Python might not exist in five years, or may become obsolete in five years.
Since the code is freely available, Python will continue to exist one way or the other. That's one of the upsides of open source. Also, Python is closer to bleeding edge than obsolete right now.
The reason I think they specify a language is that otherwise you'll see code switched to whitespace or brainfuck before being submitted to ensure maximum confusion. Remember than most organizations who are required to disclose something do so with the intent of obfuscating that legally required information as much as humanly possible.
Amtrak actually keeps stats on whether trains arrive on schedule. For instance, the New York/Boston-Chicago route, which used to be frequently 3-5 hours behind schedule, is now arriving on time about 85% of the time.
Is it perfect? No. But it's a dramatic improvement.
It's gotten significantly better over the last 5-6 years. George W Bush actually did something quite useful for Amtrak, by changing the rules to allow Amtrak to sue CSX, Norfolk Southern, etc when they violated their contracts with Amtrak (which of course they used to do regularly because there was no penalty for doing so). Once that rule changed, most trains began to run on schedule or close to it.
And for those who've never done it, it's a fairly pleasant way to travel. I'd recommend spending the extra on a sleeper room if you're going for 24+ hours, but the traveling part is thoroughly pleasant, basically lounging around, chatting with folks you meet, enjoying the view, stuff like that.
The United States has a long history of doing exactly that, actually. In the late 1840's and 1850's, that allowed German immigrants in who were escaping from the Revolutions of 1848. In the 1850's and 1860's, that allowed the Irish in who were escaping the Potato Famine. Around the turn of the 20th century, it allowed in millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in to work in industries such as meatpacking and textiles. In the 1930's and 1940's, it allowed the US to become a long-term refuge for European Jews. I could go on.
Heck, one of the major innovations of government in ancient Rome was that provincials who served in the Roman army were granted citizenship.
The standard example of this: Microsoft IIS is a minority compared to Linux running Apache, yet IIS generally has a worse track record on security.
Some of the reasons why it being open source help are:
- Lots of eyeballs on code means that fewer mistakes last very long.
- When a problem does arise, you have hundreds if not thousands of people capable of doing something about it, and as a result fixes tend to happen in less than 3 days. With a closed-source app, your server is at the mercy of the vendor, and typically it takes a few weeks because fixing bugs is lower priority than adding new features for the next version.
- Lots of eyes on the code also means that developers are more careful about it, due to the social pressure to not screw it up.
Here's a very significant tangible benefit open-source software gives you: free and easy-to-install upgrades. Of any established product. Also, open-source software doesn't come in 5 different versions (e.g. Home, Studio, Office, Professional,...), it comes in 1 version, with all the features in it, what one guy smarter than me called "Awesome Edition".
An idea of how ridiculously easy upgrades are: I was working with Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), and a notice popped up in the corner saying "Do you want to upgrade to the next version (Hardy Heron)?". I clicked Yes, waited for about 25 minutes, rebooted, and bang, I was upgraded. No CD juggling, no real intervention on my part, just 1 click and an internet connection.
And of course, being highly resistant to viruses is nice.
The Fifth Amendment reads "no person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". Not "no person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to incriminate himself". So no, we don't know that you're guilty of something, only that you've refused to be a witness in your case.
Every single (fair) judge in the country will instruct a jury that did not hear the defendant's testimony that they cannot infer anything from the fact that the defendant did not testify. That's established precedent.
You realize that basing sentencing guidelines on information like race, socioeconomic class, and gender is unconstitutional due to the Equal Protection clause, right?
What happens when the intelligence agencies lie to their oversight committees? The CIA in particular has been known to lie to its own director, and presumably by extension the president.
As far as your specific arguments:
- Moving prisoners to known locations rather than unknown locations really doesn't do much if they're legitimate prisoners. Do you seriously think that, say, Al Qaeda, could launch anything approaching a successful assault on a well-defended military base?
