... there's a lot of information that isn't available on the free internet.
I don't do legal research, just economics. They may have some proprietary content, but nothing that I've ever needed was available there only. I understand that other people have other needs.
While a lot of it IS in the public domain, it's not centralized,
That's too true, though Google comes close, if you know what to look for. They can get you a lot of stuff, though every single thing they show you has a different presentation, different hoops to jump through, et cetera.
and it's not updated, and it's not reliable.
This isn't necessarily so. Lexis-Nexis takes the data generated by BEA, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Alaska Department of Labor, and others, and packages it. The same data is available, equally reliable and updated, from the agency websites. A big part of what they do is to aggregate, package, and offer a consistant interface. That's worth a lot.
If you have some source publically and freely available, I'd love to know about it.
Just Google and the local library, I'm afraid. It works for me. The local library subscribes to L-N, too, so I'm not entirely cut off from them, but I've always found it easier to get what I need elsewhere. What you need may be different, of course.
I'm really glad that I was always way too cheap to be a customer.
Most of their data content (as opposed to news articles) comes from government agencies, is in the public domain, and is just a Google search away.
I've always said that a combination of Google and Google news alerts is the poor man's Lexis-Nexis, and now we see that it's not just cheaper, it's safer.
All those folks who paid Lexis-Nexis' fees to save time are suddenly going to be wasting a lot of time dealing with identity theft. I may come out ahead not only in saved money, but in saved time, too. For once, being cheap has paid off.
I, for one, think that political agendas that aim to benefit people at large (and have a track record of success at doing so) are less immoral than corporate agendas that seek to enrich their investors at the expense of unwitting customers.
You must have a fascinating moral paradigm, in some sense of the word ``fascinating''.
``... corporate agendas that seek to enrich their investors at the expense of unwitting customers.''? That sounds like fraud, which we have laws against. If those laws are twisted (MPAA, RIAA), or aren't being enforced (maybe MS is an example?), it's largely because of ``political agendas that aim to benefit people at large'', people like shareholders and employees, who are also consumers, just as most consumers are also shareholders, directly or indirectly.
The political process is about stealing from the productive (since they're the only ones who have anything to take), and giving to the many or to the powerful. Some contries which have carried that to its logical conclusion include present-day Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union, Germany during the 1930s and '40s, and most of Africa and South America during most of the last century.
There are two variants of the political process: the one I mention above, and the one in which you wise, benevolent ubermensch straighten out all of us untermensch, who would otherwise waste our lives on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This also involves stealing from the productive, and giving to some favored group. Since the rhetoric here involves ``helping the dear peepul'' (have you read Babbit?), they usually get away with murder, sometimes literally. The most dangerous people aren't the ones with the guns and the knives and the napalm, they're the ones with the suits, who are here to help you. I think you were talking about the second kind of ``political agenda''. If that wasn't what you meant, you may substitute ``those'' for ``you'' in ``you wise, benevolent ubermensch''.
If we have fair, constitutional laws, corporations will be able to enrich their shareholders only by making their customers better off. If anyone, corporate, government or private, is able to prosper by fraud or force, the problem doesn't lie with the crooks, but with the laws that allow them to do so, and the political process, in either of the senses I used the term above, is where those laws come from.
If it's really, REALLY secret, you have two options: destroy the drive, or trust the manufacturer. Are hard drives really so expensive that you can't eat the occasional dud?
Also, what do you propose to do when the electronics die? The info is still on the platters, but no software solution can touch it. You're back to those two choices again...
You can find removable bays all over the place and use *nix to format the drive writing all 0s to it.
As I recall, you're better off using a string of alternating 1s and 0s, followed by a string of 0s and 1s, like so: 10101010 followed by 01010101. This maximises the ``change'' you're making on each pass, and so it messes up the traces of the old information the fastest.
Back when we were still using Western Digital RLL boards, we used to write (and then read, of course) those patterns to a HD to stress-test it. If it could do that all night, always reading back what it had just written, it would probably save your data fro a while.
... we've been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years; breeding of animals and plants is an old, old practice.
... a lab where they are able to essentially make a mouse to order. You want one that grooms obsessively, here you go! Want one that glows in the dark?
I think there's a slight difference between selective breeding (which determine which of the genes already present in the species get expressed) and introducing new genes which were never before found in that species.
I see nothing wrong with these new techniques, just as I see nothing wrong with nuclear fusion, but I think your supporting argument is needlessly weak.
unless you do kernel development on x86, or linux specific development, there's nothing that runs on linux that can't be run under fink or open darwin. not to mention all the commercial apps that run without wine, crossover, et al. i know i'll get flamed, but i have been...
