I remember Waco. What about it? I'll leave it to the Exile [exile.ru], a Moscow based English Language alternative newspaper, to handle this one:
Waco had a compound full of armed cultist morons who believed that David Koresh, a failed Sting-a-be rock star, was the Savior. Ruby Ridge was the site of some armed white racist pig and his shit-for-brains wife and kids. Can anyone give us one reason why they shouldn't have been shot, gassed and burned with white phosphorus? Millions, literally millions of up-in-arms Middle Americans saw Janet Reno's mercy killing of these rabid apes as a form of totalitarianism. Folks, it's time to come clean here: Janet Reno should have killed many, many thousands more of them. As it was, we appreciate the gene-pool cleansing, even if it was just a gesture.
They love throwing the word "armed" around, don't they?
Yeah, that White Separatist living peaceably with his family in the middle of nowhere "armed" with a shotgun was a threat to society. Along with his wife who was "armed" with a baby.
I don't know, I am honestly worried about where that court ruling could take us. Technically speaking they are not "breaking" anything. They are simply crafting and sending out packets. Do we really want a world where our packets can become illegal weapons? Think about it, if you are off somewhere, doing "whatever" and you do say ARP posioning to help in your "whatever" you could of just commited a crime! Right now you can say "Screw of cop, its my network you can go to hell." but if we start telling Comcast don't send out these packets, it could be a very slipperly slope.
That is a completely different issue. This court ruling is (as you mentioned later) over the violation of a contract with users to provide internet access in exchange for a monthly fee. That's considered a big deal. An individual who does this can be prosecuted for fraud and end up in prison. Companies can lose millions in lawsuits and punitive fines.
It's possible that Comcast has some small print in the contract that allows them to do this; I'm not a Comcast customer, so I don't know for sure. If that's the case, the suit may fail. If there isn't any such clause and the court determines that they have the right to actively filter content in this way, it will become a HUGE deal because other ISPs will most likely start doing it too.
Also, about that first part... If you deliberately send traffic that interferes with someone's connection to another party, you're already breaking a law in most countries. That has been the case for well over a decade, and it's how DDoSers are prosecuted. An ISP might be able to argue that it's between them and their users (which brings it back into the realm of contract law), but a user who does it across the Internet can't claim that "he isn't breaking anything".
That's exactly what it sounds like. If you look at the full quote in the article*, he seems to be saying "Hey, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about this other "long-neglected" issue (that we have no business getting involved in)."
"We need to deal with some long-neglected issues before we tackle the media ownership rules," he said. "We should first address the appalling lack of ownership of media outlets by women and people of color. And we need to implement improvements in how outlets handle issues of concern to local communities."
How would they even go about "fixing" that without doing something blatantly illegal like offering one race or gender better deals than another?
Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein did not object specifically to the Dec. 18 date, but did say the commission has a lot of work yet to do before it should make its decision.
"We need to deal with some long-neglected issues before we tackle the media ownership rules," he said. "We should first address the appalling lack of ownership of media outlets by women and people of color. And we need to implement improvements in how outlets handle issues of concern to local communities."
Can someone explain how the FCC is related to either of these issues...? Or how newspapers fall under FCC jurisdiction? Aren't they supposed to be limited to regulating telecommunication channels and maintaining "decency"?
Also, the ban the summary mentions is already in place according to the article. They're discussing whether to keep it there or remove it.
As peoples' lives get easier, they'll start to complain and fight over things that aren't as important. This is what allows their lives to keep getting easier. Go read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you want something of an extreme example.
At any rate, the GP post isn't complaining that the price of (and the presence of advertisements in) the game is a violation of his civil liberties or a crime against humanity. He isn't threatening the companies involved, or even picketing their offices. He's basically just saying it annoys him. I'm certain you've payed to see a crappy movie before and complained about it.
Companies take note of actions and products that make customers unhappy, and (if they're smart) they adjust their actions and products.
On another note, the particular case this article is about bothers me largely because it's recruiting for the surveillance arm of British Intelligence that's going to appear, and that's just creepy.
