Umm, where are you getting the claim that the Oklahoma City bombing was before the first WTC bombing? I went back and reread what I wrote, I don't see anything that could be misinterpretted to mean that. All I was implying (through sarcasm) was that both predated 9/11.
"Well, since this is/. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but the headline says "domestic call monitoring". Why would you then conclude that it would be ineffective against domestic terrorism but effective against international terrorism? "
Because its not really 'domestic' spying, in the form of listening to conversations between two people in the United States. It is monitoring the phone conversations in which one person is in the US and other out. As such, a domestic terrorist attack (in which both parties are in the US) would not be affected by such surveillence. Now there are accusations that the NSA also listens in to domestic to domestic calls (or the FBI, I suppose they would have the jurisdiction), but that was not part of the program leaked last year and there is no more evidence that it exists than there is evidence that the US has an alien flying saucer in Area 51.
"Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe."
Much of that is because the government actively combats terrorism. If you don't think terrorism can possibly amount to any more than an insignificant number of deaths, get out from under the rock you are living under and take a look at countries like Isreal or Iraq. There terrorism is a constant problem.
Yes, there will always be more people dying of natural deaths due the the inescapable fact that humans are mortal. But I would much prefer that people liven long enough to be allowed to die of something like cancer.
Yeah, because before 9-11, terrorism was completely unknown in the United States. Its not like anyone had ever tried to detonate a bomb in the parking garage of the world trade center, or someone had tried to blow up the Federal Builing in Oklahoma City (ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
"Indeed, hybrids are not both necessary and sufficient to solve the problem, but that doesn't change that they are still necessary."
Actually, the fuel efficiency of hybrids is somewhat overrated. Yes, the Civic Hybrid and the Prius can get excellent gas mileage, though that is mostly in city driving. On the highways, they end up having to rely on their engine instead of the battery, and they don't perform that much better than normal cars of the same size and half the price. And if you need something a bit bigger (after a few years of driving an Acura Integra (including two moves), I determined that for my new car I wanted something that could actually cary more than two boxes in the backseat and a suitcase in the trunk), the Accord Hybrid gets pretty much the exact same milage as most four cylinder sedans (including the four cylinder Accord). Granted that is because it only comes in the 6-cylinder model so it is faster, but at half the price my Mazda 6 is still relatively fuel efficient. And none of this really matters if you just use the fact that your car gets better mileage to justify driving more.
"think you're confusing "consequences from government" with "consequences from private citizens/businesses". Yes, your boss can fire you just for telling a racist joke (assuming you don't work for the state) The government cannot fine or imprison you for telling a cop to fuck off (in theory)."
No, the government can still impose punishments because of something you said. The simplest example is a murder suspect who confeses to the police (assuming had he not confessed, the cops would have not been able to build up a case against him). Because of what he said though, they are able to convict him for murder. This is because while it isn't illegal to say you killed someone, it is illegal to have killed someone in the first place.
"Is there any other way for the government to impose consequences (ie, punishment) than to make something against the law? "
Whoa cowboy, back up a minute. You still havn't shown me where it says a body of the government (in this case the school board) cannot make a law (actually I think they call them rules, but its the same thing) prohibiting speech (remember use only the First Amendment as that is the topic of this thread).
Here is the exact text of the First Amendment taken straight from the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Please highlight for me the text saying you have freedom from consequences regarding speech. Hell, just show me the part saying the school district cannot impose consequences for something one of their students said.
Of course there may be consequences for things you say. In fact, thats really the only reason for speaking in the first place. If I say something, I expect others to hear it and react in some way which I hope is positive. If your definition of freedom is freedom from consequences, well I don't think you are going to find that anywhere.
"Unfortunately, if you take this argument to the extreme, you have government control of just about everything."
No, just the aspects of life that involve potential harm to others (hitting someone because you were distracted by a cell phone can hurt others). We highly regulate acitivies related to motor vehicle use due to the fact that unregulated, they can be very dangerous to innocent bystanders.
"And the opposite extreme (usually embodied by Libertarianism) is potentially just as bad."
Actually anarchists are the opposite extreme. Libertarians (capital L) is a political party advocating greater limits to government control than generally accepted by the general population. They are not mainstream, but not really extremists.
"The underlying philosophical question is: what are the limits (if any) of personal freedom?"
Running someone over is beyond your personal freedom, even if you really wanted to take that call. Preventing someone from doing that is not being a 'nanny' government, in fact preventing harm to others is one of the key purposes for the government's existence.
