The only possible ex post facto situation would be if you already were a felon and a legal gun owner, and then they passed the law saying "no felons can own guns."
That's exactly what they did. They took away the right to own guns from people who were sentenced prior to the creation of the law, thereby increasing the punishment meted out to them. See #3 of the ex post facto definition. I'll emphasize some of the verbiage:
3: Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.
Got that now? Every law. That would include "licensing" laws, criminal laws, and municipal laws. Every law, irrelevant of venue, intent, or scope. The question is, did it increase the punishment? The answer, clearly and unequivocally, is yes. The "felons may not own weapons" law increases the punishment for all felonies, in other words such a law is annexed to all crimes which are felonies; if they apply it to felons who were convicted prior to the implementation of that law — and they did exactly that, and that is what I was referring to, and it is also exactly what I said — they increase the punishment on those people ex post facto. There is no way around this.
As for my argument, it survived your post just fine. Better luck next time.
Big Brother might be watching. But there are a lot more of us, and we have a lot more eyes. As long as we can watch back, I'm not at all afraid of big brother.
I think a little time incarcerated would take care of your error here. You have every reason to be afraid of big brother. The ability to harm you extensively is alive and well. Worse, so is the will.
Tank crews have to come out sometime. When they do, a relatively simple fews rounds from a rifle will end the tank threat immediately. It takes a trained crew to operate a tank; kill the crews, and you don't need to kill the tank. Of course there are ways to deal with tanks themselves as well; bridges can fall out from under them, for instance, tunnels can collapse on them, barrels can have cement poured down them, mustard gas (and other creative kitchen concoctions) can be lofted into the nightly encampment, etc. Tanks - frankly - are most useful against other tanks. Not tens or hundreds of millions of really pissed off individuals.
Both sides - the people saying "the army won't fight" and the people saying "the army will dominate" are completely wrong. It'd be a bloody, long-term and complicated mess. Don't go there. Get laws enacted that make it a punishable crime to make an unconstitutional law, invalidate the current crop of unconstitutional laws, bring an understanding of personal liberty back to the country, stop supporting expeditionary wars of aggression, and teach your children history for crying out loud. The most ridiculous remarks I see here are most often born of ignorance of history.
It would be hard for the military to pacify that many of their own people. The political decision to destroy our own cities wouldn't go over particurlary well.
In response, I would simply call your attention to the organized and obedient shooting of the students at Kent State by national guard troops, as well as the police action against the Chicago students. Note the organized collection of firearms from New Orleans residents, rendering them less able to defend their property. All these actions went just fine from the point of view of the government.
Subsequently, I would simply observe that military personnel are trained to obey, first, foremost, and right bloody now. Regular military even more so than the guard. Technically, they're not required to obey an illegal order, but practically speaking, that is no way to remain out of the brig, waiting for a trial (that may never come, for that matter.)
No doubt it would cause a great deal of distress, but when troops perceive a group of people as a threat, and they're told they are permitted to fire on them, I suspect they'll do it without much fiddling about, especially if said group is firing on them.
There's another factor, too. No doubt the government would find it expedient to take troops from New York, for instance, and deploy them in Tennessee. No brothers firing on brothers going on in that case. These people talk different, live different, and shoot back; are you thinking that because the reason to be there is immoral or unethical, they won't do what they're told? If that's the case, how do you explain Iraq?
Orwell wrote "The purpose of power, is power." I believe he had his finger right on the button. A soldier with a weapon is a power-wielding individual. Give them the opportunity to do so, and I think they'll take it, by and large. There will be some exceptions, certainly; but I sure wouldn't walk up to a military post set up on main street with the assumption that no one would fire on me just because I am (probably) a fellow citizen.
If you're a criminal stupid enough to make your activities known in a public, obvious way, then I say the FBI should have at 'em.
And if you're a female stupid enough to wear a skirt, guys should be able to look right up it, yes? Because it is easy? Even if the female in question has something tucked up there she'd rather guys not see? Wait, you think she has some kind of right to privacy? Why? What if she's got some shoplifted stuff in there? Doesn't that give us the right to look up everybody's skirt?
Invasion of privacy is the crossing of socially defined boundaries, not just hardened boundaries like those that incorporate walls, encryption, or locks. Those hardening implementations are just the same boundary, with less trust. In other words, if I don't encrypt my hard drive, I'm not inviting you onto it. The boundary is still there. If I do encrypt the hard drive, I'm still not inviting you onto it, but I've taken the step that if you are such an ass-choad that you go there anyway, I've made it more difficult. This is because some people have made it somewhat prudent to drop the trust thing that goes along with social boundaries.
In some small towns, people don't find it necessary to lock doors - cars, houses - because they know that their neighbors won't cross the social boundary. In LA, on the other hand, they know the neighbors will cross it, and so trust is sundered, and locks go in and are used. This is not a good thing and robbery of an unlocked home is not a consequence of stupidity on the part of the homeowner, it is a consequence of social retardation on the part of the thief.
When you say it is OK for the feds to jump onto people's information that they in no way intended to share with anyone, you are explicitly sanctioning the lack of a social boundary that protects those things you do not intend to share. You might as well lie down in the gutter right now and commence staring up the ladies skirts. After all, if they didn't want you to look, they'd have worn pants, right?
Privacy, liberty, honor, grace - look into all these things. They actually have good, solid reasons to exist, and it is a terrible thing when the government - or anyone else - erodes them. When it is done as a matter of course, it is not only terrible, it is despicable.
First, the idea of separate menu sections or menus for different families of tools is only one way to look at it. While first thought says that it should be more efficient, in reality I don't think it would pan out.
Actually, it works quite well.
