THERE IS NOT LANGUAGE POLICE IN QUEBEC, this is bullshit!. There are only laws that make in sort that everything must be written in french on commercial products, and that the french must occupate the same space than the english.
There is obviously a difference in definitions here. If the USA founded a GOVERNMENT task force that: 1. proactively sought billboards, web sites(!), business cards and newspaper ads that did not predominanty feature English 2. Assessed first time violators fines of upward of 2,000 dollars for non-compliance
They would be called far worse than "language police" here on Slashdot. That said, as far as I'm concerned, every you have the right to protect your cultural heritage in this way. I wish that we could get the same thing here in the USA on a state by state basis.
Breaking navigation buttons with Ajax is not evil, navigation buttons were never meant for anything other than traversing a tree of static pages of data, which is not web 2.0. Everything in the dynamic web up to the point of asynchronous messaging was an attempt at simulating a normal event based UI through form-based round trips to the server. That sucked from a programming standpoint and broke actual accessibility too, but in a way that validated correctly against W3C HTML standards, so magically it was okay with everybody. The big deal with Ajax is, with this programming model I have to play a lot less coding grabass and can still deliver a more usable product to my customer that reduces my bandwidth usage. That's not hype, that's progress.
I want to reiterate that dynamic webapps that try to simulate ordinary event based UI are not friendly to screen readers, no matter if you use Ajax or form-based coding. Try it sometime. If you want real accessibility, also publish your content in a non-javascript version of your site that doesn't pretend it's microsoft windows in a browser.
Or you could get the uncensored Japanese release of Kill Bill, which would be a near-perfect analogy to the video games industry. Incidentally, grey market importers of often bloodier Japanese release video games have been around for decades. No one's gone apeshit yet.
(no hidden referrer links, just trying to link to a corroborating site.)
Are you talking about the ESRB or the ESA (Entertainment Software Association)? The ESRB is responsible for rating games and also vets advertizing for appropriateness, but the ESA as the video game industry policy organization I would figure to be responsible for these issues, like the ban on selling games to minors in California.
Though I agree with you. The industry, while I think the ratings are accurate, seems incapable of keeping mature games out of the hands of minors.
People who claim the ratings are bad are a vocal, idiotic minority. Most of the time critics can't even get it through their fucking skulls that the games they find such a terrible influence on children are almost always rated 'M', and NEVER MEANT FOR CHILDREN IN THE FIRST PLACE. This is obvious to anyone who has made an even cursory examination of the facts, yet remains mysteriously absent from mainstream public debate. Usually pointing this out results in a shifting ground fallacy attack, then claiming that these games are "advertised to kids". Uh, but we were talking about the ratings...
Re:Theo is not the worst by any means.
on
OpenBSD Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Every conversation about Theo always has a post that talks about how much time he doesn't have to screw with people. Yet the vast majority of his barbs are completely unnecessary, a better response 99 times out of a hundred being no response at all. It is clear that Theo MAKES time to verbally maul people, it appears to be part of his personality, and I don't think he'd be fulfilled if he wasn't doing it. If he didn't have time to deal with twits, he certainly wouldn't have time to make the sort of volume of responses he is famous for.
I spend a lot of time on OpenBSD mailing lists myself, and it is my experience that if you ask a reasonable, fair and appropriate question, you will _generally_ be treated fairly by Theo. If not, regardless of whether you are simply misguided, a troll, stupid or negligent (according to Theo), you stand the risk of being verbally assaulted.
I for one am extremely thankful for the existence of OpenBSD, and am not terribly bothered by his at times abrasive personality, because as you have said, it does not come at the expense of either his volume or quality of work I would love to meet Theo in person someday. I suspect that the primary determining factor in how he treats someone is how much they DO. He seems to have a low tolerance for people who talk and don't do, or who do but don't do correctly. When I have been deficient, I have been taken to task several times by people like him, and it has always resulted in a bettering of myself. Stupidity and negligence SHOULDN'T be tolerated.
