Did you actually read that? Because in my parsing, Wikipedia is not violating the law.
Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any badge, identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by the head of any department or agency of the United States for use by any officer or employee thereof,
Not applicable; this is referring to an actual badge.
... or any colorable imitation thereof,
Not applicable; this is referring to an actual imitation of a badge. (see Colorable, I believe in this context it just means "you could legally prove that this was intended to be an imitation of a badge")
...or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the likeness of any such badge, identification card, or other insignia,
Not applicable; this is referring to the actual action of physically creating an insignia, or creating an image of an insignia. Wikipedia did not make this image; they just pulled it from materials the FBI makes freely available.
Note also that the law does not explicitly mention files, though I guess that could be covered under "photograph" or "impression".
... or any colorable imitation thereof,
Not applicable; this refers to the same as before, but with an imitation of the badge.
... except as authorized under regulations made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
That's just sentencing.
So the prohibition is against creating an imitation insignia, or making an imitation of the insignia; it is not illegal to own one, as long as you came across it legally. For instance, if the FBI put the image of the insignia online, then it would be legal for you to have that image of the insignia. That's what Wikipedia did, and as far as I can tell it's not illegal.
(I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this thing is that complicated)
Yeah I'm not sure how this will interact with the way the Chinese drive. My wife has been there for business before, and she says that while Chinese people are generally better drivers than people here in the states, they have to be because the streets are like a giant game of no-contact bumper cars. People basically just do whatever the hell they want.
It's funny because if your higher-ups had actually read the rules that Defcon posted (you know, done a bit of research), they would have realized that the military is not being targeted. If anyone gets a call pumping them for personal information, it's not going to be due to this defcon event.
Actually to be honest, my dad never talked about his work at all. When I was a kid he wrote me a little application that would let me pick which game I wanted to play, and one time he showed me the code behind it because I kept on asking him to add more games and he wanted me to do it myself. Unfortunately, like most kids I just went "wtf I don't get it" (I don't even remember if it was an actual C program or if it was just some form of DOS basic) and that was about the end of it.
Years later, I learned Java in high school, and I guess my dad decided that porting his program would be a reasonable little project for me. It wasn't that hard, but it did show me that programming language skills can be transferable.
I actually meant to include something about that -
Graphics are your best friends. Stupid little 2D graphics are absolutely the best way to learn a language, especially if you're doing it for the first time - not only can the results be kinda cool, but you usually get almost instant feedback.
Further, one of the best ways to start learning how to do anything is to take something that already works, and start tweaking it so that it does what you want. I'm sure you can find an example Java program that'll create an applet and draw a circle or something on it - now make the circle move around, make it orbit the mouse cursor, give it a couple of friends, double buffer the applet so that things don't flicker as much... that's kinda how I started making the 2D orbit simulation I was talking about before.
In my opinion, as someone who's learned a few programming languages in his lifetime, the best way to learn a programming language (or any new technique, really) is to pick a task for yourself using that technique and figure out what you need to do to get that task done. For instance, I learned Javascript primarily because I wanted to query a couple of Sharepoint sites and display the resulting information somewhere else, and Javascript was as reasonable way of doing that as any. I learned Perl because I had a bunch of information in XML files, and I wanted to apply an XSLT transformation to all of them and concatenate the result together (that's also how I started learning XLST). I learned Java Applets because I was bored in a high school computer science class, and decided to make a 2D gravity simulation thing. I learned C++ because my dad had written his own custom version of tcpreplay, and offered me $20 to port it to Windows.
Just pick something that sounds like fun, figure out how to do it in the language of your choice, and do it.
Good lord, why do people trot this argument out every single time? Yes, all the trivially accessible minerals have been consumed - we consumed them by bringing them up to the surface. If New York City was leveled tomorrow, a couple thousand years from now it would be an obscenely rich iron mine - all of those skyscrapers are full of the stuff, which would make the area (literally!) unnaturally rich in all sorts of minerals. I mean, haven't you read stories of how we'd find gigantic piles of seashells that the Native Americans would throw out in the same spot generation after generation? Now imagine that those seashells were made out of steel and you'd have a pretty good idea of how easy it would be to mine the ruins of New York.
Yes, petrochemicals would be basically impossible to develop - but that's okay! It's not like they're the only option. After all, we had steam powered boats and locomotives for a hundred years before we developed the gas-powered internal combustion engine.
You say that like it's self-evidently untrue. I would argue the opposite - everyone does deserve to go to college. Hell, it's a simple economic argument: a well-educated workforce works more efficiently than one that is just barely educated enough to scrape by.
Worker education is by far the single best way to boost economic output. The only problem is that educated workers tend to not take shit from the sort of people who claim that they deserve to get a million dollars a year by throwing darts at a business decision dartboard, and unfortunately for some reason those are the sorts of people who get to make decisions about what public programs get funding.
By that logic, we should be paying teachers salaries equivalent to CEOs - after all, we want to only attract the best, and if they fuck up they fuck up entire generations of the workforce. If your theory is correct, why do we pay teachers a pittance and pay CEOs a lot?
Well okay, I guess I can see that - but even if they put a significant portion of their own net worth in the company, aren't they also the people who are in the best position to pull out quickly if it looks like things are going wrong? After all, they get the news first.
Further, what's a significant portion? Losing half of your wealth means a lot more to a pauper than to a millionaire. If all I have is a dollar, then putting 50% of that into my company is a bad idea. If I have two million dollars, then 50% of that in the company I work for is totally fine; even if the company goes under I'll still have a million dollars which is more than enough to let me retire at any age. In the meantime, I'm making a six-figure salary which is just padding my retirement plans.
I just don't see how that's enough risk to be commensurate with a salary that's orders of magnitude higher. I would understand it if they had, say, 80-90% of their personal wealth invested in the company, but I'm pretty sure nobody is that stupid.
Again, can you quantify the risks the boss of a financial firm faces? What, exactly, does he stand to lose above and beyond the obvious (aka his job) if things go belly-up?
I think your example is quite telling - there's no risks involved in buying a winning lottery ticket, but there's also almost no risks involved in buying a losing one. After all, in both cases your liability is limited.
Can you quantify what "big risks" are involved in running a successful financial firm? That's something I hear a lot, but I've never actually seen a breakdown of what exactly is being risked by upper management vs, say, the programmers. Sure, if the business goes bust upper management loses their jobs, but then so do the programmers.
I bet you anything it's not really $360,000 a year to store a terabyte of data.
It's probably closer to $10,000 or so a year to store a terabyte of data (this is enterprise class stuff, right?), and $350,000 a year towards unfunded IT mandates, like "We need Windows 7 on every machine! And Office 2010! And Project and Visio for everyone! And...."
That's what I love about Fry's. Their employees don't know anything about what they're selling beyond where it is, and everyone knows it so nobody wastes any time.
I've actually had Best Buy employees walk up to me and try to sell me something when I was just browsing around. Look, I came into your store; you can stop advertising to me already. I might even buy something if you had anything worth buying, but bothering me isn't going to help your case.
It's funny because that's how religion works, but not how science works. The difference is that each priest hears a different voice of God talking to him, but every scientist looks at the same underlying reality. (That's why science converges and religion diverges, but that's an argument for another day)
Long story short: if you are a truthful climate scientist, you acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer and it is at least in part due to us. Almost every piece of evidence is consistent with this conclusion, and there is almost no evidence against it.
If you don't acknowledge the the Earth is getting warmer, you're either untruthful, misled, not a climate scientist or all of the above.
Were these the same doctors that were up in arms when a US council recommended women get fewer mammograms, after evidence showed that (even absent any cost argument!) the reduced frequency was just as effective at detecting breast cancer?
Clearly not, by definition. That was a clear-cut case of the evidence saying one thing and some physicians wanting it to say another. It's not like physicians are some special breed of always-right human.
The thing is, that sort of thing is endemic in the US's medical practices. If a doctor performs an unnecessary CAT scan, the insurance company pays the financial cost and the patient pays the medical cost (a slightly elevated risk of cancer), all in the name of covering the doctor's ass. We don't follow best practices in the medical fields as much as we should, more's the pity.
Yes sorry I kinda misspoke there. No debate in the history of the world has ever really found the truth of a matter.
Saying "we'll have a debate to see which side is true" is exactly equivalent to saying "we'll have a boxing match to see which side is true" - the outcome doesn't depend the truth, and it is no better than the ancient tradition of trial by combat. The only difference is that instead of fists, orators use words.
The only result we get from a debate is which side is better at debating, not which side is closer to the truth. The only system we've found so far that reliably leads us closer to the truth is our modern evidence-based scientific method, which is why I was (perhaps obliquely) pushing that in my original post.
Presumably yes, which (I imagine) is why they don't want to debate him. Seriously, listen to some of his stuff - it's very well thought out.
Also, I think you'll find that arguments and legislation have "changed the truth" exactly as frequently as debates have: never.
Of course they haven't, and I didn't mean to imply that legislation is capable of changing the truth. The truth exists independently of the positions we may take in an argument or the laws we might pass. That's why (as I said) the laws we pass and positions we take in an argument should be based on published (scientific) literature and well-reviewed statistics, not on ideology or dogma. I'm a proponent of evidence-based legislation, just like most doctors nowadays are proponents of evidence-based medicine. Unfortunately it seems like modern politicians think that's a bad idea for some reason.
To be fair, no debate in the history of the world has ever actually changed the truth of any matter. Arguments and legislation should be based on published literature and statistics, not on who is the better orator.
That being said, I'm sure they're refusing because they know Lessig would kick ass. His position is well thought-out and basically unimpeachable, while theirs is untenable and distasteful.
I actually had a CS class ("Fundamentals of Computer Science" type thing) with a super hardcore professor. There was extra credit on the midterm; if you got the multiple choice question right, you gained one point on your final midterm grade. If you got it wrong, you lost two points.
A week later, the professor showed us the grade distribution for the midterm. There was one poor sod all the way over to the left, with -2 points. He would have actually done better by skipping the midterm.
One was a parking structure where the powers-that-be decided that it wasn't sufficient to have the "correct" number of handicapped spaces on the ground level--there must be an elevator in case some handicapped person parked in a non-handicapped spot on the 2nd floor and couldn't use the stairs.
Right, because handicapped people are subhuman and should be treated with only derision. Ha ha, you broke your leg and can't walk down the stairs! You shoulda gotten to work earlier, before all the pregnant women and other disabled people!
Look, if there wasn't enough budget to add in an elevator, then maybe the project was too marginal to finish anyway? And also, it's not like the government just randomly makes changes like that - buildings currently under construction will be grandfathered in, and the people who plan new buildings will know that they have to include those sorts of amenities. Are you sure that the "powers that be" you talked about were actually the government and not just some higher-up in the company who decided they needed a reason to cancel the project?
Anyway, every single multi-story parking structure I've seen around here (south of LA) has an elevator. Clearly the budget exists to build these things, your dad's company just didn't feel like making less money.
Well also, to be fair, most modern games are "okay but bland" at worst (aka a 7, which is funnily enough usually the equivalent of about a C- or D+). The GP is complaining because they don't calibrate the 1-10 scale against other games; they calibrate it against some absolute enjoyment scale.
For instance, I disliked GTA 4, but I would have still given it a 7 - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't especially good. When a studio pours millions of dollars into a game, you're guaranteed get something that's at least okay.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who think you can use Internet Explorer to access an SFTP or FTPS site. It's not even funny.
Of course, Internet Explorer itself doesn't help - if you click on a link in the form of "sftp://" or "ftps://", IE goes "oh hey I know how to handle this!" and tries to open it even though it has no idea what it's doing.
And of course, the users don't realize that there's a difference between FTP and SFTP/FTPS, so they say "hey why do I need to download some other program? Internet Explorer works just fine for all those other sites!"
Honestly, one thing that would make my life vastly easier is if Microsoft released an update to IE that allowed it to understand FTPS (which is the secure FTP protocol MSFT pushes in IIS 7.5, so why not?).
Slashdot Mirror
For something this retarded, you have to go further than that: I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Did you actually read that? Because in my parsing, Wikipedia is not violating the law.
Not applicable; this is referring to an actual badge.
Not applicable; this is referring to an actual imitation of a badge. (see Colorable, I believe in this context it just means "you could legally prove that this was intended to be an imitation of a badge")
Not applicable; this is referring to the actual action of physically creating an insignia, or creating an image of an insignia. Wikipedia did not make this image; they just pulled it from materials the FBI makes freely available.
Note also that the law does not explicitly mention files, though I guess that could be covered under "photograph" or "impression".
Not applicable; this refers to the same as before, but with an imitation of the badge.
That's just sentencing.
So the prohibition is against creating an imitation insignia, or making an imitation of the insignia; it is not illegal to own one, as long as you came across it legally. For instance, if the FBI put the image of the insignia online, then it would be legal for you to have that image of the insignia. That's what Wikipedia did, and as far as I can tell it's not illegal.
(I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this thing is that complicated)
Yeah I'm not sure how this will interact with the way the Chinese drive. My wife has been there for business before, and she says that while Chinese people are generally better drivers than people here in the states, they have to be because the streets are like a giant game of no-contact bumper cars. People basically just do whatever the hell they want.
It's funny because if your higher-ups had actually read the rules that Defcon posted (you know, done a bit of research), they would have realized that the military is not being targeted. If anyone gets a call pumping them for personal information, it's not going to be due to this defcon event.
Actually to be honest, my dad never talked about his work at all. When I was a kid he wrote me a little application that would let me pick which game I wanted to play, and one time he showed me the code behind it because I kept on asking him to add more games and he wanted me to do it myself. Unfortunately, like most kids I just went "wtf I don't get it" (I don't even remember if it was an actual C program or if it was just some form of DOS basic) and that was about the end of it.
Years later, I learned Java in high school, and I guess my dad decided that porting his program would be a reasonable little project for me. It wasn't that hard, but it did show me that programming language skills can be transferable.
I actually meant to include something about that -
Graphics are your best friends. Stupid little 2D graphics are absolutely the best way to learn a language, especially if you're doing it for the first time - not only can the results be kinda cool, but you usually get almost instant feedback.
Further, one of the best ways to start learning how to do anything is to take something that already works, and start tweaking it so that it does what you want. I'm sure you can find an example Java program that'll create an applet and draw a circle or something on it - now make the circle move around, make it orbit the mouse cursor, give it a couple of friends, double buffer the applet so that things don't flicker as much... that's kinda how I started making the 2D orbit simulation I was talking about before.
In my opinion, as someone who's learned a few programming languages in his lifetime, the best way to learn a programming language (or any new technique, really) is to pick a task for yourself using that technique and figure out what you need to do to get that task done. For instance, I learned Javascript primarily because I wanted to query a couple of Sharepoint sites and display the resulting information somewhere else, and Javascript was as reasonable way of doing that as any. I learned Perl because I had a bunch of information in XML files, and I wanted to apply an XSLT transformation to all of them and concatenate the result together (that's also how I started learning XLST). I learned Java Applets because I was bored in a high school computer science class, and decided to make a 2D gravity simulation thing. I learned C++ because my dad had written his own custom version of tcpreplay, and offered me $20 to port it to Windows.
Just pick something that sounds like fun, figure out how to do it in the language of your choice, and do it.
Good lord, why do people trot this argument out every single time? Yes, all the trivially accessible minerals have been consumed - we consumed them by bringing them up to the surface. If New York City was leveled tomorrow, a couple thousand years from now it would be an obscenely rich iron mine - all of those skyscrapers are full of the stuff, which would make the area (literally!) unnaturally rich in all sorts of minerals. I mean, haven't you read stories of how we'd find gigantic piles of seashells that the Native Americans would throw out in the same spot generation after generation? Now imagine that those seashells were made out of steel and you'd have a pretty good idea of how easy it would be to mine the ruins of New York.
Yes, petrochemicals would be basically impossible to develop - but that's okay! It's not like they're the only option. After all, we had steam powered boats and locomotives for a hundred years before we developed the gas-powered internal combustion engine.
You say that like it's self-evidently untrue. I would argue the opposite - everyone does deserve to go to college. Hell, it's a simple economic argument: a well-educated workforce works more efficiently than one that is just barely educated enough to scrape by.
Worker education is by far the single best way to boost economic output. The only problem is that educated workers tend to not take shit from the sort of people who claim that they deserve to get a million dollars a year by throwing darts at a business decision dartboard, and unfortunately for some reason those are the sorts of people who get to make decisions about what public programs get funding.
By that logic, we should be paying teachers salaries equivalent to CEOs - after all, we want to only attract the best, and if they fuck up they fuck up entire generations of the workforce. If your theory is correct, why do we pay teachers a pittance and pay CEOs a lot?
Well okay, I guess I can see that - but even if they put a significant portion of their own net worth in the company, aren't they also the people who are in the best position to pull out quickly if it looks like things are going wrong? After all, they get the news first.
Further, what's a significant portion? Losing half of your wealth means a lot more to a pauper than to a millionaire. If all I have is a dollar, then putting 50% of that into my company is a bad idea. If I have two million dollars, then 50% of that in the company I work for is totally fine; even if the company goes under I'll still have a million dollars which is more than enough to let me retire at any age. In the meantime, I'm making a six-figure salary which is just padding my retirement plans.
I just don't see how that's enough risk to be commensurate with a salary that's orders of magnitude higher. I would understand it if they had, say, 80-90% of their personal wealth invested in the company, but I'm pretty sure nobody is that stupid.
Again, can you quantify the risks the boss of a financial firm faces? What, exactly, does he stand to lose above and beyond the obvious (aka his job) if things go belly-up?
I think your example is quite telling - there's no risks involved in buying a winning lottery ticket, but there's also almost no risks involved in buying a losing one. After all, in both cases your liability is limited.
Can you quantify what "big risks" are involved in running a successful financial firm? That's something I hear a lot, but I've never actually seen a breakdown of what exactly is being risked by upper management vs, say, the programmers. Sure, if the business goes bust upper management loses their jobs, but then so do the programmers.
I bet you anything it's not really $360,000 a year to store a terabyte of data.
It's probably closer to $10,000 or so a year to store a terabyte of data (this is enterprise class stuff, right?), and $350,000 a year towards unfunded IT mandates, like "We need Windows 7 on every machine! And Office 2010! And Project and Visio for everyone! And...."
That's what I love about Fry's. Their employees don't know anything about what they're selling beyond where it is, and everyone knows it so nobody wastes any time.
I've actually had Best Buy employees walk up to me and try to sell me something when I was just browsing around. Look, I came into your store; you can stop advertising to me already. I might even buy something if you had anything worth buying, but bothering me isn't going to help your case.
It's funny because that's how religion works, but not how science works. The difference is that each priest hears a different voice of God talking to him, but every scientist looks at the same underlying reality. (That's why science converges and religion diverges, but that's an argument for another day)
Long story short: if you are a truthful climate scientist, you acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer and it is at least in part due to us. Almost every piece of evidence is consistent with this conclusion, and there is almost no evidence against it.
If you don't acknowledge the the Earth is getting warmer, you're either untruthful, misled, not a climate scientist or all of the above.
Clearly not, by definition. That was a clear-cut case of the evidence saying one thing and some physicians wanting it to say another. It's not like physicians are some special breed of always-right human.
