They're really an admirable organization in being dedicated to principles of civil liberties.
It has been my perception that the ACLU puts its image before liberty or reason.
They will defend the rights of Nazis and pornographers to free speech, for example.
Consider what happens when the ACLU takes a case on the side of the KKK or the like:
1. They get a lot of media attention (leads to brand exposure, leads to donations!)
2. People assume that the ACLU is in the right--why else would they defend such groups?
And they will sue to exclude any possible mention of God, Ten Commandments
In my state they are spending their money searching for a Ten Commandments monument that they think might exist somewhere so they can sue. In other words, if it exists, it has been a monumental (ahem, so to speak) failure as a tool for the establishment of religion (putting aside the question of whether that would be its purpose), but the ACLU likes the pre-packaged Ten Commandments case because it draws media attention.
It's not popular or always expedient to be principled, but it's more enduring.
If the ACLU acted only on its principles, it probably wouldn't be so popular.
But each vote to not recall Davis is essentially a vote for Davis. Which means if he is recalled with 60% of votes 40% of voters voted for him. If the candidate who then wins only got 25% of votes then how is this justified?
There are two factors that distinguish the real situation from what is described here.
A vote for recall isn't merely a vote for another candidate; it's a vote that the current governor should not be allowed to complete his term.
Anyone who votes "no" on the recall-Davis question will still have his vote for another candidate counted.
Your whole argument in your first post is that the vendor's free speech rights are not affected.
In part, but only in making the more general argument that obscene material isn't necessarily protected speech. This is what the poster I quoted had taken issue with, saying that there were no obscenity clauses in the Constitution.
part 3 of the criteria that is listed in Miller Vs. California requires that the material have no redeeming social or political content.
Actually, this case struck down the test of "utterly without redeeming social value." The new test was whether the work did not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The example given in the decision of this "serious value" was medical books which use graphic illustrations and descriptions of human anatomy as a necessary tool for education.
you seem to have the issue a little confused here.
Funny you should say so . ..
the free speech issue is not about the vendor's speech rights.
. . . because that's the point I was making . . .
and he cannot be guilty of selling obscene material.
. . . and he can, because it is not protected speech, because the state considers it obscene. Miller Vs. California, 1973, the Court determined that obscenity can be measured by state, rather than national, standards.
I like the scroll wheel, but to use it as a button on some models you have to press it directly down from the very center or it will slip'n'scroll [instead of|in addition to] pressing. Adding the horizontal pivot factor in would make me a little nervous about trying to press the middle button. Like trying to jump on a balloon wearing rollerblades.
The US Constitution doesn't have any "except for obscene materials" clauses in it.
I find this kind of argument strange. Why does the freedom of speech necessarily cover local sales of adult manga? The US Constitution doesn't guarantee the "freedom to distribute racy Japanese comics for a profit at any locale." Yet that's what the guy is in trouble for, not for his speech.
It seems to me that freedom of speech doesn't arbitrarily mean freedom of expression -- after all, any crime could be construed as an expression.
I don't think this porn vendor's right to express ideas has been unduly circumscribed. Most likely he could have legally communicated whatever idea that he may have had.
Step 2: Type "I know everyone is going to mod me down" or "OK, mod me down everyone."
Step 3: Those tricksy Slashdot readers outwit you and mod you up!.
Re:Knuth is only one foundation that won't be lost
on
Software Archaeology
·
· Score: 1
The most fundamental concept in computer science is logic, not algorithms (or worse programming languages). If a 'programmer' hasn't written a program in a low level language like C or assembler, the hiring manager should beware. Without hands-on experience with the fundamentals of computer science that person is lacking at the most basic level, regardless of whether he knows 1 language or 50 languages. He is handicapped.
It's a good thing to abstract, but it's also important to remember and study the bases of our science.
Huh? C is a member of the set of low-level languages, which in turn are a subset of logic, which makes C and like languages the basis of computer science?
Algorithms are the central concept of computer science.
This is a bit of a worry for privacy concerns, given that if I want to keep something secret from the world and private just between me and my intended recipient I have one less option.
How long until this is able to decode things like speech, too, and convert it into something recognisable in another langauge? would it still hold my voice patterns and sound like me?
Scary stuff
Well, I wouldn't worry too much about somebody compiling a huge parallel database of text in a foreign language and your speech. That would require a full-time bilingual transcriber to stalk you with a microphone for several dozen years, in which case you'd have more pressing privacy concerns.
The feeling in your face you get from your "smile muscles" is associated subconsciously with being happy. When you force your muscles into this configuration without that emotion, you subconsciously recall this feeling of happiness and it effects your present mood.
