It's interesting to see this graphical representation. I have been riding NJ Transit light rail for about 2 years (the entire state of NJ is in this "constitution-free" zone), and every once in a while one of the announcements they play is that NJ Transit reserves the right of "random inspection" of any carry-on bags at any time.
I've never seen them do it, but I've always wondered how I would/should react if I were singled out. Do they *really* have that "right"? What would happen if I refused?
It is sad but true that many people vote based on a single issue.
One of my buddies is extremely anti-abortion. So one night, I laid out a scenario where a candidate wanted to turn the U.S. into a military dictatorship and abolish the Bill of Rights-- but, who was Pro Life vs. a Pro-Choice candidate. He would still, he said-- without any doubt or hesitation-- vote Pro Life.
Scary that religious beliefs can quite often trump logic in the decision making process.
I'm surprised nobody else has said this yet: Video game consoles.
Work your lecture backwards to the data center by starting with a connected Wii that allows you to play Mario Kart against players from around the world.
Question: Why would a *book* not belong in a library? Whether or not she took any action, I cannot accept this type of sentiment from a public official.
Let us not forget that driving is a privilege, not a right. If you can no longer operate a vehicle safely, you really ought to figure out another way to get around. I live in a suburban neighborhood and have no car, and I get around just fine.
In my limited experience with elderly relatives, I'm guessing that a large part of the reason seniors keep driving past when it is safe for them to drive is simply pride. They do not want to accept the degradation of their abilities that comes with old age, nor the convenience of driving.
I don't know... I really don't care about the human face of the founder of any companies I do business with, especially huge corporate entities. I can *sort of* connect with a guy who hand crafts his beer, or grows the potatoes for his potato chips, but I'm not sure that this kind of connection is relevant when you see the world's richest man who founded a company that, for all intents and purposes, does something that most people don't really even understand.
I have a degree in communications (which includes advertising), and I simply don't see how this distinguishes the Microsoft brand in any way other than the fact that they can afford a commercial. A baffling and painfully awkward one at that.
Okay, what I'm really trying to say is that I'd love to see Jeff Goldblum kick Jerry Seinfeld's ass all over silicon valley. Ummm.
Hmm, debate. That's a good idea. In fact, let's just completely open up all of the recorded knowledge of all mankind to debate, making sure that we confuse the children of the world so much so that society devolves into completely dumbed-down anarchy, where Scientific Theory can walk hand in hand with Faith to the nearest Buttf*ckers.
I think your post is a little bit overly dramatic. The two videos you linked to show a law professor advising law students (in the U.S.) why they should always advise clients to take the 5th Amendment. The 5th Amendment was written a couple hundred years ago, so I dont know about the statement that ship has sailed. It has always been that, when you deal with the police, you really should shut your mouth and retain legal counsel.
The officer, in part 2, agrees with this sentiment. He just has a job to do, and if someone is stupid enough to talk, that is their problem. It has been that way in the U.S. for 200+ years. Surely you are not indicating that police all over the world nowadays have some sort of state-sponsored mandate operate outside of the law?
I know that may sound a little naive, but all an officer can really do is enforce the law as he understands it. What is glaringly missing in the news story are the circumstances under which the game was confiscated. How do we know that the game players werent sitting around with uzis, naked, on bricks of marijuana or something?
This sounds like a story written by some college punk trying to rebel against the System. Either that, or someone with a financial interest in selling board games. I know sure as hell that I want to buy that game now. It sounds pretty cool.
Lets also not forget that civilized culture as a whole is beginning to embrace pharmaceutical enhancements to address just about any problem the might be present in an individuals life. Prozac or Viagra...? These are things that people are using to get ahead within the confines of their own lives and professions, and yet I dont have the sense that this is generally frowned upon.
Why, then, are athletics viewed in a vacuum, as something different from the realities of the times we live in? They are doing the same thing as "regular" people in this sense.
Personally, and Im really not trying to be a troll here and Im not a scientist etc. etc., I think that many non-athletes (regular people) nowadays are going to their doctors with the goal of getting their hands on Prozac or Wellbuten or Viagra or whatever, because they would rather feel happy about things than work on making things better in their lives and becoming happy because of their achievements. This pharmaceutically engineered happiness or feeling of well-being is artificial, and may even cause more problems in the future, both physically and mentally, than were currently aware of.
At least with athletes, there is a real goal and a real result when they take these performance enhancing drugs. Certainly were not growing world-class athletes from lazy bloaks by feeding them pills. These drugs are taken to purposely enhance the bodys ability to perform a very specific task. There is, however, no substitute for talent, much like there is no substitute for happiness.
Why is it so nutty to think that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created a flat, plate-like earth, upon which to spread his noodley goodness, topped with marinara sauce and Parmesan cheese???? I mean, he has to land some time. Duh?!
There are built-in flaws with both community and paid support. Paid support costs money, and people like free stuff because they are mostly poor.
With community support-- even the Ubuntu community-- there is a certain art to extracting information. I dont mind the redundancy as much as having to sort through poorly written things that dont explicitly say what Im trying to find out.
I typically have used the forums for two types of questions: Will Thing X work if I buy it, or How do I get Thing X to work? What I find is a disconnect between n00bs (which I will admit to being, albeit one with a couple of years of Ubuntu experience, with a couple of fully functional Ubuntu PCs), and experts. The n00b asks an innocent question, and the expert says go to a terminal and type this command and here is all the crap you should see, or responds presumptuously with techno babble that is clearly above the level of the posters experience.
Recently, I got a wireless USB adapter to connect my Ubuntu laptop to my network. I looked up the model on the forum and what I found was completely inconclusive. There were a bunch of posts about troubleshooting a wireless device, but the thread ended without so much as a confirmation of whether or not the thing worked in the end, or any advice about what to do once you determine that your machine sees the device.
I subsequently did a few of the troubleshooting things (which were good, by the way, in that I could confirm that the machine could see the thing and knew what it was). I modified the network settings. Then, after a couple of unsuccessful connection attempts, I simply rebooted and the thing just worked. So the steps were to plug it in, modify the network settings, and reboot. I wish those instructions existed.
I also recently installed a PCI USB 4-port thing on my Ubuntu tower. The forum thread relating to that thing was fraught with posts saying that it will not work at all, with one post saying they got it working by moving it to the second PCI port. I interpreted that one post as an affirmative that it would work, and it did indeed work, without issue.
I think that the Ubuntu community forum is awesome, but would be much more useful if somehow, someone were able to extract and expound on the information to more clearly bring threads to a real conclusion. I will also admit that I am guilty of not posting my findings for these two recent things because I couldnt remember my logon credentials-- however, Im not exactly sure that not being logged in is a good excuse for preventing someone for sharing knowledge?? I simply only had time to share, not to spend the time figuring out how to log on.
I have a couple of years of Ubuntu usage under my belt. I am not a true Linux geek or fanboy or anything, and would probably get my Slashdot card revoked based on my lack of Gopher experience.
Ive got a cool little 4-pc network going, with 2 XP boxes, an Ubuntu box, and an Ubuntu laptop. One thing that has bugged me is that I want to reduce the bloat on the Ubuntu machines because they are older machines with mediocre processors and disk space. When I spend some time trying to uninstall things that I dont think I need, however, I get nebulous messages saying that a zillion other things will be uninstalled. When that happens, I just dont remove the thing because I dont want to lose something that Im not sure whether or not I need. Maybe the solution is simply better descriptions of things, or more explicit narrative about the ramifications of what you are about to do?
On the other hand, there are other things that I really would have liked in the canned out-of-the-box install, such as remote desktop and a decent VPN client, and if not actual codecs (I understand that there are cost and/or licensing issues with wma and mp3), at least some kind of wizard to beef up the multimedia capabilities.
I have not run into anything so far that I could not resolve without a bit of research, and Ive actually got this PC Im on right now exactly how I want it. But maybe the next thing for Ubuntu is to revisit whats in a default install.
Or, maybe tweak the install process. Maybe something along the lines of checkboxes during install, like What do you need to do? with choices like connect to work, listen to digital music, burn cds, watch movies, organize photos, things like that. There is a good chance that not everyone would check Create and edit graphics, though, so if they didnt check that they wouldnt get the GIMP. Or if it is just going to be a fun machine, skip office applications. Stuff like that.
Then, maybe the synaptic package manager has an interface that shows what you initially chose during install, and in that interface youd say hey, I really do need to have spreadsheet capability and check whatever box and voila! click Apply, and theres your Calc.
And, one more piece of polish would be some kind of little tour to map the common Windows experience to the Ubuntu experience. Stuff like, do you IM? with Pidgin youll be up and running with all of your IM accounts; or even still addicted to solitaire? check out the Games menu, under Applications. Stuff like that.
The Ubuntu experience is a full one, overall, and a relatively painless one. Things do just work, and I do not at all feel that Im lacking anything except the power thats in my XP machine because the hardware is newer. Through my brother Ive seen a few different flavors of desktop Linux, but I chose Ubuntu simply because it seemed like the easiest to get going.
I laughed when I first saw this post, but thats actually a really insightful point. My understanding of copyright law is that (at least in the US) the moment you create something original, you technically/legally own the copyright to it. If my understanding is correct, and each email were considered an original work, then the nature of this particular privacy problem is simple:
The US government, by performing domestic spying (and technically ignoring their constitutional mandate not to perform domestic spying), is illegally downloading copyrighted material. Therefore, they owe damages to the authors under copyright law. Exceptions might be made for emails facilitating plausible plans for committing acts of terror, assuming they have at least obtained the proper permission from the Court to monitor a particular email author.
If enforced, this would make it financially impossible for the US government to follow through on any strategy involving the assumption that if you monitor every single piece of email, you will find some sort of needle in a haystack.
I wonder what you mean by "shitty to be an artist"? All of this IP madness is predicated on middle men looking for the next best thing to distribute that will maximize return on investment. The reason they were even able to weasel into that spot they're in is because their artistic "victims" have based their decisions on wishes to become rich and famous.
The fact is that, particularly with music and movies since they have such high exposure these days, what is under contention is only the tip of the iceberg for consumable art/IP that is available. With the internet as a distribution center, this legal wrangling really is irrelevant to contemporary artists.
For any artist interested in simply exposing their talents (or lack thereof), this is quite an exciting time. If anything, this has opened people's eyes to the leaky shark tank that is the true nature of Big Media, and the fact that they don't HAVE to dive into it. Business people can do a lot of things to generate revenue, but they are really bad at being creative-- today's artists are slowly realizing that the power in any business relationship is (or can be) theirs in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Which part? The clearly malformed number? The will to violence? Or the sentiment favoring conformity above all else?
It's interesting to see this graphical representation. I have been riding NJ Transit light rail for about 2 years (the entire state of NJ is in this "constitution-free" zone), and every once in a while one of the announcements they play is that NJ Transit reserves the right of "random inspection" of any carry-on bags at any time.
I've never seen them do it, but I've always wondered how I would/should react if I were singled out. Do they *really* have that "right"? What would happen if I refused?
Puppets.
It is sad but true that many people vote based on a single issue.
One of my buddies is extremely anti-abortion. So one night, I laid out a scenario where a candidate wanted to turn the U.S. into a military dictatorship and abolish the Bill of Rights-- but, who was Pro Life vs. a Pro-Choice candidate. He would still, he said-- without any doubt or hesitation-- vote Pro Life.
Scary that religious beliefs can quite often trump logic in the decision making process.
I'm surprised nobody else has said this yet: Video game consoles.
Work your lecture backwards to the data center by starting with a connected Wii that allows you to play Mario Kart against players from around the world.
Question: Why would a *book* not belong in a library? Whether or not she took any action, I cannot accept this type of sentiment from a public official.
Let us not forget that driving is a privilege, not a right. If you can no longer operate a vehicle safely, you really ought to figure out another way to get around. I live in a suburban neighborhood and have no car, and I get around just fine.
In my limited experience with elderly relatives, I'm guessing that a large part of the reason seniors keep driving past when it is safe for them to drive is simply pride. They do not want to accept the degradation of their abilities that comes with old age, nor the convenience of driving.
Why not just add truthiness to the Semantic Web ISO spec?
It is called the Legislative branch.
...Send Gamers' DNA to Space
2010 A Sperm Odyssey
"My God, it's full of sperm!"
This gives new meaning to the term "blast off".
[All right, I'll shut up now.]
I don't know... I really don't care about the human face of the founder of any companies I do business with, especially huge corporate entities. I can *sort of* connect with a guy who hand crafts his beer, or grows the potatoes for his potato chips, but I'm not sure that this kind of connection is relevant when you see the world's richest man who founded a company that, for all intents and purposes, does something that most people don't really even understand.
I have a degree in communications (which includes advertising), and I simply don't see how this distinguishes the Microsoft brand in any way other than the fact that they can afford a commercial. A baffling and painfully awkward one at that.
Okay, what I'm really trying to say is that I'd love to see Jeff Goldblum kick Jerry Seinfeld's ass all over silicon valley. Ummm.
