It is absolutely NOT illegal to spread false information, though you CAN be charged for defamation caused by that, and that is not an easy hurdle to jump over for public figures and events -- Times vs. Sullivan set the standard for "actual malice" where the defamed must prove the person who spread the information did so maliciously. It's a strong protection for free speech -- that's why you don't see celebrities and politicians filing a million defamation suits (though they do use other means to suppress dissent).
Also, there are NO laws against defamation at the federal level, and fewer than half the states have criminal defamation laws.
I find myself rather frightened to find that people don't understand this important provision of US law.
Re:Titan May Have Core Made of Marshmallow Fluff
on
Titan May Have an Ocean
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I think you hit on something. Titan is a Cadbury Egg!
Possibly. Because we're discussing the web browser and Microsoft has a known history of leveraging its monopoly position (remember the company IS a convicted monopolist, even if the current regulatory environment makes it possible to forget that ever happened) by tying browser and OS together, it's reasonable to be concerned.
I've hated Microsoft at least since the Windows 95/DR-DOS fiasco, but I still consider any moves the company can make away from the crippling insistence on remaining backward-compatible back to DOS 3.0 a Good Thing.
I'm not talking just about the technical mess that results from so much code and infrastructure propping up the moldy oldies, I'm also speaking from experience how this badly warps business IT planning and support. It's one thing for a company to continue running a crufty server or two for some decades-old system in the data center, multiplying that across the entire desktop personal computer brings an enormous cost, not the least of which is the fact that malware written last millennium will still run and turn your work day into a Bad Day.
I've noticed more and more sites being designed in a similar way. They somehow make it impossible for me to see the content I want unless I completely disable ABP (or FlashBlock) to first allow the ad content to play. Instead of a little (f) icon replacing the Flash content, there's just a blank area.
That's part of the problem -- nobody really knows what TEPCO is doing to get those readings, or where they are coming from, because plant officials aren't giving that info. For all we know they could be reading tea leaves to determine the level of radiation.
TEPCO is not just reporting empirical data, they are also making claims about what is an is not happening in the reactors. Frankly, they aren't being so good at reporting the empirical data, either. The findings of plutonium in the soil outside the plant, for example -- not mentioned to the public until a full week had passed since the samples were taken. And the reading of radiation 1 million times higher than background -- later called an error by TEPCO.
The reason why everyone and his brother is speculating on what's really happening is because TEPCO isn't telling and IAEA is only repeating what TEPCO tells them.
To be (somewhat) fair to TEPCO, they might not be hiding anything, they may truly just not know. This article from the Union of Concerned Scientists examines evidence that even though the plant has power and the lights are on, the monitoring and control systems are still offline. It's not like you can just pop the case on the reactor and look to see what's inside (unless you're Superman).
In short, all anyone really knows about what's happening inside the containment structures is based on observing the effects and outside conditions. Just because nobody at TEPCO or IAEA is willing to come out with the conclusion that one or more cores have breached the reactor vessel or that the spent fuel pools are half-empty and catching fire doesn't mean that someone else can't observe the same indicators and tell us that yes, the reactors are Fuckushima'd up.
Bryce Jacobs (aka Tablizer/TopMind) would only be vindicated here if he ever demonstrated knowledge of the domains over which CMU's rejection of OOP applies: parallelism and synchronization. All his experience and arguments rest on a model of programming (if I can deign to grace his ramblings with the word 'model') that has grown, ossified, rotted, and fossilized out of the 1980s-era dBase & FoxPro systems.
Given that, and Jacobs' consistent refusal to familiarize himself with even the basic CS 101 concepts of programming, on the grounds that such ideas are just dogmatic opinions, any discussion of the research around inheritance, subclassing, objects, and parallel programming would be so far out of his league that it's insulting to the researchers and practitioners doing the work to even suggest that Jacobs deserves the slightest mention in association with CMU's decision.
"He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool"
the game would have to include it's own TCP/IP stack if you want multiplayer
Interesting thought experiment that comes to me paralleling the graphics performance vs. portability discussion.
As a parody:
Multiplayer online games suffer from various network degredation and lag problems. Why do they depend on the tcp/ip sockets API to handle networking for them? Doesn't that introduce all kinds of latency and performance issues? Think how much data throughput we could get if we were able to program directly to the ethernet card? We could manage our own buffer, segment, and windows sizes, multiplex streams using our own interrupt or polling instead of relying on select(). We could even be free of the constraints of pesky things like slow start, congestion control algorithms, and the overhead of Van Jacobson header compression. Let's just ACK when we feel like it instead of when the OS makes us.
Why not get rid of those bloated IP packet fields and headers we don't care about while we're at it? Not programming directly to the OSI Physical Layer is such a performance loss, game programmers should be able to access the network card registers and interrupts directly!
A company wanted to build a wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, too, but local residents whined about their pretty ocean views being spoiled. Just recently the company abandoned the plan after a years-long battle, but didn't admit the local opposition forced them to give up.
Japan has a lot of Pacific Ocean next to it. Wind farms can be built offshore, and as a bonus take advantage of the nearly constant winds in the shoreline environment.