Gun owners refer to this argument as the nuclear strawman. The point is, both sides are elevated to the capability to enact deadly force. That fact alone is enough to act as a deterrent for many crimes. If the guy in a wheelchair a criminal wants to rob has a handgun, It doesn't fucking matter if a criminal has an AK-47 or is unarmed. He doesn't want to take the chance of getting shot, so he walks away.
To use your analogy of nuclear weapons, it's been done. it was called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous when only one side has them. They function effectively as a deterrent when both sides can effectively wipe out the other, but not before retaliation assures their own demise.
Rendering a movie can be parallelized because for a 2-hour movie, you can predict what you need to process two hours ahead, and break up the frames among however many cores/CPUs you have. However with a game, as things change you need to respond right now, so you don't know what is happening in the next few seconds. With multiple cores you can do things like render on one core and process audio and AI on the other two. To some extent you might even be able to do some prediction and preprocess some game logic frames (count on doubling or tripling your ram usage.) But in a game you are never going to get the kind of performance boost from parallelization that you do from any sort of batch processing, simply because you are being fed your "job" in realtime instead of in one giant glob that you can just break into multiple pieces.
If you want, you can put your game loop in one thread, your audio into another and your rendering in the third, but it's not going to help you any more than just a really fast CPU when you can't render any further ahead than the current iteration in the game loop. You're just going to have a mutex in your game loop that halts all the other threads until the current iteration is finished, or everything will get all out of sync, so the benefits of multiple cores just got blown.
Presumably XML was chosen for opendocument because they wanted more flexibility than a only a typesetting language provided. With XML as the medium, theoretically any XML data source could be rendered to opendocument using a stylesheet, and any XML content could be embedded and parsed using the same parser. This is at least one level more functionality than LaTeX by itself provides. I don't see serious problems with XML except for some people's irrational fear of it.
And I was overly broad in my statement that the government can subpoena whatever information it wants. The courts and congress are limited by various law about what it can subpoena for, and of course someone can contest a subpoena. I am however, bothered by the potential for mischief in the case where anyone can keep sources from the government, though we both agree this is doable. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because at this point it goes into value judgements. There's no accounting for taste in this area.
Seriously. Why is it the government's job to protect the children?
What? Since when has it not been the government's job to do something about child molesters? The issue here is that this does nothing to prevent child molestation, and abridges the freedom of innocent people.
If you protect them from every single thing that can hurt them, when they grow up they will have no defenses to deal with any situation.
They're talking about protecting children from being sexually molested. I hope that's not what _you_ are talking about.
We are removing the Teen category and making Yahoo! Chat available to users 18 or older in order to improve the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service."
Gotta love that tautology: "Why is yahoo chat 18-only now?" "Yahoo Chat is only available to users 18 or older because we have changed our terms of service to require that only users 18 or older will be allowed. This is why minors are not allowed: because they are not allowed."
Presumably the same way that Oracle and Sun ensure that you aren't developing any database backed j2ee sites OF TERROR if you are a terrorist:
Are you a member of a known terrorist organization or a citizen or agent of any nation that is currently considered an enemy of the United States? Yes[] No[]
"Because of this agreement, Yahoo chat rooms are a safer place today," said Jon Bruning, Nebraska's attorney general, in a statement.
Yahoo agreed to develop education materials promoting the safe use of chat rooms, restrict Yahoo Chat to users 18 and older and remove the Teen category.
If they got it wrong, then Reuters got it wrong too.
I don't see how this protects our children, insofar as that any child can still use ANY OTHER CHAT ROOM ON THE ENTIRE FREAKING INTERNET. Maybe we should start making parks or other arbitrary public places 18-only to prevent child molesters. Do kids not have rights? Yahoo can run their chat rooms however they want, but by what rationale does a lawmaker determine where and where not a child can go in a completely open public place (online or real)? How does a lawmaker determine that kids can't use chat rooms? They didn't go that far, because as they said, they "reached an agreement." Which is roughly analogous to a policeman telling you they won't arrest you for loitering if you walk away now.
