Pointing to a 3042-comment Slashdot argument about something as if you were pointing to evidence is really disingenuous. Sorry, but I'm not about to spend the next week wading through it to try to find the claims you were making so I can check them.
What a newbie. This is one of the most famous/. discussions ever.
This "newbie" made seven of the comments in that more-than-three-years-old article. B-) Near the end, too, so you can tell I already waded through it once.
I'm not going to wade through it again to do YOUR homework for you.
If you actually read some of the comments, you will get good info on both sides of this debate. YOURS and mine.
That doesn't address my point.
- You claimed that the NRA funded the major studies showing benefits from gun ownership and gunbearing. (A gratuitous assertion.)
- I said that's false (gratuitous assertions can be gratuitously denied.) But being of open mind, I then asked you to back your claims with evidence.
- You pointed to an enormous slashdot discussion as if it were evidence for your claim.
- I refused to sieve through the more than 3,000 postings to try to find the evidence you claim is there, and asked you to point directly to it.
If there really IS any evidence for YOUR claim I challenge YOU to produce it, posting a direct link (or cite if it's not online) for it.
If you (or some other poster) can not do so, then I, and any other rational reader of this discussion, can safely assume that you do not have it, and that your claim is arbitrary and unsupported. (And given the number of people who would LOVE to discredit those studies, almost certainly false as well.)
The rest of your posting is a collection of red herrings. I will not be sidetracked.
Put up, or be exposed as either a dupe or bald-faced liar.
Yes, the NRA funded those "studies." This is common knowledge.
No, the NRA did NOT fund the studies in question, and the claim that they did is a bald-faced lie.
If you want more to read, here you go:
Pointing to a 3042-comment Slashdot argument about something as if you were pointing to evidence is really disingenuous. Sorry, but I'm not about to spend the next week wading through it to try to find the claims you were making so I can check them.
If you have any evidence that the studies by, say Kleck, Rossi & Wright, or Lott & Mustard were funded by the NRA, please post a pointer to it.
Yes, research funded by a group called the NRA. There is no other third party research available to support your claim.
In fact, none of it was funded by NRA.
(Some of it was funded by anti-gun groups, and at least one major researcher did a big opinion turnaround as a result of his results.)
Sorry. I'm tired of arguing over this.
Then why do you bother to respond?
You love guns. I don't. Agree? Okay good. Bye.
The base story was about research claiming that partisans, confronted by evidence, evaluate it based on emotion rather than logic, dismissing out of hand any evidence that conflicts with their political position and the releated preconceptions.
Thank you for providing such a glaring example of the behavior they describe. B-)
Look man, chill. Take it easy. We see you love guns. Maniacs like you [...]
Anonomous personal attack. I win! B-)
[...] aren't making your side of the argument look good. In fact, you make the other guy look good.
You wish. B-)
Last time I looked, rational examination of issues looks better than either quoting bogus stats or letting them stand.
And it looks a lot better than someone on the discredited side of an argument declaring victory. Or trying to sucker or social-pressure someone on the solid side into shutting up.
If you want to learn about pro vs. cons of guns, look what other countries do. Look outside of the US at their crime rates/gun crimes. And see how they handle guns.
And look at how they handle their stats, too.
In England they count a murder when they get a conviction. In the US they count a murder when they find a body.
When a father kills the mother, the three kids, and himself, the US counts four murders and a suicide. Japan counts five suicides.
I could go on.
This is what the "Uniform" is in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report - a standard way of reporting and counting crimes, so the stats from different jurisdictions within the US are at least roughly comparable.
Countries are also not comparable since there are plenty of other factors than gun policy affecting crime rates.
The biggest is culture. The US accepts immigrants from a number of cultures, many of them more violent than those of Germany or the British Isles. And it does not require them to assimilate and dump their cultural and linguistic heritage, allowing them to continue indoctrinating their children with "old country" ideas and ways of thinking for generations. The result is significant populations with hangovers from a variety of cultures, each with their own mix of criminal activity and other violent behavior.
But it's possible to sort out this effect reasonably well, since crooks tend to prey on others of their own community.
And when you look at the stats, you see that US residents of English descent have a lower murder risk in gun-happy USA than those in England. Ditto African descent vs. in Africa. Ditto Japanese descent than in Japan. And so on.
The higher murder rates in the US versus those some other countries is mainly the result of our larger population of people with ethnic roots in violent places.
(And it's cultural, not genetic. For instance, blacks who have assimilated and achieved middle-class or higher income and status have about the same murder risk as those of western European descent.)
But we're not concerned so much with passively observing differences between countries as we are with figuring out how to change things to improve them in OUR countries. (Or at least I am - are you?)
So a more productive thing to look at is how crime rates correlate with state and local gun laws and policies and CHANGES to them.
Short form: Change the laws to raise the rate of weapons carrying and the violent crime rate drops - drastically. "More Guns, Less Crime" to quote the title of one book about it.
There's plenty of solid research on this if you're interested (and willing to consider it, rather than dismiss out-of-hand any study that makes a conclusion you don't like.)
Pick your favorite source. This is common knowledge, a well known 'attribute' of Miami.
And it's wrong.
Picking just the top rated item from the google search in question, we find that the article under the points to sperling's re-interpretation of the 2002 UCR stats.
If you follow the links to the tables, you'll see that Miami was NOT the top in their study - it was beaten by (at least) Tucson. The line "Miami's violent crime rate is the highest in the nation" is from a SUBSET of cities they studied - those with population greater than a half-million (which Tucson missed by less than 3% in the 2000 census). Their weighting of crimes is suspect (unless crime rates changed drastically between 2002 and 2003), since it puts Detroit well below Miami, while the FBI puts it well above.
Interestingly, the next sentence (partially shown in the search you posted) is "Thankfully, the murder rate is relatively low." This directly contradicts your other claim of Highest murder rate, everything.
Of course your local media will be happy to misconstrue such studies into scare headlines, the better to sell more papers to the people of Miami, and more of their eyeball and ear time to advertisers.
But try a different search: '"crime rate" highest'. You'll get a raft of other headlines, claiming a broad scattering of cities and regions as the US or world record holder.
Top two items when I just did it on Google were:
- "Once Again, Dallas Has Highest Crime Rate in the Country"
- "England has worst crime rate in world"
Redefine "violent crime" appropriately and pick your cutoff city size and you can make any of a plethora of cities the record holder.
Miami has the highest crime rate in the country, and has for some time. [...] Highest murder rate, everything.
Really? Where are you getting that claim?
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports deliberately don't rank the cities. But others compile rankings from them and you can check them against the FBI's report on their web site.
According to this Wikipedia article, compiled from the FBI's 2003 UCR (which is referenced there if you want to check), Miami's violent crime rate is significantly-to-far below that of a number of other cities, such as Detroit MI, Irvington NJ, and Atlanta, GA. It's even below that of Springfiled MA - in a state more gun-unfrindly than California.
For murder rate it's even farther behind. Ranked 31 at 19.4/100,000, less than half that of Baltimore MD and Washington DC (with it's federally-enforced near-total gun ban). Gary IN takes the lead there (at 67.0), but many other big names leave Miami in the dust: Camden NJ, Detroit again, Ritchmond and Oakland CA, Newark NJ, Philidelphia PA, I could go on.
Do you have a source for your claim? Or are you just making it up as you go?
To my knowledge DNA methylation cannot be reversed and DNA methylase has not been found to exist yet. The only way DNA de-methylation at a particular CpG site in DNA can occur is by DNA replication(cell division), where replication of DNA gives an unmethylated CpG site.
Huh?
Last time I looked the point of DNA methylation was this:
One of the four bases (I forget which) has a methylation site, and the DNA replication mechanism normally copies the methylation state as well as the base type. This effectively makes the genome a FIVE-letter alphabet.
In a fraction of complex life forms that includes humans, the methylation state of all or much of the genome is "reset" to a particular configuration during the production of the gamet cells - at least those of one of the sexes.
This allows methylation to be used, gene by gene, or set-of-genes by set-of-genes, as a switch during tissue differentiation. Methylating (or de-methylating) a particular site can turn a gene's expression on or off (or perhaps modulate its expression magnitude) and the state of the switch is retained through cell replication as the tissue grows into its proper size and form, and as cells are replaced later.
Of course this means that gene expression errors can occur (and accumulate with age or exposure to toxins) due to improper copying or changing of the methylation state, just as they can occur due to improper copying of, damage to, or editing of, the base sequence itself.
= = = =
So now scientists have identified a gene which is inactivated by methylation and whose normal function is one of the roadblocks that a broad class of cancer types must eliminate as they progress to full-blown pathologies.
And of course there's a speculation that, since it's a switch, there might be a treatment potential using drugs to flip it to the non-cancer-associated state, which would make the cancerous tissue eitehr revert to normal or at least to a less invasive earlier stage of the disease.
I agree there's a potential for such a treatment. But I suspect that just dosing with a generic state-setting drug may cause havoc by resetting the switches on other genes as well. I'd expect that practical treatments will have to wait for development of a drug that's specific to that PARTICULAR gene's methylation state, or at least to the methylation sites of a narrower set of genes, rather than scattergunning the whole genome.
Of course it's possible that scattergun demethylation might not be a total disaster. Perhaps important cell differentation steps might not be totally dependent on the methylation, but include something that tends to set the switch again. Perhaps the result would be reversion to a more stem-cell like state that could "figure out" what tissue to be once again. Or perhaps even the havoc of the reset is better than dying of an otherwise incurable cancer type.
But I'm betting that more focus will be needed for a practical treatment.
Please to show where anyone is trying to suppress the speech of the Bruin Alumni Association.
The grandparent poster said that their activities - collecting and publishing evidence of professorial misuse of office for political indoctrination - shouldn't be allowed.
That certainly sounded like suppression of free speech to me.
(Academia is considered to be more liberal than conservative, or at least it's presented as such)
Much of academia - especially at UCLA - is far to the left of Joe Stalin.
But if your whole experince is such far-left-leaning loudmouths, your perception of even a moderate leftist, let alone a centerist, will be "to the right of Attila the Hun".
Don't bother looking for an actual conservative professor at that university. You won't find one - who talks about it.
It [identifying profesorial ideologues who abuse their students by propagandizing them in class and/or grading on their students' ideologies] shouldn't be allowed -
Free speech - stating true information and the evidence backing it - shouldn't be allowed?
What ever happened to the time when you could disagree with someone, but still respect their opinion?
What happened is "political correctness" - brainwashing techniques honed in the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and other Communist countries and revolutionary movements, transplanted onto campus by the radical left.
Look at you: You're apparently so indoctrinated that you actually believe it's right to suppress the speech of someone who is merely identifying (and collecting evidence to prove the identification of) professors who abuse their positions.
Lets get some facts straight: UWB has been around since the early 1950's when the military started developing it. It is ACTUALLY a simplier radio than an 802.11 radio,
While we're getting facts straight...
Actually there were TWO major types of UWB being considered by the IEEE group. One I'd characterize as an orthogonal-wavelet direct-sequence spread spectrum approach, plowsharing older military tech, which appears to be the one you're describing. The other was a orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing approach, very much like WiFi, DVB, and a number of other systems (such as the Ricochet wireless network and the Telebit Trailblazer modems.)
The systems had different technical advantages and disadvantages. (For instance: The DS system was simpler and lower power hardware, but needed notch filters on transmit to avoid interfering with other services that were still active in its band and depended on forward error correction to compensate for pattern sensitivity from the notch filters and the propagation differences across the band. The OFDM system could notch out on transmit just by chosing not to send on those segments of the band and processed each chunk of band separately so wasn't bothered by selective propagation conditions, but required a lot of DSP power on both transmit and recieve, and still needed filters to keep narrow-band interference from saturationg the receiver A-to-D converter.)
A bigger issue, though, was that the engineering talents required to work with the two systems were different. A WiFi OFDM team could just move to the OFDM system with little new knowlege. The DS system requried a somewhat different skill set to engineer - a digital/analog interface mix. There were plenty of engineers with skills availabe for each system. But they were largely DIFFERENT engineers.
Each system had several companies - at least one a major player - backing it. And of course each player was backing their bet with advance engineering on their approach, and so was heavily invested. Since both systems would perform very well (alone), the choice became more a matter of politics, protecting the companys' investments and technical lead, than of the technical merits of the respective systems.
Since a supermajority of the players in the standards voting was needed to make a pick, neither side had it, and neither was willing to bend, the process bogged down. It became apparent a couple years ago that the standards effort would fail, the working group would throw in the towel, "the marketplace would decide". And without a standard in place only the big guys would be able to play. (The chip companies were ahead and were giving advanced chip info only to major, established, partners. So even a startup intending only to assemble a device was out in the cold.)
The two systems, however, would NOT share the band well. Each would tend to jam the other. The DS side (the smaller faction) tried to salvage the train wreck. They proposed a slower, robust, common transmission mode that could be handled by either system with trivial additions to its hardware and firmware (and less effort on the OFDM faction's part than their own), to be used for the short bursts of communication involved in time-slicing the channels. And for the standard to prescirbe using this and standardizing a version of each of the two approaches.
But the OFDM group was not interested. They had more players, and the players had gotten together to do their own, internal standardization effort of their own systems. For them the standardization effort was mainly an exercise in keeping the DS group (which needed less time to get equipment ready for market) from moving until they were ready to go with their stuff. (Within their approach and with the OFDM version of the draft standard as a reference, they could go to market once they had something ready and tune out any minor incompatibilites among themselves with firmware tweaks, and there were more of them so they had the odds down,
The synopsis above is misleading. Its is GPL violators, not simply GPL users who are at risk.
And to clarify further: The issue is about basing a product on GPLed code without disclosing that you are doing so.
If you do this, get it wrong, and get caught, you have a choice between stopping distribution of the product or releasing the source to its guts (or some fraction of it) to the public (including your competitors and potential customers) for free (as in speech AND beer) reuse.
This may be perceived as a risk to your business model - and thus is something that must be disclosed to your investors and potential investors if your company is publically traded.
Maybe it's not a risk. But corporations are required to give enough information to their current and potential investors for them to make their own determination.
= = = =
Meanwhile it's NOT an issue AT ALL for companies using Linux on the desktop. or even in internal processes (as long as they don't make changes to its guts that are key to their competitive advantage and then do something that counts as distribution - which is unnecessary if it's just being used as a platform for applications and services).
Yet the article - even with the clarification - makes it seem this is an issue for desktop and server USERS - and many comments are responding to that bogus threat. Oops!
- Driver writers for GPL3ed OSes can't support DRM features of devices.
- Manufacturers of such devices could be prosecuted under the DMCA if they give driver writers any information that might be useful to write a driver to support their devices without supporting the DRM features.
So their partners who own the DRM tech - and Microsoft - will have an additional lever to use to block any assistance to Linux device-driver writers and maintainers: The power of the state.
(Even if this analysis is wrong, or governments might not chose to prosecute, the threat alone is probably enough to scare off a corporate exec.)
From the adoption of GPL3 on, count on having to reverse-engineer any DRM-enabled device.
So why not toughen up laws on companies that hire illegal immigrants in the first place? [...] If someone is caught hiring an illegal immigrant, they should be forced to have all their employees checked for citizenship status, and for each person who isn't legally accounted for, fine the company.
Such laws are already on the books - and even occasionally enforced. They're enforced with about as much vigor as the laws against illegal immigration. The current situation developed - then escalated - then snowballed - with exactly the sort of laws you propose already in place.
The problem is not a lack of laws, or laws being too "loose". The problem (or at least the "law" part of it) is that the existing laws are not being enforced.
We are buried in laws. Virtually none of them are enforced, and the rest are enforced very selectively. Passing more laws simply reduces the fraction of laws that are actually enforced - and further reduces the respect that people have for the law.
Further, if the laws directly attacking the problem are ignored, what makes you think something more indirect will be any less ignored. (Unless, of course, an indirect law has some other, unintended, effect that the people chosing what laws to enforce would find useful for their own purposes.)
If we are to return to the rule of law and respect for the law, the solution will not be found in the legislative branch throwing more laws at every problem (and further complicating the problem). The solution will be found in the executive and judicial branches enforcing laws in a consistent and productive manner.
The main contribution the legislative branch can make is to clean out the mass of junk laws by repeal or sunset, and tune the rest into a consistent, simple, understandable, fair, and constitutional body of law - with as little left to the prescription of law and as much left to free choice as possible.
Meanwhile, the administration's call for more anti-terrorism power is falling on deaf ears among both liberals and (especially) conservatives - especially in the southwestern states where the problem is so great that some have declared states of emergency, and the situation is developing into a shooting war.