It looks as if in addition to that silly one-button mouse, Apples now come without a shift key (Note to the humor-impaired: that's a joke!).
Seriously, do Apples take USB mice, and PS2 keyboards? When it's time for a new computer, I'll be thinking _very_ seriously about one of those new, no-monitor-included macs, especially if I can still use my old IBM Model M keyboard.
Folks, computers are fundamentally different from cars, and most other goods[1]. Argument by analogy is a bad plan in general, but argument by bad analogy is a sure-fire disaster. Let's try arguing by logic, or inspecting the entrails of goats, instead.
I suppose that I've just unleashed a thousand bad analogies which will prove my point while trying to disprove it. Sigh.
[1]So, why are they fundamentally different? Microsoft's monopoly, the unique dependence on software to make them useful, (and the unique characteristics of that software, relative to any physical good, including computers), the fact that they are general purpose machines to an extent that nothing else is, and on and on. You might find one of these exceptional circumstances in any field, but you're unlikely to find all of them anywhere else. Unless your analogy accounts for all of these and more, it's probably wrong.
Unfortunately what happened is that in each group the rest of the members (the groups were arranged so each group was mixed ability) ganged up on the 'smart but weak/shy' one to do all the work then goofed off.
I knew a professor who required a group paper. She also put a question on the final which went something like this:
Name of your three coauthors. What % of the work did he do?
____________________ _____%
____________________ _____%
____________________ _____%
She took this into account when grading. Several people got far lower grades than they expected, because their coauthors agreed that they'd tried to free-ride.
To quote a famous best-seller, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It seemed to work, but I don't think she did it again.
... put some kind of button on pages that allows users to "vote" for that page to be included in a dead-tree encyclopedia version of Wikipedia.
Users? You want to let users vote? The people who know so little about the topic that they've gone to Wikipedia to learn more?
Users should vote on readability, and informativeness, and such, because they can make accurate, useful judgements on those things. They should never be allowed to vote on correctness, because they cannot make accurate, useful judgements on that.
If the Wiki-folk are going to make a for-sale version, the votes for correctness and inclusion should come from experts in the various fields.
I have learned that sites which use flash are sights I don't need to see.
I have uninstalled flash. When I see the little ``puzzle piece'', I know that I've found a site that isn't worth visiting, so Flash is a great time saver for me.
I had an '82 Rabbit four-door, and a '79 Rabbit pickup. Had to use a special anti-gelling additive in the number 1, which also helped lube the pump and injectors.
We shouldn't be surprised that a little econobox has better MPG than a big motorcycle: the bikes are built for acceleration and excitement, and I suspect that MPG is the last thing on the designers' and customers' minds.
Basically, you are saying "a car with above average efficiency, in optimal conditions, gets better mileage than a motorcycle with below average efficiency in average conditions".
I don't think he was saying that at all.
I don't know about the Corolla, but I do know about the VW diesels. My two got 50+ MPG under ideal conditions, and 40 MPG running on number 1 fuel in the winter, in the hills.
So, a practical economy car, in average conditions, can beat the fuel economy of a big motercycle.
>>"Putting all that aside, I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty." [emphasis in the original]
>Of course this is true. The Constitution recognizes civil liberties, rather than grants them, in the view of the founding fathers. [emphasis added for this post]
Absolutely right, for the part I emphasized.
In this respect the ACLU and the writers of the Constitution agree.
That part I'm not so sure about. The founding fathers believed that our rights came from God, our Creator. Those rights came with responsibilities to God, and our government was intended for a Christian people. At least one of the founding fathers claimed that it would be inadequate to restrain a non-Christian people. That doesn't sound like the ACLU position at all.
Perhaps more to the point, any liberty recognised in the constitution is there because it was a fundamental liberty, in the view of the founding fathers.
>You quoted this as if it were a bad thing to have an idea of civil liberties independent of the Constitution.
Of course our rights pre-exist government, and exist independently of the government we erect to secure those rights. Of course the rights enumerated in the constitution are not the only ones we have. The ACLU honcho being quoted above seemed to be saying that rights guaranteed by the constitution may not matter, but folks (like maybe the ACLU?) can always dream up new ones if they want to. Both parts of that approach are bad.
Living like slaves didn't end civilization in China (yet).
If civilization means the ability of the few to effectively oppress the masses, then China is more civilized than the U.S., and always has been, though we may be, finally, starting to catch up.
