I agree that the purpose of the 2nd amendment is for the collective citizenry to retain the means to overthrow a government that ceases to represent us.
My problem is that following that line of reasoning is suicidally insane. Parity between private/government weapons means private ownership of nukes, and all it takes is one psychopath with a nuke to blow up a city. Or one irresponsible nuke owner.
So let's dial it back to something sane: What level of weapon ownership holds a government that won't resort to self-destructive genocide in check, but provides the least opportunity for a private massacre? Also, does modern technology offer other less violent means of holding a wayward government in check? If so, can/should we interpret the second amendment to protect those means as well? I think mass private communications would fall under that heading.
Please stop saying it's self-selected idiots refusing to get vaccinated. It's their children who are being put at risk, not themselves. If you're given the means to protect your kids from these diseases and you refuse, it's child neglect/abuse.
The first thing I thought of was the movie M. Something's wrong when it's natural to make the association between your site and an iconic story of a child killer.
If it's all game theory, then play the long game. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for more and better options in the next election.
Yes, some of the candidates are fringe whackjobs, but if you can find a serious candidate from a party with principles you like better than the Republicans/Democrats, then use your vote to build that party so they're automatically on the next ballot instead of a write-in. It's the closest thing we have to "none of the above", and it's a vote well spent.
Why are you assuming the physical access will be to a suspect's home and not a datacenter? When I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was the potential to get a trojan horse employee hired at google to create back doors or steal private keys. Then we're right back where we started from.
If there are mainstream candidates you want to win, vote for them. If not, a vote for a third party is a vote for more viable candidates to choose from in the next election. In the long run, that's a meaningful vote.
A vote for a third party is a vote for more and better candidates in the next election. It's playing the long game. You may slightly contribute to a worse winner in the current election, but you help build viable third parties and give them ballot access. That's a good use of my vote.
I have the utmost respect for Doctors Without Borders and what they do. I'm glad to hear they really have their act together. But I just can't give them any more money after seeing about 25% of what I gave them last year come back to me as full color glossy brochures asking me to give them more money. A simple letter once or twice a year would be fine. A couple emails a year instead is better. But I got enough paper from them to think I was supporting a printing company and the postal service.
The second amendment protects my right to bear arms, but if I'm arrested for a violent crime I can be prohibited from carrying guns. If I'm in jail, I can be searched for contraband without a warrant. If you make internet access an inalienable right, you're not forcing the government to always give everyone internet access. You're just (hopefully) saying it takes a criminal conviction to restrict it.
Personally, I think an amendment for this is bad precedent. This needs to fall under the free speech protections of the first amendment because the internet is a means to exercising those rights. If the judicial branch recognizes this, we won't require another constitutional amendment every time a new communications medium arises.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
I completely disagree with that point. The most valuable thing I did when I was in college was hold down a job in my field. While working on a CS degree, I spent 20-30hrs a week working helpdesk and later writing small webapps at the university. Not only did it help build good general job skills and work ethic, it taught me to apply the lessons I learned in class.
When it came time to find a post-college job, I had several interviewers tell me that it was the larger projects from my work experience that made me stand out and got me the job offers. When I've interviewed new grads for jobs, the first thing I want to talk about is real-world experience - either a job, a personal project or class projects where they've partnered with companies to solve non-contrived problems.
At least in Arizona, possession requires that you knowingly possess kiddie porn. I was on a jury once for a case that involved two child pornography charges and some molestation ones. We had to acquit on one of the kiddie porn charges because it was a recovered deleted file and we couldn't establish that the guy knew it was there. We knew he took the picture, but that was a different charge. We deliberated on most of the case for the better part of a day, but we all agreed on the kiddie porn charges in the first hour - one guilty and one not guilty. He's serving a few decades for other crimes, though.
People say there aren't enough skilled workers, but from what I can, there are too many people in the IT field.
You hit the nail right on the head here, but then you walked away. There are plenty of workers in the IT field, but not enough skilled ones. Need a strong team lead? Good luck, because they're hard to find. A good developer can easily be three times as productive as an average one, and 10x for a great programmer. If they charge 20% or even 50% more for their services, you're still getting an incredible deal. These are the people everyone wants to hire, and there's a severe shortage. Enter the H1B. By increasing the overall pool of candidates, you're bound to get a few more of the superstars you really need. But you also get a whole bunch of mediocre people who just drive down average wages in a saturated market (and let you avoid hiring the real morons).
Personally, my biggest problem with the H1B is that it's a guest worker program designed to deal with a temporary labor shortage. The shortage isn't temporary, so let's just get a much smaller number of the best and brightest (talent, not lottery) to come over here with their families and quickly become citizens rather than rotating lonely individuals out for a couple years at a time. And once you're here, you should be able to change jobs at will without risking your citizenship-path visa. As a nation, we should be recruiting, not training our competitors.
