure due process. If the federal government is going to take property and risk stifling speech, it must be able to defend those actions not only behind closed doors but also in a court of law.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fired from school?" Sorry, but in the civilized world we consider education both a requirement and a right. Unless this student is a danger to others or disrupting his school environment so much that other students are unable to learn, there is no reason to "fire him from school." Neither of these are the case. This is about a YouTube video that pissed off school administrators, nothing more.
Contacting teachers in an inappropriate way can be handled by harassment laws. Ridiculing them in inappropriate ways? If it is not done in school, interfering with other students' education, then the proper response is to suck it the hell up. You have no right whatsoever not to be offended. If it crosses into libel, it can be handled that way.
Correction: These are humans and they have rights, no more and no less than anybody else simply because they are teachers. If the exact same situation could not be handled by the legal system, then it should not be magically protected because the person is a teacher.
Again, the school has a right to enforce discipline -- but that is inside of its walls, and it's because it can't let one disruptive student ruin the education of others. A YouTube video does not meet this criteria.
Now that said, I would like to see schools have the ability to offer to discipline students, with the students' permission, in lieu of the legal or civil system for minor or school-related offenses that take place off campus. I don't think the best course of action is to have 15, 16, 17 year old kids arrested or sued. But that should be an option only if having them arrested or sued is an option. If they have committed no crime, committed no tort, and are not interfering with anybody else's education, leave them the hell alone. You don't get magical powers or magical rights simply because you are a teacher or administrator.
Yaknow, a lot of people can--and did--defend the Sony hacks. Some could probably defend the "FBI" hack, though when I hear words like "FBI-affiliated" I just cringe at what they're hiding behind that term.
But how do you defend hacking PBS? These people are obviously just scumbags with too much time on their hands, and articles like this are exactly what they want. Ignore them. They're not worth the attention.
"The community" isn't fighting back. "The community" is deliberately setting out to hurt you in an attempt to make the mafia feel bad enough to stop.
How does that sort of thing usually end up? Innocent people hurt, vigilantes in jail, new police powers to oppress every party involved and oh yeah, the mafia is still being the mafia.
You expect this situation to be somehow different? You think the people who did nothing wrong but disagree with you and got their identity stolen are going to be mad at Sony? Or at the people who did it to them?
Have to love somebody who issues ultimatums to their friends and family to fit some sort of software ideology.
Personally I bend over backward to accomodate my friends who want to talk with me, including the ones on the other side of the world for whom I maintain a SkypeIn number and am quite happy to pay for them to talk to me.
But see, that's because I value them more than I value whether or not the source code or algorithm to a service is open or not.
I can respect wherever one falls in the free software debate; I am not a zealot in either direction. But the idea of putting that position ahead of people, ahead of so-called friends, is just disgusting. My friendship is not conditional upon what software a person chooses to use.
Not that I like the PATRIOT Act or particularly care about the autopen, but if we're going strictly by the Constitution then it is actually pretty clear that he did NOT sign the bill. He never even saw the bill (the actual bill; hopefully he has seen the text, but even that is up for debate). It was a machine that replicates his signature that signed it. He never signed it any more than a really good forgery would mean he signed it. He directed that it be signed, and the document now bears his signature.
The Constitutional question, then, is whether it is the actual act of signing that matters, or the authority of the signing. Really just going to come down to whether or not one buys into strict constructionalism, like most constitutional questions.
Me, I'd prefer the president be required to actually sign -- but it's not something I'm going to get up in arms about either way.
It may be a very good investment. It depends on how the details shake out.
The rumors a few weeks ago was that the investor was going to buy a 49% share of the team -- not enough to control anything (though the owners indicated they may give this new partner a limited veto over contracts), but as big a share as you can get without that. The Mets are valued by Forbes at $747MM, meaning if all these assumptions hold to be true that he bought something at one quarter of its value. That's pretty smart for anybody, not even including inflation moving forward.
He'll also be given first chance to buy the team if the current owners falter, which is not exactly out of the realm of possibility given how close they are right now, their involvement in the Bernie Madoff scandal and pending the resolution of the lawsuit for one billion (yes, one billion) dollars against them for their involvement. Even if he buys the rest of the team at full market value, he still comes out ahead -- and the owner of the Mets.