My area toolbox contains 14 area selection tools: freehand, polygon, i-shapes (preformed, like stars; bears; triangles; continent outlines, etc), rect, rounded rect, ellipse, polyarc, bezier, bspline, numeric rect, wand, text, entire image, redo and 13 modifiers and controls: Area re-edit (for pre-select mode), color key, splatter, hold square, hold to image aspect, hold to aspect of clipping being placed, invert (complement), intersection (select only where current selection overlays previous selection), union (select where either of previous and current selection lie), exclude (select anywhere previous and current selection are not), outline only (rather than area - this implements line drawing and so forth), open selections (for instance, freehand doesn't auto-close if this is on), and anti-alias. Right clicking brings up various things like wand methods [RGB, HSL, Tolerance, Resample, Soft, 8-way] Keying modes [RGB, Hue, Color Space, Steepness, Height, Alpha] rect roundness, selection of preset shapes, fonts, splatter parameters [randomness, sizing, edge behavior, aspect], custom aspect controls for the (nominal) 1:1 setting, and finally the feathering dialog. All area selections can be set for [a] select and do nothing (this is how Photoshop works) or [b] select and trigger operation ("immediate" mode - this is the mode I usually prefer, I can work faster.)
This is just the area toolbox functionality. Most everything related to areas is accessible from this one place, although there are a few controls up in the menu system: corner/center selection modes and a special blending toolkit that uses a computed centroid of the area selection and distance from the edge(s) to create selection softness using three sliders that give you the base and apex width of a graph, as well as its height from 0 to 100%.
Adding to all this is right-button functionality over the image. Pressing the right mouse button while sizing a selection releases the initial anchor and lets you re-position the selection live; releasing it lets you go back to sizing. This is particularly handy in my preferred editing mode, "immediate." Certain selection modes - like text - offer a lot more, like the ability to skew, rotate, and size the text selection prior to final placement using the right mouse button.
My effects toolbox contains whatever I've found to be useful for the task at hand. For instance, when I'm editing images (often, it's a hobby) it contains fill, sample (eyedropper), balance, brightness, contrast, gamma, colorize, sharpen, Gaussian blur, horizontal feature removal, vertical feature removal, radial feature removal, clip, scale by percent, scale by pixel, monochrome, re-texture, alpha, flip, rotate(90 increments), free rotate, and brush, as well as the scripting and plugins tools (these can incorporate a wealth of functionality, of course, but I usually have a blue/green-screen de-fringing plugin and just pick (or write) scripts as I need them.) Right clicking the icon gets you the operation dialog, if it isn't already open. You can drag tools in and out of the box, re-arrange them in any order, change the X:Y arrangement of the box, save it as a named tool caddy, or turn it off and just use the usual "go find it" methods all the time. A few things - like levels, clone, scale to current window size, assign image to role [brush, secondary], print, copy to clipboard, insert to filmstrip and "layerize" are in each image's context menu, and so don't need to be in the op caddy.
During a photo editing session, I can get at anything either from the operations tool bar or from the operations menu (both offer identical cascading sets of organized operations, just two different ways to get at them.
GIMP's text tools are rudimentary compared to Photoshop's.
Is there a rendering / quality problem? Or are you talking about editable placement, that sort of thing?
I tend to put text on layers; you can do more with a layer than you can with anything else, so I'm not looking for anything but good fonts from the program's font engine.
No, he really doesn't. He doesn't even understand it. For instance, he says "If you shove me, you are not leaving me alone. You may be harming me, but it is not a problem of privacy." It is a problem of privacy; one person's right to shove another is strictly limited by the idea of permission, that is, the existence of an inherent boundary, and the permission - or lack thereof - to cross that boundary. This is the same concept as putting a letter in an envelope. There is an inherent boundary there, and you do not have permission to cross it. These boundaries, existing in many social, legal, financial and physical circumstances, are all direct manifestations of privacy. The constitution brings the concept to the table in unflinching fashion: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." There it is again. Boundaries. Personal, property, records, possessions. Privacy is a facet of liberty; the real problem here is that as far as the government concerned, liberty is just a quaint old word and the constitution an annoyance at most.
It's a somewhat higher hurdle to jump, in that it requires a constitutional amendment to remove the prohibition against ex post facto laws
No such hurdle exists. The government makes ex post facto laws, and the supreme court approves them when it gets to see them, regardless of the prohibitions of the constitution. Two examples come readily to mind. One is the prohibition on felons from owning firearms, though the law did not exist at the time of the felon's sentencing and the judge did not declare that a prohibition of owning firearms was a specific part of the punishment to be meted out. I know of no government excuse for this. The other is the registering of "sexual offenders" (Pee on a bush lately? Date someone a year too young on the wrong side of an age line?) where again, the registration was not ordered by a judge and no such law existed at the time, but the law applies retroactively to offenders, thereby increasing the punishment applied by the government. There is an excuse for this one, the argument is that "registration is not punishment, it is just a government function, and therefore this is not ex post facto." The argument is clearly specious, but that doesn't stop them from employing it. See how you feel if you imagine they put your name on such a list. That'll tell you if it is punishment, or just a triviality like listing you as a property owner.
Similarly, the inversion of the commerce clause has been used to create an excuse for the feds to (for example) use the legal system to attack users, growers and vendors of medical marijuana in California. The argument is that the pot, grown in California, distributed in California, used in California, "could" (cough) have been interstate commerce, and so the feds declare they have jurisdiction. The constitution clearly says they have jurisdiction in interstate commerce, not intrastate commerce, and again, we see the government doing anything it wants, regardless of what the constitution says.
I could go on for quite a while, pointing out broad and obvious constitutional violations in the areas of free speech, gun ownership, religion, warrants, article 10 and 14 violations... the point is, though, that the government is completely out of hand and what the constitution says they can or cannot do has long been either a non-issue or one that will crawl through the courts and then ruled into oblivion as have the exd post facto issues.
