I think you're extending the "congress shall make no law" phrase.
I am, yes. I don't think this is incorrect, however. Is a law that prohibits speech different from a law that prohibits speech only when certain clauses apply? Or a law that gives someone other than the government the power to prohibit your speech?
Congress created contract law. That law as written allows contract clauses that restrict your speech or other constitutionally protected rights. Those restrictions will be enforced by the power of the government, just like any other law.
The big separation between contracts and laws is that contracts are optional, laws are mandatory.
That's true, but I don't think that's something that the 1st Ammendment cares about. Many laws are "optional" in the sense that you don't have to do the thing that the law applies to. A law that said you couldn't disparage the government if you have a valid drivers license is optional because you don't need to have a license if you don't need to drive a car, right? What if instead of a law, it was a contract you signed between you and the government to gain the right to drive?
"Optional" is also a relative term. Most contract negotiations are not between equals, and one side will have a greater incentive to sign the contract regardless of what it says. If my choice is to be jobless and thusly homeless and hungry or to sign away my free speech forever to get a job, then is that really a choice?
Consider that the YMCA can require a member(citizen) to practice christianity, while congress has no such power.
That's not a contract, that's a requirement for membership, and they're not the same thing. If you violate their membership rules, you can be expelled from the YMCA. They can't sue you, though, or get a judge to force you to become a Christian to comply with their rules. If you violate a contract, however, you can be sued, and forced to comply with the contract by a judge. If that contract is one that restricts your speech, then the judge is forcing you to comply, and thusly restricting your speech himself. He is doing this because contract law, as passed by Congress, allows this. That is where the 1st ammendment violation occurs.
I think this interpretation is valid. But I also recognize that it largely stems from my belief that a freedom is not something you can sign away. Just like you can't be bound by a contract that makes you someone's slave, you shouldn't be able to sign a contract that makes you unable to speak. The whole idea of an "inalienable right" to me is that no one should be able to take it from you, even if at one point in time you said it was okay for them to. If you aren't free to change your mind, then you aren't free.
That's my view, anyway. Just give me Ammendment 10.5 and I'll be happy. I'd thought of putting it at the end of every ammendment, but I like the idea of it being its own ammendment better.
They cannot physically prevent him from speaking, but they certainly have to right to hire and fire at their own discretion, even based on his opinions or speech.
I agree. This half-wit got what was coming to him, and MS was smart and right to fire him.
But on a slightly related note, I do think that the 1st ammendment limits the ability of corporations to limit speech. Or rather, it limits the ability of corporations to use contractual clauses that limit speech. In my belief, of course, because this is actually allowed right now. The observation is that any contract clause that is enforced by a court carries the weight of law. Contract law itself was created by Congress, and that law is what is causing your free speech to be restricted.
This doctrine would make NDAs unenforceable, which I'm not certain is a good or bad thing. In general I believe following the Constitution more closely is a good thing. I can think of a couple hundred years or so of legalized oppression that wouldn't have taken place if we had actually taken the word "person" in the Constitution to mean "person" and not "persons who we happen to like".
(Note how simple and elegant the first ten amendments are. Very clear, very concise. Congress should review these when writing new laws.)
Agreed. I think the only thing the ammendments of the Bill of Rights are missing is an "And we're not fucking kidding!" clause. Especially the 9th. Why does Congress act like this ammendment doesn't even exist?
And I don't care if Palestinians are considered Semites too, you know *exactly* what I meant.
Yes, what you meant was "I have a lot of strongly held opinions on a subject that not only am I so startlingly fucking ignorant about that I can't keep straight who belongs to what group, I am also such an asshat that I can't be bothered to care".
Don't worry. Your message is coming through loud and clear, bud.
Strong countries stand up for their friends and stand up to their enemies, period.
", period." is one of my favorite English expressions, since what it almost always means is "the preceding was a bunch of made-up tripe that I want you to accept without argument like I did". That's the kind of handy information I wish more people would include in their ignorance-inspired diatribes.
I've almost got me enough food to last 12 years, and enough virgins to repopulate the planet, should I be FORCED to do so.
I don't know how many/.ers you imprisoned in your fallout shelter, but your plan is going to be all for naught, and humanity thusly doomed, when you realize that what you need isn't virgins but females.
Unless you're the female, in which case what you need is a method of tolerating the shelter full of geeks you picked up. The standard solution is booze. Lots of it.
Because people who consider and "rationaly assimilate" the future will be better prepared for it than those who say "well, it'll happen anyway so fuck it!"