Plus, the Mets are not like a condo building or another typical investment. They won't simply fail and your money poofs; it is a franchise, and like any other franchise the commissioner can step in and seize control (ask Frank McCourt and the Dodgers). Again, if this happened, Einhorn would be first in line to buy -- because of his investment, and because he lived next door to the commissioner in Milwaukee and they're close.
And hell, it may not even be intended as an investment -- it may simply be a rich man playing with rich men's toys.
All of this is ignoring the fact that even if buying a share of the Mets was a 100% investment decision, and the stupidest thing he ever did in his entire life, and comes back to bite him worse than anything in the history of the world--your absolute best case scenario--that it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Steve Ballmer is the right man to lead Microsoft, or whether he is able to see whether or not Ballmer is the right man to lead Microsoft.
So the very person filing this lawsuit has publicly acknowledged that the earthquake could not have been predicted and that the people could not have been evacuated?
I don't know how Italy's legal system works, but it would be laughed out of court at this point in the US. They've already admitted that even if the scientists and politicians did something horribly wrong, that their doing so was not the proximate cause of the damages. Case dismissed.
This probably bothers me more than anything else I have read in this entire thread, on both sides of the issue.
You're willing to do something that will damage somebody's business, based entirely on your own opinions, and yet you're not willing to stand behind those opinions by signing your name? There's something about this that strikes me as just plain wrong.
I hesitate to use words like "every," but I can think of no ISPs who advertise their plans as anything other than "up to X Mbps." Why you believe that not getting that is somehow a service they don't provide eludes me, particularly when the reason you are not receiving it is legitimate shaping activity*.
I tend to agree with you on this one, for a lot of reasons. In particular I object to the limits being buried in the terms and conditions somewhere rather than being open about it. Stil, your conclusion is that you're paying for it and they're not delivering it which is false. You're paying for what your contract says you're paying for, and somewhere in that fine print--at least nowadays--is a limit.
There are a lot of things to object about the state of Internet service in the US. The limits are going to quickly become a burden on growing Internet-based industries. The monopoly status of most providers means they are uninterested in serving their customers or competing for their business. They oversell their services far more than they should and pocket dollars intended to improve their networks. That's off the top of my head. "I'm not getting what I pay for," meh. Not so much.
* Admitting that not all shaping activity is legitimate, especially based on source/destination.
Actual money? Less. Significantly less.
Opportunity costs? They could be significant. PSN was obviously a part of the sale of PS3, which was released November 11th. If they take the extra time, do they miss the Christmas shopping season altogether? I believe XBox 360 was already out. The Wii was coming out one week later. Could they really afford to wait and let people make their console purchasing decisions without them even a choice? It's easy to say "they made $X, they could have made $X a few months from now when it was ready and saved $170MM" but I'm not sure that is the reality.
If the equation is just the $170MM, they probably made the right call. It's not, of course; there are issues involved with the bad publicity and lack of trust moving forward that will likely affect them, but that is awfully hard to quantify to bring into the discussion.
Ah, sort of, but not quite. Android is open. Much like a BSD license, when one puts essentially no restrictions on something, one of the things that may happen is that people seek to close it up. You could argue that Google could have gone out of their way to prevent it, but you can hardly blame them for it happening. Ultimately this is just another version of the BSD vs. GPL debate. Whose freedom do you protect?
Further, there are phones and carriers that have these open versions of Android installed, meaning you DO have a choice. Vote with your wallet.
A movie store? Which at this point merely SAYS you're "locked out" of it? Do you not think that somebody will devise a way to have a rooted Android phone go "yeah man, I'm completely locked down! Movie please?" Assuming such is even necessary as we speak.
Fewer apps = less choice = less freedom eh?
Well, shit. I hope linux users read your post so that they can understand how their operating system has less freedom than Windows. Poor deluded souls!
Oh I get it. You're an Apple fanboi.
I didn't particularly agree with anything you had to say, but at least up until now they've been facts (albeit ones spun to your liking). Now you're annointing your opinion as fact. Not only that, you've wandered so far into the realm of ridiculous that I hope you have a fucking rope tied to your waist to find your way back. How good a UI is has to do with user freedom? Give me a break.
