The case in question is indeed one of civil libel, as are the great majority of libel actions, but there is such a thing as criminal libel. In the United States only a few states have such laws and prosecutions are very rare. Criminal libel exists in Canada (see sections 297-316 of the Criminal Code). Although prosecutions are very rare, the statute has been upheld in recent years by the Supreme Court.
I don't think it was just that. Around 1983 I picked up a set of C coding standards developed by the folks at Bell Labs' Indian Hill site. I can't immediately lay my hands on my copy, but here is a version
of it that at a glance doesn't seem very different. It advocated the One True Style of K&R.
People who call others morons ought to learn to read more carefully (not to mention spelling "moron" correctly.) I did NOT suggest lying. I suggested waiting to apply for a spousal visa. There's a large difference.
It's also interesting that parent all but admits that he has no knowledge of what he is talking about. Soldiers who marry while posted abroad have not always had such an easy time bringing their wives back to the US. In any case, as in many other areas, the situation of soldiers is quite different from that of other people.
Actually, Pat Leahy knows what he is talking about when it comes to criminal prosecution. Before he became a Senator, he was District Attorney. (He was also the speaker at my highschool graduation.) And it isn't as if he has to play silly games to get re-elected. He's been repeatedly re-elected (he's been a Senator for 30 years) and is very popular.
You definitely should figure out your wife's immigration situation and act carefully. The deal is this. As the spouse of a US citizen she is entitled to permanent resident status. However, the government can take as much as two years to grant her that status. Therefore, you either want to apply for it while you are abroad with a LOT of leadtime, or you want to get her into the United States first and then apply for it. So long as she enters the US legally, she won't be deported if she then applies for permanent resident status as a spouse.
The catch is that most visas, including tourist visas, have as an explicit condition that the applicant NOT intend to stay permanently in the United States. So, suppose your wife gets a tourist visa to enter the US. You then go to the US embassy and apply for spousal status. By
applying for permanent residency as a spouse, she has just declared her intention to stay permanently in the United States and has thereby invalidated her tourist visa. What will happen in this situation depends on the immigration officer with whom she deals. Some may let it slide, but some are jerks and will cancel her tourist visa.
The upshot is, if you aren't prepared to wait to return to the US until your wife's permanent residency is approved, which as I say can be a matter of years, what you want to do is say nothing about her intention of staying in the US or her marriage to you and get her in on a tourist visa. Once she is safely in the US, she can apply for permanent resident status.
She should also be aware that once she has entered the United States and applied for permanent resident status, she won't be able to leave the United States with the assurance of being able to return until she gets her permanent resident status. So if there are things she needs to take care of in Japan, such as visting elderly or sick friends or relatives, it would be wise to take care of them before she leaves.
One other point. There are two main issues that the immigration people will be interested in in reviewing your wife's application. One is whether she is excludable for a reason like being a war criminal. You probably don't have to worry about this kind of thing. The other is whether your marriage is legitimate. They're on the lookout for fraudulent marriages entered into for the sole purpose of immigration. If you've been living together for some time in Japan that will help. Make sure you have documentation of that. They will also interview you individually and will be suspicious if you don't seem to know each other very well. Even if you do, be aware that sometimes cultural differences, or just idiosyncrasies, will have led to there being things that you have never talked about. So make sure that you each know about the other the kinds of things that American husbands and wives know about each other: personal history, birthdays, likes and dislikes, etc.
If, as sometimes happens, you don't know her family very well because they disapproved of the marriage, bone up.
This is based on my knowledge of immigration law and of various friends' situations over the past 25 years. I am not a lawyer. You should check on current US immigration law and possibly consult an immigration lawyer.
It isn't true that Japan does not allow naturalization. In fact, the Japanese government prefers permanent residents to become citizens.
To become a Japanese citizen, you have to show that you have become culturally assimilated. They want you to be able to speak Japanese and adopt a more-or-less Japanese lifestyle. As part of this, they require that you adopt a Japanese family name.
Like people from other countries, Koreans can become Japanese citizens. Just being born in Japan does not confer Japanese citizenship. This is not the case in the US, but it is the case in quite a few other countries, which like Japan only give automatic citizenship to the children of a Japanese parent. The Koreans who live permanently in Japan can become naturalized citizens, and some do. The reason that many do not is the requirement that they adopt a Japanese family name. For many of us the family name is not that important, but Koreans generally consider their family name an important part of their heritage and believe that it would be disrespectful to their ancestors to change it.
