But that doesn't mean that private actions can't limit freedom of speech. This private action decidedly does - it's a decision to limit expression based on its content. The fact that this ISP has both the legal right (assuming the contract is in order) and, to many, the moral right to do this does not mean that the decision does not limit free speech.
There is a broader understanding of speech, one that the 1A is legally interpreted as protecting, that includes freedom of association. By Rackspace choosing not to associate with the church, they are exercising their freedom of association.
So, the church's freedom is restricted, but the ISP's freedom is exercised, overall I'd say it's a wash.
For all the usual sardonic banter here on slashdot about natural selection et al it is sad to think that a young woman has been taken so early from her family and friends.
It's sad that she killed herself. She wasn't "taken" by some mysterious force, she ran out into traffic without looking or listening. She may as well have been playing Russian roulette.
It seems I may have jumped the gun on this one. My bad for being such an easy mark of sensationalist pop science headlines.
If we took time to accept your apology, that would divert precious comments from the long/. tradition of calling for the ritual disembowelment of the editors.
In my view any contract which requires an attorney to interpret had damn well be dealing with enough money to make it worthwhile for both parties. Buying a $50 piece of software and requiring the customer to spend $200 in attorneys fees...
... and spend two or three thousand dollars on a computer, invest hours in studying the documentation, training courses, etc. for the typical productivity software. And, as is often the case with most business-oriented productivity software, you're paying someone a full salary to use it. A good administrator shouldn't need an attorney's help (though your business probably has one on retainer for such questions) to go over the license requirements and figure out best practices for staying in compliance.
The other extreme, more where you're coming from, is that if I just want to play Half-Life, it's pretty ridiculous to expect me to hire an attorney. And I agree completely.
Generally, what ought to happen over time is that standard arrangements establish themselves and are codified into law. For most physical purchases, the uniform commercial code obviates the need for any written contract beyond a refund policy, though there are still all the safety warnings that you're supposed to read.
Eventually, we should get legislation that cuts back on this, but right now there isn't a solid business model for making money with software. EULAs are a stopgap, and if you don't like them, use FLOSS.
It's nice that they're paying but if that's $4337/14 = roughly $310 per bug you'll just have to forgive me if I don't quit my day job to focus on debugging Chrome.
That $310 check from Google is worth a lot more than its face value in establishing your credibility as a security researcher.
You've forgotten EULA clauses which exist solely to remove user rights. I think the best case I can think of for this is the "install on one computer" clauses.
Hold on, how is that "removing user rights"? After all, before you bought the software, you didn't have it. You couldn't install it anywhere.
In principle, if I can offer a lower price to the majority of users who only want to install on one computer, everyone benefits. The minority who want to install on more can negotiate a fair price, or simply buy additional licenses.
In practice, I don't agree with it. It punishes the users who actually abide by the EULA, while the vast majority of users just ignore it. I also find usage restrictions to be fairly confusing, just because there are so many different models and they are rarely well explained.
But either way, it isn't taking away anyone's rights or freedom.
It's a stupid lawsuit, but I favor any ruling that weakens the EULA. Those things are near-evil.
I'm hesitant to gut EULAs.
If you're trying to start a business involving software, you wind up taking on risk, like any business.
Without legal protections, you can still operate, but you take on more risk. You can mitigate this through insurance, but it's expensive.
If you're trying to raise capital, your investors are going to look at how much risk you've got, because more risk means lower expected returns. That means you're going to get less capital.
It won't kill off the business, by any means. But the largely unseen effect will be smaller businesses that just never start, and more domination of the market by big corps.
The Internet is the cheapest available method to move bits from one place to another. Is there a another network that does the job well enough to be considered a competitor?
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your level of alcohol consumption...
My level of alcohol consumption is zero, right now, and when I'm not under orders to abstain it will probably be from one to two a week. I'm basing moderate on what I've seen people maintain while being entirely functional.
Please don't assume that because someone is defending certain behavior that the person practices it.
