If you're in a discussion, and you don't understand a term, usually the best course of action is to ask user of that term to define or explain it for you. Failing that, you can look it up yourself. For example, Wikipedia has an article entitled Audit Trail which might be of some interest to you.
You already understand the first steps of keeping track of votes; you laid it out in your last paragraph there. I'm sure that you can figure out the rest if you think about how to keep track of the paper after it goes into the box; then you will have worked out an audit trail system for yourself.
If there was some part of the bill that was so important that it absolutely had to be passed through Congress, then it should have been made its own bill, without all the garbage that no-one could agree about. If this bill had been voted down, including this essential part, then why could that part not be re-introduced as a new bill? What Obama (and others) did is the inverse of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's no damn excuse.
Sure, it's a hoot the first time or two around, but the thing that we hate about telemarketers is the distraction and waste of time that they represent, isn't it? When you start running through these scripts, dragging out the call instead of just hanging up, isn't that even more of a waste of your own time, taking you away from whatever interesting thing it was that you were doing?
It seems to me that a simple hang-up is just as (not very) effective at stopping telemarketing as a phenomenon, and takes about 1/100th the time.
I try to be considerate to other persons: let them merge in traffic, hold the door open, not stand in front of the shelf they want to look at, and so forth, but I'm not really inclined to martyr my own time so that someone somewhere won't get a call. That person can do the same as I: just hang up.
That idea, I think, would turn a whole lot of Americans off, scented as it is with state appropriation of private property. The better way to do it, for copyrights anyways, is: copyright holders wishing to retain a copyright declare a value to the IRS for tax purposes, whatever they like: $0.02, 1.21 gigadollars, a billion seashells, anything. They pay taxes on that amount. But! When they want to bring a civil case for copyright infringement, that filed value is the maximum amount which they are allowed to collect in restitution. Absolutely nothing else. They can't possibly claim to be overtaxed, since they set their own taxable amount, and on the other hand, they can't claim billions of dollars in "lost sales". The old double-edged sword does wonders for fair play.
Every time I close my text editor and then realize that I meant to type a few more things, I have to take the ROM cartridge out of my computer, put it back in, wait for the volume to be checked, then for the executable to be moved into faster storage (so swapping doesn't take half a minute), and only then do I get to wait for it to be copied into main memory and run? Or is the interim storage too insecure?
How many ROM slots am I supposed to have on my desktop machine? Three, maybe four? So, let's see, I can listen to music, browse the web, have a chat program open, and if I've got a sweet computer, I can also use my calculator application! If I can find all the cartridges on my desk!
Software updates (er, hardware updates?) can now only be obtained conveniently at your nearest MicroCenter or Fry's. F/OSS software^Whardware^Wsecure-read-only-executable updates can be easily obtained by mailing a SAS, padded envelope to the appropriate developer (who now needs a commercial source of ROMs, and a machine to print them, along with the time to do so), who will happily mail you back your ROM just as soon as he or she gets around to it, for a small fee to cover the cost of the media (oops, I guess it's just OSS now!). Old copies of softw^Whardwa^Wwhatever can be conveniently recycled at almost no cost to the user by returning them to the developer.
Do embedded video players count as "executable code"? Congratulations, YouTube is now NetFlix. Welcome back, text-only Web pages. Goodbye, everything that makes the Web useful and interesting.
And you don't understand why nobody thinks it's a good idea?
Except that the information which they all need is equally available to all three. You're saying that Alice can just abdicate her responsibility to inform herself about an important choice like voting for US President? A valid course of thought in a given decision making process is "Well, I'd accept either P or Q, and since everyone else seems to want Q, I will also choose that.", but that doesn't excuse one from making the "P or Q, definitely not R, S, or T" choice at some point.
Teacher: "Class, you may have noticed on the course syllabus that we are due to begin learning about evolution today. However, I think it's important to get a sense of humanity's place in the universe, and so we're going to take a short digression today into the significance of all our lives. Namely, [turns off lights and displays first slide] as morsels of food for Great Cthulhu." [Slide depicts the dread god devouring the earth.]
[Some whimpering and gasping is heard among the students.]
I have to take issue with your item c), since that would prohibit independent bands, individual artists, small software developers, and the man-in-the-street from using the software to distribute their very own materials to the masses, which is supposed to be one of the big selling points for P2P. In fact, that item pretty much restricts the software to being used for nothing but piracy! (Unless you are suggesting that all material be required to be in the public domain.)
I like the thought though -- write your own P2P software, RIAA!
That's the second time you've used that [sic] when quoting "ridiculous", implying that you think it's spelled wrong, and of course from there making the secondary implication that the person who wrote it is a mouth-breathing bag of boogers who should not, under any circumstances, be listened to.