Fragmentation? It's an issue -- for developers. Even if we're going to let you have a pass on this one without spinning it in the opposite direction, you've already included it. It means less apps. Maybe.
All of these being simple flaws in your own argument, without making a counter-argument at all and taking most of your points without contention. Obviously it is quite easy to contend pretty much every single one of them if somebody who actually cares about the Android vs. iPhone pissing contest were so inclined.
In short: Your post is nothing but your opinions, presented as facts. In your terms, it is a fiasco in every way.
Honestly, all I took away from your post is that you don't like e-books. That's perfectly fine, of course; I prefer the tactile sensation of a real book myself, and I certainly understand and agree with your point about old books and preserving history.
But honestly, none of that is keeping me from getting a Kindle and buying e-books. My issue is the price. I am getting less rights to my property (or should I say licensed acquistion), have to pay a $100+ premium in terms of buying a Kindle to begin with to realize any sort of portability comparable to a real book, and can only lend it one time for 14 days--if the publisher allows it. (That last one is a particular problem for me, since my brother and I often share books.) In return, I am asked to pay the same price as the paperback I would otherwise buy, and that doesn't sit well with me.
Still, as I struggle more and more to find room for my books the Kindle and e-books are looking better and better.
Contrast that with the majority of the rest of the world's foreign policy: "Someone needs to do something about $COUNTRY, so we'll twiddle our thumbs until America steps in."
I'd respect "leave other countries alone" as a foreign policy, but it rarely exists. The real contrast (among those on the same side of the argument) is those who want to do something and those who want to issue sternly-worded press releases and resolutions and sit back and see how it goes.
America can't, and shouldn't, be the world's policeman. But once we agree that something needs to be done, I'd prefer to be among those who think the best course of action is to do something. That something will vary on the situation at hand, of course.
I'm not saying there are no problems with linux, or that it is more user-friendly than Windows in this (or any other) case, but you're hardly treating the situations equally.
For example:
Open doc versus find the doc. System-level configuration options tend to be quite well documented. How are you magically going to know where the documentation for an obscure feature is in Windows but have to look it up in linux? What the hell would you even search for? "My Windows machine seems to be pinging the Internet randomly and I want it to stop?"
Apparently "open terminal" deserves its own step, yet we're magically typing regedit. Where do we do that? Equality dictates there should be AT LEAST one more step in the Windows instructions at this stage, to open Start Menu -> Run or Ctrl-R (I think, anyway).
If you're allowed to edit system-level properties in Windows without Administrator credentials, you have an entirely different problem or, more likely, you're running as one constantly. If it's the latter, consistency once again dictates you've added an unnecessary step in the linux instructions. You're free to run linux as root if you want to vastly increase your chances of getting owned, just like you're free to do so with Windows.
b3 (sudo) and b4 (open the file) are one in the same instruction. You'll do sudo /path/to/config.file which will simultaneously get your appropriate privileges and open the file. You can have B3b if you want, subject to the above.
"Change the key as indicated" is pretty much no different than "edit as per the doc," even though you try to make it seem as if it is. In either case you're looking at documentation, finding the appropriate configuration value and changing its value. You may or may not have to add the line; if it's a feature defaulting to on, as is the situation in Windows, it will almost certainly be there. Likewise, where you add the key almost never matters other than for organizational purposes. And you have to be careful of typos either way. If the value in Windows is 0 or 1 it's likely to be the same in linux. You can fuck typing it up as easily on one system as the other.
In other words, if you're not deliberately trying to make Windows seem superior by fabricating the scenario to be simpler for Windows than linux, the steps are pretty much identical. You need to make sure the have appropriate privileges. You need to know what to edit, whether that is a key buried in the registry or a confgiruation file buried in a directory tree. You have to actually edit it, and you have to not fuck it up while you do so.
And that's without even touching the rest of your "steps," which even you admit are exaggerated.
I don't care what operating system you use; I'm not a zealout either way. I used linux for years. My PC primarily runs Windows (it has a linux distribution on a second partition that has gone from Red Hat to Gentoo to Kubuntu over the years, but it hasn't been used in several years now). I'm typing this reply on a Mac. But if you're going to make comparisons, let's be intellectually honest and make valid ones.