I knew a Japanese man whose father was Chinese.
It used to be the case that only the child of a Japanese father was automatically a Japanese citizen. The mother didn't count. This restriction was overturned by the Japanese courts as unconstitutional. Unlike the US, the Japanese constitution provides men and women with equal rights. So, my friend, though born and raised in Japan and able to speak only Japanese with any fluency, was not a citizen. He became a naturalized citizen, but had to change his family name.
I don't understand the relevance of whether or not Wei abandoned his invention. As I understand it, any
publicly known disclosed example of the same invention constitutes prior art. It doesn't matter whether it is patented or has been put into the public domain. The issue of abandonment has to do with abandoned patent applications, that is, with whether patent applications that the applicant did not pursue to the granting of a patent constitute prior art with respect to subsequent patents. The argument is that they do not constitute prior art because they have not been publicly disclosed. However, courts have ruled that under certain circumstances they do constitute prior art. In any case, I don't see the relevance to this case. Can you explain?
US patent law also requires that patents be "non-obvious". What reason is there to think that European software patents will adhere to this requirement any better than US software patents do?
In any case, the problem with software patents is not due just to the triviality and lack of originality of many US software patents. Because of the nature of software, where a single program is likely to contain anywhere from dozens to thousands of potentially patentable/patented ideas, allowing even non-trivial, non-obvious
software patents will reduce innovation and makeit all but impossible for any but the largest companies to produce software.
You cannot contest a law, without being charged with it, either.
Where is that written?
Grandparent's statement isn't exactly precise legal language, but there is something to it. In general, the courts will only act when there is an
"actual controversy", which means a criminal prosecution or civil suit in which the parties are actually at odds. For instance, if you consider a criminal law to be unconstitutional, you will normally have to violate it and get yourself charged in order to get the issue before the courts. You cannot, in general, file a suit asking the courts to nullify the law.
A relevant example is the Office of Foreign Asset Control's decision that for an American publisher to edit or translate something written by a citizen of a country embargoed by the US (such as Iran and Cuba) would violate the US embargo and thereby subject the publisher to criminal sanctions. Last year a group of publishers sued
the Secretary of the Treasury (OFAC is part of the
Treasury Department), asking the courts to overturn this position. In this case, as I understand it, the suit was possible because it addressed the interpretation of a regulation, not the law itself. In fact, the suit argued that the regulation as interpreted by OFAC violates the
underlying law.
A decision by a court as to what the law is, without further relief, is known as a declaratory judgment. Under what circumstances it is possible to obtain a declaratory judgment is a complicated area of law. It is also one that varies from country to country.
The US courts are more restrictive in this respect than those of some other countries. For instance, in Canada the government can ask the Supreme Court to state what the law is on a certain point. There doesn't have to be a case in which that point is disputed. A recent example is the reference (technically by the Governor General, the Queen's representative in Canada) to the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. In the United States, the government could not ask the Supreme Court for a similar statement of the law.
Arabs in Israel have far more than just the right to vote. They have "basic human rights", such as a real legal system, which does not exist in countries like Saudi Arabia. In Israel, in addition to the right to vote, Arab women are allowed to drive cars, dress as they wish to, leave the country without the permission of their male guardian, and walk about alone. In Saudi Arabia they aren't. It simply isn't the case that Arabs in Israel have a "useless" right to vote but lack other basic human rights.
The idea that Arab mistreatment of Jews began only as a result of the creation of Israel is a myth, due in part to the fact that overall Jews were treated better by Arabs than by Christians. That just shows how badly the Christians behaved, not how well the Muslims behaved.
In some Arab countries at some times the situation of Jews was not too bad, but Jews have been second-class citizens in virtually Arab regimes and badly mistreated much of the time. Under Islamic law, Jews are required to pay Jizya "tribute", a special tax not levied on Muslims.
Construction of new synagogues is not permitted.