Here's the only metric that really counts in my book.
If you've ever done desktop support for your friends and family, count up the times you've had to go in and clean up a rooted, malware-laden mess on Windows, either by running a full, time-consuming, malware scan and removal, or just doing a reformat and reinstall. Now do the same thing for your OS X user friends. Adjust for market share and compare the numbers.
Yeah, brb, going over to friend's house for free beer after I fix his Windows infection.
I agree with you about GE's benefiting from the ban. Of course, they already were selling light bulbs, so what switch to CFLs got them I'm not clear on. Perhaps they are cheaper to make but sell for more? I know that GE closed the last domestic incandescent light bulb factory, so presumably there is a labor cost savings to them.
As for your statements about GE's ties to the Obama administration and the Democratic party, I'll just note that the law banning CFLs is titled "The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007". It might be worthwhile to recall that in 2007, George W. Bush was president and he signed it into law. President Bush supported the bill and it was part of the slate of initiatives he laid out in his State of the Union address that year.
You're correct, it's more likely his ties to natural gas and coal interests are a motivation. Still, utilities can and do look for ways to stabilize and maintain demand within their capacity. More importantly, utilities want sufficient demand numbers to support their cases when they want to increase rates. A statistically significant drop in electricity use would give customers a very strong lever against any utility that wants to charge more per KWH.
Excellent point about the lifting stuff out of this rock's gravity well. It's unfortunate that for the past couple of decades NASA heavy lift capabilities seem to have become more and more constrained and dictated by political concerns involved in maintaining certain contractors' business models than actually getting anything into space cheaply. I don't really mourn the passing of Orion & Ares, for that reason.
I related news, the Air Force has encouraged Space X to focus on the Falcon 9 heavy and the company has scaled back its production of the Falcon 1.
Agreed, but until we get a build system at the destination, we don't have a place to transit to. Much like the early European sailing explorers, we need to take our whole big ship full of stuff with us at first, then begin to build infrastructure at the destination.
One aspect of Nautilus-X that makes sense compared to say Orion is that the long-distance craft is a ferry for a smaller landing craft. Instead of beaching a whole ship on the shore and then dragging it off when it's time to do, anchor out in the bay and send a rowboat or two to the land.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) and the following case law.
'with intent to harm' is key.
It is absolutely NOT illegal to spread false information, though you CAN be charged for defamation caused by that, and that is not an easy hurdle to jump over for public figures and events -- Times vs. Sullivan set the standard for "actual malice" where the defamed must prove the person who spread the information did so maliciously. It's a strong protection for free speech -- that's why you don't see celebrities and politicians filing a million defamation suits (though they do use other means to suppress dissent).
Also, there are NO laws against defamation at the federal level, and fewer than half the states have criminal defamation laws.
I find myself rather frightened to find that people don't understand this important provision of US law.
I think you hit on something. Titan is a Cadbury Egg!
Possibly. Because we're discussing the web browser and Microsoft has a known history of leveraging its monopoly position (remember the company IS a convicted monopolist, even if the current regulatory environment makes it possible to forget that ever happened) by tying browser and OS together, it's reasonable to be concerned.
I've hated Microsoft at least since the Windows 95/DR-DOS fiasco, but I still consider any moves the company can make away from the crippling insistence on remaining backward-compatible back to DOS 3.0 a Good Thing.
I'm not talking just about the technical mess that results from so much code and infrastructure propping up the moldy oldies, I'm also speaking from experience how this badly warps business IT planning and support. It's one thing for a company to continue running a crufty server or two for some decades-old system in the data center, multiplying that across the entire desktop personal computer brings an enormous cost, not the least of which is the fact that malware written last millennium will still run and turn your work day into a Bad Day.
And me! Except as $163.08, please!
I've noticed more and more sites being designed in a similar way. They somehow make it impossible for me to see the content I want unless I completely disable ABP (or FlashBlock) to first allow the ad content to play. Instead of a little (f) icon replacing the Flash content, there's just a blank area.
You were expecting perhaps green grass, still blue waters, amber waves of grain, and red poppies?
Your are under the impression that the IAEA is not agenda-driven, then?
That's part of the problem -- nobody really knows what TEPCO is doing to get those readings, or where they are coming from, because plant officials aren't giving that info. For all we know they could be reading tea leaves to determine the level of radiation.
TEPCO is not just reporting empirical data, they are also making claims about what is an is not happening in the reactors. Frankly, they aren't being so good at reporting the empirical data, either. The findings of plutonium in the soil outside the plant, for example -- not mentioned to the public until a full week had passed since the samples were taken. And the reading of radiation 1 million times higher than background -- later called an error by TEPCO.
The reason why everyone and his brother is speculating on what's really happening is because TEPCO isn't telling and IAEA is only repeating what TEPCO tells them.
To be (somewhat) fair to TEPCO, they might not be hiding anything, they may truly just not know. This article from the Union of Concerned Scientists examines evidence that even though the plant has power and the lights are on, the monitoring and control systems are still offline. It's not like you can just pop the case on the reactor and look to see what's inside (unless you're Superman).
In short, all anyone really knows about what's happening inside the containment structures is based on observing the effects and outside conditions. Just because nobody at TEPCO or IAEA is willing to come out with the conclusion that one or more cores have breached the reactor vessel or that the spent fuel pools are half-empty and catching fire doesn't mean that someone else can't observe the same indicators and tell us that yes, the reactors are Fuckushima'd up.
Bryce Jacobs (aka Tablizer/TopMind) would only be vindicated here if he ever demonstrated knowledge of the domains over which CMU's rejection of OOP applies: parallelism and synchronization. All his experience and arguments rest on a model of programming (if I can deign to grace his ramblings with the word 'model') that has grown, ossified, rotted, and fossilized out of the 1980s-era dBase & FoxPro systems.
Given that, and Jacobs' consistent refusal to familiarize himself with even the basic CS 101 concepts of programming, on the grounds that such ideas are just dogmatic opinions, any discussion of the research around inheritance, subclassing, objects, and parallel programming would be so far out of his league that it's insulting to the researchers and practitioners doing the work to even suggest that Jacobs deserves the slightest mention in association with CMU's decision.
"He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool"
the game would have to include it's own TCP/IP stack if you want multiplayer
Interesting thought experiment that comes to me paralleling the graphics performance vs. portability discussion.
As a parody:
Multiplayer online games suffer from various network degredation and lag problems. Why do they depend on the tcp/ip sockets API to handle networking for them? Doesn't that introduce all kinds of latency and performance issues? Think how much data throughput we could get if we were able to program directly to the ethernet card? We could manage our own buffer, segment, and windows sizes, multiplex streams using our own interrupt or polling instead of relying on select(). We could even be free of the constraints of pesky things like slow start, congestion control algorithms, and the overhead of Van Jacobson header compression. Let's just ACK when we feel like it instead of when the OS makes us.
Why not get rid of those bloated IP packet fields and headers we don't care about while we're at it? Not programming directly to the OSI Physical Layer is such a performance loss, game programmers should be able to access the network card registers and interrupts directly!
HARUMPH!!
A company wanted to build a wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, too, but local residents whined about their pretty ocean views being spoiled. Just recently the company abandoned the plan after a years-long battle, but didn't admit the local opposition forced them to give up.
NIMBY will kill us all.
Japan has a lot of Pacific Ocean next to it. Wind farms can be built offshore, and as a bonus take advantage of the nearly constant winds in the shoreline environment.
And a page for every Pokemon (gotta catch em' all!)
You make a good point -- perhaps they are Working As Intended, but not economically optimally.
As if we needed fancy mathematics to tell us that the formulas used by Wall Street traders don't work. Let me offer you Exhibit A.
Here's the only metric that really counts in my book.
If you've ever done desktop support for your friends and family, count up the times you've had to go in and clean up a rooted, malware-laden mess on Windows, either by running a full, time-consuming, malware scan and removal, or just doing a reformat and reinstall. Now do the same thing for your OS X user friends. Adjust for market share and compare the numbers.
Yeah, brb, going over to friend's house for free beer after I fix his Windows infection.
I agree with you about GE's benefiting from the ban. Of course, they already were selling light bulbs, so what switch to CFLs got them I'm not clear on. Perhaps they are cheaper to make but sell for more? I know that GE closed the last domestic incandescent light bulb factory, so presumably there is a labor cost savings to them.
As for your statements about GE's ties to the Obama administration and the Democratic party, I'll just note that the law banning CFLs is titled "The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007". It might be worthwhile to recall that in 2007, George W. Bush was president and he signed it into law. President Bush supported the bill and it was part of the slate of initiatives he laid out in his State of the Union address that year.
You're correct, it's more likely his ties to natural gas and coal interests are a motivation. Still, utilities can and do look for ways to stabilize and maintain demand within their capacity. More importantly, utilities want sufficient demand numbers to support their cases when they want to increase rates. A statistically significant drop in electricity use would give customers a very strong lever against any utility that wants to charge more per KWH.
Sen. Enzi has interests in utilities and natural gas and coal mining. Can't imagine why he'd care if people used less energy-efficient lightbulbs.
Excellent point about the lifting stuff out of this rock's gravity well. It's unfortunate that for the past couple of decades NASA heavy lift capabilities seem to have become more and more constrained and dictated by political concerns involved in maintaining certain contractors' business models than actually getting anything into space cheaply. I don't really mourn the passing of Orion & Ares, for that reason.
I related news, the Air Force has encouraged Space X to focus on the Falcon 9 heavy and the company has scaled back its production of the Falcon 1.
Agreed, but until we get a build system at the destination, we don't have a place to transit to. Much like the early European sailing explorers, we need to take our whole big ship full of stuff with us at first, then begin to build infrastructure at the destination. One aspect of Nautilus-X that makes sense compared to say Orion is that the long-distance craft is a ferry for a smaller landing craft. Instead of beaching a whole ship on the shore and then dragging it off when it's time to do, anchor out in the bay and send a rowboat or two to the land.