The constitution offers the means to make changes; but this is not convenient enough, and so we are faced on all sides with unconstitutional law, and told that it'll all be worked out in court if necessary, and in the meantime, comply or face the music.
For your reference: Ex post facto law as the term applies to the constitution, Calder v Bull (3 US 386 [1798]), in the opinion of Justice Chase:
1: Every law that makes an action done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action. 2: Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed. 3: Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed. 4: Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offense, in order to convict the offender.
Would you care to point out what you feel its actual technical, rather than aesthetic, shortcomings are so I can familiarize myself better with its limits?
Gimp is often called to task as compared to Photoshop for:
Being 8 bit only
No CMYK editing
No layer styles
UI - things are in different places, use different keystrokes
Antialiasing quality problems (there's even a post here today about that)
Platform (no current OSX native version, though there may be a X version somewhere)
The old X/Mac version has some issues with which window is active that are inconvenient
Aside from those issues — which frankly don't mean much to non-pro users with the exception of anti-aliasing (they should really fix that) and layer styles (very, very convenient) — Gimp is extraordinarily capable and certainly worth the time to learn. Personally, I have occasion to use Photoshop, Gimp, PSP, and some others most workdays; I don't have any trouble at all with functionality being over here in one program and it being over there in another. But I'm not your average user; graphics are my thing on every level from programming to amusement to my job. Frankly, the people who cry "I'm a professional" and are manifestly unable to learn a new UI... I have a lot of trouble taking them seriously. I listen to them because that's my job, and I craft solutions to problems as they describe them (such as giving them a UI that acts like the UI they are used to), but I have not found any need for those solutions myself.
See, professionals don't want just "a better pile of poo" to do their imaging work. They (and I, too) want something that IS EASY TO HANDLE. Because in graphical applications, form is function. And this is something that many programmers (at least many of those that I've discussed with) simply fail to understand.
Ok, some questions, then. What if an interface offered approaches more consistent than Photoshop's or GIMP's? For instance, in the main toolbox, both Photoshop and GIMP mix area selection tools (eg, rect, ellipse) with tools that actually modify the image using areas (eg, smudge, fill.) Because of this, the only way to know what a tool in the tool box will do is to become familiar with it; the location (in the toolbox) doesn't define the type of functionality. What if the area selection tools were in one toolbox, and tools that modified the image were able to be placed in another - perhaps just the ones you think you'll need today? In terms of usability, this type of approach associates physical location with function; this *should*, theoretically, enhance usability.
The same thing applies to layers. Photoshop's interface treats layers like they were not images, rather, as if they were only components of images. But essentially, they are images, as demonstrated by the ability to select one and edit it as if it was the image. What if a four-layer image allowed you to see, and edit, all four layers at once, just as if they were normal images, while changes to the sum of all the layers, let's call that the "master" image, are visible in yet another window? Wouldn't that be more consistent than treating a layer as if it were something other than an image? It provides direct, and simultaneous, access to everything at once (many layers begin to bring window management into the equation, but those skills are even more basic than anything inside an image editor.)
Before you answer, I would like to point out to you how many complaints that couch themselves as usability complaints refer to an application not working "like" Photoshop, and how often the phrase "industry standard" is brought up; it seems to me that when complaints of this type are voiced, they refer to learning the person has already done, and they want *compliance*, because they already have (a set of) muscle memory that they work with. They actually don't want better or easier, because better and easier is different, and different will impede their progress while they learn (if they are even willing to learn!)
I make decisions about these precise things as part of my job; I'd be very interested in specific opinions from anyone on these issues.
If you had a barcode tattooed on your wrist or even tell them your name and number, this would work just as well.
The optimum locations for physically carried ID were worked out some time ago. Either the forehead (see The NT's "Revelations" section, Hindu "caste" marks, etc), or the left chest (see Germany, ca. 1940's, and the "ID" the Jews had to carry.)
However, the RealID legislation has murky verbiage that allows for unspecified technology to be used to carry the ID electronically. Odds strongly favor this being RFID or something similar. So no need for it to be on your body, per se; it could be in your body just as easily as it could be on it, or on a card or similar external carrier. And of course, this negates the need to "present" your ID; it'll be read when you're within X distance of any client that wants to know anything in particular about you.
Why not simply forget forcing the states into issuing "approved" IDs and just require a passport for anyone who wants to fly between states?
Right to travel:
In U.S. v Guest 383 U.S. 745 (1966): "It is a right that has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized." Shapiro v Thompson 394 U.S. 618 (1969), Justice Stewart: "it is a right broadly assertable(sic) against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association,... it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all."(*) The Articles of Confederation defined a right to travel; It may be that the right was presumed to be inherent; if so, the authors of the constitution could also have thought it redundant to make it explicit.
(*) Despite this assertion, the constitution says very little about the right to travel, other than to ensure that federal legislators have a right to go legislate as per article 1, section 6.
Once the government starts saying "You can travel only if you meet the following conditions" (passport, ID, money in pocket, good reputation, etc.), they have set up a coercive situation where equality has been sundered. This is one of the key arguments against the underlying premise of RealID, as well as the no-fly list and similar non-judicial restrictions on travel and modes of travel. What you propose, the limitation of travel from state to state requiring a passport (in your concept, just by plane, but generally in any case), is a severe limitation upon the ability to travel.
And I would sadly note that as recently as just a few decades ago, the very idea was unthinkable; it is even encoded into the art of the day. In Tom Clancy's "Hunt for Red October", the first officer, bent upon defecting to the US, asks the captain if one could travel "state to state" without papers in the US; the captain assures him that is the case, and the first officer, a product of the Soviet government's implementation of just such restrictions, reacts in pleased wonder.