The thing is, that sort of thing is endemic in the US's medical practices. If a doctor performs an unnecessary CAT scan, the insurance company pays the financial cost and the patient pays the medical cost (a slightly elevated risk of cancer), all in the name of covering the doctor's ass. We don't follow best practices in the medical fields as much as we should, more's the pity.
Yes sorry I kinda misspoke there. No debate in the history of the world has ever really found the truth of a matter.
Saying "we'll have a debate to see which side is true" is exactly equivalent to saying "we'll have a boxing match to see which side is true" - the outcome doesn't depend the truth, and it is no better than the ancient tradition of trial by combat. The only difference is that instead of fists, orators use words.
The only result we get from a debate is which side is better at debating, not which side is closer to the truth. The only system we've found so far that reliably leads us closer to the truth is our modern evidence-based scientific method, which is why I was (perhaps obliquely) pushing that in my original post.
Presumably yes, which (I imagine) is why they don't want to debate him. Seriously, listen to some of his stuff - it's very well thought out.
Of course they haven't, and I didn't mean to imply that legislation is capable of changing the truth. The truth exists independently of the positions we may take in an argument or the laws we might pass. That's why (as I said) the laws we pass and positions we take in an argument should be based on published (scientific) literature and well-reviewed statistics, not on ideology or dogma. I'm a proponent of evidence-based legislation, just like most doctors nowadays are proponents of evidence-based medicine. Unfortunately it seems like modern politicians think that's a bad idea for some reason.
To be fair, no debate in the history of the world has ever actually changed the truth of any matter. Arguments and legislation should be based on published literature and statistics, not on who is the better orator.
That being said, I'm sure they're refusing because they know Lessig would kick ass. His position is well thought-out and basically unimpeachable, while theirs is untenable and distasteful.
I actually had a CS class ("Fundamentals of Computer Science" type thing) with a super hardcore professor. There was extra credit on the midterm; if you got the multiple choice question right, you gained one point on your final midterm grade. If you got it wrong, you lost two points.
A week later, the professor showed us the grade distribution for the midterm. There was one poor sod all the way over to the left, with -2 points. He would have actually done better by skipping the midterm.
Even better, it's horrible for Flash!
I for one welcome our future disability friendly HTML 5 overlords.
Right, because handicapped people are subhuman and should be treated with only derision. Ha ha, you broke your leg and can't walk down the stairs! You shoulda gotten to work earlier, before all the pregnant women and other disabled people!
Look, if there wasn't enough budget to add in an elevator, then maybe the project was too marginal to finish anyway? And also, it's not like the government just randomly makes changes like that - buildings currently under construction will be grandfathered in, and the people who plan new buildings will know that they have to include those sorts of amenities. Are you sure that the "powers that be" you talked about were actually the government and not just some higher-up in the company who decided they needed a reason to cancel the project?
Anyway, every single multi-story parking structure I've seen around here (south of LA) has an elevator. Clearly the budget exists to build these things, your dad's company just didn't feel like making less money.
Well also, to be fair, most modern games are "okay but bland" at worst (aka a 7, which is funnily enough usually the equivalent of about a C- or D+). The GP is complaining because they don't calibrate the 1-10 scale against other games; they calibrate it against some absolute enjoyment scale.
For instance, I disliked GTA 4, but I would have still given it a 7 - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't especially good. When a studio pours millions of dollars into a game, you're guaranteed get something that's at least okay.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who think you can use Internet Explorer to access an SFTP or FTPS site. It's not even funny.
Of course, Internet Explorer itself doesn't help - if you click on a link in the form of "sftp://" or "ftps://", IE goes "oh hey I know how to handle this!" and tries to open it even though it has no idea what it's doing.
And of course, the users don't realize that there's a difference between FTP and SFTP/FTPS, so they say "hey why do I need to download some other program? Internet Explorer works just fine for all those other sites!"
Honestly, one thing that would make my life vastly easier is if Microsoft released an update to IE that allowed it to understand FTPS (which is the secure FTP protocol MSFT pushes in IIS 7.5, so why not?).