Wow, that gave me a good laugh. From my experience, that isn't what the college grads are doing, that's what the veterans are doing. Life in the "real world" outside of the "ivory tower" seems to install those attitudes, rather than diminish them from everything I've seen.
I mean in college you've only got grades to compete against each other for. Outside of college everyone is competing for money.
I presume you're referring to: prov[ing]... That you can work with a team, rather than try to out-score the other team members.
Yes, in the real world you're competing for money. But in a well-run company your TEAM is competing aginst OTHER COMPANIES. If your management encourages you to compete WITHIN the team you've got a problem. Success AS a team requires cooperation WITHIN the team.
And that's one of the places where the "management can be very bad and not (quite) kill the company" effect shows up in high tek. A lot of silicon valley management DOES encourage this. It's called the "star system". (The opposite is the "Demming approach".)
In a star system a few high-profile alleged geniuses get all the resources (and most of the rewards), while everybody else's work is thrashed around and by them. But the bulk of the work is actually produced by the bulk of the team, and this slows the rest of them down (and annoys them greatly, slowing them further). The result is that the company is less productive than its competition (IF it gets to product at ALL) and eventually fails.
Demming management style recognizes that the best self-salespeople on a team may not even be the most productive. It distributes work so that everyone has something useful to do that they enjoy doing, and rewards everyone who produces rather than just the highest-profile tale-spinners. With the job divided up into territories where each member is a local expert the whole team "strokes" each other and works smoothly together. The members respect each other and divide new problems appropriately rather than competing for plums which end up going to the stars with the rest festering over doing scutt-work for no recognition. Management can concentrate on connecting the team to the rest of the company and keeping upper management from thrashing it. And LOTS of work gets done.
Of course, in my experience tech companies tend to be ill-managed.;)
Tech has SO much value-added that companies can often be INCREDIBLY ill-managed and still remain profitable for years. (And when they're starting up there's a period where they're running on investment and aren't even expected to be profitable.)
And when things are booming just TRY to hire a GOOD tech manager. They're far scarcer than good techies.
The media made it seem like you just knock on employers' doors, tell them you're a programmer, and *bam*, money, stock options, prostitutes, ferraris, etc. No industry works like that.
Two other factors:
Companies want to see some experience. There's a lot of junk fed to people in school, so there's a lot to UNlearn - starting with the attituds that you know what you're doing, that if it wasn't taught to you in school it's not important, etc. (This is especially true in software.)
You need to prove that you're over the hump and can do real work in the real world. That you can work with a team, rather than try to out-score the other team members. That you can handle a project with multiple solutions and not go for the "best" one over an "adequate and quick" or "easy to get right" one. That you can handle something longer, tougher, and more unknown than a class assignment, something without a canned solution. That you'll read the manual. That you'll pull a stock design for a wheel FROM a manual rather than trying to reinvent it.
Of course this gives you a chicken-and-egg problem: You need a job to get experience. You need experience to get a job. That's part of why work-study and unpaid internships can be a carreer win.
Most jobs are obtained through contacts. A recommend from somebody in or associated with the company is trusted much more than one that a candidate brought with him. A worker or administrator may know someone he's already worked with - and thus that he CAN work with - who has a necessary skill. And a contact will know of the jobs before HR does, and can help you prepare to fit in. And he probably won't try to get you into something he knows you can't handle.
At one time in many companies the HR department exists primarily to give nice brush-offs to the flood of unsolicited resumes while creating plausable excuses for hiring those recommended by insiders. Nowdays (or at least until the recent crash) they're more like a search firm. But even so an inside recommend is worth more than ten from outside.
It's called "networking".
And that's ANOTHER reason that work-study, internships, summer jobs, and the like are very valuable.
You notice the one offer you got was from someone you worked with while in school. Is that more understandable now?
Actually, I CAN imagine...
on
Linux TV
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· Score: 2
ObSlashdotStupidity: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh, never mind.:-)
Actually, I can.
I imagine it doing a wall-of-monitors bigscreen, in software, in real-time.
Why did they choose Linux? Had they chosen FreeBSD or something they could save face and not have to tell anyone how they did it. With the GPL, any hard work or software magic they do has to be open source too
But they don't WANT to close it up. They're licensing the hardware to other manufacturers, so there's nothing to be gained (and a lot to be lost - like willingness of other manufacturers to buy) by closing the software.
Also: They apparently want to sell to early-adopters, who have been asking for Linux.
If nothing else, I bet the customers don't want their TV crashing constantly, script-kiddies changing their channels or turning it on at 3 AM, the boss finding out what porn they're watching, and the movie companies showing up to bust them for viewing homemade copies of rented movies.
If your TV's on the net with closed-source appware how do you know it's not open to all of the above?
... it is possible to prove some software, but this is not true of most software on a useful scale.
Actually I claim that this isn't true. It is possible to prove that two very different expressions of a problem are EQUIVALENT, but that's a very different thing from proving either of them is the CORRECT solution for a given problem.
This is not as bad as it sounds: The most effective way known to notice bugs is to express the problem in two very different ways and compare them. Primary example: The spec versus the code. (That's why the spec is IMPORTANT. "Self-documenting code" is a myth. When you go to verify it and the only spec is the code itself, the only thing you can check is that the compiler works right.)
Strongly OO languages like C++ which dereference everything eat processor cycles. It may not be apparent why this is a problem until you try to implement a 6-level interrupt system on an 80186 (as one company I know of did)
For most OO languages this is true. But for C++ it is not. You can get away without the dereferencing if you need to. (You COULD even fall back into a style that amounts to compiling essentially ANSI C via a C++ compiler.)
But to get away without the dereferences you also have to abandon the things that need them - like polymorphism. This doesn't mean you have to abandon all the features. (For instance, you can define a class hierarchy so you don't get polymorphc support unless you need it, and specify that you don't use it on particular function calls - at the risk of violating encapsulation checking. (Overloaded operators are very handy and often don't need to dereference anything.) But you're starting to get into the "why bother" area.
The big problem is that to do this efficiently you need somebody who:
A) Knows how to program well in C, including how to get efficient compiler output in the tight spots.
B) Knows how to program well in OOP style.
C) Knows HOW the C++ compiler achieves its effects, so he knows how to get it to do things efficiently.
And now you're talking about a VERY rare and expensive person. A is years of training. Adding B to someone who has A is typically 6 months minimum of learning curve just to start being productive again. (Starting with B makes it hard to get really good at A, while starting with A puts up mental roadblocks when you're relearning how to do things B style.) Most procedural programmers who learn OOP stop there.
But adding C is much like repeating the learning techniques of the pioneering days of computer education. Everybody learned assembly and how pre-optimizer compilers worked, because they were expected to WRITE their own compler some day. In the process they learned how to write source code that would trick a non-optimizing compiler into putting out good assembly. Technique C consists of doing much the same thing to a C++ compiler to get the equivalent of tight C out of it.
So if you happen to have a small team of people who already HAVE all this knowlege, they might make a C++ interrupt handler that is as efficient, or nearly so, as one coded in C or even assembler. But why not just do it in C, assembler, or some hybird in the first place? Then people with only skill set A can understand it and work on it. B-)
As I understand it (though I could be off on this), the patent office doesn't strictly require that a device or process do what it is claimed to do to give you an exclusive on it. They stopped requiring that long ago - about the time they stopped requiring you to deliver a working model (for lack of storage space).
If you want to pay a bunch of money and effort to get a 17-year exclusive on building something new that doesn't work, fine with them.