It seems that almost any war showing conditions in Europe will offer a tension-laced scene where someone's papers are demanded — people used to be quick to recognize this as an abuse of power wielded for the sake of establishing and maintaining that power, and for no other reason. Orwell wrote (in 1984): "The purpose of power... is power" — he was cautionary.
Now we see travel limitations proposed sincerely in the previous post, as if this actually was a good idea. I find this more than a little depressing, and frightening.
You should get the AMD version; it has on-board support for pontoons. Same thing, really, just a different trademark. They call the prow of the vehicle "floating point technology" for the way it cuts through the water. They're still working on the wet string problem, though, so I'd wait for the first update before getting involved.
That's all fine, but you have to understand what happened here. They didn't say that the action (wiretapping) was legal; they just said - and I think, correctly - that the complaining party couldn't show that it had been directly affected, and so they had no standing to sue. Lawsuits require that you show that harm has been done to you - the party with the objection - in order to proceed. Without standing, this was stopped. Lawsuit is probably the wrong remedy for this issue unless the party objecting knows they have been tapped; the right remedy is impeachment, because what we have here is a known, admitted crime committed by a sitting, and still-sitting, president, and no knowledge, at least that I am aware of, as to who in particular was harmed.
What I was saying is that the problem exists, a remedy is encoded into the constitution to deal with such problems, but the body entrusted with meting out that remedy has not acted, and that is the real problem, not the issue of standing being required to sue. I'm not much in favor of suits in the first place, I'd *really* object to suits without standing. That'd mean if you cheated your business partner, I could sue you, even though I'm not your business partner. That's just making a bad thing worse.
This really isn't anything to do with Bush, though it is his actions we are concerned with; it is a shortcoming in the legal system, a loophole that arises because of the way lawsuits are qualified. The president has violated his oath to uphold the constitution; via US telecomm laws, wiretapping is linked inextricably to fourth amendment citizen immunity to unreasonable search; the president swears to uphold and defend the constitution, and he has not doe so, in fact a strong case can be made that he has directly violated it. There is a remedy for this. Recourse is via the congress, who should impeach and convict him for this violation of the presidential oath, a "high crime" if there ever was one.
The problem that we actually face is a congress that has absolutely no spine and is so corrupt itself that they find it perfectly natural to violate the constitution. After all, they have done it many times by producing blatantly unconstitutional laws. Examples abound: ex post facto gun laws, suppression of speech in public areas (most recently, the ruling on that kid's Jesus / Bong banner), the witless inversion of the commerce clause, violation of the right to keep and bear arms and so on.
We can't fix any of this because of the entrenched two party system, and because the legislators themselves are corrupt (with the exception of one or two.)
I have a better idea: you keep your fascist desires in YOUR bedroom, not on the internet.
The problem isn't that this person is spewing their small-mindedness on the Internet; the problem is that they, or a virtual doppelgänger, are spewing it in congress, parliament and so forth. Likewise, there's no need to keep such people off the Internet, that's just a free speech issue. The problem is the morons who are trying to enforce their ideas of what is OK between two consenting adults on people via the law. Opinion is irrelevant. Law is not. Turn your wrath towards your politicians. Really; infighting here is pointless.
Again, I'm not talking about people having sex in a different position, not even BDSM between consenting adults, but people who are deranged enough to fantasize about murder. I don't want _those_ treated like yet another minority, or as, really, just a small deviation from missionary position, I want those in a freakin' mental hospital where they can't actually enact that fantasy.
Yes... yes. I agree completely. But remember, we do have to impeach the man first.
If time isn't passing, nothing is changing, and if nothing is changing, no big (or small or anywhere in between) bang can occur. Pressure cannot increase, decrease, accrue, or distribute. Also, if nothing is changing, time can't begin, either, because there is no time, and no change from no time is still no time and no change. You can't apply a stimulus in any venue whatsoever in no time; there can be no response to no stimulus.
In other words, trying to put this idea into commonsense concepts isn't going to work no matter how hard one tries. Obviously, something happened, and we don't have any idea what it was. This whole "there was no time and 'then' time began" however — is, was, and will forever be nonsense from word one. It isn't any better than religion. It might be worse.
Mods need to be more careful on this subject; the poster is espousing a well known side of this issue. It is ridiculous and counter-productive to mod such posts as "flamebait" as we see here; they need to be in the discussion, both so that they are not censored by dimwits, and so that people with opposing views may address them as they see fit in discussion.
Slashdot luminaries have unlimited mod points and brag about it - how about you get after using them in situations like this, where some clown has taken a moderation-shit on the discussion?
While the metamod system may (though I have not seen much evidence of this) address the issue of whacking the moderator for bad modding, it does not revive the stifled discussion or remove the wrong done to the poster. For this reason, I suggest these changes.
I think you may have misunderstood me. I have no problem with Trolltech's pricing. You found a niche, and you're filling it, and more power to you.
What I have an issue with is linux itself not having a standard GUI layer, as does OSX and windows, so that applications may be written by anyone from the smallest to the largest without concern for licensing, funding, or availability by platform. This is something for the linux core developers to address.
That still leaves room for Qt; all you have to do is outperform the OS solution, and/or offer feature sets (like cross-platform compatibility, better, and/or more interesting widgets, ease of use for developers, interface builders... I'm sure you know this list a lot better than I do) and market your advantages, whatever they are, effectively. Like any other business. Nothing wrong with competition; it makes things better.
I liken it to a situation as if linux had no networking, and the only ways to add networking either (a) cost money, (b) required adherence to the open source philosophy a'la the GPL and LGPL, or (c) excluded commercial use. That'd really put an arrow in the heart of linux being used as a server platform. But that's not the case, and linux is either the best, or one of the best, server platforms out there.