Indeed, in Saudi Arabia today the open practice of any religion other than Islam is forbidden and Saudi citizens must be Muslims. A Muslim man can marry a Jewish woman, but a Jewish man cannot marry a Muslim woman. Jews cannot testify in court. Jews were required to wear distinctive clothing and in most countries were restricted in where they could live and forced to live in ghettoes.(here
is one of many summaries of the status of non-Muslims under Islamic law, with extensive quotations from Muslim sources.) There are numerous examples of mass murders of Jews in Arab countries long before 1948, such as the extermination of the 120,000 Jews of Fez, Morocco in 1146. Other massacres took place in Granada (Spain, under Moorish rule) in 1066, Libya in 1785, and Algeria in 1805, 1815, and 1830, to mention only a few.
This misses the fact that Israel comprises only 20% of Palestine Most of Palestine is and has been since 1948 under Arab rule. It's called Jordan.
Arabs in Israel may in some respects be second class citizens,but they're much better off than Jews under Arab rule, and in fact, they are better off than Arabs under Arab rule. In Israel Arabs have the vote. In Arab countries, they either don't have the vote at all or it doesn't mean much. Israel, by the way, was the first country to give Arab WOMEN the vote. In Israel Arabs can freely form their own political parties or join others, and they can be, and are, elected to the Knesset. In Israel there are real civil liberties for Arabs as well as Jews, enforced by the courts. In case after case, Arabs have WON cases in the Israeli courts. The Supreme Court of Israel has on numerous occasions over-ruled the government in favor of Arabs.
The Mennonite Central Committee has a good reputation and though religously motivated engages in minimal proselytization. (I'm not a Mennonite, or a Christian of any sort.)
Let me second this. Médecins Sans Frontières staff routinely work under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, sometimes harassed by contending governments, warlords, and bandits. This is an organization made up of heroes.
I should have thought of this before. Here's the definition of treason in the US Constitution
(Article II, Section 3):
Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
Perhaps in some circumstances exposing an agent could be construed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but in this case that would be quite a stretch.
It isn't treason because you can't make a good case that leaking the undercover CIA operative's name was part of a plot to betray the United States. That doesn't mean it wasn't wrong, and it was probably a criminal act under other statutes, but it isn't treason.
In any case, there's no reason to think that the journalists who have been held in contempt of court know who the culprit is. They are NOT the journalists who published the CIA agent's name.
They are other journalists who interviewed people about the leak. The prosecutor who is demanding to know their sources is on a fishing expedition.
On the other hand, there is one person who almost
certainly does know the identity of the leaker, namely Robert Novak, the columnist who published the agent's name. I think he belongs in jail himself. The legitimate news value of this was small. It certainly didn't justify exposing a CIA agent. Why isn't Robert Novak in jail for contempt of court? I submit that it is because he is a long-time right wing flak who did exactly what the Bush people wanted him to do.
Hence, you cannot develop an application that is intended to run on a non-Windows OS.
Right. That's exactly what I said. The EULA doesn't restrict where you run VFP itself. It only restricts where you run applications developed with VFP.
I'm saying that this is nice, but it is different from restricting where you run the product itself.
the Redistributables only operate in conjunction with Microsoft Windows platforms;
It doesn't say that you can't run the product itself,
that is, Visual Fox Pro, on a non-Microsoft system. It says that programs created using Visual Fox Pro, which presumably contain Microsoft's run-time code, can only be run under MS Windows.
Maybe something else in their EULAs contains this restriction (I no longer use any Microsoft software so I don't know) but this isn't an example.
One thing that stands out in this case is that the judges who decided the appeal actually READ THE MANUAL! Not just the user's manual but the technical manual. The formatting of the opinion is lousy (I guess the Washington courts don't use TeX:) ) but
it shows that they paid attention and did their homework. I say three cheers for the court.
Nothing in the school system astonishes me. A while back I was staying with friends who are both teachers. They showed me the handout on evaluating reading problems that a visiting "expert" on reading instruction had given out. It was five or six pages long. It said nothing about the different kinds of reading problems and how you detect them. Basically,
all it did was explain how to score the exam. That is, it explained, very slowly and carefully, that you subtract the number of incorrect answers from the total number of questions, then divide the result by the total,... etc. If I'm not mistaken the average 11 year old is supposed to know how to do this. You'd think that teachers wouldn't require any explanation, much less five or six pages. But what really took the cake was the fact that the long, detailed explanation was patently WRONG!