Three drinks a day is moderate. If you regularly have a few drinks with friends after work, you're not drinking heavily. This is the same kind of nonsense as the claim that five or six drinks in two hours constitutes a binge. I don't know why the hell we let people who hate the idea of a good time dictate what's socially acceptable, to the point where anyone who doesn't conform is labeled an alcoholic and stuck in a treatment / proselytizing program.
I understand that the idea is to point students to original sources, but I happen to think that the mindless application of the rule that you can't cite encyclopedias is wrong headed.
How about a lesser rule? "It is verboten to type a phrase in Google and report the number of hits as though it meant something."
You cite wikipedia, and seeing that you cited wikipedia, a few blogs mention it without citing anyone. Then some small newspapers quote them as "experts say", and finally it lands in a reputable newspaper, and then journals cite the newspapers, until a good journal cites the journals. And wikipedia finally cites the journal.
We've all been trained to memorize the meme that government regulation is bad. Fine if you want to believe it, and sometimes the meme is true, but sometimes, bad or not, the regulation is worse than the alternative.
Really? It's just a meme? Have you ever looked at the process by which a bill becomes law? Have you ever seen a regulatory agency, and how that law becomes policy? Have you ever read the news about cops enforcing the law, people getting tangled up in regulations? Do you even vote? The only guarantee with a regulation is that this incredibly messy process is what's going to pick the winners and losers. The potential losers ought to be protesting the regulation, it's their civic duty.
Of all the memes that need to die, number one is the meme that "opposing arguments are just a meme", e.g. Obama's favorite phrase: "false choices." People aren't just reciting talking points, they aren't just disagreeing with you to be mean or racist or whatever, they are representing their interests. The reason these recent huge bills are running into so much resistance is because they have a massive impact on huge swaths of the country and are damned near unreadable. People would be crazy to remain silent.
The only juvenile delinquency that comic books ever made me want to delve into was with the X-Ray glasses they always advertised on the back page of the comics. For a little boy, I apparently had quite the dirty mind. The thought of being able to see through girls' clothes held more awe and wonder for me than any amazing stunt Superman or Batman could ever pull off.
Turns out there is this amazing substance called "liquor" that actually works!
I love how some of the most outspoken people against video games (as well as comics, porno, etc) are often the same people who are against government expansion. Government intervention is always bad...unless it regulates something these people don't agree with.
I'm looking at you, Mitt Romney...amongst others.
First off, this guy is a liberal in all his other views, and he's just being consistent. There is nothing in modern liberalism that says you can't extend government control over material that affects children and families. Hillary Clinton's "It Takes A Village" is a perfect example of this kind of nanny-state totalitarianism. And it has its roots in progressivism, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.
But you seem to think that being in favor of regulation of health, outright prohibition of self-defense, punitive taxation, censoring political messages, campus speech codes, fairness doctrine, massive wealth transfers and socializing vast swaths of the economy don't make it inconsistent to call oneself a freedom loving liberal.
But when some conservatives are against all of the above, but happen to protest porn, they're somehow paying lip service? Bullshit. The current situation is one in which television, comics, radio, video games are all *self-regulated*. There is no government dictating what can and can't be shown, and conservatives who complain are the ones keeping it that way.
You know, I keep hearing this, how Flash keeps crashing browsers....
Yeah, not only is Flash robust, but it pretty well survived the ultimate torture test: MySpace. There are millions of pages with dozens or even hundreds of Flash widgets all written by different knuckle-draggers, and they rarely bring down the browser. Slow it to a crawl, true, but Flash will keep on trucking. That's pretty impressive.
I think it's either a tired meme or some people just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system.
It seems like the more clueless you are about how computers work, the more stable they are. For instance, I know that I make a lousy sysadmin because I want to do things the "right" way, and find out the actual reason for various error messages. But a typical sysadmin will just wipe the box and reinstall things, changing it up each time until somehow it mostly works, except for you have to press CTRL-C here and this one button doesn't work.
I can tell you right now this will fail and I can tell you why - it will cost less to run a heavily armoured vehicle than it would to fly even a lightly armoured one.
When attacking a ground vehicle, an adversary can set off an explosive almost directly underneath a vehicle, and can aim a blast at specific parts of the vehicle; this is how EFP's work. (EFP's are fundamentally different from IEDs in the manner they're deployed.) All the adversary needs to aim it is a reference point like a tree or a telephone pole.
Most ground movement will always be on roads because off-road travel is slow, dangerous and requires a tremendous amount of maintenance. You never see in movies what it's like to recover a stuck vehicle, or recover a tank that's thrown track. So ground vehicles have to carry large amounts of armor because they're going to get hit, and they're going to be right next to the explosion when they do. It is a good idea to simply get off the ground and not get blown up.
Having driven MRAPs for a while, I think they're useful in places like Baghdad where there's a significant threat of harassment from IEDs, and where you've got reasonably good roads. But I'm doubtful that you can take the v-shaped hull concept and apply it to a purely tactical vehicle, as v-shaped means a high profile and high center of gravity. And in a place like Afghanistan, where roads are mountainous, narrow or non-existent, you're probably stuck flying anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
...how does a tolerant society deal with intolerance?
There are many inconsistent and hypocritical ways of answering this question. I'm not sure there are any good answers.
This "church" is doing to tolerance what Gödel did to mathematics -- showing its internal contradictions.
No. No, no, you did not just compare these looney assholes to Gödel. Yeesh.
A fair comparison would be MLK is to tolerance as Gödel is to mathematics. (Both defined things you can actually do or accomplish with each.)
This church is to tolerance as the Indiana State legislature is to mathematics. (Both are abusing each for largely pointless ends.)
But that doesn't mean that private actions can't limit freedom of speech. This private action decidedly does - it's a decision to limit expression based on its content. The fact that this ISP has both the legal right (assuming the contract is in order) and, to many, the moral right to do this does not mean that the decision does not limit free speech.
There is a broader understanding of speech, one that the 1A is legally interpreted as protecting, that includes freedom of association. By Rackspace choosing not to associate with the church, they are exercising their freedom of association.
So, the church's freedom is restricted, but the ISP's freedom is exercised, overall I'd say it's a wash.
I think the metric verision would be putainton, though there are a dozen or so French words for "fuck".
For all the usual sardonic banter here on slashdot about natural selection et al it is sad to think that a young woman has been taken so early from her family and friends.
It's sad that she killed herself. She wasn't "taken" by some mysterious force, she ran out into traffic without looking or listening. She may as well have been playing Russian roulette.
Did you just use a car analogy in an article about testing string theory?
You can't prove it either way.
It seems I may have jumped the gun on this one. My bad for being such an easy mark of sensationalist pop science headlines.
If we took time to accept your apology, that would divert precious comments from the long /. tradition of calling for the ritual disembowelment of the editors.
In my view any contract which requires an attorney to interpret had damn well be dealing with enough money to make it worthwhile for both parties. Buying a $50 piece of software and requiring the customer to spend $200 in attorneys fees...
... and spend two or three thousand dollars on a computer, invest hours in studying the documentation, training courses, etc. for the typical productivity software. And, as is often the case with most business-oriented productivity software, you're paying someone a full salary to use it. A good administrator shouldn't need an attorney's help (though your business probably has one on retainer for such questions) to go over the license requirements and figure out best practices for staying in compliance.
The other extreme, more where you're coming from, is that if I just want to play Half-Life, it's pretty ridiculous to expect me to hire an attorney. And I agree completely.
Generally, what ought to happen over time is that standard arrangements establish themselves and are codified into law. For most physical purchases, the uniform commercial code obviates the need for any written contract beyond a refund policy, though there are still all the safety warnings that you're supposed to read.
Eventually, we should get legislation that cuts back on this, but right now there isn't a solid business model for making money with software. EULAs are a stopgap, and if you don't like them, use FLOSS.