So a patent is not an endorsement by the US government of your scientific or engineering claims.
An exception is perpetual motion machines. There were SO many applications wasting SO much of their time that they still require you do deliver a working model. THAT put a big spike in the fad, though people still try.
One fellow had trouble patenting a very efficient still. It was very tall to use gravity to create a decent vacuum at the top (like the original water version of a mercury barometer), and acted as a counter-current heat exchanger, scavenging heat from the condensate and brine to preheat the raw water feed. You still had to add the heat of solution and some more to deal with losses, but that's a LOT less than boiling off the whole output stream at local atmospheric pressure.
They initially refused his application, thinking it was a perpetual motion machine, and he had to argue long and hard to get the patent.
You can't get up and say that this tool does not break into people's system, the users do.
That's not the point.
On computer networks (in the absense of a STANDARDIZED publication of a declaration of a well-known excpetion) the permission system settings are normally considered the expression of the INTENT of the person who set them.
The only well-recognized exceptions I can think of at the moment are:
- Copyright notices on published text.
- Certain prohibitions (by custom and/or statute) on use of administrator privileges to snoop.
- The mechanism for restricting search engines from indexing certain pages (such as dynamic or proprietary site content).
Changing the permissions on a portion of their files so that the world can read and write them could be an expression of intent that they do so, or could be an error. This difference in intent is indistinguishable externally. So if another user takes advantage of the explicit permission change to do exactly what it allows, one must assume he is acting with the permission of the resource's owner unless he has been explicitly informed otherwise.
Further, when you're dealing with laws that ban an activity, any ambiguity in the law must (according to US jurisprudence) be resolved in favor of the person accused of wrongdoing and the lesser restriction.
This is true even if the BULK of the sites with open permissions in fact are, and can be expected to be, the result of user error. (I won't go into the reasons in more depth here.)
Given that using an open file system is legal by the above arguments, a tool to find such legal-to-use resources can not itself be a violation of law.
A related issue: There's been a lot of legislation lately directed at people who break into systems to misuse them, and this has resulted in prosecutions of people, especially juveniles (or chronological adults with arrested development B-) ) who were just exploring. But I have yet to see the doctrine of "attractive nuisance" applied to computer systems set up with inadequate attention to security.
Why, when faced with biological processes that seem to work in the same manner [as human-created assembly languages], do we feel the need to deny a creator?
For starters, because a "Creator" doesn't explain the origin - just pushes it back an additional level. Who (or what) created the "Creator"? Who (or what) created THAT?
Where does the series end? THERE you have something that WASN'T created by a "creator". So by insisting on one or more intermediate steps you're just making the explanation more complicated without explaining the root cause.
Given that you need either a backward-in-time causality loop or a non-Creator explanation for the start of everything, can you get from the non-Creator origin to us without an intermediate Creator?
If you can, then you can try to figure out how to distinguish the cases. Or you can just assume the simpler explanation until something shows up that seems to require the complication.
Sorry, but the genetic code is much more like bare assembly than a high level language. Each assembly instruction(base triplet) is translated directly into one machine code instruction (amino acid).
Agreed that it's more like an assembler than a high-level language. But remember that assemblers historically have had much more powerful macro and conditional assembly/compilation features than high level languages. The situation with C and its related assemblers (with a rather low-powered preprocessor on the HIGH level language and usually none on the related assembler) is a reversal of the typical situation when assemblers were in heavy use.
OTOH, there are some interesting aspects to the whole intron-exon structure.
Depending on which promoter activates the gene, the spliceosome, which chops out the introns, can splice the gene differently.
Some genes actually carry more exons than will be coded into a particular protein and will cut different ones of them out under different circumstances. The result is that a single gene can code for a small family of closely related proteins, or if you want to put it that way that a single protein can have several sequence variants.
So in addition to comment removal it has conditional assembly on a small namespace of global variables. ("-Dfoo" + "#ifdef foo", etc.).
Actually, they think that a lot of the "junk DNA" started out as places where viruses inserted their genes into ours to reproduce. Our defenses then inactivated the viral genes but they stuck around as dead weight. Since they weren't doing anything, they were free to mutate, eventually turning into pretty much nothing but noise.
Not all of them appear to be noise. Sometimes the virus mechanisms were converted to other uses by the cell - especially the DNA editing mechanisms.
For instance, many grasses have such an apparent viral reminant: A "hopping gene" that activates when the grass is under stress. This is apparently the leftover of a RNA->DNA virus that would reproduce with the host's cells until the host was in trouble, then "loop out" to try to escape the dying cell and infect others (a common viral trick).
In the grasses, what happens is: when the plant is stressed the gene starts hopping around the plant's genome, making little mutations as it does so. On one hand it means the plant is less robust because it tends to lose cells when under stress. But on the other hand, when the plant is growing near an "edge" of its eco-niche it experiences an increase in mutation rate. One of its offspring may be better adapted to the now-modified niche, or able to colonize another. When times are good the grasses heredity is stable, when bad it tries to change to fit.
As individuals the extra mutation rate under stress is a loss. But as a (set of) species this is such an enormus evolutionary gain that most current grasses have the mechanism, having been better able to evolve out of failing niches and into new ones. The fact that is only activates under stress means the grasses can remain stable and strong in a niche they fit, while still producing a high enough mutation rate to "tune in" to new niches as they become available.
Hit "submit" rather than "preview". A couple edits I'd have made otherwise:
Thanks for the references. (I've squirreled them away on my home machine so I can find them after they horizon out on Slashdot - something I rarely feel a need to do.)
Meant to say "I've squirreled YOUR POST away - something I rarely feel a need to do." It was excelent.
I know the Sweedish system was mentioned in the debates. As a set of maritime nations the colonies had a significant Sweedish population fraction.
Meant: I know the Swiss system was explicitly discussed. I don't know that about the Sweedish, but given the Sweedish population component I strongly suspect it was. (and will consult my local expert B-) )
Thanks for the references. (I've squirreled them away on my home machine so I can find them after they horizon out on Slashdot - something I rarely feel a need to do.)
Indeed, the US constitution was strongly influenced by history, with a special emphasis on the legal systems of both the then-current countries and all the historical sources available to the founders. While a major factor in the revolution was the denial to the colonists of their perception of "The Rights of Englishmen", when they went on to design their own government they drew from all those sources and debated interminably, rather than trying to idealize the British system or hack up something de-novo.
I know the Sweedish system was mentioned in the debates. As a set of maritime nations the colonies had a significant Sweedish population fraction. (My wife is the historian in the family, and I'll ask her about what Sweedish contirbutions are known to have made it into the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, etc.) Also: The Brittish Common Law draws a lot from the Sweedish system. (Partly because of Vikings, some of whom became noble families on the British Isles.)
(Interestingly: While the separation of Church and State was largely driven by Protestant ministers who didn't want a repeat of the European persecutions, another factor was a significant Muslum population and an even larger number of transient Muslums among the shipping industry. The founders explicitly debated whether to be a non-denominational-but-Christian country and the Islam was used as the prime example of a non-Christian religion that produced people of good morals.)
An infallible omnicient God (as generally postulated by the monotheists) should be able to figure out in advance an ideal design and just impelemnt it. So the only way to reconcile the observed tight fit to evolution with the hypothesis of such a God as creator is "he wanted it that way".
But what if the creator was something more fallible. Say a hacker. Or an engineering team. (Angels?) Or a series of engineering teams over a long period, such as you find in an industry. (Think "automobiles".)
Such projects are very cut-and-try, make mistakes, re-use previous workable designs with minor changes. It isn't for nothing that people refer to "the evolution" of aircraft, or trains, or warships. How WOULD you distinguish them - especially if they take place in an "intellectual property" enviornment that would limit transfer of designs from one line to another.
Of course you won't find the "Scientific Creationists" postulating a fallible God or long-term teams of fallible angels. But it makes for interesting speculation. B-)
There is a LOT of "non-coding" chunks of DNA (called "introns") mixed in between and within the genes, that get edited out between the copy into RNA and the actual production of the protein.
Could those be the comments?
And if so, do they qualify as "holy writ"?
(And I wonder: Is the mechanism that edits them out the preprocessor? Can it expand macros?)
In fact, it sounds dangerous to set up a business there until the way the court works and makes judgements has been set down and proven out. By setting up there, a business has a strange liability that is unknown.
My thoughts exactly.
Also: Attending court proceedings by streaming video? What happens when the ISP suffers congestion? "I object, Your Honor! I can't hear what the witness said.... Your Honor?... Your Honor?... Hello? Is anyone there?"
And then you get bogus claims of transmission trouble, DOS attacks, cracker attacks on the infrastructure (possibly sponsored by shady law firms), bias toward those with better internet feeds... And that's just the infrastructure of the trial!
Making it possible to file briefs and the like in a >regular court via the internet would make some sense (if you didn't have to buy into proprietary software and agree to its shrink-wrap contracts to do it). But setting up a new court means you've got a whole new set of procedural issues that are wide open until precedents are litigated. RISK!
A litigant (especially on the defense side) would be a fool to agree to have his case tried in such a "cybercourt".
Finally: Establishing a court with a focus on tech is a great business REPELLANT. Why would a company want to move to a state whose main selling point is that it's easier to be sued?
I fear your teachers have made you the victim of a defective education. You have a few events out of order and appear to be advocating a disprovable educational fad. Perhaps we can come to agreement if these are corrected. (Or perhaps you can point out where I'm wrong. B-) )
how theoretical....your own NSA, secret service, and pentagon eat your constitution for lunch every single day.
A tendency of government that the Founders warned against and tried to head off. Their work held up amazingly well until World War I began the expansion of the Federal government that changed the balance of power between it and its citizens.
your utopic dissertation is quite innacurate mostly everywhere. a constitution rules the State in which it is valid,
As I said: Here it's the law of the land. Everywhere else it (claims to be) a statement of an ideal.
tell the french to follow your constitution! it doesn't work. different cultures have different values.
Tom Payne went over there and did. That, along with the success of the American Revolution, were major factors leading to the French Revolution.
And it DIDN'T work the same way. And it nearly got Tom's head cut off (by the revolutionaries), too.
Profit used to be banned in China. Their culture is more religious and conservative than american. How can you make speculation look good in China after thousands of years of economy that ignored the western world? Profit, commerce and money are the basis for our western world. Not there.
Actually, for thousands of years they WERE the basis of the economy there, as well. Chinese were the permier capatilists (and small businessmen) of the world. Then the Chinese Communist revolution and Mao's regime attempted to stamp it out - apparently unsuccessfully.
How do you enforce a French-based constitution there?
"French-based"? You seem to subscribe to a current fad among left-wing historians, which attempts to analyze all constitutions and revolutions in terms of the French. (This is very convenient for them when they argue against actually empowering the people and for elitist rule.)
The American Revolution predates (and to a large extent inspired) that of the French, and both the theoretical and political influences on it were wildly divergent. The US constitution owes much more to the Iriquois Confederacy than to anything from Europe.
Before the colonization of the Americas the histories of the Greek and Roman Republics were used to support the claim that Republican governmental forms were flawed, and that a strong leader (such as a King or Emporer) was needed for stable government.
In North America the Six Nations Confederacy was operating a stable and powerful republic, across a land area that dwarfed the kingdoms of Europe and across cultural and language barriers that dwarfed the collection of them. There's a Franklin quote to the effect that if THEY could make it work then WE bloody well ought to be able to do so. The Federal Constitution is more closely modeled on their institutions than those of Europe.
Jefferson expected them to eventually become allies and perhaps petition for admission as states or otherwise form a combined nation. (Unfortunately for them, their public health measures had so reduced disease and thus the need for resistance to it, while Europeans were spending a millenium "mortifying the flesh", that many of the tribes were decimated by the sudden introduction of several European illnesses - of which Smallpox is merely the most notable.)
Need I mention Israel? Need I mention Cuba? Humanity, rights and law are complicated. Therefore, I think your ideas are nice, but they don't reflect reality.
Thank you. But I think you misunderstood my post.
I wasn't claiming those ideas as mine. I was explaining how the documents themselves claim a measure of universal applicability, in response to a claim that they only applied in the US.
The American Constitution is a beautiful piece of work. And it has been working for Americans (except in elections) for over 200 years.
Actually, it's in elections that it is most effective - and still working today. Note that in the recent presidential election power was transferred after a lot of talk but without tanks in the street. THAT's what it's about.
Republics aren't about fairness. Republics are about figuring out who would win the civil war, so you don't have to actually FIGHT it. As long as the election process is a good enough model of the war that anyone trying to reverse it by WAR would LOSE, there generally won't be a war.
(Note that it doesn't have to predict the war outcome accurately. Starting a war to reverse a close election will bring out a lot of people against those who are trying to reverse it, and tip the balance.)
It is a piece of work derived from a lot of blood and pain in Europe in the 18th century. The french revolution killed thousands. The russian revolutions killed thousands.
Again: Please check your chronology. How could the US Constitution be derived from the shed blood of the French and Russian Revolutions when it predates them?
Rome, greece, all in there in blood and knowledge. So slowly we will make the world a better place. But don't overestimate your constitution's powers. As an example it is very valid anywhere. As a document, only within american soil.
I think we're agreeing with each other here. As I said, the Bill of Rights claims that everybody HAS certain of the rights it enumerates, but only claims to BIND the US Federal (and in some cases, state) governments.
What you say is incredibly presumptious, since in your text lies an implied assumption that the US holds the perfect or least flawed constitution. This is a perfectly valid opinion, but remember that it is only that -- an opinion.
I made no such claim of perfection - you read that into my post.
What I did was respond to a claim that the 2nd amendment of the US Bill of Rights was irrelevant to the argument (because it didn't apply to people outside the US) with an explanation of how the internal structure of it and the Declaration of Independence claim that they ARE applicable.
While not all western nations have constitutions that fulfill the criteria you listed, most do.
Personally, I'm a fan of several constitutions.
Indeed. But look at the relative timing of their passage. The US constitution, along with the theories behind it and hte results of its adoption, can be assumed to be a major influence in the construction of most of them.
1) The US Army has more and better guns than the average normal gun-owner
There are a lot more gun-owners. Many of them are ex-military. And the US military is made up of citizens sworn to uphold the constitution and laws - one of which forbids its use in domestic law-enforcement and other such actions.
If the government goes tyrannical, provokes a popular uprising, and tries to use the army to suppress it, they may find many of the troops going over to the other side - somtimes as coherent units - and taking the whiz-bang weapons with them.
2) Since when is armed action against corporations defensible?
Whenever it's self-defense against coercion. People have a right to self-defense, whether it's against a crook with a gun or a corporation with one.
But I don't think that's what is really at issue here. These are inventory control tags. You can chose to buy products marked with them. You can chose NOT to buy products with them. Or you can chose to buy products with them and then remove them or burn them out. Armed attacks on Sun Microsystems or Motorola seem unjustified. B-)
3)As stated before, not everyone lives in the USA.
No disrespect to the US constitution, but it doesn't mean jack outside of the US
No disrespect to people of other countries, but the Bill of Rights does mean quite a bit everywhere. Like the Declaration of Independence, it makes statements about global theories, as well as setting out local rules.
"Rights" are distinct from "privileges". "Rights" are something you have REGARDLESS of what your government claims. (It's just up to you to defend them against government ATTEMPTS to deny you the use of them.)
The Delaration of Independence makes the de-novo claim that such rights exist, lists a few of the ways the English government attempted to deny them to the Colonists, and declares that certain Colonies are now independent. The Bill of Rights contains a list of SOME of the rights that were considered particularly important, along with a binding prohibition on the US governments (federal and state) against even TRYING to deny them.
Now you don't have to believe that these Rights were given to you by "Nature" or "Nature's God". But the documents claim Rights are not the creation of governments, but are pre-existing (and that the proper function of government is to DEFEND them.) Thus they are claiming that YOU have Rights REGARDLESS of who you are or where you live. You can decide to beileve this, too, and start USING and DEFENDING those rights.
What is distinct about the US is that the US government's core documents explicitly list some of these rights, the US legal system explicitly claims that if a law attempts to deny them it is not actually a law but only the appearnce of one, which grants no power, creates no office, and need not be obeyed, and if an official tries to enforce such a law or otherwise acts to interfere with the exercise of these rights he's no longer acting as an official, but as a criminal individual.
HERE the Bill of Rights is part of the law of the land. THERE it's just an assertion. You can believe it and act on it if you feel like it. And just like here, if enough of you are willing to believe it and risk acting on it, you might make something similar the law of YOUR land.
Or you might die trying. "The Tree of Liberty must be watered, from time to time, with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants."
... more disturbingly, it seems like your constitution is only considered relevant when it doesn't affect corporations or the governments ability to violate your privacy, take away your rights, or basically screw you six ways from Sunday:(
Of COURSE!
With respect to governments: They're always trying to get away with more than they're allowed. And the people have to slap them down. Usually they do it in court. Sometimes they do it in other ways. (Look at the writings of the Founders. That's what they expected. That's why the hamstrung the government with three branches and a "balance of power" - they were trying to make it easy to gridlock it whenever it tried to do something outside its proper bounds.)
With respect to corporations: That's because the Constitution puts limits on GOVERNMENTS in their dealings with INDIVIDUALS and groups of them. It does NOT place limits on the INDIVIDUALS and groups in their dealings with each other. Corporations are groups of individuals, so the constitution does NOT place limits on them - when they're not acting as part of the government.
But it DOES allow OTHER individuals and groups of them to defend themselves against COERCION by government, individuals, or groups. That includes coercion by corporations. It explicitly allows them to have the TOOLS to defend themselves. (That's why the Second Amendment came up.) And it allows the government to mediate such disputes, define limits on coercive behavior by them and punishments for it, and enforce those limits.
The government has greater powers with respect to Corporations than it does with respect to other groups of citizens. That's because Corporations are a creation of government laws. The government licenses groups of people to put some resources in a pot for a money-making (or other) project, and if they get in a dispute it limits their liability to the resources in the pot, as long as they don't deliberately break any criminal laws and follow the rules of the license. A corporation is treated like a separate individual before the law - but as a creation of a license it has mostly privileges, not rights (though the privileges are largely modeled on the rights and privileges of individuals), and what rights it has are the rights of its component individuals.
As for VOLUNTEERING to buy a product with a radio-locatable tag: You can chose to do it. You can chose not to do it. Or you can chose to do it and then remove the tag.
They're just there to keep track of inventory. Once it's yours, remove it (or burn it out in place).
"Could this be a way for admission people to work for diversity?"
The answer is yes.
I'm not so sure. Looks like a way for the UC administrations to evade an objective standard. This increases their own discression and power, to the detriment of out-group students.
As I understand it, a big problem with the current admission practice is that some of the schools (UC Berkley for example) give extra points for "advanced placement" high-school class grades. Students who take them and do well can easily get a much "better than perfect" high-school grade point average. This is cranked into the "objective" formula.
These classes are available in the highschools of rich neighborhoods, but not poorer ones. And even when they ARE available, each school's AP classes are given an individual weighting factor. AP points from "good" schools count more than those from "mediocre" scools. "Bad" schools needn't bother.
The result is that a student from a ghetto school can ace every class, including any AP they might have available, blow the top off the SAT, and STILL be below the "objective" cut-point for admission to California's premier colleges. They go to a lower-tier college if they get in at all.
(Then hi-tek execs can hire only grads from top-tier schools - UCB, MIT, etc. - for the plum positions. This gives them a licence to perpetuate the state-sanctioned discrimination.)
This isn't just academic (so to speak). Exactly this situation happened to the daughter of one of my neighbors.
The solution is to eliminate the AP classes from the admission process. This eliminates the crypto-racisim and crypto-classism, and lets students in the door on an equal basis. Once they're in, they get to sink or swim on their merits.
But that doesn't mean eliminating them from college entirely. An EXCELENT use for an AP class from a qualified school program would be as an equivalant of a prerequisite from the 100 or 200 series of classes. Those who passed AP classes could get to the meat of their higher education a bit earlier.
... it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census ould not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure. The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be...
I must disagree with you. The issue is not that sampling COULD be more accurate. The issue is that corrupt politicians could more easily distort the results to their own advantage.
The test of any law is not how it would work if it were administered by honest people, but how much havoc it could cause if administered by DIShonest tyrants.
The laws required to prosecute these people can take 18 months to be passed, yet these raids were carried out as early as last december! What gives, how come we only hear about this now?
What makes you think they needed a new law? Copyrigt violation is already against the law.
You don't need a special extra law to say "It's also against the law if you use a computer" any more than you need one to say "It's also against the law if you use stone tablets, a chisel, and a mallet".
They're doing something illegal, they've had a caution and they ignored it, now they've been arrested...where's the problem again?
And as an aside, isn't this what everyone always wanted? "Don't sue Napster...go after the users who are just using the software for illegal purposes"?
Dead on. (I'd have modded you up but I wanted to chime in, too.)
The piece of the Napster defense that I agree with totally is the claim that they're just an indexer, the file transfer is between two users, and when a copyright infringement occurs it's the work of the users.
Zorching Napster for "abetting" the copyright infringement has a "chilling effect" on other search engine authors (and other pointers-out-of-resources) by making them responsible for any misdeeds by users of their product. So they have to both self-censor and put in a lot of extra work to avoid culpability.
This theory could be used, for instance, against crime reporters to keep them from pointing out the neighborhoods where drug dealers hang out. If a reader goes there and buys drugs, suddenly it's RICO time for the reporter for "abetting".
But copyright violation IS against the law. So if the Napster users WERE actually making copies of copyrighted works in violation of the law, their neck is on the block, and correctly so. It was very nice of the prosecutors to give them a warning and only come after them when they persisted. Now they get to have their day in court, and the courts will determine if their particular copymaking constitutes fair use.
Penalties for copyright violation are draconian. This is because it's so hard to actually catch the violators. So when they do catch one they make an example of him.
The legal system's solution to the "whack a mole" game is to use a BIG mallet and hope the spray of gore scares off the rest of the moles.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that gave me a good laugh. From my experience, that isn't what the college grads are doing, that's what the veterans are doing. Life in the "real world" outside of the "ivory tower" seems to install those attitudes, rather than diminish them from everything I've seen.
... That you can work with a team, rather than try to out-score the other team members.
I mean in college you've only got grades to compete against each other for. Outside of college everyone is competing for money.
I presume you're referring to: prov[ing]
Yes, in the real world you're competing for money. But in a well-run company your TEAM is competing aginst OTHER COMPANIES. If your management encourages you to compete WITHIN the team you've got a problem. Success AS a team requires cooperation WITHIN the team.
And that's one of the places where the "management can be very bad and not (quite) kill the company" effect shows up in high tek. A lot of silicon valley management DOES encourage this. It's called the "star system". (The opposite is the "Demming approach".)
In a star system a few high-profile alleged geniuses get all the resources (and most of the rewards), while everybody else's work is thrashed around and by them. But the bulk of the work is actually produced by the bulk of the team, and this slows the rest of them down (and annoys them greatly, slowing them further). The result is that the company is less productive than its competition (IF it gets to product at ALL) and eventually fails.
Demming management style recognizes that the best self-salespeople on a team may not even be the most productive. It distributes work so that everyone has something useful to do that they enjoy doing, and rewards everyone who produces rather than just the highest-profile tale-spinners. With the job divided up into territories where each member is a local expert the whole team "strokes" each other and works smoothly together. The members respect each other and divide new problems appropriately rather than competing for plums which end up going to the stars with the rest festering over doing scutt-work for no recognition. Management can concentrate on connecting the team to the rest of the company and keeping upper management from thrashing it. And LOTS of work gets done.
Of course, in my experience tech companies tend to be ill-managed. ;)
Tech has SO much value-added that companies can often be INCREDIBLY ill-managed and still remain profitable for years. (And when they're starting up there's a period where they're running on investment and aren't even expected to be profitable.)
And when things are booming just TRY to hire a GOOD tech manager. They're far scarcer than good techies.
Two other factors:
Companies want to see some experience. There's a lot of junk fed to people in school, so there's a lot to UNlearn - starting with the attituds that you know what you're doing, that if it wasn't taught to you in school it's not important, etc. (This is especially true in software.)
You need to prove that you're over the hump and can do real work in the real world. That you can work with a team, rather than try to out-score the other team members. That you can handle a project with multiple solutions and not go for the "best" one over an "adequate and quick" or "easy to get right" one. That you can handle something longer, tougher, and more unknown than a class assignment, something without a canned solution. That you'll read the manual. That you'll pull a stock design for a wheel FROM a manual rather than trying to reinvent it.
Of course this gives you a chicken-and-egg problem: You need a job to get experience. You need experience to get a job. That's part of why work-study and unpaid internships can be a carreer win.
Most jobs are obtained through contacts. A recommend from somebody in or associated with the company is trusted much more than one that a candidate brought with him. A worker or administrator may know someone he's already worked with - and thus that he CAN work with - who has a necessary skill. And a contact will know of the jobs before HR does, and can help you prepare to fit in. And he probably won't try to get you into something he knows you can't handle.
At one time in many companies the HR department exists primarily to give nice brush-offs to the flood of unsolicited resumes while creating plausable excuses for hiring those recommended by insiders. Nowdays (or at least until the recent crash) they're more like a search firm. But even so an inside recommend is worth more than ten from outside.
It's called "networking".
And that's ANOTHER reason that work-study, internships, summer jobs, and the like are very valuable.
You notice the one offer you got was from someone you worked with while in school. Is that more understandable now?
ObSlashdotStupidity: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh, never mind. :-)
Actually, I can.
I imagine it doing a wall-of-monitors bigscreen, in software, in real-time.
B-)
Why did they choose Linux? Had they chosen FreeBSD or something they could save face and not have to tell anyone how they did it. With the GPL, any hard work or software magic they do has to be open source too
But they don't WANT to close it up. They're licensing the hardware to other manufacturers, so there's nothing to be gained (and a lot to be lost - like willingness of other manufacturers to buy) by closing the software.
Also: They apparently want to sell to early-adopters, who have been asking for Linux.
If nothing else, I bet the customers don't want their TV crashing constantly, script-kiddies changing their channels or turning it on at 3 AM, the boss finding out what porn they're watching, and the movie companies showing up to bust them for viewing homemade copies of rented movies.
If your TV's on the net with closed-source appware how do you know it's not open to all of the above?
Yes he was.
But I'd be more concerned with slashdotting his ISP connection than the box itself.
... it is possible to prove some software, but this is not true of most software on a useful scale.
Actually I claim that this isn't true. It is possible to prove that two very different expressions of a problem are EQUIVALENT, but that's a very different thing from proving either of them is the CORRECT solution for a given problem.
This is not as bad as it sounds: The most effective way known to notice bugs is to express the problem in two very different ways and compare them. Primary example: The spec versus the code. (That's why the spec is IMPORTANT. "Self-documenting code" is a myth. When you go to verify it and the only spec is the code itself, the only thing you can check is that the compiler works right.)
Strongly OO languages like C++ which dereference everything eat processor cycles. It may not be apparent why this is a problem until you try to implement a 6-level interrupt system on an 80186 (as one company I know of did)
For most OO languages this is true. But for C++ it is not. You can get away without the dereferencing if you need to. (You COULD even fall back into a style that amounts to compiling essentially ANSI C via a C++ compiler.)
But to get away without the dereferences you also have to abandon the things that need them - like polymorphism. This doesn't mean you have to abandon all the features. (For instance, you can define a class hierarchy so you don't get polymorphc support unless you need it, and specify that you don't use it on particular function calls - at the risk of violating encapsulation checking. (Overloaded operators are very handy and often don't need to dereference anything.) But you're starting to get into the "why bother" area.
The big problem is that to do this efficiently you need somebody who:
A) Knows how to program well in C, including how to get efficient compiler output in the tight spots.
B) Knows how to program well in OOP style.
C) Knows HOW the C++ compiler achieves its effects, so he knows how to get it to do things efficiently.
And now you're talking about a VERY rare and expensive person. A is years of training. Adding B to someone who has A is typically 6 months minimum of learning curve just to start being productive again. (Starting with B makes it hard to get really good at A, while starting with A puts up mental roadblocks when you're relearning how to do things B style.) Most procedural programmers who learn OOP stop there.
But adding C is much like repeating the learning techniques of the pioneering days of computer education. Everybody learned assembly and how pre-optimizer compilers worked, because they were expected to WRITE their own compler some day. In the process they learned how to write source code that would trick a non-optimizing compiler into putting out good assembly. Technique C consists of doing much the same thing to a C++ compiler to get the equivalent of tight C out of it.
So if you happen to have a small team of people who already HAVE all this knowlege, they might make a C++ interrupt handler that is as efficient, or nearly so, as one coded in C or even assembler. But why not just do it in C, assembler, or some hybird in the first place? Then people with only skill set A can understand it and work on it. B-)
As I understand it (though I could be off on this), the patent office doesn't strictly require that a device or process do what it is claimed to do to give you an exclusive on it. They stopped requiring that long ago - about the time they stopped requiring you to deliver a working model (for lack of storage space).
If you want to pay a bunch of money and effort to get a 17-year exclusive on building something new that doesn't work, fine with them.
So a patent is not an endorsement by the US government of your scientific or engineering claims.
An exception is perpetual motion machines. There were SO many applications wasting SO much of their time that they still require you do deliver a working model. THAT put a big spike in the fad, though people still try.
One fellow had trouble patenting a very efficient still. It was very tall to use gravity to create a decent vacuum at the top (like the original water version of a mercury barometer), and acted as a counter-current heat exchanger, scavenging heat from the condensate and brine to preheat the raw water feed. You still had to add the heat of solution and some more to deal with losses, but that's a LOT less than boiling off the whole output stream at local atmospheric pressure.
They initially refused his application, thinking it was a perpetual motion machine, and he had to argue long and hard to get the patent.
You can't get up and say that this tool does not break into people's system, the users do.
That's not the point.
On computer networks (in the absense of a STANDARDIZED publication of a declaration of a well-known excpetion) the permission system settings are normally considered the expression of the INTENT of the person who set them.
The only well-recognized exceptions I can think of at the moment are:
- Copyright notices on published text.
- Certain prohibitions (by custom and/or statute) on use of administrator privileges to snoop.
- The mechanism for restricting search engines from indexing certain pages (such as dynamic or proprietary site content).
Changing the permissions on a portion of their files so that the world can read and write them could be an expression of intent that they do so, or could be an error. This difference in intent is indistinguishable externally. So if another user takes advantage of the explicit permission change to do exactly what it allows, one must assume he is acting with the permission of the resource's owner unless he has been explicitly informed otherwise.
Further, when you're dealing with laws that ban an activity, any ambiguity in the law must (according to US jurisprudence) be resolved in favor of the person accused of wrongdoing and the lesser restriction.
This is true even if the BULK of the sites with open permissions in fact are, and can be expected to be, the result of user error. (I won't go into the reasons in more depth here.)
Given that using an open file system is legal by the above arguments, a tool to find such legal-to-use resources can not itself be a violation of law.
A related issue: There's been a lot of legislation lately directed at people who break into systems to misuse them, and this has resulted in prosecutions of people, especially juveniles (or chronological adults with arrested development B-) ) who were just exploring. But I have yet to see the doctrine of "attractive nuisance" applied to computer systems set up with inadequate attention to security.
Why, when faced with biological processes that seem to work in the same manner [as human-created assembly languages], do we feel the need to deny a creator?
For starters, because a "Creator" doesn't explain the origin - just pushes it back an additional level. Who (or what) created the "Creator"? Who (or what) created THAT?
Where does the series end? THERE you have something that WASN'T created by a "creator". So by insisting on one or more intermediate steps you're just making the explanation more complicated without explaining the root cause.
Given that you need either a backward-in-time causality loop or a non-Creator explanation for the start of everything, can you get from the non-Creator origin to us without an intermediate Creator?
If you can, then you can try to figure out how to distinguish the cases. Or you can just assume the simpler explanation until something shows up that seems to require the complication.
Sorry, but the genetic code is much more like bare assembly than a high level language. Each assembly instruction(base triplet) is translated directly into one machine code instruction (amino acid).
Agreed that it's more like an assembler than a high-level language. But remember that assemblers historically have had much more powerful macro and conditional assembly/compilation features than high level languages. The situation with C and its related assemblers (with a rather low-powered preprocessor on the HIGH level language and usually none on the related assembler) is a reversal of the typical situation when assemblers were in heavy use.
OTOH, there are some interesting aspects to the whole intron-exon structure.
Depending on which promoter activates the gene, the spliceosome, which chops out the introns, can splice the gene differently.
Some genes actually carry more exons than will be coded into a particular protein and will cut different ones of them out under different circumstances. The result is that a single gene can code for a small family of closely related proteins, or if you want to put it that way that a single protein can have several sequence variants.
So in addition to comment removal it has conditional assembly on a small namespace of global variables. ("-Dfoo" + "#ifdef foo", etc.).
Actually, they think that a lot of the "junk DNA" started out as places where viruses inserted their genes into ours to reproduce. Our defenses then inactivated the viral genes but they stuck around as dead weight. Since they weren't doing anything, they were free to mutate, eventually turning into pretty much nothing but noise.
Not all of them appear to be noise. Sometimes the virus mechanisms were converted to other uses by the cell - especially the DNA editing mechanisms.
For instance, many grasses have such an apparent viral reminant: A "hopping gene" that activates when the grass is under stress. This is apparently the leftover of a RNA->DNA virus that would reproduce with the host's cells until the host was in trouble, then "loop out" to try to escape the dying cell and infect others (a common viral trick).
In the grasses, what happens is: when the plant is stressed the gene starts hopping around the plant's genome, making little mutations as it does so. On one hand it means the plant is less robust because it tends to lose cells when under stress. But on the other hand, when the plant is growing near an "edge" of its eco-niche it experiences an increase in mutation rate. One of its offspring may be better adapted to the now-modified niche, or able to colonize another. When times are good the grasses heredity is stable, when bad it tries to change to fit.
As individuals the extra mutation rate under stress is a loss. But as a (set of) species this is such an enormus evolutionary gain that most current grasses have the mechanism, having been better able to evolve out of failing niches and into new ones. The fact that is only activates under stress means the grasses can remain stable and strong in a niche they fit, while still producing a high enough mutation rate to "tune in" to new niches as they become available.
Hit "submit" rather than "preview". A couple edits I'd have made otherwise:
Thanks for the references. (I've squirreled them away on my home machine so I can find them after they horizon out on Slashdot - something I rarely feel a need to do.)
Meant to say "I've squirreled YOUR POST away - something I rarely feel a need to do." It was excelent.
I know the Sweedish system was mentioned in the debates. As a set of maritime nations the colonies had a significant Sweedish population fraction.
Meant: I know the Swiss system was explicitly discussed. I don't know that about the Sweedish, but given the Sweedish population component I strongly suspect it was. (and will consult my local expert B-) )
Thanks for the references. (I've squirreled them away on my home machine so I can find them after they horizon out on Slashdot - something I rarely feel a need to do.)
Indeed, the US constitution was strongly influenced by history, with a special emphasis on the legal systems of both the then-current countries and all the historical sources available to the founders. While a major factor in the revolution was the denial to the colonists of their perception of "The Rights of Englishmen", when they went on to design their own government they drew from all those sources and debated interminably, rather than trying to idealize the British system or hack up something de-novo.
I know the Sweedish system was mentioned in the debates. As a set of maritime nations the colonies had a significant Sweedish population fraction. (My wife is the historian in the family, and I'll ask her about what Sweedish contirbutions are known to have made it into the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, etc.) Also: The Brittish Common Law draws a lot from the Sweedish system. (Partly because of Vikings, some of whom became noble families on the British Isles.)
(Interestingly: While the separation of Church and State was largely driven by Protestant ministers who didn't want a repeat of the European persecutions, another factor was a significant Muslum population and an even larger number of transient Muslums among the shipping industry. The founders explicitly debated whether to be a non-denominational-but-Christian country and the Islam was used as the prime example of a non-Christian religion that produced people of good morals.)
An infallible omnicient God (as generally postulated by the monotheists) should be able to figure out in advance an ideal design and just impelemnt it. So the only way to reconcile the observed tight fit to evolution with the hypothesis of such a God as creator is "he wanted it that way".
But what if the creator was something more fallible. Say a hacker. Or an engineering team. (Angels?) Or a series of engineering teams over a long period, such as you find in an industry. (Think "automobiles".)