It's just to disambiguate the two meanings of "free" -- "requiring no cost" and "having liberty". What is really mean is not "free as in air" but "free as in the way in which beer can be free".
Beer can "have no cost", but it is silly to think of beer as having liberty. It's the same as saying "free as in 'no cost'", but is better in that it evokes the image of a cold, frosty mug overlfowing with the frothy head of your favorite lager absolutely free!
Speech can "have liberty", in that you can be free to speak or not. It's the same as saying "free as in 'liberty'".
If you think it is stupid because beer is often not "free as in beer", then I'll remind you that speech is often not "free as in speech".
Yeah, I remember the early speeches. Those were the ones where Bush was emphasizing that Saddam probably supported terrorists, and oh by the way 9/11 happened, not that you should connect the two though I hope you will. That seemed to work for 70% of the people, but "the media" had a nasty habit of pointing out experts saying that ties with terrorism were highly unlikely. WMDs was both more believable (we know Saddam at least -wanted- to have nukes) and less falsifiable. If the media focused on that, it was because it was less obviously crap and something more likely to actually justify a war.
None of which would explain why Bush would lie about Saddam having a 45-minute launch capability, Rumsfield repeating that lie along with the lie that not only did Saddam have WMD, but we knew where they were.
So even if I believed that it was the media that forced the emphasis on WMD (which is possible), that still leaves the administration making whatever baldfaced lies they could think of to justify the war. If your point is that instead of getting a set of stupid lies about WMD we would have gotten a bunch of stupid lies about some other reason for attacking, then I remain unimpressed.
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
Simply great.
A nice touch was how slash cut off your post so that to me the end looked like this:
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones long long ago;/* in a galaxy far, far away */
Conservatives really dont care about oil or the infamous Big Business for that matter. Its almost like the lefties think that W (or any conservative) has this secret passion for oil, like its a fine art or wine. Conservatives dont care about oil, they care about a cheap standard of living.
If you can't distinguish between Conservatives and the Bush Administration, then you probably shouldn't be talking about what Conservatives really think or believe.
If Righties were truely capitalist pigs out to "earn" as much money as possible, and they were not directly involved in the oil business wouldnt they just focus on products/services they could make money on including trampling on the oil industry if they got in their way?
They would. Which is exactly why those who are directly involved with oil do everything they can to make sure that it won't happen. That Big Oil (really Big Energy, but whatever) is worried about being circumvented and made obsolete by upstart technologies is exactly the theory.
That these upstart technologies may be headed and championed by other Conservatives is besides the point. I don't recall anyone else confusing all conservatives anywhere with the subset that makes bungloads of cash off of oil and also happens to be deciding policy for our country.
I'm fairly certain he has. I saw it in the Yahoo insider trading roster earlier this year, after the stock had jumped up to the 6-8 dollar range. Now it doesn't go back far enough, so I can't prove it. Maybe someone (his lawyer or CPA) suggested he hold off. Or I was hallucinating. Either or!
Talk of a pump and dump scheme is extremely unlikely, IMO, and very hard to prove without a smoking gun.
The second part of your statement is true. The first, I can't agree with. Quite obviously "pump and dump" is occuring, in that Darl's beating of the litigation war drum has caused an otherwise highly infeasible rise in SCO's stock and that executives at SCO including Darl are selling off their now valuable shares for hefty gains. The only thing left to decide is if there is a "scheme", meaning Darl & Co know full well their claim has no merit and -only- intended to artificially raise the stock price. That's hard to prove. Extremely hard to prove. Which is exactly why it is not extremely unlikely.
Repeal is not an option. Dropping the laws would be nothing short of suicidal in terms of maintaining control over a fundamentally lawless population.
I don't think so.
As your Ayn Rand quote suggests, the only ones who would be committing suicide by dropping the unenforced laws would be the ones who use the casting of everyone as a criminal and selective enforcement of laws to maintain power. Everyone else would merely be free of another form of control and discrimination.
I find it strange that you would use that quote to justify your argument that the population is "fundamentaly lawless". From the passage: "Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." That's rather the opposite statement, that the population is insufficiently lawless and must be made more so by passing laws that they can't help but break.
Selective law enforcement is nothing but "abuse of power" under a different name. This is why you can be pulled over for "Driving While Black" -- the cop can always find a legitimate reason to pull you over if he wants to, so he never has to say "I pulled him over because he was black and I like to harass black people".
The only solution that makes sense is the present one. Your freedom comes with responsibility. Use it wisely.
What good is "freedom" if that "freedom" is contingent on the whim of those with the power to enforce the laws that you are surely breaking? Remember your quote? "The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals... One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." So your "solution" is to grant the government the power to crack down on anyone at any time at their own whim.
Freedom does come with responsibility. Responsibilities such as recognizing when your freedom is being taken away. Being alert to the lies told by those trying to take it away. Being vigilant. Understanding that nobody is going to take your freedom away for your good, only for theirs, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool. But probably a liar.
Non-American citizens have no inherant rights to a speedy (or any) trial in America.
I would just like to call your attention to the fact that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the rights afforded by it only extend to citizens. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to due process are granted to every person, not citizen. I don't know why people think otherwise, but it simply isn't true.
"Amendment V: [emphasis mine, as if you couldn't guess]
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or publ ic danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
"No person". Not "no citizen". This is not accidental wording, either. The Constitution does refer to citizens in several places. Specifically in regards to those eligible to run for Congress or President, and in the various ammendments regarding the right to vote which is only guaranteed for citizens by the Constitution.
Here is a snippet from the 14th Ammendment that further illustrates the deliberate distinction between citizen and person:
"Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "
The difference is made very clear here. A "citizen" is any "person" born or naturalized in the United States, "Citizens" thus clearly being a subset of "Persons". But the next sentence says that is in fact the superset, Persons, which cannot be denied due process or equal protection.
In other words, it doesn't make a lick of difference if those held in Guantanamo are citizens or not. Until election day, anyway, and then the citizens being held illegally can bitch to the non-citizens being held illegally that they're really being abused because they are being denied their right to vote as well.
By the way, I would think it would seem only natural that non-citizens still get the right to free speech, due process, etc. What kind of "freedom" do we Americans believe in that you have to be a naturalized citizen to get? Are these not "inalienable human rights"? Or is it "freedom for us and others only if we feel like it"? Actually, the more I think about it, the more it disturbs me that some would believe that a non-citizen could simply be locked up, his posessions taken, and his life ended all without a trial, and this would be okay.
Natural selection isn't so easy as "bad eyes means dead hunter".
The "fitness" of an organism is defined by one thing: reproduction. If you survive long enough to have a kid, and your kid can do the same, then you're "fit" and your genes go on.
So if the bad-eyed hunter was part of a larger group of mostly-good-eyed hunters, he may survive, and his bad-eye genes carry on. Maybe it'd be harder for him to find a mate, but maybe not.
If the bad-eyed hunter was part of a tribe that used the "buffalo jump" method of hunting, then he would probably survive since eyesight wouldn't be as important.
Maybe the bad-eyed hunter was the one that came up with the "buffalo jump" method in the first place.
Essentially, any flaw that isn't directly fatal may survive with the organism that carries it. Nature's rule is "anything goes, so long as it works".
Which means we were never going to become gods anyway.:)
Did you even watch the movie? Or even bother reading the plot outline on imbd? "Plot Outline: Futuristic story of a genetically imperfect man and his seemingly inobtainable goal to travel in space." (emphasis mine, for added humiliation)
But this feature will only come into play when the cooling solution is unable to keep up with the processor ( IE: dead fan, extremely hot room )
I'm pretty sure that in the case of a dead fan your system will still crash. Halving the speed will not reduce power by enough to let you run without a fan (assuming your cooling solution needed one in the first place).
By the way, the P4 doesn't actually reduce the clock speed. Instead, it runs full speed for a while, then stops running at all for a while, at a 1:1 ratio. This has virtually the same effect on power as halving the clock speed, but I imagine was much better for their poor (as in "much abused", not "shoddy") clock distribution network.
This is basically the concept of this discussion: will your computer run hotter under load rather than running idle HLT commands?
The answer is yes. What this means to you in terms of silicon lifetime is probably beyond the expertise of anyone here on Slashdot, so take every "insight" with a bag of salt.
I'm sure there's a process/platform engineer somewhere around here who is familiar with the formulas used to calculate MTBF and the effect of temperature on said calculations. That's not me, but if you don't want a quantitative answer, then you can do okay. Yes, hotter chips die faster. On the other hand, the MTBF numbers are calculated assuming that the machine is under full load the entire time. So while you will have a lower lifespan running your chip at full load all the time, it shouldn't be to a degree that the chip will die before you were ready to replace it anyway. If and only if you have a decent cooling solution, of course.
And yes, you should definitely take that with a grain of salt.:)
My evil business leader has ASKED me to spend serious time contributing back to an open source project that we use as our customer support system... I'm not working on things that our company needs, but rather general improvements that are useful to EVERYONE.
So you don't need a support system? Or you're specifically adding features that your company doesn't and (presumeably) won't ever need?