However, this is precisely the situation that is extant with regard to GUI, and linux is far, far behind when it comes to the number of GUI-centric applications. Without pointing at any specific application, I can think of some that are way, way below the top performers in the field that linux users repeatedly hail as "great" and "good enough" to not require the top performers to pay attention... when the fact is, if those applications arrived on the platform it would be a great day for everyone, except perhaps the developers of the sub-standard apps already here. I think that the two facts - no standard GUI layer and almost no major commercial GUI apps - are inextricably related, and something that, should the lack be addressed, have the potential to cause a surge of applications to arrive on the machine.
Many of the tools I think would arrive would be closed, commercial applications. This would likely aggravate some people. It would also cause others to say "I think we can use this platform." None of which poses an actual problem for linux folks, unless they consider the commercial people competition. Me, I think competition is a good thing, so I'm rather deaf to those complaints.
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That's exactly what they did. They took away the right to own guns from people who were sentenced prior to the creation of the law, thereby increasing the punishment meted out to them. See #3 of the ex post facto definition. I'll emphasize some of the verbiage:
3: Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.
Got that now? Every law. That would include "licensing" laws, criminal laws, and municipal laws. Every law, irrelevant of venue, intent, or scope. The question is, did it increase the punishment? The answer, clearly and unequivocally, is yes. The "felons may not own weapons" law increases the punishment for all felonies, in other words such a law is annexed to all crimes which are felonies; if they apply it to felons who were convicted prior to the implementation of that law — and they did exactly that, and that is what I was referring to, and it is also exactly what I said — they increase the punishment on those people ex post facto. There is no way around this.
As for my argument, it survived your post just fine. Better luck next time.
Now... there is a nasty and inconvenience confluence of facts for the IRS if I ever saw one.
I think a little time incarcerated would take care of your error here. You have every reason to be afraid of big brother. The ability to harm you extensively is alive and well. Worse, so is the will.
Tank crews have to come out sometime. When they do, a relatively simple fews rounds from a rifle will end the tank threat immediately. It takes a trained crew to operate a tank; kill the crews, and you don't need to kill the tank. Of course there are ways to deal with tanks themselves as well; bridges can fall out from under them, for instance, tunnels can collapse on them, barrels can have cement poured down them, mustard gas (and other creative kitchen concoctions) can be lofted into the nightly encampment, etc. Tanks - frankly - are most useful against other tanks. Not tens or hundreds of millions of really pissed off individuals.
Both sides - the people saying "the army won't fight" and the people saying "the army will dominate" are completely wrong. It'd be a bloody, long-term and complicated mess. Don't go there. Get laws enacted that make it a punishable crime to make an unconstitutional law, invalidate the current crop of unconstitutional laws, bring an understanding of personal liberty back to the country, stop supporting expeditionary wars of aggression, and teach your children history for crying out loud. The most ridiculous remarks I see here are most often born of ignorance of history.
In response, I would simply call your attention to the organized and obedient shooting of the students at Kent State by national guard troops, as well as the police action against the Chicago students. Note the organized collection of firearms from New Orleans residents, rendering them less able to defend their property. All these actions went just fine from the point of view of the government.
Subsequently, I would simply observe that military personnel are trained to obey, first, foremost, and right bloody now. Regular military even more so than the guard. Technically, they're not required to obey an illegal order, but practically speaking, that is no way to remain out of the brig, waiting for a trial (that may never come, for that matter.)
No doubt it would cause a great deal of distress, but when troops perceive a group of people as a threat, and they're told they are permitted to fire on them, I suspect they'll do it without much fiddling about, especially if said group is firing on them.
There's another factor, too. No doubt the government would find it expedient to take troops from New York, for instance, and deploy them in Tennessee. No brothers firing on brothers going on in that case. These people talk different, live different, and shoot back; are you thinking that because the reason to be there is immoral or unethical, they won't do what they're told? If that's the case, how do you explain Iraq?
Orwell wrote "The purpose of power, is power." I believe he had his finger right on the button. A soldier with a weapon is a power-wielding individual. Give them the opportunity to do so, and I think they'll take it, by and large. There will be some exceptions, certainly; but I sure wouldn't walk up to a military post set up on main street with the assumption that no one would fire on me just because I am (probably) a fellow citizen.
And if you're a female stupid enough to wear a skirt, guys should be able to look right up it, yes? Because it is easy? Even if the female in question has something tucked up there she'd rather guys not see? Wait, you think she has some kind of right to privacy? Why? What if she's got some shoplifted stuff in there? Doesn't that give us the right to look up everybody's skirt?
Invasion of privacy is the crossing of socially defined boundaries, not just hardened boundaries like those that incorporate walls, encryption, or locks. Those hardening implementations are just the same boundary, with less trust. In other words, if I don't encrypt my hard drive, I'm not inviting you onto it. The boundary is still there. If I do encrypt the hard drive, I'm still not inviting you onto it, but I've taken the step that if you are such an ass-choad that you go there anyway, I've made it more difficult. This is because some people have made it somewhat prudent to drop the trust thing that goes along with social boundaries.
In some small towns, people don't find it necessary to lock doors - cars, houses - because they know that their neighbors won't cross the social boundary. In LA, on the other hand, they know the neighbors will cross it, and so trust is sundered, and locks go in and are used. This is not a good thing and robbery of an unlocked home is not a consequence of stupidity on the part of the homeowner, it is a consequence of social retardation on the part of the thief.
When you say it is OK for the feds to jump onto people's information that they in no way intended to share with anyone, you are explicitly sanctioning the lack of a social boundary that protects those things you do not intend to share. You might as well lie down in the gutter right now and commence staring up the ladies skirts. After all, if they didn't want you to look, they'd have worn pants, right?
Privacy, liberty, honor, grace - look into all these things. They actually have good, solid reasons to exist, and it is a terrible thing when the government - or anyone else - erodes them. When it is done as a matter of course, it is not only terrible, it is despicable.
"The purpose of power, is power." -- Geo. Orwell, "1984".
Actually, it works quite well.
My area toolbox contains 14 area selection tools: freehand, polygon, i-shapes (preformed, like stars; bears; triangles; continent outlines, etc), rect, rounded rect, ellipse, polyarc, bezier, bspline, numeric rect, wand, text, entire image, redo and 13 modifiers and controls: Area re-edit (for pre-select mode), color key, splatter, hold square, hold to image aspect, hold to aspect of clipping being placed, invert (complement), intersection (select only where current selection overlays previous selection), union (select where either of previous and current selection lie), exclude (select anywhere previous and current selection are not), outline only (rather than area - this implements line drawing and so forth), open selections (for instance, freehand doesn't auto-close if this is on), and anti-alias. Right clicking brings up various things like wand methods [RGB, HSL, Tolerance, Resample, Soft, 8-way] Keying modes [RGB, Hue, Color Space, Steepness, Height, Alpha] rect roundness, selection of preset shapes, fonts, splatter parameters [randomness, sizing, edge behavior, aspect], custom aspect controls for the (nominal) 1:1 setting, and finally the feathering dialog. All area selections can be set for [a] select and do nothing (this is how Photoshop works) or [b] select and trigger operation ("immediate" mode - this is the mode I usually prefer, I can work faster.)
This is just the area toolbox functionality. Most everything related to areas is accessible from this one place, although there are a few controls up in the menu system: corner/center selection modes and a special blending toolkit that uses a computed centroid of the area selection and distance from the edge(s) to create selection softness using three sliders that give you the base and apex width of a graph, as well as its height from 0 to 100%.
Adding to all this is right-button functionality over the image. Pressing the right mouse button while sizing a selection releases the initial anchor and lets you re-position the selection live; releasing it lets you go back to sizing. This is particularly handy in my preferred editing mode, "immediate." Certain selection modes - like text - offer a lot more, like the ability to skew, rotate, and size the text selection prior to final placement using the right mouse button.
My effects toolbox contains whatever I've found to be useful for the task at hand. For instance, when I'm editing images (often, it's a hobby) it contains fill, sample (eyedropper), balance, brightness, contrast, gamma, colorize, sharpen, Gaussian blur, horizontal feature removal, vertical feature removal, radial feature removal, clip, scale by percent, scale by pixel, monochrome, re-texture, alpha, flip, rotate(90 increments), free rotate, and brush, as well as the scripting and plugins tools (these can incorporate a wealth of functionality, of course, but I usually have a blue/green-screen de-fringing plugin and just pick (or write) scripts as I need them.) Right clicking the icon gets you the operation dialog, if it isn't already open. You can drag tools in and out of the box, re-arrange them in any order, change the X:Y arrangement of the box, save it as a named tool caddy, or turn it off and just use the usual "go find it" methods all the time. A few things - like levels, clone, scale to current window size, assign image to role [brush, secondary], print, copy to clipboard, insert to filmstrip and "layerize" are in each image's context menu, and so don't need to be in the op caddy.
During a photo editing session, I can get at anything either from the operations tool bar or from the operations menu (both offer identical cascading sets of organized operations, just two different ways to get at them.
Is there a rendering / quality problem? Or are you talking about editable placement, that sort of thing?
I tend to put text on layers; you can do more with a layer than you can with anything else, so I'm not looking for anything but good fonts from the program's font engine.
No, he really doesn't. He doesn't even understand it. For instance, he says "If you shove me, you are not leaving me alone. You may be harming me, but it is not a problem of privacy." It is a problem of privacy; one person's right to shove another is strictly limited by the idea of permission, that is, the existence of an inherent boundary, and the permission - or lack thereof - to cross that boundary. This is the same concept as putting a letter in an envelope. There is an inherent boundary there, and you do not have permission to cross it. These boundaries, existing in many social, legal, financial and physical circumstances, are all direct manifestations of privacy. The constitution brings the concept to the table in unflinching fashion: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." There it is again. Boundaries. Personal, property, records, possessions. Privacy is a facet of liberty; the real problem here is that as far as the government concerned, liberty is just a quaint old word and the constitution an annoyance at most.
No such hurdle exists. The government makes ex post facto laws, and the supreme court approves them when it gets to see them, regardless of the prohibitions of the constitution. Two examples come readily to mind. One is the prohibition on felons from owning firearms, though the law did not exist at the time of the felon's sentencing and the judge did not declare that a prohibition of owning firearms was a specific part of the punishment to be meted out. I know of no government excuse for this. The other is the registering of "sexual offenders" (Pee on a bush lately? Date someone a year too young on the wrong side of an age line?) where again, the registration was not ordered by a judge and no such law existed at the time, but the law applies retroactively to offenders, thereby increasing the punishment applied by the government. There is an excuse for this one, the argument is that "registration is not punishment, it is just a government function, and therefore this is not ex post facto." The argument is clearly specious, but that doesn't stop them from employing it. See how you feel if you imagine they put your name on such a list. That'll tell you if it is punishment, or just a triviality like listing you as a property owner.
Similarly, the inversion of the commerce clause has been used to create an excuse for the feds to (for example) use the legal system to attack users, growers and vendors of medical marijuana in California. The argument is that the pot, grown in California, distributed in California, used in California, "could" (cough) have been interstate commerce, and so the feds declare they have jurisdiction. The constitution clearly says they have jurisdiction in interstate commerce, not intrastate commerce, and again, we see the government doing anything it wants, regardless of what the constitution says.
