From my observations, though, for every 1 responsible hunter there seem to be 10 irresponsible.
I'm a hunter and while I might not agree with your numbers from my personal experience, I do agree that a great many irresponsible hunters exist. The causes of this are numerous, but in general, it doesn't matter too much. I'm a strong believer in freedom. I voted to keep dove hunting legal in my state, eve though I think 99.9% of people who hunt doves are complete and total jackasses. I think people have the right to be complete and total jackasses and make decisions I find appalling... provided those decisions are not infringing upon the safety and freedom of others. When hunters are unsafe, or destructive, that's where the law should step in, and realistically we have plenty of laws on the books to cover those cases(including most everything you list and I don't see anyone campaigning to change those laws), although they are often poorly enforced due to lack of manpower and concentration of man power on other things, like busting kids for smoking pot.
I will defend people's freedom to hunt, along with their freedom to marry people of the same sex, put pornography on the front of their house, dress as a nazi, worship Thor, and vote for Sarah Palin. That's because I think the freedom to do things I may or may not agree with is more important.
Yet people in Europe don't feel oppressed, and have high levels of personal happiness (as well as other factors like health) whilst generally having better levels of literacy and numeracy. Most importantly, European "preference for the safety of lawbreakers over personal self-defense" seems to allow us to have vastly lower crime rates than in the US, particularly much lower gun crime rates, and certainly vastly fewer accidental injuries and deaths from firearms.
Maybe you just don't know that much about your own continent? Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Norway, Austria, Serbia, Greece, Belgium, and many more all have very significant gun ownership rates, some coming close to the US. Those numbers do not correlate well with violent crime numbers, certainly not as well as other significant cultural factors (like wealth disparity) do.The idea that restricting gun ownership more than the US already does, would decrease deaths related to violent crime is not really supported by any studies I've seen.
"Both self and wife have used firearms in self-defense without firing them."
Really? That's pretty unfortunate. Here in Europe I've never been in such a situation where I'd have have had to do that, nor do I know anyone who has. Sounds like gun ownership helps ensure your country is a really nice place to live in.
Get off your high horse. There are lots of places in Europe, especially eastern Europe and the UK where you have a significant chance of being the victim of violent crime. Not all of us are wealthy and can afford to live in safe places. For you to assert with no evidence and in fact contrary to existing scientific evidence that ownership rates of guns are causative in making an area unsafe is simply unfounded and irresponsible. Please do your research before burdening us with your opinions.
If you have freedom why do corporations in the US have so much control both politically and personally? If you have guns as a deterrent to criminals, why is crime so high?
Who says we have more freedom? In some ways the US tends to have more while in others it has less than the average EU country. It's a trade off. As for why is crime so high, for the same reasons it is in other countries. We have strict (not free) laws prohibiting recreational use of drugs and treat addiction as a crime instead of an illness, giving rise to huge culture or organized crime and violence. We have very high and rising wealth disparity, much more so than anywhere in Europe (except maybe Bosnia-Hertogovania). We don't have sufficient social safety nets for the ill, addicted, and destitute. There are other factors, but those are the really big ones. The political control by large corporations almost certainly leads to more crime (in a causative way) than gun ownership laws.
If you feel safe, free, and secure as a result of gun ownership why do Americans report so much lower levels of personal happiness?
Are you actually implying gun ownership is a significant factor in determining overall happiness? Gun ownership in the US is more about traditions, politics, and personal defense, than happiness. Yeah after you just shot the guy trying to beat your neighbor to death you might feel happy that both you and your neighbor are alive, but that's not overall happiness. Rather you're more likely to feel traumatized and depressed, although maybe less so than if your neighbor was beaten to death in front of you and you did nothing. Having a tool to survive violent crime might keep us alive, but getting rid of the causes of violent crime is a lot better. But it's not an either/or proposition; in Norway nearly as many households own guns (by percentage) as in the US, but the violent crime rate there is orders of magnitude lower. Heck just look at gun ownership and gun laws and violent crime and other factors in the US, Canada, the UK, and Norway and try to find a correlation. I dare you. Frankly, I think you have to be ignorant to think gun ownership rates have a correlative and potentially causative relationship with violent crime. It's called the scientific method, look into it.
The questionnaire is starts on page 21 of the PDF. They all seem to be uncontrovertibly facts. I don't see that who the governor of California, or what the new minimum wage is can be "interpreted" to change the results of the study.
So how is this rally going to help restore sanity to political conversation?
