I'm pretty sure it does. Although it isn't spelled out explicitly in the first amendment, neither is the responsibility to use "arms" responsibly spelled out in the same amendment that enumerates the right to keep and bear them. Nobody has a problem assuming that ownership of a gun carries responsibility; why does anyone have a problem with assuming responsibility attaches to the press?
In fact, the first amendment press rights were specified specifically because of the importance of the press being ALLOWED to be right, even if the government didn't like it.
There can be some legal ramifications about being incorrect, or intentionally lying, but the only reason they should be right is for reputation.
The fact that there are legal ramifications means "reputation" is not the only reason to be right.
So, which source? The original journalist, for reporting on an event at the time in 2002?
Assuming the story was accurate in 2002, which I think it was, no.
How about the original paper, which listed it as a popular story?
A popular story in 2002, or a popular story TODAY? If they lost the date information on the story, yes. Otherwise, no.
Google, which added the story to their news aggregation feed?
Since they added it to their NEWS feed in 2008, when it was news in 2002, yes, this is a good candidate for liability.
Other news outlets, for reporting it as new news when it was seen on an automatic feed?
They probably bear some liability as well. It depends on who "lost" the fact that the story was written in 2002 versus 2008.
Information is not illegal. It's how you act on it that creates a liability.
Information may not be illegal, but shouldn't MISinformation be? It is in some cases already. Shout FIRE in a crowded theater when there isn't one, for example.
No, the information that in 2002 UAL was in financial trouble isn't illegal and shouldn't be. However, by labelling the information "news" and putting today's date on it, that's MISinformation and it is hard to know if was the result of malice or stupidity. That's what a trial would, we hope, determine. There is the appearance of an illegal act (fraud), and it is proper to investigate and perhaps prosecute. If someone did this deliberately, they need to be held accountable.
As for the question if INformation should be illegal, the answer is still, in some cases, yes. HIPPA makes it a crime for a hospital to divulge medical information about a patient. (I know, it is a fine line between calling that "information" and "acting on information", but since the crime exists with no action other than divulging it, I'd say it's "information" that's the crime.)
Should it be illegal for me to publish, say, your SSN? How about if I publish your bank account data, including numbers and balances? If "information" shouldn't be illegal, how can we make giving information to people a crime? They can't have information without it somehow being given to them. This is the same argument that is used to demand federal funding of, shall we say, certain medical procedures. The claim is that, shall we say, half the population, doesn't really have the right to that procedure if they cannot afford it.
Sorry, but most online "newspapers" just republish other web content.
No, newspapers mostly publish AP and their own stories. Even so, fact checking is a responsibility that goes with any "newspaper" that wants the right of a free press to apply to them.
Ask yourself, how long could Slashdot go with an automated submission editor?
Slashdot is not a newspaper. Slashdot is a news concentrator and comment board. Every article in/. has, or ought to have if it doesn't, a source link that takes you to the source. Further, there are a large number of people who are ready, willing and able to post immediate "that's crap" comments, while online newspaper response comments are slow to appear, if they do at all. You have to get past the newspaper censor, who, for our local newspapers, seems biased against any comments that point out factual errors in the newspaper. (I posted THREE comments describing why a recent article about this HHO gas-milage aid stuff was physically impossible, but the paper had reported how well it works and needed to protect its own image. None of the three made it online.)
Yes, my local paper has links to the AP for other stories, but anything they run under their own name has no links. I expect those stories to be fact checked, but I know they are not. It is the same old story: read an article in a newspaper about something you know, you'll realize how wrong they get things, but read an article about something new and you'll assume they know what they are doing. Why do we do that? What part of human nature causes us to trust things we know are inherently untrustworthy?
Seriously, this is a case of a lot of stupid people making stupid mistakes. If you have a system that dumps all stock based upon a bad headline,
That's not how the systems work.
It's PEOPLE who decide to dump stock based on the headline. Dumping stock makes the price go down. The SOFTWARE part of the story is called a "stop-loss order", which is an automatic "sell" order based on stock price. The theory, which works in practice, is that dumping a stock that has lost 50% of its value (or some other trigger level) will prevent a complete loss of money on that stock. Half of what you had is better than 10% of what you had.
It replaces the need for someone to sit at the computer monitoring the stock prices every minute of the day. It also prevents the time delay (and loss) for someone who does monitor prices every minute having to enter and execute the sell order.
If they need something, perhaps going after those companies for artificially deflating the stock's value would be the best course. It's not like this couldn't have happened with humans.
That's right -- the source of the story should be liable. And it's not like this couldn't have happened with humans, because it started with humans.
Now, as someone else commented, it's day trading (or short term) that causes this kind of thing. If you buy stock and sit on it (not literally), it will usually go up. My $5 Sony stock has split once and is much higher. Of course, I bought it 30 years ago. And only ten shares. Sigh. It's been higher than it is now, but it's still higher than when I bought it.
This kind of information tempts one to say "make a law" that all stock bought must be held for six months before it can be sold. That's still not a solution. It will just move the problem over to options, and keep short term money out of the market, making it smaller.
The cyberonic website asks for a phone number to determine availability, and instead of simply saying yes or no, they put up another form with address, phone number, and EMAIL address demands. Then, even with all the entries filled in, they respond with "all required entries must be filled in, please 'back' and try again."
Phishing for email addresses and phone numbers. Bah. A pox on them and their ilk.
In THIS area, we have cable and one DSL. Qwest. While I COULD drop cable and go DSL, I would be paying money to a company that lied to me in order to get my money the first time I subscribed to DSL, could not install it on the right physical pair, and lied to the state PUC when I filed my complaint about their lies.
When I called them on their lies, they did not offer to provide the service they had promised, they offered to provide it for three months -- after which I would be paying extra for the service they claimed was part of the base package.
She's completely unqualified to be President should McCain die in office.
On the other hand, Obama is completely unqualified to be President and if he's elected won't need any hypothetical death to be in that office.
How can you say that someone who has been a chief executive of a state (and a city) is unqualified compared to someone who has never run a company of any size and whose sole federal experience is less than one term in the Senate?
How can you complain about someone being unqualified to be President when they are a candidate for VP, when the other candidate for President is even less qualified?
Why would McCain lose votes from people who are concerned that Barry is unqualified? Why is putting an unqualified person directly into the office better than electing one to be runner-up and get on-the-job training prior to doing the job?
And when leaving the roundabout, who has got priority? The car leaving it, or the one coming in?
The vehicle IN the roundabout has the right of way. In this case, the one leaving it, but if he's leaving it, there's no reason for the one entering it to wait. Unless, of course, you are appropriately paranoid and don't trust people who either use or don't use their turn signals.
And anyway, right or left lane?
Right or left lane what?
For the OP, roundabouts are not always the answer to four way stops. They take more real estate to build (properly), are confusing to drivers who aren't used to them (most of the US drivers) , and are simply dangerous when built in limited space as a replacement for a four way stop.
We've got two in our little town now, built in the same space as the four way stop was, as a means of "calming" traffic. (As if traffic got excited over a four way stop!?) Many people simply treat it as a four way stop and stop when they aren't supposed to (dangerous), or use the same "on the right" rule as the four way stop (exactly wrong) or don't use any rules at all and go either way around the circle depending on which way they want to go.
And I'll usually just wait until Wednesday when the local uni has their surplus sale, and I can find $45 cables in a pile for $1 each. Amazing the stuff that people throw out when they weren't paying for it and don't know what it's worth.
Well, strictly speaking, by definition a $12 game console is a $12 computer as well.
Try telling that to a Web-TV user. He gets email and surfs the web all without needing a computer!
Re:When will people learn?!?!?!
on
Hot Water, Hot Earth
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
(at least on a human time scale)
That's the key phrase. On a human time scale things have been very calm.
On a geological time scale, things have been very very very active. Cold, hot, cold, hot. Glaciers, volcanoes. We don't even know all that has happened because we simply haven't been here keeping records for all that time.
We can guess what happened, but it's only a guess, and depends on many assumptions that cannot be verified independently. (For example, CO2 cannot possibly diffuse out of a trapped gas bubble in an ice core over thousands or tens of thousands of years, right? How big a surprise is it to some people that solid water can simply evaporate even while frozen solid?)
We do know that things have been much different in the past. We are fools to assume that the only 'right' way for the earth to be is how it is now. Or a decade ago. And yet, fools build houses on sandbars all the time. Expensive houses. And then demand that the government do something when nature changes. Just like we are demanding action when nature changes climate, like it has for billions of years prior to us.
The climate is not a zero sum game. Putting an ounce of gold on one side doesn't mean the system won't react (and we know it will) to restore balance.
But then, a 100 pound lead weight on one side doesn't balance a 100 pound gold weight on the other in the first place. Lead is measured in a different system than gold. Even though a troy ounce weighs more than an avoirdupois ounce, there are only 12 to the pound. You can put a LOT of extra gold on the gold side before the lead is balanced.
Nor should the user be told that the site IS a fake and contains malicious code and the user
should NEVER go there, like IE tells people.
The correct statement is that the authenticity of the site cannot be verified. "Not verified" is not synonymous with "fake".
Microsoft's IE action is forcing sites to get signed certs that don't need them. Mine is one of them. I'm perfectly happy with agreeing to accept a self-signed cert for my site; some people weren't and they forced the issue. The level of security needed was not sufficient to justify the cost. The reason why MS programmed their browser to make these false statements about my site I cannot know; it certainly reeks of money.
Let's say that we implement the trust system that you propose (self-signed certs appear as more secure than plain sites, and less secure than trusted certs).
I don't think that's the trust system being proposed.
I think it is obvious that self-signed certs don't provide a trust chain.
However, I think it should be the USER'S choice to accept them or not. The browser should not be making claims about the authenticity of the site or whether it contains malicious code based on the self-signed cert. Firefox 2 has it about right. "Cannot verify, will you accept?" This nonsense from IE telling people NOT to go to a site with a self-signed cert is over the top and absurd.
The AP article that this is based on says it is "4th century" and "New Testament". Combined, that means it must be 4th century CE, not BCE.
The/. article is just plain goofy since it says 4th century BCE and then claims some significance to the fact that it doesn't mention the resurrection -- an event that occured a few decades CE. It's like insulting a Microsoft DOS 3.0 manual for not telling you how to format an NTFS partition.
Iraq did not have a nuke program. It didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
Then that 550 metric tons http://www.nysun.com/editorials/iraqs-yellowcake/81328/ of yellowcake uranium that was taken out of Iraq and sold to a company in Canada was, ummm, just yellow-colored flour Saddam intended to use to bake bread for all the starving Iraqi children?
I know, he was in the business of making those Uranium marbles that United Nuclear sells. Oh, please. Yellowcake is the first step in preparing weapon's grade uranium. It's the same kind of yellowcake that Saddam supposedly wasn't buying from Niger. Yeah, the UN allegedly knew about it, but if Saddam truly had no nuclear intentions he had no need to keep it around, and would have made a bundle of money selling it.
What about the chemical rockets that made the news about 7 days into the war, and then dissappeared from the media altogether? They didn't fit the lie that Saddam had no WMD, so we stopped hearing about them. "Hey, we found chemical rockets! Wait, he doesn't have WMD, so he can't have chemical rockets. What chemical rockets?"
And, of course, tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds died from mass hallucination and nothing at all to do with chemical weapons.
The old Iraqi government has never been meaningfully linked with any acts of terrorism against western nations. They had nothing to do with Al Quaida.
So? The only terrorists and bad guys in the world are Al Quaida? I don't think so.
Many, many more people have died in Iraq as a result of the invasion than would have died under Saddam's rule.
And most of them have died at the hands of the terrorists who blow up police stations and mosques and women and children and use force and terror to try to keep people from working with their own government. Yes, Saddam would never have allowed these terrorists to work his streets, but that doesn't mean his own troops wouldn't have still been killing people.
Basically, my advice to you is quit being so scared.
My advice to you is to listen to the facts and stop treating people you discuss things with as if they are just scared of something. It's insulting and condescending to treat people that way. They disagree with you, they aren't scared of you.
They're just generally ordinary people.
"Generally ordinary people" don't load the buick with a few hundred pounds of explosive and then detonate it in an outdoor market filled with women and children, or in front of a church. They don't strap a few pounds of C4 onto themselves, then a layer of nails and rat poison, and then go find a busload of children to blow up, and if the blast doesn't kill them, they'll bleed to death from the nail wounds.
It is a sad statement about the world when someone can claim that such people are "generally ordinary people". I think we are better than that.
My post is based on historical evidence and precedent. We saw what happened when we negotiated with North Korea regarding their nuclear program. They extracted promises from us in return for not proceeding, and after they got what they wanted they went ahead just as if we'd never spoken to them.
I saw Iraqi television right before the war started. It was being carried on C-SPAN. About every ten minutes, the "news" carried the major story of how 137 (I forget the precise number) US cities had passed resolutions against the war with the obvious implication that the US wasn't going to do anything about Saddam. Every ten minutes. Don't forget, Iraqi TV wasn't like PBS or even NBC here. It was run by Saddam's sons, and it did not say anything that Saddam didn't want heard. If Iraqi TV reported the resolutions, it was because Saddam wanted his people to hear it. Or are you claiming that C-SPAN fabricated Iraqi televion signals just to confuse us?
I was alive and watching world events when when the terrorists in Iran abducted our citizens. I watched in awe as James Earl Carter launced a hopelessy bad attempt at getting them back, and then went into "diplomacy" mode. I also lived through the release of those people immediately following the election, and it was almost universally acknowledged that the election of Ronald Regan was the reason they gave up. They didn't want a president who was likely to mount a successful military action to stop the nonsense, they wanted more of Carter's talk talk talk. Every day they held our people hostage was a day they could demand more and claim we were weak and powerless because all we did was talk. (And a bit of trivia for those who weren't around then: The Iranian Hostage Crisis launched the career of Ted Koppel on Nightline. That program started as a nightly summary of the crisis and what talking had taken place that day. It was so well received, it stayed on the air after the crisis was over.)
Compare the time spent "talking" with the Iranians and the result at Entebbe. Terrorists wanted talk talk talk. They got raided and killed. They certainly didn't want that. End of problem.
It is neither hate nor ignorance to acknowledge what has worked and what has not worked in dealing with fundamentalist terrorists in the past. Talk does not work. If talk worked, the world would be at peace because Jimmy Carter was the master of talk. Remember Camp David? All the "peace accords"? A nobel peace prize?
All that happens when we talk is the other side asks for concessions, and we give them. In World War II, it was called appeasement. Notice how well that worked. You don't even need to have been alive then, I think the outcome is pretty well known. The same thing happens today.
If anything, to ignore history and think that all we need is just a little more talk or just a little bit better negotiator to solve the middle east problems is truly ignorance.
I can see the future of your post..
Yeah, I noticed how unpleasant political facts get modded down on slashdot. Moderation isn't supposed to be about whether you agree or not, but conservative views tend to get a lot more negative mod points than liberal views. And just saying that will result in a flurry of negative mod points, I know.
The last thing that the kookiest of the terror groups want is a president who is interested in multi-lateral diplomatic settlements to points of conflict between Muslim countries and the US.
Don't be silly. That's exactly the kind of thing they'd want. They can lie through their teeth, extract all kinds of concessions and appeasement, then point to those concessions as proof that the US is weak, immoral and powerless. Then launch an attack against the US but claim that they didn't do it. After the attack, more rounds of diplomacy and concessions, and the loop continues.
Further, they can point to the weakness of the US and tell the people they are oppressing that there is no help coming from the US -- just like Saddam was doing to his people before the war. Saddam used every city government anti-war resolution against us and his own people, repeatedly broadcasting the fact that the US wasn't going to ever do anything because all the people said they weren't. The fact he was wrong didn't stop him from doing it, and he was only wrong because we have a president that knows when enough is enough.
If you don't think this is how the terrorists operate, review the history of Iraq, or North Korea, which got concessions in exchange for nuclear limitations, and went ahead and built their nuke program anyway after they got the concessions.
An invasion and war, on the other hand, would push moderates in Iran into the arms of Islamic radicals that promise to defend them.
Yes, they win by spinning things either way. They lose if we remove them, which will never happen by talking to them. There is nothing we can say that will make them peaceful. They have no interest in compromise with Satan, unlike many of the people in the US.
Look, your initial comment was "if you can play the file format, you have both a working codec and a codec that the player knows about, so the player isn't going to tell you that you need to download another one.".
That was the initial statement from a couple of comments above. It is also the truth. If you can play it, you already have the codec for the data in it.
If you had just left out the word format, I would have had no complaints.
No, you would have picked some other part of the comment to avoid reading, just like you pretended that someone said that any codec will play any encoding and jumped on me for that, or started talking about being able to open the file when the verb was and still is "play".
I told you that I am not interested in debating with you your line between format and encoding.
"Format" is a perfectly valid way to refer to the complete structure of a file, which includes not only the file extension that windows wants to apply to it, but the structure of the data within the file (e.g., how it is encoded). To stop at the first level of structure and call only that the format is an artificial distinction that most people ignore. The DivX encoding follows a certain format for that data or else you couldn't read it.
Now, tell me how you play a file without having the codec for it. And if you want to be strictly pendantic in every word you use, tell me how you can claim to play a file format if you don't have the codec for the data in those files. Exactly what result do you get when you play a file of a specific "format" if you don't have the codec, and in what language would whatever that result is be called "playing"?
"I can play AVI files, too. They all only display a warning that I need a codec, but other than that, they play just fine. Did I like the movie in that file? I don't know, I never got past the 'need a codec' warning. But it played just fine." If my boss said that to me after I gave him an AVI of something, I'd think he was nuts. Either it plays or it doesn't. Don't say it plays if it does not.
This argument is silly. I am quite correct in saying if you can play a file you have the codec. If you can play a file formatted as an AVI, you already have the codec for whatever encoding it's in. The operative word is "play", not "format". Don't tell me you can play a file in AVI format without the codec, because you can't, and you've not yet explained how you do this, if you can.
I can be able to play a file format, but still not be able to play a file with a specific encoding in that format.
Either you can play the file or you cannot. I'm not going to waste time with a meaningless differentiation between what you want to call a format and whether you think format includes encoding or not. It's irrelevant. The condition is "if you can play the file". That's what most people consider the important part. If someone asks me for an AVI file, and I give them one they cannot play, I don't say "I gave you what you asked for", I give them a different file they can play.
If you can play the file, you have the codec for whatever format (including encoding) that it contains. If you can already play the file (there's that same conditional clause again, ignore it at your peril), the player will not tell you that you need to download a codec for it. You may not have the "right" codec, but you have a working codec. That is a fact. You claimed I was wrong.
Now, if I am wrong, tell me how you can play the file and NOT have a working codec for it. (And when I say "play", I mean plays correctly. I don't consider garbage displays or half the content to be "playing" a file.) If you can play an AVI file, you have the codec for it. It is absolutely irrelevant WHAT codec it required or how you split the file contents up between "format" and "encoding", you must already have the codec or you could not play the file.
Further, if you can play the file (not just "open"), your player will not tell you to download another codec. It has already been configured to know what codec to use -- or else you wouldn't be able to PLAY THE FILE. So, when ANYTHING tells you that you MUST download a codec to play a file that you can already play, it is shouting MALWARE.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure it does. Although it isn't spelled out explicitly in the first amendment, neither is the responsibility to use "arms" responsibly spelled out in the same amendment that enumerates the right to keep and bear them. Nobody has a problem assuming that ownership of a gun carries responsibility; why does anyone have a problem with assuming responsibility attaches to the press?
In fact, the first amendment press rights were specified specifically because of the importance of the press being ALLOWED to be right, even if the government didn't like it.
There can be some legal ramifications about being incorrect, or intentionally lying, but the only reason they should be right is for reputation.
The fact that there are legal ramifications means "reputation" is not the only reason to be right.
Assuming the story was accurate in 2002, which I think it was, no.
How about the original paper, which listed it as a popular story?
A popular story in 2002, or a popular story TODAY? If they lost the date information on the story, yes. Otherwise, no.
Google, which added the story to their news aggregation feed?
Since they added it to their NEWS feed in 2008, when it was news in 2002, yes, this is a good candidate for liability.
Other news outlets, for reporting it as new news when it was seen on an automatic feed?
They probably bear some liability as well. It depends on who "lost" the fact that the story was written in 2002 versus 2008.
Information is not illegal. It's how you act on it that creates a liability.
Information may not be illegal, but shouldn't MISinformation be? It is in some cases already. Shout FIRE in a crowded theater when there isn't one, for example.
No, the information that in 2002 UAL was in financial trouble isn't illegal and shouldn't be. However, by labelling the information "news" and putting today's date on it, that's MISinformation and it is hard to know if was the result of malice or stupidity. That's what a trial would, we hope, determine. There is the appearance of an illegal act (fraud), and it is proper to investigate and perhaps prosecute. If someone did this deliberately, they need to be held accountable.
As for the question if INformation should be illegal, the answer is still, in some cases, yes. HIPPA makes it a crime for a hospital to divulge medical information about a patient. (I know, it is a fine line between calling that "information" and "acting on information", but since the crime exists with no action other than divulging it, I'd say it's "information" that's the crime.)
Should it be illegal for me to publish, say, your SSN? How about if I publish your bank account data, including numbers and balances? If "information" shouldn't be illegal, how can we make giving information to people a crime? They can't have information without it somehow being given to them. This is the same argument that is used to demand federal funding of, shall we say, certain medical procedures. The claim is that, shall we say, half the population, doesn't really have the right to that procedure if they cannot afford it.
No, newspapers mostly publish AP and their own stories. Even so, fact checking is a responsibility that goes with any "newspaper" that wants the right of a free press to apply to them.
Ask yourself, how long could Slashdot go with an automated submission editor?
Slashdot is not a newspaper. Slashdot is a news concentrator and comment board. Every article in /. has, or ought to have if it doesn't, a source link that takes you to the source. Further, there are a large number of people who are ready, willing and able to post immediate "that's crap" comments, while online newspaper response comments are slow to appear, if they do at all. You have to get past the newspaper censor, who, for our local newspapers, seems biased against any comments that point out factual errors in the newspaper. (I posted THREE comments describing why a recent article about this HHO gas-milage aid stuff was physically impossible, but the paper had reported how well it works and needed to protect its own image. None of the three made it online.)
Yes, my local paper has links to the AP for other stories, but anything they run under their own name has no links. I expect those stories to be fact checked, but I know they are not. It is the same old story: read an article in a newspaper about something you know, you'll realize how wrong they get things, but read an article about something new and you'll assume they know what they are doing. Why do we do that? What part of human nature causes us to trust things we know are inherently untrustworthy?
That's not how the systems work.
It's PEOPLE who decide to dump stock based on the headline. Dumping stock makes the price go down. The SOFTWARE part of the story is called a "stop-loss order", which is an automatic "sell" order based on stock price. The theory, which works in practice, is that dumping a stock that has lost 50% of its value (or some other trigger level) will prevent a complete loss of money on that stock. Half of what you had is better than 10% of what you had.
It replaces the need for someone to sit at the computer monitoring the stock prices every minute of the day. It also prevents the time delay (and loss) for someone who does monitor prices every minute having to enter and execute the sell order.
If they need something, perhaps going after those companies for artificially deflating the stock's value would be the best course. It's not like this couldn't have happened with humans.
That's right -- the source of the story should be liable. And it's not like this couldn't have happened with humans, because it started with humans.
Now, as someone else commented, it's day trading (or short term) that causes this kind of thing. If you buy stock and sit on it (not literally), it will usually go up. My $5 Sony stock has split once and is much higher. Of course, I bought it 30 years ago. And only ten shares. Sigh. It's been higher than it is now, but it's still higher than when I bought it.
This kind of information tempts one to say "make a law" that all stock bought must be held for six months before it can be sold. That's still not a solution. It will just move the problem over to options, and keep short term money out of the market, making it smaller.
Abso-fracking-lutely.
Along with the right to a free press comes the responsibility to be right. Most newspapers ignore the responsibility while hiding behind the right.
Yep, it's a good idea to monitor the broadcasts of the opposition.
CNN -- the news network that carries The Daily Show on it's international feed.
The cyberonic website asks for a phone number to determine availability, and instead of simply saying yes or no, they put up another form with address, phone number, and EMAIL address demands. Then, even with all the entries filled in, they respond with "all required entries must be filled in, please 'back' and try again."
Phishing for email addresses and phone numbers. Bah. A pox on them and their ilk.
When I called them on their lies, they did not offer to provide the service they had promised, they offered to provide it for three months -- after which I would be paying extra for the service they claimed was part of the base package.
No, Qwest is not a DSL option in this household.
On the other hand, Obama is completely unqualified to be President and if he's elected won't need any hypothetical death to be in that office.
How can you say that someone who has been a chief executive of a state (and a city) is unqualified compared to someone who has never run a company of any size and whose sole federal experience is less than one term in the Senate?
How can you complain about someone being unqualified to be President when they are a candidate for VP, when the other candidate for President is even less qualified?
Why would McCain lose votes from people who are concerned that Barry is unqualified? Why is putting an unqualified person directly into the office better than electing one to be runner-up and get on-the-job training prior to doing the job?
The vehicle IN the roundabout has the right of way. In this case, the one leaving it, but if he's leaving it, there's no reason for the one entering it to wait. Unless, of course, you are appropriately paranoid and don't trust people who either use or don't use their turn signals.
And anyway, right or left lane?
Right or left lane what?
For the OP, roundabouts are not always the answer to four way stops. They take more real estate to build (properly), are confusing to drivers who aren't used to them (most of the US drivers) , and are simply dangerous when built in limited space as a replacement for a four way stop.
We've got two in our little town now, built in the same space as the four way stop was, as a means of "calming" traffic. (As if traffic got excited over a four way stop!?) Many people simply treat it as a four way stop and stop when they aren't supposed to (dangerous), or use the same "on the right" rule as the four way stop (exactly wrong) or don't use any rules at all and go either way around the circle depending on which way they want to go.
I would rather have the four way stop.
Move to Oregon, dude. The state will actually pay for your euthenasia even when it won't pay for treatment. How advanced is THAT!!
I'm gonna put that pdf on my laptop for the next time I go through customs. My God, they talk about ACID in that thing!
And I'll usually just wait until Wednesday when the local uni has their surplus sale, and I can find $45 cables in a pile for $1 each. Amazing the stuff that people throw out when they weren't paying for it and don't know what it's worth.
Try telling that to a Web-TV user. He gets email and surfs the web all without needing a computer!
That's the key phrase. On a human time scale things have been very calm.
On a geological time scale, things have been very very very active. Cold, hot, cold, hot. Glaciers, volcanoes. We don't even know all that has happened because we simply haven't been here keeping records for all that time.
We can guess what happened, but it's only a guess, and depends on many assumptions that cannot be verified independently. (For example, CO2 cannot possibly diffuse out of a trapped gas bubble in an ice core over thousands or tens of thousands of years, right? How big a surprise is it to some people that solid water can simply evaporate even while frozen solid?)
We do know that things have been much different in the past. We are fools to assume that the only 'right' way for the earth to be is how it is now. Or a decade ago. And yet, fools build houses on sandbars all the time. Expensive houses. And then demand that the government do something when nature changes. Just like we are demanding action when nature changes climate, like it has for billions of years prior to us.
The climate is not a zero sum game. Putting an ounce of gold on one side doesn't mean the system won't react (and we know it will) to restore balance.
But then, a 100 pound lead weight on one side doesn't balance a 100 pound gold weight on the other in the first place. Lead is measured in a different system than gold. Even though a troy ounce weighs more than an avoirdupois ounce, there are only 12 to the pound. You can put a LOT of extra gold on the gold side before the lead is balanced.
The correct statement is that the authenticity of the site cannot be verified. "Not verified" is not synonymous with "fake".
Microsoft's IE action is forcing sites to get signed certs that don't need them. Mine is one of them. I'm perfectly happy with agreeing to accept a self-signed cert for my site; some people weren't and they forced the issue. The level of security needed was not sufficient to justify the cost. The reason why MS programmed their browser to make these false statements about my site I cannot know; it certainly reeks of money.
I don't think that's the trust system being proposed.
I think it is obvious that self-signed certs don't provide a trust chain.
