That's what it started out as. Now, it's an organization dedicated to defending those parts of the Constitution it approves of and those interpretations that match its agenda. The ACLU has made it quite plain a number of times that it will not, under any circumstances defend the Second Amendment. As long as that's its position, I, among many others, want nothing to do with it. I love how everytime someone wants to disagree with a point of view, their opponent has an "agenda," while the people they agree with have "values." Feel free to disagree with the ACLU about the second amendment, but if you read the text of the Constitution, you understand that the second amendment is difficult to interpret. The courts in the US very rarely side with people who hold to the most pro-gun positions anyway; the ACLU is not the only one who does not interpret the second amendment in the same way that the NRA does.
The ACLU does tons of good work with free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, Fourth amendment issues, etc, etc, etc. You want nothing to do with the ACLU because of its position on ONE confusingly-worded amendment? That seems extremely shortsighted to me. Strip away your free speech rights, and advocating second amendment rights becomes terrorism. Let's make sure we keep our free speech rights so we can be free to continue to debate what our second amendment rights should be. Support the ACLU, and that will remain possible.
Here is what you asked:
So tell us which countries have not followed Cuba's example? What do you mean by "followed Cuba's example?" Histories and interactions between countries are complicated things; they can be similar or dissimilar nearly infinite ways. What dissimilarities are important to you when you ask about "not follow[ing]" Cuba's example?
So tell us which countries have not followed Cuba's example? Please be more specific. In what respect? Are you implying that Cuba has been a success story for embargoes?
Ha, I hadn't thought of that! You're right, but it was combined embargo and military action (and a period of occupation afterwards) that was really required to meet the North's goals. I'm not sure an embargo by itself would have convinced the South to rejoin the union.
You're asking us to prove a negative. In what way is finding one example of an embargo working proving a negative? It isn't. First, I didn't ask for proof that embargoes work; I asked for one example. Second, "embargoes work" is a positive claim, not a negative one. I asked for neither a proof nor a negative.
In fact, several posters said "South Africa" in response to the post, so they understood that I wasn't asking proof for a negative statement (otherwise they wouldn't have been able to comply. It is debatable whether South Africa is really a good example, but it is worth discussion.
The embargo was highly unlikely to have been effective, especially since as soon as Reagan got into office he weakened it because he knew it would be ineffective. In other words, it didn't have any time to work even if it would have, given more time.
But for humans to suicide attack Cylons? Again, it's one thing if you're talking about a Viper pilot pressing home an attack against a basestar. Losing a capital ship should hurt, they don't grow on trees, and such a move could provide the opening for the Galactica to escape a sticky situation. But strapping on a dynamite vest and walking into a Cylon bar? "Bugger, I got blown up. Well, let me crawl out of this tank, put on something slutty and we can resume at some other bar." I don't know that it was common knowledge among everyone that they could resurrect so easily at that point. Also, people can be irrational. Suicide bombing isn't that effective in getting what you want here on Earth, either, but people still do it.
I use virtual PC on Vista Home premium. It runs fine, it just isn't supported. It gives a warning on install, that's all (unless something has changed in the past few months since I installed it).
Paper is a renewable resource like rice or strawberries. It's grown on farms like any other crop. They aren't out there chopping down ancient redwoods for paper.
The issue of going paperless to save the planet was always bogus. Making paper requires lots of chemicals which are not particularly eco-friendly. Also, only a percentage of the trees used to make paper worldwide come from tree farms. According to this website, only 16% come from paper farms, so that means the rest (that isn't recycled) comes from sources that take more time to renew. In the mean time, the older trees that were removing more CO2 from the air are (at best) replaced by much seedlings or much younger trees, meaning that there is less CO2 being removed from the air.
On the contrary, making something that will be widely read available online will have only a small effect of power usage. If you factor in the amount of power used by the machines that harvested and created the paper it WOULD have been printed on, I imagine there is a pretty big savings.
Our senses already provide a reasonably detailed record of what happens on a moment to moment basis. The only (relevant) difference between an electronic surveillance tool and your own brain is the ability to play back what happened to a third party. Thus, it cannot the recording per se that they are be objecting to. If it were, wiping your memory would be ok, and I don't think anyone would advocate that even if it were possible.