One of the notable mentions in Mr. Stewart's speech was that the press is a big part of the problem in that they only cover the extreme and extremely nutty, since it makes for more entertaining news. What we have here is an opportunity to use humor to make more moderate and rational discussion of the issues palatable to the rating seeking mainstream press (well except maybe Fox). If you feel you are a moderate, well here's a great chance to go discuss the topic and maybe even mug for a camera or two while espousing your views. Who knows, maybe a lot of people will see it and relate and the press will realize a large part of the population still is interested in a rational discourse about the best ways to solve our problems. Maybe some politicians will discover the same and step away from some of the nutjob flamewar style rhetoric they've been using because they think it will get them more votes.
As an aside, while the press and politicians certainly try to polarize the public into two camps that can only scream at each other, I haven't found that it has worked as well as they make it seem in their coverage. Going to a middle-lower class bar and chatting with normal people often finds me discussing topics with people with very different views. For the most part, however, they're willing to discuss the issues reasonably and agree to disagree without any hysterics.
In 2009 the PEW research study asked individuals where they got their news then 23 factual questions about US politics and wold affairs. Below is the list of news sources, correlated with percentage of correct answers:
Major Newspaper web sites 54%
Colbert Report 54%
Daily Show 54%
Jim Lehrer News Hour 53%
National Public Radio 51%
OReilly Factor 51%
Rush Limbaugh 50%
News Magazines 48%
TV News Web Sites 44%
Local Daily Newspapers 43%
CNN 41%
Google News 41%
Yahoo News 41%
Network Evening News 38%
Online Blogs 37%
Local TV News 35%
Fox News 35%
Network Morning Shows 34%
From this can we pretty definitively site that the fans of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are more likely to be knowledgeable about what's going on in the world than Glen Beck;s rally attendees?
It is also illegal when your electronics spy on you. So in fact apple software breaks the law by taking a screen shot of the map application and storing it.
As far as I know, caching an image by the OS is not illegal in any jurisdiction. Taking an image and transmitting it to someone who is not the owner of the device, without their permission would be a problem in some jurisdictions. But then, that's not what anyone is claiming is happening.
. But if someone would prefer an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, a phone from Palm or Blackberry, I really don't care. The existence of competitors in no way reduces the utility of my own phone. In fact, the existence of competition probably leads to improvements for all of the phones.
It's true, competition is good for the market and consumers. It's bad for monopolists. The reason MS is so often derided here is that they are in the business of leveraging and creating monopolized markets, which is bad for the market and consumers. The reason people here don't want Windows Mobile to succeed is because MS will leverage their existing monopolies to make other phones have less utility, whether that is by making it harder for other phones to properly interact with Windows, by limiting the use of MSOffice formats on other phones, by making it hard to network other phones with exchange and the like, or by some other means. MS has been all about reducing the utility of potential competitors by artificially breaking them using their existing market power. So while simply releasing a phone does not hurt you, in the long term MS being successful in the space likely will. Moreover, if MS becomes too successful in the space, it's likely they will manage to kill or retard innovation in that market, getting themselves more money at the cost of progress. You'll forgive those of us then, that aren't wishing them well in their enterprise.
Printing costs money, as does reprinting when things change. The subject matter is fairly static, but learning methods are not. Changing the texts from multimedia e-books to flat files will cost. And then there's the ability to take tests and get and submit homework and communicate with the teachers, perform research online, and have access to a library of other works, use multimedia to present info in more four dimensional ways, etc. Really, why kill trees and give kids back pain while spending money on technology that's being phased out?
It would be great if classes all over the country used open-source courseware, but that's not what's happening here...not by a long shot.
This is a pilot program though. California does have e-books and are still creating more. This makes them an alternative going forward for licensing. I'm supposing that HMH is funding part of this as a way to try out and promote their own technology, but it will be hard for them to stick it to CA on licensing fees given the alternatives.
And how much is the cost of that electronic textbook's license per student? Probably less than $100, but definitely not free.
Free.
Schwarzenegger launched a program in 2009 to create digital textbooks in math and science owned by the state board of education. At the end of 2009 they had ten texts, including math through Calc 1 and 2.
...and the digital ones aren't free. I seem to recall they cost about the same as the paper version.
You might want to Google the "California Free Digital Textbook Initiative". They already have the digital textbooks, so no they aren't paying for anything other than keeping them up to date.
I am a web developer too and just by sticking to standards my pages tend to work flawlessly with Opera on the first try. Usually I find myself tweaking things for FireFox and IE to make it look normal.
Generally I see problems with IE 6, then other flavors of IE, then the occasional Safari, Chrome, Opera, or Firefox bug in equal numbers. But that doesn't mean it's smart to roll out a new high volume site without thoroughly testing, and for a beta it makes a ton of sense to start whitelisting browsers as they are tested then collecting feedback on those browsers while another team thoroughly tests each browser/version/OS version/major plugins before adding it to the whitelist.