Not that what your boss is doing isn't really cool. It is. But it doesn't sound like altruism to me. Sounds to me like he's getting a support system with on-going custom development for the price of less than one engineer. Paying one of your developers to contribute to an open source product you use is good sense -- you get all the benefits of open source development and in-house development on the cheap. Yay!
By the way, here's another news flash: Your business leader, should you happen to work for a publicly traded company, evil or not, is required by law to be a greedy bastard who only cares about the bottom line. If he ever does anything that goes against this, he can be sued by the shareholders. Great world we live in, eh?
The companies that are worried about losing their customers have every reason to be. The ones that are worried are most likely the ones that know that needing to keep their number is the only thing keeping customers around. The only way to keep them around after number portability kicks in is to *gasp* improve the quality of their service. Why do you think they are fighting it?
Which is the whole point. Number importability is a way for telcos to lock you into using their service. And someday -- someday -- the majority* will understand that letting corporations lock you into using their products is bad and stupid and you should never do it.
I hope this takes effect. I'm not planning on switching services immediately, but I sure as hell want the option to switch if and when my service lags behind. Because what is the god-damned point of competition if people can't choose to use the instead?
* Maybe I don't give "the majority" credit. All the telcos lock you in with number importability, so it's not like you had a choice. And it may just be that it's merely the minority known as "management" that doesn't understand the problem with lock-in.
More or less the same here. The way I use the service is to download one or two albums from a bunch of bands I've never heard of, burn it to an mp3 CD and listen to it at work to decide which bands I like and want to get more of. Once I've gotten all that (normally 10-20 albums) I may not download anything more for a month or two since I've got a bunch of new music that I really like. But more importantly all the bands I didn't like didn't cost me anything, but I was still able to give them a fair shake (rather than a useless:30 intro!).
My binges aren't as big as yours, but the end result is that I still get 10x the music I normally get, because normally I only buy bands I know and thus feel safe spending the money on.
Because it was easy to find new things, I never really minded that I couldn't find a lot of my favorite bands on there. That was kinda the point to me: I wasn't there to get a cheap copy of some CD from one of my favorite bands, I was there to get lots of CDs from bands I didn't really know or was on the fence about. That's no longer possible with the new setup.
Yes, that's the key feature for me as well. The reason I love Emusic is that it frees me to explore not just bands but entire genres that I never would have risked my hard-earned $$ on before. Even at $4 an album I'm still not going to go frivilously wasting money on bands I've never heard of or genres I don't know the meaning of. No idea what "Psych" is, but I'd try out a band or two under than genre if it was free, not for $4.
Actually, this is worse. Not only are you paying for every experiment, if all your experiments turn out to suck, you can't download any more songs to replace them! So you can try out 3 albums, then wait a month, try three more... And in the meantime you're paying. Not a great way to expand one's musical horizons.
This is going to drastically change the way I use the service. I'm not certain if it is worth it. I do like Emusic because it is exactly what we wanted -- legal, cheap, and without Digital Rights Restrictions. But if the new Emusic doesn't work out, I'll just go back to what I was doing -- getting virtually no new music at all.
We all seemed to be speaking the same language. We'd get lots of "yes yes we understand perfectly". But nothing we ever said seemed to make it into the code in any recognizable fashion.
I imagine the guy standing there on the other end of the line with an English phrasebook open on the table. "Yes yes, I understand perfectly" he reads aloud, then turns to his coworkers with a blank look and shrugs. They laugh, and go back to playing Halo.
By the way, if you think the best way to make sure you don't get screwed again is to not use over-seas contractors, then you will be screwed again. The difference will be that he will be sincere when he says that he understands you, just before going back to his game of Halo.
I think his point was that most atoi() implementations are going to look very similar, becaue it isn't a very complicated function.
I bet even PDP-11 implementation looked a lot like other PDP-11 implementations by other PDP-11 programmers.
I wrote atoi() in C for an interview. Took about 2 minutes. Especially since the night before I'd written it in powerpc assembly. And it probably looked a lot like what anyone else would have written.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're extending the "congress shall make no law" phrase.
I am, yes. I don't think this is incorrect, however. Is a law that prohibits speech different from a law that prohibits speech only when certain clauses apply? Or a law that gives someone other than the government the power to prohibit your speech?
Congress created contract law. That law as written allows contract clauses that restrict your speech or other constitutionally protected rights. Those restrictions will be enforced by the power of the government, just like any other law.
The big separation between contracts and laws is that contracts are optional, laws are mandatory.