- The capability of the intelligence agencies to analyze all the stuff they'd get by intercepting all phone and financial transactions (which are the "tools" you describe) is not infinite.
- If there were a legitimate reason to wiretap somebody or determine what's going on with their bank accounts, warrants and subpoenas are quite capable tools for getting the intelligence agencies what they need. Even the Swiss are now willing to give out information about bank activity with the appropriate legal authority.
- You mistakenly assume that just because an intelligence agency describes a person or group as an enemy, they are an enemy.
- No terrorist worth their salt will send a truly secret message in the clear over a telecommunications channel. They also won't move money via standard bank accounts, they'll use suitcases of cash or something similarly hard to trace.
To take your basic approach here to its logical and absurd conclusion: Based on your argument, the New York Times is an enemy of the United States, because it is aiding and abetting enemies. In addition, all people who read or advertise in the New York Times are aiding and abetting terrorism, because they're funding this terrorist news outlet. And in addition, all people who are friends with people who read the New York Times are clearly linked to the terrorist network. So by your argument, most of the citizenry of the United States is an enemy of the United States.
Check out Glenn Greenwald's post on this exact issue. He raises an extremely important point:
- Illegally wiretapping US citizens, and/or ordering illegal wiretapping of US citizens: No problem, we have to look forwards, not backwards. - Exposing illegal and inefficient workings of the NSA: throw the book at 'em.
There's some serious academic study on the subject of how we'd go about communicating with aliens.
For instance, one semi-correct idea from the thoroughly stupid film Contact was that sending a series of pulses using the relatively low prime numbers would make sense to an intelligent alien species, because mathematical concepts like counting and prime numbers would be well-within the capabilities of any alien capable of communicating with us. Another proposal was to use the same sort of on-off mechanism to send monochrome pictures. It would be a long time before anything useful came of it other than a "big hello", but there are definitely places to start.
Some other major reasons why "think of the artists" is pure BS: - Well, for starters, they're musicians creating music, or actors and directors and producers and everyone else making movies, not "artists" making "content". Calling it "content" immediately states that artistic endeavors are only worth something if they can be sold.
- RIAA-signed musicians don't get squat for their work most of the time. Read just about any of the reports on it, including this one.
It's also worth remembering that it's easy to demonstrate that the RIAA needs musicians much more than musicians need the RIAA - The Grateful Dead. They never signed a record deal, they encouraged bootleg tapes to be freely distributed, and continue to do just fine for themselves.
Right now for most consumer goods manufacturing costs are the smallest part of the total cost of the good. If we were paying just the cost of manufacturing + the cost of shipping, that $20 mouse would probably be about $5, and most of that $5 would be shipping costs. The rest of that $20 goes to retailing, marketing, and profits.
It should be pointed out that the National Labor Committee's standard MO is exposing the use of foreign sweatshop labor, so that there's a significant PR cost to continuing to use this sort of labor. Sometimes they're successful in embarrassing companies into doing the right thing. Sometimes they're not. Often they're more successful in embarrassing companies into appearing to do the right thing but continuing their sleazy practices behind the scenes. Or often the company that the American firm they're embarrassing gets promised "no, no, of course we don't use sweatshop labor" by the foreign contractor, who proceeds to use sweatshop labor anyways knowing that the American firm will never check on it.
Their work is illuminating on how the push towards free trade has impacted the poorer areas of the world. It's worth thinking about when you're at Walmart, at an economics lecture, or in the voting booth.
That voting system, while producing different results than the plurality system we have, still isn't perfect. It can't be: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
While it may be close nationally, it often isn't so close within a particular state. In a swing state like Ohio, you probably want to vote for Lesser Evil, because there's a good chance that Greater Evil wins. In a state which is solidly one way or the other, you can safely vote for Good Guy because it won't change whether Greater Evil wins. And in fact the Nader campaign advocated precisely that sort of calculus.
The other theory goes like this: First you make sure that Greater Evil never has a chance of winning. Then you push for the Good Guy over Lesser Evil, knowing that it's safe to do so because Greater Evil can't win.