1. nondisclosure of sources is not freedom of expression, so the determination of who is covered and who is not is therefore not a first amendment issue.
2. Who has freedom of speech IS clearly defined: insofar as the government is explicitly prohibited from abridging free speech.
This information class will be smaller than the existing "journalist" population, that you can be sure of. This in turn will limit the outlets that whistleblowers can go to.
It has never been the case that whistleblowers have a "right" to be anonymous. This has been a commonly followed convention, because it serves the public good.
Yet, the journalist still becomes imprisioned, how nice.
Yes, for violating a subpoena. Just because you have freedom of speech doesn't mean the government can't issue subpoenas. My claim was that the ONLY information the government cannot legally coerce is self-incriminating information. A journalist can still be charged with non-cooperation of subpoena, which has nothing to do freedom of speech. they can say whatever they want, but they may be required to name sources. This in no way whatsoever abridges an individual's right to express an opinion, report on events, or redress government. How? How does this possibly abridge this right?
If we agree on anything, it's that journalists being able to have anonymous sources helps society. But where we differ appears to be that you consider that a right that is granted by the first amendment, and I think it is no such right, but should be a privilege as granted by some criteria established by law.
The OP was stating that shield laws put first amendment rights at risk by establishing an arbitrary protected class for protecting anonymous sources. I claim this false because anonymity protection has nothing to do with free speech rights and because free speech rights are enjoyed by a VERY well defined group, everyone, no exceptions.
1. Nobility is hereditary, the condition of being a journalist is not.
2. Re: loyalty. King's rule is arbitrary and cannot be overruled, hence bad in this case. However, this bill is written by legislators which are appointed by representative government. The determination of who is covered and who is not is not out of our control.
3. By this definition, what's not a title? Are we saying that the state can't regulate who practices law or medicine? What about police officers carrying firearms in no-carry states? non-profit entities? Tax tiers? People are treated differently by all kinds of criteria.
I'm not making the connection. Just because licensure might be required to be covered under a shield law doesn't mean that suddenly free speech rights are at risk. No one is talking about limiting free speech.
Technically NO ONE has the the "right" to keep confidential sources, it's just acknowledged as a good idea, and is afforded as a "privilege". The first amendment simply does not cover it. The only information the government does not have the power to extract from an individual via subpoena is anything that could be construed as self-incrimination under the 5th amendment. Confidential sources is not even close to meeting this definition, not the least of which is that the journalist is not on trial for anything.
Technically they have not been granted due process. The restriction is not part of their sentence, and indeed, the law applies to CMs who fulfilled their sentences even before the law was put into place. The way that it is rationalized is that the law is not an action to restrict the rights of CMs, it's an action to prevent future crimes.
Back to the topic at hand, I would say that probably a journalist shield law is legitimate under the 14th amendment insofar as a) it's a federal law, not a state law and b) it protects the right of anyone to BECOME a journalist--occupation clearly denotes certain privileges, for example as a police officer. Would anyone go so far as to say that police officers have no extra privileges (high speed pursuit, handling of illegal materials, whatever) under the 14th amendment?
The movie industry implemented a standard ratings system that is perceived to work, while video games implemented a standard that is perceived not to. Therefore, legislation to enforce one, and not the other.
I'm always a little suspect of solutions that suggest trading the quantifiable and readily obtainable to the more abstract.
I don't see why, that's art. Quantifiable is good, but it's ALWAYS secondary to "Abstract" concepts when it comes to art. If you gave a monkey a dual CPU G5 with Photoshop and gave a charcoal briquette to Picasso, I'm putting my money on Picasso, who gives a crap about the medium. Now what you'd be saying here is, give the G5 to Picasso. What the OP is saying is, you don't have Picasso, you have a monkey. We all want the Picasso plus the G5, but we got the monkey.
Slashdot Mirror
There is obviously a difference in definitions here. If the USA founded a GOVERNMENT task force that:
1. proactively sought billboards, web sites(!), business cards and newspaper ads that did not predominanty feature English
2. Assessed first time violators fines of upward of 2,000 dollars for non-compliance
They would be called far worse than "language police" here on Slashdot. That said, as far as I'm concerned, every you have the right to protect your cultural heritage in this way. I wish that we could get the same thing here in the USA on a state by state basis.
Breaking navigation buttons with Ajax is not evil, navigation buttons were never meant for anything other than traversing a tree of static pages of data, which is not web 2.0. Everything in the dynamic web up to the point of asynchronous messaging was an attempt at simulating a normal event based UI through form-based round trips to the server. That sucked from a programming standpoint and broke actual accessibility too, but in a way that validated correctly against W3C HTML standards, so magically it was okay with everybody. The big deal with Ajax is, with this programming model I have to play a lot less coding grabass and can still deliver a more usable product to my customer that reduces my bandwidth usage. That's not hype, that's progress.
I want to reiterate that dynamic webapps that try to simulate ordinary event based UI are not friendly to screen readers, no matter if you use Ajax or form-based coding. Try it sometime. If you want real accessibility, also publish your content in a non-javascript version of your site that doesn't pretend it's microsoft windows in a browser.
Or you could get the uncensored Japanese release of Kill Bill, which would be a near-perfect analogy to the video games industry. Incidentally, grey market importers of often bloodier Japanese release video games have been around for decades. No one's gone apeshit yet.
(no hidden referrer links, just trying to link to a corroborating site.)
Are you talking about the ESRB or the ESA (Entertainment Software Association)? The ESRB is responsible for rating games and also vets advertizing for appropriateness, but the ESA as the video game industry policy organization I would figure to be responsible for these issues, like the ban on selling games to minors in California.
Though I agree with you. The industry, while I think the ratings are accurate, seems incapable of keeping mature games out of the hands of minors.
People who claim the ratings are bad are a vocal, idiotic minority. Most of the time critics can't even get it through their fucking skulls that the games they find such a terrible influence on children are almost always rated 'M', and NEVER MEANT FOR CHILDREN IN THE FIRST PLACE. This is obvious to anyone who has made an even cursory examination of the facts, yet remains mysteriously absent from mainstream public debate. Usually pointing this out results in a shifting ground fallacy attack, then claiming that these games are "advertised to kids". Uh, but we were talking about the ratings...
Every conversation about Theo always has a post that talks about how much time he doesn't have to screw with people. Yet the vast majority of his barbs are completely unnecessary, a better response 99 times out of a hundred being no response at all. It is clear that Theo MAKES time to verbally maul people, it appears to be part of his personality, and I don't think he'd be fulfilled if he wasn't doing it. If he didn't have time to deal with twits, he certainly wouldn't have time to make the sort of volume of responses he is famous for.
I spend a lot of time on OpenBSD mailing lists myself, and it is my experience that if you ask a reasonable, fair and appropriate question, you will _generally_ be treated fairly by Theo. If not, regardless of whether you are simply misguided, a troll, stupid or negligent (according to Theo), you stand the risk of being verbally assaulted.
I for one am extremely thankful for the existence of OpenBSD, and am not terribly bothered by his at times abrasive personality, because as you have said, it does not come at the expense of either his volume or quality of work I would love to meet Theo in person someday. I suspect that the primary determining factor in how he treats someone is how much they DO. He seems to have a low tolerance for people who talk and don't do, or who do but don't do correctly. When I have been deficient, I have been taken to task several times by people like him, and it has always resulted in a bettering of myself. Stupidity and negligence SHOULDN'T be tolerated.
Gun owners refer to this argument as the nuclear strawman. The point is, both sides are elevated to the capability to enact deadly force. That fact alone is enough to act as a deterrent for many crimes. If the guy in a wheelchair a criminal wants to rob has a handgun, It doesn't fucking matter if a criminal has an AK-47 or is unarmed. He doesn't want to take the chance of getting shot, so he walks away.
To use your analogy of nuclear weapons, it's been done. it was called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous when only one side has them. They function effectively as a deterrent when both sides can effectively wipe out the other, but not before retaliation assures their own demise.
Rendering a movie can be parallelized because for a 2-hour movie, you can predict what you need to process two hours ahead, and break up the frames among however many cores/CPUs you have. However with a game, as things change you need to respond right now, so you don't know what is happening in the next few seconds. With multiple cores you can do things like render on one core and process audio and AI on the other two. To some extent you might even be able to do some prediction and preprocess some game logic frames (count on doubling or tripling your ram usage.) But in a game you are never going to get the kind of performance boost from parallelization that you do from any sort of batch processing, simply because you are being fed your "job" in realtime instead of in one giant glob that you can just break into multiple pieces.
If you want, you can put your game loop in one thread, your audio into another and your rendering in the third, but it's not going to help you any more than just a really fast CPU when you can't render any further ahead than the current iteration in the game loop. You're just going to have a mutex in your game loop that halts all the other threads until the current iteration is finished, or everything will get all out of sync, so the benefits of multiple cores just got blown.
Nope, just the usual toothbrushes and Jack Chick tracts.
Presumably XML was chosen for opendocument because they wanted more flexibility than a only a typesetting language provided. With XML as the medium, theoretically any XML data source could be rendered to opendocument using a stylesheet, and any XML content could be embedded and parsed using the same parser. This is at least one level more functionality than LaTeX by itself provides. I don't see serious problems with XML except for some people's irrational fear of it.
And I was overly broad in my statement that the government can subpoena whatever information it wants. The courts and congress are limited by various law about what it can subpoena for, and of course someone can contest a subpoena. I am however, bothered by the potential for mischief in the case where anyone can keep sources from the government, though we both agree this is doable. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because at this point it goes into value judgements. There's no accounting for taste in this area.
Javascript is an accepted WWW standard. There is no reason for any app developer to not use javascript to his heart's content.
Yeah, fuck those blind people and their screen readers. Hey, W3C ALSO recommends having a static fallback site! link
Number 7 quick tip:
Scripts, applets, & plug-ins. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.
Seriously. Why is it the government's job to protect the children?
What? Since when has it not been the government's job to do something about child molesters? The issue here is that this does nothing to prevent child molestation, and abridges the freedom of innocent people.
If you protect them from every single thing that can hurt them, when they grow up they will have no defenses to deal with any situation.
They're talking about protecting children from being sexually molested. I hope that's not what _you_ are talking about.
We are removing the Teen category and making Yahoo! Chat available to users 18 or older in order to improve the user experience and compliance with our Terms of Service."
Gotta love that tautology: "Why is yahoo chat 18-only now?" "Yahoo Chat is only available to users 18 or older because we have changed our terms of service to require that only users 18 or older will be allowed. This is why minors are not allowed: because they are not allowed."
Presumably the same way that Oracle and Sun ensure that you aren't developing any database backed j2ee sites OF TERROR if you are a terrorist:
Are you a member of a known terrorist organization or a citizen or agent of any nation that is currently considered an enemy of the United States? Yes[] No[]
According to this Reuters link:
"Because of this agreement, Yahoo chat rooms are a safer place today," said Jon Bruning, Nebraska's attorney general, in a statement.
Yahoo agreed to develop education materials promoting the safe use of chat rooms, restrict Yahoo Chat to users 18 and older and remove the Teen category.
If they got it wrong, then Reuters got it wrong too.
I don't see how this protects our children, insofar as that any child can still use ANY OTHER CHAT ROOM ON THE ENTIRE FREAKING INTERNET. Maybe we should start making parks or other arbitrary public places 18-only to prevent child molesters. Do kids not have rights? Yahoo can run their chat rooms however they want, but by what rationale does a lawmaker determine where and where not a child can go in a completely open public place (online or real)? How does a lawmaker determine that kids can't use chat rooms? They didn't go that far, because as they said, they "reached an agreement." Which is roughly analogous to a policeman telling you they won't arrest you for loitering if you walk away now.