If civilization means placing a very high value on the individual, then China has no civilization, and never has, though we may be starting to sink toward their level.
No, I really don't see any signs of the situation changing in China: the idea that individuals could have any intrinsic value, beyond their utility to those in power, is still quite foreign there. The limited ``freedoms'' that the government is allowing are there only to get the proles to work harder.
The idea that the government can allow freedom is the antithesis of the ideas of the U.S. founding fathers: they believed that people allowed a few restricted powers to governments, and they wrote that into the constitution that our government is now ignoring.
>>Flat rate for a lot of stuff would appeal to a lot of people a whole lot more.
>This would be possible if only one or two media companies owned everything.
It would also be possible if the independent media companies syndicated their content with a few on-line aggregators, who could then retail it for a small, flat rate.
The next bubble I foresee is in the demand for bankruptcy counselling.
You were probably joking, but if there is any sort of credential or training you can get in that field, I'd do it, if I were you. That would be a great fallback career: it'll start booming when you get laid off from whatever you're doing now.
if people are saying that you can't possibly lose money,
if the cost of ordinary housing is beyond the reach of ordinary folks, even with two wage earners.
I think that California qualifies on those last two counts, at least. How is the rental situation? Is rent cheaper than mortgage payments for a comparable accomodation? If so, this might be a great time to sell your house and rent something comparable.
The median price in Santa Clara County (... where regular folks live) is $615k.
Most Californians can't afford to buy a house.
At 5% interest, each $100k of mortgage means $536 of monthly payments on a thirty year mortgage. If you have a 20% downpayment, you're going to have a monthly mortgage payment of $2641, plus taxes, plus a bit extra for points. That's more than $31k a year just for a mortgage! The median household would be spending more than 60% of their household income on their mortgage payment, if they could find a fool who would give them a loan that was that much beyond their means.
Housing prices are notoriously sticky downward, because homeowners will resist selling when they're upside down on their mortgage. However, if those homeowners start missing mortgage payments or going bankrupt, the banks wind up having a firesale.
If interest rates rise noticably, enough people will be priced out of the market that demand will fall, and there will be a glut of $600k houses. No one will be willing to sell them for a $100k loss, so many Californians will be living in houses with for sale signs in the yard, hoping that they can unload and move to some place they'd rather be. The folks who have to move will lose an arm and a leg.
It could get a lot worse than that. I'd guess that if there is another significant dip in California's economy, there will be a lot of recent home buyers who just can't make those mortgage payments, and a shortage of ``bigger fools'' on whom they can unload those houses. Then prices won't be sticky downward anymore! Banks will be repossessing and selling at auction, and we'd see Santa Clara houses going for Houston prices.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't do legal research, just economics. They may have some proprietary content, but nothing that I've ever needed was available there only. I understand that other people have other needs.
While a lot of it IS in the public domain, it's not centralized,
That's too true, though Google comes close, if you know what to look for. They can get you a lot of stuff, though every single thing they show you has a different presentation, different hoops to jump through, et cetera.
and it's not updated, and it's not reliable.
This isn't necessarily so. Lexis-Nexis takes the data generated by BEA, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Alaska Department of Labor, and others, and packages it. The same data is available, equally reliable and updated, from the agency websites. A big part of what they do is to aggregate, package, and offer a consistant interface. That's worth a lot.
If you have some source publically and freely available, I'd love to know about it.
Just Google and the local library, I'm afraid. It works for me. The local library subscribes to L-N, too, so I'm not entirely cut off from them, but I've always found it easier to get what I need elsewhere. What you need may be different, of course.
Most of their data content (as opposed to news articles) comes from government agencies, is in the public domain, and is just a Google search away.
I've always said that a combination of Google and Google news alerts is the poor man's Lexis-Nexis, and now we see that it's not just cheaper, it's safer.
All those folks who paid Lexis-Nexis' fees to save time are suddenly going to be wasting a lot of time dealing with identity theft. I may come out ahead not only in saved money, but in saved time, too. For once, being cheap has paid off.
You must have a fascinating moral paradigm, in some sense of the word ``fascinating''.
``... corporate agendas that seek to enrich their investors at the expense of unwitting customers.''? That sounds like fraud, which we have laws against. If those laws are twisted (MPAA, RIAA), or aren't being enforced (maybe MS is an example?), it's largely because of ``political agendas that aim to benefit people at large'', people like shareholders and employees, who are also consumers, just as most consumers are also shareholders, directly or indirectly.