% cd cybermorans -bash: cd: home: No such file or directory
% while 1
while? wget -rm -np http://www.cybertriallawyer.com/
while? sleep 10
while? rm -rf *
while? end
There goes my home directory. Good thing I wasn't at/.
The way I understand it is that the constitution limits the powers that the government has by enumerating them. It defines the upper limit of the power of the government. In contrast, the bill of rights defines the lower limit of rights that the people have by enumerating basic rights. People have more rights than are defined in the bill of rights. They are only limited by the law (the manifestation of other people's rights).
That's close, but not quite. What the constitution really does is grant the government powers by enumerating them. Some of those grants are quite broad. For example, the interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so broadly as to allow the government to regulate nearly anything involving the production and distribution of goods. But the important thing to remember is that the US government derives its power from its citizens and is innately limited to whatever powers we grant it. The government doesn't have any intrinsic powers for the constitution to limit.
Your explanation of these grants and the bill of rights as upper and lower bounds is a very good, concise description. I've never seen constitutional law boiled down to something that can be parsed by a mathematician before.
Every time I hear someone complain about the "desperate shortage of skilled programmers", I cringe. It's true, there is a desperate shortage of skilled programmers, but there's always a glut of mediocre/decent/good programmers. That's what nobody pays attention to in this whole debate.
It's easy to find programmers to fill positions, especially if you pay well. But it's very difficult to recruit the really talented people. And there's a huge difference. I know talented programmers who are easily three times as productive as their middle-of-the-road peers. The bad programmers are actually counterproductive - you could do their work in less time than it takes to manage them. Everyone wants the talented people, and there's more than enough companies willing to pay for them. But outside the dot-bomb, there just haven't been enough of these people to go around.
I believe Bill Gates when he says he needs H1B workers to fill all the job openings Microsoft lists. But that's not because there aren't enough native programmers here in the US. It's because there aren't enough people here who are up to his standards.
A small number of H1B programmers are necessary to fill very specific niches and won't affect domestic hiring or pay scales, but we're bringing in way more than that to create a larger pool of top talent. And that means less talented American programmers either take pay cuts or get forced out of the field. It's not just supply and demand. It's supply, demand and quality.
Why is everyone on this thread assuming that "math" just means arithmetic, geometry and calculus? I took a lot of those clases on the way to my CS degree and I don't use very much of them at work. But I also took discrete math and some algorithms courses that applied it. Even if you're not thinking about discrete math, you're probably using it a lot when you're coding. It's one of those things that happens in a back corner of your brain without always requiring conscious awareness of what you're doing.
But, so long as the education is accurate, can you think of a better thing than a population who understands copyright law
Political intentions tend to trump facts in education. We couldn't even get a law passed to mandate that DARE's (anti-drug education program) information be medically accurate. Some of what they teach you about the ill effects of drugs are so egregiously exagerated that any kid with half a brain can't take the program seriously. If that can't even be held to the truth, I don't have much hope for copyright law education consisting of anything but RIAA/MPAA propaganda.
The already let you turn off the shows you don't feel are appropriate. They mandated that all TVs contain the V-chip. I like the concept of the chip (encourages parental reponsibility rather than making the government the censor), but I'm a bit bothered about having the government require me to pay extra for a feature I don't want myself. Allowing a la carte for self-censorship strikes me as redundant. Still, I'd probably take about 5 channels I might watch and ditch the rest.
OK, first my background. I used to work in behavioral health. I changed industries about two years ago. I've worked extensively with both C# and Java in the last four years. My thoughts:
- Almost everything in behavioral health was on the MS platform. If you're writing a webapp, this doesn't matter, but you'll have a slightly easier time selling a.NET client application than a Java one. Note that I said behavioral health, which is a smaller niche than healthcare in general. I don't know much about the larger industry.
- If I want to turn out something quick and dirty, I can do it faster in C#. This is because the Visual Studio IDE is desgigned to make building user interfaces easy. It's not perfect, but it's great for prototyping and I can fine-tune the generated code. I have yet to see a UI-building tool in Java that can rival this. (This line's gonna get flamed because I haven't looked very hard.)
- Eclipse (for Java) is by far the most powerful and useful IDE I've ever worked with for coding. It blows Visual Studio out of the water for writing code, but it doesn't have UI building tools. Use it and you'll learn to love the refactoring tools and junit integration.