Temporarily owned by us, yeah; not necessarily temporarily owned. Most property can be passed along to others even after the technical owner is dead. Patents, on the other hand, have an expiration date. The number of owners in that time is not relevant.
I agree completely.
Let's pretend this hypothetical developer needs a $500 monitor and has a $50,000 salary (which is pretty high for a monitor and pretty low for a developer). That's 1%, and it's a one-time cost. As you say, if it makes him even 1% more productive this is a win right away, much less looking long-term (gasp!) at a sustained higher productivity for a small one-time investment. Not to mention a happier employee who actually feels like his boss is trying to give him the tools he needs to do his job efficiently, rather than one who is running to Slashdot to call him a whiner and look for ways to refuse it to him.
While I agree that this sort of pre-filtered information over a societal level can become a problem, it's simply not the search engine's job to try to make us better rounded individuals. In fact it is against their interests.
Their job to return the results a user is most likely to be interested in, and whether we want to admit it or not that includes taking whatever biases into account that they can muster. That doesn't mean filtering the results, but it should definitely be a part of the weighting. If Google did not do this, they are likely to actually lose money. Users are not getting the links they want most near the top of their results, therefore it's "working poorly" and any search engine that gives them what they want is a better algorithm, meaning they take their searches and the advertising dollars that go with them to someplace else. I'm not sure "we have half the users we did before, but they all read from a diverse set of sources!" is something to brag about. (Nor does not factoring bias into the weighting necessarily mean that they're going to read a diverse set of sources. Maybe they're just patient in clicking through to find what they're looking for.)
It kind of reminds me of college. "You're treated like an adult! Everything is different!" That's what I heard going in, and I got there and was enraged to find out that I was going to spend two years dealing with "general education" requirements that have nothing to do with the things I want to learn. I spent the last 18 years of my life having people try to make me a well-rounded person. I'm an adult now, paying thousands of dollars a year in tuition. May I fucking choose what I see now? But that was years ago and I digress.
The point is, search engines aren't about rounding our lives or our political influences. It's about returning the best possible results for my search as near to the top of the results list as possible. If I think Fox News is nothing but a bunch of idiotic, anti-intellectual, hypocritical shills and don't place any value in their results, then returning them at the top is a horrendous waste of my time.
We should expose ourselves to a large variety of sources and influences, but it has to be by choice. I don't want anybody forcing it on me or deciding what those sources are.
You'll have to move your indignant rage to a different issue. I have every confidence that you will find one promptly.
Yes, they were.
Slashdot users spend half of every day bitching about how Joe Average just isn't discerning enough. They don't support the politicians and policies that Slashdot Joe supports, therefore the conclusion is that they just accept whatever is spoon-fed to them. Slashdot Joe is immune to advertising because he's just too smart, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry so the explanation must be that Joe Average just can't resist the urge to buy any shit they see on TV. Joe Average and everybody like him are "sheeple," a term that, if not invented here, certainly crops up everyday. It goes on and on and on, every single day.
Sometimes things can't be verified, or at least can't be verified with an average person's resources. Sometimes, it's as simple as dropping to a fucking shell and typing "ping thepiratebay.org" with a non-Comcast ISP and realizing that people are being "sheeple." Which do you figure this was?
Not everybody attached to this story was wrong. From the sounds of it, there was a progression where at some point, non-Comcast users could still reach the site while Comcasters couldn't. But by the time the story hit Slashdot, it was already bullshit and not one person in the entire chain of posting this story, including paid "editors," bothered to see if it was true. Then the vast majority of Slashdotters, many of whom posted some idiocy about how superior they are yesterday and will do so again tomorrow, jumped right on the bandwagon, unable to be bothered to spend literally ten seconds of their own time to verify what they're being told. Then there's people like you, defending it. Gosh, it can't be that you were in the wrong, it's just that Comcast sucks soooooo much that assuming they're wrong without spending ten seconds to see is the logical thing to do! No, sorry. Own up to the failure. Own up to this site, at least today, being no better than the "sheeple" they deride. This is a technology website for god's sake. If we can't be bothered to take ten seconds to see if we know what we're talking about... well, we deserve being put in our place by situations like this, don't we?