However, I think it should be the USER'S choice to accept them or not. The browser should not be making claims about the authenticity of the site or whether it contains malicious code based on the self-signed cert. Firefox 2 has it about right. "Cannot verify, will you accept?" This nonsense from IE telling people NOT to go to a site with a self-signed cert is over the top and absurd.
The /. article is just plain goofy since it says 4th century BCE and then claims some significance to the fact that it doesn't mention the resurrection -- an event that occured a few decades CE. It's like insulting a Microsoft DOS 3.0 manual for not telling you how to format an NTFS partition.
Then that 550 metric tons http://www.nysun.com/editorials/iraqs-yellowcake/81328/ of yellowcake uranium that was taken out of Iraq and sold to a company in Canada was, ummm, just yellow-colored flour Saddam intended to use to bake bread for all the starving Iraqi children? I know, he was in the business of making those Uranium marbles that United Nuclear sells. Oh, please. Yellowcake is the first step in preparing weapon's grade uranium. It's the same kind of yellowcake that Saddam supposedly wasn't buying from Niger. Yeah, the UN allegedly knew about it, but if Saddam truly had no nuclear intentions he had no need to keep it around, and would have made a bundle of money selling it.
What about the chemical rockets that made the news about 7 days into the war, and then dissappeared from the media altogether? They didn't fit the lie that Saddam had no WMD, so we stopped hearing about them. "Hey, we found chemical rockets! Wait, he doesn't have WMD, so he can't have chemical rockets. What chemical rockets?"
And, of course, tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds died from mass hallucination and nothing at all to do with chemical weapons.
The old Iraqi government has never been meaningfully linked with any acts of terrorism against western nations. They had nothing to do with Al Quaida.
So? The only terrorists and bad guys in the world are Al Quaida? I don't think so.
Many, many more people have died in Iraq as a result of the invasion than would have died under Saddam's rule.
And most of them have died at the hands of the terrorists who blow up police stations and mosques and women and children and use force and terror to try to keep people from working with their own government. Yes, Saddam would never have allowed these terrorists to work his streets, but that doesn't mean his own troops wouldn't have still been killing people.
Basically, my advice to you is quit being so scared.
My advice to you is to listen to the facts and stop treating people you discuss things with as if they are just scared of something. It's insulting and condescending to treat people that way. They disagree with you, they aren't scared of you.
They're just generally ordinary people.
"Generally ordinary people" don't load the buick with a few hundred pounds of explosive and then detonate it in an outdoor market filled with women and children, or in front of a church. They don't strap a few pounds of C4 onto themselves, then a layer of nails and rat poison, and then go find a busload of children to blow up, and if the blast doesn't kill them, they'll bleed to death from the nail wounds.
It is a sad statement about the world when someone can claim that such people are "generally ordinary people". I think we are better than that.
My post is based on historical evidence and precedent. We saw what happened when we negotiated with North Korea regarding their nuclear program. They extracted promises from us in return for not proceeding, and after they got what they wanted they went ahead just as if we'd never spoken to them.
I saw Iraqi television right before the war started. It was being carried on C-SPAN. About every ten minutes, the "news" carried the major story of how 137 (I forget the precise number) US cities had passed resolutions against the war with the obvious implication that the US wasn't going to do anything about Saddam. Every ten minutes. Don't forget, Iraqi TV wasn't like PBS or even NBC here. It was run by Saddam's sons, and it did not say anything that Saddam didn't want heard. If Iraqi TV reported the resolutions, it was because Saddam wanted his people to hear it. Or are you claiming that C-SPAN fabricated Iraqi televion signals just to confuse us?
I was alive and watching world events when when the terrorists in Iran abducted our citizens. I watched in awe as James Earl Carter launced a hopelessy bad attempt at getting them back, and then went into "diplomacy" mode. I also lived through the release of those people immediately following the election, and it was almost universally acknowledged that the election of Ronald Regan was the reason they gave up. They didn't want a president who was likely to mount a successful military action to stop the nonsense, they wanted more of Carter's talk talk talk. Every day they held our people hostage was a day they could demand more and claim we were weak and powerless because all we did was talk. (And a bit of trivia for those who weren't around then: The Iranian Hostage Crisis launched the career of Ted Koppel on Nightline. That program started as a nightly summary of the crisis and what talking had taken place that day. It was so well received, it stayed on the air after the crisis was over.)
Compare the time spent "talking" with the Iranians and the result at Entebbe. Terrorists wanted talk talk talk. They got raided and killed. They certainly didn't want that. End of problem.
It is neither hate nor ignorance to acknowledge what has worked and what has not worked in dealing with fundamentalist terrorists in the past. Talk does not work. If talk worked, the world would be at peace because Jimmy Carter was the master of talk. Remember Camp David? All the "peace accords"? A nobel peace prize?
All that happens when we talk is the other side asks for concessions, and we give them. In World War II, it was called appeasement. Notice how well that worked. You don't even need to have been alive then, I think the outcome is pretty well known. The same thing happens today.
If anything, to ignore history and think that all we need is just a little more talk or just a little bit better negotiator to solve the middle east problems is truly ignorance.
I can see the future of your post..
Yeah, I noticed how unpleasant political facts get modded down on slashdot. Moderation isn't supposed to be about whether you agree or not, but conservative views tend to get a lot more negative mod points than liberal views. And just saying that will result in a flurry of negative mod points, I know.
Don't be silly. That's exactly the kind of thing they'd want. They can lie through their teeth, extract all kinds of concessions and appeasement, then point to those concessions as proof that the US is weak, immoral and powerless. Then launch an attack against the US but claim that they didn't do it. After the attack, more rounds of diplomacy and concessions, and the loop continues.
Further, they can point to the weakness of the US and tell the people they are oppressing that there is no help coming from the US -- just like Saddam was doing to his people before the war. Saddam used every city government anti-war resolution against us and his own people, repeatedly broadcasting the fact that the US wasn't going to ever do anything because all the people said they weren't. The fact he was wrong didn't stop him from doing it, and he was only wrong because we have a president that knows when enough is enough.
If you don't think this is how the terrorists operate, review the history of Iraq, or North Korea, which got concessions in exchange for nuclear limitations, and went ahead and built their nuke program anyway after they got the concessions.
An invasion and war, on the other hand, would push moderates in Iran into the arms of Islamic radicals that promise to defend them.
Yes, they win by spinning things either way. They lose if we remove them, which will never happen by talking to them. There is nothing we can say that will make them peaceful. They have no interest in compromise with Satan, unlike many of the people in the US.
If HE wants to be pedantic?
Bingo. Exactly. "Open" wasn't the verb being used. "Play" was, with all the connotations that includes.
That was the initial statement from a couple of comments above. It is also the truth. If you can play it, you already have the codec for the data in it.
If you had just left out the word format, I would have had no complaints.
No, you would have picked some other part of the comment to avoid reading, just like you pretended that someone said that any codec will play any encoding and jumped on me for that, or started talking about being able to open the file when the verb was and still is "play".
I told you that I am not interested in debating with you your line between format and encoding. "Format" is a perfectly valid way to refer to the complete structure of a file, which includes not only the file extension that windows wants to apply to it, but the structure of the data within the file (e.g., how it is encoded). To stop at the first level of structure and call only that the format is an artificial distinction that most people ignore. The DivX encoding follows a certain format for that data or else you couldn't read it.
Now, tell me how you play a file without having the codec for it. And if you want to be strictly pendantic in every word you use, tell me how you can claim to play a file format if you don't have the codec for the data in those files. Exactly what result do you get when you play a file of a specific "format" if you don't have the codec, and in what language would whatever that result is be called "playing"?
"I can play AVI files, too. They all only display a warning that I need a codec, but other than that, they play just fine. Did I like the movie in that file? I don't know, I never got past the 'need a codec' warning. But it played just fine." If my boss said that to me after I gave him an AVI of something, I'd think he was nuts. Either it plays or it doesn't. Don't say it plays if it does not.
This argument is silly. I am quite correct in saying if you can play a file you have the codec. If you can play a file formatted as an AVI, you already have the codec for whatever encoding it's in. The operative word is "play", not "format". Don't tell me you can play a file in AVI format without the codec, because you can't, and you've not yet explained how you do this, if you can.
No, I am not.
I can be able to play a file format, but still not be able to play a file with a specific encoding in that format.
Either you can play the file or you cannot. I'm not going to waste time with a meaningless differentiation between what you want to call a format and whether you think format includes encoding or not. It's irrelevant. The condition is "if you can play the file". That's what most people consider the important part. If someone asks me for an AVI file, and I give them one they cannot play, I don't say "I gave you what you asked for", I give them a different file they can play.
If you can play the file, you have the codec for whatever format (including encoding) that it contains. If you can already play the file (there's that same conditional clause again, ignore it at your peril), the player will not tell you that you need to download a codec for it. You may not have the "right" codec, but you have a working codec. That is a fact. You claimed I was wrong.
Now, if I am wrong, tell me how you can play the file and NOT have a working codec for it. (And when I say "play", I mean plays correctly. I don't consider garbage displays or half the content to be "playing" a file.) If you can play an AVI file, you have the codec for it. It is absolutely irrelevant WHAT codec it required or how you split the file contents up between "format" and "encoding", you must already have the codec or you could not play the file.
Further, if you can play the file (not just "open"), your player will not tell you to download another codec. It has already been configured to know what codec to use -- or else you wouldn't be able to PLAY THE FILE. So, when ANYTHING tells you that you MUST download a codec to play a file that you can already play, it is shouting MALWARE.