When you understand that they must be objecting to something other than recording, their purpose becomes clear. With electronic surveillance tools comes a lack of doubt about what happened. With only your brain as your surveillance tool, they can always deny what happened. This is not possible if you record an event electronically. The government's ability to create doubt is the key to why citizens are being restricted in their surveillance rights. As we know, with doubt comes power.
I believe every person should have a right to have a solid, verifiable record of ANY interaction they have with a representative of the government. Without this right, the government simply has too much power to create doubt when they infringe on our rights.
"After you uninstall Service Pack for Windows (KB936330), we recommend that you wait at least one hour before you try to install the final release of Windows Vista SP1," As Miracle Max said, "You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."
It can be shown that native intelligence is heritable to some degree. There's even racial differences in average IQ - with east Asians being the smartest (oh that ought to get me a lot of flack). As any psychological researcher will tell you, IQ != intelligence. IQ as a method of measuring intelligence is flawed, and the fact that different races score differently on IQ test may say more about the measurement than about what is being measured. Of course, it has only been a little more than a century since people were measuring cranial sizes to come to the same conclusion, so it isn't any surprise that this assertion still comes up.
I have no doubt that intelligence is heritable. There are variations in intelligence between individuals. However, to claim that entire races are, on average, more or less intelligent than another is just stupid. For that to happen, the races would have had to have 1) drastically different selection pressures and 2) very little gene flow between them. Neither of these things occurred, as far as anyone can tell. Claims of different intelligences across races continue to be racist BS, even if a few of its well-meaning proponents don't realize it.
Re:Not necessarily bad in all cases...
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
But with the pseudocode, you can write your own program in whatever language you like to verify the results. In my opinion, proving something doesn't obligate you to show every single step. We all omit things in proofs, especially steps which can be verified easily by others, like algebraic simplification, etc. The pseudocode is the minimum acceptable transparency in a computer-aided proof.
Not necessarily bad in all cases...
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are some programs which can aid proofs that are closed source. This doesn't HAVE to mean that steps of the proof are omitted. Take, for example, Mathematica for the Web. It can spit out a result, including all the steps (try a derivative). Or check out a sample Otter proof. Mathematica is closed source, Otter is open source. However, even if both of these were closed source, all the steps would be laid bare for all to see.
In other cases, like the proof of the four color theorem, it seems like the source code is important to see, but not essential. Pseudocode should suffice. Providing pseudocode is akin to saying things like "Simplifying expression (1) yields..."; we don't have to provide EVERY step, but with pseudocode you have enough to determine whether the algorithm itself will work. Checking the source code beyond that is akin to checking someone's algebra.
Just because we don't know how the program arrived at the steps it did doesn't mean that we shouldn't use it; we can usually check the steps. After all, the human brain has been a closed-source proof machine for thousands of years, and no one has complained about that:) Just require pseudocode in computer aided proofs, and it should be sufficient.
I was actually taking this article to heart until I read this paragraph, then I realised the author has probably never had any real mobile OS design experience. There are a lot of things wrong with WM6, but I'd like to see an article written by someone with a little more consideration for mobile design necessities. Your post says everything that is wrong with modern interface design. Designers should design things to be used by people without design experience. If you need design experience to evaluate a product, you haven't designed the interface right. The ultimate (and only) judge of a good interface is whether the target audience finds it a successful interface. The target audience is rarely people with mobile interface design.
From the linked article:
One can be forgiven for suspecting that the true motives of environmentalists, whether they oppose mining the Moon, drilling for oil in Alaska, or building wind farms off Nantucket, involve less a love for the environment and more a hostility for technology itself. I believe I speak for most environmentalists on Slashdot (having read the comments about this article) and most environmentalists in general (although I can't be sure) that the implication that environmentalists are just crazy Ludites is crazy in itself. Only someone completely cut off from average, everyday environmentalists would say such a thing. The evidence just on Slashdot is overwhelming; no one would say Slashdotters are hostile towards technology, and many (most?) could be described as environmentalists. This just doesn't square with reality.
Just because one (or a few) environmentalist has a (to us) wacky view, doesn't mean he represents the whole of environmentalists. The only reason you'd imply this is if you had an agenda, and the author of the linked article clearly does.
who makes laws and spends money? While I agree with you, your implication that the legislature of the US is solely responsible for the functions of making laws and spending money is incorrect. Law making is a joint responsibility between the legislature and the executive branch. The president often effectively sets the legislative agenda through appeals to the public. Even if one party controls Congress, it can be extremely difficult to override a presidential veto.
As for spending money, that is almost 100% the role of the executive branch. As for determining how money will be spent, this is also a joint responsibility between the legislature and the executive branch.
Since these are basically subway stations, you expect to see ads there, and they aren't obtrusive at all, so they feel like part of the environment rather than being a jarring experience.
Hellgate is not the game to make an outrage over, because the ads in it are so tastefully done that they feel right. Simply because you don't notice the ads doesn't mean they don't effect you. The ads in the game are subtly changing your outlook towards the product being advertised. In fact, it is better for them if you don't notice them. You are being taken advantage of all the time by advertisers, and the fact that people now accept this as being normal is very sad.
When you start thinking of advertising as normal and even part of an enjoyable entertainment experience, you have given companies an open-ended invitation to manipulate you. You may think you are immune, but you aren't. They use tried-and-true psychological principles to ensure that large numbers of people think of their product just a little more positively.
Don't let them manipulate you. Tell them when you pay for entertainment, you expect to be treated with a little more respect, not as simply a marketing target.
By the way, if you MUST have ads to feel at home in a virtual environment, the folks at Rockstar games did it right in their GTA series. They created fake ads that were funny, added to the environment, and did not try to manipulate you into buying some existing product.
Using the term "evolutionary rate" is pretty misleading: whats happening is that the genomes are changing faster, but almost all of that change isn't from any selective pressure. Drift is evolution. There is nothing misleading about the term; evolution does not have to include natural selection. Natural selection, rather is simply one avenue of many by which evolution can happen.
So while it may be true that cameras don't stop crime or help to solve it, there is nothing in this article to support that assertion. Actually, the statistics that the article cites DO support the assertion, but the support is weak, for the reasons you cite. This may seem pedantic, but even weak evidence shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Instead, it should be evaluated as weak, and serve as the background for further research.
Trained enough to realize that Google Earth images are old and not up to date, for starters, and are henceforth generally useless. That's why the article gives explicit instructions on how to download the new imagery.
Slashdot Mirror
The ACLU does tons of good work with free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, Fourth amendment issues, etc, etc, etc. You want nothing to do with the ACLU because of its position on ONE confusingly-worded amendment? That seems extremely shortsighted to me. Strip away your free speech rights, and advocating second amendment rights becomes terrorism. Let's make sure we keep our free speech rights so we can be free to continue to debate what our second amendment rights should be. Support the ACLU, and that will remain possible.
Thanks for the example!
In fact, several posters said "South Africa" in response to the post, so they understood that I wasn't asking proof for a negative statement (otherwise they wouldn't have been able to comply. It is debatable whether South Africa is really a good example, but it is worth discussion.
The embargo was highly unlikely to have been effective, especially since as soon as Reagan got into office he weakened it because he knew it would be ineffective. In other words, it didn't have any time to work even if it would have, given more time.
I asked for evidence, and you provided gibberish and cut-and-paste from Sun Tzu. Bravo.
Give one example of an embargo working. You can't - they only end up hurting innocent people and isolating countries so change is slower.
I don't know that it was common knowledge among everyone that they could resurrect so easily at that point. Also, people can be irrational. Suicide bombing isn't that effective in getting what you want here on Earth, either, but people still do it.
I use virtual PC on Vista Home premium. It runs fine, it just isn't supported. It gives a warning on install, that's all (unless something has changed in the past few months since I installed it).