How can Washington claim that there is a "terrorist threat" when they leave the southern border wide open to wholesale invasion by all comers, to the tune of millions per year - (including those from countries that are the hotbeds of anti-US terrorism), along with anything they can carry (or ship in, disguised as harmless bales of illegal drugs)?
If there really is a "terrorist threat" why isn't the government down there right NOW with every national guardsman, reservist, and regular military member and piece of applicable military equipment that can be spared elsewhere, sealing and fortifying that border? As long as that is wide open, confiscating fingernail clippers at airports and bugging international phone calls and the internet is a sick joke.
Some people think that closing the borders protects US jobs but the reality is that, since corporations can cross borders with ease, if the cheap workers don't come to the corporations then the corporations will go to the cheap workers with the same loss of US jobs.
The problem with "illegal" foreign workers is not that they work for less.
The problem with "illegal" foregin workers is that they work for less than legal US citizens CAN work.
Because they're illegal they can work for less than minimum wage, when a documented worker must be paid at least the minimum. (And they can often keep a lot more of it because many of them don't have to pay taxes on what they do make.)
Because they're illegal they can't complain of poor working conditions, or join or organize unions. First time one makes trouble for the boss, all the boss has to do is inform on him and he's gone.
Result: Essentially all the unions except the government employee unions have been broken. And contractors must hire illegals and pay them crap, or they can't compete with those who do. (In construction work, for instance, virtually all the positions except crane operator (a very visible, responsible, and REGULATED position, given the havoc an incompent can cause) are now filled almost entirely with "undocumented" non-union labor, when they were once held by union employees, paid a decent wage and benefits and working under decent conditions.)
Of course this situation means no benefits either - especially medical benefits. So both the "undocumented" workers and their families obtain health care and other benefits through the welfare system, and through leaching on the medical system. Clinics and urgent care operations require a payment and information for billing, while the much more expensive emergency rooms are required to treat all comers and prohibited from inquiring about immigration status. So E-rooms are used for every cold and flu, and virtally all of the cost is transferred to the progressively smaller fraction of patients who actually pay for their care - directly, or through employer-paid insurance programs. This load causes the cost of medical care to skyrocket - and these added costs make citizen workers even less competitive against "undocumented" workers.
Yet many of them do not seek, or can't obtain, treatment for chronic illnesses or immunizations. The result is a resurgence of childhood diseases for which immunizations exist, drug-resistant tuburculosis, and introduction into the US of a number of mosquito-borne tropical diseases - to name just a few of the problems.
The children of these families, of course, receive education in the public schools. Very expensive education, of course, thanks to the requirement that the be taught in Spanish (even if they were not native speakers of it). California is wallowing in debt. Yet just the money spend on public school education for children of the "undocumented" has been reliabily estimated to exceed the state's defict. Eliminating this cost alone would balance the state's budget.
So, despite claims that the "undocumented" contribute to the economy, for the average taxpaying citizen the costs are far disproportionate to the benefit. Those rich enough to afford domestic help and companies able to hire an "undocumented" workforce get cheap labor (and union busters), subsidized by the taxes and increased service costs paid by the rest of us.
And make no mistake: These people are displacing the citizen work force. (In the last reporting interval the number of blue-collar jobs lost by US citizens and the number gained by "undocumented" laborers inside the US were virtually identical.)
Some jobs CAN'T be outsourced: Construction. Farm labor. Landscaping. Janitorial work. I could go on. These are jobs that US citizens have historically done - and which they mostly don't do any more. It's not because they don't WANT to. It's because they CAN'T - because employers CAN'T hire them, under US law, for as
[...] information on George W. illegally bypassing said court [...]
One of the issues currently in play is whether it IS illegal for the whitehouse to "bypass said court" - or even if congress CAN prescribe by law that the executive branch must ask such a court for permission to wiretap FOR FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE.
There's no question that the congress can prescribe how the executive branch does wiretapping for CRIMINAL JUSTICE purposes - (except that the constitution may completely prohibit warrantless wiretaps FOR THAT PURPOSE, so even congress couldn't authorize warrentless taps if the info goes to criminal cases).
(And - assuming the administration's claim is correct - one thing that's wrong about the Patriot Act is that it allows info obtained on the claimed-to-be-lower foreign-intellignence standard of suspicion to leak into law enforcement's operation, with its high requirements for suspicion and warrants.)
To say (as you do above) that the wiretapping in question is illegal is to take one party's side in an argument about a point of law. That point will only be settled when the Supreme Court rules on it.
It doesn't bother me that they want to wiretap suspected terrorists, but why the no-warrant stuff? Can't they just get a classified warrant?
There are two uses for intercepts of communications:
- Developing evidence for criminal prosecutions.
- Developing intelligence about military operations, to improve response to them. In the terrorism context: Finding out in advance and stopping things like the 9/11 attacks.
The first clearly is a search, and under the 5th amendment requires warrants supported by probable cause. The congress can pass laws to set up procedures and limits on when and how to do this, which must be followed by the executive and courts.
Courts have already declared that any evidence gathered WITHOUT such warrants and/or probable cause, including any information developed as a result of investigations started due to illegally obtained information, can not be used. No matter how many steps there are between the illegally-obtained info and the evidence. This is the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine. The chain is only broken when a separate, legally-obtained, probable cause occurs to justify the searches, taps, etc. without recourse to the "bad fruit" as a cause of suspicion. (Moral justification: An out-of-control government is MUCH more dangerous than even a few serial killers let loose. You can't get people to watch the watchmen - but you can encourage them to behave within the law by making it impossible to get convictions when they break it.)
The administration claims that the second is a constitutional function of the executive branch, part of its military role. As such the congress has no power to pass laws that would block or control the executive branch's use of this claimed branch-specific power. And that as long as the information gleaned is not used for criminal prosecution it's fair game.
This interpretation would mean that the administration could intercept a lot more stuff without warrants - PROVIDED it didn't use this info in the furtherance of prosecuting CRIMINAL cases. That would let them do things like stop 9/11-style attacks (provided they didn't then bring criminal cases against the terrorists on whom they only had only the military spying info and things derived from it, or the investigations it started).
This raises problems for the administration: Say they have news in advance of another 9/11 style attack. Do they let it go forward and kill 3,000 innocent civilians so they can bust the (probably dead anyhow) attackers and as much of their network as they can reach? Or do they stop the attack? (But without the intercepts they don't get the choice.)
Since the wiretapping technology is common, keeping these functions separate is tough. That's a major reason behind the separation between the NSA and the FBI.
The Clinton administration (by executive order) raised that wall so high that it cut them off virtually completely - which was apparently a large part of the reason the 9/11 attacks weren't headed off. The Patriot Act lowers it - and many (myself included) think it lowers it too far, allowing tainted intelligence to flow to law enforcement.
And that's, IMHO, what's going on here. The administration wants to continue using their claimed "right to do military spying" without interference. Those opposed to it are opposed for one or more of the following reasons:
- They're confusing the two functions,
- They don't agree that such military spying is constitutional, or
- They think that the military spying info will be improperly used for law-enforcement or otherwise improperly (i.e. leaked to businesses, used to create databases on citizens, to support "dirty tricks" actions against political opponents, etc.)
That last is a reasonable fear: Such spying his been used in this way repeatedly in the past. It usually only makes it to the news decades later, allowing the perpetual claim that "it used to be that way in the old days but not any more".
Thankfully, most Americans understand that if they have no affiliation with terrorist groups, they have nothing to worry about.
Yeah, right.
I know a nice housewife who converted to Islam a few months before 9/11.
She participates in a number of Islamic political discussion web sites and mailing lists - where she is a voice of reason, explaining to Muslums how various actions look to Americans and giving them helpful suggestions. Especially this includes how to make it clear to us if they really are opposed to terrorism.
On a couple occasions a radical jihadist mailing list has arbitrarily added her to their distribution list and not removed her despite repeated requests.
The NSA says is doing traffic analysis. That means looking at who talks to whom and when - without looking at the contents of the transmissions.
Think about how the bogus jihadist mailing list subscription and her attempts to get off it makes her look. Bunch of email from a terrorist organization, lots this mail followed in short order my of email from her to them...
(Her solution: After they fail to remove her after a couple attempts, complain to the FBI, attaching the offending email. B-) But the NSA won't hear about that. So unless her mail to the FBI shows up in the traffic analysis and is analyzed correctly (or incorrectly in a way that makes her look to the NSA like an FBI informant or a double-agent) she'll still look like a jihadi, won't she?)
... us WHAT WAS DISCOVERED - or even POINTED US TO THE RESEARCH, rather than just saying it HAD been discovered and then sidtracking into ragging on the "intelligent design" creationists.
I see lots of bitching and wringing of hands. It don't see a BIT of the action necessary to deal with this crap.
Congresscritters can stick little gotchase in bills every day. If the ever get used it takes enormous effort, cost, and personal risk to get them struck down in courts. Ditto to get them repealed.
The way to nip this stuff in the bud is to make it COST the congresscritters.
I'm not talking about the ones who voted for the "must-pass bill" that was parisitized. They have a plausible excuse. I'm talking about the ones who ADDED THE OFFENDING LANGUAGE to the bill.
So where, in all this coverage and hand-wringing, is the LIST OF NAMES of the congressman or senator who PROPOSED THE AMENDMENT, and the LIST OF NAMES of the congressmen or senators who VOTED FOR THE AMENDMENT?
Don't like it? Dig out those names and publish them.
Then start a campaign in their district (which you can do from anywhere in the country) to get them bumped - in the next primary, and the next election, and the one after it, and the one after that, until they're gone. Or (fat chance) they submit, and get passed, a repeal of each of their own offending bills.
I worked in the Radar and Optics lab starting back in the summer of 1968. That fall I ran an optical processor in Emmett's lab for one of his colleagues (Ron Fredricks), processing side-looking radar data using holographic techniques. (An optic processor could do a multi-megapixel two-D fourier transform in the time it took the laser light to go a couple yards down the optic bench. In those days computers were built of discrete components, and it would have taken one perhaps days - even with FFT algorithms, which were just being developed - to do the same. So this was quite a big deal. (Computers weren't up to this job for a decade or more.)
That lasted until it was discovered that I was the only person on the floor with a working knowlege of Fortran when Emmett needed some programming done to model wavefronts for his current project.
Coding Emmett's stuff got my hands on one of Cray's first machines (a CDC 1604), under circumstances where I would often have the machine to myself for an hour at a time while waiting for output to be processed - time I used to "cut my hacker teeth" by exploring the OS and building my own tools.
By the time I had his program done he had figured out an analytical solution to his problem (yet another example of his brilliance). But by then the sister infrared-and-optics lab (which owned the computer) had seen my work and "borrowed" me for several years afterward to do their lab's system and some of their application programming. So I have Emmett to thank (in addition to Galler, Riddle, Blue, and to some extent Weiser) for launching my carreer in computer programming.
Emmett loved to show off the stuff in the lab or tell "war stories" of laser and wavefront optics history. Some things I recall:
- An early setup for making phase holograms that could be illuminated by white light for reconstruction - along with a holographic corrector plate that predistorted the reconstruction beam, making the image painfully brilliant.
- A two-beam setup for creating an image of a surface with its illumination dependent on depth, creating topological-map style rings of light and dark areas of high resolution - suitable for depth-mapping the impression on the surface of a coin with a couple dozen levels. And a discussion of whether one could use the principle to make a "striped light" flashlight that would appear to illuminate things this way without requiring an intervening hologram step.
A story about the discovery (not invention) of the neodymium-doped-glass laser - when another laser-lab worker in the ruby-rod days happened to notice, while taking holiday photographs of his family, that right after the strobe flashed a glass ashtray would make a red blink. (He took the ashtray to the lab, demonstrated the effect to others, then they smashed and analyzed it, isolating the impurity responsible for the effect and building working laser rods much less expensive than synthetic rubies.)
I am deeply saddened to hear of his passing. But he has left an enormous legacy. The world is a much brighter place for his having been in it.
There are (at least) two problems with SCO's reasoning.
1) The APA (Asset Perchase Agreement) was between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations. Caldera/The SCO Group bought whatever assets Santa Cruz Operations owned at the time of sale. Did Caldera/The SCO Group buy the APA also? Can they go back and enforce a contact that was between Novell and the original Santa Cruz Operations?
Sure, unless the terms of the original contract forbid it. That's what it means to transfer an asset: The new owner has the same rights as the old one.
Biz contracts are generally written to survive mergers, spinouts, and the like even if they do forbid simple sale. Keeping that sorted out is much of why mergers and the like get complicated, and a big part of why the execs get the big bucks. (Like legislation, it's a matter of writing a program and getting it right the first time - but with millions of bucks down the drain if you have a bug.)
2) The APA was written to transfer only the UNIX licensing management to Santa Cruz Operations. Even if The SCO Group can enforce the original APA, can they expand the terms of the APA from mere license management to include their UNIX IP extortion, ahem, SCOSource scheme, thereby invoking the copyright transfer clause of the APA?
They can't "expand the terms". But the CAN exercise terms that were already there (usually even if they or their predecessors hadn't happened to exercise them previously). Which is what they're claiming to do.
There are (at least) two problems with SCO's reasoning.
1) The APA (Asset Perchase Agreement) was between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations. Caldera/The SCO Group bought whatever assets Santa Cruz Operations owned at the time of sale. Did Caldera/The SCO Group buy the APA also? Can they go back and enforce a contact that was between Novell and the original Santa Cruz Operations?
Yes, unless the contract's transfer was excluded by its own terms. (That's what it means to buy an asset, after all: The new owner has the same rights as the old one.)
Keeping this stuff sorted out as companies merge, split, and trade divisions and assets around is part of why the execs pull down the big bux. (As with legislation, it's like writing programs and getting them right the first time - but dropping millions of bucks down the sewer if you have a bug.)
2) The APA was written to transfer only the UNIX licensing management to Santa Cruz Operations. Even if The SCO Group can enforce the original APA, can they expand the terms of the APA from mere license management to include their UNIX IP extortion, ahem, SCOSource scheme, thereby invoking the copyright transfer clause of the APA?
They can't "expand the terms". They can, however, invoke terms that were already there but that they (or their predecessors) hadn't yet happened to invoke. Which is what they are claiming to do.
If you'd just paid Novell a few million to get them to sign such a contract "selling you the Unix business", or taken a high corporate office in a company that had done so, wouldn't YOU think that's what it meant?
It doesn't matter what the current SCO execs think, it only matters what the Santa Cruz execs who signed the contract thought it meant.
One issue being discussed is whether the current SCO execs are halucinating a transfer of IP that isn't in the contract and launched their suit based on the halucination. I'm just pointing out that there's a plausible reading of that sentence that would give them what they claim.
Whatever they meant, it's clearly only a conditional transfer. If any unconditional copyright transfer was contemplated, it would have occurred by now.
The only thing conditional is the selection of which copyrights and trademarks are necessary to enforce their rights. I don't see anything that would indicate that the rights don't transfer until needed - though it could be argued that they could later discover that any particular set of copyright was needed to enforce their rights and demand its immediate transfer.
The condition in the amendment says the copyrights won't transfer except as required "to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies." In order to trigger the transfer, SCO needs to find something in their current activities that meet that clause.
Seems to me they only need to find a hypothetical. But that's moot. Wouldn't you agree that a legal battle-royalle against IBM qualifies?
the maintainers of linux - and other open software - should be prepared for the courts to accept SCO's arguments on the copyright ownership issue and should stay squeaky-clean by avoiding inclusion of any code that was in UNIX prior to 9/19/1995 (or even 10/18/1966) or derived from such code
Regardless of SCO's arguments about who owns the code, it's still under copyright and should not be included in any open source project. To date, nobody has been able to present any evidence that there was ever any copyrightable material improperly added to Linux and that's not likely to change.
We agree there. But IMHO the linux / open source community should also avoid UNIX code even if someone purports to be opening it to them until this copyright-ownership dispute is settled.
Not that you're likely to find anything worth taking in ten-year old code in any case.
Can't agree there. Algorithms don't stop working or decay with time - even when "obsoleted". Implementations ditto. Sometimes something better shows up later, sometimes not. Indeed, often later stuff is worse, because it's a second/third/fourth-best-known solution when the better stuff is tied up in some IP-protection. Then there's compatibility - sometimes you need to do it the old way or you break a lot of stuff. Further, the older solutions are usually well understood and researched, and often serve as the foundation for later work that would all collapse if you tried to use a different starting point. Then there's ease-of-use - sometimes the "better" solutions are a pain to abstract into something comprehensible.
Would you claim that, say, semaphores, pipes, or signals are now no longer useful? Or that there's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT way to do them that's better?
Slashdot Mirror
Pointing to a 3042-comment Slashdot argument about something as if you were pointing to evidence is really disingenuous. Sorry, but I'm not about to spend the next week wading through it to try to find the claims you were making so I can check them.
/. discussions ever.
What a newbie. This is one of the most famous
This "newbie" made seven of the comments in that more-than-three-years-old article. B-) Near the end, too, so you can tell I already waded through it once.
I'm not going to wade through it again to do YOUR homework for you.
If you actually read some of the comments, you will get good info on both sides of this debate. YOURS and mine.
That doesn't address my point.
- You claimed that the NRA funded the major studies showing benefits from gun ownership and gunbearing. (A gratuitous assertion.)
- I said that's false (gratuitous assertions can be gratuitously denied.) But being of open mind, I then asked you to back your claims with evidence.
- You pointed to an enormous slashdot discussion as if it were evidence for your claim.
- I refused to sieve through the more than 3,000 postings to try to find the evidence you claim is there, and asked you to point directly to it.
If there really IS any evidence for YOUR claim I challenge YOU to produce it, posting a direct link (or cite if it's not online) for it.
If you (or some other poster) can not do so, then I, and any other rational reader of this discussion, can safely assume that you do not have it, and that your claim is arbitrary and unsupported. (And given the number of people who would LOVE to discredit those studies, almost certainly false as well.)
The rest of your posting is a collection of red herrings. I will not be sidetracked.
Put up, or be exposed as either a dupe or bald-faced liar.
Yes, the NRA funded those "studies." This is common knowledge.
No, the NRA did NOT fund the studies in question, and the claim that they did is a bald-faced lie.
If you want more to read, here you go:
Pointing to a 3042-comment Slashdot argument about something as if you were pointing to evidence is really disingenuous. Sorry, but I'm not about to spend the next week wading through it to try to find the claims you were making so I can check them.
If you have any evidence that the studies by, say Kleck, Rossi & Wright, or Lott & Mustard were funded by the NRA, please post a pointer to it.
Yes, research funded by a group called the NRA. There is no other third party research available to support your claim.
In fact, none of it was funded by NRA.
(Some of it was funded by anti-gun groups, and at least one major researcher did a big opinion turnaround as a result of his results.)
Sorry. I'm tired of arguing over this.
Then why do you bother to respond?
You love guns. I don't. Agree? Okay good. Bye.
The base story was about research claiming that partisans, confronted by evidence, evaluate it based on emotion rather than logic, dismissing out of hand any evidence that conflicts with their political position and the releated preconceptions.
Thank you for providing such a glaring example of the behavior they describe. B-)
Look man, chill. Take it easy. We see you love guns. Maniacs like you [...]
Anonomous personal attack. I win! B-)
[...] aren't making your side of the argument look good. In fact, you make the other guy look good.
You wish. B-)
Last time I looked, rational examination of issues looks better than either quoting bogus stats or letting them stand.
And it looks a lot better than someone on the discredited side of an argument declaring victory. Or trying to sucker or social-pressure someone on the solid side into shutting up.
If you want to learn about pro vs. cons of guns, look what other countries do. Look outside of the US at their crime rates/gun crimes. And see how they handle guns.
And look at how they handle their stats, too.
In England they count a murder when they get a conviction. In the US they count a murder when they find a body.
When a father kills the mother, the three kids, and himself, the US counts four murders and a suicide. Japan counts five suicides.
I could go on.
This is what the "Uniform" is in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report - a standard way of reporting and counting crimes, so the stats from different jurisdictions within the US are at least roughly comparable.
Countries are also not comparable since there are plenty of other factors than gun policy affecting crime rates.
The biggest is culture. The US accepts immigrants from a number of cultures, many of them more violent than those of Germany or the British Isles. And it does not require them to assimilate and dump their cultural and linguistic heritage, allowing them to continue indoctrinating their children with "old country" ideas and ways of thinking for generations. The result is significant populations with hangovers from a variety of cultures, each with their own mix of criminal activity and other violent behavior.
But it's possible to sort out this effect reasonably well, since crooks tend to prey on others of their own community.
And when you look at the stats, you see that US residents of English descent have a lower murder risk in gun-happy USA than those in England. Ditto African descent vs. in Africa. Ditto Japanese descent than in Japan. And so on.
The higher murder rates in the US versus those some other countries is mainly the result of our larger population of people with ethnic roots in violent places.
(And it's cultural, not genetic. For instance, blacks who have assimilated and achieved middle-class or higher income and status have about the same murder risk as those of western European descent.)
But we're not concerned so much with passively observing differences between countries as we are with figuring out how to change things to improve them in OUR countries. (Or at least I am - are you?)
So a more productive thing to look at is how crime rates correlate with state and local gun laws and policies and CHANGES to them.
Short form: Change the laws to raise the rate of weapons carrying and the violent crime rate drops - drastically. "More Guns, Less Crime" to quote the title of one book about it.
There's plenty of solid research on this if you're interested (and willing to consider it, rather than dismiss out-of-hand any study that makes a conclusion you don't like.)
Pick your favorite source. This is common knowledge, a well known 'attribute' of Miami.
And it's wrong.
Picking just the top rated item from the google search in question, we find that the article under the points to sperling's re-interpretation of the 2002 UCR stats.
If you follow the links to the tables, you'll see that Miami was NOT the top in their study - it was beaten by (at least) Tucson. The line "Miami's violent crime rate is the highest in the nation" is from a SUBSET of cities they studied - those with population greater than a half-million (which Tucson missed by less than 3% in the 2000 census). Their weighting of crimes is suspect (unless crime rates changed drastically between 2002 and 2003), since it puts Detroit well below Miami, while the FBI puts it well above.
Interestingly, the next sentence (partially shown in the search you posted) is "Thankfully, the murder rate is relatively low." This directly contradicts your other claim of Highest murder rate, everything.
Of course your local media will be happy to misconstrue such studies into scare headlines, the better to sell more papers to the people of Miami, and more of their eyeball and ear time to advertisers.
But try a different search: '"crime rate" highest'. You'll get a raft of other headlines, claiming a broad scattering of cities and regions as the US or world record holder.
Top two items when I just did it on Google were:
- "Once Again, Dallas Has Highest Crime Rate in the Country"
- "England has worst crime rate in world"
Redefine "violent crime" appropriately and pick your cutoff city size and you can make any of a plethora of cities the record holder.
Miami has the highest crime rate in the country, and has for some time. [...] Highest murder rate, everything.
Really? Where are you getting that claim?
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports deliberately don't rank the cities. But others compile rankings from them and you can check them against the FBI's report on their web site.
According to this Wikipedia article, compiled from the FBI's 2003 UCR (which is referenced there if you want to check), Miami's violent crime rate is significantly-to-far below that of a number of other cities, such as Detroit MI, Irvington NJ, and Atlanta, GA. It's even below that of Springfiled MA - in a state more gun-unfrindly than California.
For murder rate it's even farther behind. Ranked 31 at 19.4/100,000, less than half that of Baltimore MD and Washington DC (with it's federally-enforced near-total gun ban). Gary IN takes the lead there (at 67.0), but many other big names leave Miami in the dust: Camden NJ, Detroit again, Ritchmond and Oakland CA, Newark NJ, Philidelphia PA, I could go on.
Do you have a source for your claim? Or are you just making it up as you go?
To my knowledge DNA methylation cannot be reversed and DNA methylase has not been found to exist yet. The only way DNA de-methylation at a particular CpG site in DNA can occur is by DNA replication(cell division), where replication of DNA gives an unmethylated CpG site.
Huh?
Last time I looked the point of DNA methylation was this:
One of the four bases (I forget which) has a methylation site, and the DNA replication mechanism normally copies the methylation state as well as the base type. This effectively makes the genome a FIVE-letter alphabet.
In a fraction of complex life forms that includes humans, the methylation state of all or much of the genome is "reset" to a particular configuration during the production of the gamet cells - at least those of one of the sexes.
This allows methylation to be used, gene by gene, or set-of-genes by set-of-genes, as a switch during tissue differentiation. Methylating (or de-methylating) a particular site can turn a gene's expression on or off (or perhaps modulate its expression magnitude) and the state of the switch is retained through cell replication as the tissue grows into its proper size and form, and as cells are replaced later.
Of course this means that gene expression errors can occur (and accumulate with age or exposure to toxins) due to improper copying or changing of the methylation state, just as they can occur due to improper copying of, damage to, or editing of, the base sequence itself.
= = = =
So now scientists have identified a gene which is inactivated by methylation and whose normal function is one of the roadblocks that a broad class of cancer types must eliminate as they progress to full-blown pathologies.
And of course there's a speculation that, since it's a switch, there might be a treatment potential using drugs to flip it to the non-cancer-associated state, which would make the cancerous tissue eitehr revert to normal or at least to a less invasive earlier stage of the disease.
I agree there's a potential for such a treatment. But I suspect that just dosing with a generic state-setting drug may cause havoc by resetting the switches on other genes as well. I'd expect that practical treatments will have to wait for development of a drug that's specific to that PARTICULAR gene's methylation state, or at least to the methylation sites of a narrower set of genes, rather than scattergunning the whole genome.
Of course it's possible that scattergun demethylation might not be a total disaster. Perhaps important cell differentation steps might not be totally dependent on the methylation, but include something that tends to set the switch again. Perhaps the result would be reversion to a more stem-cell like state that could "figure out" what tissue to be once again. Or perhaps even the havoc of the reset is better than dying of an otherwise incurable cancer type.
But I'm betting that more focus will be needed for a practical treatment.
Please to show where anyone is trying to suppress the speech of the Bruin Alumni Association.
The grandparent poster said that their activities - collecting and publishing evidence of professorial misuse of office for political indoctrination - shouldn't be allowed.
That certainly sounded like suppression of free speech to me.
(Academia is considered to be more liberal than conservative, or at least it's presented as such)
Much of academia - especially at UCLA - is far to the left of Joe Stalin.
But if your whole experince is such far-left-leaning loudmouths, your perception of even a moderate leftist, let alone a centerist, will be "to the right of Attila the Hun".
Don't bother looking for an actual conservative professor at that university. You won't find one - who talks about it.
It [identifying profesorial ideologues who abuse their students by propagandizing them in class and/or grading on their students' ideologies] shouldn't be allowed -
Free speech - stating true information and the evidence backing it - shouldn't be allowed?
What ever happened to the time when you could disagree with someone, but still respect their opinion?
What happened is "political correctness" - brainwashing techniques honed in the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and other Communist countries and revolutionary movements, transplanted onto campus by the radical left.
Look at you: You're apparently so indoctrinated that you actually believe it's right to suppress the speech of someone who is merely identifying (and collecting evidence to prove the identification of) professors who abuse their positions.
Lets get some facts straight:
UWB has been around since the early 1950's when the military started developing it. It is ACTUALLY a simplier radio than an 802.11 radio,
While we're getting facts straight...
Actually there were TWO major types of UWB being considered by the IEEE group. One I'd characterize as an orthogonal-wavelet direct-sequence spread spectrum approach, plowsharing older military tech, which appears to be the one you're describing. The other was a orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing approach, very much like WiFi, DVB, and a number of other systems (such as the Ricochet wireless network and the Telebit Trailblazer modems.)
The systems had different technical advantages and disadvantages. (For instance: The DS system was simpler and lower power hardware, but needed notch filters on transmit to avoid interfering with other services that were still active in its band and depended on forward error correction to compensate for pattern sensitivity from the notch filters and the propagation differences across the band. The OFDM system could notch out on transmit just by chosing not to send on those segments of the band and processed each chunk of band separately so wasn't bothered by selective propagation conditions, but required a lot of DSP power on both transmit and recieve, and still needed filters to keep narrow-band interference from saturationg the receiver A-to-D converter.)
A bigger issue, though, was that the engineering talents required to work with the two systems were different. A WiFi OFDM team could just move to the OFDM system with little new knowlege. The DS system requried a somewhat different skill set to engineer - a digital/analog interface mix. There were plenty of engineers with skills availabe for each system. But they were largely DIFFERENT engineers.
Each system had several companies - at least one a major player - backing it. And of course each player was backing their bet with advance engineering on their approach, and so was heavily invested. Since both systems would perform very well (alone), the choice became more a matter of politics, protecting the companys' investments and technical lead, than of the technical merits of the respective systems.
Since a supermajority of the players in the standards voting was needed to make a pick, neither side had it, and neither was willing to bend, the process bogged down. It became apparent a couple years ago that the standards effort would fail, the working group would throw in the towel, "the marketplace would decide". And without a standard in place only the big guys would be able to play. (The chip companies were ahead and were giving advanced chip info only to major, established, partners. So even a startup intending only to assemble a device was out in the cold.)
The two systems, however, would NOT share the band well. Each would tend to jam the other. The DS side (the smaller faction) tried to salvage the train wreck. They proposed a slower, robust, common transmission mode that could be handled by either system with trivial additions to its hardware and firmware (and less effort on the OFDM faction's part than their own), to be used for the short bursts of communication involved in time-slicing the channels. And for the standard to prescirbe using this and standardizing a version of each of the two approaches.
But the OFDM group was not interested. They had more players, and the players had gotten together to do their own, internal standardization effort of their own systems. For them the standardization effort was mainly an exercise in keeping the DS group (which needed less time to get equipment ready for market) from moving until they were ready to go with their stuff. (Within their approach and with the OFDM version of the draft standard as a reference, they could go to market once they had something ready and tune out any minor incompatibilites among themselves with firmware tweaks, and there were more of them so they had the odds down,
The synopsis above is misleading. Its is GPL violators, not simply GPL users who are at risk.
And to clarify further: The issue is about basing a product on GPLed code without disclosing that you are doing so.
If you do this, get it wrong, and get caught, you have a choice between stopping distribution of the product or releasing the source to its guts (or some fraction of it) to the public (including your competitors and potential customers) for free (as in speech AND beer) reuse.
This may be perceived as a risk to your business model - and thus is something that must be disclosed to your investors and potential investors if your company is publically traded.
Maybe it's not a risk. But corporations are required to give enough information to their current and potential investors for them to make their own determination.
= = = =
Meanwhile it's NOT an issue AT ALL for companies using Linux on the desktop. or even in internal processes (as long as they don't make changes to its guts that are key to their competitive advantage and then do something that counts as distribution - which is unnecessary if it's just being used as a platform for applications and services).
Yet the article - even with the clarification - makes it seem this is an issue for desktop and server USERS - and many comments are responding to that bogus threat. Oops!
The editors should clarify the article further.
No time to go into details now. Jist:
- Driver writers for GPL3ed OSes can't support DRM features of devices.
- Manufacturers of such devices could be prosecuted under the DMCA if they give driver writers any information that might be useful to write a driver to support their devices without supporting the DRM features.
So their partners who own the DRM tech - and Microsoft - will have an additional lever to use to block any assistance to Linux device-driver writers and maintainers: The power of the state.
(Even if this analysis is wrong, or governments might not chose to prosecute, the threat alone is probably enough to scare off a corporate exec.)
From the adoption of GPL3 on, count on having to reverse-engineer any DRM-enabled device.
So why not toughen up laws on companies that hire illegal immigrants in the first place? [...] If someone is caught hiring an illegal immigrant, they should be forced to have all their employees checked for citizenship status, and for each person who isn't legally accounted for, fine the company.
Such laws are already on the books - and even occasionally enforced. They're enforced with about as much vigor as the laws against illegal immigration. The current situation developed - then escalated - then snowballed - with exactly the sort of laws you propose already in place.
The problem is not a lack of laws, or laws being too "loose". The problem (or at least the "law" part of it) is that the existing laws are not being enforced.
We are buried in laws. Virtually none of them are enforced, and the rest are enforced very selectively. Passing more laws simply reduces the fraction of laws that are actually enforced - and further reduces the respect that people have for the law.
Further, if the laws directly attacking the problem are ignored, what makes you think something more indirect will be any less ignored. (Unless, of course, an indirect law has some other, unintended, effect that the people chosing what laws to enforce would find useful for their own purposes.)
If we are to return to the rule of law and respect for the law, the solution will not be found in the legislative branch throwing more laws at every problem (and further complicating the problem). The solution will be found in the executive and judicial branches enforcing laws in a consistent and productive manner.
The main contribution the legislative branch can make is to clean out the mass of junk laws by repeal or sunset, and tune the rest into a consistent, simple, understandable, fair, and constitutional body of law - with as little left to the prescription of law and as much left to free choice as possible.
Meanwhile, the administration's call for more anti-terrorism power is falling on deaf ears among both liberals and (especially) conservatives - especially in the southwestern states where the problem is so great that some have declared states of emergency, and the situation is developing into a shooting war.
How can Washington claim that there is a "terrorist threat" when they leave the southern border wide open to wholesale invasion by all comers, to the tune of millions per year - (including those from countries that are the hotbeds of anti-US terrorism), along with anything they can carry (or ship in, disguised as harmless bales of illegal drugs)?
If there really is a "terrorist threat" why isn't the government down there right NOW with every national guardsman, reservist, and regular military member and piece of applicable military equipment that can be spared elsewhere, sealing and fortifying that border? As long as that is wide open, confiscating fingernail clippers at airports and bugging international phone calls and the internet is a sick joke.
Some people think that closing the borders protects US jobs but the reality is that, since corporations can cross borders with ease, if the cheap workers don't come to the corporations then the corporations will go to the cheap workers with the same loss of US jobs.
The problem with "illegal" foreign workers is not that they work for less.
The problem with "illegal" foregin workers is that they work for less than legal US citizens CAN work.
Because they're illegal they can work for less than minimum wage, when a documented worker must be paid at least the minimum. (And they can often keep a lot more of it because many of them don't have to pay taxes on what they do make.)
Because they're illegal they can't complain of poor working conditions, or join or organize unions. First time one makes trouble for the boss, all the boss has to do is inform on him and he's gone.
Result: Essentially all the unions except the government employee unions have been broken. And contractors must hire illegals and pay them crap, or they can't compete with those who do. (In construction work, for instance, virtually all the positions except crane operator (a very visible, responsible, and REGULATED position, given the havoc an incompent can cause) are now filled almost entirely with "undocumented" non-union labor, when they were once held by union employees, paid a decent wage and benefits and working under decent conditions.)
Of course this situation means no benefits either - especially medical benefits. So both the "undocumented" workers and their families obtain health care and other benefits through the welfare system, and through leaching on the medical system. Clinics and urgent care operations require a payment and information for billing, while the much more expensive emergency rooms are required to treat all comers and prohibited from inquiring about immigration status. So E-rooms are used for every cold and flu, and virtally all of the cost is transferred to the progressively smaller fraction of patients who actually pay for their care - directly, or through employer-paid insurance programs. This load causes the cost of medical care to skyrocket - and these added costs make citizen workers even less competitive against "undocumented" workers.
Yet many of them do not seek, or can't obtain, treatment for chronic illnesses or immunizations. The result is a resurgence of childhood diseases for which immunizations exist, drug-resistant tuburculosis, and introduction into the US of a number of mosquito-borne tropical diseases - to name just a few of the problems.
The children of these families, of course, receive education in the public schools. Very expensive education, of course, thanks to the requirement that the be taught in Spanish (even if they were not native speakers of it). California is wallowing in debt. Yet just the money spend on public school education for children of the "undocumented" has been reliabily estimated to exceed the state's defict. Eliminating this cost alone would balance the state's budget.
So, despite claims that the "undocumented" contribute to the economy, for the average taxpaying citizen the costs are far disproportionate to the benefit. Those rich enough to afford domestic help and companies able to hire an "undocumented" workforce get cheap labor (and union busters), subsidized by the taxes and increased service costs paid by the rest of us.
And make no mistake: These people are displacing the citizen work force. (In the last reporting interval the number of blue-collar jobs lost by US citizens and the number gained by "undocumented" laborers inside the US were virtually identical.)
Some jobs CAN'T be outsourced: Construction. Farm labor. Landscaping. Janitorial work. I could go on. These are jobs that US citizens have historically done - and which they mostly don't do any more. It's not because they don't WANT to. It's because they CAN'T - because employers CAN'T hire them, under US law, for as
[...] information on George W. illegally bypassing said court [...]
One of the issues currently in play is whether it IS illegal for the whitehouse to "bypass said court" - or even if congress CAN prescribe by law that the executive branch must ask such a court for permission to wiretap FOR FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE.
There's no question that the congress can prescribe how the executive branch does wiretapping for CRIMINAL JUSTICE purposes - (except that the constitution may completely prohibit warrantless wiretaps FOR THAT PURPOSE, so even congress couldn't authorize warrentless taps if the info goes to criminal cases).
(And - assuming the administration's claim is correct - one thing that's wrong about the Patriot Act is that it allows info obtained on the claimed-to-be-lower foreign-intellignence standard of suspicion to leak into law enforcement's operation, with its high requirements for suspicion and warrants.)
To say (as you do above) that the wiretapping in question is illegal is to take one party's side in an argument about a point of law. That point will only be settled when the Supreme Court rules on it.
It doesn't bother me that they want to wiretap suspected terrorists, but why the no-warrant stuff? Can't they just get a classified warrant?
There are two uses for intercepts of communications:
- Developing evidence for criminal prosecutions.
- Developing intelligence about military operations, to improve response to them. In the terrorism context: Finding out in advance and stopping things like the 9/11 attacks.
The first clearly is a search, and under the 5th amendment requires warrants supported by probable cause. The congress can pass laws to set up procedures and limits on when and how to do this, which must be followed by the executive and courts.
Courts have already declared that any evidence gathered WITHOUT such warrants and/or probable cause, including any information developed as a result of investigations started due to illegally obtained information, can not be used. No matter how many steps there are between the illegally-obtained info and the evidence. This is the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine. The chain is only broken when a separate, legally-obtained, probable cause occurs to justify the searches, taps, etc. without recourse to the "bad fruit" as a cause of suspicion. (Moral justification: An out-of-control government is MUCH more dangerous than even a few serial killers let loose. You can't get people to watch the watchmen - but you can encourage them to behave within the law by making it impossible to get convictions when they break it.)
The administration claims that the second is a constitutional function of the executive branch, part of its military role. As such the congress has no power to pass laws that would block or control the executive branch's use of this claimed branch-specific power. And that as long as the information gleaned is not used for criminal prosecution it's fair game.
This interpretation would mean that the administration could intercept a lot more stuff without warrants - PROVIDED it didn't use this info in the furtherance of prosecuting CRIMINAL cases. That would let them do things like stop 9/11-style attacks (provided they didn't then bring criminal cases against the terrorists on whom they only had only the military spying info and things derived from it, or the investigations it started).
This raises problems for the administration: Say they have news in advance of another 9/11 style attack. Do they let it go forward and kill 3,000 innocent civilians so they can bust the (probably dead anyhow) attackers and as much of their network as they can reach? Or do they stop the attack? (But without the intercepts they don't get the choice.)
Since the wiretapping technology is common, keeping these functions separate is tough. That's a major reason behind the separation between the NSA and the FBI.
The Clinton administration (by executive order) raised that wall so high that it cut them off virtually completely - which was apparently a large part of the reason the 9/11 attacks weren't headed off. The Patriot Act lowers it - and many (myself included) think it lowers it too far, allowing tainted intelligence to flow to law enforcement.
And that's, IMHO, what's going on here. The administration wants to continue using their claimed "right to do military spying" without interference. Those opposed to it are opposed for one or more of the following reasons:
- They're confusing the two functions,
- They don't agree that such military spying is constitutional, or
- They think that the military spying info will be improperly used for law-enforcement or otherwise improperly (i.e. leaked to businesses, used to create databases on citizens, to support "dirty tricks" actions against political opponents, etc.)
That last is a reasonable fear: Such spying his been used in this way repeatedly in the past. It usually only makes it to the news decades later, allowing the perpetual claim that "it used to be that way in the old days but not any more".
Thankfully, most Americans understand that if they have no affiliation with terrorist groups, they have nothing to worry about.
Yeah, right.
I know a nice housewife who converted to Islam a few months before 9/11.
She participates in a number of Islamic political discussion web sites and mailing lists - where she is a voice of reason, explaining to Muslums how various actions look to Americans and giving them helpful suggestions. Especially this includes how to make it clear to us if they really are opposed to terrorism.
On a couple occasions a radical jihadist mailing list has arbitrarily added her to their distribution list and not removed her despite repeated requests.
The NSA says is doing traffic analysis. That means looking at who talks to whom and when - without looking at the contents of the transmissions.
Think about how the bogus jihadist mailing list subscription and her attempts to get off it makes her look. Bunch of email from a terrorist organization, lots this mail followed in short order my of email from her to them...
(Her solution: After they fail to remove her after a couple attempts, complain to the FBI, attaching the offending email. B-) But the NSA won't hear about that. So unless her mail to the FBI shows up in the traffic analysis and is analyzed correctly (or incorrectly in a way that makes her look to the NSA like an FBI informant or a double-agent) she'll still look like a jihadi, won't she?)
Tice had his security clearance removed and was fired because of psychological concerns.
As I recall, they pulled the same thing on the guy who released "The Pentagon Papers" back in the Vietnam era.
When Tice was asked about this claim he laughed it off and said that it is SOP to throw the fruitcake at anyone who might expose company problems.
... us WHAT WAS DISCOVERED - or even POINTED US TO THE RESEARCH, rather than just saying it HAD been discovered and then sidtracking into ragging on the "intelligent design" creationists.
I see lots of bitching and wringing of hands.
It don't see a BIT of the action necessary to deal with this crap.
Congresscritters can stick little gotchase in bills every day. If the ever get used it takes enormous effort, cost, and personal risk to get them struck down in courts. Ditto to get them repealed.
The way to nip this stuff in the bud is to make it COST the congresscritters.
I'm not talking about the ones who voted for the "must-pass bill" that was parisitized. They have a plausible excuse. I'm talking about the ones who ADDED THE OFFENDING LANGUAGE to the bill.
So where, in all this coverage and hand-wringing, is the LIST OF NAMES of the congressman or senator who PROPOSED THE AMENDMENT, and the LIST OF NAMES of the congressmen or senators who VOTED FOR THE AMENDMENT?
Don't like it? Dig out those names and publish them.
Then start a campaign in their district (which you can do from anywhere in the country) to get them bumped - in the next primary, and the next election, and the one after it, and the one after that, until they're gone. Or (fat chance) they submit, and get passed, a repeal of each of their own offending bills.
I worked in the Radar and Optics lab starting back in the summer of 1968. That fall I ran an optical processor in Emmett's lab for one of his colleagues (Ron Fredricks), processing side-looking radar data using holographic techniques. (An optic processor could do a multi-megapixel two-D fourier transform in the time it took the laser light to go a couple yards down the optic bench. In those days computers were built of discrete components, and it would have taken one perhaps days - even with FFT algorithms, which were just being developed - to do the same. So this was quite a big deal. (Computers weren't up to this job for a decade or more.)
That lasted until it was discovered that I was the only person on the floor with a working knowlege of Fortran when Emmett needed some programming done to model wavefronts for his current project.
Coding Emmett's stuff got my hands on one of Cray's first machines (a CDC 1604), under circumstances where I would often have the machine to myself for an hour at a time while waiting for output to be processed - time I used to "cut my hacker teeth" by exploring the OS and building my own tools.
By the time I had his program done he had figured out an analytical solution to his problem (yet another example of his brilliance). But by then the sister infrared-and-optics lab (which owned the computer) had seen my work and "borrowed" me for several years afterward to do their lab's system and some of their application programming. So I have Emmett to thank (in addition to Galler, Riddle, Blue, and to some extent Weiser) for launching my carreer in computer programming.
Emmett loved to show off the stuff in the lab or tell "war stories" of laser and wavefront optics history. Some things I recall:
- An early setup for making phase holograms that could be illuminated by white light for reconstruction - along with a holographic corrector plate that predistorted the reconstruction beam, making the image painfully brilliant.
- A two-beam setup for creating an image of a surface with its illumination dependent on depth, creating topological-map style rings of light and dark areas of high resolution - suitable for depth-mapping the impression on the surface of a coin with a couple dozen levels. And a discussion of whether one could use the principle to make a "striped light" flashlight that would appear to illuminate things this way without requiring an intervening hologram step.
A story about the discovery (not invention) of the neodymium-doped-glass laser - when another laser-lab worker in the ruby-rod days happened to notice, while taking holiday photographs of his family, that right after the strobe flashed a glass ashtray would make a red blink. (He took the ashtray to the lab, demonstrated the effect to others, then they smashed and analyzed it, isolating the impurity responsible for the effect and building working laser rods much less expensive than synthetic rubies.)
I am deeply saddened to hear of his passing. But he has left an enormous legacy. The world is a much brighter place for his having been in it.
There are (at least) two problems with SCO's reasoning.
1) The APA (Asset Perchase Agreement) was between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations. Caldera/The SCO Group bought whatever assets Santa Cruz Operations owned at the time of sale. Did Caldera/The SCO Group buy the APA also? Can they go back and enforce a contact that was between Novell and the original Santa Cruz Operations?
Sure, unless the terms of the original contract forbid it. That's what it means to transfer an asset: The new owner has the same rights as the old one.
Biz contracts are generally written to survive mergers, spinouts, and the like even if they do forbid simple sale. Keeping that sorted out is much of why mergers and the like get complicated, and a big part of why the execs get the big bucks. (Like legislation, it's a matter of writing a program and getting it right the first time - but with millions of bucks down the drain if you have a bug.)
2) The APA was written to transfer only the UNIX licensing management to Santa Cruz Operations. Even if The SCO Group can enforce the original APA, can they expand the terms of the APA from mere license management to include their UNIX IP extortion, ahem, SCOSource scheme, thereby invoking the copyright transfer clause of the APA?
They can't "expand the terms". But the CAN exercise terms that were already there (usually even if they or their predecessors hadn't happened to exercise them previously). Which is what they're claiming to do.
There are (at least) two problems with SCO's reasoning.
1) The APA (Asset Perchase Agreement) was between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations. Caldera/The SCO Group bought whatever assets Santa Cruz Operations owned at the time of sale. Did Caldera/The SCO Group buy the APA also? Can they go back and enforce a contact that was between Novell and the original Santa Cruz Operations?
Yes, unless the contract's transfer was excluded by its own terms. (That's what it means to buy an asset, after all: The new owner has the same rights as the old one.)
Keeping this stuff sorted out as companies merge, split, and trade divisions and assets around is part of why the execs pull down the big bux. (As with legislation, it's like writing programs and getting them right the first time - but dropping millions of bucks down the sewer if you have a bug.)
2) The APA was written to transfer only the UNIX licensing management to Santa Cruz Operations. Even if The SCO Group can enforce the original APA, can they expand the terms of the APA from mere license management to include their UNIX IP extortion, ahem, SCOSource scheme, thereby invoking the copyright transfer clause of the APA?
They can't "expand the terms". They can, however, invoke terms that were already there but that they (or their predecessors) hadn't yet happened to invoke. Which is what they are claiming to do.
If you'd just paid Novell a few million to get them to sign such a contract "selling you the Unix business", or taken a high corporate office in a company that had done so, wouldn't YOU think that's what it meant?
It doesn't matter what the current SCO execs think, it only matters what the Santa Cruz execs who signed the contract thought it meant.
One issue being discussed is whether the current SCO execs are halucinating a transfer of IP that isn't in the contract and launched their suit based on the halucination. I'm just pointing out that there's a plausible reading of that sentence that would give them what they claim.
Whatever they meant, it's clearly only a conditional transfer. If any unconditional copyright transfer was contemplated, it would have occurred by now.
The only thing conditional is the selection of which copyrights and trademarks are necessary to enforce their rights. I don't see anything that would indicate that the rights don't transfer until needed - though it could be argued that they could later discover that any particular set of copyright was needed to enforce their rights and demand its immediate transfer.
The condition in the amendment says the copyrights won't transfer except as required "to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies." In order to trigger the transfer, SCO needs to find something in their current activities that meet that clause.
Seems to me they only need to find a hypothetical. But that's moot. Wouldn't you agree that a legal battle-royalle against IBM qualifies?
the maintainers of linux - and other open software - should be prepared for the courts to accept SCO's arguments on the copyright ownership issue and should stay squeaky-clean by avoiding inclusion of any code that was in UNIX prior to 9/19/1995 (or even 10/18/1966) or derived from such code
Regardless of SCO's arguments about who owns the code, it's still under copyright and should not be included in any open source project. To date, nobody has been able to present any evidence that there was ever any copyrightable material improperly added to Linux and that's not likely to change.
We agree there. But IMHO the linux / open source community should also avoid UNIX code even if someone purports to be opening it to them until this copyright-ownership dispute is settled.
Not that you're likely to find anything worth taking in ten-year old code in any case.
Can't agree there. Algorithms don't stop working or decay with time - even when "obsoleted". Implementations ditto. Sometimes something better shows up later, sometimes not. Indeed, often later stuff is worse, because it's a second/third/fourth-best-known solution when the better stuff is tied up in some IP-protection. Then there's compatibility - sometimes you need to do it the old way or you break a lot of stuff. Further, the older solutions are usually well understood and researched, and often serve as the foundation for later work that would all collapse if you tried to use a different starting point. Then there's ease-of-use - sometimes the "better" solutions are a pain to abstract into something comprehensible.
Would you claim that, say, semaphores, pipes, or signals are now no longer useful? Or that there's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT way to do them that's better?