Uproar? true, some polls have shown widespread opposition to the current bill, but in many (most?) cases the polls don't distinguish the reason for the disapproval. one may oppose the bill because it goes to far, or because it doesn't go far enough.
for example here is a poll (admitedly rather old at this point) showing 57% of Americans in favor of a public option.
I don't really disagree with you, but I think you're over-simplifying things. All newspapers, even the big ones, have been flailing about trying to remain "relevant".
But, as folks up-thread have mentioned, newspapers still sometimes do good local work. Consider the series by the L.A. Times a few months ago on the abuses at MLK Hospital. Brutal stuff, and I'm sure it took weeks of hard work to put together.
Is it necessary that the L.A. Times itself do such reporting? Of course not. But, and here's the kicker, while I read the articles and thought they were excellent pieces which should (and did) lead to some sort of action, I paid nothing at all to read the story. I probably would, in theory anyway, pay for good local journalism, but at this point I wouldn't know who to pay. I can't say that it'd be a terrible thing if all current media companies vanished, but what's to replace them?
Yes, that's from a very important and still widely followed tax case, decided in 1935. But then there's also this:
From its inception, the economic substance doctrine has been used to prevent taxpayers from subverting the legislative purpose of the tax code by engaging in transactions that are fictitious or lack economic reality simply to reap a tax benefit. Transactions are considered to have economic substance when imbued with tax-independent considerations, and not shaped solely by tax-avoidance features.
That's from a 2007 opinion of the Court of Federal Claims. So while it's true that you can arrange your affairs to minimize your taxes, you can't engage in pure fictions or shams. The difference is hard to tell, and certainly the insane and embarrassing complexity of the tax code has something to do with it.
This is only half the story. In the same way that you have no "right" to play the game the way you want, the casino has no "right" to even operate in the first place. Witness the number of states (fewer now, of course) where gambling is entirely illegal.
The fact is that casinos operate in a highly regulated environment. They cannot even offer games to customers without getting approval from a government body. The government could, if it wanted to, prevent the casino from booting card counters.
So why don't they? Because, as someone mentioned above, this is all a make-believe "problem". Far far more people think they can count cards than actually can, and it's just not worth it for the casino to trouble with the few who may, possibly, be getting a slight advantage over them. Better for them to let that one guy win a bit, tell all his buddies about his success, and then take their money, and probably his too!
Would you like to see a fully compliant XML parser, written in a few hundred lines?
does it
auto-detect character encodings?
correctly expand internal entity declarations?
report namespaces correctly?
correctly handle xml:space?
default attribute values from a DTD?
handle parameter entities?
handle external parsed entities?
correctly reject characters outside the legal range?
(some of these are cheating a bit on my part -- namespaces are not strictly part of XML 1.0)
In general, I agree with you that it's possible to write a fully-compliant parser in a few days. It is far more complicated than most people seem to think, though, and fully compliant XML is not isomorphic to s-expressions.
> Once a developer is capable of realizing that much, they can
> form a picture of how hard writing an XML parser will be. (Easy)
That's the main point of well-formedness. XML is *designed* to be easy to parse.
> I could probably make a simple, fully-compliant, slow parser in a
> day or two, with a functional programming language like Haskell...
A *day* or two?
I could write an XML parser in Perl in an hour, if I didn't mind re-inventing something that already exists on the CPAN.
You people don't know what the fuck you're talking about. XML parsing is not easy. What is easy is writing a parser for a half-assed subset of whatever parts of XML you feel like you need.
The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely.
you avoided his point, which was not that the universe will end but that it began.
"the age of X" generally means not "how long until X dies or ceases to exist", but "how long since X was born or came into existence".
The apparent directionality of entropy over time might imply (in a general, imprecise way) that entropy had a minimum value at some point, that this point was the "beginning of the universe", and (so it's said) that a beginning with no antecedent implies some sort of creative force, i.e. god.
Ignoring the sementics, what exactly is the difference?
It's impossible to give a simple answer, since there are a whole range of different things generally called "regulations". About the only common factor is that regulations are not issued by Congress, but by some sort of "executive" body like the FCC, USDA, DOT, etc.
So, in the strictest and least interesting sense regulations are not laws by definition, since they are not passed by the one body capable of passing laws, the Congress. Many regulations are more like "serious recommendations", in the sense that it's the executive's statement of the sort of behavior that they find acceptable, given the current state of the law. If you happened to disagree with the executive's interpretation, you could go to court and show (a somewhat uphill battle. but not impossible) that the agency had exceeded its authority, or had not followed the right procedure in adopting the regulation, or whatever. You are not bound to follow the regulations, but if you don't you may have a long and expensive fight on your hands. Still, agencies do loose these battles sometimes.
Sometimes, though, Congress will say something like "The IRS will now make rules relating to deductions for home expenses," and the IRS will go ahead and make those rules. These are still regulations, but because Congress has straight out said that it wants the IRS to make rules of that sort, they are almost like laws. I.e. there's very little chance (although still some chance) that a court would step in and invalidate the regulation.
What about Berman v. Parker, 1954? That involved a condemnation for the redevelopment of a "blighted" part of town, and SCOTUS had no problem with it. Same with Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 1984, where the intended result was to take property away from one owner and give it to another. Or rather, the intent was to break up a landholding oligarchy, and that was perfectly OK with the Supreme Court.
No, you may not like Kelo but it certainly wasn't new law.
The IRS works. The American tax code is a bloated mess, but that's Congress' fault, not the IRS's. Considering what they're up against, the IRS works miracles.
Wickard was the high water mark of Commerce Clause expansion. Since then (it's been over 60 years, you know) SCOTUS has backed way off, and has given the 10th Amendment its teeth back. See e.g. U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), which called Wickard "perhaps the most far reaching example of Commerce Clause authority over intrastate activity".
MS may not be able to write off donations to schools. When Singer (the sewing machine company) tried this, the IRS denied the deduction, saying that Singer wasn't motivated by charity but by the hope that the students learning on their machines would be more likely to buy Singer machines in the future. The case went as far as the Court of Federal Claims, which agreed with the IRS: no deduction.
As for shopping malls. I believe it still stands that they can ask any patron to leave. If you do not, you can be arrested for tresspassing.
Did you check the link in the parent site? The one about a shopping mall not being able to give the boot to leafleters? The point was that it's not always as clear as the Slashdot crowd appears to think it is. Private property can take on the character of a public space, and constitutional restrictions can be applied against the owners.
Having said that, Flickr wouldn't appear to be even close to meeting this standard.
I was sitting next to a couple of Paul supporters at lunch a few weeks ago, in a big cafeteria style joint. They were talking loudly among themselves about Paul, and about his lack of support. The claim, apparently made in all honesty, was that there were only two reasons for not supporting Paul: you haven't heard about him, or you're too dumb to understand.
I was struck at the time by this, not just in itself but because it seemed to be consistent with my encounters with friends of mine who happen to be Paul supporters. He seems to attract people who are absolutely certain that they've got the answers to everything, which seems to me a dangerous thing in a leader.
As a document designer/producer, that may be true. But as a consumer you may not be in a position to make that decision. At any rate, DTDs being part of the XML spec, a general purpose parser must be prepared to deal with DTDs, even outside the realm of validation.
And there's no point to lookup the DTD. Fetching DTDs is only useful for validating an unknown document.
No, DTDs are used for more than validation. Attribute defaults and entity declarations are two instances that come to mind. You may need those even if you don't plan on validating the instance.
Of course, this doesn't mean that HTML user agents should be fetching DTDs off the web repeatedly, for all the obvious reasons.
Why do you even need to validate it, unless you're a validator? Just try to parse it - it probably won't validate anyway, and you'll have to do either do it in some kind of quirks mode or just break. If you can parse it correctly, does it matter if it validates? If you can't parse it, does it matter if it validates?
It's not quite that simple. The DTD isn't just used for validation. It's also may contain attribute defaults and entity declarations, without which you may not be able to make sense of the document.
Still, on the whole it is idiotic. The "Public Identifier" can be used to identify the document as HTML (or whatever) and a cached DTD can/should be used. My point is just that in general, there are uses of the DTD beyond validation.
The bug detailing this behavior has been changed from WONTFIX to REPOPENED. A look at the comments associated with the bug makes me think that perhaps the eclipse team will indeed fix this.
I worked briefly at a physics lab in Japan. It was some years ago, so it's possible that I'm misremembering, but as I recall they were very fond of macs. At any rate, they had plenty of the little things around.
While this is true, the "amount" of creativity (whatever that means) required in order for copyright to adhere is very small. Even the most meagre creativity is enough. It's also true that certain aspects of the coupons ("10% off everything!!!") are so common as to be unprotectable, since you basically can't make a coupon w/o saying something of that sort. But the "creativity bar" is very low, and my guess (which is exactly what this is) is that the coupons would be protected.
The beaches of the entire US are "open" to the public, according to the Public Trust Doctrine. The trick is: where does the "beach" end and private property start, and what guarantees are there that the public can get to the public beach? States are all over the map on these questions.
Oregon has one of the most generous (from the public's perspective") access regimes. Hawaii also. The law is very favorable to permitting access, even across private land. Other places (New Jersey and New Hampshire and two that I'm aware of), not so much.
It it not true that the owner of property can set any conditions they like restraining speech of people invited onto the property. In short, it is not true, as has been repeatedly asserted above, that the First Amendment does not apply at all to private parties.
I used emacs "professionally" as my main development editor for, mmmmm, about 15 years. It's funny: perhaps my first encounter with an "integrated" development environment was an emacs mode which prettified gdb. ISTR a Sun tool as well whicih used emacs as its editor widget. I wrote C, C++, perl, and finally Java, and although I'd try IDEs as they came out they never quite fit the bill for me. This included earlier versions of Eclipse.
But I've finally made the switch to eclipse, and while I miss (or have yet to discover equivalents for) many of the shortcuts, I don't think I'd recommend emacs for Java development any longer. And in the Windows world, I don't think emacs can be seriously considered as an alternative to something like VS.
For text munging, on the other hand, I continue to use emacs. There are, off the top of my head, three features that I've never seen anywhere else. The first is "kill-rectangle". I sometimes am given a lage log file with say 50k lines like
[THE DATE IS HERE] [CODE DESCRIPTOR] [LOG LEVEL] [OTHER CRAP] --- interesting bits. [THE DATE IS HERE] [CODE DESCRIPTOR] [LOG LEVEL] [OTHER CRAP] --- more interesting bits.
I want to do some automated munging on the interesting bits, but it's inconvenient having all the other crap. picture the entire contents of the file: the other crap forms a "rectangle" in the buffer. I can easily select and kill that rectangle, leaving a buffer with only the interesting bits.
of course, I could also write a regexp to filter out the crap, but why bother? I can kill-rectangle in about 5 keystrokes.
Another cool feature is "adaptive fill" mode. This was very handy back when I composed my mail in emacs. It's a line splitting algorithm which is sensitive to "list" indentation. Slashdot wil eat my formatting, but the idea is that after a line break in what emacs thinks is a list element (or any other block of text that it thinks should be intended differently) it'll indent the line "correctly". It's a minor thing, but it's strange how I miss it.
Finally, macros. Again, I have a 50k line file, and I want to apply some operation to each line. But I may not know at first exactly what operation I want to perform. So I start recording a macro, take a whack at the first line. Repeat, until I get the operation down right. Then I can apply the macro say 10 times, just to be sure. Then I run it through the rest of the buffer. I'm sure vim (etc.) have a similar feature, but at this point the emacs keystrokes are so embedded in my fingers that I do this w/o having to think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uproar? true, some polls have shown widespread opposition to the current bill, but in many (most?) cases the polls don't distinguish the reason for the disapproval. one may oppose the bill because it goes to far, or because it doesn't go far enough. for example here is a poll (admitedly rather old at this point) showing 57% of Americans in favor of a public option.
I don't really disagree with you, but I think you're over-simplifying things. All newspapers, even the big ones, have been flailing about trying to remain "relevant".
But, as folks up-thread have mentioned, newspapers still sometimes do good local work. Consider the series by the L.A. Times a few months ago on the abuses at MLK Hospital. Brutal stuff, and I'm sure it took weeks of hard work to put together.
Is it necessary that the L.A. Times itself do such reporting? Of course not. But, and here's the kicker, while I read the articles and thought they were excellent pieces which should (and did) lead to some sort of action, I paid nothing at all to read the story. I probably would, in theory anyway, pay for good local journalism, but at this point I wouldn't know who to pay. I can't say that it'd be a terrible thing if all current media companies vanished, but what's to replace them?
Yes, that's from a very important and still widely followed tax case, decided in 1935. But then there's also this:
From its inception, the economic substance doctrine has been used to prevent taxpayers from subverting the legislative purpose of the tax code by engaging in transactions that are fictitious or lack economic reality simply to reap a tax benefit. Transactions are considered to have economic substance when imbued with tax-independent considerations, and not shaped solely by tax-avoidance features.
That's from a 2007 opinion of the Court of Federal Claims. So while it's true that you can arrange your affairs to minimize your taxes, you can't engage in pure fictions or shams. The difference is hard to tell, and certainly the insane and embarrassing complexity of the tax code has something to do with it.
This is only half the story. In the same way that you have no "right" to play the game the way you want, the casino has no "right" to even operate in the first place. Witness the number of states (fewer now, of course) where gambling is entirely illegal.
The fact is that casinos operate in a highly regulated environment. They cannot even offer games to customers without getting approval from a government body. The government could, if it wanted to, prevent the casino from booting card counters.
So why don't they? Because, as someone mentioned above, this is all a make-believe "problem". Far far more people think they can count cards than actually can, and it's just not worth it for the casino to trouble with the few who may, possibly, be getting a slight advantage over them. Better for them to let that one guy win a bit, tell all his buddies about his success, and then take their money, and probably his too!
Would you like to see a fully compliant XML parser, written in a few hundred lines?
does it
(some of these are cheating a bit on my part -- namespaces are not strictly part of XML 1.0)
In general, I agree with you that it's possible to write a fully-compliant parser in a few days. It is far more complicated than most people seem to think, though, and fully compliant XML is not isomorphic to s-expressions.
> Once a developer is capable of realizing that much, they can > form a picture of how hard writing an XML parser will be. (Easy) That's the main point of well-formedness. XML is *designed* to be easy to parse. > I could probably make a simple, fully-compliant, slow parser in a > day or two, with a functional programming language like Haskell... A *day* or two? I could write an XML parser in Perl in an hour, if I didn't mind re-inventing something that already exists on the CPAN.
You people don't know what the fuck you're talking about. XML parsing is not easy. What is easy is writing a parser for a half-assed subset of whatever parts of XML you feel like you need.
The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely.
you avoided his point, which was not that the universe will end but that it began.
"the age of X" generally means not "how long until X dies or ceases to exist", but "how long since X was born or came into existence".
The apparent directionality of entropy over time might imply (in a general, imprecise way) that entropy had a minimum value at some point, that this point was the "beginning of the universe", and (so it's said) that a beginning with no antecedent implies some sort of creative force, i.e. god.
It's impossible to give a simple answer, since there are a whole range of different things generally called "regulations". About the only common factor is that regulations are not issued by Congress, but by some sort of "executive" body like the FCC, USDA, DOT, etc.
So, in the strictest and least interesting sense regulations are not laws by definition, since they are not passed by the one body capable of passing laws, the Congress. Many regulations are more like "serious recommendations", in the sense that it's the executive's statement of the sort of behavior that they find acceptable, given the current state of the law. If you happened to disagree with the executive's interpretation, you could go to court and show (a somewhat uphill battle. but not impossible) that the agency had exceeded its authority, or had not followed the right procedure in adopting the regulation, or whatever. You are not bound to follow the regulations, but if you don't you may have a long and expensive fight on your hands. Still, agencies do loose these battles sometimes.
Sometimes, though, Congress will say something like "The IRS will now make rules relating to deductions for home expenses," and the IRS will go ahead and make those rules. These are still regulations, but because Congress has straight out said that it wants the IRS to make rules of that sort, they are almost like laws. I.e. there's very little chance (although still some chance) that a court would step in and invalidate the regulation.
I see you study and raise you 63% of doctors support a mixed public/private option.
so which is it?
What about Berman v. Parker, 1954? That involved a condemnation for the redevelopment of a "blighted" part of town, and SCOTUS had no problem with it. Same with Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 1984, where the intended result was to take property away from one owner and give it to another. Or rather, the intent was to break up a landholding oligarchy, and that was perfectly OK with the Supreme Court.
No, you may not like Kelo but it certainly wasn't new law.
The IRS works. The American tax code is a bloated mess, but that's Congress' fault, not the IRS's. Considering what they're up against, the IRS works miracles.
Wickard was the high water mark of Commerce Clause expansion. Since then (it's been over 60 years, you know) SCOTUS has backed way off, and has given the 10th Amendment its teeth back. See e.g. U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), which called Wickard "perhaps the most far reaching example of Commerce Clause authority over intrastate activity".
MS may not be able to write off donations to schools. When Singer (the sewing machine company) tried this, the IRS denied the deduction, saying that Singer wasn't motivated by charity but by the hope that the students learning on their machines would be more likely to buy Singer machines in the future. The case went as far as the Court of Federal Claims, which agreed with the IRS: no deduction.
As for shopping malls. I believe it still stands that they can ask any patron to leave. If you do not, you can be arrested for tresspassing.
Did you check the link in the parent site? The one about a shopping mall not being able to give the boot to leafleters? The point was that it's not always as clear as the Slashdot crowd appears to think it is. Private property can take on the character of a public space, and constitutional restrictions can be applied against the owners.
Having said that, Flickr wouldn't appear to be even close to meeting this standard.
I was sitting next to a couple of Paul supporters at lunch a few weeks ago, in a big cafeteria style joint. They were talking loudly among themselves about Paul, and about his lack of support. The claim, apparently made in all honesty, was that there were only two reasons for not supporting Paul: you haven't heard about him, or you're too dumb to understand.
I was struck at the time by this, not just in itself but because it seemed to be consistent with my encounters with friends of mine who happen to be Paul supporters. He seems to attract people who are absolutely certain that they've got the answers to everything, which seems to me a dangerous thing in a leader.
As a document designer/producer, that may be true. But as a consumer you may not be in a position to make that decision. At any rate, DTDs being part of the XML spec, a general purpose parser must be prepared to deal with DTDs, even outside the realm of validation.
No, DTDs are used for more than validation. Attribute defaults and entity declarations are two instances that come to mind. You may need those even if you don't plan on validating the instance.
Of course, this doesn't mean that HTML user agents should be fetching DTDs off the web repeatedly, for all the obvious reasons.
It's not quite that simple. The DTD isn't just used for validation. It's also may contain attribute defaults and entity declarations, without which you may not be able to make sense of the document.
Still, on the whole it is idiotic. The "Public Identifier" can be used to identify the document as HTML (or whatever) and a cached DTD can/should be used. My point is just that in general, there are uses of the DTD beyond validation.
The bug detailing this behavior has been changed from WONTFIX to REPOPENED. A look at the comments associated with the bug makes me think that perhaps the eclipse team will indeed fix this.
See here
I worked briefly at a physics lab in Japan. It was some years ago, so it's possible that I'm misremembering, but as I recall they were very fond of macs. At any rate, they had plenty of the little things around.
While this is true, the "amount" of creativity (whatever that means) required in order for copyright to adhere is very small. Even the most meagre creativity is enough. It's also true that certain aspects of the coupons ("10% off everything!!!") are so common as to be unprotectable, since you basically can't make a coupon w/o saying something of that sort. But the "creativity bar" is very low, and my guess (which is exactly what this is) is that the coupons would be protected.
The beaches of the entire US are "open" to the public, according to the Public Trust Doctrine. The trick is: where does the "beach" end and private property start, and what guarantees are there that the public can get to the public beach? States are all over the map on these questions.
Oregon has one of the most generous (from the public's perspective") access regimes. Hawaii also. The law is very favorable to permitting access, even across private land. Other places (New Jersey and New Hampshire and two that I'm aware of), not so much.
See SCOTUS, in Pruneyard
But I've finally made the switch to eclipse, and while I miss (or have yet to discover equivalents for) many of the shortcuts, I don't think I'd recommend emacs for Java development any longer. And in the Windows world, I don't think emacs can be seriously considered as an alternative to something like VS.
For text munging, on the other hand, I continue to use emacs. There are, off the top of my head, three features that I've never seen anywhere else. The first is "kill-rectangle". I sometimes am given a lage log file with say 50k lines like
I want to do some automated munging on the interesting bits, but it's inconvenient having all the other crap. picture the entire contents of the file: the other crap forms a "rectangle" in the buffer. I can easily select and kill that rectangle, leaving a buffer with only the interesting bits.of course, I could also write a regexp to filter out the crap, but why bother? I can kill-rectangle in about 5 keystrokes.
Another cool feature is "adaptive fill" mode. This was very handy back when I composed my mail in emacs. It's a line splitting algorithm which is sensitive to "list" indentation. Slashdot wil eat my formatting, but the idea is that after a line break in what emacs thinks is a list element (or any other block of text that it thinks should be intended differently) it'll indent the line "correctly". It's a minor thing, but it's strange how I miss it.
Finally, macros. Again, I have a 50k line file, and I want to apply some operation to each line. But I may not know at first exactly what operation I want to perform. So I start recording a macro, take a whack at the first line. Repeat, until I get the operation down right. Then I can apply the macro say 10 times, just to be sure. Then I run it through the rest of the buffer. I'm sure vim (etc.) have a similar feature, but at this point the emacs keystrokes are so embedded in my fingers that I do this w/o having to think about it.
That method can't be used, but see Float.floatToRawIntBits.