If Microsoft is so concerned about responsibility for security flaws, why is it that they don't offer indemnification for users hurt by their software?
Agreed. I don't understand why we allow corporations to make political contributions. It corrupts the political process terribly and has no moral justification. Issues involving corporations can be perfectly well advocated by individuals. If legal changes are necessary for a certain industry to develop, for example, if the economic benefits outweigh the costs (e.g. environmental problems), people will still vote for it, but they'll do it on the basis of evidence and argument rather than
what is effectively bribery, whether we call it that or not. Why isn't there a movement to forbid corporate political donations?
Tibet has been a part of China for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's status only came into question in the last fifty, thanks to the involvement of the CIA, during the cold war.
This is utter nonsense. Tibet has been independent of China for most of its history. Imperial China claimed sovereignty over every state with which it had diplomatic relations, on the theory that the Emperor could only enter into the relationship of master to vassal, including Japan, Okinawa (an independant country until 1609), Korea, and Vietnam. China has long claimed sovereignty over Tibet, but Tibet was de facto an independent state and did not acknowledge Chinese sovereignty.
As a matter of international law, the critical fact is that in 1951, at the time of the Chinese invasion, Tibet was an independant state. It had a distinctive population occupying a well-defined territory under the effective control of its own government. The government of Tibet issued coins and currency and passports that were internationally recognized. It entered into diplomatic relations as a sovereign nation with other countries, including Nepal,Mongolia, Great Britain, and Ladakh. In fact, The Republic of China negotiated with Tibet as a sovereign nation at the Simla Conference in 1913-1914.
Actually, there are other approaches. For instance, the cake maker can be paid a fixed wage plus expenses to provide new model cakes from time to time. This is,
approximately, the model for academic research. Or someone (government, consumer organization) can contract with cake makers to produce new models. Yet another approach is to hold competitions with cake-makers earning their income via prizes. This is the model on which rodeo cowboys earn their living.
I'm not saying that all or any of these approaches will be good in all cases, but it isn't true that the only possibility is paying the producer on a piecework basis.
I'm not sure how useful the technology as described would be for most of these purposes. It only blurs faces. People taking surreptitious photographs in the ladies' locker room probably don't care all that much about the faces.
Isn't there an expectation that, if you're in a public area, you're fair game for being photographed?
Legally, and from the point of view of most people, this is true, but there are cultures in which people object strongly to being photographed, whether in public or private. I believe that some Muslims object to photographs of people because they consider it to lead to idolatry, though clearly not all Muslims take this position, so I'm not sure how widespread it is.
In some cultures people object to being photographed because they believe that the photo makes them vulnerable to witchcraft. There are people who take this very seriously. A Saulteau
(Canadian Indian) friend of mine was photographed without her knowledge by some people she met while travelling, who subsequently sent her copies. She was very upset and ritually burned them.
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research. That used to take the form of funding for publication and travel to conferences, but some grants now include some money for publishing the data. Of course, how expensive that is varies considerably from field to field.
I think they just mean dissemination, not collection. Look at the preceding paragraph:
But the Commercial Weather Services Association, the industry's trade group, has complained that such sites violate an agreement from the pre-Internet era. By its argument, the taxpayers should continue to pay for all the weather balloons and monitoring stations--but should not be allowed to get the results directly from government sites.
That says that the government should continue to do the collection but not disseminate the information to the public.
The information that local TV stations collect is different. It's current, local information.
I don't see this in the article. It just talks about dissemination. Am I missing something? Where do you get the idea that the private companies want to take over collection of the information?
Right. The "duplication of service" is duplication of distribution to the public. The companies in this business receive the data free from the NWS and resell it at a large markup to the public. If the NSW provides weather data to the public, it will be
duplicating the companies' service. In short, duplication is not a real issue here. What is at issue is that certain companies have made a business of getting information free and selling it and they don't want their business undercut by everyone being able to get the raw data.
The same is true in the UNIX world. The
GNU gettext package lets you internationalize your program just once by replacing each string by a call to a function that uses the string as an index into a message catalog for the appropriate language. Producing a new translation is then just a matter of producing a message catalog for that language. I believe that GNU gettext works on any POSIX-compliant system. I don't know for sure, but it probably works on MS Windows.
I was surprised to see that Firefox had separate builds for each language. I don't know why it was done that way. In addition to greatly increasing
the amount of code they have to keep on the server , it means that you can't switch languages using the same copy of the program. You need to run a separate copy for each language.
