In other words, nobody who might be able to get employed in an industry can help regulate it? There doesn't need to be a promised financial incentive for someone to go from a regulatory body to industry. It can be implied, or even assumed. Should lobbyists be banned entirely, since they're probably paid by a company or an industry association?
Careful there, you have to be more clear than that. Are you OK with encryption that can be broken by heat death of the Universe + t billion years for a Kardashev Type I, Type II, or Type III civilization? I'm not sure AES-256 will stand up to a sufficiently large Type III civilization with highly advanced quantum computers.
The right to be forgotten doesn't seem to rely on money. An individual can submit a request to Google, and I haven't heard they're charging large fees. Doing the investigation to see if the information is trivial: google yourself and look at the results. If there's information there that might be harmful to you if known, and the information may not be legally considered in various decisions, submit the request.
I'd imagine that a wealthy person would find it harder to exercise the right, since there'd be much more information out there, and some of it might not be legally forgotten because it's significant.
The reason the government is involved with marriage is tradition.
The important thing about marriage is that it's a package deal of changes that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to accomplish. It establishes an artificial and close family relationship. If my wife or I were to be unconscious, the other would make the care decisions. It's simple for one of us to inherit from the other. The government recognizes us as an economic unit for tax purposes. If she has a baby, I'm automatically the father unless I object and demand tests. There's a host of things that marriage is involved in, some good and some not so good, and most of these aren't government benefits. (For income tax purposes, a married couple pays less taxes than a family with one worker and one stay-at-home, and more than they would if they were able to file individually and had roughly equal and substantial incomes. This certainly isn't an unalloyed benefit.)
What I'd like to see is some sort of declaration that would establish two people as each other's next of kin, with all that that implies. Legally, it would function something like marriage, but it wouldn't be called that. Marriage would then be a concept that various churches could latch onto with whatever religious restrictions they pleased.
You might want to look at US participation in both European wars.
In the first one, US entry did change the strategic balance of the war, and the Germans knew that they needed to win in the first half of 1918 or not at all. They responded by launching offensives, which failed to break the British and French and pretty much used up German army capabilities. It was after that that US troops got in the line in large numbers. Belleau Wood involved a relatively small number of German soldiers.
In the second one, US entry was at the end of 1941, but the US wasn't a significant force in Europe for some time. The first Eighth Air Force raid was in mid-1942 using US-produced bombers borrowed from the RAF. The first US soldiers fighting Germans were about the end of 1942, after which it was pretty clear in retrospect that Germany was going to lose. The US had no more than one field army fighting Germans until June 1944, at which point German defeat was obviously the most likely result. US participation did hasten the end of the war and changed where the Western-Soviet demarcation line was.
The USN played a minor role in WWI, mostly in the Mediterranean, which was never a significant naval theater in WWI. In WWII, the USN was fighting Germans from September 1941 on, and not doing too well. The USN role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic was definitely secondary to the British, and perhaps less than the Canadian. The USN did make sure the Battle of the Atlantic stayed won.
Believe it or not, there's very little use in modern society for a word that means to divide soldiers in groups of ten, and randomly pick one of each ten to be beaten to death by the others using clubs. Much like the keyword "auto" in C and pre-2011 C++, the word needed a new meaning to be useful.
An "official" dictionary meaning means one that's been used enough to rate an entry in a dictionary. I believe that Scrabble officially considers a word as eligible if it appears in three out of a certain set of dictionaries.
You can make long lists of names of Christian scientists (not Christian Scientists, although I suppose you could come up with a lot of names there too). Many Christian denominations have no problem with science, the most notable probably being the Roman Catholic Church. That doesn't mean there isn't a minority of Christians who are aggressively and loudly irrational and stupid, unfortunately.
The part under pain of perjury is the part where the notice sender claims that there is a copyrighted work, and that the sender either holds the copyright or represents the copyright holder. The other part, the infringement claim, is not under pain of perjury. It really can't be, since the DMCA does have to have room for mistakes. If there is a mistaken claim, the poster is supposed to file a counter-claim.
This has gone wrong in two ways. First, many places that host user-provided content don't care about counter-claims, since they're not worried about their users suing them. Second, organizations shotgun DMCA notices against nearly random content, for bad reasons or none at all.