The decision also depends on the degree to which Greater Evil is worse than Lesser Evil.
I'll start with two very reasonable premises here: 1. The number of Gore voters who thought he was a better choice than Nader was at least equal to the number of Nader voters, and were distributed in roughly the same way across US states. 2. The number of Bush voters who really preferred Nader was too small to matter.
Now, you argued yourself that you'd need 100% of Gore voters to switch to Nader for Nader to win. So if Nader wins, it's because the voters who preferred Gore voted for Nader (because he's less evil than Bush), and thus made their own choice of voting for the lesser evil. So once again, to avoid the triumph of the greater evil, somebody has to hold their nose and vote for the lesser evil.
That's why I always support Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?
But more seriously, while the "lesser evil" argument isn't entirely valid, bear in mind that if 50% of Nader voters had voted for Gore in 2000, Gore would have won easily and the debacle that was the George W Bush administration would never have happened. So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil" when it's a close election between completely evil and not-so-completely evil, and "vote for what you really want" when it isn't.
A notable difference between the Democrats and Republicans on this issue is that gay Democrats tend to be out (e.g. Barney Frank), whereas gay Republicans tend to be closeted.
In a lot of ways, openly gay Republicans often find themselves in the same position as black Republicans have been in at least historically: they're there, and they believe in many if not all of the official positions of the GOP, but are often as a group the targets of bigotry from other members of their own party who are trying to stir up their base of older rural white people (that's not even close to the entire population of the GOP, but it is a group that a lot of Republican candidates try to appeal to).
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, he sure was.
Python might not exist in five years, or may become obsolete in five years.
Since the code is freely available, Python will continue to exist one way or the other. That's one of the upsides of open source. Also, Python is closer to bleeding edge than obsolete right now.
The reason I think they specify a language is that otherwise you'll see code switched to whitespace or brainfuck before being submitted to ensure maximum confusion. Remember than most organizations who are required to disclose something do so with the intent of obfuscating that legally required information as much as humanly possible.
Amtrak actually keeps stats on whether trains arrive on schedule. For instance, the New York/Boston-Chicago route, which used to be frequently 3-5 hours behind schedule, is now arriving on time about 85% of the time.
Is it perfect? No. But it's a dramatic improvement.
It's gotten significantly better over the last 5-6 years. George W Bush actually did something quite useful for Amtrak, by changing the rules to allow Amtrak to sue CSX, Norfolk Southern, etc when they violated their contracts with Amtrak (which of course they used to do regularly because there was no penalty for doing so). Once that rule changed, most trains began to run on schedule or close to it.
And for those who've never done it, it's a fairly pleasant way to travel. I'd recommend spending the extra on a sleeper room if you're going for 24+ hours, but the traveling part is thoroughly pleasant, basically lounging around, chatting with folks you meet, enjoying the view, stuff like that.
You can't give citizenship out left and right.
The United States has a long history of doing exactly that, actually. In the late 1840's and 1850's, that allowed German immigrants in who were escaping from the Revolutions of 1848. In the 1850's and 1860's, that allowed the Irish in who were escaping the Potato Famine. Around the turn of the 20th century, it allowed in millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in to work in industries such as meatpacking and textiles. In the 1930's and 1940's, it allowed the US to become a long-term refuge for European Jews. I could go on.
Heck, one of the major innovations of government in ancient Rome was that provincials who served in the Roman army were granted citizenship.
No, it has a lot to do with being open source.
The standard example of this: Microsoft IIS is a minority compared to Linux running Apache, yet IIS generally has a worse track record on security.
Some of the reasons why it being open source help are:
- Lots of eyeballs on code means that fewer mistakes last very long.
- When a problem does arise, you have hundreds if not thousands of people capable of doing something about it, and as a result fixes tend to happen in less than 3 days. With a closed-source app, your server is at the mercy of the vendor, and typically it takes a few weeks because fixing bugs is lower priority than adding new features for the next version.