- I believe that Java provides better infrastructure for building enterprise-class applications than.NET. Either architecture can be made to scale, but Java provides sane architecture for things like transactions (JTA) where.NET makes you roll your own. I really think.NET glossed over some enterprise features to make things easier for the novice where Java forced you to think about doing things right.
- If you're using Java, don't blindly lock yourself into J2EE. That was my first mistake. I now use hibernate for my persistence layer instead of EJBs and tapestry is my web framework of choice. Hibernate is much easier to write (and especially test) than EJBs. Struts is an ugly crutch that completely breaks the OOP principle of encapsulation and JSF is the bastard child of struts, ASP.NET and some thalidomide.
Now you have a decision to make, and I'm not going to make it for you.
uce@ftc.gov is my favorite when someone with no legitimate use for my email is requesting it. If that won't take, next in line are postmaster@site.com, webmaster@site.com and root@site.com - where site.com is whatever site is demanding my email. After that comes abuse@aol.com, abuse@hotmail.com and abuse@earthlink.net. I don't expect AOL or any of the other big ISPs to do anything, but on the off chance they do, it means a site that's trying to abuse my email will run afowl of someone who can cut them off from a large number of customer/victims.
These devices are not illegal because an infrared emitter is a tool. As many people have pointed out in threads regarding everything from encryption programs to guns to peer-to-peer software, the government should not be banning tools with noninfringing uses. And IR emitters have MANY non-infringing uses.
I could understand if the FCC required licenses for emitters of a certain power. I think it should definitely be illegal to trigger lights to change if you're not an emergency vehicle. Just don't ban the device because some people aren't capable of using it responsibly. Ban the abuse of the device instead. There is no excuse for curtailing freedoms just to make it easier to enforce laws.
I agree that children don't have the rights that adults have. But you're mixing up responsibility with accountibility. There's a difference. Responsibility means you have to answer for the consequences of your own actions. Accountability means you have to answer for what happens, regardless if it's your fault or not.
You're demanding that children be held accountable for their upbringing while at the same time denying that they have any responsibility for it. And that's just a sidenote.
The whole idea of using RFIDs for mindless authoritarian tracking of attendance undermines the whole point of education - to learn. Making children accountable for attendence instead of responsible for learning defeats the purpose of raising an intelligent human being (regardless of what you consider the goals of public education to be).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the purpose of the 2nd amendment is for the collective citizenry to retain the means to overthrow a government that ceases to represent us.
My problem is that following that line of reasoning is suicidally insane. Parity between private/government weapons means private ownership of nukes, and all it takes is one psychopath with a nuke to blow up a city. Or one irresponsible nuke owner.
So let's dial it back to something sane: What level of weapon ownership holds a government that won't resort to self-destructive genocide in check, but provides the least opportunity for a private massacre? Also, does modern technology offer other less violent means of holding a wayward government in check? If so, can/should we interpret the second amendment to protect those means as well? I think mass private communications would fall under that heading.
Please stop saying it's self-selected idiots refusing to get vaccinated. It's their children who are being put at risk, not themselves. If you're given the means to protect your kids from these diseases and you refuse, it's child neglect/abuse.
The first thing I thought of was the movie M. Something's wrong when it's natural to make the association between your site and an iconic story of a child killer.
If it's all game theory, then play the long game. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for more and better options in the next election.
Yes, some of the candidates are fringe whackjobs, but if you can find a serious candidate from a party with principles you like better than the Republicans/Democrats, then use your vote to build that party so they're automatically on the next ballot instead of a write-in. It's the closest thing we have to "none of the above", and it's a vote well spent.
Why are you assuming the physical access will be to a suspect's home and not a datacenter? When I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was the potential to get a trojan horse employee hired at google to create back doors or steal private keys. Then we're right back where we started from.
If there are mainstream candidates you want to win, vote for them. If not, a vote for a third party is a vote for more viable candidates to choose from in the next election. In the long run, that's a meaningful vote.
A vote for a third party is a vote for more and better candidates in the next election. It's playing the long game. You may slightly contribute to a worse winner in the current election, but you help build viable third parties and give them ballot access. That's a good use of my vote.
I have the utmost respect for Doctors Without Borders and what they do. I'm glad to hear they really have their act together. But I just can't give them any more money after seeing about 25% of what I gave them last year come back to me as full color glossy brochures asking me to give them more money. A simple letter once or twice a year would be fine. A couple emails a year instead is better. But I got enough paper from them to think I was supporting a printing company and the postal service.
The second amendment protects my right to bear arms, but if I'm arrested for a violent crime I can be prohibited from carrying guns. If I'm in jail, I can be searched for contraband without a warrant. If you make internet access an inalienable right, you're not forcing the government to always give everyone internet access. You're just (hopefully) saying it takes a criminal conviction to restrict it.