I could go on for quite a while, pointing out broad and obvious constitutional violations in the areas of free speech, gun ownership, religion, warrants, article 10 and 14 violations... the point is, though, that the government is completely out of hand and what the constitution says they can or cannot do has long been either a non-issue or one that will crawl through the courts and then ruled into oblivion as have the exd post facto issues.
The constitution offers the means to make changes; but this is not convenient enough, and so we are faced on all sides with unconstitutional law, and told that it'll all be worked out in court if necessary, and in the meantime, comply or face the music.
For your reference: Ex post facto law as the term applies to the constitution, Calder v Bull (3 US 386 [1798]), in the opinion of Justice Chase:
1: Every law that makes an action done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action. 2: Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed. 3: Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed. 4: Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offense, in order to convict the offender.
Gimp is often called to task as compared to Photoshop for:
Aside from those issues — which frankly don't mean much to non-pro users with the exception of anti-aliasing (they should really fix that) and layer styles (very, very convenient) — Gimp is extraordinarily capable and certainly worth the time to learn. Personally, I have occasion to use Photoshop, Gimp, PSP, and some others most workdays; I don't have any trouble at all with functionality being over here in one program and it being over there in another. But I'm not your average user; graphics are my thing on every level from programming to amusement to my job. Frankly, the people who cry "I'm a professional" and are manifestly unable to learn a new UI... I have a lot of trouble taking them seriously. I listen to them because that's my job, and I craft solutions to problems as they describe them (such as giving them a UI that acts like the UI they are used to), but I have not found any need for those solutions myself.
Ok, some questions, then. What if an interface offered approaches more consistent than Photoshop's or GIMP's? For instance, in the main toolbox, both Photoshop and GIMP mix area selection tools (eg, rect, ellipse) with tools that actually modify the image using areas (eg, smudge, fill.) Because of this, the only way to know what a tool in the tool box will do is to become familiar with it; the location (in the toolbox) doesn't define the type of functionality. What if the area selection tools were in one toolbox, and tools that modified the image were able to be placed in another - perhaps just the ones you think you'll need today? In terms of usability, this type of approach associates physical location with function; this *should*, theoretically, enhance usability.
The same thing applies to layers. Photoshop's interface treats layers like they were not images, rather, as if they were only components of images. But essentially, they are images, as demonstrated by the ability to select one and edit it as if it was the image. What if a four-layer image allowed you to see, and edit, all four layers at once, just as if they were normal images, while changes to the sum of all the layers, let's call that the "master" image, are visible in yet another window? Wouldn't that be more consistent than treating a layer as if it were something other than an image? It provides direct, and simultaneous, access to everything at once (many layers begin to bring window management into the equation, but those skills are even more basic than anything inside an image editor.)
Before you answer, I would like to point out to you how many complaints that couch themselves as usability complaints refer to an application not working "like" Photoshop, and how often the phrase "industry standard" is brought up; it seems to me that when complaints of this type are voiced, they refer to learning the person has already done, and they want *compliance*, because they already have (a set of) muscle memory that they work with. They actually don't want better or easier, because better and easier is different, and different will impede their progress while they learn (if they are even willing to learn!)
I make decisions about these precise things as part of my job; I'd be very interested in specific opinions from anyone on these issues.
The optimum locations for physically carried ID were worked out some time ago. Either the forehead (see The NT's "Revelations" section, Hindu "caste" marks, etc), or the left chest (see Germany, ca. 1940's, and the "ID" the Jews had to carry.)
However, the RealID legislation has murky verbiage that allows for unspecified technology to be used to carry the ID electronically. Odds strongly favor this being RFID or something similar. So no need for it to be on your body, per se; it could be in your body just as easily as it could be on it, or on a card or similar external carrier. And of course, this negates the need to "present" your ID; it'll be read when you're within X distance of any client that wants to know anything in particular about you.
Had you been paying attention to the news, you would realize there are fewer than 50 remaining to be so encouraged. :)
Right to travel:
In U.S. v Guest 383 U.S. 745 (1966): "It is a right that has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized." Shapiro v Thompson 394 U.S. 618 (1969), Justice Stewart: "it is a right broadly assertable(sic) against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association, ... it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all."(*) The Articles of Confederation defined a right to travel; It may be that the right was presumed to be inherent; if so, the authors of the constitution could also have thought it redundant to make it explicit.
(*) Despite this assertion, the constitution says very little about the right to travel, other than to ensure that federal legislators have a right to go legislate as per article 1, section 6.
Once the government starts saying "You can travel only if you meet the following conditions" (passport, ID, money in pocket, good reputation, etc.), they have set up a coercive situation where equality has been sundered. This is one of the key arguments against the underlying premise of RealID, as well as the no-fly list and similar non-judicial restrictions on travel and modes of travel. What you propose, the limitation of travel from state to state requiring a passport (in your concept, just by plane, but generally in any case), is a severe limitation upon the ability to travel.
And I would sadly note that as recently as just a few decades ago, the very idea was unthinkable; it is even encoded into the art of the day. In Tom Clancy's "Hunt for Red October", the first officer, bent upon defecting to the US, asks the captain if one could travel "state to state" without papers in the US; the captain assures him that is the case, and the first officer, a product of the Soviet government's implementation of just such restrictions, reacts in pleased wonder.
It seems that almost any war showing conditions in Europe will offer a tension-laced scene where someone's papers are demanded — people used to be quick to recognize this as an abuse of power wielded for the sake of establishing and maintaining that power, and for no other reason. Orwell wrote (in 1984): "The purpose of power... is power" — he was cautionary.
Now we see travel limitations proposed sincerely in the previous post, as if this actually was a good idea. I find this more than a little depressing, and frightening.