I know this is late, but RTFQ. It is very clear that he is building a new site, not working on an existing one that is already done in PHP.
BTW, Python has a very large user base, especially when you consider uses other than web programming. Ruby isn't that small either, it just recently has become popular over here in the states (believe it or not, there are programmers in other countries like Japan as well). If you want to talk about a "toy language", you need to look no further than PHP, whose origional purpose was merely to make it easy to build personal webpages. And on the topic of the enthusiasm of fanboys, it is clear you really don't need to look beyond yourself.
Yeah, you also have no idea about how the political system works over here. The Hubble maintenance was delayed because of saftey issues regarding the shuttle (currently our only manned space vehicle), and NASA is considering letting it die because they feel their funding (NASA, like everyone else, is forced to work on a limited budget) could better serve science by going to other projects. It has nothing to do with who is in the White House.
In 2008? You might want to count again (ues a calculator if 2008 is too big of a number for you to divide by in your head). Bush will still be president unless something happens to him, in which case Cheney will be president. In November of 2008 we will have a new election, and the winner of that election will take office in 2009.
You are kidding, right? The Hubble has recieved plenty of publicity, thats why there is all this controversy over letting it go (long after it has lived out its intended lifespan) even though NASA has determined their research could be better served by using the money it would require to keep Hubble operating elsewhere, such as with the James Webb telescope.
And the reason the maintenance was cancelled isn't because Bush didn't like science class in high school, its because (in case you don't read the news) the shuttle program was grounded after the Columbia fell apart on re-entry.
"
Yes, the main reason for the existence of interpreted languages: simplicity."
Translation: You are lazy.
Come on, if your point was just that it is easier to work in PHP, you could have just compared the code needed to maintain multidimensional arrays in both languages. Instead you challenged Perl programmers to do something with only a subset of their languages features, implying (at least to young programmers visiting this thread and who do not know better) that such a feat was not possible with Perl and you need some sort of hack to get it to work. That is disingenuous at best. I want to see a valid technological reason why you would be required to develop a Perl app without using references.
That arguement really does not work here. The whole of this (purely speculative) merger would be to allow the MS/Yahoo super company compete with Google (which already has a monopoly in the search arena). This merger would do nothing to create a monopoly (or at least a horizontal one) as MS isn't doing that well in the Internet arena (Yahoo's strength) and Yahoo doesn't much at all (as far as I know) in terms of desktop software (MS's strength).
"I believe that a government telling companies that they cannot perform such an action would be considered conservative."
Not really... Conservative is usually used as they antonym for liberal in the political use of the word. As in "Conservatives want to stay the course in Iraq while liberals want to pull out now". I've at least never heard it used as the antonym for the economical use of the word (as in a term for laissez faire capitalism). And I really hope such a use of the word conservative in that sense never takes off, its already bad enough that liberal trade policies are often supported by the conservative party, if conservative policies were also supported by the liberal party...
"Prior art has no additional strength when published in patent form"
Sure it does. When you publish your work in a patent you are forced to mention every claim you can possibly think of. Thats not always going to be the case when you are writing a paper.
"and doing that is vastly more expensive than even a vanity press such as IP.com Prior Art Database (which I found in two minutes of searching)."
Its not that expensive when you consider most large companies already have huge legal departments to handle IP issues.
Aw, thats cute. You think all we have to do to ward off disaster in the future is to carpool and recycle. Cute, but dead wrong.
Your view on climate change (this isn't your fault, if you are like me you were probably brought up to think this by Saturday morning cartoons that used this dumbed down version of enviromentalism) is apparently that disasters like global warming occur as a direct reaction to this bad stuff (pollution, waste, deforestation, etc.) done by humans and if only people were to stop doing that bad stuff it would stop. Unfortunately it is much more complicated than that. For one thing, climate change happens naturally, and no I'm not talking about at a geological time scale. Climate can change very dramatically, often in merely decades. No its not "The Day After Tomorrow" change, but then again that type of thing won't happen with greenhouse gases either (the directors admit that they grosly exaggerated some sceanarios and just plain made up other ones in order to make an entertaining movie).
Yes, human beings very likely do influence it quite a bit. But influencing is different from being the source. So yes, if we dramatically reduce pollution over the next few years, we might be able to affect the climate. But that doesn't mean we will be helping our survival and certainly does not mean we will be stopping (or even slowing) climate change. Now that being said, there still are many reasons to recycle or pollute less (why do you think I may a trip to the town dump every few months to drop off cans?), but you shouldn't do it thinking "if I recycle this can, manbearpig, er, global warming will be defeated forever!"