I'm not seeing any technical reason for the block...
Do you see a technical reason for the block on mobile chrome? How about for mobile Safari? The point is this is Google's bread and butter, their main site and the second most visited site on the whole freaking internet! They're not going to just hope it works in browsers they haven't tested, so until they get around to properly testing the new beta feature fully on each browser and in each language, they're sticking with the old version. Can you not see how that makes more business sense to whitelist browsers and languages one at a time, rather then rolling it out to everyone and waiting to hear complaints from millions of people?
I have to wonder why Opera is not on the supported browser list.
It's not a "supported list" it's a "first beta tester's list". They're rolling out gradually by platform and country so they have time to test. No mobile platforms are using it yet, including Chrome on Android. No one in Portugal gets it either.
They wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms". I assume that means once they get around to testing the various versions of Opera, they'll start enabling it for Opera users as well. In the mean time, you'll just have to spoof your browser string, wait, or use a different browser to test this feature.
It really makes me think that there's a conspiracy out there to ensure Opera never becomes popular.
That's just what the government implanted nanobots altering your brain chemistry are programmed to make you think. Seriously, there's no conspiracy. Developers target the big platforms first, because that's where the users are. Opera is usually fine anyway, but falls into the category of "edge cases". As someone who does test some Web apps professionally, I can tell you, I set many of the priorities and Opera on Win XP is right about in the same category as Safari on Windows XP, near the bottom of the list.
Unlike webkit-based browsers, it supports MathML...
Actually, MathML was merged to the trunk of Webkit the middle of last month. So if you're running the latest, it's working, although when it will be in a particular browser depends upon the release schedule for that browser.
It also directly targeted WebGL support, whereas other vendors tried to sneak in proprietary standards before giving up.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Chrome and Safari both have extensive WebGL support at this point. They also support some additional functionality, like Apple's 3D CSS transforms, but calling them proprietary is misleading. The Firefox team has actually implemented some of them. "Proprietary" doesn't mean the same thing as "hard to implement on OS's that don't have most of the graphics work done for you". It's a published open standard.
But that doesn't make sense. Why does Google have marketshare?
Irrelevant. It's like asking why Tom has a rifle. Maybe he uses it for hunting. Maybe he's a cop. It doesn't matter. When you have power, you're prohibited from using that power in ways that harm society. Mike doesn't own a rifle and he can aim his hands at people and squeeze with his finger all he wants. When he buys and is holding a gun, the law sees it differently. It's not illegal to gain a monopoly (in general) just as it's not illegal to obtain a rifle (in general). But you are certainly prohibited from using either in certain ways.
...Google should be able to do whatever they want because customers can switch pretty easily.
But other companies can't. Other companies have to do business with Google because that' where the majority of the ad viewing public is. This gives Google a lot of power over other companies and "with power comes responsibility" or some such cliche... but legal responsibility.
It doesn't hurt consumers if Google messes with their search results because of these things.
It may very well do just that. If Google promotes some specific company with inferior products while making another vanish, most people will never know. They won't switch away from Google, but the free market in which other companies will have been undermined, with the cheapest, best product not winning. That's illegal, and was made so because we had a lot of problems in the past. The free market does not sort out it's own problems when monopolies are involved, which is why we wrote laws to prevent the free market from being broken in that way.
Other than those 3 cases, companies should be able to do whatever they want.
I'm betting you aren't an economist, because what you prescribe is an economic recipe for disaster. But don't take my word for it, read your history books. We tried that experiment and it caused huge amounts of human suffering and economic collapse.
This is a non-issue. People use google.com's website of their own volition.
That has little or nothing to do with it. If Google is ruled to have sufficient market share for selling advertising based on search, then that gives Google a lot of power, including power to distort other markets. The law says, if they do have that power, it's illegal for them to use it to gain, including by harming competitors in other markets. Legally speaking Google cannot rank search results any way they please. They can do it according to impartial rules, but if they have large enough share, they cannot rank certain companies lower as way to gain in other markets.
I seriously doubt, it is the case tat Google is breaking the law here. Likely this is just empty legal harassment, but hopefully the courts will determine that.
Can someone please explain this to me? What company or website am I searching for on google.com where searching for them does not bring up their website?
When you search for "Macaroni" what macaroni making company's website is ranked first among the many returned? If Google has overwhelming influence on the search market and they change their rankings so that it is a macaroni making company not owned by a company they compete with in another market, then that's against the law. It seems unlikely that is the case in any market, but hopefully the courts will determine the truth of the matter.
Fair enough, but consider who it was that established those "progressive" (usually a code word for socialist or communist, used by those without the courage to call themselves what they really are); the left.
You seem to be missing a noun in your sentence. And progressive isn't a code word in terms of taxation. It's a well established economic term referring to a progression of taxation rates that correlate to wealth or income rates.
It just took this long to get the tax rates as low as they are now, but they are still way too high.
That's a perfectly valid opinion, but my point was, why is it considered "conservative"? It's changing the status quo and if we're labeling things consistently should be "radical" if anything. Labeling it "conservative" only makes sense if "conservative" just means what republican candidates say they want (but never vote for I guess).
You'd have a hard time convincing me that income tax should have any brackets above 10%, or even that it should be progressive at all...
Nor was it my intention to do so. I would, however, recommend you read a bit about economic if you have the time and try to create a model of exactly what you think will happen to an economy without progressive taxation and to look at the economies of countries that have tried it in the past and the few asian/eastern european countries trying it now and see how well it has been working. Without sufficient progressiveness of taxation to counterbalance the wealth condensation principal, wealth only moves one direction until the system becomes unstable and collapses.
You're an excellent example of exactly what Mr. Singh speaks about at the end of his interview. Science isn't about finding support for your belief or absolute proof some other belief has no possibility of being correct. It's about using a formal, methodological process for deciding what to believe. I don't think anyone who has objectively decided who are credible experts in the field then looked into what the most supported scientific theories are, has not concluded that the scientific answer so far is that global climate change is happening at rapid and unexpected rates, most likely due to the influence of humans including gas emissions.
Sure you can go out and pick studies and people to attack or quote to support any opinion you've already formed, but that isn't science nor is it reasoned. And that's where you and the majority of our society seems to be failing.
Younger people are typically left-wing. As you get older, and if you're responsible, you'll begin swinging right... unless you're a career politician...
Usually what happens is people form opinions and rarely ever change them. Younger people for more liberal ideas and the definition of "liberal" and "conservative" (such as they are) changes over time so people so by the time a person who was liberal in their youth dies, the same opinions they've always held are now labelled as "conservative".
Or in short, old people mostly become set in their ways and don't like change, as they perceive it. Most people in general, have incorrect beliefs about what actually happened in the past and don't bother to research the truth. For example, the issue of taxation. Never in our history has taxation been as lacking in progressiveness (usually considered a liberal trait) as it is now. When "liberal" politicians try to move taxation to a more progressive level, like it was under Reagan or even Nixon, our society labels that as "liberal" and the opposite of conservative, even though it's actually moving things to be more like they used to be an always have been. Of course that's because the labels "liberal" and conservative" aren't about values, but about dividing society into two competing groups because it's the easiest way to get votes.
According to TFS, Android is the most like the desktop PC. Now I was under the impression from my Mac fanboi friends that the iPhone runs OS X with only a different GUI -- either they're wrong, or the proposed justification for why Android is less secure than iOS is wrong...
First, iOS is a variant of OS X, but with all the software signed, vetted(weakly), and in sandboxes as a requirement. Those are all optional and used for a small subset of software on the desktop version of OS X. By analogy, both the NSA document portal (running SELinux and strictly maintained) and my former company's remote development wiki are running Linux. That doesn't mean the OS is the important factor as to whether they are both secure or not.
The way Android handsets are most similar to security plagued desktop computers is that in both cases commercial companies are using an OS from another vendor and installing it on their commercial offerings without any pre-established method for end users to freely and easily keep their own OS up to date without help. The average person will buy a phone, install software, and if their hardware vendor does not push security updates upon them (some will for a period of time, some won't ever) their system will become out of date and vulnerable to many know exploits, just as Windows XP is today.
...Makes the whole argument fall to bits on inspection...
I don't think so. You've predicated your argument upon how close in lineage and application compatibility the OS is to existing desktop OS's. If you don't make said assumption the argument makes a lot of sense. Also the potential solutions begin to make more sense, ranging from finding hardware vendors that vet and maintain their users systems for the life of the handset to placing OS and security updates into the hands of either Google or an independent body that is concerned about end users more than short term cost cutting.
If a badly-written program can circumvent ASLR and DEP for itself, then aren't DEP and ASLR a bit useless?
In terms of preventing malware from running, no, they're an extra roadblock, but they are certainly not the hardest to overcome.
How does a badly-written, ancient program "bypass" such measures?
By linking the exploit to MS provided software included with Windows that does not use ASLR. From the article, "The gadgets come from Windows Live messenger dlls that are loaded by default on IE and have no ASLR flag,"
The Quicktime problem is that someone can get arbitrary code to try to execute on your box in the first place. That only happens because of the Quicktime flaw.
Are DEP and ASLR really that worthless that "old programs" compiled before they came along are allowed to do anything?