Re:I have always been curious
on
Decrypting Kryptos
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's a classic book on the history of codes and codebreaking called The Codebreakers,
by David Kahn.
A revised edition came out recently.
There is even a Wikipedia article about him.
A child's request for euthanasia should be ignored
Why? Granted, a child may not have the mental capacity to think rationally about the life that lies ahead and should not be euthanized just because he or she feels that life is a burden and doesn't want to go on, but there are circumstances in which a child is perfectly capable of making such a decision, and in which it would be cruel not to euthanize the child. If a child is dying in great pain, I'd say that there is just as good a reason to put him out of his misery as an adult.
Prolonging agony doesn't protect a person; it's just torture.
There's nothing illegal (AFAIK) about asking someone to break a contract.
It isn't a crime, and therefore is not illegal in the strict sense, but yes, inducing someone to break a contract is a tort, something that the injured party can sue you for. It is called tortious interference. Here's a definition.
You'll notice that one of the examples it gives is
having the employees commit wrongs such as disclosing the former employer's trade secrets
The people I have known who ran VMS were all physicists and electrical engineers who had large amounts of legacy Fortran code that they didn't want to port, and for which the VMS Fortran compiler was said to be superior to anything available for UNIX at the time. I wonder to what extent eople actually like VMS as an OS and to what extent its survival is due to heritage code?
Re:Soo... let me get this straight...
on
Spammers Sue Spamee
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Person A may well have liability in this case.
It depends. If you make a valid complaint to your landlord about your neighbor, and your landlord follows appropriate procedures and evicts your neighbor, you are both in the clear. If you make a false complaint, knowing it to be false, or with reckless disregard for the truth, and your landlord acts on that complaint, your neighbor would have a claim against you. Your landlord might or might not be in the clear depending on whether he followed appropriate procedures and whether it was reasonable of him to take your complaint to be valid. If you make a valid complaint but your landlord fails to follow appropriate procedures, then you should be in the clear but your landlord may be liable.
The landlord-tenant example is actually not ideal as far as general tort law is concerned because landlord-tenant relations are often governed by special state or local laws.
One relevant cause of action is what is called "tortious interference". That is where A improperly interferes in the business relationship between B and C.
To take a parallel criminal example, suppose that
gangster A hires hit man B to kill rival C.
Surely you don't think that only hit man B has
committed a crime? Gangster A is guilty at the very least of "solicitation of murder" and, depending on the jurisdiction, may be guilty of other crimes as well.
It seems to me that the article conflates several different kinds of extensibility under one heading and that the different kinds have different virtues and vices. One kind of extensibility is the abstraction and information encapsulation that OOP provides. That seems to be a win. Another kind of extensibility is the ability to "go meta" provided by reflection. This is provided by languages like LISP and by strongly object-oriented languages in which everything is a first-class object. It too seems to be a good idea.
A third kind of extensibility is the ability to modify syntax. As I recall there was somewhat of a vogue for this in the late 1980s though I can't remember the names of the languages or any other details. My memory is that it proved to be a bad idea. It removes the framework that we rely on, especially for people reading other people's code, or for people reading their own code after time has passed. Languages with powerful macro preprocessors allow the ability to modify syntax. Here again, my experience, and I think that of many others, is that this makes life much more difficult. In sum, I'm not sure that extensibility in the general terms discussed in the article is such a good idea.
Well, to begin with I was talking about the world as a whole. Even if only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, Americans only make up 4.6% of the world's population. And indeed the same site
that parent cites makes the point that:
Belief in creation science seems to be largely a U.S. phenomenon.
As to the US, yes, it is true that only a small minority accept a purely materialist view of evolution. However, evolutionists of some sort outnumber evolutionists, 49% to 44%. The question is what to make of the "theistic evolution" category. I would still include these people in the evolutionary camp. Without more detailed data one can't be sure, but this category presumably includes the official Roman Catholic view, on which evolution proceeded in essentially the way that materialist biologists believe it did, but God infused humans with souls at the point at which human beings evolved. So, although creationism is pretty common in the United States,
belief in something like biblical creation is less common than belief in evolution.
I believe that the official Roman Catholic view is that evolution took place as scientists believe.
They add the claim that at the point at which humans became human, God infused them with souls. This isn't really inconsistent with biological theory since biology doesn't have anything to say about souls. Effectively, the official view is biology + infusion of the soul.
I agree that those Christians who believe in evolution would not agree that life evolved purely as a result of cosmic chance, but evolution in and of itself doesn't require that. A purely materialist scientist sees no need to appeal to anything other than chance, but one can hold a perfectly orthodox view of evolution and at the same time believe that a Supreme Being set the whole thing in motion.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft is so concerned about responsibility for security flaws, why is it that they don't offer indemnification for users hurt by their software?
They probably gave in to pressure from the NSA, which didn't want the encryption to be too hard to break. Those NSA folks like to joyride.:)
Agreed. I don't understand why we allow corporations to make political contributions. It corrupts the political process terribly and has no moral justification. Issues involving corporations can be perfectly well advocated by individuals. If legal changes are necessary for a certain industry to develop, for example, if the economic benefits outweigh the costs (e.g. environmental problems), people will still vote for it, but they'll do it on the basis of evidence and argument rather than what is effectively bribery, whether we call it that or not. Why isn't there a movement to forbid corporate political donations?
This is utter nonsense. Tibet has been independent of China for most of its history. Imperial China claimed sovereignty over every state with which it had diplomatic relations, on the theory that the Emperor could only enter into the relationship of master to vassal, including Japan, Okinawa (an independant country until 1609), Korea, and Vietnam. China has long claimed sovereignty over Tibet, but Tibet was de facto an independent state and did not acknowledge Chinese sovereignty.
As a matter of international law, the critical fact is that in 1951, at the time of the Chinese invasion, Tibet was an independant state. It had a distinctive population occupying a well-defined territory under the effective control of its own government. The government of Tibet issued coins and currency and passports that were internationally recognized. It entered into diplomatic relations as a sovereign nation with other countries, including Nepal,Mongolia, Great Britain, and Ladakh. In fact, The Republic of China negotiated with Tibet as a sovereign nation at the Simla Conference in 1913-1914.
Actually, there are other approaches. For instance, the cake maker can be paid a fixed wage plus expenses to provide new model cakes from time to time. This is, approximately, the model for academic research. Or someone (government, consumer organization) can contract with cake makers to produce new models. Yet another approach is to hold competitions with cake-makers earning their income via prizes. This is the model on which rodeo cowboys earn their living. I'm not saying that all or any of these approaches will be good in all cases, but it isn't true that the only possibility is paying the producer on a piecework basis.
I'm not sure how useful the technology as described would be for most of these purposes. It only blurs faces. People taking surreptitious photographs in the ladies' locker room probably don't care all that much about the faces.
Legally, and from the point of view of most people, this is true, but there are cultures in which people object strongly to being photographed, whether in public or private. I believe that some Muslims object to photographs of people because they consider it to lead to idolatry, though clearly not all Muslims take this position, so I'm not sure how widespread it is.
In some cultures people object to being photographed because they believe that the photo makes them vulnerable to witchcraft. There are people who take this very seriously. A Saulteau (Canadian Indian) friend of mine was photographed without her knowledge by some people she met while travelling, who subsequently sent her copies. She was very upset and ritually burned them.
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research. That used to take the form of funding for publication and travel to conferences, but some grants now include some money for publishing the data. Of course, how expensive that is varies considerably from field to field.
I think they just mean dissemination, not collection. Look at the preceding paragraph:
That says that the government should continue to do the collection but not disseminate the information to the public.The information that local TV stations collect is different. It's current, local information.
I don't see this in the article. It just talks about dissemination. Am I missing something? Where do you get the idea that the private companies want to take over collection of the information?
Right. The "duplication of service" is duplication of distribution to the public. The companies in this business receive the data free from the NWS and resell it at a large markup to the public. If the NSW provides weather data to the public, it will be duplicating the companies' service. In short, duplication is not a real issue here. What is at issue is that certain companies have made a business of getting information free and selling it and they don't want their business undercut by everyone being able to get the raw data.
The same is true in the UNIX world. The GNU gettext package lets you internationalize your program just once by replacing each string by a call to a function that uses the string as an index into a message catalog for the appropriate language. Producing a new translation is then just a matter of producing a message catalog for that language. I believe that GNU gettext works on any POSIX-compliant system. I don't know for sure, but it probably works on MS Windows.
I was surprised to see that Firefox had separate builds for each language. I don't know why it was done that way. In addition to greatly increasing the amount of code they have to keep on the server , it means that you can't switch languages using the same copy of the program. You need to run a separate copy for each language.
There's a classic book on the history of codes and codebreaking called The Codebreakers, by David Kahn. A revised edition came out recently. There is even a Wikipedia article about him.
Why? Granted, a child may not have the mental capacity to think rationally about the life that lies ahead and should not be euthanized just because he or she feels that life is a burden and doesn't want to go on, but there are circumstances in which a child is perfectly capable of making such a decision, and in which it would be cruel not to euthanize the child. If a child is dying in great pain, I'd say that there is just as good a reason to put him out of his misery as an adult. Prolonging agony doesn't protect a person; it's just torture.
This is misleading in suggesting that LanguageLog is limited to English. Actually, it deals with all sorts of linguistic topics and languages.
Well, outside of Microsoft the evolution of C has proceeded in a different way, namely to D.
It isn't a crime, and therefore is not illegal in the strict sense, but yes, inducing someone to break a contract is a tort, something that the injured party can sue you for. It is called tortious interference. Here's a definition. You'll notice that one of the examples it gives is
The people I have known who ran VMS were all physicists and electrical engineers who had large amounts of legacy Fortran code that they didn't want to port, and for which the VMS Fortran compiler was said to be superior to anything available for UNIX at the time. I wonder to what extent eople actually like VMS as an OS and to what extent its survival is due to heritage code?
Person A may well have liability in this case. It depends. If you make a valid complaint to your landlord about your neighbor, and your landlord follows appropriate procedures and evicts your neighbor, you are both in the clear. If you make a false complaint, knowing it to be false, or with reckless disregard for the truth, and your landlord acts on that complaint, your neighbor would have a claim against you. Your landlord might or might not be in the clear depending on whether he followed appropriate procedures and whether it was reasonable of him to take your complaint to be valid. If you make a valid complaint but your landlord fails to follow appropriate procedures, then you should be in the clear but your landlord may be liable. The landlord-tenant example is actually not ideal as far as general tort law is concerned because landlord-tenant relations are often governed by special state or local laws.
One relevant cause of action is what is called "tortious interference". That is where A improperly interferes in the business relationship between B and C.
To take a parallel criminal example, suppose that gangster A hires hit man B to kill rival C. Surely you don't think that only hit man B has committed a crime? Gangster A is guilty at the very least of "solicitation of murder" and, depending on the jurisdiction, may be guilty of other crimes as well.
It seems to me that the article conflates several different kinds of extensibility under one heading and that the different kinds have different virtues and vices. One kind of extensibility is the abstraction and information encapsulation that OOP provides. That seems to be a win. Another kind of extensibility is the ability to "go meta" provided by reflection. This is provided by languages like LISP and by strongly object-oriented languages in which everything is a first-class object. It too seems to be a good idea.
A third kind of extensibility is the ability to modify syntax. As I recall there was somewhat of a vogue for this in the late 1980s though I can't remember the names of the languages or any other details. My memory is that it proved to be a bad idea. It removes the framework that we rely on, especially for people reading other people's code, or for people reading their own code after time has passed. Languages with powerful macro preprocessors allow the ability to modify syntax. Here again, my experience, and I think that of many others, is that this makes life much more difficult. In sum, I'm not sure that extensibility in the general terms discussed in the article is such a good idea.
ICANN is soliciting comments on the revised transfer policy: RFC. Let them know what you think.
I'm glad to hear it. It is a nice distribution. But there's still a way to go. Mandrake's annual revenue is only 0.016% of Microsoft's.
From what I can tell, the Mormon church appears to have no real official position on evolution. Individual Mormons have diverse views.
Well, to begin with I was talking about the world as a whole. Even if only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, Americans only make up 4.6% of the world's population. And indeed the same site that parent cites makes the point that:
As to the US, yes, it is true that only a small minority accept a purely materialist view of evolution. However, evolutionists of some sort outnumber evolutionists, 49% to 44%. The question is what to make of the "theistic evolution" category. I would still include these people in the evolutionary camp. Without more detailed data one can't be sure, but this category presumably includes the official Roman Catholic view, on which evolution proceeded in essentially the way that materialist biologists believe it did, but God infused humans with souls at the point at which human beings evolved. So, although creationism is pretty common in the United States, belief in something like biblical creation is less common than belief in evolution.
I believe that the official Roman Catholic view is that evolution took place as scientists believe. They add the claim that at the point at which humans became human, God infused them with souls. This isn't really inconsistent with biological theory since biology doesn't have anything to say about souls. Effectively, the official view is biology + infusion of the soul.
I agree that those Christians who believe in evolution would not agree that life evolved purely as a result of cosmic chance, but evolution in and of itself doesn't require that. A purely materialist scientist sees no need to appeal to anything other than chance, but one can hold a perfectly orthodox view of evolution and at the same time believe that a Supreme Being set the whole thing in motion.