No, the jury is supposed to decide what the FACTS are.
The judge is supposed to decide what the law is.
In fact, in some jurisdictions judges in civil cases
can present the jury with a set of questions of fact.
The judge then makes the overall decision by applying the law
to the jury's answers to these questions.
I don't know much about control of network bandwidth so I have a question rather than a comment. It seems to me that there are some situations at least in which it is legitimate to assure certain users of the bandwidth that they need, to the possible (presumably temporary) detriment of other users. Let's say that a specialized surgeon is doing remote robotic
surgery over the network. I would want her connection to have very high priority - her packets are more important than somebody's porn download or Slashdot reading. Is it possible to arrange this at present, or would it require the sort of discriminatory service that BellSouth is proposing?
Hunh? Wasn't Hewlett-Packard an engineering-driven company? Granted, it is going down the tubes, but arguably BECAUSE it was taken over by the business types, not because it was engineering-driven.
Why do so many Christians seem to feel that they are being "repressed" if Christianity isn't given offical state-funded recongition?
The claims of most religions are so utterly lacking in empirical foundation if not ridiculous and contradictory that few people would believe them if not indoctrinated since childhood. This is why many people want to impose their religion in the educational system. The desire of many Christians (and Muslims) for state recognition and funding is due to a combination of this and the fact that as exclusive religions, whose adherents consider non-believers to be damned and enemies of believers, they consider it dangerous and evil to allow anything other than their own religion.
I just wish that people who promulgate so-called zero-tolerance policies would realize that far from looking strong and principled what they've really done is brand on their forehead "I am too stupid and lazy to make logical distinctions."
I know people think its funny, but what Gore ACTUALLY said was about his role as a legislator and was perfectly accurate. He wasn't taking credit for something he didn't do. Give him a break and pick on somebody who deserves it. There are lots of choices.
So how come you don't like Okanagan wine?
Anyhow, I don't feel strongly about the wine one
way or the other, but the cider (that's hard cider
in American) is terrific. And big, juicy, cheap blueberries...
It doesn't say where they're going to put it. Parts of southern British Columbia don't get much snow. The Okanagan, for example, has a Mediterranean climate. Lots of fruit is grown there, including grapes that support a burgeoning wine industry.
It's true that MS Windows was based on the Apple GUI, not X11.
On the other hand, there were previous window system, in addition to the Xerox Star on which the Apple interface was modelled. X was
based on W, the window system for the experimental V operating
system at Stanford. There was even an earlier window system on Unix proper. In the early 1980s Bell Labs had a bit-mapped
terminal called the BLIT that ran a window system under Unix.
I saw it at Bell Labs in 1983. If I'm not mistaken, the the terminal had a CPU to which a lot of the processing was downloaded.
You generally do sign a contract when you're admitted to the hospital, though offhand I can't say if it contains a clause about ownership of image copyrights. However, in my experience you generally do not sign any such contract when you get x-rays or other tests as an outpatient.
What's a "random card number service"? Sounds like something a lot of us could use, but I've never heard of it. If the banks where I have credit cards (Wells Fargo and Bank of Montreal) have it, I'm not aware ofit.
I'm not so sure that the lab owns the x-rays. It sounds like a work-for-hire situation. You hired them to take the x-rays; you own the copyright. The reason this isn't true in the typical situation when you hire a professional photographer is because you sign a contract that creates a special arrangment. You don't sign any such contract when you have x-rays taken.
People who like grep should check out TRE agrep,
which comes with the TRE regexp library.
In addition to the usual regexp constructs, it allows for approximations with weights set individually for each group.
For example, you can require that one part match exactly while another part can fail to match by up to 2 insertions.
The original purpose of copyright in England, where copyright law originated, was censorship. It was a privilege granted by the crown to the publisher. Copyright as conceived in the US Constitution was for the benefit of the public and author, but increasingly we seem to be returning to copyright as a cozy deal between publishers and the government.
We can't make lobbying illegal, but we can, and should, make it illegal for a corporation to make political contributions.
The fact that corporations can inject vast amounts of money into politics is a major corrupting influence and gives corporations disproportionate influence. Only human beings should be allowed to make political contributions, and those should be limited so that wealthy people don't have excessive influence.
I have yet to see a list of what features useful to the visually impaired are present in MS Office and absent from the word processors that support ODF. Until I see such a list, I can only consider this to be FUD. OpenOffice Writer, for example, has some accessibility options in its options dialog. Maybe they aren't sufficient, but it certainly isn't the case that accessibility has not been considered by the authors of software supporting ODF.
On the other hand, how good is MS Word? According to the Wikipedia article on screen readers, neither MS Word nor Internet Explorer meet Microsoft's own accessibility standards:
...Microsoft Word does not comply with the Microsoft Active Accessibility API, so screen readers must still maintain an off-screen model for Word or find another way to access its contents.
I sure wish we could hear from some objective advocates for the visually impaired, on the one hand, as to their requirements, and on the other hand from people who know what software meets these requirements and what doesn't.
The start-up time is a major reason that I rarely use OpenOffice Writer.
I just tried the suggestion of turning off Java. It didn't have much of an
effect. This is on a 1.6GHZ P4 with 512MB RAM running Linux. In contrast,
emacs starts up virtually instantly and has a binary of only 4.5MB.
Granted that there are valid reasons for OO Writer to be larger than emacs,
it is still the case that that the 15 seconds or more that OO Writer takes
to start up are a major deterrent to using it.
While we're on the subject, there's one other thing about OO Writer that I intensely dislike, namely the fact that it ignores the directory that I start it up in. No matter what directory I am sitting in when I start up (and I usually start it from the command line), instead of behaving like a proper Unix program and using the current working directory as the default, if I try to open a file it defaults to the last directory visited in the previous session, and if it hasn't stored that, my home directory. I can understand having this behavior available as an option if MS Windows users expect it and will be unhappy without it, but I don't like having this broken behavior imposed on me. People lecture a lot about how important it is to emulate the native look and feel when porting from Unix to MS Windows or the Mac - why are so many programs left unadapted to the Unix way of doing things? For me the failure to default to the current directory coupled with the pain of navigating via a GUI make using OOWriter and programs with similar MS Windows-style navigation painful to the point that I avoid using them.
Try the -k option to man followed by something you're interested in.
It will give you a list of relevant man pages. For example, if I type:
man -k compiler
I get a list that includes bcc, gcc, javac, luac, ocamlc and other compilers. You will sometimes get a lot of stuff that you aren't
really interested in, and it may miss things that you would like to check out, but its still very handy. It will often remind of the name of a program you can't recall or suggest useful things to read about.
To begin with, you're shifting your claims here. You started
out with the claim that all the principal did was prohibit the students from posting information about the school. I quote:
Except if the kid posts information relating to school on his blog (his class schedule, what time he has lunch, etc.), it remains school business and thus the school has the right to regulate it. Thats what is being prohibited by this rule (for those of who just read the title or/. summary and not the actual FA).
Even on your analysis above, namely that the principal only banned students from putting up the particular type of site that contains personal information, what he did is quite different from what you first claimed. You've shifted from the claim that the ban was on posting information about the school, which is what is in the handbook, to the claim that the ban is on posting personal information, which is not (for the most part - some personal information is also information about the school) covered by the handbook rule cited. So you've tacitly admitted that your initial claim, on the basis of which you asserted that Slashdotters in general misread this and that I made myself look like an asshole,
was incorrect.
Secondly, since your hypothesis is now that the principal banned the students from posting personal information but that is not what the handbook rule deals with, your account of the mention of the handbook falls apart. On the other hand, as far as I can see my analysis of why the article mentioned the handbook stands. Your argument that:
As far as your analysis of the mentioning of the handbook goes, that would be possible if not for the word "but" in there.
is too vague for me to interpret. What "but"? Where is "there"?
Turning now to the question of whether the principal prohibited
the students from blogging or merely from putting up personal profiles, he certainly seems to have intended to include blogs since since it says "similar sites with personal profiles AND blogs". If he only intended to tell the students not to put up personal profiles of the sort that contain photos and contact information (as opposed to the sort that say "I'm a highschool student in New Jersey interested in math and baseball"..) there would be no reason to mention blogs.
Nor is it true that the second mention of the word blog is not in the context of the ban. Let's look at it again:
The primary impetus behind the ban is to protect students, McHugh said. The Web sites, popular forums for students to blog about their lives and feelings about their teachers and schools, are fertile ground for sexual predators to gather information about children, he said.
That's definitely in the context of the ban. It is talking about why the principal imposed the ban. It says that he is concerned about the content of the students' blogs. He is definitely not talking about just banning personal profiles.
Given the wording, it is possible that he didn't intend to include impersonal blogs, e.g. that he would not have a problem with a student who was invited to join the Volokh Conspiracy, but what the article describes clearly goes well beyond telling the students not to post information about the school and it unequivocally does include blogs.
The fact is that the article explicitly states that the principal forbade the students to have blogs. The fact that the student handbook contains only a different, weaker prohibition on releasing certain information about the students school activities does not qualify that statement. Very likely the mention of what is in the handbook is there to make the point that the principal's speech came as a surprise to the students. Principals and other authority figures not infrequently urge those over whom they have authority to adhere to existing rules, but this was not such a case - what he announced was a new rule.
In any case, even if we couldn't come up with a good explanation of why the article mentioned the handbook, that would not support the inference that it was mentioned so as to qualify the statement that students were prohibited from blogging. For one thing, the fact that we can't come up with the explanation doesn't mean that there isn't one. For another, if the author did want to qualify that statement, he could more easily have written the initial statement to that effect in the first place.