This isn't about old programs. This is the current version of Quicktime. This is about old code in the current version. Code that should never have shipped in the first place. But, until DEP and ASLR are applied to everything that is on a huge number of boxes and/or application level sandboxing or access control becomes robust DEP and ASLR are not very effective.
What's Quicktime doing differently to every other old, insecure program out there that makes it more of a risk?
The Quicktime part of this exploit isn't all that unusual. It's just run of the mill except for being the result of programmers' backdoor shortcut code that should never have gone out in the production release. The bypassing of ASLR in this case, was more interesting to me.
Say no more. This strawman argument means we don't need to explore this any further.
Do you even know what a strawman argument is? What argument did I make on behalf of Tea Partier's?
...anyone who tries from the starting gate to bust the two party oligopoly is destined to failure.
In the US no one has successfully challenged it on a wide scale since it became entrenched. In other countries similar situations have been resolved by grassroots movements. And on the local level Libertarians have certainly taken over some areas, if only in a few states. But how does it hurt people who oppose the two party system to actually oppose it politically as well?
Also, I don't see a reason for the democrats to enjoy support from the tea party people in this election cycle. They're just on the other side.
Um, yeah, all democrats are opposed to smaller government and don't fit with the supposed ideals of the Tea Party as well as Republicans? If the Tea Party wasn't just an extremist splinter of the Republican party and was actually working towards something novel it might be worthwhile, but it isn't. It's just the worst losers of the last election cycle, not anything else... as you seem to be demonstrating.
And "sane", "cohesive"? What do you expect here from a just born political movement?
Generally movements form around concrete ideals. That is, when they aren't dreamed up by PR firms and used to rally disparate people with disparate views around vague and unfocused goals. You don't see that it's aberrant for a people to join a political movement first, then for the movement to try to define what it is they're all coming out to support second?
Either it's a movement engineered by Madison Avenue, in which it's sane and cohesive even if it doesn't look it.
It's "sane" in that it is a useful tool for manipulating people via propaganda. That doesn't mean it actually has any substance or useful ideals or goals that make it a real movement.
Or it's an impromptu movement in which case it shouldn't be sane and cohesive until there's been some time for the people to deal with real world politics and well, reality, picking up some experience and pragmatism in the process.
I don't know of any other movement that gains momentum and followers without having a clear message and goal first. People generally join movements because they agree with the goal, then it builds. In this case, people have built a movement without defined goals, now it is being used to push politics in all sorts of ways... most of which don't seem to be benefiting the people very much at all.
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From my observations, though, for every 1 responsible hunter there seem to be 10 irresponsible.
I'm a hunter and while I might not agree with your numbers from my personal experience, I do agree that a great many irresponsible hunters exist. The causes of this are numerous, but in general, it doesn't matter too much. I'm a strong believer in freedom. I voted to keep dove hunting legal in my state, eve though I think 99.9% of people who hunt doves are complete and total jackasses. I think people have the right to be complete and total jackasses and make decisions I find appalling... provided those decisions are not infringing upon the safety and freedom of others. When hunters are unsafe, or destructive, that's where the law should step in, and realistically we have plenty of laws on the books to cover those cases(including most everything you list and I don't see anyone campaigning to change those laws), although they are often poorly enforced due to lack of manpower and concentration of man power on other things, like busting kids for smoking pot.
I will defend people's freedom to hunt, along with their freedom to marry people of the same sex, put pornography on the front of their house, dress as a nazi, worship Thor, and vote for Sarah Palin. That's because I think the freedom to do things I may or may not agree with is more important.
Yet people in Europe don't feel oppressed, and have high levels of personal happiness (as well as other factors like health) whilst generally having better levels of literacy and numeracy. Most importantly, European "preference for the safety of lawbreakers over personal self-defense" seems to allow us to have vastly lower crime rates than in the US, particularly much lower gun crime rates, and certainly vastly fewer accidental injuries and deaths from firearms.
Maybe you just don't know that much about your own continent? Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Norway, Austria, Serbia, Greece, Belgium, and many more all have very significant gun ownership rates, some coming close to the US. Those numbers do not correlate well with violent crime numbers, certainly not as well as other significant cultural factors (like wealth disparity) do.The idea that restricting gun ownership more than the US already does, would decrease deaths related to violent crime is not really supported by any studies I've seen.
"Both self and wife have used firearms in self-defense without firing them."
Really? That's pretty unfortunate. Here in Europe I've never been in such a situation where I'd have have had to do that, nor do I know anyone who has. Sounds like gun ownership helps ensure your country is a really nice place to live in.