You should get the AMD version; it has on-board support for pontoons. Same thing, really, just a different trademark. They call the prow of the vehicle "floating point technology" for the way it cuts through the water. They're still working on the wet string problem, though, so I'd wait for the first update before getting involved.
That's all fine, but you have to understand what happened here. They didn't say that the action (wiretapping) was legal; they just said - and I think, correctly - that the complaining party couldn't show that it had been directly affected, and so they had no standing to sue. Lawsuits require that you show that harm has been done to you - the party with the objection - in order to proceed. Without standing, this was stopped. Lawsuit is probably the wrong remedy for this issue unless the party objecting knows they have been tapped; the right remedy is impeachment, because what we have here is a known, admitted crime committed by a sitting, and still-sitting, president, and no knowledge, at least that I am aware of, as to who in particular was harmed.
What I was saying is that the problem exists, a remedy is encoded into the constitution to deal with such problems, but the body entrusted with meting out that remedy has not acted, and that is the real problem, not the issue of standing being required to sue. I'm not much in favor of suits in the first place, I'd *really* object to suits without standing. That'd mean if you cheated your business partner, I could sue you, even though I'm not your business partner. That's just making a bad thing worse.
This really isn't anything to do with Bush, though it is his actions we are concerned with; it is a shortcoming in the legal system, a loophole that arises because of the way lawsuits are qualified. The president has violated his oath to uphold the constitution; via US telecomm laws, wiretapping is linked inextricably to fourth amendment citizen immunity to unreasonable search; the president swears to uphold and defend the constitution, and he has not doe so, in fact a strong case can be made that he has directly violated it. There is a remedy for this. Recourse is via the congress, who should impeach and convict him for this violation of the presidential oath, a "high crime" if there ever was one.
The problem that we actually face is a congress that has absolutely no spine and is so corrupt itself that they find it perfectly natural to violate the constitution. After all, they have done it many times by producing blatantly unconstitutional laws. Examples abound: ex post facto gun laws, suppression of speech in public areas (most recently, the ruling on that kid's Jesus / Bong banner), the witless inversion of the commerce clause, violation of the right to keep and bear arms and so on.
We can't fix any of this because of the entrenched two party system, and because the legislators themselves are corrupt (with the exception of one or two.)
The problem isn't that this person is spewing their small-mindedness on the Internet; the problem is that they, or a virtual doppelgänger, are spewing it in congress, parliament and so forth. Likewise, there's no need to keep such people off the Internet, that's just a free speech issue. The problem is the morons who are trying to enforce their ideas of what is OK between two consenting adults on people via the law. Opinion is irrelevant. Law is not. Turn your wrath towards your politicians. Really; infighting here is pointless.
Yes... yes. I agree completely. But remember, we do have to impeach the man first.
Oh, heck, I know that one: Politician
If time isn't passing, nothing is changing, and if nothing is changing, no big (or small or anywhere in between) bang can occur. Pressure cannot increase, decrease, accrue, or distribute. Also, if nothing is changing, time can't begin, either, because there is no time, and no change from no time is still no time and no change. You can't apply a stimulus in any venue whatsoever in no time; there can be no response to no stimulus.
In other words, trying to put this idea into commonsense concepts isn't going to work no matter how hard one tries. Obviously, something happened, and we don't have any idea what it was. This whole "there was no time and 'then' time began" however — is, was, and will forever be nonsense from word one. It isn't any better than religion. It might be worse.
Mods need to be more careful on this subject; the poster is espousing a well known side of this issue. It is ridiculous and counter-productive to mod such posts as "flamebait" as we see here; they need to be in the discussion, both so that they are not censored by dimwits, and so that people with opposing views may address them as they see fit in discussion.
Slashdot luminaries have unlimited mod points and brag about it - how about you get after using them in situations like this, where some clown has taken a moderation-shit on the discussion?
While the metamod system may (though I have not seen much evidence of this) address the issue of whacking the moderator for bad modding, it does not revive the stifled discussion or remove the wrong done to the poster. For this reason, I suggest these changes.
I think you may have misunderstood me. I have no problem with Trolltech's pricing. You found a niche, and you're filling it, and more power to you.
What I have an issue with is linux itself not having a standard GUI layer, as does OSX and windows, so that applications may be written by anyone from the smallest to the largest without concern for licensing, funding, or availability by platform. This is something for the linux core developers to address.
That still leaves room for Qt; all you have to do is outperform the OS solution, and/or offer feature sets (like cross-platform compatibility, better, and/or more interesting widgets, ease of use for developers, interface builders... I'm sure you know this list a lot better than I do) and market your advantages, whatever they are, effectively. Like any other business. Nothing wrong with competition; it makes things better.
I liken it to a situation as if linux had no networking, and the only ways to add networking either (a) cost money, (b) required adherence to the open source philosophy a'la the GPL and LGPL, or (c) excluded commercial use. That'd really put an arrow in the heart of linux being used as a server platform. But that's not the case, and linux is either the best, or one of the best, server platforms out there.
However, this is precisely the situation that is extant with regard to GUI, and linux is far, far behind when it comes to the number of GUI-centric applications. Without pointing at any specific application, I can think of some that are way, way below the top performers in the field that linux users repeatedly hail as "great" and "good enough" to not require the top performers to pay attention... when the fact is, if those applications arrived on the platform it would be a great day for everyone, except perhaps the developers of the sub-standard apps already here. I think that the two facts - no standard GUI layer and almost no major commercial GUI apps - are inextricably related, and something that, should the lack be addressed, have the potential to cause a surge of applications to arrive on the machine.
Many of the tools I think would arrive would be closed, commercial applications. This would likely aggravate some people. It would also cause others to say "I think we can use this platform." None of which poses an actual problem for linux folks, unless they consider the commercial people competition. Me, I think competition is a good thing, so I'm rather deaf to those complaints.