Personally, I think an amendment for this is bad precedent. This needs to fall under the free speech protections of the first amendment because the internet is a means to exercising those rights. If the judicial branch recognizes this, we won't require another constitutional amendment every time a new communications medium arises.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
I completely disagree with that point. The most valuable thing I did when I was in college was hold down a job in my field. While working on a CS degree, I spent 20-30hrs a week working helpdesk and later writing small webapps at the university. Not only did it help build good general job skills and work ethic, it taught me to apply the lessons I learned in class.
When it came time to find a post-college job, I had several interviewers tell me that it was the larger projects from my work experience that made me stand out and got me the job offers. When I've interviewed new grads for jobs, the first thing I want to talk about is real-world experience - either a job, a personal project or class projects where they've partnered with companies to solve non-contrived problems.
At least in Arizona, possession requires that you knowingly possess kiddie porn. I was on a jury once for a case that involved two child pornography charges and some molestation ones. We had to acquit on one of the kiddie porn charges because it was a recovered deleted file and we couldn't establish that the guy knew it was there. We knew he took the picture, but that was a different charge. We deliberated on most of the case for the better part of a day, but we all agreed on the kiddie porn charges in the first hour - one guilty and one not guilty. He's serving a few decades for other crimes, though.
People say there aren't enough skilled workers, but from what I can, there are too many people in the IT field.
You hit the nail right on the head here, but then you walked away. There are plenty of workers in the IT field, but not enough skilled ones. Need a strong team lead? Good luck, because they're hard to find. A good developer can easily be three times as productive as an average one, and 10x for a great programmer. If they charge 20% or even 50% more for their services, you're still getting an incredible deal. These are the people everyone wants to hire, and there's a severe shortage. Enter the H1B. By increasing the overall pool of candidates, you're bound to get a few more of the superstars you really need. But you also get a whole bunch of mediocre people who just drive down average wages in a saturated market (and let you avoid hiring the real morons).
Personally, my biggest problem with the H1B is that it's a guest worker program designed to deal with a temporary labor shortage. The shortage isn't temporary, so let's just get a much smaller number of the best and brightest (talent, not lottery) to come over here with their families and quickly become citizens rather than rotating lonely individuals out for a couple years at a time. And once you're here, you should be able to change jobs at will without risking your citizenship-path visa. As a nation, we should be recruiting, not training our competitors.
He chose the wrong forum. I think break.com is willing to host videos with graphic violence and unwarranted brutality.
% cd cybermorans
/.
-bash: cd: home: No such file or directory
% while 1
while? wget -rm -np http://www.cybertriallawyer.com/
while? sleep 10
while? rm -rf *
while? end
There goes my home directory. Good thing I wasn't at
The way I understand it is that the constitution limits the powers that the government has by enumerating them. It defines the upper limit of the power of the government. In contrast, the bill of rights defines the lower limit of rights that the people have by enumerating basic rights. People have more rights than are defined in the bill of rights. They are only limited by the law (the manifestation of other people's rights).
That's close, but not quite. What the constitution really does is grant the government powers by enumerating them. Some of those grants are quite broad. For example, the interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so broadly as to allow the government to regulate nearly anything involving the production and distribution of goods. But the important thing to remember is that the US government derives its power from its citizens and is innately limited to whatever powers we grant it. The government doesn't have any intrinsic powers for the constitution to limit.
Your explanation of these grants and the bill of rights as upper and lower bounds is a very good, concise description. I've never seen constitutional law boiled down to something that can be parsed by a mathematician before.
Every time I hear someone complain about the "desperate shortage of skilled programmers", I cringe. It's true, there is a desperate shortage of skilled programmers, but there's always a glut of mediocre/decent/good programmers. That's what nobody pays attention to in this whole debate.
It's easy to find programmers to fill positions, especially if you pay well. But it's very difficult to recruit the really talented people. And there's a huge difference. I know talented programmers who are easily three times as productive as their middle-of-the-road peers. The bad programmers are actually counterproductive - you could do their work in less time than it takes to manage them. Everyone wants the talented people, and there's more than enough companies willing to pay for them. But outside the dot-bomb, there just haven't been enough of these people to go around.
I believe Bill Gates when he says he needs H1B workers to fill all the job openings Microsoft lists. But that's not because there aren't enough native programmers here in the US. It's because there aren't enough people here who are up to his standards.
A small number of H1B programmers are necessary to fill very specific niches and won't affect domestic hiring or pay scales, but we're bringing in way more than that to create a larger pool of top talent. And that means less talented American programmers either take pay cuts or get forced out of the field. It's not just supply and demand. It's supply, demand and quality.