But it's not spelled wrong; ridiculous is correct.
(Jumping into the middle of the conversation here.)
My understanding is that Congress had the power to tax the States unequally, but not individual persons. If you look below, in Section 9, it goes on to say:
No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
So then Congress could say that they need $100, and that CA, being the most populous, needs to pay $12, whereas WY (I think) being least, only needs to pay 10c. Or they could also say that every individual person needs to pay a penny. But then the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax the income of persons.
No, the protection that copyright offers is with respect to the _distribution_ of copies, and is the legal basis upon which rests the GPL. Format- and time-shifting, as well as the making of archival copies, are legally-allowed acts with copyrighted material, under the "Fair Use" doctrine. Even though I know I sound like a tinfoil hatter when I say it, the movie and music studios' misinformation campaign has gotten to you if you think otherwise.
The ripping of a DVD is only prohibited by the DMCA because that law prohibits the bypassing of measures (i.e., CSS) put in place to prevent copying. Since you can't get at the movie without either going through CSS "legitimately" (by getting a key from the implementer of CSS, which means that you are then subject to the terms that they impose), or getting around it (which is prohibited), you are de facto, but not _directly_ by any law, prevented from copying the movie. The copying of the movie itself still falls under copyright law, and is still okay in certain limited circumstances.
Full marks for corpora, but definitely points off for forgetting 2nd declension masculine: filius, gladius, which are filii, gladii in the nominative plural. Granted that this does not apply to virus, but the double i does exist.
I took my wording from the constitution itself.
Article 1, section 9:
Which is an strange place to infer Presidential powers from, since the office of the President isn't mentioned until the next Article, and this Article is the description of the US Congress.
Better go buy your ObL pennant and jersey, then; corporations have had legally recognized status as persons, with all kinds of rights, since the late 1800's. That's why junk mail is legal; prohibiting it infringes on corporations' "free speech rights". The Supreme Court case is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.
The phone would need to have a specific command code to remotely enable the microphone, and there is no concievable value in such a feature.
Sadly enough, there are apparently now cellphones with this exact feature. It is marketed to parents who want to keep their eye (ear) on their kids at all times. The phone rings as normal, I believe, but if no-one answers, the caller can punch in a code to override the phone and make it answer anyways. Then the microphone is on, so if Johnny said he was going to study at Steve's house, but there's suspicious moaning/loud party music/sound of whatever going on, the parents know about it. Gross, huh?
Well, I should apologize. I was (as happens too often around here) too quick off the mark; I overreacted. Your first post struck my "red-state vs. blue state"/"culture war" nerve. (Although, as I said, I'm not on the creationist side, and I live in a "blue" state.) I kinda get riled up when I hear someone making what sounds like "those not agreeing with me are unworthy idiots" noises. But that was not really what you were trying to do.
That boy that you know -- I'd say don't write him off yet (not that I am suggesting you have). If he isn't even out of high school yet, he hasn't had much of a chance to make up his own mind. And of course, he may never have or take the chance. But if he goes away to college for a few years, being as bright as you say, he'll start to look around on his own, and then who knows what he'll decide? Maybe he'll continue to think his parents are right, or maybe the opposite.
P.S. You post very coherently (and politely! Thanks!) after four (or more?) whiskeys.
Ok, I'm an atheist, and the arguments that I've seen for "Intelligent Design" range from disingenuous, through misrepresentation of facts, all the way to willful ignorance. I don't think they have any place in a science class. I think they belong in Logic class, where students learn to tear them apart. But this post by plover is a simple bigoted piece of flamebait, and the fact that it's modded "Insightful" worries me slightly.
Who gave you the right to decide what a mother or father may teach his or her child in their home? If you truly believe, as you seem to imply you do, that prayer has no effect, what possible reason could you have to object to someone muttering to himself about the well-being of his child?
The idea that you are espousing is the same as the one that your "mom and pop" do, that is, that ideas are toxic, and that we should never expose a person to an idea that is deemed incorrect by our society, because the person-in-the-street does not have enough of whatever we consider virtuous (either faith or IQ, in this case) to be trusted to make up his or her own damn mind.
This is not a good position to be arguing from. It is authoritarian and anti-intellectual.
I agree. I have always thought that if you find something at work which you can do to make your job easier/more efficient, the first thing you need to do is propose it to your managers. If they say it's good, go for it. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for some variation of this scenario that is being asked about here.
In the long run, your employer sets the terms of your employment, and if you have made it clear that you could do your job a little bit better by doing some side project or other, but your managers don't like the idea, your employer ultimately is the one who bears the cost of that inefficiency. You have to take the attitude that if they don't want to let you help yourself, then they can only expect so much from you.