Get off your high horse. There are lots of places in Europe, especially eastern Europe and the UK where you have a significant chance of being the victim of violent crime. Not all of us are wealthy and can afford to live in safe places. For you to assert with no evidence and in fact contrary to existing scientific evidence that ownership rates of guns are causative in making an area unsafe is simply unfounded and irresponsible. Please do your research before burdening us with your opinions.
If you have freedom why do corporations in the US have so much control both politically and personally? If you have guns as a deterrent to criminals, why is crime so high?
Who says we have more freedom? In some ways the US tends to have more while in others it has less than the average EU country. It's a trade off. As for why is crime so high, for the same reasons it is in other countries. We have strict (not free) laws prohibiting recreational use of drugs and treat addiction as a crime instead of an illness, giving rise to huge culture or organized crime and violence. We have very high and rising wealth disparity, much more so than anywhere in Europe (except maybe Bosnia-Hertogovania). We don't have sufficient social safety nets for the ill, addicted, and destitute. There are other factors, but those are the really big ones. The political control by large corporations almost certainly leads to more crime (in a causative way) than gun ownership laws.
If you feel safe, free, and secure as a result of gun ownership why do Americans report so much lower levels of personal happiness?
Are you actually implying gun ownership is a significant factor in determining overall happiness? Gun ownership in the US is more about traditions, politics, and personal defense, than happiness. Yeah after you just shot the guy trying to beat your neighbor to death you might feel happy that both you and your neighbor are alive, but that's not overall happiness. Rather you're more likely to feel traumatized and depressed, although maybe less so than if your neighbor was beaten to death in front of you and you did nothing. Having a tool to survive violent crime might keep us alive, but getting rid of the causes of violent crime is a lot better. But it's not an either/or proposition; in Norway nearly as many households own guns (by percentage) as in the US, but the violent crime rate there is orders of magnitude lower. Heck just look at gun ownership and gun laws and violent crime and other factors in the US, Canada, the UK, and Norway and try to find a correlation. I dare you. Frankly, I think you have to be ignorant to think gun ownership rates have a correlative and potentially causative relationship with violent crime. It's called the scientific method, look into it.
I would have to see the questions...
Take a look: http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/319.pdf
The questionnaire is starts on page 21 of the PDF. They all seem to be uncontrovertibly facts. I don't see that who the governor of California, or what the new minimum wage is can be "interpreted" to change the results of the study.
So how is this rally going to help restore sanity to political conversation?
One of the notable mentions in Mr. Stewart's speech was that the press is a big part of the problem in that they only cover the extreme and extremely nutty, since it makes for more entertaining news. What we have here is an opportunity to use humor to make more moderate and rational discussion of the issues palatable to the rating seeking mainstream press (well except maybe Fox). If you feel you are a moderate, well here's a great chance to go discuss the topic and maybe even mug for a camera or two while espousing your views. Who knows, maybe a lot of people will see it and relate and the press will realize a large part of the population still is interested in a rational discourse about the best ways to solve our problems. Maybe some politicians will discover the same and step away from some of the nutjob flamewar style rhetoric they've been using because they think it will get them more votes.
As an aside, while the press and politicians certainly try to polarize the public into two camps that can only scream at each other, I haven't found that it has worked as well as they make it seem in their coverage. Going to a middle-lower class bar and chatting with normal people often finds me discussing topics with people with very different views. For the most part, however, they're willing to discuss the issues reasonably and agree to disagree without any hysterics.
In 2009 the PEW research study asked individuals where they got their news then 23 factual questions about US politics and wold affairs. Below is the list of news sources, correlated with percentage of correct answers:
From this can we pretty definitively site that the fans of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are more likely to be knowledgeable about what's going on in the world than Glen Beck;s rally attendees?
It is also illegal when your electronics spy on you. So in fact apple software breaks the law by taking a screen shot of the map application and storing it.
As far as I know, caching an image by the OS is not illegal in any jurisdiction. Taking an image and transmitting it to someone who is not the owner of the device, without their permission would be a problem in some jurisdictions. But then, that's not what anyone is claiming is happening.
. But if someone would prefer an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, a phone from Palm or Blackberry, I really don't care. The existence of competitors in no way reduces the utility of my own phone. In fact, the existence of competition probably leads to improvements for all of the phones.
It's true, competition is good for the market and consumers. It's bad for monopolists. The reason MS is so often derided here is that they are in the business of leveraging and creating monopolized markets, which is bad for the market and consumers. The reason people here don't want Windows Mobile to succeed is because MS will leverage their existing monopolies to make other phones have less utility, whether that is by making it harder for other phones to properly interact with Windows, by limiting the use of MSOffice formats on other phones, by making it hard to network other phones with exchange and the like, or by some other means. MS has been all about reducing the utility of potential competitors by artificially breaking them using their existing market power. So while simply releasing a phone does not hurt you, in the long term MS being successful in the space likely will. Moreover, if MS becomes too successful in the space, it's likely they will manage to kill or retard innovation in that market, getting themselves more money at the cost of progress. You'll forgive those of us then, that aren't wishing them well in their enterprise.
just print those free ones, then.