Defending this is just juvenile. This wasn't Comcast's failure--neither the problems with TPB nor everybody else jumping to conclusions because ten seconds of their life to verify fact and fiction is just too much to ask. It was the failure of the people jumping to those conclusions, period, and like the OP said, they should shut up and eat their crow.
So is pollution from coal power, which estimates say kills between 10,000 and 30,000 people per year (depending on which sources you want to believe).
Yet there are no news stories about that. Not even a mention in any of the fear-mongering stories about the "nuclear meltdown," not that I've heard. This was one of the worst nuclear power disasters in the history of the world. Does it even have a death toll yet?
If people want to talk about the safety of our power options, I'm all for it. But such discussion must be rational and honest. If all that people are trying to accomplish is fear-mongering, well, I guess that's their right, but nobody should take them seriously.
Yep. It's because people think they're better than they are. It's kind of like how Congress' approval rating is around 30%, and yet 90% of incumbents are re-elected.
You've likely heard some variation on the "80%* of people believe they are above average" line at some point. I went looking for that number for my reply and turned up what this is called: Illusory Superiority. And perhaps not surprisingly, there is a section on the Wikipedia article dealing with driving skills. In fairly small samples (~200), 93% of US drivers and 69% of Swedish drivers rated themselves in the top 50% with their driving skills; 88% of the US and 77% of the Swedish sample rated themselves as in the top 50% for safety. A second study five years later showed, in composite, that 80% of drivers rated themselves as above-average. (Yup, that's why I chose 80% there.)
In other words, it's because the average person is incapable of admitting that they're not very good drivers, even when it's true. Every time something goes wrong with an AI car, the vast majority of people are going to think that they would have avoided that accident. Sometimes it will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, but it won't stop the majority from thinking it either way.
This has nothing to do with fear of technology, by the way, as another reply claims. It's rather an inability to accurately judge our own skills, and it's just a fact of human nature.
* I made up the statistic because I honestly can't remember it; suffice to say, over 50%. And yes, I'm aware of the irony that depending on what we're talking about more than 50% of people CAN be above average.
That only applies to fields where you actually can offer better service. The value of a search engine is entirely based on the quality of the results. A company like Red Hat can open its code and yet still make a decent profit by offering support contracts and other custom services, while the open source nature, at least potentially, improves that core product.
If they release their code and all the data that helps their results be better, how, exactly, can Google differentiate themselves from the field? "We have a prettier website!" Yeah, no.
Open sourcing core products works for some fields, but not all of them. Pretending they're all equivalent doesn't make it so.
There's also a strange Slashdot phenomena where saying something along the lines of "I'm going to get modded down for this" tends to get you modded up.
You're missing the big one. God is simply unfalsifiable, because when you introduce an omnipotent, all-powerful being there always exists the chance that he doesn't want to be discovered and may be fucking with your results to prevent it.
As I've always said, people are free to believe in intelligent design if they so choose; I personally don't, but there is at least a logic to it. But pretending that opinion is science, whether it is ultimately right or wrong, is a ridiculous notion that devalues not just the theory and the topic, but science and education itself. Science is something where the process matters far more than the result, and teaching intelligent design in schools throws the process out because it doesn't help believers reach the conclusions they already reached.
The right to due process, granted explicitly by the US Constitution, as well as the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty -- a tenant of the US judicial system pretty much since the beginning.
These seizures aren't part of any investigation, so it's not akin to a search warrant. They're seized because the government and a judge unilaterally decided their operators are guilty. The're not even bothering to try to prosecute the owners, a pretty clear indication that they don't feel they have a case capable of garnering convictions. These operators were given no notice of the investigation or the court hearings, no chance to defend themselves against the charges and, given that at least 80,000 of these seizures are on suspect grounds, it's pretty clear that it was done with no reliable evidence to begin with. When provided evidence that their seizure was in the wrong (a la dajaz1.com), ICE makes no move to so much as investigate it, much less return the property that they have stolen.
Moreover, it allows the US government to seize the property of non-US citizens who may not be violating any laws in their own jurisdiction, even with the attempts to ram silly treaties through their teeth. In several cases, the sites were already declared to be legal by their local court systems. But because the .com and .net registries happen to be here, the US feigns jurisdiction over these people and their actions, essentially declaring itself the sole world arbiter of legality.
Or for another explanation: