Moral-majority nonsense is part of it, but it's also no accident that U.S.-based casinos were among the bill's biggest proponents, and casino-money-taking representatives were the ones who pushed it. One of the bill's main purposes is to protect American gambling corporations from internet-based and foreign competition.
Moving them sucks, granted, but not having them would suck also. A large collection of books on a flash drive just isn't as nice to look at as a wall full of books.
I don't own one so I could be misreading, but if I understand correctly, Kindle has free wireless internet access via the Sprint network, which is itself pretty valuable. I hear its browser sucks, but it's still better than nothing. It also apparently has some alternate (non-sucky-browser) interface to Wikipedia, and just being able to look up Wikipedia articles for free over a wireless cell network seems like a fairly useful feature, at least for those of us who aren't willing to shell out monthly or per-KB fees for wireless internet on our cell phones.
Most generational GCs I know of use copying; they have tiered object-age regions and copy newer objects into the older-object regions if they live long enough. So if your program allocates a zillion objects of which 95% die quickly, the 5% get copied elsewhere (and are packed during the copying, reducing fragmentation) while the 95% get collected, leaving your new-objects area a contiguous free area again.
You're right that it's the copying that is the fundamental benefit; a plain copying garbage collector with no generations would handle fragmentation just fine. Generational GCs are just a typically more efficient, and these days more common, way of doing it.
These problems have been solved for twenty years now; that software in 2007 would be manually reference-counting (and not even handling reference cycles properly!) and digging for bits of fragmented memory to parcel out is pretty embarrassing. You could instead, for example, use a modern generational garbage collector.
The exact rights the Court chooses to recognize at any given time changes depending on the political views of the Supreme Court justices. Put some conservatives on the Court and contracts are a Constitutional right; put some liberals on the Court and they aren't. The reverse with abortion.
The holding in Roe v. Wade doesn't even completely apply anymore, as there've been a dozen or so cases since then amending, explaining, or otherwise complicating the holding to the point where only experts can really tell you what the Supreme Court thinks the Constitution says on the subject. And it will probably say something different a few years from now too.
The Supreme Court also has a long history of inventing rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, which are later overturned. One of the earliest major ones was actually invented by conservatives and later overturned by liberals: the early-20th-century Court held that there was a Constitutional right to "freedom of contract", and therefore that legislation for e.g. minimum-wage laws was unconstitutional, as it impeded citizens' freedom to enter into contracts of their own choosing. A later court decided that the Constitution didn't say this after all.
So basically unless it's really clearly spelled out in the Constitution, a Supreme Court holding is really just that, an opinion of the Supreme Court, based largely on political views and subject to change in the future.
Or do you really think it was the Constitution that resolved Bush v. Gore in 2004? No, it was the Supreme Court, under the convenient fiction of "interpreting the Constitution".
The committee that wrote the immunity bill had eight democrats on it, of which six voted for it: Rockefeller (WV), Feinstein (CA), Bayh (IN), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), and Whitehouse (RI). Only Feingold (WI) and Wyden (OR) voted against.
In addition, Dodd's first attempt to stall the legislation failed, 76-10. Only 9 other Democrats supported him.
Slashdot recently celebrated its tenth anniversary of not being ashamed about inaccurate article titles, so they're not about to start getting all embarrassed about them now.
After Dodd made it sufficiently obvious that he was going to drag this out all week until the end of the session, while there are still other bills Reid would like to get on the agenda, Reid gave in for now and postponed further consideration of the bill until the next session in January.
If it were a narrow bill specifically exempting telecomm employees from personal liability it might be worth discussing. But this bill is mainly about protecting telecomm companies from having to pay out monetary damages in large class-action lawsuits, like the one the EFF filed against AT&T.
I'm not a lawyer so I could be misreading this, but it looks like they've basically agreed to a settlement, in which the grandmother will be enjoined from any future piracy but not assessed monetary damages.
That's actually better for the RIAA than dropping the suit, because it pretty definitively resolves the matter if she agrees to a settlement.
The "bad" version of the bill was written and passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee 13-2. Chairman and primary evildoer on the committee is John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV). Six of the eight Democrats voted in favor: Rockefeller, Feinstein (CA), Bayh (IN), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), and Whitehouse (RI). Two voted against: Feingold (WI) and Wyden (OR). In addition all seven Republicans voted in favor.
On the one hand, the leading opponent of this bill is Chris Dodd (D-CT). On the other hand, the person who wrote and pushed the bill is John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), and the person who brought it to the floor and is currently trying to engineer its passage is Harry Reid (D-NV). As far as I can tell the Republicans are mostly in favor, but since they don't control the agenda or any of the committees the real power struggle is within different factions of the Democratic Party.
