There really needs this balance As in theory Extream Left will lead to Dictators and fully planned echonomies (which don't work) the Extream right leads to anarchy and unregulated echonomies (which don't work)
"Extreme", but I digress. Actually, if you look around a bit, you'll see that extreme right can also lead to dictatorship, such as in the case of Spain after the civil war. I think what leads to dictatorship is allowing absolute power. Dictatorship seems to have little to do with ideology and everything to do with some person's decision to exploit a time of crisis to seize absolute control. It's why we should get upset when government officials fail to follow the laws and regulations that have been put in place through representative government.
Despite the fact that many U.S. government agencies are ensla^H^H^H^H^H reliant on Windows for office automation software, they probably have people in their employ who understand a good deal about Linux, and I wouldn't be surprised if their tool kit included Linux-based tools. After all, if you want to be able to boot a system from CD or USB so you can copy its disk contents across the network to some storage and analysis system, wouldn't the obvious choice be to build something based on Damn Small Linux or some similar distribution?
Somehow, I think that presenting the Border Patrol with a laptop that boots into Linux is going to add a few points toward qualifying for a VIP interview. Not that I would let that force me to use Windows....
TFA says the rejection letter claims the contents are under a non-disclosure agreement. It would be interesting to know whether the App Store developers signed any sort of NDA that would include their disclosing communications between Apple and them. If not, I don't think the NDA Apple claims is binding.
From everything I've heard about the iPhone, I have no interest in it, and I'm rapidly losing interest in Apple's computer products. I guess I ought to sell that Apple stock of mine -- once the market comes back to life.
My mileage certainly hasn't been that good. I live on high ground 20 miles outside D.C., as the crow flies. With analog, I can receive all of the local VHF stations, plus three VHF stations in Baltimore, and a smattering of UHF stations, including Goldvein, VA, which is over an hour's drive away. Some of the stations are snowier than others, but I can see them. With my DTV converter, I can reliably receive two of the "VHF" stations and three "UHF" stations whose transmitters are in D.C. but which came in rather poorly in analog. I can't get the Fox affiliate (no major loss), and the CBS affiliate is out if there is a heavy rain. All of this is from the same antenna in my attic, and the stations that don't work use the same transmitter tower and have the same output power as some of the ones that do!
I expect that some of this will improve when I go up in the attic (when the weather cools) and muck about with the antennae -- probably taking the VHF antenna out of the mix and going with just the UHF antenna -- but I don't think I stand a snowball's chance of ever getting Baltimore in digital.
What I've seen with digital is you get one of:
A beautiful, clear picture better than anything seen before.
Nothing.
A really weird, choppy picture that is sort of still and sort of not, kind of like the old video-conferencing equipment they had ten years ago -- but certainly not useful.
The new transmitters take a lot more power - WRC, for example, transmits analog with 100 KW, while the digital tranmission is 800 KW. They are on a much shorter wavelength, so they are much more susceptible to being blocked by landforms, buildings and -- I read this somewhere -- shingles. (Looks like I'm going to have to mount my antenna outside.) I strongly doubt that digital signals will travel the 50 miles or so my parents will need where they live.
On the whole, I'd just as soon keep my analog televisions and the bit of snow I get. It looks to me like the main beneficiaries of this thing are going to be television manufacturers and cable/satellite television providers. It sure as heck isn't going to be us.
Seriously, I think too many people think it's their right to drive. I know deaf people that drive. That shouldn't be allowed yet they can because there is so much pressure on the government to basically allow certain impaired people(ie deaf and old people) and any young jack ass to drive a car.
I will agree with you that too many people think they have a right to drive, but I strongly disagree about deaf people. The deaf people I have known have had excellent perception of what's going on around them. Hearing plays a pretty minor role in driving. If you want to take a shot at hearing impairment, go for the people driving around with the radio turned up and the windows closed, who aren't going to hear an ambulance and who are functionally deaf but don't know it.
But yes, we should screen against incompetent drivers. I think there should be retesting at each license renewal for everybody. Besides the fact that people forget simple things like the requirement to signal lane changes, laws change and people don't notice. Virginia, where I live, has had a law on the books for 10 years that requires using headlights when it rains, but I still see people driving in really bad visibility with no lights on. Unfortunately, Virginia has gone in the opposite direction. When I was 45, they had me take an eye test; I just renewed my license by mail last month, and it's good for another years. So it will have been 13 years since they checked my eyesight, if they do it then.
As far as restricting the licensing of young people, that's the wrong approach. Kids should learn to drive when they're fifteen or sixteen but should be kept on a tight leash by their parents. The ones I knew who killed themselves off at a young age were the same ones whose parents gave them full use of a car right after they got their license. It's a pattern that repeats itself year after year.
Certainly in the UK, a contract which refuses legal recourse (ie "You can't take us to court") is illegal and, therefore, that clause is automatically null and void.
I haven't read The Fine ToS (I'm not an AT&T customer), but the trend in the U.S. for a number of years now is to put a binding arbitration clause in the contract. There are arbitration firms that provide a venue in lieu of the courts to settle disputes between parties. The effect, as I understand it, is to shift more of the cost of initiating litigation onto the plaintiff and to reduce the risk of exorbitant awards against the defendant. There are plenty of other benefits, but I think they accrue mostly to the benefit of the party writing the contract. (Not that this is much different from the way contracts were written before this trend.)
I've generally found that people on the business side of stuff respect me for my competence in an area where they are weak. The only time I can think of that this wasn't so was in my first tech job -- an on-site contracted help desk job -- twenty-some years ago. The non-IT staff had had several years of poor support from the previous contractor, and they expected more of the same when I started. I learned that actually solving people's problems and treating them with respect goes a long way. Even the most flaming, arrogant ***hole in the organization respected me after a year or so, and this was the same guy who cussed me out on the phone in my first week. The thing is to not get wrapped up in office politics. Everyone brings some value to the organization, or he wouldn't be there. Someone found enough merit in each staff member to offer the job.
I think the bottom line is that we need to deliver two things:
Solutions to the business side's problems, which is what we were hired for.
Respect for the people we work with, because that's a basic human need, the absence of which makes the first item seem inadequate.
Sure, why not. While we're at it, let's teach Holocaust denial in History class, and Ebonics in English lit. Also, we'll make sure to cover Alchemy in chemistry class, and our Geography teachers MUST give equal time to the idea that the world is flat!
As someone else already pointed out, Michael Reiss is advocating discussion of creationism in class, not teaching it as fact. You can't show the emperor has no clothes unless you can get him out in public view. The same goes for other crackpot hypotheses. I am pretty sure that my kid's Holocaust class at religious school this year will include discussion of Holocaust denial, so that she and her classmates will know how to debunk the people who say it didn't happen.
I don't believe TFA makes a case that superstition is an evolutionary advantage; rather, it seems to support the idea that pattern recognition is an evolutionary advantage -- and that is not limited to the human species.
For example, our late cat noticed that sometimes we opened the refrigerator, then took out a bowl, and presented him with said bowl containing a blob of tasty ground meat. He was therefore frequently distressed when I would open the freezer, take out a bowl, and then go sit on the couch to eat ice cream instead of giving him a bowl of cat food. I don't think that his expectation that food would follow the opening of the refrigerator door could be superstition, it was simple recognition that sometimes these actions resulted in something he wanted.
Superstition is clearly something unique to our species, and the fact that it can be beneficial in some circumstances and not so in others doesn't mean it's a good thing or a bad thing. The final judgment on that will be if and when superstition is what finally kills off the species, and that judgment will be up to the rats and cockroaches.
Assert a highly restrictive copyright on the content and then employ the most sophisticated DRM you can on it. Within days, perhaps hours, it will be all over the Net, especially if you enlist the aid of the MPAA to protect it.