These puns are Wearing and Tearing on my sense of humor. I'll give you No Quarter if you continue saying them. It'll be your fault When the Levee Breaks...the levee of my SANITY, that is.
Your fight against bad puns in Slashdot posts looks like it's going to be a Battle of Evermore.
I cannot see any way that someone could make a defensible argument for a University forcing its students to use a particular search engine. It's just braindead. When the person making the decision is a director of (or anyone with a significant stake in) the company benefitting, it goes beyond being stupid and irresponsible and becomes corrupt.
How does IU pull this off, anyway? Do they actually block Google, Yahoo, etc?
Trademarks aren't copyrights, there is no "fair use clause".
No, Trademark Law also has a fair use doctrine, which includes using trademarks nominatively. Otherwise you'd see Coke and Pepsi suing each other whenever one of them put out an ad comparing the two.
Beyond that, Google never said they were doing it to comply with laws. They are probably doing it as a professional courtesy. If somebody wanted to put an "ad" up that slammed freerepublic, and freerepublic asked Google not to, then Google would give them the same consideration.
The article mentions anti-Blackwater and anti-Exxon ads as being "permitted" by Google, but it doesn't say whether or not the companies have requested takedowns.
Either way, if their trademark use policy doesn't allow for nominative use, it's faulty and needs to be fixed. Plenty of companies run comparative ads (our product versus Competitor X's product), which generally require the other company to be identified.
Surely murder is a conscious action? One that requires a decision based in free will? So it could hardly be argued that murder is 'natural'; murder is uncommon among humans, who may have free will, and impossible for an animal which presumably does not. Killing, OTOH, that's natural:)
You'd really have to define "murder", "free will", and "natural" to get a good answer.
"Murder" is incredibly murky. It's generally defined as "killing without sufficient cause", which means that it differs between countries, cultures, and individuals. Whether or not it requires "free will" depends on how people decide to define it (eg, requiring malicious intent and/or sanity).
Some people don't even believe "free will" exists, and many have an agnostic viewpoint about it. If it does exist in humans, I don't see any reason that animals wouldn't have it, or that it wouldn't be "natural".
"Natural" can also mean different things depending on who you're talking to. A Jew or Christian might define it as "intended by God". Someone else might define it as "existing in Nature apart from Mankind", and a third person might say that everything is natural, including all actions by humans.
Basically, a ad had a trademark on it, and the trademark owner asked for the ad to be removed? Not really big news...
It'll be news if they submitted an ad WITHOUT infringing on a trademark, and that was rejected.
I'm quite sure that referencing a trademark when you're criticizing the holder is considered fair use, and Google is ignoring other ads that use trademarks in a similar fashion.
Google may not have violated any law here, but if the article is telling the whole story, I would be hard put to say they aren't Doing Evil. I'd have to see the ad in question to know for sure...
No, you need to re-read his post. He was saying that whether something is "natural" has nothing to do with whether it's right.
For example, alligators sometimes eat their young. It's not "unnatural", but most people wouldn't be okay with other humans doing it.
Most animals don't wear pants. It's "unnatural", but most people wouldn't say it's immoral.
Anyway, the religious leaders who call homosexuality "unnatural" aren't talking about whether or not animals do it, because they know very well that they do. They believe that homosexuality in humans is encouraged by a supernatural source - temptation by Satan. They're talking about the spirits-and-witches type of "unnatural", not the pants kind. Of course, non-religious people who don't believe the first exists tend to assume they mean the second.
Murders over sexual preference are the exception here, not the legally-enforced norm. Contrary to what you seem to think, most gays don't get a constant stream of death threats and physical violence from Christians, even in rural conservative towns. People protest when they go on parade? Boo hoo.
Letting a unique species go kaput is a bad idea, especially if they're moderately intelligent (and primates). Psychologists, anthropologists, and people who study communication benefit a lot from these guys, and that translates into benefit for humans.
There are also emotional/ethical angles that you may or may not care about. Even if you're purely practical, though, there are reasons to keep gorillas around.
Happens. Really, it's interesting to watch judeochristians begrudge the muslim world one good crusade. (...) Not that people should be involved in a religious war.