Basically this bill only: 1) exists; and 2) is up for a vote because the Democratic leadership supports it. But it is only in danger of not passing because a sizeable Democratic minority opposes it. So if it passes it'll be mostly some Democrats' fault, and if it fails, credit will mostly go to some (other) Democrats.
Last I had heard, Wikipedia was getting attacked left and right for not being elitist enough; wasn't that what led Sanger to split off his own project with more expert peer-review of articles? I guess you can't please everyone...
Books are chosen for libraries because someone might find them useful someday. Horribly biased books by well-known people almost automatically get in. Books with outright lies in them get in, especially if the subject is politics, but also if it's science. Less extremely, books with lots of selective coverage get in.
It's not universally true, but in my experience a book is only really useful as an introduction to an area if you know something about the book's author and how the book has been received by others in the area. Wikipedia is usually better about presenting that sort of information up front---if there are differences of opinion in a field, a Wikipedia article is fairly likely to mention both of them, whereas a book by one "camp" may well completely ignore the other camp or grossly misconstrue it.
A lot of poor countries complain that "aid" is in effect a subsidy to western farmers plus product dumping, which completely destroys the market for their own local farmers. They'd prefer to have monetary support for their own local farmers instead of flown-in foreign food, but when they ask for donations of cash instead of food, they're usually told no due to fears of corruption. Now admittedly that's a real fear, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that paying American farmers to dump product cheaply on Africa is not going to make Africans richer. It does help American farmers, though, many of whom not coincidentally live in politically important states.
Philanthropy does not always have to go to the single neediest person, since a world where everyone's life is minimally non-horrible isn't exactly much of anything to strive towards, and furthermore promoting sustainable economies is more of a long-range solution to keep people out of poverty than giving people rice is.
Many of us support all sorts of things that in some universal scale are "low-priority". For example I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other people support environmental causes or donate to political parties. Other people endow university scholarships. Google sponsors Summer of Code when they could just cancel that whole project and spend their money on rice. Etc.
The kinds of people who are interested in consensus medical opinion on the matter aren't going to turn to YouTube for their medical advice. The kinds of people who think the medical establishment is a conspiracy are much more likely to do so.
The article seems to imply that people are getting medical advice from YouTube with no preconceived notions, and therefore that the higher ratings of "alternative" viewpoints are spreading misinformation, while it's much more likely IMO that they're going there with preconceived notions and seeking out the information that reinforces them.
"Crowdsourcing" usually means getting people to do stuff for you for free, where you own the results and the people who created them cannot use them except by paying you (if at all). This is why people should be sure that projects they contribute to as volunteers release their results under some kind of Free license. For example, contributions to Wikipedia are free-licensed, and even if Wikipedia died or turned ultra-evil tomorrow, you could use the articles yourself under the GFDL, or set up a fork based on them. The same is true of contributions to MusicBrainz (Open Audio License), among other such projects.
For a good early example of the opposite, recall the CDDB fiasco---lots of people submitting data that ends up owned by someone who won't let you use it except under onerous licensing terms. The rise of "Web 2.0" has basically taken CDDB-style business models and made them much more common, so it's important to make sure you aren't enabling that sort of thing that in the long term ends up working directly against your interests.
I have it on good authority that He looks poorly on the use of "your" where "you're" was intended. And don't even try to use an apostrophe when making plurals.
They're of comparable sizes, and which is bigger depends on the measure. They have similar revenues (~$3.8 billion), market capitalizations (~$19 billion), and employees (~7000). EA might be bigger by whatever measure the article writers prefer, but it isn't by a big margin even if so.
It's true that the bills usually get more Republican than Democratic votes when it comes down to the actual voting, but since the Democrats control the leadership and all the committee chairs, they could make these bills be DOA if they wanted to. The Republicans were pretty good at that when they were in power---bills that didn't command a "majority of the majority" were basically never allowed out of committee. I suspect that the Democrats for whatever reason don't actually want to block telecomm immunity, because they could if they really tried.
Actually living in cities as opposed to way out in suburbia is becoming more popular again than it was in the 80s, and it never really went out of style in most of the world (in Europe and Asia in particular).
Her 1993 health-care proposal was somewhat more ambitious, although it was mainly criticized for being excessively bureaucratic rather than "socialist". Basically it would've kept everything nominally private, but created a detailed set of rules for what exactly corporations and private HMOs would have to offer to whom and in what manner.
Her current proposal seems to have backed off a lot and basically consists of a recipe for the government to shovel lots of money at insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Moral-majority nonsense is part of it, but it's also no accident that U.S.-based casinos were among the bill's biggest proponents, and casino-money-taking representatives were the ones who pushed it. One of the bill's main purposes is to protect American gambling corporations from internet-based and foreign competition.
Moving them sucks, granted, but not having them would suck also. A large collection of books on a flash drive just isn't as nice to look at as a wall full of books.
I don't own one so I could be misreading, but if I understand correctly, Kindle has free wireless internet access via the Sprint network, which is itself pretty valuable. I hear its browser sucks, but it's still better than nothing. It also apparently has some alternate (non-sucky-browser) interface to Wikipedia, and just being able to look up Wikipedia articles for free over a wireless cell network seems like a fairly useful feature, at least for those of us who aren't willing to shell out monthly or per-KB fees for wireless internet on our cell phones.
Most generational GCs I know of use copying; they have tiered object-age regions and copy newer objects into the older-object regions if they live long enough. So if your program allocates a zillion objects of which 95% die quickly, the 5% get copied elsewhere (and are packed during the copying, reducing fragmentation) while the 95% get collected, leaving your new-objects area a contiguous free area again.
You're right that it's the copying that is the fundamental benefit; a plain copying garbage collector with no generations would handle fragmentation just fine. Generational GCs are just a typically more efficient, and these days more common, way of doing it.
These problems have been solved for twenty years now; that software in 2007 would be manually reference-counting (and not even handling reference cycles properly!) and digging for bits of fragmented memory to parcel out is pretty embarrassing. You could instead, for example, use a modern generational garbage collector.
The exact rights the Court chooses to recognize at any given time changes depending on the political views of the Supreme Court justices. Put some conservatives on the Court and contracts are a Constitutional right; put some liberals on the Court and they aren't. The reverse with abortion.
The holding in Roe v. Wade doesn't even completely apply anymore, as there've been a dozen or so cases since then amending, explaining, or otherwise complicating the holding to the point where only experts can really tell you what the Supreme Court thinks the Constitution says on the subject. And it will probably say something different a few years from now too.
The Supreme Court also has a long history of inventing rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, which are later overturned. One of the earliest major ones was actually invented by conservatives and later overturned by liberals: the early-20th-century Court held that there was a Constitutional right to "freedom of contract", and therefore that legislation for e.g. minimum-wage laws was unconstitutional, as it impeded citizens' freedom to enter into contracts of their own choosing. A later court decided that the Constitution didn't say this after all.
So basically unless it's really clearly spelled out in the Constitution, a Supreme Court holding is really just that, an opinion of the Supreme Court, based largely on political views and subject to change in the future.
Or do you really think it was the Constitution that resolved Bush v. Gore in 2004? No, it was the Supreme Court, under the convenient fiction of "interpreting the Constitution".
The committee that wrote the immunity bill had eight democrats on it, of which six voted for it: Rockefeller (WV), Feinstein (CA), Bayh (IN), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), and Whitehouse (RI). Only Feingold (WI) and Wyden (OR) voted against.
In addition, Dodd's first attempt to stall the legislation failed, 76-10. Only 9 other Democrats supported him.
Slashdot recently celebrated its tenth anniversary of not being ashamed about inaccurate article titles, so they're not about to start getting all embarrassed about them now.
After Dodd made it sufficiently obvious that he was going to drag this out all week until the end of the session, while there are still other bills Reid would like to get on the agenda, Reid gave in for now and postponed further consideration of the bill until the next session in January.
If it were a narrow bill specifically exempting telecomm employees from personal liability it might be worth discussing. But this bill is mainly about protecting telecomm companies from having to pay out monetary damages in large class-action lawsuits, like the one the EFF filed against AT&T.
I'm not a lawyer so I could be misreading this, but it looks like they've basically agreed to a settlement, in which the grandmother will be enjoined from any future piracy but not assessed monetary damages.
That's actually better for the RIAA than dropping the suit, because it pretty definitively resolves the matter if she agrees to a settlement.
The "bad" version of the bill was written and passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee 13-2. Chairman and primary evildoer on the committee is John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV). Six of the eight Democrats voted in favor: Rockefeller, Feinstein (CA), Bayh (IN), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), and Whitehouse (RI). Two voted against: Feingold (WI) and Wyden (OR). In addition all seven Republicans voted in favor.
On the one hand, the leading opponent of this bill is Chris Dodd (D-CT). On the other hand, the person who wrote and pushed the bill is John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), and the person who brought it to the floor and is currently trying to engineer its passage is Harry Reid (D-NV). As far as I can tell the Republicans are mostly in favor, but since they don't control the agenda or any of the committees the real power struggle is within different factions of the Democratic Party.
Basically this bill only: 1) exists; and 2) is up for a vote because the Democratic leadership supports it. But it is only in danger of not passing because a sizeable Democratic minority opposes it. So if it passes it'll be mostly some Democrats' fault, and if it fails, credit will mostly go to some (other) Democrats.
Last I had heard, Wikipedia was getting attacked left and right for not being elitist enough; wasn't that what led Sanger to split off his own project with more expert peer-review of articles? I guess you can't please everyone...
Books are chosen for libraries because someone might find them useful someday. Horribly biased books by well-known people almost automatically get in. Books with outright lies in them get in, especially if the subject is politics, but also if it's science. Less extremely, books with lots of selective coverage get in.
It's not universally true, but in my experience a book is only really useful as an introduction to an area if you know something about the book's author and how the book has been received by others in the area. Wikipedia is usually better about presenting that sort of information up front---if there are differences of opinion in a field, a Wikipedia article is fairly likely to mention both of them, whereas a book by one "camp" may well completely ignore the other camp or grossly misconstrue it.
A lot of poor countries complain that "aid" is in effect a subsidy to western farmers plus product dumping, which completely destroys the market for their own local farmers. They'd prefer to have monetary support for their own local farmers instead of flown-in foreign food, but when they ask for donations of cash instead of food, they're usually told no due to fears of corruption. Now admittedly that's a real fear, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that paying American farmers to dump product cheaply on Africa is not going to make Africans richer. It does help American farmers, though, many of whom not coincidentally live in politically important states.
Philanthropy does not always have to go to the single neediest person, since a world where everyone's life is minimally non-horrible isn't exactly much of anything to strive towards, and furthermore promoting sustainable economies is more of a long-range solution to keep people out of poverty than giving people rice is.
Many of us support all sorts of things that in some universal scale are "low-priority". For example I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other people support environmental causes or donate to political parties. Other people endow university scholarships. Google sponsors Summer of Code when they could just cancel that whole project and spend their money on rice. Etc.
The kinds of people who are interested in consensus medical opinion on the matter aren't going to turn to YouTube for their medical advice. The kinds of people who think the medical establishment is a conspiracy are much more likely to do so.
The article seems to imply that people are getting medical advice from YouTube with no preconceived notions, and therefore that the higher ratings of "alternative" viewpoints are spreading misinformation, while it's much more likely IMO that they're going there with preconceived notions and seeking out the information that reinforces them.
"Crowdsourcing" usually means getting people to do stuff for you for free, where you own the results and the people who created them cannot use them except by paying you (if at all). This is why people should be sure that projects they contribute to as volunteers release their results under some kind of Free license. For example, contributions to Wikipedia are free-licensed, and even if Wikipedia died or turned ultra-evil tomorrow, you could use the articles yourself under the GFDL, or set up a fork based on them. The same is true of contributions to MusicBrainz (Open Audio License), among other such projects.
For a good early example of the opposite, recall the CDDB fiasco---lots of people submitting data that ends up owned by someone who won't let you use it except under onerous licensing terms. The rise of "Web 2.0" has basically taken CDDB-style business models and made them much more common, so it's important to make sure you aren't enabling that sort of thing that in the long term ends up working directly against your interests.
I have it on good authority that He looks poorly on the use of "your" where "you're" was intended. And don't even try to use an apostrophe when making plurals.
They're of comparable sizes, and which is bigger depends on the measure. They have similar revenues (~$3.8 billion), market capitalizations (~$19 billion), and employees (~7000). EA might be bigger by whatever measure the article writers prefer, but it isn't by a big margin even if so.
It's true that the bills usually get more Republican than Democratic votes when it comes down to the actual voting, but since the Democrats control the leadership and all the committee chairs, they could make these bills be DOA if they wanted to. The Republicans were pretty good at that when they were in power---bills that didn't command a "majority of the majority" were basically never allowed out of committee. I suspect that the Democrats for whatever reason don't actually want to block telecomm immunity, because they could if they really tried.
Actually living in cities as opposed to way out in suburbia is becoming more popular again than it was in the 80s, and it never really went out of style in most of the world (in Europe and Asia in particular).
Her 1993 health-care proposal was somewhat more ambitious, although it was mainly criticized for being excessively bureaucratic rather than "socialist". Basically it would've kept everything nominally private, but created a detailed set of rules for what exactly corporations and private HMOs would have to offer to whom and in what manner.
Her current proposal seems to have backed off a lot and basically consists of a recipe for the government to shovel lots of money at insurance and pharmaceutical companies.