Actually, the MTA is a public-benefit corporation. I wouldn't be surprised if part of their Frankensteinian monstrosity included being free of copyright law.
Also, I'm not a lawyer or anything, but isn't it works of the Federal government that are legally in the public domain? I'm not entirely sure the same rule applies to the states. Even if you're making an argument based on what-should-be not what-is, your assumption is that the citizens of New York should own the maps. By that logic, we still ought to be able to levy royalties on out-of-state copiers....
Since the blog only seemed to exist to insult her, then I think it is more reasonable for the court to allow finding out who the anonymous author was.
Not really -- at least in the US, statements of opinion are not considered actionable, although the Supreme Court has ruled that this is not a necessary part of the First Amendment.
Where she may have a case is with the claim that these statements are defamatory per se -- a category which covers mental illness (psychotic) and allegations of unchastity (skank, ho). These don't require proof of damages or really anything; it's just automatically defamatory. So, note to everyone: if you want to call a model names in public, make sure it doesn't impugn her sexual character or mental health.
the sense of group integrity and social self-preservation that keeps them from blurting out pointless rubbish at random passers-by vanishes, along with any reward they would get from carefully crafting high-quality verbal output.
I think it's a little excessive, but my point was: do you really do this every time? This happened in broad daylight, with the attacker being someone in a recognizable official uniform. I guarantee you this guy has a chain-lock on his door, and if he'd used it, the other guy couldn't have hit him without busting out the door frame first. So it's not an inadequate security strategy; it's a lapse in caution, which can happen to anyone. Home defense is like condoms: only effective if you're using it 100% of the time (and not 100% effective even then).
As for the flashlight, be a little careful with that. If guns are this readily available in your jurisdiction, your intruder knows he'd better shoot first. The beam just shows where to point his. ('course, you probably don't want to shoot a shotgun blind in your darkened living room -- but you're more sure to kill his night vision if you just flip on the lights.) The guy breaking into your house always has this advantage: there's no way anybody he runs into in your house is his confused neighbor, or wife or teenage son having a midnight snack.
The effectiveness of guns, like that of any means of self-defense, is highly situationally specific. I guarantee you this guy had a self-defense tool that's that's part of every New York apartment -- the chain lock -- that, if used, could've prevented this from happening, just as surely as a gun could've. But few people use chain locks before opening their doors. Just the same, your gun would've done you no good if it were in the bedroom closet while the guy was wailing on you. Unless you were hoping to escape from him, then run to your bedroom, get the gun, load it, and manage to shoot the guy before he's on top of you again.
Or do you load a couple rounds and have your gun in hand every time the doorbell rings? Really? Do you leave your gun with bullets in it, lying around where your toddler can grab it readily? Of course you don't, but then there goes its self-defense effectiveness. And if you wear your gun when you answer the door, and the guy on the other side means you harm, you'd better hope you can get the shot off before he's on you, because when he sees that gun he is not going to back down while you're conscious enough to shoot him in the back.
I don't think guns are evil. I believe everyone should know how to shoot and how to handle a firearm, and I absolutely would want a gun in an obviously threatening situation where the firearm is ready and the violence is foreseeable (say, a riot down the street, or a war zone). I just understand that guns are far less effective in realistic self-defense situations than hoplomaniacs believe.
If anything would've kept the victim safer, it'd be having a big dog. Doesn't have to be a particularly vicious breed, just faithful and over fifty pounds. I can only chuckle at what would've happened if this goon had tried to pull a stunt like this near my stepmother's Lab.
The city government has made it quite clear that only felons are allowed to own weapons there. This wouldn't have happened in a state/city where the Second Amendment still exists.
Yes it would have. It just would've been the tech with the gun. (Or Verizon would have to pay techs more on account of how many of them end up as bodies on the doorsteps of people with nervous fingers.)
Honestly, this kind of hoplomania is disconcerting. I believe a person should know how to shoot and I support the right to own guns, but I'm sick of seeing people ascribe magical social effects to widespread gun ownership as though nothing of this sort has ever happened in Houston.
The real way this would never have happened is if Verizon acted promptly and properly, and fired the guy.
Some people do, actually, do just that. They're often crazy enough not to be even remotely employable, but I've had situations where I've dealt with people who were on the verge of attacking me with no provocation whatsoever.
I don't think you're seeing what I'm saying. The article says that the East Asians misread a standardized "fear" face as surprise. If this was not a sincerely felt emotion, i.e. the person making the face wasn't *actually* afraid (as seems likely to me, especially since the article says that sincerely-felt emotions do read as universal), then we could just as easily say that the Western scientists misread a surprise face as fear when they labeled the reference face.