I don't know why everybody assumes that man pages must be read online. When I really had to learn UNIX
seriously, I bought myself one of the five-volume Berkeley manual sets to keep at home. These consisted of the man pages plus various technical reports. In addition to looking things up, I would read through them. It was a great way to get an idea of what the system consists of and what programs, library functions, system calls, and so forth are available. That was very handy set of books. I'd still be using them if not for the fact that I'm no longer running 4.2BSD.
I read somewhere a story about a guy at Microsoft who fixed the buggy flood-fill code in the graphics for Microsoft Basic. He showed his fix to Bill Gates and wondered aloud about who had written the original code, it was such a piece of garbage. Gates nodded, said nothing, and left. An old hand who had witnessed this then told him that the author of the original code was Bill Gates.
It seems clear from the history we have that Gates was once a real programmer. He knew assembly language and knew enough to write a Basic interpreter. That may not be rocket science, but it requires more than novice programming skills.
So I think it is safe to say that he knows the basics and that he has some experience of real programming projects.
What I can't tell from what I know about him is whether he has kept up at all and whether he has a broad view of CS and programming. Does he know C? LISP? Python? Does he grok object oriented programming? How about functional programming? Has he worked with both polling and interrupt-driven GUIs and does he appreciate the differences?
I have no idea.
I'm willing to grant that sometimes software patents can motivate innovation. It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people
(though not everyone) and in some cases, such as the RSA example, it is arguably true that this motivation would have been absent without patents and that the technology might not have developed as soon or as well as it did without them.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued. It seems to me that the difference is that the RSA patents deal with something very specific. That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme. Furthermore, the need for this kind of standardized strong encryption was restricted to a relatively narrow class of software. Most programmers could go ahead without any concern for this patent because their software didn't use encryption at all. On the other hand, a patent on hash tables or binary search, for instance, would have deterred innovation because these techniques are used in all sorts of software.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
As other posters have already shown, my characterization of the Sokal Hoax was entirely accurate. The only deception on the part of Sokal was that he did not explicitly inform the editors of Social Text, at the time he submitted the paper, that he did not sincerely believe in its content.
That was of course necessary in order to carry out his experiment. Since the good of demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes outweighs a minor and temporary deception, I consider his behavior to have been ethical. The paper wore its falsehood on its sleeve. The errors in it were not subtle but would easily be detected by anyone with a basic knowledge of science. The quotations of and references to, postmodern writings were all genuine and accurate, from major figures.
There is no evidence that Sokal does not understand "science studies", nor is there any evidence other than the self-serving post hoc whining of the editors, that they did not consider the paper to be credible but published it anyway.
If this is true, they failed in their duty as editors, which is either only to publish work that they believe to be credible or, in the event that special circumstances motivate publication of something that they do not believe to be credible, to publish it with a disclaimer.
The ignorance of science and the philosophy of science exhibited by the editors of Social Text is not atypical. I have had the misfortune of having to deal directly with
such people in my own (not current) department.
One such person, who taught graduate courses on
"fundamentals" and purported to be an expert on the philosophy of her field, turned out to be familiar ONLY with postmodern critiques of science. She has never read any of the work that she and they criticize, nor even works that she cites, such as those of Feyerabend. Postmodern "science studie" have the same relationship to serious philosophy and history of science as Creationism does to real biology.
Wikipedia is very useful, but this is an excellant example of how it can be corrupted by fanatics.
I think parent is thinking of the Sokal hoax,
in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote a completely non-sensical physics paper and submitted it to
Social Text, the leading journal of postmodern pseudo-intellectuals. Social Text accepted the paper and published it, thereby demonstrating their complete ignorance of modern science, which they purport to understand and be in a position to critique. Sokal then exposed their foolishness in
a piece in Lingua Franca (sadly defunct).
He has links to the hoax article, his Lingua Franca article, the statements by the editors of Social Text, and much other material here
The problems of a terrorist tracking database have already been well discussed
in Trevanian's classic Shibumi:
The value of color-coding came under criticism when the system was applied to more
intricate problems. For instance, active supporters of the Provisional IRA
and of the various Ulster defense organizations were randomly assigned green or
orange cards, because Fat Boy's review of the tactics, philosophy, and effectiveness
of the two groups made them indistinguishable from one another.
Another major problem arose from Fat Boy's mindless pursuit of logic in assigning colors.
To differentiate between Chinese and European communist agents, the Chinese
were assigned yellow cards; and the Europeans under their domination received a
mixture of red and yellow, which produced for them orange cards, identical with those of
the North Irish. Such random practices led to some troublesome errors, not the least
of which was Fat Boy's longstanding assumption that Ian Paisley was an Albanian.
The most dramatic error concerned African nationalists and American Black Power
actives. With a certain racial logic, these subjects were assigned black cards.
For several months these men were able to operate without observation or
interference from the Mother Company and her governmental subsidiaries for the
simple reason that black print on black cards is rather difficult to read.
Slashdot Mirror
The case in question is indeed one of civil libel, as are the great majority of libel actions, but there is such a thing as criminal libel. In the United States only a few states have such laws and prosecutions are very rare. Criminal libel exists in Canada (see sections 297-316 of the Criminal Code). Although prosecutions are very rare, the statute has been upheld in recent years by the Supreme Court.
I don't think it was just that. Around 1983 I picked up a set of C coding standards developed by the folks at Bell Labs' Indian Hill site. I can't immediately lay my hands on my copy, but here is a version of it that at a glance doesn't seem very different. It advocated the One True Style of K&R.
People who call others morons ought to learn to read more carefully (not to mention spelling "moron" correctly.) I did NOT suggest lying. I suggested waiting to apply for a spousal visa. There's a large difference.
It's also interesting that parent all but admits that he has no knowledge of what he is talking about. Soldiers who marry while posted abroad have not always had such an easy time bringing their wives back to the US. In any case, as in many other areas, the situation of soldiers is quite different from that of other people.
Actually, Pat Leahy knows what he is talking about when it comes to criminal prosecution. Before he became a Senator, he was District Attorney. (He was also the speaker at my highschool graduation.) And it isn't as if he has to play silly games to get re-elected. He's been repeatedly re-elected (he's been a Senator for 30 years) and is very popular.
You definitely should figure out your wife's immigration situation and act carefully. The deal is this. As the spouse of a US citizen she is entitled to permanent resident status. However, the government can take as much as two years to grant her that status. Therefore, you either want to apply for it while you are abroad with a LOT of leadtime, or you want to get her into the United States first and then apply for it. So long as she enters the US legally, she won't be deported if she then applies for permanent resident status as a spouse.
The catch is that most visas, including tourist visas, have as an explicit condition that the applicant NOT intend to stay permanently in the United States. So, suppose your wife gets a tourist visa to enter the US. You then go to the US embassy and apply for spousal status. By applying for permanent residency as a spouse, she has just declared her intention to stay permanently in the United States and has thereby invalidated her tourist visa. What will happen in this situation depends on the immigration officer with whom she deals. Some may let it slide, but some are jerks and will cancel her tourist visa.
The upshot is, if you aren't prepared to wait to return to the US until your wife's permanent residency is approved, which as I say can be a matter of years, what you want to do is say nothing about her intention of staying in the US or her marriage to you and get her in on a tourist visa. Once she is safely in the US, she can apply for permanent resident status.
She should also be aware that once she has entered the United States and applied for permanent resident status, she won't be able to leave the United States with the assurance of being able to return until she gets her permanent resident status. So if there are things she needs to take care of in Japan, such as visting elderly or sick friends or relatives, it would be wise to take care of them before she leaves.
One other point. There are two main issues that the immigration people will be interested in in reviewing your wife's application. One is whether she is excludable for a reason like being a war criminal. You probably don't have to worry about this kind of thing. The other is whether your marriage is legitimate. They're on the lookout for fraudulent marriages entered into for the sole purpose of immigration. If you've been living together for some time in Japan that will help. Make sure you have documentation of that. They will also interview you individually and will be suspicious if you don't seem to know each other very well. Even if you do, be aware that sometimes cultural differences, or just idiosyncrasies, will have led to there being things that you have never talked about. So make sure that you each know about the other the kinds of things that American husbands and wives know about each other: personal history, birthdays, likes and dislikes, etc. If, as sometimes happens, you don't know her family very well because they disapproved of the marriage, bone up.
This is based on my knowledge of immigration law and of various friends' situations over the past 25 years. I am not a lawyer. You should check on current US immigration law and possibly consult an immigration lawyer.
It isn't true that Japan does not allow naturalization. In fact, the Japanese government prefers permanent residents to become citizens. To become a Japanese citizen, you have to show that you have become culturally assimilated. They want you to be able to speak Japanese and adopt a more-or-less Japanese lifestyle. As part of this, they require that you adopt a Japanese family name.
Like people from other countries, Koreans can become Japanese citizens. Just being born in Japan does not confer Japanese citizenship. This is not the case in the US, but it is the case in quite a few other countries, which like Japan only give automatic citizenship to the children of a Japanese parent. The Koreans who live permanently in Japan can become naturalized citizens, and some do. The reason that many do not is the requirement that they adopt a Japanese family name. For many of us the family name is not that important, but Koreans generally consider their family name an important part of their heritage and believe that it would be disrespectful to their ancestors to change it.
I knew a Japanese man whose father was Chinese. It used to be the case that only the child of a Japanese father was automatically a Japanese citizen. The mother didn't count. This restriction was overturned by the Japanese courts as unconstitutional. Unlike the US, the Japanese constitution provides men and women with equal rights. So, my friend, though born and raised in Japan and able to speak only Japanese with any fluency, was not a citizen. He became a naturalized citizen, but had to change his family name.
I don't understand the relevance of whether or not Wei abandoned his invention. As I understand it, any publicly known disclosed example of the same invention constitutes prior art. It doesn't matter whether it is patented or has been put into the public domain. The issue of abandonment has to do with abandoned patent applications, that is, with whether patent applications that the applicant did not pursue to the granting of a patent constitute prior art with respect to subsequent patents. The argument is that they do not constitute prior art because they have not been publicly disclosed. However, courts have ruled that under certain circumstances they do constitute prior art. In any case, I don't see the relevance to this case. Can you explain?
US patent law also requires that patents be "non-obvious". What reason is there to think that European software patents will adhere to this requirement any better than US software patents do?
In any case, the problem with software patents is not due just to the triviality and lack of originality of many US software patents. Because of the nature of software, where a single program is likely to contain anywhere from dozens to thousands of potentially patentable/patented ideas, allowing even non-trivial, non-obvious software patents will reduce innovation and makeit all but impossible for any but the largest companies to produce software.
Grandparent's statement isn't exactly precise legal language, but there is something to it. In general, the courts will only act when there is an "actual controversy", which means a criminal prosecution or civil suit in which the parties are actually at odds. For instance, if you consider a criminal law to be unconstitutional, you will normally have to violate it and get yourself charged in order to get the issue before the courts. You cannot, in general, file a suit asking the courts to nullify the law.
A relevant example is the Office of Foreign Asset Control's decision that for an American publisher to edit or translate something written by a citizen of a country embargoed by the US (such as Iran and Cuba) would violate the US embargo and thereby subject the publisher to criminal sanctions. Last year a group of publishers sued the Secretary of the Treasury (OFAC is part of the Treasury Department), asking the courts to overturn this position. In this case, as I understand it, the suit was possible because it addressed the interpretation of a regulation, not the law itself. In fact, the suit argued that the regulation as interpreted by OFAC violates the underlying law.
A decision by a court as to what the law is, without further relief, is known as a declaratory judgment. Under what circumstances it is possible to obtain a declaratory judgment is a complicated area of law. It is also one that varies from country to country. The US courts are more restrictive in this respect than those of some other countries. For instance, in Canada the government can ask the Supreme Court to state what the law is on a certain point. There doesn't have to be a case in which that point is disputed. A recent example is the reference (technically by the Governor General, the Queen's representative in Canada) to the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. In the United States, the government could not ask the Supreme Court for a similar statement of the law.
Arabs in Israel have far more than just the right to vote. They have "basic human rights", such as a real legal system, which does not exist in countries like Saudi Arabia. In Israel, in addition to the right to vote, Arab women are allowed to drive cars, dress as they wish to, leave the country without the permission of their male guardian, and walk about alone. In Saudi Arabia they aren't. It simply isn't the case that Arabs in Israel have a "useless" right to vote but lack other basic human rights.
The idea that Arab mistreatment of Jews began only as a result of the creation of Israel is a myth, due in part to the fact that overall Jews were treated better by Arabs than by Christians. That just shows how badly the Christians behaved, not how well the Muslims behaved.
In some Arab countries at some times the situation of Jews was not too bad, but Jews have been second-class citizens in virtually Arab regimes and badly mistreated much of the time. Under Islamic law, Jews are required to pay Jizya "tribute", a special tax not levied on Muslims. Construction of new synagogues is not permitted. Indeed, in Saudi Arabia today the open practice of any religion other than Islam is forbidden and Saudi citizens must be Muslims. A Muslim man can marry a Jewish woman, but a Jewish man cannot marry a Muslim woman. Jews cannot testify in court. Jews were required to wear distinctive clothing and in most countries were restricted in where they could live and forced to live in ghettoes.(here is one of many summaries of the status of non-Muslims under Islamic law, with extensive quotations from Muslim sources.) There are numerous examples of mass murders of Jews in Arab countries long before 1948, such as the extermination of the 120,000 Jews of Fez, Morocco in 1146. Other massacres took place in Granada (Spain, under Moorish rule) in 1066, Libya in 1785, and Algeria in 1805, 1815, and 1830, to mention only a few.
This misses the fact that Israel comprises only 20% of Palestine Most of Palestine is and has been since 1948 under Arab rule. It's called Jordan.
Arabs in Israel may in some respects be second class citizens,but they're much better off than Jews under Arab rule, and in fact, they are better off than Arabs under Arab rule. In Israel Arabs have the vote. In Arab countries, they either don't have the vote at all or it doesn't mean much. Israel, by the way, was the first country to give Arab WOMEN the vote. In Israel Arabs can freely form their own political parties or join others, and they can be, and are, elected to the Knesset. In Israel there are real civil liberties for Arabs as well as Jews, enforced by the courts. In case after case, Arabs have WON cases in the Israeli courts. The Supreme Court of Israel has on numerous occasions over-ruled the government in favor of Arabs.
The Mennonite Central Committee has a good reputation and though religously motivated engages in minimal proselytization. (I'm not a Mennonite, or a Christian of any sort.)
Let me second this. Médecins Sans Frontières staff routinely work under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, sometimes harassed by contending governments, warlords, and bandits. This is an organization made up of heroes.
I should have thought of this before. Here's the definition of treason in the US Constitution (Article II, Section 3):
Perhaps in some circumstances exposing an agent could be construed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but in this case that would be quite a stretch.It isn't treason because you can't make a good case that leaking the undercover CIA operative's name was part of a plot to betray the United States. That doesn't mean it wasn't wrong, and it was probably a criminal act under other statutes, but it isn't treason.
In any case, there's no reason to think that the journalists who have been held in contempt of court know who the culprit is. They are NOT the journalists who published the CIA agent's name. They are other journalists who interviewed people about the leak. The prosecutor who is demanding to know their sources is on a fishing expedition.
On the other hand, there is one person who almost certainly does know the identity of the leaker, namely Robert Novak, the columnist who published the agent's name. I think he belongs in jail himself. The legitimate news value of this was small. It certainly didn't justify exposing a CIA agent. Why isn't Robert Novak in jail for contempt of court? I submit that it is because he is a long-time right wing flak who did exactly what the Bush people wanted him to do.
Whoa there! It says:
It doesn't say that you can't run the product itself, that is, Visual Fox Pro, on a non-Microsoft system. It says that programs created using Visual Fox Pro, which presumably contain Microsoft's run-time code, can only be run under MS Windows. Maybe something else in their EULAs contains this restriction (I no longer use any Microsoft software so I don't know) but this isn't an example.One thing that stands out in this case is that the judges who decided the appeal actually READ THE MANUAL! Not just the user's manual but the technical manual. The formatting of the opinion is lousy (I guess the Washington courts don't use TeX :) ) but
it shows that they paid attention and did their homework. I say three cheers for the court.