I also find it funny, because I wasn't actually aware that when I purchased a music CD I was entering into a contract with anyone. Oh, sorry, Mr. Ross, do you mean that I didn't _really_ buy the CD, but I have a _license_ for the stuff on it?
Well, if that's true, I'd like the dozen-odd CDs that I have that are scratched and unplayable to be replaced, please, since I have a license still for the music thereon.
What's that?
Oh, it seems I did buy the media itself after all. Well surely, then, I can make a backup copy of the music, since the medium is fragile and I need to protect my investment.
Oh, dear, now I'm stifling innovation?
Hmm, well, how about if I just give you the finger? Yes, I like that much better.
Making music using mathematics is one thing, and making a theory of music using mathematics is quite another. You need to pick which one you are going to go after. There are very few people who would tell you that the latter is a good idea. There are at least a few noteworthy composers who would tell you the former is worthwhile.
Iannis Xenakis is of course the first who comes to mind, since he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and engineering, and wrote what is known as stochastic music. What is probably his most famous piece, Metastasis, is based upon measurements and shapes from a particular building. He also more or less initiated the field of music made with granular synthesis, which suits itself very well to stochastic and other algorithmic composition methods. There's a pretty good writeup here.
Then there's Conlon Nancarrow, who, while not having any formal mathematical training (so far as I know), spent most of his career hand-punching player piano rolls in very complex rhythmical relationships. (He later said that if he had access to computers, he of course would have done it that way -- hand-punching is a pain in the ass!). Read about him here.
Charles Dodge hung out at Bell Labs for a while, and wrote a piece called "Earth's Magnetic Field", based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. He also produced some of the first successful pieces using voice synthesis (which are available on an album called "Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental"; really good listening!), and is in general a smart engineering guy who writes good computer music. Official page here (not very interesting), and a bit written by him here.
You may also have heard of serialism, which was, if not algorithmic, at least systematic. There were even composers in the classical period using what can really only be called algorithms.
So, anyways, while I agree that the Wolfram music is silly, that doesn't mean you can't make excellent music using formal systems, algorithms, or even representations of some data set.
It's not the ease or lack thereof with which biometric systems can be foiled, because the same is true of any system. (Like you say, you just have to make your hurdles high enough.) The problem is, as soon as my data, whatever it is, retinal scan, fingerprint, whatever, is out of my control (cracked, or whatever), I am fucked for the rest of my life.
A password, or even a key for my door, I can change really easily as soon as I know it's compromised. My fingerprint is pretty difficult to change. You can even get your SSN (in the US) changed with ease compared to your retina.
I don't even want to think about what would happen to the poor schmoe whose data was compromised and couldn't use the same biometric system that everyone else did.
Considering the whole SSN situation (not supposed to be used for ID, but everyone does anyways), I'm not eager to trust "the system" with using something like my retinal scan for ID.
I object to gay civil unions being considered marriages because I feel that there is no evidence to suggest that a gay civil union is as good as a traditional marriage at raising children.
I understand and appreciate your concern, but the evidence you refer to here and above is, statistically, pretty shaky. There is a tremendous amount of evidence showing that a nuclear family (mother, father, son, daughter) produces well-adjusted children for two reasons: 1) there is no control data: that's been the near-exclusive family format during the time when any data was collected; other options were not available to compare, and 2) the result begs the question; if a nuclear family is the social standard (for well-adjusted and so forth), then anyone who does not participate in it (i.e., son grows up and starts a family with another man, or even lives as a bachelor) is automatically marked as "bad", precluding the possibility that alternatives can even be considered.
Reason number 1 also indicates why there is a lack of evidence that a family with parents of the same gender produces children who do well in society: it has not even been socially possible for a couple of the same gender to raise a family for long enough or in great enough numbers for there to be data.
I don't say that you are wrong (though I disagree with your views), but I do suggest that there is not enough solid data on this topic (raising of children) to support either position.
Slashdot Mirror
You already understand the first steps of keeping track of votes; you laid it out in your last paragraph there. I'm sure that you can figure out the rest if you think about how to keep track of the paper after it goes into the box; then you will have worked out an audit trail system for yourself.
If there was some part of the bill that was so important that it absolutely had to be passed through Congress, then it should have been made its own bill, without all the garbage that no-one could agree about. If this bill had been voted down, including this essential part, then why could that part not be re-introduced as a new bill? What Obama (and others) did is the inverse of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's no damn excuse.
It seems to me that a simple hang-up is just as (not very) effective at stopping telemarketing as a phenomenon, and takes about 1/100th the time.
I try to be considerate to other persons: let them merge in traffic, hold the door open, not stand in front of the shelf they want to look at, and so forth, but I'm not really inclined to martyr my own time so that someone somewhere won't get a call. That person can do the same as I: just hang up.
That idea, I think, would turn a whole lot of Americans off, scented as it is with state appropriation of private property. The better way to do it, for copyrights anyways, is: copyright holders wishing to retain a copyright declare a value to the IRS for tax purposes, whatever they like: $0.02, 1.21 gigadollars, a billion seashells, anything. They pay taxes on that amount. But! When they want to bring a civil case for copyright infringement, that filed value is the maximum amount which they are allowed to collect in restitution. Absolutely nothing else. They can't possibly claim to be overtaxed, since they set their own taxable amount, and on the other hand, they can't claim billions of dollars in "lost sales". The old double-edged sword does wonders for fair play.
Maximus is the superlative of magnus ("great"), and means "greatest".
Keyboard is probably Greek, and I have no idea what it means. :P
/me shrugs
So we get "Greatest Best Keyboard", I guess?
How many ROM slots am I supposed to have on my desktop machine? Three, maybe four? So, let's see, I can listen to music, browse the web, have a chat program open, and if I've got a sweet computer, I can also use my calculator application! If I can find all the cartridges on my desk!
Software updates (er, hardware updates?) can now only be obtained conveniently at your nearest MicroCenter or Fry's. F/OSS software^Whardware^Wsecure-read-only-executable updates can be easily obtained by mailing a SAS, padded envelope to the appropriate developer (who now needs a commercial source of ROMs, and a machine to print them, along with the time to do so), who will happily mail you back your ROM just as soon as he or she gets around to it, for a small fee to cover the cost of the media (oops, I guess it's just OSS now!). Old copies of softw^Whardwa^Wwhatever can be conveniently recycled at almost no cost to the user by returning them to the developer.
Do embedded video players count as "executable code"? Congratulations, YouTube is now NetFlix. Welcome back, text-only Web pages. Goodbye, everything that makes the Web useful and interesting.
And you don't understand why nobody thinks it's a good idea?
Except that the information which they all need is equally available to all three. You're saying that Alice can just abdicate her responsibility to inform herself about an important choice like voting for US President? A valid course of thought in a given decision making process is "Well, I'd accept either P or Q, and since everyone else seems to want Q, I will also choose that.", but that doesn't excuse one from making the "P or Q, definitely not R, S, or T" choice at some point.
[Some whimpering and gasping is heard among the students.]
Teacher: "Cthulhu fhtagn!"
I like the thought though -- write your own P2P software, RIAA!
That's the second time you've used that [sic] when quoting "ridiculous", implying that you think it's spelled wrong, and of course from there making the secondary implication that the person who wrote it is a mouth-breathing bag of boogers who should not, under any circumstances, be listened to.
But it's not spelled wrong; ridiculous is correct.
My understanding is that Congress had the power to tax the States unequally, but not individual persons. If you look below, in Section 9, it goes on to say:
No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.So then Congress could say that they need $100, and that CA, being the most populous, needs to pay $12, whereas WY (I think) being least, only needs to pay 10c. Or they could also say that every individual person needs to pay a penny. But then the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax the income of persons.
But I could be off track.
The ripping of a DVD is only prohibited by the DMCA because that law prohibits the bypassing of measures (i.e., CSS) put in place to prevent copying. Since you can't get at the movie without either going through CSS "legitimately" (by getting a key from the implementer of CSS, which means that you are then subject to the terms that they impose), or getting around it (which is prohibited), you are de facto, but not _directly_ by any law, prevented from copying the movie. The copying of the movie itself still falls under copyright law, and is still okay in certain limited circumstances.
Full marks for corpora, but definitely points off for forgetting 2nd declension masculine: filius, gladius, which are filii, gladii in the nominative plural. Granted that this does not apply to virus, but the double i does exist.
Surely you mean the fiddle?
Forget the microbes; I'm worried about the shoggoths!
Which is an strange place to infer Presidential powers from, since the office of the President isn't mentioned until the next Article, and this Article is the description of the US Congress.
Better go buy your ObL pennant and jersey, then; corporations have had legally recognized status as persons, with all kinds of rights, since the late 1800's. That's why junk mail is legal; prohibiting it infringes on corporations' "free speech rights". The Supreme Court case is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.