From this evidence, we cannot claim that one group or the other misread the face; only that their readings were different (and, thus, that the facial expression itself was not universal).
If East Asians misread fear as surprise, it means that the expression of fear is universal, but East Asians (at least those in this study) don't read the signs that separate fear from surprise.
That doesn't follow. If we grant that East Asians experience fear, and are capable of expressing it to each other through faces (both of which seem trivially obvious), then the point would be "the signs that separate fear from surprise" are not universal -- or otherwise put, if not everybody recognizes something, then that something isn't really universal.
The reference face used to represent fear is not universally perceived as such -- but the expression isn't personally handed down by God as The Official Expression Of Fear. So the result only shows that (a small sample of) East Asians do not recognize what the Western scientists label as the "fear" face. The article made a distinction between expressions of truly felt emotion (which are believed to be universal) and social expressions, such as a polite smile, which are objectively different from real-emotion expressions and which are faked in different ways by different cultures.
The observation that people from different cultures use different cues to establish the emotions of others is interesting in itself; that those differences lead to culturally-based distinctions in how social expressions are perceived is also an interesting result.
The article answers that question -- the Easterners tested (a whopping sample of 13 people) tended to identify expressions as less-socially-threatening alternatives. So, surprise instead of fear or disgust, for example.
People act like the company is cheating you, but what this really is is an incentive to take your vacation time.
Indeed, this is how you should treat it.
From the company's perspective, the reason they do this is that they can't afford to have a large, unknowable liability on the books. If you have six months' vacation time accrued, and then you quit/are fired/whatever, they're legally obligated to compensate you in some manner. So either they're paying a check into the air for six months, or they're paying a REALLY BIG check all at once that makes somebody's quarterly budget look like chum in the shark tank. So they've started capping it, because at least that way the people who talk to the shareholders don't get spooked when turnover problems are compounded by awful budget problems.
Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's the alternate solution that Blizzard has come up with.:) EvE Online sounds *insanely* tilted to established players, which is why I've never been interested in it really, but a lesser version of what you describe here is in fact true of WoW; you can't get all the really best gear without either extensive (and reasonably successful) PvP play, or a lot of end-game raiding. Of course, gear in general doesn't mean as much in WoW as it does in EvE.
That'd be a neat trick seeing as how the voter who uses the ballot marking device still gets to see and hold the ballot before he casts it. It would also be a neat trick when you consider that the vast majority of voters will be filling out their ballots by hand.
I've been a New York voter for ten years, and I've never gotten to do either of those things. Granted, my districts have always used the old flip-the-switch, pull-the-lever machines, but I've never gotten to actually see or hold the ballot I cast. Nor do I know anybody (aside from potentially out-of-district folks casting affidavit ballots, which officially may not even be counted) that has filled out a ballot by hand. Or by "filled out the ballot by hand" did you mean "manipulated the interface that purports to represent the ballot"? If the machines you're talking about print out a ballot card in human-readable format that can be inspected before being dropped in a ballot box, then (1) they aren't the touch-screen voting most people are worried about, and (2) there's basically no reason to use the machine instead of just using paper to begin with.
Yeah and drawing your own election district is also a way to rig the process. Are we talking about those issues or voting technology here?
Sorry, did you not say "If you can find a way to rig an election in the State of New York I'd be real interested in knowing about it?" That's a way to rig an election... The whole point being that you can't focus on the security of one part of the voting machine without looking at the other parts of the machine, and even the entire process. You mention certain specific security features without looking at the larger picture of security (not to mention the problem that the system may not be designed to be secure).
If you can find a way to rig an election in the State of New York then I'd be real interested in knowing about it.
Make the machines. Include a backdoor that allows them to be controlled via radio. Rig the machine so that it doesn't print what it says it's printing. Fin
Sincerely, A Fellow NY Voter
P.S. Running machine candidates with major avenues named after their namesake granddaddies is a pretty sure-fire way to rig the democratic process, too, although it has nothing to do with voting machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a transit company try to stop someone from making their service more user-friendly?
...you've never been to New York, have you?
...I think you just convinced me to go buy some expensive paper and take up a new hobby...
Actually, the MTA is a public-benefit corporation. I wouldn't be surprised if part of their Frankensteinian monstrosity included being free of copyright law.
Also, I'm not a lawyer or anything, but isn't it works of the Federal government that are legally in the public domain? I'm not entirely sure the same rule applies to the states. Even if you're making an argument based on what-should-be not what-is, your assumption is that the citizens of New York should own the maps. By that logic, we still ought to be able to levy royalties on out-of-state copiers....
Sorry mate, they just got bought out by google. :(
Since the blog only seemed to exist to insult her, then I think it is more reasonable for the court to allow finding out who the anonymous author was.
Not really -- at least in the US, statements of opinion are not considered actionable, although the Supreme Court has ruled that this is not a necessary part of the First Amendment.
Where she may have a case is with the claim that these statements are defamatory per se -- a category which covers mental illness (psychotic) and allegations of unchastity (skank, ho). These don't require proof of damages or really anything; it's just automatically defamatory. So, note to everyone: if you want to call a model names in public, make sure it doesn't impugn her sexual character or mental health.
the sense of group integrity and social self-preservation that keeps them from blurting out pointless rubbish at random passers-by vanishes, along with any reward they would get from carefully crafting high-quality verbal output.
Not true. I have excellent karma.
Poopy-head.
See Texas, Florida, and 'Castle Laws' for the reasons you are wrong.
I'm sorry, we appear to disagree about the definition of "first-world country."
Do you have a problem with that?
I think it's a little excessive, but my point was: do you really do this every time? This happened in broad daylight, with the attacker being someone in a recognizable official uniform. I guarantee you this guy has a chain-lock on his door, and if he'd used it, the other guy couldn't have hit him without busting out the door frame first. So it's not an inadequate security strategy; it's a lapse in caution, which can happen to anyone. Home defense is like condoms: only effective if you're using it 100% of the time (and not 100% effective even then).
As for the flashlight, be a little careful with that. If guns are this readily available in your jurisdiction, your intruder knows he'd better shoot first. The beam just shows where to point his. ('course, you probably don't want to shoot a shotgun blind in your darkened living room -- but you're more sure to kill his night vision if you just flip on the lights.) The guy breaking into your house always has this advantage: there's no way anybody he runs into in your house is his confused neighbor, or wife or teenage son having a midnight snack.
The effectiveness of guns, like that of any means of self-defense, is highly situationally specific. I guarantee you this guy had a self-defense tool that's that's part of every New York apartment -- the chain lock -- that, if used, could've prevented this from happening, just as surely as a gun could've. But few people use chain locks before opening their doors. Just the same, your gun would've done you no good if it were in the bedroom closet while the guy was wailing on you. Unless you were hoping to escape from him, then run to your bedroom, get the gun, load it, and manage to shoot the guy before he's on top of you again.
Or do you load a couple rounds and have your gun in hand every time the doorbell rings? Really? Do you leave your gun with bullets in it, lying around where your toddler can grab it readily? Of course you don't, but then there goes its self-defense effectiveness.
And if you wear your gun when you answer the door, and the guy on the other side means you harm, you'd better hope you can get the shot off before he's on you, because when he sees that gun he is not going to back down while you're conscious enough to shoot him in the back.
I don't think guns are evil. I believe everyone should know how to shoot and how to handle a firearm, and I absolutely would want a gun in an obviously threatening situation where the firearm is ready and the violence is foreseeable (say, a riot down the street, or a war zone). I just understand that guns are far less effective in realistic self-defense situations than hoplomaniacs believe.
If anything would've kept the victim safer, it'd be having a big dog. Doesn't have to be a particularly vicious breed, just faithful and over fifty pounds. I can only chuckle at what would've happened if this goon had tried to pull a stunt like this near my stepmother's Lab.
I'll see your Femme Nikita and raise you a Delicatessen. :)
Would those crimes have happened if there had been an outlet for all that rage?
You mean like boxing, or MMA cagefights, or violent video games?
The city government has made it quite clear that only felons are allowed to own weapons there. This wouldn't have happened in a state/city where the Second Amendment still exists.
Yes it would have. It just would've been the tech with the gun. (Or Verizon would have to pay techs more on account of how many of them end up as bodies on the doorsteps of people with nervous fingers.)
Honestly, this kind of hoplomania is disconcerting. I believe a person should know how to shoot and I support the right to own guns, but I'm sick of seeing people ascribe magical social effects to widespread gun ownership as though nothing of this sort has ever happened in Houston.
The real way this would never have happened is if Verizon acted promptly and properly, and fired the guy.
Actually, he's not. There's no bruise marks on the throat, though.
He apparently also broke his ankle running down the stairs to get away from this guy.
The awesome part is the binding arbitration clause....
No, there wouldn't be any charges filed against me because I feared for my life in my own home.
There would be in Queens.
As always, know the laws of your local jurisdiction before you go getting all Dirty Harry on some service tech.
People don't just attack random strangers
Some people do, actually, do just that. They're often crazy enough not to be even remotely employable, but I've had situations where I've dealt with people who were on the verge of attacking me with no provocation whatsoever.