This is effectively what the grandparent was saying. The smile is the fantasy--appearance without meaning. Since the appearance is neurally associated with the meaning, however, triggering the former can stimulate the latter. This could be applied to smiles or fantasy games.
It strikes me that the silly part of the article is assuming that the technology to be used for all of these applications is humanoid robots. The author's justification?
(1) They fit well in elevators.
(2) In 1900, it would have been insane to suggest that people would be flying in airplanes in the future.
Now, why do you need a humanoid robot to fly a plane? What a waste of hardware, not to mention programming investment. Just stick with the autopilot. For fast-food kiosks, the touch screens are probably a much more convenient interface. And so on.
due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft
Sorry if this is a stupid question--but which one of these was the open source game, and which were the Blizzard games? I can't ever keep them straight.
It would be really interesting when people decided to put one of these things in there pocket without turning it off. Every time they set down, it could be executing a program and running amuck.
Don't worry; turning it off is very simple. Merely straighten the Gummi device, thus ending all input. To activate it again, bend any part of the card.
If I was going to put my name on something I did not write, I'd damn well make sure my legal team audits each and every bit of it to insure I wouldnt get myself in hot water over it.
Sen. Hatch: I don't know what Javascript is, but you'd damn well better audit each and every bit of it.
Legal Team: We don't either, but we'll damn well do it.
Andy Woolley: You'd better, or you'll be in hot water.
It boils down to this, the editors are making software for the purpose of censoring, hiding, removing
I couldn't help but notice that the thrust of this argument seems to hang on the fact that the word censorship can be used.
Consider another form of censorship (technologically enabled, even): the stop button. You decide you don't like the movie, so you stop it. That's wrong because it's censorship, right?--but not just wrong, illegal. That's the issue between the EFF and the studios; can people legally engage in such "censorship"?
With this all-or-nothing vision, it follows that if anyone ever submits to observing any portion of any package of content (movie, music, dance, speech, &c.), he is legally obligated to observe it all until the presenting party has finished. Otherwise, it might undermine the artistic integrity of the presenter.
Am I supposed to be happy the EFF is supporting my rights of usage, or upset that is it's supporting a sort of censorship.
Despite what the hippie public school teachers might say, censorship as a social issue isn't about the absence of illicit sex in media; it's about a centralized authority controlling content. In this case, the same social issue is at stake, but the centralized authority wishes to force content instead of withhold it. Censorship in the spooky 1984 sense isn't involved, except possibly for paranoid "slippery slope" theorists.
I know that competition has been overconfident before, but I think Google is going to be harder to crack than some user software package like Netscape.
Microsoft can't very well package their OS with a Google-less copy of the Internet (er, well, don't quote me on that). And if they do some contortionist act to make Google hard to access, they'll have seriously crippled their own software. All that would accomplish is to hasten the day of the bloated monster's final belch.
BUT, even if you take his words as figuratively as possible, he still has no business making them.
Here, I basically agree. I'm generally against rhetoric because it can preclude direct discussion of the issues.
Say Alan Greenspan were to make a similar comment--perhaps he says that if companies don't start hiring more new empolyees the economy will fall into a depression.
I'm not sure this is quite the same. I can see Alan Greenspan making a comment that he knows will be publicized and waking up the next morning to see economic turbulence. I don't envision Orrin Hatch making his comment in a political forum and then waking up the next morning to see remotely-destroying-computers legislation enacted.
He has received $175,000 in campaign funding from the TV/Music/Movie industries and almost $500,000 from the commuications/electronics sectors--underneath all the speculation here, the bottom line is he is being paid to push an agenda.
Are these numbers significant? I haven't done research on it myself, but I imagine that one could add up campaign contributions from different sectors to make a high-profile politician look compromised on just about any issue--although I suppose there must ultimately be a reason for those contributions to take place.:]
At any rate, I think the Senator has been embarrassed that his big clubhouse talk has drawn negative publicity, but I don't foresee serious damage to any other parties.
but sometimes hype & hyperbole are necessary because people don't actually read things otherwise.
I don't agree. I'm willing to make my own filtering decisions after the media has decided what to present.
are you saying that the direct quotes from Hatch were untrue?
No, I assumed that they were accurate.
He is advocating something that is blatantly unconstitutional
My contention was that he wasn't advocating the idea; rather, that it was a rhetorical device. Evidences for this include:
two seperate opinions in the original article by groups who were more informed and aware of the context that it a rhetorical tactic
the very fact that the idea is blatantly unconstitutional. All politician jokes aside, I don't believe that he is that stupid.
he didn't publicize this. Politicians regularly use the very same "hype & hyperbole" you mentioned to get their points across--but within their political forums.
It seems that someone just happened to have nothing else to write about and decided to make an article of it, only to slap on the very end a bit about how he probably didn't mean it like that.
Quotes (as they are used in the article) usually mean those are the Senator's own words. Unless this is taken out of context and by "do[ing] this" he means catching Osama and not p2p-ers, I can't see how you can misinterpret that.
I don't think anyone disputes that. The idea is that the Senator's own words are more likely constitute rhetoric than a plan of action.
Slashdot Mirror
Hooray! The dawning of a new era! A physical design that destroys entropy and creates information!
It has been my perception that the ACLU puts its image before liberty or reason.
They will defend the rights of Nazis and pornographers to free speech, for example.
Consider what happens when the ACLU takes a case on the side of the KKK or the like:
1. They get a lot of media attention (leads to brand exposure, leads to donations!)
2. People assume that the ACLU is in the right--why else would they defend such groups?
And they will sue to exclude any possible mention of God, Ten Commandments
In my state they are spending their money searching for a Ten Commandments monument that they think might exist somewhere so they can sue. In other words, if it exists, it has been a monumental (ahem, so to speak) failure as a tool for the establishment of religion (putting aside the question of whether that would be its purpose), but the ACLU likes the pre-packaged Ten Commandments case because it draws media attention.
It's not popular or always expedient to be principled, but it's more enduring.
If the ACLU acted only on its principles, it probably wouldn't be so popular.
There are two factors that distinguish the real situation from what is described here.
A vote for recall isn't merely a vote for another candidate; it's a vote that the current governor should not be allowed to complete his term.
Anyone who votes "no" on the recall-Davis question will still have his vote for another candidate counted.
In part, but only in making the more general argument that obscene material isn't necessarily protected speech. This is what the poster I quoted had taken issue with, saying that there were no obscenity clauses in the Constitution.
part 3 of the criteria that is listed in Miller Vs. California requires that the material have no redeeming social or political content.
Actually, this case struck down the test of "utterly without redeeming social value." The new test was whether the work did not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The example given in the decision of this "serious value" was medical books which use graphic illustrations and descriptions of human anatomy as a necessary tool for education.
Funny you should say so . . .
the free speech issue is not about the vendor's speech rights.
. . . because that's the point I was making . . .
and he cannot be guilty of selling obscene material.
. . . and he can, because it is not protected speech, because the state considers it obscene. Miller Vs. California, 1973, the Court determined that obscenity can be measured by state, rather than national, standards.
I like the scroll wheel, but to use it as a button on some models you have to press it directly down from the very center or it will slip'n'scroll [instead of|in addition to] pressing. Adding the horizontal pivot factor in would make me a little nervous about trying to press the middle button. Like trying to jump on a balloon wearing rollerblades.
I find this kind of argument strange. Why does the freedom of speech necessarily cover local sales of adult manga? The US Constitution doesn't guarantee the "freedom to distribute racy Japanese comics for a profit at any locale." Yet that's what the guy is in trouble for, not for his speech.
It seems to me that freedom of speech doesn't arbitrarily mean freedom of expression -- after all, any crime could be construed as an expression.
I don't think this porn vendor's right to express ideas has been unduly circumscribed. Most likely he could have legally communicated whatever idea that he may have had.
Step 1: Make a comment.
Step 2: Type "I know everyone is going to mod me down" or "OK, mod me down everyone."
Step 3: Those tricksy Slashdot readers outwit you and mod you up!.
It's a good thing to abstract, but it's also important to remember and study the bases of our science.
Huh? C is a member of the set of low-level languages, which in turn are a subset of logic, which makes C and like languages the basis of computer science?
Algorithms are the central concept of computer science.
I've promised myself not to buy any portable electronic devices for the next couple of decades. I'm holding out for the micro-engines.
How long until this is able to decode things like speech, too, and convert it into something recognisable in another langauge? would it still hold my voice patterns and sound like me?
Scary stuff
Well, I wouldn't worry too much about somebody compiling a huge parallel database of text in a foreign language and your speech. That would require a full-time bilingual transcriber to stalk you with a microphone for several dozen years, in which case you'd have more pressing privacy concerns.
This is effectively what the grandparent was saying. The smile is the fantasy--appearance without meaning. Since the appearance is neurally associated with the meaning, however, triggering the former can stimulate the latter. This could be applied to smiles or fantasy games.
It strikes me that the silly part of the article is assuming that the technology to be used for all of these applications is humanoid robots. The author's justification?
(1) They fit well in elevators.
(2) In 1900, it would have been insane to suggest that people would be flying in airplanes in the future.
Now, why do you need a humanoid robot to fly a plane? What a waste of hardware, not to mention programming investment. Just stick with the autopilot. For fast-food kiosks, the touch screens are probably a much more convenient interface. And so on.
Look for my website soon. Here's a preview of the diagram of my method.
1(a,b,c,d) --> 2 --> 3(a,b)
1a) Keyboard input
1b) Microphone input
1c) Scanner input
1d) Mouse input
2) Solve NP-complete problems with some algorithm
3a) output to printer
3b) output to monitor
You would prefer to stand in a four-hour line to get your government-issued thirty-five-pound potato-powered laptop?
Sorry if this is a stupid question--but which one of these was the open source game, and which were the Blizzard games? I can't ever keep them straight.
Don't worry; turning it off is very simple. Merely straighten the Gummi device, thus ending all input. To activate it again, bend any part of the card.
This is just another step down the slippery slope. Someday the computers will be controlling us!
Sen. Hatch: I don't know what Javascript is, but you'd damn well better audit each and every bit of it.
Legal Team: We don't either, but we'll damn well do it.
Andy Woolley: You'd better, or you'll be in hot water.
I couldn't help but notice that the thrust of this argument seems to hang on the fact that the word censorship can be used.
Consider another form of censorship (technologically enabled, even): the stop button. You decide you don't like the movie, so you stop it. That's wrong because it's censorship, right?--but not just wrong, illegal. That's the issue between the EFF and the studios; can people legally engage in such "censorship"?
With this all-or-nothing vision, it follows that if anyone ever submits to observing any portion of any package of content (movie, music, dance, speech, &c.), he is legally obligated to observe it all until the presenting party has finished. Otherwise, it might undermine the artistic integrity of the presenter.
Despite what the hippie public school teachers might say, censorship as a social issue isn't about the absence of illicit sex in media; it's about a centralized authority controlling content. In this case, the same social issue is at stake, but the centralized authority wishes to force content instead of withhold it. Censorship in the spooky 1984 sense isn't involved, except possibly for paranoid "slippery slope" theorists.
Microsoft can't very well package their OS with a Google-less copy of the Internet (er, well, don't quote me on that). And if they do some contortionist act to make Google hard to access, they'll have seriously crippled their own software. All that would accomplish is to hasten the day of the bloated monster's final belch.
Here, I basically agree. I'm generally against rhetoric because it can preclude direct discussion of the issues.
Say Alan Greenspan were to make a similar comment--perhaps he says that if companies don't start hiring more new empolyees the economy will fall into a depression.
I'm not sure this is quite the same. I can see Alan Greenspan making a comment that he knows will be publicized and waking up the next morning to see economic turbulence. I don't envision Orrin Hatch making his comment in a political forum and then waking up the next morning to see remotely-destroying-computers legislation enacted.
He has received $175,000 in campaign funding from the TV/Music/Movie industries and almost $500,000 from the commuications/electronics sectors--underneath all the speculation here, the bottom line is he is being paid to push an agenda.
Are these numbers significant? I haven't done research on it myself, but I imagine that one could add up campaign contributions from different sectors to make a high-profile politician look compromised on just about any issue--although I suppose there must ultimately be a reason for those contributions to take place. :]
At any rate, I think the Senator has been embarrassed that his big clubhouse talk has drawn negative publicity, but I don't foresee serious damage to any other parties.
I don't agree. I'm willing to make my own filtering decisions after the media has decided what to present.
are you saying that the direct quotes from Hatch were untrue?
No, I assumed that they were accurate.
He is advocating something that is blatantly unconstitutional
My contention was that he wasn't advocating the idea; rather, that it was a rhetorical device. Evidences for this include:
two seperate opinions in the original article by groups who were more informed and aware of the context that it a rhetorical tactic
the very fact that the idea is blatantly unconstitutional. All politician jokes aside, I don't believe that he is that stupid.
he didn't publicize this. Politicians regularly use the very same "hype & hyperbole" you mentioned to get their points across--but within their political forums.
It seems that someone just happened to have nothing else to write about and decided to make an article of it, only to slap on the very end a bit about how he probably didn't mean it like that.
I don't think anyone disputes that. The idea is that the Senator's own words are more likely constitute rhetoric than a plan of action.