"Tell me, please, how do you write multidimensional arrays in Perl? No, no, you are *not* allowed to use references!"
Is there a reason for this restriction? I mean, if you take out a major part of a language, you are going to be limited in what you can do with it. That doesn't mean the language is no good or another language is better, it just means you have to learn how to use that feature.
I'm not saying the language is completely useless (ok, I guess that was what I said in my last post, but that was intended to be a joke). I'm sure it is very useful for html writers who want to make a simple dynamic web page without learning how to program. The problem is that it teaches those people some very bad habits if they want to go into 'real' computer science.
For instance, accessing variables that are not defined returns nothing by default (most languages will throw an exception should this happen). This results in problems like this occuring.
There are plenty of easy to learn languages such as Python and Ruby out there that do not have nearly as many problems, so there is not too much of an excuse to use PHP for anything but the simplest web page. What this guy is trying to do, use PHP despite the fact that it is obviously not powerful enough for his requirements), is just wrong.
"No, if it's caused by human beings, then human beings can do something about it. "
What, build a time machine, go back in time and give hybrid technology to all the people back in the 1920s so that global warming never happens in the first place?
"I don't really give a damn what the cause is. We -- the human race -- can have a net positive effect on this issue. That, alone, is reason to do it."
Do what? While the fact that it doesn't really matter was sort of the point of my previous post so I'll agree with you there, its not as if there is a big red button we can press which will instantly stop any climate change. In reality the only thing we can do is prepare and make our society resistent to the changes that will occur in the future.
""The ecosystem" is not fragile as you say. However, "our ecosystem", the one that allows humans to exist, *is* fragile. "
Our existence certainly is less stable than the ecosystem in general (though I still wouldn't classify it as 'fragile', we have already survived ice ages and other various ecological disasters), but the post I was responding to (in case you are unfamiliar with how a message board works, often a person will respond to the claims of a specific person instead of addressing the issue in general) was not talking about just our existence. If you wish to address our own survival independent of the survival of the rest of the ecosystem, please feel free to start a new thread.
"God you are fucking stupid. No one is talking about "saving the earth.""
I'm going to assume you are being sarcastic here, but just in case you are not, the following websites (found with just a few minutes on google) are talking about "saving the earth":
I know many environmentalists who do consider their goal to be saving the planet, which they consider much more important than our own existence. If you don't know anyone like that, well then you may just need to make some more diverse friends...
Yes, but even a worse case scenario, mankind going extinct (which is verty unlikely, we are a very adaptable species that has survived worse disasters), is very different from the 'collapse' of the food chain. Plus environmental changes that can cause famine and death are pretty much inevitable. The illusion that our environment is stable is just plain wrong, our climate can change (with or without our help) extremly quickly. And no, I am not talking about changes over thousands of years, I am talking about dramatic changes in just years. This history of mankind is full of famines and deaths associated with such dramatic changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, where are you getting the claim that the Oklahoma City bombing was before the first WTC bombing? I went back and reread what I wrote, I don't see anything that could be misinterpretted to mean that. All I was implying (through sarcasm) was that both predated 9/11.
Nice strawman there, buddy. Let me know when you have a real argument.
Because its not really 'domestic' spying, in the form of listening to conversations between two people in the United States. It is monitoring the phone conversations in which one person is in the US and other out. As such, a domestic terrorist attack (in which both parties are in the US) would not be affected by such surveillence. Now there are accusations that the NSA also listens in to domestic to domestic calls (or the FBI, I suppose they would have the jurisdiction), but that was not part of the program leaked last year and there is no more evidence that it exists than there is evidence that the US has an alien flying saucer in Area 51.
"Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe."
Much of that is because the government actively combats terrorism. If you don't think terrorism can possibly amount to any more than an insignificant number of deaths, get out from under the rock you are living under and take a look at countries like Isreal or Iraq. There terrorism is a constant problem.
Yes, there will always be more people dying of natural deaths due the the inescapable fact that humans are mortal. But I would much prefer that people liven long enough to be allowed to die of something like cancer.
Yeah, because before 9-11, terrorism was completely unknown in the United States. Its not like anyone had ever tried to detonate a bomb in the parking garage of the world trade center, or someone had tried to blow up the Federal Builing in Oklahoma City (ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
"Indeed, hybrids are not both necessary and sufficient to solve the problem, but that doesn't change that they are still necessary."
Actually, the fuel efficiency of hybrids is somewhat overrated. Yes, the Civic Hybrid and the Prius can get excellent gas mileage, though that is mostly in city driving. On the highways, they end up having to rely on their engine instead of the battery, and they don't perform that much better than normal cars of the same size and half the price. And if you need something a bit bigger (after a few years of driving an Acura Integra (including two moves), I determined that for my new car I wanted something that could actually cary more than two boxes in the backseat and a suitcase in the trunk), the Accord Hybrid gets pretty much the exact same milage as most four cylinder sedans (including the four cylinder Accord). Granted that is because it only comes in the 6-cylinder model so it is faster, but at half the price my Mazda 6 is still relatively fuel efficient. And none of this really matters if you just use the fact that your car gets better mileage to justify driving more.
No, the government can still impose punishments because of something you said. The simplest example is a murder suspect who confeses to the police (assuming had he not confessed, the cops would have not been able to build up a case against him). Because of what he said though, they are able to convict him for murder. This is because while it isn't illegal to say you killed someone, it is illegal to have killed someone in the first place.
"Is there any other way for the government to impose consequences (ie, punishment) than to make something against the law? "
Whoa cowboy, back up a minute. You still havn't shown me where it says a body of the government (in this case the school board) cannot make a law (actually I think they call them rules, but its the same thing) prohibiting speech (remember use only the First Amendment as that is the topic of this thread).
Please highlight for me the text saying you have freedom from consequences regarding speech. Hell, just show me the part saying the school district cannot impose consequences for something one of their students said.
Of course there may be consequences for things you say. In fact, thats really the only reason for speaking in the first place. If I say something, I expect others to hear it and react in some way which I hope is positive. If your definition of freedom is freedom from consequences, well I don't think you are going to find that anywhere.
No, just the aspects of life that involve potential harm to others (hitting someone because you were distracted by a cell phone can hurt others). We highly regulate acitivies related to motor vehicle use due to the fact that unregulated, they can be very dangerous to innocent bystanders.
"And the opposite extreme (usually embodied by Libertarianism) is potentially just as bad."
Actually anarchists are the opposite extreme. Libertarians (capital L) is a political party advocating greater limits to government control than generally accepted by the general population. They are not mainstream, but not really extremists.
"The underlying philosophical question is: what are the limits (if any) of personal freedom?"
Running someone over is beyond your personal freedom, even if you really wanted to take that call. Preventing someone from doing that is not being a 'nanny' government, in fact preventing harm to others is one of the key purposes for the government's existence.
BTW, Python has a very large user base, especially when you consider uses other than web programming. Ruby isn't that small either, it just recently has become popular over here in the states (believe it or not, there are programmers in other countries like Japan as well). If you want to talk about a "toy language", you need to look no further than PHP, whose origional purpose was merely to make it easy to build personal webpages. And on the topic of the enthusiasm of fanboys, it is clear you really don't need to look beyond yourself.
Yeah, you also have no idea about how the political system works over here. The Hubble maintenance was delayed because of saftey issues regarding the shuttle (currently our only manned space vehicle), and NASA is considering letting it die because they feel their funding (NASA, like everyone else, is forced to work on a limited budget) could better serve science by going to other projects. It has nothing to do with who is in the White House.
In 2008? You might want to count again (ues a calculator if 2008 is too big of a number for you to divide by in your head). Bush will still be president unless something happens to him, in which case Cheney will be president. In November of 2008 we will have a new election, and the winner of that election will take office in 2009.
And the reason the maintenance was cancelled isn't because Bush didn't like science class in high school, its because (in case you don't read the news) the shuttle program was grounded after the Columbia fell apart on re-entry.
Translation: You are lazy.
Come on, if your point was just that it is easier to work in PHP, you could have just compared the code needed to maintain multidimensional arrays in both languages. Instead you challenged Perl programmers to do something with only a subset of their languages features, implying (at least to young programmers visiting this thread and who do not know better) that such a feat was not possible with Perl and you need some sort of hack to get it to work. That is disingenuous at best. I want to see a valid technological reason why you would be required to develop a Perl app without using references.
That arguement really does not work here. The whole of this (purely speculative) merger would be to allow the MS/Yahoo super company compete with Google (which already has a monopoly in the search arena). This merger would do nothing to create a monopoly (or at least a horizontal one) as MS isn't doing that well in the Internet arena (Yahoo's strength) and Yahoo doesn't much at all (as far as I know) in terms of desktop software (MS's strength).