Printing costs money, as does reprinting when things change. The subject matter is fairly static, but learning methods are not. Changing the texts from multimedia e-books to flat files will cost. And then there's the ability to take tests and get and submit homework and communicate with the teachers, perform research online, and have access to a library of other works, use multimedia to present info in more four dimensional ways, etc. Really, why kill trees and give kids back pain while spending money on technology that's being phased out?
It would be great if classes all over the country used open-source courseware, but that's not what's happening here...not by a long shot.
This is a pilot program though. California does have e-books and are still creating more. This makes them an alternative going forward for licensing. I'm supposing that HMH is funding part of this as a way to try out and promote their own technology, but it will be hard for them to stick it to CA on licensing fees given the alternatives.
And how much is the cost of that electronic textbook's license per student? Probably less than $100, but definitely not free.
Free.
Schwarzenegger launched a program in 2009 to create digital textbooks in math and science owned by the state board of education. At the end of 2009 they had ten texts, including math through Calc 1 and 2.
...and the digital ones aren't free. I seem to recall they cost about the same as the paper version.
You might want to Google the "California Free Digital Textbook Initiative". They already have the digital textbooks, so no they aren't paying for anything other than keeping them up to date.
I am a web developer too and just by sticking to standards my pages tend to work flawlessly with Opera on the first try. Usually I find myself tweaking things for FireFox and IE to make it look normal.
Generally I see problems with IE 6, then other flavors of IE, then the occasional Safari, Chrome, Opera, or Firefox bug in equal numbers. But that doesn't mean it's smart to roll out a new high volume site without thoroughly testing, and for a beta it makes a ton of sense to start whitelisting browsers as they are tested then collecting feedback on those browsers while another team thoroughly tests each browser/version/OS version/major plugins before adding it to the whitelist.
I'm not seeing any technical reason for the block...
Do you see a technical reason for the block on mobile chrome? How about for mobile Safari? The point is this is Google's bread and butter, their main site and the second most visited site on the whole freaking internet! They're not going to just hope it works in browsers they haven't tested, so until they get around to properly testing the new beta feature fully on each browser and in each language, they're sticking with the old version. Can you not see how that makes more business sense to whitelist browsers and languages one at a time, rather then rolling it out to everyone and waiting to hear complaints from millions of people?
I have to wonder why Opera is not on the supported browser list.
It's not a "supported list" it's a "first beta tester's list". They're rolling out gradually by platform and country so they have time to test. No mobile platforms are using it yet, including Chrome on Android. No one in Portugal gets it either.
They wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms". I assume that means once they get around to testing the various versions of Opera, they'll start enabling it for Opera users as well. In the mean time, you'll just have to spoof your browser string, wait, or use a different browser to test this feature.
It really makes me think that there's a conspiracy out there to ensure Opera never becomes popular.
That's just what the government implanted nanobots altering your brain chemistry are programmed to make you think. Seriously, there's no conspiracy. Developers target the big platforms first, because that's where the users are. Opera is usually fine anyway, but falls into the category of "edge cases". As someone who does test some Web apps professionally, I can tell you, I set many of the priorities and Opera on Win XP is right about in the same category as Safari on Windows XP, near the bottom of the list.
Repeat that while logged in, so I can damage your karma the same way you damaged mine.
Do you mean by making you look like an idiot so people modded you down? Or are you presuming they moderated your post?
And there's no way to turn-off the annoying "popup" images that Google now uses during Image searches.
At the bottom of the image search page is a link "Switch to basic version". You're on Slashdot, figure it out from there.
Unlike webkit-based browsers, it supports MathML...
Actually, MathML was merged to the trunk of Webkit the middle of last month. So if you're running the latest, it's working, although when it will be in a particular browser depends upon the release schedule for that browser.
It also directly targeted WebGL support, whereas other vendors tried to sneak in proprietary standards before giving up.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Chrome and Safari both have extensive WebGL support at this point. They also support some additional functionality, like Apple's 3D CSS transforms, but calling them proprietary is misleading. The Firefox team has actually implemented some of them. "Proprietary" doesn't mean the same thing as "hard to implement on OS's that don't have most of the graphics work done for you". It's a published open standard.
But that doesn't make sense. Why does Google have marketshare?