That's true, but I don't think that's something that the 1st Ammendment cares about. Many laws are "optional" in the sense that you don't have to do the thing that the law applies to. A law that said you couldn't disparage the government if you have a valid drivers license is optional because you don't need to have a license if you don't need to drive a car, right? What if instead of a law, it was a contract you signed between you and the government to gain the right to drive?
"Optional" is also a relative term. Most contract negotiations are not between equals, and one side will have a greater incentive to sign the contract regardless of what it says. If my choice is to be jobless and thusly homeless and hungry or to sign away my free speech forever to get a job, then is that really a choice?
Consider that the YMCA can require a member(citizen) to practice christianity, while congress has no such power.
That's not a contract, that's a requirement for membership, and they're not the same thing. If you violate their membership rules, you can be expelled from the YMCA. They can't sue you, though, or get a judge to force you to become a Christian to comply with their rules. If you violate a contract, however, you can be sued, and forced to comply with the contract by a judge. If that contract is one that restricts your speech, then the judge is forcing you to comply, and thusly restricting your speech himself. He is doing this because contract law, as passed by Congress, allows this. That is where the 1st ammendment violation occurs.
I think this interpretation is valid. But I also recognize that it largely stems from my belief that a freedom is not something you can sign away. Just like you can't be bound by a contract that makes you someone's slave, you shouldn't be able to sign a contract that makes you unable to speak. The whole idea of an "inalienable right" to me is that no one should be able to take it from you, even if at one point in time you said it was okay for them to. If you aren't free to change your mind, then you aren't free.
That's my view, anyway. Just give me Ammendment 10.5 and I'll be happy. I'd thought of putting it at the end of every ammendment, but I like the idea of it being its own ammendment better.
They cannot physically prevent him from speaking, but they certainly have to right to hire and fire at their own discretion, even based on his opinions or speech.
I agree. This half-wit got what was coming to him, and MS was smart and right to fire him.
But on a slightly related note, I do think that the 1st ammendment limits the ability of corporations to limit speech. Or rather, it limits the ability of corporations to use contractual clauses that limit speech. In my belief, of course, because this is actually allowed right now. The observation is that any contract clause that is enforced by a court carries the weight of law. Contract law itself was created by Congress, and that law is what is causing your free speech to be restricted.
This doctrine would make NDAs unenforceable, which I'm not certain is a good or bad thing. In general I believe following the Constitution more closely is a good thing. I can think of a couple hundred years or so of legalized oppression that wouldn't have taken place if we had actually taken the word "person" in the Constitution to mean "person" and not "persons who we happen to like".
(Note how simple and elegant the first ten amendments are. Very clear, very concise. Congress should review these when writing new laws.)
Agreed. I think the only thing the ammendments of the Bill of Rights are missing is an "And we're not fucking kidding!" clause. Especially the 9th. Why does Congress act like this ammendment doesn't even exist?
Voting in Iraq could have changed things. But it was illegal.
Where did you hear this?
Seriously, where did you hear it?
And I don't care if Palestinians are considered Semites too, you know *exactly* what I meant.
Yes, what you meant was "I have a lot of strongly held opinions on a subject that not only am I so startlingly fucking ignorant about that I can't keep straight who belongs to what group, I am also such an asshat that I can't be bothered to care".
Don't worry. Your message is coming through loud and clear, bud.
Strong countries stand up for their friends and stand up to their enemies, period.
", period." is one of my favorite English expressions, since what it almost always means is "the preceding was a bunch of made-up tripe that I want you to accept without argument like I did". That's the kind of handy information I wish more people would include in their ignorance-inspired diatribes.
I've almost got me enough food to last 12 years, and enough virgins to repopulate the planet, should I be FORCED to do so.
/.ers you imprisoned in your fallout shelter, but your plan is going to be all for naught, and humanity thusly doomed, when you realize that what you need isn't virgins but females.
I don't know how many
Unless you're the female, in which case what you need is a method of tolerating the shelter full of geeks you picked up. The standard solution is booze. Lots of it.
Because people who consider and "rationaly assimilate" the future will be better prepared for it than those who say "well, it'll happen anyway so fuck it!"
You fuck-wit.
It's just to disambiguate the two meanings of "free" -- "requiring no cost" and "having liberty". What is really mean is not "free as in air" but "free as in the way in which beer can be free".
Beer can "have no cost", but it is silly to think of beer as having liberty. It's the same as saying "free as in 'no cost'", but is better in that it evokes the image of a cold, frosty mug overlfowing with the frothy head of your favorite lager absolutely free!
Speech can "have liberty", in that you can be free to speak or not. It's the same as saying "free as in 'liberty'".