The issue of going paperless to save the planet was always bogus. Making paper requires lots of chemicals which are not particularly eco-friendly. Also, only a percentage of the trees used to make paper worldwide come from tree farms. According to this website, only 16% come from paper farms, so that means the rest (that isn't recycled) comes from sources that take more time to renew. In the mean time, the older trees that were removing more CO2 from the air are (at best) replaced by much seedlings or much younger trees, meaning that there is less CO2 being removed from the air.
On the contrary, making something that will be widely read available online will have only a small effect of power usage. If you factor in the amount of power used by the machines that harvested and created the paper it WOULD have been printed on, I imagine there is a pretty big savings.
Our senses already provide a reasonably detailed record of what happens on a moment to moment basis. The only (relevant) difference between an electronic surveillance tool and your own brain is the ability to play back what happened to a third party. Thus, it cannot the recording per se that they are be objecting to. If it were, wiping your memory would be ok, and I don't think anyone would advocate that even if it were possible.
When you understand that they must be objecting to something other than recording, their purpose becomes clear. With electronic surveillance tools comes a lack of doubt about what happened. With only your brain as your surveillance tool, they can always deny what happened. This is not possible if you record an event electronically. The government's ability to create doubt is the key to why citizens are being restricted in their surveillance rights. As we know, with doubt comes power.
I believe every person should have a right to have a solid, verifiable record of ANY interaction they have with a representative of the government. Without this right, the government simply has too much power to create doubt when they infringe on our rights.
I have no doubt that intelligence is heritable. There are variations in intelligence between individuals. However, to claim that entire races are, on average, more or less intelligent than another is just stupid. For that to happen, the races would have had to have 1) drastically different selection pressures and 2) very little gene flow between them. Neither of these things occurred, as far as anyone can tell. Claims of different intelligences across races continue to be racist BS, even if a few of its well-meaning proponents don't realize it.
But with the pseudocode, you can write your own program in whatever language you like to verify the results. In my opinion, proving something doesn't obligate you to show every single step. We all omit things in proofs, especially steps which can be verified easily by others, like algebraic simplification, etc. The pseudocode is the minimum acceptable transparency in a computer-aided proof.
In other cases, like the proof of the four color theorem, it seems like the source code is important to see, but not essential. Pseudocode should suffice. Providing pseudocode is akin to saying things like "Simplifying expression (1) yields..."; we don't have to provide EVERY step, but with pseudocode you have enough to determine whether the algorithm itself will work. Checking the source code beyond that is akin to checking someone's algebra.
Just because we don't know how the program arrived at the steps it did doesn't mean that we shouldn't use it; we can usually check the steps. After all, the human brain has been a closed-source proof machine for thousands of years, and no one has complained about that :) Just require pseudocode in computer aided proofs, and it should be sufficient.
Just because one (or a few) environmentalist has a (to us) wacky view, doesn't mean he represents the whole of environmentalists. The only reason you'd imply this is if you had an agenda, and the author of the linked article clearly does.
As for spending money, that is almost 100% the role of the executive branch. As for determining how money will be spent, this is also a joint responsibility between the legislature and the executive branch.
Hellgate is not the game to make an outrage over, because the ads in it are so tastefully done that they feel right. Simply because you don't notice the ads doesn't mean they don't effect you. The ads in the game are subtly changing your outlook towards the product being advertised. In fact, it is better for them if you don't notice them. You are being taken advantage of all the time by advertisers, and the fact that people now accept this as being normal is very sad.
When you start thinking of advertising as normal and even part of an enjoyable entertainment experience, you have given companies an open-ended invitation to manipulate you. You may think you are immune, but you aren't. They use tried-and-true psychological principles to ensure that large numbers of people think of their product just a little more positively.
Don't let them manipulate you. Tell them when you pay for entertainment, you expect to be treated with a little more respect, not as simply a marketing target.
By the way, if you MUST have ads to feel at home in a virtual environment, the folks at Rockstar games did it right in their GTA series. They created fake ads that were funny, added to the environment, and did not try to manipulate you into buying some existing product.
I prefer to tar and gzip my .tex files, and include a .ps file if they want to print it. The recipients thank me when I give up and send them odf.