- Lots of eyes on the code also means that developers are more careful about it, due to the social pressure to not screw it up.
Here's a very significant tangible benefit open-source software gives you: free and easy-to-install upgrades. Of any established product. Also, open-source software doesn't come in 5 different versions (e.g. Home, Studio, Office, Professional, ...), it comes in 1 version, with all the features in it, what one guy smarter than me called "Awesome Edition".
An idea of how ridiculously easy upgrades are: I was working with Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), and a notice popped up in the corner saying "Do you want to upgrade to the next version (Hardy Heron)?". I clicked Yes, waited for about 25 minutes, rebooted, and bang, I was upgraded. No CD juggling, no real intervention on my part, just 1 click and an internet connection.
And of course, being highly resistant to viruses is nice.
Send this kid to study with Knuth immediately.
Who the heck modded this off-topic? The summary brought up taking the Fifth, and that film is absolutely 100% apropos.
Basically, if you don't take the Fifth, you're an idiot.
The Fifth Amendment reads "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". Not "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to incriminate himself". So no, we don't know that you're guilty of something, only that you've refused to be a witness in your case.
Every single (fair) judge in the country will instruct a jury that did not hear the defendant's testimony that they cannot infer anything from the fact that the defendant did not testify. That's established precedent.
You realize that basing sentencing guidelines on information like race, socioeconomic class, and gender is unconstitutional due to the Equal Protection clause, right?
What happens when the intelligence agencies lie to their oversight committees? The CIA in particular has been known to lie to its own director, and presumably by extension the president.
As far as your specific arguments:
- Moving prisoners to known locations rather than unknown locations really doesn't do much if they're legitimate prisoners. Do you seriously think that, say, Al Qaeda, could launch anything approaching a successful assault on a well-defended military base?
- The capability of the intelligence agencies to analyze all the stuff they'd get by intercepting all phone and financial transactions (which are the "tools" you describe) is not infinite.
- If there were a legitimate reason to wiretap somebody or determine what's going on with their bank accounts, warrants and subpoenas are quite capable tools for getting the intelligence agencies what they need. Even the Swiss are now willing to give out information about bank activity with the appropriate legal authority.
- You mistakenly assume that just because an intelligence agency describes a person or group as an enemy, they are an enemy.
- No terrorist worth their salt will send a truly secret message in the clear over a telecommunications channel. They also won't move money via standard bank accounts, they'll use suitcases of cash or something similarly hard to trace.
To take your basic approach here to its logical and absurd conclusion: Based on your argument, the New York Times is an enemy of the United States, because it is aiding and abetting enemies. In addition, all people who read or advertise in the New York Times are aiding and abetting terrorism, because they're funding this terrorist news outlet. And in addition, all people who are friends with people who read the New York Times are clearly linked to the terrorist network. So by your argument, most of the citizenry of the United States is an enemy of the United States.
Check out Glenn Greenwald's post on this exact issue. He raises an extremely important point:
- Illegally wiretapping US citizens, and/or ordering illegal wiretapping of US citizens: No problem, we have to look forwards, not backwards.
- Exposing illegal and inefficient workings of the NSA: throw the book at 'em.
Something is very very rotten.
There's some serious academic study on the subject of how we'd go about communicating with aliens.
For instance, one semi-correct idea from the thoroughly stupid film Contact was that sending a series of pulses using the relatively low prime numbers would make sense to an intelligent alien species, because mathematical concepts like counting and prime numbers would be well-within the capabilities of any alien capable of communicating with us. Another proposal was to use the same sort of on-off mechanism to send monochrome pictures. It would be a long time before anything useful came of it other than a "big hello", but there are definitely places to start.
Some other major reasons why "think of the artists" is pure BS:
- Well, for starters, they're musicians creating music, or actors and directors and producers and everyone else making movies, not "artists" making "content". Calling it "content" immediately states that artistic endeavors are only worth something if they can be sold.