Not really... Conservative is usually used as they antonym for liberal in the political use of the word. As in "Conservatives want to stay the course in Iraq while liberals want to pull out now". I've at least never heard it used as the antonym for the economical use of the word (as in a term for laissez faire capitalism). And I really hope such a use of the word conservative in that sense never takes off, its already bad enough that liberal trade policies are often supported by the conservative party, if conservative policies were also supported by the liberal party...
Sure it does. When you publish your work in a patent you are forced to mention every claim you can possibly think of. Thats not always going to be the case when you are writing a paper.
"and doing that is vastly more expensive than even a vanity press such as IP.com Prior Art Database (which I found in two minutes of searching)."
Its not that expensive when you consider most large companies already have huge legal departments to handle IP issues.
Yeah, just like filling a bucket with seawater is a single step to emptying the ocean.
Your view on climate change (this isn't your fault, if you are like me you were probably brought up to think this by Saturday morning cartoons that used this dumbed down version of enviromentalism) is apparently that disasters like global warming occur as a direct reaction to this bad stuff (pollution, waste, deforestation, etc.) done by humans and if only people were to stop doing that bad stuff it would stop. Unfortunately it is much more complicated than that. For one thing, climate change happens naturally, and no I'm not talking about at a geological time scale. Climate can change very dramatically, often in merely decades. No its not "The Day After Tomorrow" change, but then again that type of thing won't happen with greenhouse gases either (the directors admit that they grosly exaggerated some sceanarios and just plain made up other ones in order to make an entertaining movie).
Yes, human beings very likely do influence it quite a bit. But influencing is different from being the source. So yes, if we dramatically reduce pollution over the next few years, we might be able to affect the climate. But that doesn't mean we will be helping our survival and certainly does not mean we will be stopping (or even slowing) climate change. Now that being said, there still are many reasons to recycle or pollute less (why do you think I may a trip to the town dump every few months to drop off cans?), but you shouldn't do it thinking "if I recycle this can, manbearpig, er, global warming will be defeated forever!"
"Tell me, please, how do you write multidimensional arrays in Perl? No, no, you are *not* allowed to use references!"
Is there a reason for this restriction? I mean, if you take out a major part of a language, you are going to be limited in what you can do with it. That doesn't mean the language is no good or another language is better, it just means you have to learn how to use that feature.
For instance, accessing variables that are not defined returns nothing by default (most languages will throw an exception should this happen). This results in problems like this occuring.
There are plenty of easy to learn languages such as Python and Ruby out there that do not have nearly as many problems, so there is not too much of an excuse to use PHP for anything but the simplest web page. What this guy is trying to do, use PHP despite the fact that it is obviously not powerful enough for his requirements), is just wrong.
What if you don't like cats?
Hey, I might have found the first legit reason for using PHP!
Hell the very next post I read had someone talking about saving our planet.
What, build a time machine, go back in time and give hybrid technology to all the people back in the 1920s so that global warming never happens in the first place?
"I don't really give a damn what the cause is. We -- the human race -- can have a net positive effect on this issue. That, alone, is reason to do it."
Do what? While the fact that it doesn't really matter was sort of the point of my previous post so I'll agree with you there, its not as if there is a big red button we can press which will instantly stop any climate change. In reality the only thing we can do is prepare and make our society resistent to the changes that will occur in the future.
Our existence certainly is less stable than the ecosystem in general (though I still wouldn't classify it as 'fragile', we have already survived ice ages and other various ecological disasters), but the post I was responding to (in case you are unfamiliar with how a message board works, often a person will respond to the claims of a specific person instead of addressing the issue in general) was not talking about just our existence. If you wish to address our own survival independent of the survival of the rest of the ecosystem, please feel free to start a new thread.
"God you are fucking stupid. No one is talking about "saving the earth.""
I'm going to assume you are being sarcastic here, but just in case you are not, the following websites (found with just a few minutes on google) are talking about "saving the earth":
I know many environmentalists who do consider their goal to be saving the planet, which they consider much more important than our own existence. If you don't know anyone like that, well then you may just need to make some more diverse friends...
Yes, but even a worse case scenario, mankind going extinct (which is verty unlikely, we are a very adaptable species that has survived worse disasters), is very different from the 'collapse' of the food chain. Plus environmental changes that can cause famine and death are pretty much inevitable. The illusion that our environment is stable is just plain wrong, our climate can change (with or without our help) extremly quickly. And no, I am not talking about changes over thousands of years, I am talking about dramatic changes in just years. This history of mankind is full of famines and deaths associated with such dramatic changes.