Such projects are very cut-and-try, make mistakes, re-use previous workable designs with minor changes. It isn't for nothing that people refer to "the evolution" of aircraft, or trains, or warships. How WOULD you distinguish them - especially if they take place in an "intellectual property" enviornment that would limit transfer of designs from one line to another.
Of course you won't find the "Scientific Creationists" postulating a fallible God or long-term teams of fallible angels. But it makes for interesting speculation. B-)
A fellow I once worked with wondered:
There is a LOT of "non-coding" chunks of DNA (called "introns") mixed in between and within the genes, that get edited out between the copy into RNA and the actual production of the protein.
Could those be the comments?
And if so, do they qualify as "holy writ"?
(And I wonder: Is the mechanism that edits them out the preprocessor? Can it expand macros?)
In fact, it sounds dangerous to set up a business there until the way the court works and makes judgements has been set down and proven out. By setting up there, a business has a strange liability that is unknown.
... Your Honor? ... Your Honor? ... Hello? Is anyone there?"
My thoughts exactly.
Also: Attending court proceedings by streaming video? What happens when the ISP suffers congestion? "I object, Your Honor! I can't hear what the witness said.
And then you get bogus claims of transmission trouble, DOS attacks, cracker attacks on the infrastructure (possibly sponsored by shady law firms), bias toward those with better internet feeds... And that's just the infrastructure of the trial!
Making it possible to file briefs and the like in a >regular court via the internet would make some sense (if you didn't have to buy into proprietary software and agree to its shrink-wrap contracts to do it). But setting up a new court means you've got a whole new set of procedural issues that are wide open until precedents are litigated. RISK!
A litigant (especially on the defense side) would be a fool to agree to have his case tried in such a "cybercourt".
Finally: Establishing a court with a focus on tech is a great business REPELLANT. Why would a company want to move to a state whose main selling point is that it's easier to be sued?
I fear your teachers have made you the victim of a defective education. You have a few events out of order and appear to be advocating a disprovable educational fad. Perhaps we can come to agreement if these are corrected. (Or perhaps you can point out where I'm wrong. B-) )
how theoretical....your own NSA, secret service, and pentagon eat your constitution for lunch every single day.
A tendency of government that the Founders warned against and tried to head off. Their work held up amazingly well until World War I began the expansion of the Federal government that changed the balance of power between it and its citizens.
your utopic dissertation is quite innacurate mostly everywhere. a constitution rules the State in which it is valid,
As I said: Here it's the law of the land. Everywhere else it (claims to be) a statement of an ideal.
tell the french to follow your constitution! it doesn't work. different cultures have different values.
Tom Payne went over there and did. That, along with the success of the American Revolution, were major factors leading to the French Revolution.
And it DIDN'T work the same way. And it nearly got Tom's head cut off (by the revolutionaries), too.
Profit used to be banned in China. Their culture is more religious and conservative than american. How can you make speculation look good in China after thousands of years of economy that ignored the western world? Profit, commerce and money are the basis for our western world. Not there.
Actually, for thousands of years they WERE the basis of the economy there, as well. Chinese were the permier capatilists (and small businessmen) of the world. Then the Chinese Communist revolution and Mao's regime attempted to stamp it out - apparently unsuccessfully.
How do you enforce a French-based constitution there?
"French-based"? You seem to subscribe to a current fad among left-wing historians, which attempts to analyze all constitutions and revolutions in terms of the French. (This is very convenient for them when they argue against actually empowering the people and for elitist rule.)
The American Revolution predates (and to a large extent inspired) that of the French, and both the theoretical and political influences on it were wildly divergent. The US constitution owes much more to the Iriquois Confederacy than to anything from Europe.
Before the colonization of the Americas the histories of the Greek and Roman Republics were used to support the claim that Republican governmental forms were flawed, and that a strong leader (such as a King or Emporer) was needed for stable government.
In North America the Six Nations Confederacy was operating a stable and powerful republic, across a land area that dwarfed the kingdoms of Europe and across cultural and language barriers that dwarfed the collection of them. There's a Franklin quote to the effect that if THEY could make it work then WE bloody well ought to be able to do so. The Federal Constitution is more closely modeled on their institutions than those of Europe.
Jefferson expected them to eventually become allies and perhaps petition for admission as states or otherwise form a combined nation. (Unfortunately for them, their public health measures had so reduced disease and thus the need for resistance to it, while Europeans were spending a millenium "mortifying the flesh", that many of the tribes were decimated by the sudden introduction of several European illnesses - of which Smallpox is merely the most notable.)
Need I mention Israel? Need I mention Cuba? Humanity, rights and law are complicated. Therefore, I think your ideas are nice, but they don't reflect reality.
Thank you. But I think you misunderstood my post.
I wasn't claiming those ideas as mine. I was explaining how the documents themselves claim a measure of universal applicability, in response to a claim that they only applied in the US.
The American Constitution is a beautiful piece of work. And it has been working for Americans (except in elections) for over 200 years.
Actually, it's in elections that it is most effective - and still working today. Note that in the recent presidential election power was transferred after a lot of talk but without tanks in the street. THAT's what it's about.
Republics aren't about fairness. Republics are about figuring out who would win the civil war, so you don't have to actually FIGHT it. As long as the election process is a good enough model of the war that anyone trying to reverse it by WAR would LOSE, there generally won't be a war.
(Note that it doesn't have to predict the war outcome accurately. Starting a war to reverse a close election will bring out a lot of people against those who are trying to reverse it, and tip the balance.)
It is a piece of work derived from a lot of blood and pain in Europe in the 18th century. The french revolution killed thousands. The russian revolutions killed thousands.
Again: Please check your chronology. How could the US Constitution be derived from the shed blood of the French and Russian Revolutions when it predates them?
Rome, greece, all in there in blood and knowledge. So slowly we will make the world a better place. But don't overestimate your constitution's powers. As an example it is very valid anywhere. As a document, only within american soil.
I think we're agreeing with each other here. As I said, the Bill of Rights claims that everybody HAS certain of the rights it enumerates, but only claims to BIND the US Federal (and in some cases, state) governments.
Take care.
And you as well.
What you say is incredibly presumptious, since in your text lies an implied assumption that the US holds the perfect or least flawed constitution. This is a perfectly valid opinion, but remember that it is only that -- an opinion.
I made no such claim of perfection - you read that into my post.
What I did was respond to a claim that the 2nd amendment of the US Bill of Rights was irrelevant to the argument (because it didn't apply to people outside the US) with an explanation of how the internal structure of it and the Declaration of Independence claim that they ARE applicable.
While not all western nations have constitutions that fulfill the criteria you listed, most do.
Personally, I'm a fan of several constitutions.
Indeed. But look at the relative timing of their passage. The US constitution, along with the theories behind it and hte results of its adoption, can be assumed to be a major influence in the construction of most of them.
1) The US Army has more and better guns than the average normal gun-owner
There are a lot more gun-owners. Many of them are ex-military. And the US military is made up of citizens sworn to uphold the constitution and laws - one of which forbids its use in domestic law-enforcement and other such actions.
If the government goes tyrannical, provokes a popular uprising, and tries to use the army to suppress it, they may find many of the troops going over to the other side - somtimes as coherent units - and taking the whiz-bang weapons with them.
2) Since when is armed action against corporations defensible?
Whenever it's self-defense against coercion. People have a right to self-defense, whether it's against a crook with a gun or a corporation with one.