Nothing in the school system astonishes me. A while back I was staying with friends who are both teachers. They showed me the handout on evaluating reading problems that a visiting "expert" on reading instruction had given out. It was five or six pages long. It said nothing about the different kinds of reading problems and how you detect them. Basically, all it did was explain how to score the exam. That is, it explained, very slowly and carefully, that you subtract the number of incorrect answers from the total number of questions, then divide the result by the total, ... etc. If I'm not mistaken the average 11 year old is supposed to know how to do this. You'd think that teachers wouldn't require any explanation, much less five or six pages. But what really took the cake was the fact that the long, detailed explanation was patently WRONG!
I don't know why everybody assumes that man pages must be read online. When I really had to learn UNIX seriously, I bought myself one of the five-volume Berkeley manual sets to keep at home. These consisted of the man pages plus various technical reports. In addition to looking things up, I would read through them. It was a great way to get an idea of what the system consists of and what programs, library functions, system calls, and so forth are available. That was very handy set of books. I'd still be using them if not for the fact that I'm no longer running 4.2BSD.
I read somewhere a story about a guy at Microsoft who fixed the buggy flood-fill code in the graphics for Microsoft Basic. He showed his fix to Bill Gates and wondered aloud about who had written the original code, it was such a piece of garbage. Gates nodded, said nothing, and left. An old hand who had witnessed this then told him that the author of the original code was Bill Gates.
It seems clear from the history we have that Gates was once a real programmer. He knew assembly language and knew enough to write a Basic interpreter. That may not be rocket science, but it requires more than novice programming skills. So I think it is safe to say that he knows the basics and that he has some experience of real programming projects. What I can't tell from what I know about him is whether he has kept up at all and whether he has a broad view of CS and programming. Does he know C? LISP? Python? Does he grok object oriented programming? How about functional programming? Has he worked with both polling and interrupt-driven GUIs and does he appreciate the differences? I have no idea.
I'm willing to grant that sometimes software patents can motivate innovation. It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone) and in some cases, such as the RSA example, it is arguably true that this motivation would have been absent without patents and that the technology might not have developed as soon or as well as it did without them.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued. It seems to me that the difference is that the RSA patents deal with something very specific. That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme. Furthermore, the need for this kind of standardized strong encryption was restricted to a relatively narrow class of software. Most programmers could go ahead without any concern for this patent because their software didn't use encryption at all. On the other hand, a patent on hash tables or binary search, for instance, would have deterred innovation because these techniques are used in all sorts of software.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
As other posters have already shown, my characterization of the Sokal Hoax was entirely accurate. The only deception on the part of Sokal was that he did not explicitly inform the editors of Social Text, at the time he submitted the paper, that he did not sincerely believe in its content. That was of course necessary in order to carry out his experiment. Since the good of demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes outweighs a minor and temporary deception, I consider his behavior to have been ethical. The paper wore its falsehood on its sleeve. The errors in it were not subtle but would easily be detected by anyone with a basic knowledge of science. The quotations of and references to, postmodern writings were all genuine and accurate, from major figures.
There is no evidence that Sokal does not understand "science studies", nor is there any evidence other than the self-serving post hoc whining of the editors, that they did not consider the paper to be credible but published it anyway. If this is true, they failed in their duty as editors, which is either only to publish work that they believe to be credible or, in the event that special circumstances motivate publication of something that they do not believe to be credible, to publish it with a disclaimer.
The ignorance of science and the philosophy of science exhibited by the editors of Social Text is not atypical. I have had the misfortune of having to deal directly with such people in my own (not current) department. One such person, who taught graduate courses on "fundamentals" and purported to be an expert on the philosophy of her field, turned out to be familiar ONLY with postmodern critiques of science. She has never read any of the work that she and they criticize, nor even works that she cites, such as those of Feyerabend. Postmodern "science studie" have the same relationship to serious philosophy and history of science as Creationism does to real biology.
Wikipedia is very useful, but this is an excellant example of how it can be corrupted by fanatics.
I think parent is thinking of the Sokal hoax, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote a completely non-sensical physics paper and submitted it to Social Text, the leading journal of postmodern pseudo-intellectuals. Social Text accepted the paper and published it, thereby demonstrating their complete ignorance of modern science, which they purport to understand and be in a position to critique. Sokal then exposed their foolishness in a piece in Lingua Franca (sadly defunct). He has links to the hoax article, his Lingua Franca article, the statements by the editors of Social Text, and much other material here
The problems of a terrorist tracking database have already been well discussed in Trevanian's classic Shibumi: