I'm not a member of the ACLU because, although they work for many things I support, a large portion of their money and effort goes towards causes I don't care very much at all about, and some even goes towards causes I actively oppose.
A few examples:
I generally support most access to abortion on utilitarian grounds, but disagree with most of the ACLU's rhetoric surrounding the issue ("woman's right to choose" doesn't enter into the basic philosophical question, imho -- you only have the right to choose it if it's not morally wrong in the first place, so that line of argument begs the question). And in any case, it's not one of the causes I support so much that I'd actively donate money to it.
I generally oppose affirmative action programs. I believe there are some legitimate motivations for them, but that they're entirely misguided. For example, I'll agree that a poor inner city black person should get some breaks compared to a rich white person. But poor "white trash" from West Virginia should get some breaks compared to Colin Powell's children too. Race is not irrelevant (there's certainly still some discrimination still), but I think it should be a less important consideration than socio-economic status. Furthermore, even the racial considerations are misguided -- why is preference given to blacks and hispanics, but not to children of poor Vietnamese immigrants, who are just as discriminated-against, solely on the basis that Vietnamese immigrants are, on the average, more successful? Are we punishing them for studying hard and pushing their kids to go to college?
There's a few more, but those are the big two that take up a lot of the ACLU's time and money. I don't see either one as really a fundamental classic civil liberties issue; abortion is a complex moral decision and affirmative action is a social program intended to fix a social problem (which, even if it's a good idea, is something more along the lines of welfare -- a positive program, which is something entirely different from a protection of civil liberties).
So all that said, does anyone know of any good organizations that are dedicated to protecting civil liberties in the classic sense? I already know about the EFF of course, and have joined them, and would be willing to join others if I found some.
Copying brief excerpts of material for educational use should be okay, but copying entire works should not be. If it were, there'd be no incentive to create educational works (i.e. those primarily or only intented to be used by educators, like textbooks), since nobody would pay for them.
Perhaps on console it is, but on the computer, Snood is currently one of the world's most popular games (it's clone of bust-a-move; frozenbubble is a better clone for linux).
(This is meant as a legitimate question, since I know virtually nothing about Darwin.)
I can see a bunch of neat things in the windowmanager (and underlying graphics API), but is there anything particularly interesting about the base Darwin OS that would merit using it over, say, Linux or FreeBSD?
There's a lot of good reasons Vietnam protestors weren't dismissed as quickly as these protestors. The biggest one is probably the duration and deadliness of the war; if the current war in Iraq drags on for the next three years, with thousands of soldiers being killed, you can bet that the American public's support for the war will significantly decrease. Similarly, if you had told people in the 1960s that the Vietnam war could be taken care of in 6 months with fewer than 1,000 casualties, support for it would likely have increased significantly.
There's a big difference between "attacking America" and attacking American fighter jets that are flying over his Iraq. It's not like he was firing missiles at Boston.
Recent polls show about 65-70% of Americans in favor of the war and 50-55% of Bris in favor of the war (significantly more than your 20% figure). Even a few weeks ago, UK support for the war was more in the 30-35% range, not 20%.
we can dismiss ad hominem attacks
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There's a difference between a polemic and a mere ad hominem attack. The latter is a classic form of fallacious argument, and should not normally be given any weight.
the first gulf war was necessary though
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What's often left out is how many civilians suffered as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Thousands of Kuwaitis were taken away to detention camps, and many are still missing, over ten years later. Kuwaiti oil wells were burned, anything in sight looted, and so on. There's a reason that Turkey is wavering on supporting the U.S., but Kuwait has been with us since the beginning -- they've suffered at Saddam's hands, and want him gone. As an added bonus, they hope that some Kuwaiti POWs and kidnapped civilians are still alive in Iraq (500-1,000 are still unaccounted for), and hope that the U.S. invasion will free them.
Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses Iraq's government is responsible for (including nerve gassing ethnic minorities)
... Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses the US government is responsible for (like keeping alleged terrorists locked up without due process)
Are you seriously suggesting that keeping around 200 alleged terrorists locked up without due process is somehow comparable to killing 5000 civilians with chemical weapons?
It is possible to exploit this remotely, in the sense of "over the internet, thousands of miles from the vulnerable box." It's not possible to exploit it remotely, in the sense of "just a user on the internet who knows your IP." The "local" here refers to the fact that the exploiter needs to have a local account on the system already; this exploit will allow the unprivileged local account to illicitly elevate itself to root privileges.
So don't panic if you're just running a desktop machine, but if you're running something like a university cs department server, where thousands of people have local accounts (and thus now potentially root access), some panic (or quick patching) would be in order.
Everyone's taking comfort in the fact that no remote exploitation is possible, but remember all those universities that you've convinced over the past few years to switch from proprietary UNIX to Linux for their cs department and mail servers? The ones with thousands of local accounts given out to all the students and faculty? Yeah, they might not be happy about this.
that seems kind of odd
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The skills needed for compiler-writing are pretty specialized; mostly low-level hardware-specific stuff (the high-level language-design stuff can be taught by implementing an interpreter -- that I certainly see as a valuable portion of any undergrad CS degree). Unless you plan to do something which would use those skills, it doesn't seem very useful to require them, any more than it would be to require an upper-division course in computability theory for someone who wasn't planning to do graduate study in theoretical CS.
not a C/C++ compiler
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Writing an interpreter for a simple (usually functional) language is a fairly common part of many undergraduate programming languages classes. Writing an actual compiler is more rarely done (unless your school offers an upper-division elective in compilers), and writing a compiler for a language as complex and nasty as C or C++ is pretty much never done at the undergraduate level. It's not particularly easy to do; even gcc is still quite a bit behind commercial compilers in many areas, and it's been worked on for nearly two decades now.
depends on what you mean by GPL free
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If you want to read the sourcecode they're GPL free. If you want to compile them to binary format, you have to either get a proprietary compiler or a GPL compiler, since there are no good BSD ones.
yeah they are based on GNU tools
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Every free flavor of BSD uses the GNU Compiler Collection to compile nearly all of their apps, and ships it as the standard system compiler.
This isn't really the case; European governments are much more stingy about immigration and naturalization than the U.S. For example, many second-generation Turkish immigrants in Germany who were born in Germany do not have German citizenship. Why? Because they're not ethnically German. As another example, my dad, an American, who married a Greek woman, tried to get a work permit in Greece. He was denied. Why? Because he's not ethnically Greek (if it was an American woman marrying a Greek man, on the other hand, that'd be okay -- the man's the head of the household in the Old World, after all).
(Hint: Economies flourish in a stable and peaceful world)
While we'd all like that to be true, it's not clear that it actually is. It's generally accepted, for example, that the onset of World War II -- the height of instability and lack of peacefulness -- directly ended the worldwide depression of the 1930s.
The literacy rates I quoted for Africa, Arab countries, and Asia are for women's literacy (as clicking on the source link would indicate). The corresponding overall population figures are around 10-15% higher (but still well below 70%).
I'd also point out that large disparities between male and female literacy rates are another sign of third-world status.
In some segments of the socio- and anthropological fields this is accepted. Note that some segments of the socio- and anthropological fields are also noted for "not being real science."
To take literacy rates as an example, third-world countries are characterized by literacy rates in the neighborhood of 50-70%, with rates for women being significantly lower than those for men. The average literacy rate for Africa is around 50%, with that for Arab and Asian countries being around 45% (source: UNESCO). Even "advanced" and "educated" third-world countries tend to have literacy rates around 70-85% (Libya, China, Kenya, etc.). The United States, by countrast, has a literacy rate of 97% (source for the past two sentences is the CIA World Factbook, and corroborated by a random perusal of some Google search results). This is firmly within the "first-world" range, which ranges from Greece and Israel at 95% to Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway at 100%.
A possible reason Germany is at the forefront of EU countries in these sorts of laws is that the gigantic Bertelsmann AG can is effectively part of that consortium.
If your program has a type error in it, it's almost always because it has a bug in it. This will eventually be a problem; the difference being that in ML you take care of it at compile-time, while in Scheme you may not notice the bug for years if it's in some little-run branch of the code.
Slashdot Mirror
A few examples:
There's a few more, but those are the big two that take up a lot of the ACLU's time and money. I don't see either one as really a fundamental classic civil liberties issue; abortion is a complex moral decision and affirmative action is a social program intended to fix a social problem (which, even if it's a good idea, is something more along the lines of welfare -- a positive program, which is something entirely different from a protection of civil liberties).
So all that said, does anyone know of any good organizations that are dedicated to protecting civil liberties in the classic sense? I already know about the EFF of course, and have joined them, and would be willing to join others if I found some.
Copying brief excerpts of material for educational use should be okay, but copying entire works should not be. If it were, there'd be no incentive to create educational works (i.e. those primarily or only intented to be used by educators, like textbooks), since nobody would pay for them.
Perhaps on console it is, but on the computer, Snood is currently one of the world's most popular games (it's clone of bust-a-move; frozenbubble is a better clone for linux).
(This is meant as a legitimate question, since I know virtually nothing about Darwin.)
I can see a bunch of neat things in the windowmanager (and underlying graphics API), but is there anything particularly interesting about the base Darwin OS that would merit using it over, say, Linux or FreeBSD?
Sources: Scud missile lands on Matrix production studio. More soon.
There's a lot of good reasons Vietnam protestors weren't dismissed as quickly as these protestors. The biggest one is probably the duration and deadliness of the war; if the current war in Iraq drags on for the next three years, with thousands of soldiers being killed, you can bet that the American public's support for the war will significantly decrease. Similarly, if you had told people in the 1960s that the Vietnam war could be taken care of in 6 months with fewer than 1,000 casualties, support for it would likely have increased significantly.
There's a big difference between "attacking America" and attacking American fighter jets that are flying over his Iraq. It's not like he was firing missiles at Boston.
Recent polls show about 65-70% of Americans in favor of the war and 50-55% of Bris in favor of the war (significantly more than your 20% figure). Even a few weeks ago, UK support for the war was more in the 30-35% range, not 20%.
There's a difference between a polemic and a mere ad hominem attack. The latter is a classic form of fallacious argument, and should not normally be given any weight.
What's often left out is how many civilians suffered as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Thousands of Kuwaitis were taken away to detention camps, and many are still missing, over ten years later. Kuwaiti oil wells were burned, anything in sight looted, and so on. There's a reason that Turkey is wavering on supporting the U.S., but Kuwait has been with us since the beginning -- they've suffered at Saddam's hands, and want him gone. As an added bonus, they hope that some Kuwaiti POWs and kidnapped civilians are still alive in Iraq (500-1,000 are still unaccounted for), and hope that the U.S. invasion will free them.
You go up to something that looks like a store, and try the doors to see if it's open.
Are you seriously suggesting that keeping around 200 alleged terrorists locked up without due process is somehow comparable to killing 5000 civilians with chemical weapons?
It is possible to exploit this remotely, in the sense of "over the internet, thousands of miles from the vulnerable box." It's not possible to exploit it remotely, in the sense of "just a user on the internet who knows your IP." The "local" here refers to the fact that the exploiter needs to have a local account on the system already; this exploit will allow the unprivileged local account to illicitly elevate itself to root privileges.
So don't panic if you're just running a desktop machine, but if you're running something like a university cs department server, where thousands of people have local accounts (and thus now potentially root access), some panic (or quick patching) would be in order.
Everyone's taking comfort in the fact that no remote exploitation is possible, but remember all those universities that you've convinced over the past few years to switch from proprietary UNIX to Linux for their cs department and mail servers? The ones with thousands of local accounts given out to all the students and faculty? Yeah, they might not be happy about this.
The skills needed for compiler-writing are pretty specialized; mostly low-level hardware-specific stuff (the high-level language-design stuff can be taught by implementing an interpreter -- that I certainly see as a valuable portion of any undergrad CS degree). Unless you plan to do something which would use those skills, it doesn't seem very useful to require them, any more than it would be to require an upper-division course in computability theory for someone who wasn't planning to do graduate study in theoretical CS.
Writing an interpreter for a simple (usually functional) language is a fairly common part of many undergraduate programming languages classes. Writing an actual compiler is more rarely done (unless your school offers an upper-division elective in compilers), and writing a compiler for a language as complex and nasty as C or C++ is pretty much never done at the undergraduate level. It's not particularly easy to do; even gcc is still quite a bit behind commercial compilers in many areas, and it's been worked on for nearly two decades now.
If you want to read the sourcecode they're GPL free. If you want to compile them to binary format, you have to either get a proprietary compiler or a GPL compiler, since there are no good BSD ones.
Every free flavor of BSD uses the GNU Compiler Collection to compile nearly all of their apps, and ships it as the standard system compiler.
This isn't really the case; European governments are much more stingy about immigration and naturalization than the U.S. For example, many second-generation Turkish immigrants in Germany who were born in Germany do not have German citizenship. Why? Because they're not ethnically German. As another example, my dad, an American, who married a Greek woman, tried to get a work permit in Greece. He was denied. Why? Because he's not ethnically Greek (if it was an American woman marrying a Greek man, on the other hand, that'd be okay -- the man's the head of the household in the Old World, after all).
(Hint: Economies flourish in a stable and peaceful world)
While we'd all like that to be true, it's not clear that it actually is. It's generally accepted, for example, that the onset of World War II -- the height of instability and lack of peacefulness -- directly ended the worldwide depression of the 1930s.
The literacy rates I quoted for Africa, Arab countries, and Asia are for women's literacy (as clicking on the source link would indicate). The corresponding overall population figures are around 10-15% higher (but still well below 70%).
I'd also point out that large disparities between male and female literacy rates are another sign of third-world status.
In some segments of the socio- and anthropological fields this is accepted. Note that some segments of the socio- and anthropological fields are also noted for "not being real science."
To take literacy rates as an example, third-world countries are characterized by literacy rates in the neighborhood of 50-70%, with rates for women being significantly lower than those for men. The average literacy rate for Africa is around 50%, with that for Arab and Asian countries being around 45% (source: UNESCO). Even "advanced" and "educated" third-world countries tend to have literacy rates around 70-85% (Libya, China, Kenya, etc.). The United States, by countrast, has a literacy rate of 97% (source for the past two sentences is the CIA World Factbook, and corroborated by a random perusal of some Google search results). This is firmly within the "first-world" range, which ranges from Greece and Israel at 95% to Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway at 100%.
A possible reason Germany is at the forefront of EU countries in these sorts of laws is that the gigantic Bertelsmann AG can is effectively part of that consortium.
If your program has a type error in it, it's almost always because it has a bug in it. This will eventually be a problem; the difference being that in ML you take care of it at compile-time, while in Scheme you may not notice the bug for years if it's in some little-run branch of the code.
I'd say it's because ML's type system means I'll never have to see error in car at runtime again.