This reminds me of a recent Diamond Geezer post lampooning the new legal restrictions on the use of the words "London" and "2012":
We demand that you change your behaviour and amend your speech. Watch, and learn:
Instead of "Today is January 3rd 2012" say "Today is three days after 2011."
Instead of signing legal documents "03/01/2012" write "03/01/12"
Instead of "My baby is due in June 2012" say "I'm having a baby in a special year, I am very blessed."
Instead of "Do you have any 2012 tickets?" say "Do you have any Inspirational National Event tickets?"
Instead of "2012 is turning out to be a shit year already" say "I think I'll just pop down to John Lewis and buy a cuddly Mandeville."
In July, it will also become illegal to mention the word "London" in public. We will issue further instructions at this time.
He's only half-joking—the British Parliament really did pass a law, the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006, which effectively prohibits the use of these words in certain combinations, except by the Olympics organizing committee and its official sponsors.* According to LOCOG's own guidelines, the prohibited expressions are
– any two of the words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve
OR
– any word in the list above with one or more of the words: London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver, bronze
*Technically, the only real crime is creating a false association between a business and the Olympics, regardless of what language is used, but the Act singles out a number of particular words and expressions for special consideration by the courts.
Also the shooter isn't a "white male" as media keeps reporting. He's a minority just like the victim is a minority. This was a Hispanic on Black crime, not a white on black crime, but they are trying to spin it to make the white majority feel guilty. Stirring a race war.
It would be extremely inconvenient, which is why no country which wants to maintain good relations with the US (that'd be almost all of them), or with its own citizens who do business with the US, is going to do this.
Samsung tends to use a lot of Free Software in their firmware—our Samsung TV came with a copy of the GPL and some other licences. If this is the case with the 2012 models, has anyone thought to request the source code for the firmware? Even if the alleged spying software is proprietary, if it really exists there might be hooks or calls to it in the GPL'd code which they're legally required to disclose. Then at least you'd have evidence that it exists.
Employers have no right to ask job applicants for their house keys or to read their diaries
Really? What law prevents them from doing that? I was under the impression that, at least in the US, employers can ask prospective employees almost whatever information they damn well please. The only exceptions I'm aware of is stuff that could then be used to illegally discriminate against you, such as your religion and race. Unless something in your house or in your diary exposes you as a member of a protected class, then why couldn't a prospective employer insist on seeing them? It's not as though you are obligated to consent.
What proportion of the researchers participating in this boycott have actually published in or refereed for Elsevier journals? It's very easy to piously support a boycott if you don't actually do business with the target.
If the apps truly were free then battery depletion due to activity unrelated to the user's intended functionality of the program wouldn't be a problem; you (or someone else) would quickly get into the source code and remove the offending routines. The problem described in the summary occurs only with proprietary apps, whether or not you have to pay for them.
Do they issue warrants for civil cases? I would have thought that his failure to appear would simply result in a default judgment entered against him. I'd advise the AC to check his credit report to see if there any outstanding debts which the plaintiff has reported as unpaid.
Verizon uses the same boilerplate contract for all its regular customers because it would take too much time (and therefore money) to negotiate and implement millions of individual contracts. But it's conceivable that a small handful of highly-paid executives could effectively set their own terms of service as a perquisite. Perhaps the more privacy-conscious among them have "opted out" of the more nefarious terms and conditions.
A few years ago I also found I needed to redact text from a document. I do most of my document processing in LaTeX, and found that the following works nicely. It replaces (not overprints) all text inside \redact{...} with a black bar, and copes well with wrapping across lines and pages.
To think that the state somehow operates outside of capitalism is ludicrous. Capitalism has been the pervailing socioeconomic model in the world for the last several centuries, and governments are just as much a part of it as businesses. Even the Soviet Union acknowledged that it was capitalist; Lenin himself was advocating a move towards "state capitalism" as early as 1901, saying it would be a huge step forward for Russia.
If you're going to berate a poster for inventing new definitions for socialism, then you should realize that the one you yourself are using is a novel invention by Lenin. Marx himself used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably to refer to a democratic, stateless socio-economic system where labour would be voluntary and there would be free access to goods and services. The idea of a central state with a command economy was Lenin's idea, and he redefined "socialism" to refer to it.
Why don't you offer up some evidence or a citation for your rather bizarre claim rather than wrongly assume your opponent hasn't read the source material himself?
Whether he was telling workers to unite internationally or separately within their own countries is irrelevant to your error. You claimed that his message (whatever it was) was not intended for workers of larger countries, but the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto prove otherwise.
This form of society is more commonly referred to as "primitive communism" and existed in pre-agrarian societies. In fact, it still exists in a few remaining isolated hunter–gatherer tribes. Any examination of them will put to rest your rather ridiculous notion that they leave their old and weak to die.
Humans lived under "true communism" for hundreds of thousands of years longer than they have lived under capitalism, or feudalism, or any other socio-economic system. We're still around, so it can't be against our nature to live in a more or less egalitarian society of free access. Sure, human nature gives us the capacity to be greedy and corrupt and antisocial, but how we actually act in a given situation is determined more by environmental than genetic factors. The challenge now is not to overcome human nature, but to apply it to forming a worldwide society which combines the uncoerced labour, free access, and democracy of our primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors with the modern-day technological and industrial benefits which capitalism has built up for us.
That's why Marx not only identified the problem but the solution. He famously remarked that "philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it." Whatever criticisms can be levelled at Marx, being an armchair philosopher who didn't propose any concrete course of action isn't one of them.
Cite? Everything I've read from Marx indicates that he intended for communism to be an international goal. This was most famously stated in The Communist Manifesto: "Working men of all countries, unite!"
Firefox has been dumbed down ever since it was forked from Mozilla. That was, in fact, the main point of forking it: to provide a stripped-down browser that was easy to use. If you want a powerful, configurable Mozilla-based browser, then use SeaMonkey, which was the continuation of Mozilla. (Ironically, it has the additional advantage in recent years of not being bloated like Firefox.)
For the last thirty years I've been getting my weekly dose of science news from Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio. Shows are available for download or streaming online as soon as they air, and their online archive of episodes goes back to 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
Or better yet, a bathroom mirror.
This reminds me of a recent Diamond Geezer post lampooning the new legal restrictions on the use of the words "London" and "2012":
He's only half-joking—the British Parliament really did pass a law, the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006, which effectively prohibits the use of these words in certain combinations, except by the Olympics organizing committee and its official sponsors.* According to LOCOG's own guidelines, the prohibited expressions are
*Technically, the only real crime is creating a false association between a business and the Olympics, regardless of what language is used, but the Act singles out a number of particular words and expressions for special consideration by the courts.
In American parlance, the term "Hispanic" has nothing to do with race; it just means "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race". If you are Hispanic you can be black, white, mulatto, mestizo, or any other racial background.
It would be extremely inconvenient, which is why no country which wants to maintain good relations with the US (that'd be almost all of them), or with its own citizens who do business with the US, is going to do this.
Samsung tends to use a lot of Free Software in their firmware—our Samsung TV came with a copy of the GPL and some other licences. If this is the case with the 2012 models, has anyone thought to request the source code for the firmware? Even if the alleged spying software is proprietary, if it really exists there might be hooks or calls to it in the GPL'd code which they're legally required to disclose. Then at least you'd have evidence that it exists.
Really? What law prevents them from doing that? I was under the impression that, at least in the US, employers can ask prospective employees almost whatever information they damn well please. The only exceptions I'm aware of is stuff that could then be used to illegally discriminate against you, such as your religion and race. Unless something in your house or in your diary exposes you as a member of a protected class, then why couldn't a prospective employer insist on seeing them? It's not as though you are obligated to consent.
What proportion of the researchers participating in this boycott have actually published in or refereed for Elsevier journals? It's very easy to piously support a boycott if you don't actually do business with the target.
If the apps truly were free then battery depletion due to activity unrelated to the user's intended functionality of the program wouldn't be a problem; you (or someone else) would quickly get into the source code and remove the offending routines. The problem described in the summary occurs only with proprietary apps, whether or not you have to pay for them.
Do they issue warrants for civil cases? I would have thought that his failure to appear would simply result in a default judgment entered against him. I'd advise the AC to check his credit report to see if there any outstanding debts which the plaintiff has reported as unpaid.
Verizon uses the same boilerplate contract for all its regular customers because it would take too much time (and therefore money) to negotiate and implement millions of individual contracts. But it's conceivable that a small handful of highly-paid executives could effectively set their own terms of service as a perquisite. Perhaps the more privacy-conscious among them have "opted out" of the more nefarious terms and conditions.
I am curious to know how much electricity was wasted on this apparently useless endeavour.
A few years ago I also found I needed to redact text from a document. I do most of my document processing in LaTeX, and found that the following works nicely. It replaces (not overprints) all text inside \redact{...} with a black bar, and copes well with wrapping across lines and pages.
\RequirePackage{soul,color}
\sethlcolor{black}
\makeatletter
\def\phantom@SOUL@ulunderline#1{{%
\setbox\z@\hbox{#1}%
\dimen@=\wd\z@
\dimen@i=\SOUL@uloverlap
\advance\dimen@2\dimen@i
\rlap{%
\null
\kern-\dimen@i
\SOUL@ulcolor{\SOUL@ulleaders\hskip\dimen@}%
}%
\phantom{\unhcopy\z@}% \phantom added here
}}
\DeclareRobustCommand\redact[1]{\begingroup
\let\SOUL@ulunderline\phantom@SOUL@ulunderline
\hl{#1}%
\endgroup}
\makeatother
To think that the state somehow operates outside of capitalism is ludicrous. Capitalism has been the pervailing socioeconomic model in the world for the last several centuries, and governments are just as much a part of it as businesses. Even the Soviet Union acknowledged that it was capitalist; Lenin himself was advocating a move towards "state capitalism" as early as 1901, saying it would be a huge step forward for Russia.
If you're going to berate a poster for inventing new definitions for socialism, then you should realize that the one you yourself are using is a novel invention by Lenin. Marx himself used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably to refer to a democratic, stateless socio-economic system where labour would be voluntary and there would be free access to goods and services. The idea of a central state with a command economy was Lenin's idea, and he redefined "socialism" to refer to it.
Why don't you offer up some evidence or a citation for your rather bizarre claim rather than wrongly assume your opponent hasn't read the source material himself?
Where did Marx advocate central planning?
Whether he was telling workers to unite internationally or separately within their own countries is irrelevant to your error. You claimed that his message (whatever it was) was not intended for workers of larger countries, but the closing lines of The Communist Manifesto prove otherwise.
This form of society is more commonly referred to as "primitive communism" and existed in pre-agrarian societies. In fact, it still exists in a few remaining isolated hunter–gatherer tribes. Any examination of them will put to rest your rather ridiculous notion that they leave their old and weak to die.
Humans lived under "true communism" for hundreds of thousands of years longer than they have lived under capitalism, or feudalism, or any other socio-economic system. We're still around, so it can't be against our nature to live in a more or less egalitarian society of free access. Sure, human nature gives us the capacity to be greedy and corrupt and antisocial, but how we actually act in a given situation is determined more by environmental than genetic factors. The challenge now is not to overcome human nature, but to apply it to forming a worldwide society which combines the uncoerced labour, free access, and democracy of our primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors with the modern-day technological and industrial benefits which capitalism has built up for us.
That's why Marx not only identified the problem but the solution. He famously remarked that "philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it." Whatever criticisms can be levelled at Marx, being an armchair philosopher who didn't propose any concrete course of action isn't one of them.
Cite? Everything I've read from Marx indicates that he intended for communism to be an international goal. This was most famously stated in The Communist Manifesto: "Working men of all countries, unite!"
Man doesn't support any navigation at all, does it? I thought it farmed that out to $PAGER.
Firefox has been dumbed down ever since it was forked from Mozilla. That was, in fact, the main point of forking it: to provide a stripped-down browser that was easy to use. If you want a powerful, configurable Mozilla-based browser, then use SeaMonkey, which was the continuation of Mozilla. (Ironically, it has the additional advantage in recent years of not being bloated like Firefox.)
For the last thirty years I've been getting my weekly dose of science news from Quirks & Quarks on CBC radio. Shows are available for download or streaming online as soon as they air, and their online archive of episodes goes back to 2000.
If everyone avoided posting links to copyrighted material, the only ones left would be to sites such as the Gutenberg Project.