- RIAA-signed musicians don't get squat for their work most of the time. Read just about any of the reports on it, including this one.
It's also worth remembering that it's easy to demonstrate that the RIAA needs musicians much more than musicians need the RIAA - The Grateful Dead. They never signed a record deal, they encouraged bootleg tapes to be freely distributed, and continue to do just fine for themselves.
The Right to Read was written 13 years ago, and is still remarkably prescient.
Wouldn't that be a proven non-solution, since it was shutdown by the spammers?
Right now for most consumer goods manufacturing costs are the smallest part of the total cost of the good. If we were paying just the cost of manufacturing + the cost of shipping, that $20 mouse would probably be about $5, and most of that $5 would be shipping costs. The rest of that $20 goes to retailing, marketing, and profits.
It should be pointed out that the National Labor Committee's standard MO is exposing the use of foreign sweatshop labor, so that there's a significant PR cost to continuing to use this sort of labor. Sometimes they're successful in embarrassing companies into doing the right thing. Sometimes they're not. Often they're more successful in embarrassing companies into appearing to do the right thing but continuing their sleazy practices behind the scenes. Or often the company that the American firm they're embarrassing gets promised "no, no, of course we don't use sweatshop labor" by the foreign contractor, who proceeds to use sweatshop labor anyways knowing that the American firm will never check on it.
Their work is illuminating on how the push towards free trade has impacted the poorer areas of the world. It's worth thinking about when you're at Walmart, at an economics lecture, or in the voting booth.
That voting system, while producing different results than the plurality system we have, still isn't perfect. It can't be: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
It depends.
While it may be close nationally, it often isn't so close within a particular state. In a swing state like Ohio, you probably want to vote for Lesser Evil, because there's a good chance that Greater Evil wins. In a state which is solidly one way or the other, you can safely vote for Good Guy because it won't change whether Greater Evil wins. And in fact the Nader campaign advocated precisely that sort of calculus.
The other theory goes like this: First you make sure that Greater Evil never has a chance of winning. Then you push for the Good Guy over Lesser Evil, knowing that it's safe to do so because Greater Evil can't win.
The decision also depends on the degree to which Greater Evil is worse than Lesser Evil.
This one's easy.
I'll start with two very reasonable premises here:
1. The number of Gore voters who thought he was a better choice than Nader was at least equal to the number of Nader voters, and were distributed in roughly the same way across US states.
2. The number of Bush voters who really preferred Nader was too small to matter.
Now, you argued yourself that you'd need 100% of Gore voters to switch to Nader for Nader to win. So if Nader wins, it's because the voters who preferred Gore voted for Nader (because he's less evil than Bush), and thus made their own choice of voting for the lesser evil. So once again, to avoid the triumph of the greater evil, somebody has to hold their nose and vote for the lesser evil.
That's why I always support Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?
But more seriously, while the "lesser evil" argument isn't entirely valid, bear in mind that if 50% of Nader voters had voted for Gore in 2000, Gore would have won easily and the debacle that was the George W Bush administration would never have happened. So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil" when it's a close election between completely evil and not-so-completely evil, and "vote for what you really want" when it isn't.
Alternate reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Craig (just kidding)
A notable difference between the Democrats and Republicans on this issue is that gay Democrats tend to be out (e.g. Barney Frank), whereas gay Republicans tend to be closeted.
In a lot of ways, openly gay Republicans often find themselves in the same position as black Republicans have been in at least historically: they're there, and they believe in many if not all of the official positions of the GOP, but are often as a group the targets of bigotry from other members of their own party who are trying to stir up their base of older rural white people (that's not even close to the entire population of the GOP, but it is a group that a lot of Republican candidates try to appeal to).
Well, I wanted to pick something written by and about Canadians. Plus you have the rhythm and rhyme scheme all wrong. This is a better version:
"In short, in matters digital, downloadable and musical,
I am the very model of a modern copy criminal."