The highest bug bounty, $1337
$1337? Oh come on!
Well, $5318008 was a bit much.
It's nice that they're paying but if that's $4337/14 = roughly $310 per bug you'll just have to forgive me if I don't quit my day job to focus on debugging Chrome.
That $310 check from Google is worth a lot more than its face value in establishing your credibility as a security researcher.
You've forgotten EULA clauses which exist solely to remove user rights. I think the best case I can think of for this is the "install on one computer" clauses.
Hold on, how is that "removing user rights"? After all, before you bought the software, you didn't have it. You couldn't install it anywhere.
In principle, if I can offer a lower price to the majority of users who only want to install on one computer, everyone benefits. The minority who want to install on more can negotiate a fair price, or simply buy additional licenses.
In practice, I don't agree with it. It punishes the users who actually abide by the EULA, while the vast majority of users just ignore it. I also find usage restrictions to be fairly confusing, just because there are so many different models and they are rarely well explained.
But either way, it isn't taking away anyone's rights or freedom.
It's a stupid lawsuit, but I favor any ruling that weakens the EULA. Those things are near-evil.
I'm hesitant to gut EULAs.
If you're trying to start a business involving software, you wind up taking on risk, like any business.
Without legal protections, you can still operate, but you take on more risk. You can mitigate this through insurance, but it's expensive.
If you're trying to raise capital, your investors are going to look at how much risk you've got, because more risk means lower expected returns. That means you're going to get less capital.
It won't kill off the business, by any means. But the largely unseen effect will be smaller businesses that just never start, and more domination of the market by big corps.
The Internet is the cheapest available method to move bits from one place to another. Is there a another network that does the job well enough to be considered a competitor?
SIPRNET, JWICS, etc.
I figured it was the same reason they use it in American light beers.
The difference between an alcoholic and one who is not is...
... that an alcoholic is diagnosed by a licensed professional.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your level of alcohol consumption...
My level of alcohol consumption is zero, right now, and when I'm not under orders to abstain it will probably be from one to two a week. I'm basing moderate on what I've seen people maintain while being entirely functional.
Please don't assume that because someone is defending certain behavior that the person practices it.
Three drinks a day is moderate. If you regularly have a few drinks with friends after work, you're not drinking heavily. This is the same kind of nonsense as the claim that five or six drinks in two hours constitutes a binge. I don't know why the hell we let people who hate the idea of a good time dictate what's socially acceptable, to the point where anyone who doesn't conform is labeled an alcoholic and stuck in a treatment / proselytizing program.
I understand that the idea is to point students to original sources, but I happen to think that the mindless application of the rule that you can't cite encyclopedias is wrong headed.
How about a lesser rule? "It is verboten to type a phrase in Google and report the number of hits as though it meant something."
Otherwise were does it end?
You cite wikipedia, and seeing that you cited wikipedia, a few blogs mention it without citing anyone. Then some small newspapers quote them as "experts say", and finally it lands in a reputable newspaper, and then journals cite the newspapers, until a good journal cites the journals. And wikipedia finally cites the journal.
It ends with consensus!
We've all been trained to memorize the meme that government regulation is bad. Fine if you want to believe it, and sometimes the meme is true, but sometimes, bad or not, the regulation is worse than the alternative.
Really? It's just a meme? Have you ever looked at the process by which a bill becomes law? Have you ever seen a regulatory agency, and how that law becomes policy? Have you ever read the news about cops enforcing the law, people getting tangled up in regulations? Do you even vote? The only guarantee with a regulation is that this incredibly messy process is what's going to pick the winners and losers. The potential losers ought to be protesting the regulation, it's their civic duty.
Of all the memes that need to die, number one is the meme that "opposing arguments are just a meme", e.g. Obama's favorite phrase: "false choices." People aren't just reciting talking points, they aren't just disagreeing with you to be mean or racist or whatever, they are representing their interests. The reason these recent huge bills are running into so much resistance is because they have a massive impact on huge swaths of the country and are damned near unreadable. People would be crazy to remain silent.