Wrong sun god. Ra was Egyptian. Apollo was the Roman sun god. The Roman emperor Constantine mandated the observance of dies solis (Sun's day) in 321 C.E. after he converted to Christianity. (Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
I inferred it from the fact that New York is demanding that retailers with no physical presence in the state of New York collect New York sales taxes. If they have a use tax, though, then I'd say they have dealt with the problem as effectively as they can, other than doing border searches of U.S. mail and common carriers' vehicles. Personally, I'm completely unsympathetic to what they're trying to do; it flies in the face of the Constitution.
Oy. We're getting into subclasses of sales tax here in Virginia, too, but what you describe reminds me of the old Blue Laws we used to have, which allowed things like a printed T-shirt to be sold on Sunday but not an undershirt (or maybe it was the other way around). It was really convoluted and ultimately revolved around value judgments as to what could be sold on the "Lord's Day", predicated, of course, on the assumption that everyone worships the Roman sun god.
Anyway, if I had mod points, I'd give you "informative".
Virginia (the Old Dominion, a bastion of conservatism) has a use tax. It's surprising to me that New York, which has a higher tax bite doesn't. Of course, the problem with use taxes comes in collecting them, and that's why most states collect sales tax from the seller.
is 30 years of 2 am blood-curdling screams and blasphemous curses against our lord jesus when a parent happened to step on one of these things barefoot.
No. There've been 50 years of that. But this article makes me feel old, since I played with Legos from my earliest memory until well after all my peers stopped playing with them, and still I don't remember the minifigs. (Don't get me started on the robot things.)
Okay, to all the people who are arguing with you, I respectfully implore: Please read the "fine" decision. The courts have said that border searches don't require reasonable grounds for suspicion because they are "different" than searches within the U.S.
Now, if this upsets you and you live in the U.S., complain to Congress. It'll take you maybe fifteen minutes to bang out a letter to your congressman/woman and your two senators explaining that you think DHS is going too far. I have already done so, and I got back nice, polite letters explaining that there's a war on terror going on, etc., etc. They're not going to listen to me and the handful of people from EFF and the ACLU. But if their email boxes are swamped with complaints from Slashdotters (and their friends and families), maybe Congress will do something. Otherwise, resign yourself to the possibility that your electronic toys may be impounded and scrutinized at the border.
These are just two incidents from S.C., where I have roots and take notice of such things. In both cases, the most damning evidence against the police is from their own in-car cameras. I'm sure S.C. hasn't cornered the market on thuggish cops.
I think that as a general rule of thumb, if you are filming a police or other law enforcement action and you think the people doing the enforcing may be breaking the law, you don't want to advertise the fact, lest their attention be diverted to you, with potential consequences including loss of the evidence you are collecting. When I was just starting off on my own, my dad (a newspaper man) dispensed this piece of advice: "If you are stopped by a policeman for any reason, say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir'. Let him be the big man, because he has the badge and the gun, and it will be his word against yours." Basically, if you think there is something that needs to be redressed, write the facts down (badge number, name, etc.) and take it up with the supervisors later, in plain light of day. Being a smart aleck isn't the way to go.
I remember two rules from the small bit of gun safety I was taught as a kid. Rule one was you don't point a gun at anything/anyone you don't intend to kill. I've been told that cops are trained to shoot to kill, not to wound. Mark my words: the people who stand to benefit most from this variable-speed bullet stuff are the attorneys.
There have been a few times when I knew my wife was at a meeting or something and I wanted her to pick something up on the way home, but I didn't want to disturb her during the meeting. The same might apply if it's late at night and the message can wait until the recipient wakes up -- and I don't plan on being up at that hour.
Of course, since my wife and I have cell phones on the same system, we can log into our own voice mail and send messages, and now, of course, there's texting.
I read several of your posts and several of the responses from people, and I wanted you to know I am with you to a point -- and I am not a Marine. Kids need limits, and we set them, too. Our daughter is beginning to understand that the limits are not there to imprison her but to keep her safe, and we are ever so slowly expanding them. It's a fine line. At 12, she knows that we can read her email but promise not to unless something comes up involving her safety. We tell her why we have set the limits, and we are willing to discuss moving them from time to time. It's paying off.