I don't think you're seeing what I'm saying.
The article says that the East Asians misread a standardized "fear" face as surprise. If this was not a sincerely felt emotion, i.e. the person making the face wasn't *actually* afraid (as seems likely to me, especially since the article says that sincerely-felt emotions do read as universal), then we could just as easily say that the Western scientists misread a surprise face as fear when they labeled the reference face.
From this evidence, we cannot claim that one group or the other misread the face; only that their readings were different (and, thus, that the facial expression itself was not universal).
Well, hold on.
If East Asians misread fear as surprise, it means that the expression of fear is universal, but East Asians (at least those in this study) don't read the signs that separate fear from surprise.
That doesn't follow. If we grant that East Asians experience fear, and are capable of expressing it to each other through faces (both of which seem trivially obvious), then the point would be "the signs that separate fear from surprise" are not universal -- or otherwise put, if not everybody recognizes something, then that something isn't really universal.
The reference face used to represent fear is not universally perceived as such -- but the expression isn't personally handed down by God as The Official Expression Of Fear. So the result only shows that (a small sample of) East Asians do not recognize what the Western scientists label as the "fear" face. The article made a distinction between expressions of truly felt emotion (which are believed to be universal) and social expressions, such as a polite smile, which are objectively different from real-emotion expressions and which are faked in different ways by different cultures.
The observation that people from different cultures use different cues to establish the emotions of others is interesting in itself; that those differences lead to culturally-based distinctions in how social expressions are perceived is also an interesting result.
The article answers that question -- the Easterners tested (a whopping sample of 13 people) tended to identify expressions as less-socially-threatening alternatives. So, surprise instead of fear or disgust, for example.
I'd much rather federal programs paid for themselves through taxes, rather than restricting access to legal proceedings to those with money.
Any price-based barrier to entry is too great for the legal system.
People act like the company is cheating you, but what this really is is an incentive to take your vacation time.
Indeed, this is how you should treat it.
From the company's perspective, the reason they do this is that they can't afford to have a large, unknowable liability on the books. If you have six months' vacation time accrued, and then you quit/are fired/whatever, they're legally obligated to compensate you in some manner. So either they're paying a check into the air for six months, or they're paying a REALLY BIG check all at once that makes somebody's quarterly budget look like chum in the shark tank.
So they've started capping it, because at least that way the people who talk to the shareholders don't get spooked when turnover problems are compounded by awful budget problems.
Oh, I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that it's the alternate solution that Blizzard has come up with. :)
EvE Online sounds *insanely* tilted to established players, which is why I've never been interested in it really, but a lesser version of what you describe here is in fact true of WoW; you can't get all the really best gear without either extensive (and reasonably successful) PvP play, or a lot of end-game raiding. Of course, gear in general doesn't mean as much in WoW as it does in EvE.
Or you can use the WoW answer -- ensure that very little that's really worthwhile is actually purchasable with transferable in-game currency.
That'd be a neat trick seeing as how the voter who uses the ballot marking device still gets to see and hold the ballot before he casts it. It would also be a neat trick when you consider that the vast majority of voters will be filling out their ballots by hand.
I've been a New York voter for ten years, and I've never gotten to do either of those things. Granted, my districts have always used the old flip-the-switch, pull-the-lever machines, but I've never gotten to actually see or hold the ballot I cast. Nor do I know anybody (aside from potentially out-of-district folks casting affidavit ballots, which officially may not even be counted) that has filled out a ballot by hand.
Or by "filled out the ballot by hand" did you mean "manipulated the interface that purports to represent the ballot"?
If the machines you're talking about print out a ballot card in human-readable format that can be inspected before being dropped in a ballot box, then (1) they aren't the touch-screen voting most people are worried about, and (2) there's basically no reason to use the machine instead of just using paper to begin with.
Yeah and drawing your own election district is also a way to rig the process. Are we talking about those issues or voting technology here?
Sorry, did you not say "If you can find a way to rig an election in the State of New York I'd be real interested in knowing about it?" That's a way to rig an election...
The whole point being that you can't focus on the security of one part of the voting machine without looking at the other parts of the machine, and even the entire process. You mention certain specific security features without looking at the larger picture of security (not to mention the problem that the system may not be designed to be secure).
If you can find a way to rig an election in the State of New York then I'd be real interested in knowing about it.
Make the machines. Include a backdoor that allows them to be controlled via radio. Rig the machine so that it doesn't print what it says it's printing.
Fin
Sincerely,
A Fellow NY Voter
P.S. Running machine candidates with major avenues named after their namesake granddaddies is a pretty sure-fire way to rig the democratic process, too, although it has nothing to do with voting machines.