> If the laws weren't so complicated and hard to
> read that the "average citizen" didn't have a
>
> hope-in-hell of understanding even a part of
> them without a lifetime of learning, then we
> wouldn't need nearly as many lawyers as the US
> requires at this point in history.
The situation is not that bad. An 9th grade education should provide the basis of the English
reading skills and enough of the Latin etymology to read law books and case history. This level of education should also provide sufficient historical background to understand the context of the laws as they are written. I am not a lawyer, but did work as a legal secretary for a number of years. I have read many contracts, many civil statutes, and many case histories. The language is written to be clear and concise to a fault, not to be intentionally misleading or difficult.
It's not my fault that the current state of education leaves 9th graders unable to read even the daily newspaper. The same arguments that people raise regarding the difficulty of reading law, can be made for the difficulty of reading, say, Dickens or Wilde. I'll bet the average USAn has trouble with that literature too.
People bash written laws that they haven't read. Why?
"The US is a republic not a democracy....
If the electoral college decided to screw the election... there is absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it."
During this long period of relative peace and tranquility that we have enjoyed, we seem to have forgotten the very basis on which our Republic was founded: That it is acceptable and necessary, under extreme circumstances, to violently remove the lawful authority from power and completely rebuild the nation from first principles. This is easier to do when the issues are divisive enough to divide the military as well as the common people. We don't want to exercise the option because it might cause us to miss our programs on cable tv, or we might go a week without a paycheck; not to mention that we might DIE, or be forced to kill our own brothers.
The remedies are all spelled out in the laws of the land, but either we don't have the stomach to perform the duties mandated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or else circumstances have not deteriorated enough to lead us to such dire consequences. But to say there is "nothing we can do" is to deny the entire history of this country, and shames everyone who has ever died for freedom.
"As it currently stands 50% of the college is bound by law to vote for their party's choice. "
Do you realize the fines are $1000.00 or less? That no criminal penalties would be imposed? There would be little risk to the faithless elector, who might actually be seen as a hero for
taking the risk, voting their conscience and bringing us out of this dark space.
The resulting government would at least have been legally elected. I would much prefer faithless elector votes to decide the president than for the decision to be made by the judicial branch or appointment by the House.
"A real democratic system would be a lot cheaper. "
Maybe in the short term, but I fear the real price would be paid in graves. Does no-one take into consideration the fact that the people who decided a representative system would be more stable and more equitable, were standing on bloodstained soil?
The rest of your message is rhetoric that I can't address right now.
> The popular vote vs the electoral college.
> I mean, come on! 100Million people >vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's >facing the distinct possibility of losing by less
> than 500 votes in a single state?
The time to address this is *before*, not *after* the election. The campaign and election were held under the framework of the electorate. You can't just change the rules now without starting over. And there are bigger problems with that than most people consider. For instance, where does the money come from? The electoral college is a great
way to give a voice to states with less population. You think little old ladies in Florida are a problem now? Wait until the suggestion that farmers in Iowa give up some of their political power takes hold. You'll see plowshares beaten into swords before that happens.
> No universal ballot
> Some one tell me again why >presidential ballots aren't designed by the >federal government, and are allowed to be >different
> everywhere?
That's the way it ought to be. It vastly increases the complexity of any attempt to control an election. Consider that the federal government that you would put in charge of the election will always be controlled by the incumbent party -- the
challenging party cannot ever regard this as fair. We have state boundaries and state governments and state laws for very good reasons. Are you suggesting that we do away with statehoods? That notion has led to significant bloodshed in the past. States' rights and sovreignty are considered by many to be among the most important freedoms.
All the people who support the integrity of the Constitution when it comes to the 1st amendment seem to be willing to wipe their asses with it when other parts of it don't make them happy.
Just because something seems to make sense in the midst of a crisis does not mean it is a better approach. Do people not realize that there would be potential problems with any other system of voting?
" In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only
takes a few hours to count all the votes. "
My understanding is that in the UK, the people can call a general election whenever they want.
I'm not convinced that the voting public has any
real franchise in Britain (and N. Ireland).
On the other hand, Britain as a whole does give proper credibility to political parties.
Let me say this:
Slowdowns and bottlenecks in the process of the
American government are *features* not *bugs*.
It's better to have slow bureaucracy than rapid
tyranny. Ironically, the success of this system
has sheilded many generations from the consequences of less successful systems.
> For starters - on a state-by-state basis >(because the Presidential election is, after all, >a series of 51 state elections), we must >standardize both
> ballots and recount processes.
Another feature of the election system is that
it cannot be manipulated from a central point.
Again, a feature, not a bug. If all the voting
systems were the same, the door is open to a corrupt federal government keeping itself in office indefinitely.
Changing the electoral process now sets a precedent for the future -- the process can be changed in arbitrary ways! We need to think about whether doing away with the
electoral college and replacing it with "something else" amounts to a bloodless coup d'etat.
Actually, it remains to be seen whether it will
bloodless. No matter what happens, there will be
a lack of confidence in the government that this
process installs. This government should definitely not be allowed to change the electoral process!! It's ONLY four years, and it probably
will not go wrong next time.
Not to worry; I believe the abolition of the electoral college is about as likely as Texas' independence or the voluntary income tax.
I was expecting to see the book priced at
$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not something that was popular enough to
be De-CsSed and mirrorred around the globe
*before* this happened. It's up to the community
to make it impossible for this to happen.
Well, what I mean is, Weisstein could have
complied with the order without the web losing
the resource altogether.
Screw the web for publishing. It's not free enough, in it's current form, to be revolutionary.
Somebody invent the next thing please. You know,
the thing that makes the Web of today look like the Web makes the internet before 1993 look. Or something.
>How would you feel if laws were passed allowing
>you[r] boss to plant hidden microphoens [sic.]
>and cameras in your office?
Actually, a law would need to be passed forbidding this. It is legal today. Consider
the convenience store with the hidden microphone
and camera? How is that workplace different from
"your office?" How would you, as a lawmaker, word
the bill to make a hidden camera legal in one
workplace but not another?
"Yet readers of the articles proclaiming a shortage would be perplexed if they also knew that Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for software
positions, and that this rate is typical in the industry."
This is a blatant case of spin-doctoring.
The 2% rate shouldn't seem atypical to anyone who's done staffing for specialized jobs. Even
in food service, you might have one position available and have 200 people respond to your ad.
Now, a restaurant will probably hire the first dishwasher or hostess or whoever and stop taking
applicants, but a chem-eng r&d job might not get
filled for months, while applicants come and go.
Just because you only hire one person for a job that a hundred people applied for should be no cause for alarm.
Culture? Corporate Culture is for companies that
have been in business since 1920, or for industries that have "Culture", like a theatre,
or an oil exploration company, or maybe a recording studio.
Tech companies don't have "culture"
Everybody that works there, works there because
they get a bi-weekly paycheck. That's it. That's
the culture. How one "fits into" such a culture
is a no-brainer.
If you were applying to Lloyd's of London or the
Wall Street Journal or something like that, they might be able to make the case that there's a certain culture beyond the usual corporate deal.
I don't understand why so many people think these
things are all that "ugly."
Is it the white keyboard? Or the tubular frame
around the monitor? Or the trademark? Sounds to
me like Taco said it's ugly and people seem to
agree. The handle looks interesting, doubly so
if it happens to be where the aux battery is.
The keyboard may take some getting used to, and it
may be wonderful, who knows? Also, the keyboard in the unit for the US market could very well be
different from the Japanese prototype you're seeing in the photos.
I don't understand why people are saying these things are "ugly" as compared to the average thinkpad or powerbook. If the spec's and compatability are like they should be for a vaio,
and if it's really lightweight, then fabulous.
I want to know two things about it:
1. Can it, on the standard battery charge, play
240 minutes of DVD with the volume turned up to say, 70%. Haven't seen a notebook yet that can
do pull that off.
2. What is the median S/N ratio for the analog audio input of the soundchip? (SP/DIF I/O would be nice too). I'd like to record live music, with minimal noise, thank you.
>unless the general public is who is responsible >for fixing the software
Who do you think your system administrators,
network managers, stock brokers, insurance agents,
etcetera, are? It is the General Public who need
to know about these things, whether they can fix
them or not!
No system is "mission critical" until the mission relies on it.
History has shown that it can come down the the number of plastic bags on board. If these systems are "unimportant" to the mission then why are they on board?
So they're somewhere between "useless mass" and "mission critical." Sooner or later, a mission's success may hinge on the operation of some or all of the computers onboard, perhaps to a purpose that was not forseen in the mission planning phases.
"I used to work at a library, our barcode scanners could do the same thing, this was about
five years ago, so this technology existed before the CueCat people even began
developing the CueCat."
I think it would be really, really funny, if the
method used by your library scanner was Patented,
and the CueCat device violated that patent. It would be a nice, ironic underscore to the fact that the software in question is LEGAL, while Patents are another concept entirely.
They pass these fascist rules and enforce them...
and the teams don't walk out, and the people calling the shots get rewarded, and are even encouraged to become more strict and greedy.
If you ask me, the athletes are getting what they deserve.
It would only take a couple of major events being blacked out to destroy the credibility of the Olympics forever.
No customer is going to pay the same price
for https://your.domain.com:65220/
as they would for:443. Further,
the number of ports available doesn't
provide the kind of scale needed (hundreds
of thousands or millions of sites for large
ISP's); and client firewall issues make port-based
solutions unacceptable.
>pay the extortion or withdraw from that >univer[s]ity
Well said. I believe you have just stumbled
on the solution. Unfortunately, people won't
have the guts to go through with it. We don't
deserve freedom.
If only this message could get across, I have no
doubt that bankruptingly low enrollment, with
large amounts of feedback to the university as
to the reason, would give this program the scarlet
letter of unprofitability.
>Incidentally, the "go get MySQL, you dumbass"
> posters are missing an important point:
> libraries use the MARC data standard for catalog
> records, and
> SQL doesn't cope well with the kind of
> tricks MARC can do.
Several people have said that, but I was hoping for an example or two to support the statement.
Not that I'm interested in MARC, but that I'm curious about where people percieve that SQL has such limitations.
>> A professional album costs upwards of $100,000 to record.
>You've been taken in by the studio hype.
It's not atypical for the *cover art* to be a very
significant chunk of this, something independent
bands don't think much about. (I haven't been
involved in production since the vinyl days, but
the cost of printing the sleeves and the cost of
pressing the records was about 50/50).
It was nearly $10,000 to make 2500 copies of a garage album in '85, all told. Selling them is
another story. It's interesting to discover more
than a decade later, that the record is perceived as "rare" in Holland, and shows up in collector catalogs:-)
Slashdot Mirror
What are the odds that any "medical marijuana" .health
information sites will ever be allowed a
domain, for instance?
> If the laws weren't so complicated and hard to
> read that the "average citizen" didn't have a
>
> hope-in-hell of understanding even a part of
> them without a lifetime of learning, then we
> wouldn't need nearly as many lawyers as the US
> requires at this point in history.
The situation is not that bad. An 9th grade education should provide the basis of the English
reading skills and enough of the Latin etymology to read law books and case history. This level of education should also provide sufficient historical background to understand the context of the laws as they are written. I am not a lawyer, but did work as a legal secretary for a number of years. I have read many contracts, many civil statutes, and many case histories. The language is written to be clear and concise to a fault, not to be intentionally misleading or difficult.
It's not my fault that the current state of education leaves 9th graders unable to read even the daily newspaper. The same arguments that people raise regarding the difficulty of reading law, can be made for the difficulty of reading, say, Dickens or Wilde. I'll bet the average USAn has trouble with that literature too.
People bash written laws that they haven't read. Why?
"The US is a republic not a democracy....
If the electoral college decided to screw the election... there is absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it."
During this long period of relative peace and tranquility that we have enjoyed, we seem to have forgotten the very basis on which our Republic was founded: That it is acceptable and necessary, under extreme circumstances, to violently remove the lawful authority from power and completely rebuild the nation from first principles. This is easier to do when the issues are divisive enough to divide the military as well as the common people. We don't want to exercise the option because it might cause us to miss our programs on cable tv, or we might go a week without a paycheck; not to mention that we might DIE, or be forced to kill our own brothers.
The remedies are all spelled out in the laws of the land, but either we don't have the stomach to perform the duties mandated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or else circumstances have not deteriorated enough to lead us to such dire consequences. But to say there is "nothing we can do" is to deny the entire history of this country, and shames everyone who has ever died for freedom.
"As it currently stands 50% of the college is bound by law to vote for their party's choice. "
Do you realize the fines are $1000.00 or less? That no criminal penalties would be imposed? There would be little risk to the faithless elector, who might actually be seen as a hero for
taking the risk, voting their conscience and bringing us out of this dark space.
The resulting government would at least have been legally elected. I would much prefer faithless elector votes to decide the president than for the decision to be made by the judicial branch or appointment by the House.
"A real democratic system would be a lot cheaper. "
Maybe in the short term, but I fear the real price would be paid in graves. Does no-one take into consideration the fact that the people who decided a representative system would be more stable and more equitable, were standing on bloodstained soil?
The rest of your message is rhetoric that I can't address right now.
> The popular vote vs the electoral college.
> I mean, come on! 100Million people >vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's >facing the distinct possibility of losing by less
> than 500 votes in a single state?
The time to address this is *before*, not *after* the election. The campaign and election were held under the framework of the electorate. You can't just change the rules now without starting over. And there are bigger problems with that than most people consider. For instance, where does the money come from? The electoral college is a great
way to give a voice to states with less population. You think little old ladies in Florida are a problem now? Wait until the suggestion that farmers in Iowa give up some of their political power takes hold. You'll see plowshares beaten into swords before that happens.
> No universal ballot
> Some one tell me again why >presidential ballots aren't designed by the >federal government, and are allowed to be >different
> everywhere?
That's the way it ought to be. It vastly increases the complexity of any attempt to control an election. Consider that the federal government that you would put in charge of the election will always be controlled by the incumbent party -- the
challenging party cannot ever regard this as fair. We have state boundaries and state governments and state laws for very good reasons. Are you suggesting that we do away with statehoods? That notion has led to significant bloodshed in the past. States' rights and sovreignty are considered by many to be among the most important freedoms.
All the people who support the integrity of the Constitution when it comes to the 1st amendment seem to be willing to wipe their asses with it when other parts of it don't make them happy.
Just because something seems to make sense in the midst of a crisis does not mean it is a better approach. Do people not realize that there would be potential problems with any other system of voting?
" In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only
takes a few hours to count all the votes. "
My understanding is that in the UK, the people can call a general election whenever they want.
I'm not convinced that the voting public has any
real franchise in Britain (and N. Ireland).
On the other hand, Britain as a whole does give proper credibility to political parties.
Let me say this:
Slowdowns and bottlenecks in the process of the
American government are *features* not *bugs*.
It's better to have slow bureaucracy than rapid
tyranny. Ironically, the success of this system
has sheilded many generations from the consequences of less successful systems.
> For starters - on a state-by-state basis >(because the Presidential election is, after all, >a series of 51 state elections), we must >standardize both
> ballots and recount processes.
Another feature of the election system is that
it cannot be manipulated from a central point.
Again, a feature, not a bug. If all the voting
systems were the same, the door is open to a corrupt federal government keeping itself in office indefinitely.
Changing the electoral process now sets a precedent for the future -- the process can be changed in arbitrary ways! We need to think about whether doing away with the
electoral college and replacing it with "something else" amounts to a bloodless coup d'etat.
Actually, it remains to be seen whether it will
bloodless. No matter what happens, there will be
a lack of confidence in the government that this
process installs. This government should definitely not be allowed to change the electoral process!! It's ONLY four years, and it probably
will not go wrong next time.
Not to worry; I believe the abolition of the electoral college is about as likely as Texas' independence or the voluntary income tax.
Despite its popularity, the "WWW" is NOT
"the internet"
>As someone else mentioned, its like not just
>viewing a crime scene, but crossing the yellow >tape.
Except... there was no yellow tape.
I was expecting to see the book priced at
$3000 or so and then get all agitated. It's
only $99.00 on cdrom. I realize that it *was*
free, but, what are you going to do?
It's not something that was popular enough to
be De-CsSed and mirrorred around the globe
*before* this happened. It's up to the community
to make it impossible for this to happen.
Well, what I mean is, Weisstein could have
complied with the order without the web losing
the resource altogether.
Screw the web for publishing. It's not free enough, in it's current form, to be revolutionary.
Somebody invent the next thing please. You know,
the thing that makes the Web of today look like the Web makes the internet before 1993 look. Or something.
>How would you feel if laws were passed allowing
>you[r] boss to plant hidden microphoens [sic.]
>and cameras in your office?
Actually, a law would need to be passed forbidding this. It is legal today. Consider
the convenience store with the hidden microphone
and camera? How is that workplace different from
"your office?" How would you, as a lawmaker, word
the bill to make a hidden camera legal in one
workplace but not another?
Yeah. Unfortunately, my clever proof is much too long to fit on the napkin.
"almost" arrested is like "almost" pregnant.
Michael, you didn't share some important details.
What really happened?
"Yet readers of the articles proclaiming a shortage would be perplexed if they also knew that Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for software
positions, and that this rate is typical in the industry."
This is a blatant case of spin-doctoring.
The 2% rate shouldn't seem atypical to anyone who's done staffing for specialized jobs. Even
in food service, you might have one position available and have 200 people respond to your ad.
Now, a restaurant will probably hire the first dishwasher or hostess or whoever and stop taking
applicants, but a chem-eng r&d job might not get
filled for months, while applicants come and go.
Just because you only hire one person for a job that a hundred people applied for should be no cause for alarm.
Culture? Corporate Culture is for companies that
have been in business since 1920, or for industries that have "Culture", like a theatre,
or an oil exploration company, or maybe a recording studio.
Tech companies don't have "culture"
Everybody that works there, works there because
they get a bi-weekly paycheck. That's it. That's
the culture. How one "fits into" such a culture
is a no-brainer.
If you were applying to Lloyd's of London or the
Wall Street Journal or something like that, they might be able to make the case that there's a certain culture beyond the usual corporate deal.
I don't understand why so many people think these
things are all that "ugly."
Is it the white keyboard? Or the tubular frame
around the monitor? Or the trademark? Sounds to
me like Taco said it's ugly and people seem to
agree. The handle looks interesting, doubly so
if it happens to be where the aux battery is.
The keyboard may take some getting used to, and it
may be wonderful, who knows? Also, the keyboard in the unit for the US market could very well be
different from the Japanese prototype you're seeing in the photos.
I don't understand why people are saying these things are "ugly" as compared to the average thinkpad or powerbook. If the spec's and compatability are like they should be for a vaio,
and if it's really lightweight, then fabulous.
I want to know two things about it:
1. Can it, on the standard battery charge, play
240 minutes of DVD with the volume turned up to say, 70%. Haven't seen a notebook yet that can
do pull that off.
2. What is the median S/N ratio for the analog audio input of the soundchip? (SP/DIF I/O would be nice too). I'd like to record live music, with minimal noise, thank you.
You remember the "I checked my
notebook!" Toshiba commercials?
No, I do not remember. Can you explain?
>unless the general public is who is responsible >for fixing the software
Who do you think your system administrators,
network managers, stock brokers, insurance agents,
etcetera, are? It is the General Public who need
to know about these things, whether they can fix
them or not!
"nothing mission critical is run on them."
No system is "mission critical" until the mission relies on it.
History has shown that it can come down the the number of plastic bags on board. If these systems are "unimportant" to the mission then why are they on board?
So they're somewhere between "useless mass" and "mission critical." Sooner or later, a mission's success may hinge on the operation of some or all of the computers onboard, perhaps to a purpose that was not forseen in the mission planning phases.
"I used to work at a library, our barcode scanners could do the same thing, this was about
five years ago, so this technology existed before the CueCat people even began
developing the CueCat."
I think it would be really, really funny, if the
method used by your library scanner was Patented,
and the CueCat device violated that patent. It would be a nice, ironic underscore to the fact that the software in question is LEGAL, while Patents are another concept entirely.
They pass these fascist rules and enforce them...
and the teams don't walk out, and the people calling the shots get rewarded, and are even encouraged to become more strict and greedy.
If you ask me, the athletes are getting what they deserve.
It would only take a couple of major events being blacked out to destroy the credibility of the Olympics forever.
No customer is going to pay the same price :443. Further,
for https://your.domain.com:65220/
as they would for
the number of ports available doesn't
provide the kind of scale needed (hundreds
of thousands or millions of sites for large
ISP's); and client firewall issues make port-based
solutions unacceptable.
>pay the extortion or withdraw from that >univer[s]ity
Well said. I believe you have just stumbled
on the solution. Unfortunately, people won't
have the guts to go through with it. We don't
deserve freedom.
If only this message could get across, I have no
doubt that bankruptingly low enrollment, with
large amounts of feedback to the university as
to the reason, would give this program the scarlet
letter of unprofitability.
Now the damn song is stuck in my head:
"Lemming, Lemming, Lemming of the BDA!"
>Incidentally, the "go get MySQL, you dumbass"
> posters are missing an important point:
> libraries use the MARC data standard for catalog
> records, and
> SQL doesn't cope well with the kind of
> tricks MARC can do.
Several people have said that, but I was hoping for an example or two to support the statement.
Not that I'm interested in MARC, but that I'm curious about where people percieve that SQL has such limitations.
> can't figure out the difference between
> an array and a list
Huh?
Is there a difference between an array and a list in perl?
I'm not trying to defend what's obviously a very poor book, but I wonder where Tom's coming from here.
A list such as (0,1,2,3)
and an array e.g. @a = (0,1,2,3)
don't differ in any fundamental way in perl.
Do they?
Even Tom himself refers to lists as arrays in the perl documentation.
I quote:
"A list of lists, or an array of an array if you would, is just a regular old array..."
Of course I haven't read the book TC is bitching about, so there is presumably something in there that's completely wrong.
>> A professional album costs upwards of $100,000 to record.
>You've been taken in by the studio hype.
It's not atypical for the *cover art* to be a very
significant chunk of this, something independent
bands don't think much about. (I haven't been
involved in production since the vinyl days, but
the cost of printing the sleeves and the cost of
pressing the records was about 50/50).
It was nearly $10,000 to make 2500 copies of a garage album in '85, all told. Selling them is
another story. It's interesting to discover more
than a decade later, that the record is perceived as "rare" in Holland, and shows up in collector catalogs