Cars scare the hell out of me. I think that giving a teenager a car is like giving him/her a grenade with a loose pin. I knew several kids of my generation who were given cars for their own personal use, and they ended up dead. From what I read in the papers, teenagers now do the same dumb things as we did 30-some years ago, and it seems to me like the best thing the parents can do is keep the keys on a short leash. Our kid won't get a car until she can buy one, the same as was the case for me.
I don't think we're going to need the GPS tracking for the car; if I have any question about whether I can trust my daughter to borrow the car, she's not getting it. The same techniques and tools that my parents had available to them still exist and still work well: odometer readings, bottle caps in the car, letters bearing an official return address, grades, and my gut feeling about the kids my daughter chooses to hang out with. No, the techniques aren't fool-proof, but life offers but two guarantees: death and taxes.
The GPS tracking devices may be a good thing for business, and they may be really cool technology, but this is one I don't think I need.
Slashdot Mirror
"Extreme", but I digress. Actually, if you look around a bit, you'll see that extreme right can also lead to dictatorship, such as in the case of Spain after the civil war. I think what leads to dictatorship is allowing absolute power. Dictatorship seems to have little to do with ideology and everything to do with some person's decision to exploit a time of crisis to seize absolute control. It's why we should get upset when government officials fail to follow the laws and regulations that have been put in place through representative government.
Somehow, I think that presenting the Border Patrol with a laptop that boots into Linux is going to add a few points toward qualifying for a VIP interview. Not that I would let that force me to use Windows....
Isn't that where they practice omphaloskepsis?
From everything I've heard about the iPhone, I have no interest in it, and I'm rapidly losing interest in Apple's computer products. I guess I ought to sell that Apple stock of mine -- once the market comes back to life.
My mileage certainly hasn't been that good. I live on high ground 20 miles outside D.C., as the crow flies. With analog, I can receive all of the local VHF stations, plus three VHF stations in Baltimore, and a smattering of UHF stations, including Goldvein, VA, which is over an hour's drive away. Some of the stations are snowier than others, but I can see them. With my DTV converter, I can reliably receive two of the "VHF" stations and three "UHF" stations whose transmitters are in D.C. but which came in rather poorly in analog. I can't get the Fox affiliate (no major loss), and the CBS affiliate is out if there is a heavy rain. All of this is from the same antenna in my attic, and the stations that don't work use the same transmitter tower and have the same output power as some of the ones that do!
I expect that some of this will improve when I go up in the attic (when the weather cools) and muck about with the antennae -- probably taking the VHF antenna out of the mix and going with just the UHF antenna -- but I don't think I stand a snowball's chance of ever getting Baltimore in digital.
What I've seen with digital is you get one of:
The new transmitters take a lot more power - WRC, for example, transmits analog with 100 KW, while the digital tranmission is 800 KW. They are on a much shorter wavelength, so they are much more susceptible to being blocked by landforms, buildings and -- I read this somewhere -- shingles. (Looks like I'm going to have to mount my antenna outside.) I strongly doubt that digital signals will travel the 50 miles or so my parents will need where they live.
On the whole, I'd just as soon keep my analog televisions and the bit of snow I get. It looks to me like the main beneficiaries of this thing are going to be television manufacturers and cable/satellite television providers. It sure as heck isn't going to be us.
I will agree with you that too many people think they have a right to drive, but I strongly disagree about deaf people. The deaf people I have known have had excellent perception of what's going on around them. Hearing plays a pretty minor role in driving. If you want to take a shot at hearing impairment, go for the people driving around with the radio turned up and the windows closed, who aren't going to hear an ambulance and who are functionally deaf but don't know it.
But yes, we should screen against incompetent drivers. I think there should be retesting at each license renewal for everybody. Besides the fact that people forget simple things like the requirement to signal lane changes, laws change and people don't notice. Virginia, where I live, has had a law on the books for 10 years that requires using headlights when it rains, but I still see people driving in really bad visibility with no lights on. Unfortunately, Virginia has gone in the opposite direction. When I was 45, they had me take an eye test; I just renewed my license by mail last month, and it's good for another years. So it will have been 13 years since they checked my eyesight, if they do it then.
As far as restricting the licensing of young people, that's the wrong approach. Kids should learn to drive when they're fifteen or sixteen but should be kept on a tight leash by their parents. The ones I knew who killed themselves off at a young age were the same ones whose parents gave them full use of a car right after they got their license. It's a pattern that repeats itself year after year.
I haven't read The Fine ToS (I'm not an AT&T customer), but the trend in the U.S. for a number of years now is to put a binding arbitration clause in the contract. There are arbitration firms that provide a venue in lieu of the courts to settle disputes between parties. The effect, as I understand it, is to shift more of the cost of initiating litigation onto the plaintiff and to reduce the risk of exorbitant awards against the defendant. There are plenty of other benefits, but I think they accrue mostly to the benefit of the party writing the contract. (Not that this is much different from the way contracts were written before this trend.)
I've generally found that people on the business side of stuff respect me for my competence in an area where they are weak. The only time I can think of that this wasn't so was in my first tech job -- an on-site contracted help desk job -- twenty-some years ago. The non-IT staff had had several years of poor support from the previous contractor, and they expected more of the same when I started. I learned that actually solving people's problems and treating them with respect goes a long way. Even the most flaming, arrogant ***hole in the organization respected me after a year or so, and this was the same guy who cussed me out on the phone in my first week. The thing is to not get wrapped up in office politics. Everyone brings some value to the organization, or he wouldn't be there. Someone found enough merit in each staff member to offer the job.
I think the bottom line is that we need to deliver two things:
As someone else already pointed out, Michael Reiss is advocating discussion of creationism in class, not teaching it as fact. You can't show the emperor has no clothes unless you can get him out in public view. The same goes for other crackpot hypotheses. I am pretty sure that my kid's Holocaust class at religious school this year will include discussion of Holocaust denial, so that she and her classmates will know how to debunk the people who say it didn't happen.
I don't believe TFA makes a case that superstition is an evolutionary advantage; rather, it seems to support the idea that pattern recognition is an evolutionary advantage -- and that is not limited to the human species.
For example, our late cat noticed that sometimes we opened the refrigerator, then took out a bowl, and presented him with said bowl containing a blob of tasty ground meat. He was therefore frequently distressed when I would open the freezer, take out a bowl, and then go sit on the couch to eat ice cream instead of giving him a bowl of cat food. I don't think that his expectation that food would follow the opening of the refrigerator door could be superstition, it was simple recognition that sometimes these actions resulted in something he wanted.
Superstition is clearly something unique to our species, and the fact that it can be beneficial in some circumstances and not so in others doesn't mean it's a good thing or a bad thing. The final judgment on that will be if and when superstition is what finally kills off the species, and that judgment will be up to the rats and cockroaches.
. . . don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
Assert a highly restrictive copyright on the content and then employ the most sophisticated DRM you can on it. Within days, perhaps hours, it will be all over the Net, especially if you enlist the aid of the MPAA to protect it.
Wrong sun god. Ra was Egyptian. Apollo was the Roman sun god. The Roman emperor Constantine mandated the observance of dies solis (Sun's day) in 321 C.E. after he converted to Christianity. (Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire )
I inferred it from the fact that New York is demanding that retailers with no physical presence in the state of New York collect New York sales taxes. If they have a use tax, though, then I'd say they have dealt with the problem as effectively as they can, other than doing border searches of U.S. mail and common carriers' vehicles. Personally, I'm completely unsympathetic to what they're trying to do; it flies in the face of the Constitution.
Anyway, if I had mod points, I'd give you "informative".