The political process is about stealing from the productive (since they're the only ones who have anything to take), and giving to the many or to the powerful. Some contries which have carried that to its logical conclusion include present-day Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union, Germany during the 1930s and '40s, and most of Africa and South America during most of the last century.
There are two variants of the political process: the one I mention above, and the one in which you wise, benevolent ubermensch straighten out all of us untermensch, who would otherwise waste our lives on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This also involves stealing from the productive, and giving to some favored group. Since the rhetoric here involves ``helping the dear peepul'' (have you read Babbit?), they usually get away with murder, sometimes literally. The most dangerous people aren't the ones with the guns and the knives and the napalm, they're the ones with the suits, who are here to help you. I think you were talking about the second kind of ``political agenda''. If that wasn't what you meant, you may substitute ``those'' for ``you'' in ``you wise, benevolent ubermensch''.
If we have fair, constitutional laws, corporations will be able to enrich their shareholders only by making their customers better off. If anyone, corporate, government or private, is able to prosper by fraud or force, the problem doesn't lie with the crooks, but with the laws that allow them to do so, and the political process, in either of the senses I used the term above, is where those laws come from.
Also, what do you propose to do when the electronics die? The info is still on the platters, but no software solution can touch it. You're back to those two choices again ...
As I recall, you're better off using a string of alternating 1s and 0s, followed by a string of 0s and 1s, like so: 10101010 followed by 01010101. This maximises the ``change'' you're making on each pass, and so it messes up the traces of the old information the fastest.
Back when we were still using Western Digital RLL boards, we used to write (and then read, of course) those patterns to a HD to stress-test it. If it could do that all night, always reading back what it had just written, it would probably save your data fro a while.
They put Linux on it, and you're still wining.
Wining and dining! And winning.
Or were you referring the whining, Windows-using slashdotters, who winge about both sides of every issue? No, that would mean you made a typo.
I think there's a slight difference between selective breeding (which determine which of the genes already present in the species get expressed) and introducing new genes which were never before found in that species.
I see nothing wrong with these new techniques, just as I see nothing wrong with nuclear fusion, but I think your supporting argument is needlessly weak.
It looks as if in addition to that silly one-button mouse, Apples now come without a shift key (Note to the humor-impaired: that's a joke!).
Seriously, do Apples take USB mice, and PS2 keyboards? When it's time for a new computer, I'll be thinking _very_ seriously about one of those new, no-monitor-included macs, especially if I can still use my old IBM Model M keyboard.
When this was on slashdot almost two years back, I seem to recall that there were too many dozens of posts making bad analogies to cars and car dealers.
Folks, computers are fundamentally different from cars, and most other goods[1]. Argument by analogy is a bad plan in general, but argument by bad analogy is a sure-fire disaster. Let's try arguing by logic, or inspecting the entrails of goats, instead.
I suppose that I've just unleashed a thousand bad analogies which will prove my point while trying to disprove it. Sigh.
[1]So, why are they fundamentally different? Microsoft's monopoly, the unique dependence on software to make them useful, (and the unique characteristics of that software, relative to any physical good, including computers), the fact that they are general purpose machines to an extent that nothing else is, and on and on. You might find one of these exceptional circumstances in any field, but you're unlikely to find all of them anywhere else. Unless your analogy accounts for all of these and more, it's probably wrong.
Very similar indeed: there's only one step different between them:
Wikipedia
Microsoft:
I guess it's up to the individual, potential contributors to decide whether that is a significant difference.
I knew a professor who required a group paper. She also put a question on the final which went something like this:
- Name of your three coauthors. What % of the work did he do?
- ____________________ _____%
- ____________________ _____%
- ____________________ _____%
She took this into account when grading. Several people got far lower grades than they expected, because their coauthors agreed that they'd tried to free-ride.To quote a famous best-seller, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It seemed to work, but I don't think she did it again.
Users? You want to let users vote? The people who know so little about the topic that they've gone to Wikipedia to learn more?
Users should vote on readability, and informativeness, and such, because they can make accurate, useful judgements on those things. They should never be allowed to vote on correctness, because they cannot make accurate, useful judgements on that.
If the Wiki-folk are going to make a for-sale version, the votes for correctness and inclusion should come from experts in the various fields.
I have uninstalled flash. When I see the little ``puzzle piece'', I know that I've found a site that isn't worth visiting, so Flash is a great time saver for me.
"Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero"
Then, "The more access pupils had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework"
Well? Which is it, zero or negative correlation?
Read it for yourself.
The gist of it seems to be that they estimated several measures of the affect. Any which were significant were negative.
So, this this the cover you werer talking about?
We shouldn't be surprised that a little econobox has better MPG than a big motorcycle: the bikes are built for acceleration and excitement, and I suspect that MPG is the last thing on the designers' and customers' minds.
I don't think he was saying that at all.
I don't know about the Corolla, but I do know about the VW diesels. My two got 50+ MPG under ideal conditions, and 40 MPG running on number 1 fuel in the winter, in the hills.
So, a practical economy car, in average conditions, can beat the fuel economy of a big motercycle.
You just might be. If you have your text to speech thingy going, and the voice recognition going too, you'll regret letting it read rm -rf ~/
Is ``miffed'' the new euphemism for ``dead''?
Did you mean Time to party like it's 946684799
>Of course this is true. The Constitution recognizes civil liberties, rather than grants them, in the view of the founding fathers. [emphasis added for this post]
Absolutely right, for the part I emphasized.
In this respect the ACLU and the writers of the Constitution agree.
That part I'm not so sure about. The founding fathers believed that our rights came from God, our Creator. Those rights came with responsibilities to God, and our government was intended for a Christian people. At least one of the founding fathers claimed that it would be inadequate to restrain a non-Christian people. That doesn't sound like the ACLU position at all.
Perhaps more to the point, any liberty recognised in the constitution is there because it was a fundamental liberty, in the view of the founding fathers.
>You quoted this as if it were a bad thing to have an idea of civil liberties independent of the Constitution.
Of course our rights pre-exist government, and exist independently of the government we erect to secure those rights. Of course the rights enumerated in the constitution are not the only ones we have. The ACLU honcho being quoted above seemed to be saying that rights guaranteed by the constitution may not matter, but folks (like maybe the ACLU?) can always dream up new ones if they want to. Both parts of that approach are bad.
If civilization means the ability of the few to effectively oppress the masses, then China is more civilized than the U.S., and always has been, though we may be, finally, starting to catch up.
If civilization means placing a very high value on the individual, then China has no civilization, and never has, though we may be starting to sink toward their level.
No, I really don't see any signs of the situation changing in China: the idea that individuals could have any intrinsic value, beyond their utility to those in power, is still quite foreign there. The limited ``freedoms'' that the government is allowing are there only to get the proles to work harder.
The idea that the government can allow freedom is the antithesis of the ideas of the U.S. founding fathers: they believed that people allowed a few restricted powers to governments, and they wrote that into the constitution that our government is now ignoring.
>This would be possible if only one or two media companies owned everything.
It would also be possible if the independent media companies syndicated their content with a few on-line aggregators, who could then retail it for a small, flat rate.
>Too bad things aren't going that direction...
Aren't they? Or was that sarcasm?
You were probably joking, but if there is any sort of credential or training you can get in that field, I'd do it, if I were you. That would be a great fallback career: it'll start booming when you get laid off from whatever you're doing now.
You might be seeing a housing bubble if
it's significantly cheaper to rent than buy,
if people are saying that you can't possibly lose money,
if the cost of ordinary housing is beyond the reach of ordinary folks, even with two wage earners.
I think that California qualifies on those last two counts, at least. How is the rental situation? Is rent cheaper than mortgage payments for a comparable accomodation? If so, this might be a great time to sell your house and rent something comparable.
The median price in Santa Clara County (... where regular folks live) is $615k.
Most Californians can't afford to buy a house. At 5% interest, each $100k of mortgage means $536 of monthly payments on a thirty year mortgage. If you have a 20% downpayment, you're going to have a monthly mortgage payment of $2641, plus taxes, plus a bit extra for points. That's more than $31k a year just for a mortgage! The median household would be spending more than 60% of their household income on their mortgage payment, if they could find a fool who would give them a loan that was that much beyond their means.
Housing prices are notoriously sticky downward, because homeowners will resist selling when they're upside down on their mortgage. However, if those homeowners start missing mortgage payments or going bankrupt, the banks wind up having a firesale.
If interest rates rise noticably, enough people will be priced out of the market that demand will fall, and there will be a glut of $600k houses. No one will be willing to sell them for a $100k loss, so many Californians will be living in houses with for sale signs in the yard, hoping that they can unload and move to some place they'd rather be. The folks who have to move will lose an arm and a leg.
It could get a lot worse than that. I'd guess that if there is another significant dip in California's economy, there will be a lot of recent home buyers who just can't make those mortgage payments, and a shortage of ``bigger fools'' on whom they can unload those houses. Then prices won't be sticky downward anymore! Banks will be repossessing and selling at auction, and we'd see Santa Clara houses going for Houston prices.