Do you think North Africa and Turkey were converted peacefully to Islam, and the Moors who held most of Spain for four hundred years were tourists? Anyway, what's really interesting is watching Israel and a portion of the Muslim world try to slaughter each other over land while trying to maintain a religious pretext for their followers. I wish everyone else would stop trying to interfere (and funding both sides with tax money, bleh).
I mean, without ever owning up to the wholesale murder of the ENTIRE American continent, north and south.
What would you consider to be "owning up" to that? I don't see anyone who denies that many of them were forced out of their homes by military might; children are taught about that in elementary school (and again in middle school, and high school, and University...). Do you consider Americans and Europeans responsible for the ones who were killed by naturally spreading smallpox? What about the ones who were killed by other natives with European weaponry? Most people aren't going to care much about the last two, and they'll understand that to some extent there are still living natives, so they WILL deny that Europeans/Americans "murdered the entire American continent".
The links aren't very complicated for legal documents.
The first document says that they reject the rejection. The second one says that they don't understand the examiner's explanation. And that's terrible.
How do you explain what makes something obvious when it's obvious?
It's incredibly easy, if not trivial, to design a site so that someone can save a set of data (name, address, CC info) and resubmit it along with another set of data (the order) in one click. There are first and second-year CS and CIS projects that are more complicated than that. Securing the site wouldn't be nearly as simple, but that's not the part that's covered by the patent.
What the hell is this awful flash website?? The complete text of the story is flash, and before i can read the article, i have to watch an animation that prepares me for the structure of it??
Flash wasn't even installed on the computer I'm using right now, so I spent about thirty seconds looking for a "Go Straight to Article" link before realizing there wasn't one.
If you do get to the final article, though, there's a "Tell us what you think of our new look!" link. Amusingly, there's a html/txt version, but the only way to get to it is through the flash site (unless I missed something).
Okay, I'm playing devil's advocate here. If in fact what you say is true - that programming can't be taught in high school, then how do we have programmers over the age of forty? I graduated from high school in 1981; there were _zero_ pc computers in most high schools back then.
Why do children need to code anyway? And why do they need to use a computer? Isn't it better to teach them to think, and other basics such as reading, writing, and maths?
1. I didn't say that programmers can't be taught in high school. However, their chances of getting a capable teacher (in the formal sense, anyway) at that stage or earlier are slim to none. Their chances of getting damaged by an incapable teacher or a brain-dead office class are high. 2. Teaching a child to program doesn't keep them from learning how to read, write, or do math. In fact, I'd say it reinforces reading and math quite a bit.
The laptops aren't intended for places where there's a lack of food; they're intended to help build nations where roads, electricity, and food are taken care of.
This is an honest question: why do kids need laptops? Is there some fundamental problem in teaching today that can only be solved with computers?
Yes. Specifically, they need to know how to use computers. Most of the teachers don't really know how, and worse, most of them are certain that they do. The best way to teach them is to give them a simple one that isn't (readily) capable of playing flashy video games, music, and movies, but can be programmed.
This has to be done before they're thrown the high school "Computer 101" class where they're put through every circle of MS Office Hell. With very few exceptions, you can't start teaching someone to code in college; either they've already been doing it, or they'll never know how. The kids who took the Office classes in high school and think it made them computer savvy don't normally last past the first year in CS.
Feds must love going after suspects of crimes related to technology; they can justify seizing everything the person has for the flimsiest reason. If they're lucky, they even get to auction off the lot.
And why the hell are modchips illegal? If someone's committing sizable copyright infringement, you can already nail them for something. You don't need a redundant law that criminalizes the guy who wanted to see if his X-Box could run Linux.
I'm not a socialist by a long shot, but it looks like you've got some illusions. It really isn't that easy.
Aside from housing, basic needs in America cost no more than a couple dollars a day. Some rice, beans, fresh fruit and vegetables. A few sets of used clothing.
That's more than two bucks a day even in the cheapest places, and rent+utilities is going to be at the VERY least $350 a month (meaning you're living in a trailer or coffin apartment). You also left out toiletries. I don't think living alone for an extended period of time under $700 a month is possible if no one is subsidizing you.
Of course, at $700 a month, you'll be at the mercy of your landlord, your employer, and any number of other people this entire time; if they screw you, you won't have the money to take legal action, and you'd be out of either a house or a job if you tried. Just getting a job will be difficult, especially since you won't have a car. Everyone will be suspicious of you because you'll look poor. Because you eat so poorly, you'll get sick often (meaning no work) and won't be able to afford medicine or a doctor.
All that, of course, is if you're single, and in a place with a very low cost-of-living for the US.
Many people also don't consider moving, no matter what the local economy is like compared to elsewhere. That is a huge luxury as well and nothing that a nation needs to be "guaranteeing".
Often, moving costs money that they don't have, and it also means giving up whatever connections or advantages they have locally, in exchange for a chance things will be better.
If I got a knock on my door and looked out and saw the police department and cameras outside my door, my first thought is not to kill myself, it would be to wonder what the hell is going on.
If I got a knock on my door, opened it and saw a cop or two, I'd ask what was going on.
If I got a knock on my door, opened it and got rushed by several cops and newsmen with cameras, two things are going to rush through my mind:
1. I'm going to be accused of something very serious. 2. When they arrest me for whatever-it-is, that is going to be recorded, broadcasted, and probably viewed by everyone that I care about. Of course, it might not be, but considering everything else going on, I'm going to be expecting the worst.
One of the worst things about the situation is that playing along and staying quiet makes you look guilty to the people watching, even though it's the best choice when you're arrested (regardless of innocence or guilt). You're basically forced to incriminate yourself one way, or the other.
Cameras catching someone walk into a house is one thing; news cameras rolling alongside the police when they raid a house is something else entirely. Can we at least have empirical evidence that someone's guilty before throwing them out on national tv?
Look, if an undercover cop asks you to sell him drugs and you do so, you go to jail.
Nope, that's also entrapment.
He's right that you would go to prison; it would just be for possessing the drugs instead of dealing them. He enticed you to sell him drugs that you might not have otherwise, but he didn't entice you into possessing them.
That's assuming he directly asked for the drugs, of course...Most of the time, they won't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because he isn't offensive in the least. The only ways he could even be considered "stereotypical" is his name and accent.
Does it bother you that CowboyNeal is an offensive American stereotype?
They love throwing the word "armed" around, don't they?
Yeah, that White Separatist living peaceably with his family in the middle of nowhere "armed" with a shotgun was a threat to society. Along with his wife who was "armed" with a baby.
That is a completely different issue. This court ruling is (as you mentioned later) over the violation of a contract with users to provide internet access in exchange for a monthly fee. That's considered a big deal. An individual who does this can be prosecuted for fraud and end up in prison. Companies can lose millions in lawsuits and punitive fines.
It's possible that Comcast has some small print in the contract that allows them to do this; I'm not a Comcast customer, so I don't know for sure. If that's the case, the suit may fail. If there isn't any such clause and the court determines that they have the right to actively filter content in this way, it will become a HUGE deal because other ISPs will most likely start doing it too.
Also, about that first part... If you deliberately send traffic that interferes with someone's connection to another party, you're already breaking a law in most countries. That has been the case for well over a decade, and it's how DDoSers are prosecuted. An ISP might be able to argue that it's between them and their users (which brings it back into the realm of contract law), but a user who does it across the Internet can't claim that "he isn't breaking anything".
How would they even go about "fixing" that without doing something blatantly illegal like offering one race or gender better deals than another?
Can someone explain how the FCC is related to either of these issues...? Or how newspapers fall under FCC jurisdiction? Aren't they supposed to be limited to regulating telecommunication channels and maintaining "decency"?
Also, the ban the summary mentions is already in place according to the article. They're discussing whether to keep it there or remove it.
As peoples' lives get easier, they'll start to complain and fight over things that aren't as important. This is what allows their lives to keep getting easier. Go read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom if you want something of an extreme example.
At any rate, the GP post isn't complaining that the price of (and the presence of advertisements in) the game is a violation of his civil liberties or a crime against humanity. He isn't threatening the companies involved, or even picketing their offices. He's basically just saying it annoys him. I'm certain you've payed to see a crappy movie before and complained about it.
Companies take note of actions and products that make customers unhappy, and (if they're smart) they adjust their actions and products.
On another note, the particular case this article is about bothers me largely because it's recruiting for the surveillance arm of British Intelligence that's going to appear, and that's just creepy.
Your fight against bad puns in Slashdot posts looks like it's going to be a Battle of Evermore.
I cannot see any way that someone could make a defensible argument for a University forcing its students to use a particular search engine. It's just braindead. When the person making the decision is a director of (or anyone with a significant stake in) the company benefitting, it goes beyond being stupid and irresponsible and becomes corrupt.
How does IU pull this off, anyway? Do they actually block Google, Yahoo, etc?
No, Trademark Law also has a fair use doctrine, which includes using trademarks nominatively. Otherwise you'd see Coke and Pepsi suing each other whenever one of them put out an ad comparing the two.
The article mentions anti-Blackwater and anti-Exxon ads as being "permitted" by Google, but it doesn't say whether or not the companies have requested takedowns.
Either way, if their trademark use policy doesn't allow for nominative use, it's faulty and needs to be fixed. Plenty of companies run comparative ads (our product versus Competitor X's product), which generally require the other company to be identified.
You'd really have to define "murder", "free will", and "natural" to get a good answer.
"Murder" is incredibly murky. It's generally defined as "killing without sufficient cause", which means that it differs between countries, cultures, and individuals. Whether or not it requires "free will" depends on how people decide to define it (eg, requiring malicious intent and/or sanity).
Some people don't even believe "free will" exists, and many have an agnostic viewpoint about it. If it does exist in humans, I don't see any reason that animals wouldn't have it, or that it wouldn't be "natural".
"Natural" can also mean different things depending on who you're talking to. A Jew or Christian might define it as "intended by God". Someone else might define it as "existing in Nature apart from Mankind", and a third person might say that everything is natural, including all actions by humans.
No, you need to re-read his post. He was saying that whether something is "natural" has nothing to do with whether it's right.
For example, alligators sometimes eat their young. It's not "unnatural", but most people wouldn't be okay with other humans doing it.
Most animals don't wear pants. It's "unnatural", but most people wouldn't say it's immoral.
Anyway, the religious leaders who call homosexuality "unnatural" aren't talking about whether or not animals do it, because they know very well that they do. They believe that homosexuality in humans is encouraged by a supernatural source - temptation by Satan. They're talking about the spirits-and-witches type of "unnatural", not the pants kind. Of course, non-religious people who don't believe the first exists tend to assume they mean the second.
A celebrity gets death threats? NO WAI.
Murders over sexual preference are the exception here, not the legally-enforced norm. Contrary to what you seem to think, most gays don't get a constant stream of death threats and physical violence from Christians, even in rural conservative towns. People protest when they go on parade? Boo hoo.
Letting a unique species go kaput is a bad idea, especially if they're moderately intelligent (and primates). Psychologists, anthropologists, and people who study communication benefit a lot from these guys, and that translates into benefit for humans.
There are also emotional/ethical angles that you may or may not care about. Even if you're purely practical, though, there are reasons to keep gorillas around.
Do you think North Africa and Turkey were converted peacefully to Islam, and the Moors who held most of Spain for four hundred years were tourists? Anyway, what's really interesting is watching Israel and a portion of the Muslim world try to slaughter each other over land while trying to maintain a religious pretext for their followers. I wish everyone else would stop trying to interfere (and funding both sides with tax money, bleh).
What would you consider to be "owning up" to that? I don't see anyone who denies that many of them were forced out of their homes by military might; children are taught about that in elementary school (and again in middle school, and high school, and University...).
Do you consider Americans and Europeans responsible for the ones who were killed by naturally spreading smallpox? What about the ones who were killed by other natives with European weaponry? Most people aren't going to care much about the last two, and they'll understand that to some extent there are still living natives, so they WILL deny that Europeans/Americans "murdered the entire American continent".
The links aren't very complicated for legal documents.
The first document says that they reject the rejection. The second one says that they don't understand the examiner's explanation. And that's terrible.
How do you explain what makes something obvious when it's obvious?
It's incredibly easy, if not trivial, to design a site so that someone can save a set of data (name, address, CC info) and resubmit it along with another set of data (the order) in one click. There are first and second-year CS and CIS projects that are more complicated than that. Securing the site wouldn't be nearly as simple, but that's not the part that's covered by the patent.
Flash wasn't even installed on the computer I'm using right now, so I spent about thirty seconds looking for a "Go Straight to Article" link before realizing there wasn't one.
If you do get to the final article, though, there's a "Tell us what you think of our new look!" link. Amusingly, there's a html/txt version, but the only way to get to it is through the flash site (unless I missed something).
1. I didn't say that programmers can't be taught in high school. However, their chances of getting a capable teacher (in the formal sense, anyway) at that stage or earlier are slim to none. Their chances of getting damaged by an incapable teacher or a brain-dead office class are high.
2. Teaching a child to program doesn't keep them from learning how to read, write, or do math. In fact, I'd say it reinforces reading and math quite a bit.
Someone says this in every OLPC article.
The laptops aren't intended for places where there's a lack of food; they're intended to help build nations where roads, electricity, and food are taken care of.
Yes. Specifically, they need to know how to use computers. Most of the teachers don't really know how, and worse, most of them are certain that they do. The best way to teach them is to give them a simple one that isn't (readily) capable of playing flashy video games, music, and movies, but can be programmed.
This has to be done before they're thrown the high school "Computer 101" class where they're put through every circle of MS Office Hell. With very few exceptions, you can't start teaching someone to code in college; either they've already been doing it, or they'll never know how. The kids who took the Office classes in high school and think it made them computer savvy don't normally last past the first year in CS.
Feds must love going after suspects of crimes related to technology; they can justify seizing everything the person has for the flimsiest reason. If they're lucky, they even get to auction off the lot.
And why the hell are modchips illegal? If someone's committing sizable copyright infringement, you can already nail them for something. You don't need a redundant law that criminalizes the guy who wanted to see if his X-Box could run Linux.
That's more than two bucks a day even in the cheapest places, and rent+utilities is going to be at the VERY least $350 a month (meaning you're living in a trailer or coffin apartment). You also left out toiletries. I don't think living alone for an extended period of time under $700 a month is possible if no one is subsidizing you.
Of course, at $700 a month, you'll be at the mercy of your landlord, your employer, and any number of other people this entire time; if they screw you, you won't have the money to take legal action, and you'd be out of either a house or a job if you tried. Just getting a job will be difficult, especially since you won't have a car. Everyone will be suspicious of you because you'll look poor. Because you eat so poorly, you'll get sick often (meaning no work) and won't be able to afford medicine or a doctor.
All that, of course, is if you're single, and in a place with a very low cost-of-living for the US.
Often, moving costs money that they don't have, and it also means giving up whatever connections or advantages they have locally, in exchange for a chance things will be better.
If I got a knock on my door, opened it and saw a cop or two, I'd ask what was going on.
If I got a knock on my door, opened it and got rushed by several cops and newsmen with cameras, two things are going to rush through my mind:
1. I'm going to be accused of something very serious.
2. When they arrest me for whatever-it-is, that is going to be recorded, broadcasted, and probably viewed by everyone that I care about. Of course, it might not be, but considering everything else going on, I'm going to be expecting the worst.
One of the worst things about the situation is that playing along and staying quiet makes you look guilty to the people watching, even though it's the best choice when you're arrested (regardless of innocence or guilt). You're basically forced to incriminate yourself one way, or the other.
Cameras catching someone walk into a house is one thing; news cameras rolling alongside the police when they raid a house is something else entirely. Can we at least have empirical evidence that someone's guilty before throwing them out on national tv?
He's right that you would go to prison; it would just be for possessing the drugs instead of dealing them. He enticed you to sell him drugs that you might not have otherwise, but he didn't entice you into possessing them.
That's assuming he directly asked for the drugs, of course...Most of the time, they won't do that.