If I were to send a DMCA notice, I would have to cite something I had the copyright on, like a blog post or story, or I'd be committing perjury. I could send a notice on content completely unrelated to my blog post and still stay legal.
It would be better if there was some category analogous to vexatious litigation, so that companies would be penalized for sending out too many invalid notices.
Unless things have changed since I paid any attention to game journalism, finding ethics was pretty much impossible, and supporting ethics was something like voting for the Unicorn Fairy party.
Github does not exist to spread things at all, and the only thing I'm likely to find offensive is COBOL projects. Github exists to host projects, and excludes what they consider illegitimate projects on a case-by-case basis. A bakery exists to make and sell baked goods, and in that state it was illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Discrimination based on a broad category is different from not serving individuals. If the couple had engaged in bad behavior, the bakery would have refused their order on that basis, and there would be no problem.
My understanding of the details primarily comes from the Finding of Facts in the court ruling, personally. The ruling said that the bakery had practiced illegal discrimination to start with, and had gone on to encourage online harassment.
Laws are normally passed either to solve an existing problem or to grandstand. The LGBQ community was having discrimination problems, and many states altered their anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation. This does in fact protect anybody, as no business in those states can discriminate against me for being heterosexual. (Yeah, this echos Anatole France's comment that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and steal bread.)
Facebook dominates its market. If I'm to keep in contact with some of my friends electronically, I need to be on Facebook. (Some of them no longer use email.) If Facebook does something offensive, I can't get the benefits of a social network anywhere else.
Github is a hosting site. Anyone halfway competent could put up another pretty much trivially, maybe on Amazon Web Services, and it would host perfectly well. When Sourceforge got less attractive, people simply went over to Github and whatever that primarily Mercurial site was that I'm blanking out on.
Last time we bought a car, we basically signed up for a 5-year loan at a trivial interest rate. Paying the car off would have been the wrong thing to do financially, since the interest rate is much below what we get on investments. That loan has a certain value in itself, and you're not getting those terms in a private resale.
Crimes do not necessarily require criminal intent. It's illegal to kill someone even if you weren't trying to kill them. It's criminal to be criminally negligent even if it was out of laziness rather than malice.
Solicitation to commit a criminal activity is mostly illegal by itself. Police are allowed to participate in some illegal activities while running sting operations, so a police officer could solicit, although aggressive solicitation would probably constitute entrapment.
I'd say we do need specific laws for some computer-related crimes. One would be unauthorized access, provided we define "unauthorized" in a reasonable manner. Logging in with a supplied account name and password should not count, for example, no matter for what purpose. Fraud normally requires proof of harm, as does property damage. Someone hacking into a computer system may not do visible harm, but we really are better off if it's illegal.
Every so often, a conspiracy theory turns out to be about a real live conspiracy. You can't dismiss a conspiracy theory by calling it a conspiracy theory.
If I had to have a subscription to every site I go to, I wouldn't be going to many sites, and I'd be very reluctant to check out a new site. The best pay-as-you-go solution I've heard of is micropayments, and that idea has a lot of psychological and technical issues.
With a new W10 laptop, I found that Minesweeper was now full-screen, and I was informed I could pay extra for an ad-free Minesweeper. Not even Minesweeper is safe.
A law enforcement officer with a gun is considerably different from a random good guy with a gun. The officer is trained to respond to problems, and can afford to make a mistake.
Would you care to tell us what the FBI should have done about the shooter before he became a shooter? I will warn you that I'll reject arbitrary imprisonment or deprivation of Constitutional rights as answers. The fact is that the authorities really can't do anything to stop a determined shooter who intends to die in the process.
This is at least something that can be changed without a Constitutional amendment. It's largely based on the House and Senate rules. Basically, lawmakers get more power with greater seniority (as well as more skill and connections), so throwing out a three-term Senator means a significant loss in effective Senate representation.
The system wasn't deliberately set up to mandate two major powers, but it was set up that way nonetheless.
The first step towards viable third parties would be ranked-choice voting, so people could vote first for the party they like and then the major party that they don't dislike as much as the other. If, in 2000 Florida, Nader voters had been able to vote "I want Nader, and I don't want Bush", it would probably have given the election to Gore, so lots of people are dissuaded from voting third party lest someone they really dislike get in.
The next would be to change the selection of President to be plurality of popular vote, rather than majority of electoral votes. If there's three relatively equal parties, the Presidential election will doubtless be thrown into the House, and since the House will likely not agree with a majority the Vice President will become President. The current rules work reasonably well with a two-party system, but a third party would trash it.
A more major change could be allocating Representatives by party. Right now, if your party has a steady 20% support all through your state, you get no representation in Congress. If we had at-large elections of party slates, third parties would have a better chance of getting into Congress.
The "rigged system" is not the fault of the voters. It's a result of decisions made in the late 1700s.
By following the current rules, we wind up with two major parties. The rules are the same for all parties, but the major ones are qualitatively different due to emergent properties of the system.
The H-1B program is being abused badly there. If any US worker has to train an H-1B replacement before being involuntarily separated, the program is being abused.
If one program is abused, with bad results, it doesn't mean a vaguely similar program will not have good results.
All humans have the same facilities and are technically capable of the same intelligence. Education *is* intelligence.
That's your first post in this thread. It looked to me like you;'re claiming more than that there are certain specific things that people can learn to do a whole lot better. My claim is that people have very different intellectual potentials. It's incompatible with the claim I quoted, but it's perfectly compatible with a claim that education can be improved (for the future of the species, I really hope it can be).
I don't see that there's any real justification for claiming that I like software development and so I become good at it, as opposed to my claim that I've got unusual potential or aptitude or whatever for it, and so I like it. (Besides, I think we've all known people who like doing things and didn't become good at them.) You're taking an inherent ability and rephrasing it. If I inherently like software engineering more than most people, exactly what is the difference between that and me being unusually good at it?
As far as the math program example, I was discussing children who studied hard and were found to have less potential than some children who studied a lot less hard. If education were intelligence, that wouldn't happen in significant numbers.
You may well know more about learning techniques than I do, since I haven't done more than poke at the subject from time to time. Still, I'm perfectly capable of constructing logical arguments (which may be erroneous, but we all make mistakes), so I can argue with you (high inherent intelligence helps here, to alliterate), and I don't believe that a random idiot off the street can come anywhere near to matching me in my strong points. The heartbreaking thing, to me, is that there are potential genius kids who never get the education and therefore never realize their potential. People are being wasted out there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's become ironic, since AES was developed by (IIRC) a couple of Belgians.
In other words, nobody who might be able to get employed in an industry can help regulate it? There doesn't need to be a promised financial incentive for someone to go from a regulatory body to industry. It can be implied, or even assumed. Should lobbyists be banned entirely, since they're probably paid by a company or an industry association?
Careful there, you have to be more clear than that. Are you OK with encryption that can be broken by heat death of the Universe + t billion years for a Kardashev Type I, Type II, or Type III civilization? I'm not sure AES-256 will stand up to a sufficiently large Type III civilization with highly advanced quantum computers.
The right to be forgotten doesn't seem to rely on money. An individual can submit a request to Google, and I haven't heard they're charging large fees. Doing the investigation to see if the information is trivial: google yourself and look at the results. If there's information there that might be harmful to you if known, and the information may not be legally considered in various decisions, submit the request.
I'd imagine that a wealthy person would find it harder to exercise the right, since there'd be much more information out there, and some of it might not be legally forgotten because it's significant.
The reason the government is involved with marriage is tradition.
The important thing about marriage is that it's a package deal of changes that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to accomplish. It establishes an artificial and close family relationship. If my wife or I were to be unconscious, the other would make the care decisions. It's simple for one of us to inherit from the other. The government recognizes us as an economic unit for tax purposes. If she has a baby, I'm automatically the father unless I object and demand tests. There's a host of things that marriage is involved in, some good and some not so good, and most of these aren't government benefits. (For income tax purposes, a married couple pays less taxes than a family with one worker and one stay-at-home, and more than they would if they were able to file individually and had roughly equal and substantial incomes. This certainly isn't an unalloyed benefit.)
What I'd like to see is some sort of declaration that would establish two people as each other's next of kin, with all that that implies. Legally, it would function something like marriage, but it wouldn't be called that. Marriage would then be a concept that various churches could latch onto with whatever religious restrictions they pleased.
You might want to look at US participation in both European wars.
In the first one, US entry did change the strategic balance of the war, and the Germans knew that they needed to win in the first half of 1918 or not at all. They responded by launching offensives, which failed to break the British and French and pretty much used up German army capabilities. It was after that that US troops got in the line in large numbers. Belleau Wood involved a relatively small number of German soldiers.
In the second one, US entry was at the end of 1941, but the US wasn't a significant force in Europe for some time. The first Eighth Air Force raid was in mid-1942 using US-produced bombers borrowed from the RAF. The first US soldiers fighting Germans were about the end of 1942, after which it was pretty clear in retrospect that Germany was going to lose. The US had no more than one field army fighting Germans until June 1944, at which point German defeat was obviously the most likely result. US participation did hasten the end of the war and changed where the Western-Soviet demarcation line was.
The USN played a minor role in WWI, mostly in the Mediterranean, which was never a significant naval theater in WWI. In WWII, the USN was fighting Germans from September 1941 on, and not doing too well. The USN role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic was definitely secondary to the British, and perhaps less than the Canadian. The USN did make sure the Battle of the Atlantic stayed won.
Believe it or not, there's very little use in modern society for a word that means to divide soldiers in groups of ten, and randomly pick one of each ten to be beaten to death by the others using clubs. Much like the keyword "auto" in C and pre-2011 C++, the word needed a new meaning to be useful.
An "official" dictionary meaning means one that's been used enough to rate an entry in a dictionary. I believe that Scrabble officially considers a word as eligible if it appears in three out of a certain set of dictionaries.
You can make long lists of names of Christian scientists (not Christian Scientists, although I suppose you could come up with a lot of names there too). Many Christian denominations have no problem with science, the most notable probably being the Roman Catholic Church. That doesn't mean there isn't a minority of Christians who are aggressively and loudly irrational and stupid, unfortunately.
The part under pain of perjury is the part where the notice sender claims that there is a copyrighted work, and that the sender either holds the copyright or represents the copyright holder. The other part, the infringement claim, is not under pain of perjury. It really can't be, since the DMCA does have to have room for mistakes. If there is a mistaken claim, the poster is supposed to file a counter-claim.
This has gone wrong in two ways. First, many places that host user-provided content don't care about counter-claims, since they're not worried about their users suing them. Second, organizations shotgun DMCA notices against nearly random content, for bad reasons or none at all.
If I were to send a DMCA notice, I would have to cite something I had the copyright on, like a blog post or story, or I'd be committing perjury. I could send a notice on content completely unrelated to my blog post and still stay legal.
It would be better if there was some category analogous to vexatious litigation, so that companies would be penalized for sending out too many invalid notices.
Unless things have changed since I paid any attention to game journalism, finding ethics was pretty much impossible, and supporting ethics was something like voting for the Unicorn Fairy party.
Github does not exist to spread things at all, and the only thing I'm likely to find offensive is COBOL projects. Github exists to host projects, and excludes what they consider illegitimate projects on a case-by-case basis. A bakery exists to make and sell baked goods, and in that state it was illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Discrimination based on a broad category is different from not serving individuals. If the couple had engaged in bad behavior, the bakery would have refused their order on that basis, and there would be no problem.
My understanding of the details primarily comes from the Finding of Facts in the court ruling, personally. The ruling said that the bakery had practiced illegal discrimination to start with, and had gone on to encourage online harassment.
Laws are normally passed either to solve an existing problem or to grandstand. The LGBQ community was having discrimination problems, and many states altered their anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation. This does in fact protect anybody, as no business in those states can discriminate against me for being heterosexual. (Yeah, this echos Anatole France's comment that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and steal bread.)
Facebook dominates its market. If I'm to keep in contact with some of my friends electronically, I need to be on Facebook. (Some of them no longer use email.) If Facebook does something offensive, I can't get the benefits of a social network anywhere else.
Github is a hosting site. Anyone halfway competent could put up another pretty much trivially, maybe on Amazon Web Services, and it would host perfectly well. When Sourceforge got less attractive, people simply went over to Github and whatever that primarily Mercurial site was that I'm blanking out on.
Last time we bought a car, we basically signed up for a 5-year loan at a trivial interest rate. Paying the car off would have been the wrong thing to do financially, since the interest rate is much below what we get on investments. That loan has a certain value in itself, and you're not getting those terms in a private resale.
Crimes do not necessarily require criminal intent. It's illegal to kill someone even if you weren't trying to kill them. It's criminal to be criminally negligent even if it was out of laziness rather than malice.
Solicitation to commit a criminal activity is mostly illegal by itself. Police are allowed to participate in some illegal activities while running sting operations, so a police officer could solicit, although aggressive solicitation would probably constitute entrapment.
I'd say we do need specific laws for some computer-related crimes. One would be unauthorized access, provided we define "unauthorized" in a reasonable manner. Logging in with a supplied account name and password should not count, for example, no matter for what purpose. Fraud normally requires proof of harm, as does property damage. Someone hacking into a computer system may not do visible harm, but we really are better off if it's illegal.
Every so often, a conspiracy theory turns out to be about a real live conspiracy. You can't dismiss a conspiracy theory by calling it a conspiracy theory.
That's what they want you to believe, anyway.
If I had to have a subscription to every site I go to, I wouldn't be going to many sites, and I'd be very reluctant to check out a new site. The best pay-as-you-go solution I've heard of is micropayments, and that idea has a lot of psychological and technical issues.
With a new W10 laptop, I found that Minesweeper was now full-screen, and I was informed I could pay extra for an ad-free Minesweeper. Not even Minesweeper is safe.
A law enforcement officer with a gun is considerably different from a random good guy with a gun. The officer is trained to respond to problems, and can afford to make a mistake.
Would you care to tell us what the FBI should have done about the shooter before he became a shooter? I will warn you that I'll reject arbitrary imprisonment or deprivation of Constitutional rights as answers. The fact is that the authorities really can't do anything to stop a determined shooter who intends to die in the process.
This is at least something that can be changed without a Constitutional amendment. It's largely based on the House and Senate rules. Basically, lawmakers get more power with greater seniority (as well as more skill and connections), so throwing out a three-term Senator means a significant loss in effective Senate representation.
The system wasn't deliberately set up to mandate two major powers, but it was set up that way nonetheless.
The first step towards viable third parties would be ranked-choice voting, so people could vote first for the party they like and then the major party that they don't dislike as much as the other. If, in 2000 Florida, Nader voters had been able to vote "I want Nader, and I don't want Bush", it would probably have given the election to Gore, so lots of people are dissuaded from voting third party lest someone they really dislike get in.
The next would be to change the selection of President to be plurality of popular vote, rather than majority of electoral votes. If there's three relatively equal parties, the Presidential election will doubtless be thrown into the House, and since the House will likely not agree with a majority the Vice President will become President. The current rules work reasonably well with a two-party system, but a third party would trash it.
A more major change could be allocating Representatives by party. Right now, if your party has a steady 20% support all through your state, you get no representation in Congress. If we had at-large elections of party slates, third parties would have a better chance of getting into Congress.
The "rigged system" is not the fault of the voters. It's a result of decisions made in the late 1700s.
By following the current rules, we wind up with two major parties. The rules are the same for all parties, but the major ones are qualitatively different due to emergent properties of the system.
The H-1B program is being abused badly there. If any US worker has to train an H-1B replacement before being involuntarily separated, the program is being abused.
If one program is abused, with bad results, it doesn't mean a vaguely similar program will not have good results.
That's your first post in this thread. It looked to me like you;'re claiming more than that there are certain specific things that people can learn to do a whole lot better. My claim is that people have very different intellectual potentials. It's incompatible with the claim I quoted, but it's perfectly compatible with a claim that education can be improved (for the future of the species, I really hope it can be).
I don't see that there's any real justification for claiming that I like software development and so I become good at it, as opposed to my claim that I've got unusual potential or aptitude or whatever for it, and so I like it. (Besides, I think we've all known people who like doing things and didn't become good at them.) You're taking an inherent ability and rephrasing it. If I inherently like software engineering more than most people, exactly what is the difference between that and me being unusually good at it?
As far as the math program example, I was discussing children who studied hard and were found to have less potential than some children who studied a lot less hard. If education were intelligence, that wouldn't happen in significant numbers.
You may well know more about learning techniques than I do, since I haven't done more than poke at the subject from time to time. Still, I'm perfectly capable of constructing logical arguments (which may be erroneous, but we all make mistakes), so I can argue with you (high inherent intelligence helps here, to alliterate), and I don't believe that a random idiot off the street can come anywhere near to matching me in my strong points. The heartbreaking thing, to me, is that there are potential genius kids who never get the education and therefore never realize their potential. People are being wasted out there.