Hmm, debate. That's a good idea. In fact, let's just completely open up all of the recorded knowledge of all mankind to debate, making sure that we confuse the children of the world so much so that society devolves into completely dumbed-down anarchy, where Scientific Theory can walk hand in hand with Faith to the nearest Buttf*ckers.
Philip K. Dick?
I think your post is a little bit overly dramatic. The two videos you linked to show a law professor advising law students (in the U.S.) why they should always advise clients to take the 5th Amendment. The 5th Amendment was written a couple hundred years ago, so I dont know about the statement that ship has sailed. It has always been that, when you deal with the police, you really should shut your mouth and retain legal counsel.
The officer, in part 2, agrees with this sentiment. He just has a job to do, and if someone is stupid enough to talk, that is their problem. It has been that way in the U.S. for 200+ years. Surely you are not indicating that police all over the world nowadays have some sort of state-sponsored mandate operate outside of the law?
I know that may sound a little naive, but all an officer can really do is enforce the law as he understands it. What is glaringly missing in the news story are the circumstances under which the game was confiscated. How do we know that the game players werent sitting around with uzis, naked, on bricks of marijuana or something?
This sounds like a story written by some college punk trying to rebel against the System. Either that, or someone with a financial interest in selling board games. I know sure as hell that I want to buy that game now. It sounds pretty cool.
Lets also not forget that civilized culture as a whole is beginning to embrace pharmaceutical enhancements to address just about any problem the might be present in an individuals life. Prozac or Viagra...? These are things that people are using to get ahead within the confines of their own lives and professions, and yet I dont have the sense that this is generally frowned upon.
Why, then, are athletics viewed in a vacuum, as something different from the realities of the times we live in? They are doing the same thing as "regular" people in this sense.
Personally, and Im really not trying to be a troll here and Im not a scientist etc. etc., I think that many non-athletes (regular people) nowadays are going to their doctors with the goal of getting their hands on Prozac or Wellbuten or Viagra or whatever, because they would rather feel happy about things than work on making things better in their lives and becoming happy because of their achievements. This pharmaceutically engineered happiness or feeling of well-being is artificial, and may even cause more problems in the future, both physically and mentally, than were currently aware of.
At least with athletes, there is a real goal and a real result when they take these performance enhancing drugs. Certainly were not growing world-class athletes from lazy bloaks by feeding them pills. These drugs are taken to purposely enhance the bodys ability to perform a very specific task. There is, however, no substitute for talent, much like there is no substitute for happiness.
Why is it so nutty to think that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created a flat, plate-like earth, upon which to spread his noodley goodness, topped with marinara sauce and Parmesan cheese???? I mean, he has to land some time. Duh?!
There are built-in flaws with both community and paid support. Paid support costs money, and people like free stuff because they are mostly poor.
With community support-- even the Ubuntu community-- there is a certain art to extracting information. I dont mind the redundancy as much as having to sort through poorly written things that dont explicitly say what Im trying to find out.
I typically have used the forums for two types of questions: Will Thing X work if I buy it, or How do I get Thing X to work? What I find is a disconnect between n00bs (which I will admit to being, albeit one with a couple of years of Ubuntu experience, with a couple of fully functional Ubuntu PCs), and experts. The n00b asks an innocent question, and the expert says go to a terminal and type this command and here is all the crap you should see, or responds presumptuously with techno babble that is clearly above the level of the posters experience.
Recently, I got a wireless USB adapter to connect my Ubuntu laptop to my network. I looked up the model on the forum and what I found was completely inconclusive. There were a bunch of posts about troubleshooting a wireless device, but the thread ended without so much as a confirmation of whether or not the thing worked in the end, or any advice about what to do once you determine that your machine sees the device.
I subsequently did a few of the troubleshooting things (which were good, by the way, in that I could confirm that the machine could see the thing and knew what it was). I modified the network settings. Then, after a couple of unsuccessful connection attempts, I simply rebooted and the thing just worked. So the steps were to plug it in, modify the network settings, and reboot. I wish those instructions existed.
I also recently installed a PCI USB 4-port thing on my Ubuntu tower. The forum thread relating to that thing was fraught with posts saying that it will not work at all, with one post saying they got it working by moving it to the second PCI port. I interpreted that one post as an affirmative that it would work, and it did indeed work, without issue.
I think that the Ubuntu community forum is awesome, but would be much more useful if somehow, someone were able to extract and expound on the information to more clearly bring threads to a real conclusion. I will also admit that I am guilty of not posting my findings for these two recent things because I couldnt remember my logon credentials-- however, Im not exactly sure that not being logged in is a good excuse for preventing someone for sharing knowledge?? I simply only had time to share, not to spend the time figuring out how to log on.
I have a couple of years of Ubuntu usage under my belt. I am not a true Linux geek or fanboy or anything, and would probably get my Slashdot card revoked based on my lack of Gopher experience.
Ive got a cool little 4-pc network going, with 2 XP boxes, an Ubuntu box, and an Ubuntu laptop. One thing that has bugged me is that I want to reduce the bloat on the Ubuntu machines because they are older machines with mediocre processors and disk space. When I spend some time trying to uninstall things that I dont think I need, however, I get nebulous messages saying that a zillion other things will be uninstalled. When that happens, I just dont remove the thing because I dont want to lose something that Im not sure whether or not I need. Maybe the solution is simply better descriptions of things, or more explicit narrative about the ramifications of what you are about to do?
On the other hand, there are other things that I really would have liked in the canned out-of-the-box install, such as remote desktop and a decent VPN client, and if not actual codecs (I understand that there are cost and/or licensing issues with wma and mp3), at least some kind of wizard to beef up the multimedia capabilities.
I have not run into anything so far that I could not resolve without a bit of research, and Ive actually got this PC Im on right now exactly how I want it. But maybe the next thing for Ubuntu is to revisit whats in a default install.
Or, maybe tweak the install process. Maybe something along the lines of checkboxes during install, like What do you need to do? with choices like connect to work, listen to digital music, burn cds, watch movies, organize photos, things like that. There is a good chance that not everyone would check Create and edit graphics, though, so if they didnt check that they wouldnt get the GIMP. Or if it is just going to be a fun machine, skip office applications. Stuff like that.
Then, maybe the synaptic package manager has an interface that shows what you initially chose during install, and in that interface youd say hey, I really do need to have spreadsheet capability and check whatever box and voila! click Apply, and theres your Calc.
And, one more piece of polish would be some kind of little tour to map the common Windows experience to the Ubuntu experience. Stuff like, do you IM? with Pidgin youll be up and running with all of your IM accounts; or even still addicted to solitaire? check out the Games menu, under Applications. Stuff like that.
The Ubuntu experience is a full one, overall, and a relatively painless one. Things do just work, and I do not at all feel that Im lacking anything except the power thats in my XP machine because the hardware is newer. Through my brother Ive seen a few different flavors of desktop Linux, but I chose Ubuntu simply because it seemed like the easiest to get going.
I laughed when I first saw this post, but thats actually a really insightful point. My understanding of copyright law is that (at least in the US) the moment you create something original, you technically/legally own the copyright to it. If my understanding is correct, and each email were considered an original work, then the nature of this particular privacy problem is simple:
The US government, by performing domestic spying (and technically ignoring their constitutional mandate not to perform domestic spying), is illegally downloading copyrighted material. Therefore, they owe damages to the authors under copyright law. Exceptions might be made for emails facilitating plausible plans for committing acts of terror, assuming they have at least obtained the proper permission from the Court to monitor a particular email author.
If enforced, this would make it financially impossible for the US government to follow through on any strategy involving the assumption that if you monitor every single piece of email, you will find some sort of needle in a haystack.
Think the National Enquirer with a racist agenda and you're getting somewhat close.
And the Daily Mail is WORSE than that???
They did, at least cinematically. What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder what you mean by "shitty to be an artist"? All of this IP madness is predicated on middle men looking for the next best thing to distribute that will maximize return on investment. The reason they were even able to weasel into that spot they're in is because their artistic "victims" have based their decisions on wishes to become rich and famous.
The fact is that, particularly with music and movies since they have such high exposure these days, what is under contention is only the tip of the iceberg for consumable art/IP that is available. With the internet as a distribution center, this legal wrangling really is irrelevant to contemporary artists.
For any artist interested in simply exposing their talents (or lack thereof), this is quite an exciting time. If anything, this has opened people's eyes to the leaky shark tank that is the true nature of Big Media, and the fact that they don't HAVE to dive into it. Business people can do a lot of things to generate revenue, but they are really bad at being creative-- today's artists are slowly realizing that the power in any business relationship is (or can be) theirs in the end.
I've always thought it kind of tastes like ham.
Dam all you bastards buying them out every time I try to get one!
Yes, those bastards do tend to flood the stores that carry Wii consoles, don't they.
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