So the new model is heliocentric instead of geocentric. I thought we made this switch centuries ago.
Post a threat against the President, and the Secret Service would be at your door with K-Y and rubber gloves in 3 minutes and 21 seconds.
It must not have been a very serious threat if they stopped to buy some gloves and K-Y on the way.
Why is everyone on this thread assuming that "math" just means arithmetic, geometry and calculus? I took a lot of those clases on the way to my CS degree and I don't use very much of them at work. But I also took discrete math and some algorithms courses that applied it. Even if you're not thinking about discrete math, you're probably using it a lot when you're coding. It's one of those things that happens in a back corner of your brain without always requiring conscious awareness of what you're doing.
But, so long as the education is accurate, can you think of a better thing than a population who understands copyright law
Political intentions tend to trump facts in education. We couldn't even get a law passed to mandate that DARE's (anti-drug education program) information be medically accurate. Some of what they teach you about the ill effects of drugs are so egregiously exagerated that any kid with half a brain can't take the program seriously. If that can't even be held to the truth, I don't have much hope for copyright law education consisting of anything but RIAA/MPAA propaganda.
The already let you turn off the shows you don't feel are appropriate. They mandated that all TVs contain the V-chip. I like the concept of the chip (encourages parental reponsibility rather than making the government the censor), but I'm a bit bothered about having the government require me to pay extra for a feature I don't want myself. Allowing a la carte for self-censorship strikes me as redundant. Still, I'd probably take about 5 channels I might watch and ditch the rest.
OK, first my background. I used to work in behavioral health. I changed industries about two years ago. I've worked extensively with both C# and Java in the last four years. My thoughts:
.NET client application than a Java one. Note that I said behavioral health, which is a smaller niche than healthcare in general. I don't know much about the larger industry.
.NET. Either architecture can be made to scale, but Java provides sane architecture for things like transactions (JTA) where .NET makes you roll your own. I really think .NET glossed over some enterprise features to make things easier for the novice where Java forced you to think about doing things right.
- Almost everything in behavioral health was on the MS platform. If you're writing a webapp, this doesn't matter, but you'll have a slightly easier time selling a
- If I want to turn out something quick and dirty, I can do it faster in C#. This is because the Visual Studio IDE is desgigned to make building user interfaces easy. It's not perfect, but it's great for prototyping and I can fine-tune the generated code. I have yet to see a UI-building tool in Java that can rival this. (This line's gonna get flamed because I haven't looked very hard.)
- Eclipse (for Java) is by far the most powerful and useful IDE I've ever worked with for coding. It blows Visual Studio out of the water for writing code, but it doesn't have UI building tools. Use it and you'll learn to love the refactoring tools and junit integration.
- I believe that Java provides better infrastructure for building enterprise-class applications than
- If you're using Java, don't blindly lock yourself into J2EE. That was my first mistake. I now use hibernate for my persistence layer instead of EJBs and tapestry is my web framework of choice. Hibernate is much easier to write (and especially test) than EJBs. Struts is an ugly crutch that completely breaks the OOP principle of encapsulation and JSF is the bastard child of struts, ASP.NET and some thalidomide.
Now you have a decision to make, and I'm not going to make it for you.
uce@ftc.gov is my favorite when someone with no legitimate use for my email is requesting it. If that won't take, next in line are postmaster@site.com, webmaster@site.com and root@site.com - where site.com is whatever site is demanding my email. After that comes abuse@aol.com, abuse@hotmail.com and abuse@earthlink.net. I don't expect AOL or any of the other big ISPs to do anything, but on the off chance they do, it means a site that's trying to abuse my email will run afowl of someone who can cut them off from a large number of customer/victims.
These devices are not illegal because an infrared emitter is a tool. As many people have pointed out in threads regarding everything from encryption programs to guns to peer-to-peer software, the government should not be banning tools with noninfringing uses. And IR emitters have MANY non-infringing uses.
I could understand if the FCC required licenses for emitters of a certain power. I think it should definitely be illegal to trigger lights to change if you're not an emergency vehicle. Just don't ban the device because some people aren't capable of using it responsibly. Ban the abuse of the device instead. There is no excuse for curtailing freedoms just to make it easier to enforce laws.
You're demanding that children be held accountable for their upbringing while at the same time denying that they have any responsibility for it. And that's just a sidenote.
The whole idea of using RFIDs for mindless authoritarian tracking of attendance undermines the whole point of education - to learn. Making children accountable for attendence instead of responsible for learning defeats the purpose of raising an intelligent human being (regardless of what you consider the goals of public education to be).