Virginia (the Old Dominion, a bastion of conservatism) has a use tax. It's surprising to me that New York, which has a higher tax bite doesn't. Of course, the problem with use taxes comes in collecting them, and that's why most states collect sales tax from the seller.
No. There've been 50 years of that. But this article makes me feel old, since I played with Legos from my earliest memory until well after all my peers stopped playing with them, and still I don't remember the minifigs. (Don't get me started on the robot things.)
Okay, to all the people who are arguing with you, I respectfully implore: Please read the "fine" decision. The courts have said that border searches don't require reasonable grounds for suspicion because they are "different" than searches within the U.S.
Now, if this upsets you and you live in the U.S., complain to Congress. It'll take you maybe fifteen minutes to bang out a letter to your congressman/woman and your two senators explaining that you think DHS is going too far. I have already done so, and I got back nice, polite letters explaining that there's a war on terror going on, etc., etc. They're not going to listen to me and the handful of people from EFF and the ACLU. But if their email boxes are swamped with complaints from Slashdotters (and their friends and families), maybe Congress will do something. Otherwise, resign yourself to the possibility that your electronic toys may be impounded and scrutinized at the border.
These are just two incidents from S.C., where I have roots and take notice of such things. In both cases, the most damning evidence against the police is from their own in-car cameras. I'm sure S.C. hasn't cornered the market on thuggish cops.
I think that as a general rule of thumb, if you are filming a police or other law enforcement action and you think the people doing the enforcing may be breaking the law, you don't want to advertise the fact, lest their attention be diverted to you, with potential consequences including loss of the evidence you are collecting. When I was just starting off on my own, my dad (a newspaper man) dispensed this piece of advice: "If you are stopped by a policeman for any reason, say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir'. Let him be the big man, because he has the badge and the gun, and it will be his word against yours." Basically, if you think there is something that needs to be redressed, write the facts down (badge number, name, etc.) and take it up with the supervisors later, in plain light of day. Being a smart aleck isn't the way to go.
Don't worry. There are others. Rest assured that regardless of which party is in control of the budget, there will be pork.
I remember two rules from the small bit of gun safety I was taught as a kid. Rule one was you don't point a gun at anything/anyone you don't intend to kill. I've been told that cops are trained to shoot to kill, not to wound. Mark my words: the people who stand to benefit most from this variable-speed bullet stuff are the attorneys.
Of course, since my wife and I have cell phones on the same system, we can log into our own voice mail and send messages, and now, of course, there's texting.
It's better that chickens don't make great pets, because they're tasty, and it's hard to eat a pet.
That's good. I was thinking Mr. Yuck, but a skull-and-crossbones has much wider recognition.
I read several of your posts and several of the responses from people, and I wanted you to know I am with you to a point -- and I am not a Marine. Kids need limits, and we set them, too. Our daughter is beginning to understand that the limits are not there to imprison her but to keep her safe, and we are ever so slowly expanding them. It's a fine line. At 12, she knows that we can read her email but promise not to unless something comes up involving her safety. We tell her why we have set the limits, and we are willing to discuss moving them from time to time. It's paying off.
Cars scare the hell out of me. I think that giving a teenager a car is like giving him/her a grenade with a loose pin. I knew several kids of my generation who were given cars for their own personal use, and they ended up dead. From what I read in the papers, teenagers now do the same dumb things as we did 30-some years ago, and it seems to me like the best thing the parents can do is keep the keys on a short leash. Our kid won't get a car until she can buy one, the same as was the case for me.
I don't think we're going to need the GPS tracking for the car; if I have any question about whether I can trust my daughter to borrow the car, she's not getting it. The same techniques and tools that my parents had available to them still exist and still work well: odometer readings, bottle caps in the car, letters bearing an official return address, grades, and my gut feeling about the kids my daughter chooses to hang out with. No, the techniques aren't fool-proof, but life offers but two guarantees: death and taxes.
The GPS tracking devices may be a good thing for business, and they may be really cool technology, but this is one I don't think I need.