If you think it is stupid because beer is often not "free as in beer", then I'll remind you that speech is often not "free as in speech".
Yeah, I remember the early speeches. Those were the ones where Bush was emphasizing that Saddam probably supported terrorists, and oh by the way 9/11 happened, not that you should connect the two though I hope you will. That seemed to work for 70% of the people, but "the media" had a nasty habit of pointing out experts saying that ties with terrorism were highly unlikely. WMDs was both more believable (we know Saddam at least -wanted- to have nukes) and less falsifiable. If the media focused on that, it was because it was less obviously crap and something more likely to actually justify a war.
None of which would explain why Bush would lie about Saddam having a 45-minute launch capability, Rumsfield repeating that lie along with the lie that not only did Saddam have WMD, but we knew where they were.
So even if I believed that it was the media that forced the emphasis on WMD (which is possible), that still leaves the administration making whatever baldfaced lies they could think of to justify the war. If your point is that instead of getting a set of stupid lies about WMD we would have gotten a bunch of stupid lies about some other reason for attacking, then I remain unimpressed.
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
/* in a galaxy far, far away */
Simply great.
A nice touch was how slash cut off your post so that to me the end looked like this:
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones
long long ago;
the logic being you would gain superhuman powers and hence cool names like dying-of-cancer-man and oh-the-burning-pain-man.
That would be sweet! As Dying-of-Cancer Man, you could fight crime using the awesome power of your inspiring tale of courage!
DoCM: "Stop, villain! *pant* Your nefarious schemes are over! *hack cough* Oh, there goes the last of my hair..."
Villain: "Your body wracked with cancer and the effects of chemotherapy, I'm surprised you can stand, much less threaten me."
DoCM: "I just want to leave the world... a better place than I found it..."
Henchman: "You can't hurt him, boss... He's dying of cancer!"
Villain: "You're right! Such courage and love of life... We surrender, Dying-of-Cancer Man!"
Conservatives really dont care about oil or the infamous Big Business for that matter. Its almost like the lefties think that W (or any conservative) has this secret passion for oil, like its a fine art or wine. Conservatives dont care about oil, they care about a cheap standard of living.
If you can't distinguish between Conservatives and the Bush Administration, then you probably shouldn't be talking about what Conservatives really think or believe.
If Righties were truely capitalist pigs out to "earn" as much money as possible, and they were not directly involved in the oil business wouldnt they just focus on products/services they could make money on including trampling on the oil industry if they got in their way?
They would. Which is exactly why those who are directly involved with oil do everything they can to make sure that it won't happen. That Big Oil (really Big Energy, but whatever) is worried about being circumvented and made obsolete by upstart technologies is exactly the theory.
That these upstart technologies may be headed and championed by other Conservatives is besides the point. I don't recall anyone else confusing all conservatives anywhere with the subset that makes bungloads of cash off of oil and also happens to be deciding policy for our country.
But straw men are easier to burn, aren't they?
I'm fairly certain he has. I saw it in the Yahoo insider trading roster earlier this year, after the stock had jumped up to the 6-8 dollar range. Now it doesn't go back far enough, so I can't prove it. Maybe someone (his lawyer or CPA) suggested he hold off. Or I was hallucinating. Either or!
Talk of a pump and dump scheme is extremely unlikely, IMO, and very hard to prove without a smoking gun.
The second part of your statement is true. The first, I can't agree with. Quite obviously "pump and dump" is occuring, in that Darl's beating of the litigation war drum has caused an otherwise highly infeasible rise in SCO's stock and that executives at SCO including Darl are selling off their now valuable shares for hefty gains. The only thing left to decide is if there is a "scheme", meaning Darl & Co know full well their claim has no merit and -only- intended to artificially raise the stock price. That's hard to prove. Extremely hard to prove. Which is exactly why it is not extremely unlikely.
Repeal is not an option. Dropping the laws would be nothing short of suicidal in terms of maintaining control over a fundamentally lawless population.
I don't think so.
As your Ayn Rand quote suggests, the only ones who would be committing suicide by dropping the unenforced laws would be the ones who use the casting of everyone as a criminal and selective enforcement of laws to maintain power. Everyone else would merely be free of another form of control and discrimination.
I find it strange that you would use that quote to justify your argument that the population is "fundamentaly lawless". From the passage: "Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." That's rather the opposite statement, that the population is insufficiently lawless and must be made more so by passing laws that they can't help but break.
Selective law enforcement is nothing but "abuse of power" under a different name. This is why you can be pulled over for "Driving While Black" -- the cop can always find a legitimate reason to pull you over if he wants to, so he never has to say "I pulled him over because he was black and I like to harass black people".