The only juvenile delinquency that comic books ever made me want to delve into was with the X-Ray glasses they always advertised on the back page of the comics. For a little boy, I apparently had quite the dirty mind. The thought of being able to see through girls' clothes held more awe and wonder for me than any amazing stunt Superman or Batman could ever pull off.
Turns out there is this amazing substance called "liquor" that actually works!
I love how some of the most outspoken people against video games (as well as comics, porno, etc) are often the same people who are against government expansion. Government intervention is always bad...unless it regulates something these people don't agree with.
I'm looking at you, Mitt Romney...amongst others.
First off, this guy is a liberal in all his other views, and he's just being consistent. There is nothing in modern liberalism that says you can't extend government control over material that affects children and families. Hillary Clinton's "It Takes A Village" is a perfect example of this kind of nanny-state totalitarianism. And it has its roots in progressivism, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.
But you seem to think that being in favor of regulation of health, outright prohibition of self-defense, punitive taxation, censoring political messages, campus speech codes, fairness doctrine, massive wealth transfers and socializing vast swaths of the economy don't make it inconsistent to call oneself a freedom loving liberal.
But when some conservatives are against all of the above, but happen to protest porn, they're somehow paying lip service? Bullshit. The current situation is one in which television, comics, radio, video games are all *self-regulated*. There is no government dictating what can and can't be shown, and conservatives who complain are the ones keeping it that way.
You know, I keep hearing this, how Flash keeps crashing browsers. ...
Yeah, not only is Flash robust, but it pretty well survived the ultimate torture test: MySpace. There are millions of pages with dozens or even hundreds of Flash widgets all written by different knuckle-draggers, and they rarely bring down the browser. Slow it to a crawl, true, but Flash will keep on trucking. That's pretty impressive.
I think it's either a tired meme or some people just don't know how to setup and maintain a stable system.
It seems like the more clueless you are about how computers work, the more stable they are. For instance, I know that I make a lousy sysadmin because I want to do things the "right" way, and find out the actual reason for various error messages. But a typical sysadmin will just wipe the box and reinstall things, changing it up each time until somehow it mostly works, except for you have to press CTRL-C here and this one button doesn't work.
I can tell you right now this will fail and I can tell you why - it will cost less to run a heavily armoured vehicle than it would to fly even a lightly armoured one.
When attacking a ground vehicle, an adversary can set off an explosive almost directly underneath a vehicle, and can aim a blast at specific parts of the vehicle; this is how EFP's work. (EFP's are fundamentally different from IEDs in the manner they're deployed.) All the adversary needs to aim it is a reference point like a tree or a telephone pole.
Most ground movement will always be on roads because off-road travel is slow, dangerous and requires a tremendous amount of maintenance. You never see in movies what it's like to recover a stuck vehicle, or recover a tank that's thrown track. So ground vehicles have to carry large amounts of armor because they're going to get hit, and they're going to be right next to the explosion when they do. It is a good idea to simply get off the ground and not get blown up.
Having driven MRAPs for a while, I think they're useful in places like Baghdad where there's a significant threat of harassment from IEDs, and where you've got reasonably good roads. But I'm doubtful that you can take the v-shaped hull concept and apply it to a purely tactical vehicle, as v-shaped means a high profile and high center of gravity. And in a place like Afghanistan, where roads are mountainous, narrow or non-existent, you're probably stuck flying anyway.
No amount of malware can ever drain as much performance as Norton Antivirus.
No malware can suck the life, soul or mind out of you like PowerPoint.
Bambam, this is Grover.
Grover, this is Bambam.
Bambam, this is Grover. Request, orbital strike, thermonuclear payload, TRP Malcon.
Grover, this is Bambam, send nuclear authorization codes.
Bambam, this is Grover, authorization code follows, "kill it with fire."
Shot over.
Shout out.
Splash over.
Splash out.
Bambam, this is Grover, fire for effect.