Slashdotters do sometimes misinterpret articles, but in this case I and most others got it right and you got it wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the jury is supposed to decide what the FACTS are. The judge is supposed to decide what the law is. In fact, in some jurisdictions judges in civil cases can present the jury with a set of questions of fact. The judge then makes the overall decision by applying the law to the jury's answers to these questions.
I don't know much about control of network bandwidth so I have a question rather than a comment. It seems to me that there are some situations at least in which it is legitimate to assure certain users of the bandwidth that they need, to the possible (presumably temporary) detriment of other users. Let's say that a specialized surgeon is doing remote robotic surgery over the network. I would want her connection to have very high priority - her packets are more important than somebody's porn download or Slashdot reading. Is it possible to arrange this at present, or would it require the sort of discriminatory service that BellSouth is proposing?
Hunh? Wasn't Hewlett-Packard an engineering-driven company? Granted, it is going down the tubes, but arguably BECAUSE it was taken over by the business types, not because it was engineering-driven.
The claims of most religions are so utterly lacking in empirical foundation if not ridiculous and contradictory that few people would believe them if not indoctrinated since childhood. This is why many people want to impose their religion in the educational system. The desire of many Christians (and Muslims) for state recognition and funding is due to a combination of this and the fact that as exclusive religions, whose adherents consider non-believers to be damned and enemies of believers, they consider it dangerous and evil to allow anything other than their own religion.
I just wish that people who promulgate so-called zero-tolerance policies would realize that far from looking strong and principled what they've really done is brand on their forehead "I am too stupid and lazy to make logical distinctions."
I know people think its funny, but what Gore ACTUALLY said was about his role as a legislator and was perfectly accurate. He wasn't taking credit for something he didn't do. Give him a break and pick on somebody who deserves it. There are lots of choices.
So how come you don't like Okanagan wine? Anyhow, I don't feel strongly about the wine one way or the other, but the cider (that's hard cider in American) is terrific. And big, juicy, cheap blueberries...
It doesn't say where they're going to put it. Parts of southern British Columbia don't get much snow. The Okanagan, for example, has a Mediterranean climate. Lots of fruit is grown there, including grapes that support a burgeoning wine industry.
It's true that MS Windows was based on the Apple GUI, not X11. On the other hand, there were previous window system, in addition to the Xerox Star on which the Apple interface was modelled. X was based on W, the window system for the experimental V operating system at Stanford. There was even an earlier window system on Unix proper. In the early 1980s Bell Labs had a bit-mapped terminal called the BLIT that ran a window system under Unix. I saw it at Bell Labs in 1983. If I'm not mistaken, the the terminal had a CPU to which a lot of the processing was downloaded.
Isn't the central database where all this registration is done on Windows the infamous Registry, source of zillions of bugs?
You generally do sign a contract when you're admitted to the hospital, though offhand I can't say if it contains a clause about ownership of image copyrights. However, in my experience you generally do not sign any such contract when you get x-rays or other tests as an outpatient.
Is Stitch another name for Grub? I've never heard of it.
You do realize that this provides an argument for emacs fans? Unlike vi, emacs can edit binaries. I've done it.
What's a "random card number service"? Sounds like something a lot of us could use, but I've never heard of it. If the banks where I have credit cards (Wells Fargo and Bank of Montreal) have it, I'm not aware ofit.
I'm not so sure that the lab owns the x-rays. It sounds like a work-for-hire situation. You hired them to take the x-rays; you own the copyright. The reason this isn't true in the typical situation when you hire a professional photographer is because you sign a contract that creates a special arrangment. You don't sign any such contract when you have x-rays taken.
Eolas has sponsored a number of OSS projects using Tcl according to this article on the Tcl/Tk wiki.
People who like grep should check out TRE agrep, which comes with the TRE regexp library. In addition to the usual regexp constructs, it allows for approximations with weights set individually for each group. For example, you can require that one part match exactly while another part can fail to match by up to 2 insertions.
The original purpose of copyright in England, where copyright law originated, was censorship. It was a privilege granted by the crown to the publisher. Copyright as conceived in the US Constitution was for the benefit of the public and author, but increasingly we seem to be returning to copyright as a cozy deal between publishers and the government.
We can't make lobbying illegal, but we can, and should, make it illegal for a corporation to make political contributions. The fact that corporations can inject vast amounts of money into politics is a major corrupting influence and gives corporations disproportionate influence. Only human beings should be allowed to make political contributions, and those should be limited so that wealthy people don't have excessive influence.
Sorry, I screwed up the link to the Wikipedia article. Here it is.
I have yet to see a list of what features useful to the visually impaired are present in MS Office and absent from the word processors that support ODF. Until I see such a list, I can only consider this to be FUD. OpenOffice Writer, for example, has some accessibility options in its options dialog. Maybe they aren't sufficient, but it certainly isn't the case that accessibility has not been considered by the authors of software supporting ODF.
On the other hand, how good is MS Word? According to the Wikipedia article on screen readers, neither MS Word nor Internet Explorer meet Microsoft's own accessibility standards:
I sure wish we could hear from some objective advocates for the visually impaired, on the one hand, as to their requirements, and on the other hand from people who know what software meets these requirements and what doesn't.
The start-up time is a major reason that I rarely use OpenOffice Writer. I just tried the suggestion of turning off Java. It didn't have much of an effect. This is on a 1.6GHZ P4 with 512MB RAM running Linux. In contrast, emacs starts up virtually instantly and has a binary of only 4.5MB. Granted that there are valid reasons for OO Writer to be larger than emacs, it is still the case that that the 15 seconds or more that OO Writer takes to start up are a major deterrent to using it.
While we're on the subject, there's one other thing about OO Writer that I intensely dislike, namely the fact that it ignores the directory that I start it up in. No matter what directory I am sitting in when I start up (and I usually start it from the command line), instead of behaving like a proper Unix program and using the current working directory as the default, if I try to open a file it defaults to the last directory visited in the previous session, and if it hasn't stored that, my home directory. I can understand having this behavior available as an option if MS Windows users expect it and will be unhappy without it, but I don't like having this broken behavior imposed on me. People lecture a lot about how important it is to emulate the native look and feel when porting from Unix to MS Windows or the Mac - why are so many programs left unadapted to the Unix way of doing things? For me the failure to default to the current directory coupled with the pain of navigating via a GUI make using OOWriter and programs with similar MS Windows-style navigation painful to the point that I avoid using them.
Try the -k option to man followed by something you're interested in. It will give you a list of relevant man pages. For example, if I type:
I get a list that includes bcc, gcc, javac, luac, ocamlc and other compilers. You will sometimes get a lot of stuff that you aren't really interested in, and it may miss things that you would like to check out, but its still very handy. It will often remind of the name of a program you can't recall or suggest useful things to read about.To begin with, you're shifting your claims here. You started out with the claim that all the principal did was prohibit the students from posting information about the school. I quote:
Even on your analysis above, namely that the principal only banned students from putting up the particular type of site that contains personal information, what he did is quite different from what you first claimed. You've shifted from the claim that the ban was on posting information about the school, which is what is in the handbook, to the claim that the ban is on posting personal information, which is not (for the most part - some personal information is also information about the school) covered by the handbook rule cited. So you've tacitly admitted that your initial claim, on the basis of which you asserted that Slashdotters in general misread this and that I made myself look like an asshole, was incorrect.Secondly, since your hypothesis is now that the principal banned the students from posting personal information but that is not what the handbook rule deals with, your account of the mention of the handbook falls apart. On the other hand, as far as I can see my analysis of why the article mentioned the handbook stands. Your argument that:
is too vague for me to interpret. What "but"? Where is "there"?Turning now to the question of whether the principal prohibited the students from blogging or merely from putting up personal profiles, he certainly seems to have intended to include blogs since since it says "similar sites with personal profiles AND blogs". If he only intended to tell the students not to put up personal profiles of the sort that contain photos and contact information (as opposed to the sort that say "I'm a highschool student in New Jersey interested in math and baseball"..) there would be no reason to mention blogs.
Nor is it true that the second mention of the word blog is not in the context of the ban. Let's look at it again:
That's definitely in the context of the ban. It is talking about why the principal imposed the ban. It says that he is concerned about the content of the students' blogs. He is definitely not talking about just banning personal profiles.Given the wording, it is possible that he didn't intend to include impersonal blogs, e.g. that he would not have a problem with a student who was invited to join the Volokh Conspiracy, but what the article describes clearly goes well beyond telling the students not to post information about the school and it unequivocally does include blogs.
The fact is that the article explicitly states that the principal forbade the students to have blogs. The fact that the student handbook contains only a different, weaker prohibition on releasing certain information about the students school activities does not qualify that statement. Very likely the mention of what is in the handbook is there to make the point that the principal's speech came as a surprise to the students. Principals and other authority figures not infrequently urge those over whom they have authority to adhere to existing rules, but this was not such a case - what he announced was a new rule.
In any case, even if we couldn't come up with a good explanation of why the article mentioned the handbook, that would not support the inference that it was mentioned so as to qualify the statement that students were prohibited from blogging. For one thing, the fact that we can't come up with the explanation doesn't mean that there isn't one. For another, if the author did want to qualify that statement, he could more easily have written the initial statement to that effect in the first place.
Slashdotters do sometimes misinterpret articles, but in this case I and most others got it right and you got it wrong.