Sadly enough, there are apparently now cellphones with this exact feature. It is marketed to parents who want to keep their eye (ear) on their kids at all times. The phone rings as normal, I believe, but if no-one answers, the caller can punch in a code to override the phone and make it answer anyways. Then the microphone is on, so if Johnny said he was going to study at Steve's house, but there's suspicious moaning/loud party music/sound of whatever going on, the parents know about it. Gross, huh?
Engadget has a blurb.
That boy that you know -- I'd say don't write him off yet (not that I am suggesting you have). If he isn't even out of high school yet, he hasn't had much of a chance to make up his own mind. And of course, he may never have or take the chance. But if he goes away to college for a few years, being as bright as you say, he'll start to look around on his own, and then who knows what he'll decide? Maybe he'll continue to think his parents are right, or maybe the opposite.
P.S. You post very coherently (and politely! Thanks!) after four (or more?) whiskeys.
P.P.S. What kinda whiskey? Heh.
See you around.
Who gave you the right to decide what a mother or father may teach his or her child in their home? If you truly believe, as you seem to imply you do, that prayer has no effect, what possible reason could you have to object to someone muttering to himself about the well-being of his child?
The idea that you are espousing is the same as the one that your "mom and pop" do, that is, that ideas are toxic, and that we should never expose a person to an idea that is deemed incorrect by our society, because the person-in-the-street does not have enough of whatever we consider virtuous (either faith or IQ, in this case) to be trusted to make up his or her own damn mind.
This is not a good position to be arguing from. It is authoritarian and anti-intellectual.
In the long run, your employer sets the terms of your employment, and if you have made it clear that you could do your job a little bit better by doing some side project or other, but your managers don't like the idea, your employer ultimately is the one who bears the cost of that inefficiency. You have to take the attitude that if they don't want to let you help yourself, then they can only expect so much from you.
Well, if that's true, I'd like the dozen-odd CDs that I have that are scratched and unplayable to be replaced, please, since I have a license still for the music thereon.
What's that?
Oh, it seems I did buy the media itself after all. Well surely, then, I can make a backup copy of the music, since the medium is fragile and I need to protect my investment.
Oh, dear, now I'm stifling innovation?
Hmm, well, how about if I just give you the finger? Yes, I like that much better.
Iannis Xenakis is of course the first who comes to mind, since he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and engineering, and wrote what is known as stochastic music. What is probably his most famous piece, Metastasis, is based upon measurements and shapes from a particular building. He also more or less initiated the field of music made with granular synthesis, which suits itself very well to stochastic and other algorithmic composition methods. There's a pretty good writeup here.
Then there's Conlon Nancarrow, who, while not having any formal mathematical training (so far as I know), spent most of his career hand-punching player piano rolls in very complex rhythmical relationships. (He later said that if he had access to computers, he of course would have done it that way -- hand-punching is a pain in the ass!). Read about him here.
Charles Dodge hung out at Bell Labs for a while, and wrote a piece called "Earth's Magnetic Field", based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. He also produced some of the first successful pieces using voice synthesis (which are available on an album called "Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental"; really good listening!), and is in general a smart engineering guy who writes good computer music. Official page here (not very interesting), and a bit written by him here.
You may also have heard of serialism, which was, if not algorithmic, at least systematic. There were even composers in the classical period using what can really only be called algorithms.
So, anyways, while I agree that the Wolfram music is silly, that doesn't mean you can't make excellent music using formal systems, algorithms, or even representations of some data set.
A password, or even a key for my door, I can change really easily as soon as I know it's compromised. My fingerprint is pretty difficult to change. You can even get your SSN (in the US) changed with ease compared to your retina.
I don't even want to think about what would happen to the poor schmoe whose data was compromised and couldn't use the same biometric system that everyone else did. Considering the whole SSN situation (not supposed to be used for ID, but everyone does anyways), I'm not eager to trust "the system" with using something like my retinal scan for ID.
I understand and appreciate your concern, but the evidence you refer to here and above is, statistically, pretty shaky. There is a tremendous amount of evidence showing that a nuclear family (mother, father, son, daughter) produces well-adjusted children for two reasons: 1) there is no control data: that's been the near-exclusive family format during the time when any data was collected; other options were not available to compare, and 2) the result begs the question; if a nuclear family is the social standard (for well-adjusted and so forth), then anyone who does not participate in it (i.e., son grows up and starts a family with another man, or even lives as a bachelor) is automatically marked as "bad", precluding the possibility that alternatives can even be considered.
Reason number 1 also indicates why there is a lack of evidence that a family with parents of the same gender produces children who do well in society: it has not even been socially possible for a couple of the same gender to raise a family for long enough or in great enough numbers for there to be data.
I don't say that you are wrong (though I disagree with your views), but I do suggest that there is not enough solid data on this topic (raising of children) to support either position.