The only solution that makes sense is the present one. Your freedom comes with responsibility. Use it wisely.
What good is "freedom" if that "freedom" is contingent on the whim of those with the power to enforce the laws that you are surely breaking? Remember your quote? "The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals... One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." So your "solution" is to grant the government the power to crack down on anyone at any time at their own whim.
Freedom does come with responsibility. Responsibilities such as recognizing when your freedom is being taken away. Being alert to the lies told by those trying to take it away. Being vigilant. Understanding that nobody is going to take your freedom away for your good, only for theirs, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a fool. But probably a liar.
At least for the ones' whose stock options have vested!
Non-American citizens have no inherant rights to a speedy (or any) trial in America.
I would just like to call your attention to the fact that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the rights afforded by it only extend to citizens. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right to due process are granted to every person, not citizen. I don't know why people think otherwise, but it simply isn't true.
"Amendment V: [emphasis mine, as if you couldn't guess]
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or publ ic danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
"No person". Not "no citizen". This is not accidental wording, either. The Constitution does refer to citizens in several places. Specifically in regards to those eligible to run for Congress or President, and in the various ammendments regarding the right to vote which is only guaranteed for citizens by the Constitution.
Here is a snippet from the 14th Ammendment that further illustrates the deliberate distinction between citizen and person:
"Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. "
The difference is made very clear here. A "citizen" is any "person" born or naturalized in the United States, "Citizens" thus clearly being a subset of "Persons". But the next sentence says that is in fact the superset, Persons, which cannot be denied due process or equal protection.
In other words, it doesn't make a lick of difference if those held in Guantanamo are citizens or not. Until election day, anyway, and then the citizens being held illegally can bitch to the non-citizens being held illegally that they're really being abused because they are being denied their right to vote as well.
By the way, I would think it would seem only natural that non-citizens still get the right to free speech, due process, etc. What kind of "freedom" do we Americans believe in that you have to be a naturalized citizen to get? Are these not "inalienable human rights"? Or is it "freedom for us and others only if we feel like it"? Actually, the more I think about it, the more it disturbs me that some would believe that a non-citizen could simply be locked up, his posessions taken, and his life ended all without a trial, and this would be okay.
Natural selection isn't so easy as "bad eyes means dead hunter".
:)
The "fitness" of an organism is defined by one thing: reproduction. If you survive long enough to have a kid, and your kid can do the same, then you're "fit" and your genes go on.
So if the bad-eyed hunter was part of a larger group of mostly-good-eyed hunters, he may survive, and his bad-eye genes carry on. Maybe it'd be harder for him to find a mate, but maybe not.
If the bad-eyed hunter was part of a tribe that used the "buffalo jump" method of hunting, then he would probably survive since eyesight wouldn't be as important.
Maybe the bad-eyed hunter was the one that came up with the "buffalo jump" method in the first place.
Essentially, any flaw that isn't directly fatal may survive with the organism that carries it. Nature's rule is "anything goes, so long as it works".
Which means we were never going to become gods anyway.
I could have written a better script if I stuck a felt tip marker up my ass and then played twister for a few hours.
How's that coming along, by the way? Any bites from movie producers yet?
every-farking-body was genetically perfect?
Did you even watch the movie? Or even bother reading the plot outline on imbd? "Plot Outline: Futuristic story of a genetically imperfect man and his seemingly inobtainable goal to travel in space." (emphasis mine, for added humiliation)
But this feature will only come into play when the cooling solution is unable to keep up with the processor ( IE: dead fan, extremely hot room )
:)
I'm pretty sure that in the case of a dead fan your system will still crash. Halving the speed will not reduce power by enough to let you run without a fan (assuming your cooling solution needed one in the first place).
By the way, the P4 doesn't actually reduce the clock speed. Instead, it runs full speed for a while, then stops running at all for a while, at a 1:1 ratio. This has virtually the same effect on power as halving the clock speed, but I imagine was much better for their poor (as in "much abused", not "shoddy") clock distribution network.
This is basically the concept of this discussion: will your computer run hotter under load rather than running idle HLT commands?
The answer is yes. What this means to you in terms of silicon lifetime is probably beyond the expertise of anyone here on Slashdot, so take every "insight" with a bag of salt.
I'm sure there's a process/platform engineer somewhere around here who is familiar with the formulas used to calculate MTBF and the effect of temperature on said calculations. That's not me, but if you don't want a quantitative answer, then you can do okay. Yes, hotter chips die faster. On the other hand, the MTBF numbers are calculated assuming that the machine is under full load the entire time. So while you will have a lower lifespan running your chip at full load all the time, it shouldn't be to a degree that the chip will die before you were ready to replace it anyway. If and only if you have a decent cooling solution, of course.
And yes, you should definitely take that with a grain of salt.
My evil business leader has ASKED me to spend serious time contributing back to an open source project that we use as our customer support system ... I'm not working on things that our company needs, but rather general improvements that are useful to EVERYONE.
So you don't need a support system? Or you're specifically adding features that your company doesn't and (presumeably) won't ever need?
Not that what your boss is doing isn't really cool. It is. But it doesn't sound like altruism to me. Sounds to me like he's getting a support system with on-going custom development for the price of less than one engineer. Paying one of your developers to contribute to an open source product you use is good sense -- you get all the benefits of open source development and in-house development on the cheap. Yay!
By the way, here's another news flash: Your business leader, should you happen to work for a publicly traded company, evil or not, is required by law to be a greedy bastard who only cares about the bottom line. If he ever does anything that goes against this, he can be sued by the shareholders. Great world we live in, eh?
The companies that are worried about losing their customers have every reason to be. The ones that are worried are most likely the ones that know that needing to keep their number is the only thing keeping customers around. The only way to keep them around after number portability kicks in is to *gasp* improve the quality of their service. Why do you think they are fighting it?
Which is the whole point. Number importability is a way for telcos to lock you into using their service. And someday -- someday -- the majority* will understand that letting corporations lock you into using their products is bad and stupid and you should never do it.
I hope this takes effect. I'm not planning on switching services immediately, but I sure as hell want the option to switch if and when my service lags behind. Because what is the god-damned point of competition if people can't choose to use the instead?
* Maybe I don't give "the majority" credit. All the telcos lock you in with number importability, so it's not like you had a choice. And it may just be that it's merely the minority known as "management" that doesn't understand the problem with lock-in.
More or less the same here. The way I use the service is to download one or two albums from a bunch of bands I've never heard of, burn it to an mp3 CD and listen to it at work to decide which bands I like and want to get more of. Once I've gotten all that (normally 10-20 albums) I may not download anything more for a month or two since I've got a bunch of new music that I really like. But more importantly all the bands I didn't like didn't cost me anything, but I was still able to give them a fair shake (rather than a useless :30 intro!).
My binges aren't as big as yours, but the end result is that I still get 10x the music I normally get, because normally I only buy bands I know and thus feel safe spending the money on.
Because it was easy to find new things, I never really minded that I couldn't find a lot of my favorite bands on there. That was kinda the point to me: I wasn't there to get a cheap copy of some CD from one of my favorite bands, I was there to get lots of CDs from bands I didn't really know or was on the fence about. That's no longer possible with the new setup.
Yes, that's the key feature for me as well. The reason I love Emusic is that it frees me to explore not just bands but entire genres that I never would have risked my hard-earned $$ on before. Even at $4 an album I'm still not going to go frivilously wasting money on bands I've never heard of or genres I don't know the meaning of. No idea what "Psych" is, but I'd try out a band or two under than genre if it was free, not for $4.
Actually, this is worse. Not only are you paying for every experiment, if all your experiments turn out to suck, you can't download any more songs to replace them! So you can try out 3 albums, then wait a month, try three more... And in the meantime you're paying. Not a great way to expand one's musical horizons.
This is going to drastically change the way I use the service. I'm not certain if it is worth it. I do like Emusic because it is exactly what we wanted -- legal, cheap, and without Digital Rights Restrictions. But if the new Emusic doesn't work out, I'll just go back to what I was doing -- getting virtually no new music at all.
We all seemed to be speaking the same language. We'd get lots of "yes yes we understand perfectly". But nothing we ever said seemed to make it into the code in any recognizable fashion.
I imagine the guy standing there on the other end of the line with an English phrasebook open on the table. "Yes yes, I understand perfectly" he reads aloud, then turns to his coworkers with a blank look and shrugs. They laugh, and go back to playing Halo.
By the way, if you think the best way to make sure you don't get screwed again is to not use over-seas contractors, then you will be screwed again. The difference will be that he will be sincere when he says that he understands you, just before going back to his game of Halo.
I think his point was that most atoi() implementations are going to look very similar, becaue it isn't a very complicated function.
I bet even PDP-11 implementation looked a lot like other PDP-11 implementations by other PDP-11 programmers.
I wrote atoi() in C for an interview. Took about 2 minutes. Especially since the night before I'd written it in powerpc assembly. And it probably looked a lot like what anyone else would have written.