But I don't think that's what is really at issue here. These are inventory control tags. You can chose to buy products marked with them. You can chose NOT to buy products with them. Or you can chose to buy products with them and then remove them or burn them out. Armed attacks on Sun Microsystems or Motorola seem unjustified. B-)
3)As stated before, not everyone lives in the USA.
See my previous response here.
No disrespect to the US constitution, but it doesn't mean jack outside of the US
... more disturbingly, it seems like your constitution is only considered relevant when it doesn't affect corporations or the governments ability to violate your privacy, take away your rights, or basically screw you six ways from Sunday:(
No disrespect to people of other countries, but the Bill of Rights does mean quite a bit everywhere. Like the Declaration of Independence, it makes statements about global theories, as well as setting out local rules.
"Rights" are distinct from "privileges". "Rights" are something you have REGARDLESS of what your government claims. (It's just up to you to defend them against government ATTEMPTS to deny you the use of them.)
The Delaration of Independence makes the de-novo claim that such rights exist, lists a few of the ways the English government attempted to deny them to the Colonists, and declares that certain Colonies are now independent. The Bill of Rights contains a list of SOME of the rights that were considered particularly important, along with a binding prohibition on the US governments (federal and state) against even TRYING to deny them.
Now you don't have to believe that these Rights were given to you by "Nature" or "Nature's God". But the documents claim Rights are not the creation of governments, but are pre-existing (and that the proper function of government is to DEFEND them.) Thus they are claiming that YOU have Rights REGARDLESS of who you are or where you live. You can decide to beileve this, too, and start USING and DEFENDING those rights.
What is distinct about the US is that the US government's core documents explicitly list some of these rights, the US legal system explicitly claims that if a law attempts to deny them it is not actually a law but only the appearnce of one, which grants no power, creates no office, and need not be obeyed, and if an official tries to enforce such a law or otherwise acts to interfere with the exercise of these rights he's no longer acting as an official, but as a criminal individual.
HERE the Bill of Rights is part of the law of the land. THERE it's just an assertion. You can believe it and act on it if you feel like it. And just like here, if enough of you are willing to believe it and risk acting on it, you might make something similar the law of YOUR land.
Or you might die trying. "The Tree of Liberty must be watered, from time to time, with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants."
Of COURSE!
With respect to governments: They're always trying to get away with more than they're allowed. And the people have to slap them down. Usually they do it in court. Sometimes they do it in other ways. (Look at the writings of the Founders. That's what they expected. That's why the hamstrung the government with three branches and a "balance of power" - they were trying to make it easy to gridlock it whenever it tried to do something outside its proper bounds.)
With respect to corporations: That's because the Constitution puts limits on GOVERNMENTS in their dealings with INDIVIDUALS and groups of them. It does NOT place limits on the INDIVIDUALS and groups in their dealings with each other. Corporations are groups of individuals, so the constitution does NOT place limits on them - when they're not acting as part of the government.
But it DOES allow OTHER individuals and groups of them to defend themselves against COERCION by government, individuals, or groups. That includes coercion by corporations. It explicitly allows them to have the TOOLS to defend themselves. (That's why the Second Amendment came up.) And it allows the government to mediate such disputes, define limits on coercive behavior by them and punishments for it, and enforce those limits.
The government has greater powers with respect to Corporations than it does with respect to other groups of citizens. That's because Corporations are a creation of government laws. The government licenses groups of people to put some resources in a pot for a money-making (or other) project, and if they get in a dispute it limits their liability to the resources in the pot, as long as they don't deliberately break any criminal laws and follow the rules of the license. A corporation is treated like a separate individual before the law - but as a creation of a license it has mostly privileges, not rights (though the privileges are largely modeled on the rights and privileges of individuals), and what rights it has are the rights of its component individuals.
As for VOLUNTEERING to buy a product with a radio-locatable tag: You can chose to do it. You can chose not to do it. Or you can chose to do it and then remove the tag.
They're just there to keep track of inventory. Once it's yours, remove it (or burn it out in place).
"Could this be a way for admission people to work for diversity?"
The answer is yes.
I'm not so sure. Looks like a way for the UC administrations to evade an objective standard. This increases their own discression and power, to the detriment of out-group students.
As I understand it, a big problem with the current admission practice is that some of the schools (UC Berkley for example) give extra points for "advanced placement" high-school class grades. Students who take them and do well can easily get a much "better than perfect" high-school grade point average. This is cranked into the "objective" formula.
These classes are available in the highschools of rich neighborhoods, but not poorer ones. And even when they ARE available, each school's AP classes are given an individual weighting factor. AP points from "good" schools count more than those from "mediocre" scools. "Bad" schools needn't bother.
The result is that a student from a ghetto school can ace every class, including any AP they might have available, blow the top off the SAT, and STILL be below the "objective" cut-point for admission to California's premier colleges. They go to a lower-tier college if they get in at all.
(Then hi-tek execs can hire only grads from top-tier schools - UCB, MIT, etc. - for the plum positions. This gives them a licence to perpetuate the state-sanctioned discrimination.)
This isn't just academic (so to speak). Exactly this situation happened to the daughter of one of my neighbors.
The solution is to eliminate the AP classes from the admission process. This eliminates the crypto-racisim and crypto-classism, and lets students in the door on an equal basis. Once they're in, they get to sink or swim on their merits.
But that doesn't mean eliminating them from college entirely. An EXCELENT use for an AP class from a qualified school program would be as an equivalant of a prerequisite from the 100 or 200 series of classes. Those who passed AP classes could get to the meat of their higher education a bit earlier.
... it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census ould not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure. The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be ...
I must disagree with you. The issue is not that sampling COULD be more accurate. The issue is that corrupt politicians could more easily distort the results to their own advantage.
The test of any law is not how it would work if it were administered by honest people, but how much havoc it could cause if administered by DIShonest tyrants.
The laws required to prosecute these people can take 18 months to be passed, yet these raids were carried out as early as last december! What gives, how come we only hear about this now?
What makes you think they needed a new law? Copyrigt violation is already against the law.
You don't need a special extra law to say "It's also against the law if you use a computer" any more than you need one to say "It's also against the law if you use stone tablets, a chisel, and a mallet".
They're doing something illegal, they've had a caution and they ignored it, now they've been arrested...where's the problem again?
And as an aside, isn't this what everyone always wanted? "Don't sue Napster...go after the users who are just using the software for illegal purposes"?
Dead on. (I'd have modded you up but I wanted to chime in, too.)
The piece of the Napster defense that I agree with totally is the claim that they're just an indexer, the file transfer is between two users, and when a copyright infringement occurs it's the work of the users.
Zorching Napster for "abetting" the copyright infringement has a "chilling effect" on other search engine authors (and other pointers-out-of-resources) by making them responsible for any misdeeds by users of their product. So they have to both self-censor and put in a lot of extra work to avoid culpability.
This theory could be used, for instance, against crime reporters to keep them from pointing out the neighborhoods where drug dealers hang out. If a reader goes there and buys drugs, suddenly it's RICO time for the reporter for "abetting".
But copyright violation IS against the law. So if the Napster users WERE actually making copies of copyrighted works in violation of the law, their neck is on the block, and correctly so. It was very nice of the prosecutors to give them a warning and only come after them when they persisted. Now they get to have their day in court, and the courts will determine if their particular copymaking constitutes fair use.
Penalties for copyright violation are draconian. This is because it's so hard to actually catch the violators. So when they do catch one they make an example of him.
The legal system's solution to the "whack a mole" game is to use a BIG mallet and hope the spray of gore scares off the rest of the moles.