Anyone and everyone levelling accusations without naming sources can be very, very harmful.
This is why professional journalists are extremely careful about using anonymous sources.
1. nondisclosure of sources is not freedom of expression, so the determination of who is covered and who is not is therefore not a first amendment issue.
2. Who has freedom of speech IS clearly defined: insofar as the government is explicitly prohibited from abridging free speech.
This information class will be smaller than the existing "journalist" population, that you can be sure of. This in turn will limit the outlets that whistleblowers can go to.
It has never been the case that whistleblowers have a "right" to be anonymous. This has been a commonly followed convention, because it serves the public good.
Yet, the journalist still becomes imprisioned, how nice.
Yes, for violating a subpoena. Just because you have freedom of speech doesn't mean the government can't issue subpoenas. My claim was that the ONLY information the government cannot legally coerce is self-incriminating information. A journalist can still be charged with non-cooperation of subpoena, which has nothing to do freedom of speech. they can say whatever they want, but they may be required to name sources. This in no way whatsoever abridges an individual's right to express an opinion, report on events, or redress government. How? How does this possibly abridge this right?
If we agree on anything, it's that journalists being able to have anonymous sources helps society. But where we differ appears to be that you consider that a right that is granted by the first amendment, and I think it is no such right, but should be a privilege as granted by some criteria established by law.
The OP was stating that shield laws put first amendment rights at risk by establishing an arbitrary protected class for protecting anonymous sources. I claim this false because anonymity protection has nothing to do with free speech rights and because free speech rights are enjoyed by a VERY well defined group, everyone, no exceptions.
Problems:
1. Nobility is hereditary, the condition of being a journalist is not.
2. Re: loyalty. King's rule is arbitrary and cannot be overruled, hence bad in this case. However, this bill is written by legislators which are appointed by representative government. The determination of who is covered and who is not is not out of our control.
3. By this definition, what's not a title? Are we saying that the state can't regulate who practices law or medicine? What about police officers carrying firearms in no-carry states? non-profit entities? Tax tiers? People are treated differently by all kinds of criteria.
That's true, however the government has an explicitly enumerated power to subpoena information.
I'm not making the connection. Just because licensure might be required to be covered under a shield law doesn't mean that suddenly free speech rights are at risk. No one is talking about limiting free speech.
Technically NO ONE has the the "right" to keep confidential sources, it's just acknowledged as a good idea, and is afforded as a "privilege". The first amendment simply does not cover it. The only information the government does not have the power to extract from an individual via subpoena is anything that could be construed as self-incrimination under the 5th amendment. Confidential sources is not even close to meeting this definition, not the least of which is that the journalist is not on trial for anything.
Technically they have not been granted due process. The restriction is not part of their sentence, and indeed, the law applies to CMs who fulfilled their sentences even before the law was put into place. The way that it is rationalized is that the law is not an action to restrict the rights of CMs, it's an action to prevent future crimes.
Back to the topic at hand, I would say that probably a journalist shield law is legitimate under the 14th amendment insofar as a) it's a federal law, not a state law and b) it protects the right of anyone to BECOME a journalist--occupation clearly denotes certain privileges, for example as a police officer. Would anyone go so far as to say that police officers have no extra privileges (high speed pursuit, handling of illegal materials, whatever) under the 14th amendment?
The movie industry implemented a standard ratings system that is perceived to work, while video games implemented a standard that is perceived not to. Therefore, legislation to enforce one, and not the other.
I'm always a little suspect of solutions that suggest trading the quantifiable and readily obtainable to the more abstract.
I don't see why, that's art. Quantifiable is good, but it's ALWAYS secondary to "Abstract" concepts when it comes to art. If you gave a monkey a dual CPU G5 with Photoshop and gave a charcoal briquette to Picasso, I'm putting my money on Picasso, who gives a crap about the medium. Now what you'd be saying here is, give the G5 to Picasso. What the OP is saying is, you don't have Picasso, you have a monkey. We all want the Picasso plus the G5, but we got the monkey.