Irrelevant. It's like asking why Tom has a rifle. Maybe he uses it for hunting. Maybe he's a cop. It doesn't matter. When you have power, you're prohibited from using that power in ways that harm society. Mike doesn't own a rifle and he can aim his hands at people and squeeze with his finger all he wants. When he buys and is holding a gun, the law sees it differently. It's not illegal to gain a monopoly (in general) just as it's not illegal to obtain a rifle (in general). But you are certainly prohibited from using either in certain ways.
...Google should be able to do whatever they want because customers can switch pretty easily.
But other companies can't. Other companies have to do business with Google because that' where the majority of the ad viewing public is. This gives Google a lot of power over other companies and "with power comes responsibility" or some such cliche... but legal responsibility.
It doesn't hurt consumers if Google messes with their search results because of these things.
It may very well do just that. If Google promotes some specific company with inferior products while making another vanish, most people will never know. They won't switch away from Google, but the free market in which other companies will have been undermined, with the cheapest, best product not winning. That's illegal, and was made so because we had a lot of problems in the past. The free market does not sort out it's own problems when monopolies are involved, which is why we wrote laws to prevent the free market from being broken in that way.
Other than those 3 cases, companies should be able to do whatever they want.
I'm betting you aren't an economist, because what you prescribe is an economic recipe for disaster. But don't take my word for it, read your history books. We tried that experiment and it caused huge amounts of human suffering and economic collapse.
This is a non-issue. People use google.com's website of their own volition.
That has little or nothing to do with it. If Google is ruled to have sufficient market share for selling advertising based on search, then that gives Google a lot of power, including power to distort other markets. The law says, if they do have that power, it's illegal for them to use it to gain, including by harming competitors in other markets. Legally speaking Google cannot rank search results any way they please. They can do it according to impartial rules, but if they have large enough share, they cannot rank certain companies lower as way to gain in other markets.
I seriously doubt, it is the case tat Google is breaking the law here. Likely this is just empty legal harassment, but hopefully the courts will determine that.
Can someone please explain this to me? What company or website am I searching for on google.com where searching for them does not bring up their website?
When you search for "Macaroni" what macaroni making company's website is ranked first among the many returned? If Google has overwhelming influence on the search market and they change their rankings so that it is a macaroni making company not owned by a company they compete with in another market, then that's against the law. It seems unlikely that is the case in any market, but hopefully the courts will determine the truth of the matter.
Fair enough, but consider who it was that established those "progressive" (usually a code word for socialist or communist, used by those without the courage to call themselves what they really are); the left.
You seem to be missing a noun in your sentence. And progressive isn't a code word in terms of taxation. It's a well established economic term referring to a progression of taxation rates that correlate to wealth or income rates.
It just took this long to get the tax rates as low as they are now, but they are still way too high.
That's a perfectly valid opinion, but my point was, why is it considered "conservative"? It's changing the status quo and if we're labeling things consistently should be "radical" if anything. Labeling it "conservative" only makes sense if "conservative" just means what republican candidates say they want (but never vote for I guess).
You'd have a hard time convincing me that income tax should have any brackets above 10%, or even that it should be progressive at all...
Nor was it my intention to do so. I would, however, recommend you read a bit about economic if you have the time and try to create a model of exactly what you think will happen to an economy without progressive taxation and to look at the economies of countries that have tried it in the past and the few asian/eastern european countries trying it now and see how well it has been working. Without sufficient progressiveness of taxation to counterbalance the wealth condensation principal, wealth only moves one direction until the system becomes unstable and collapses.
You're an excellent example of exactly what Mr. Singh speaks about at the end of his interview. Science isn't about finding support for your belief or absolute proof some other belief has no possibility of being correct. It's about using a formal, methodological process for deciding what to believe. I don't think anyone who has objectively decided who are credible experts in the field then looked into what the most supported scientific theories are, has not concluded that the scientific answer so far is that global climate change is happening at rapid and unexpected rates, most likely due to the influence of humans including gas emissions.
Sure you can go out and pick studies and people to attack or quote to support any opinion you've already formed, but that isn't science nor is it reasoned. And that's where you and the majority of our society seems to be failing.
Younger people are typically left-wing. As you get older, and if you're responsible, you'll begin swinging right... unless you're a career politician...
Usually what happens is people form opinions and rarely ever change them. Younger people for more liberal ideas and the definition of "liberal" and "conservative" (such as they are) changes over time so people so by the time a person who was liberal in their youth dies, the same opinions they've always held are now labelled as "conservative".
Or in short, old people mostly become set in their ways and don't like change, as they perceive it. Most people in general, have incorrect beliefs about what actually happened in the past and don't bother to research the truth. For example, the issue of taxation. Never in our history has taxation been as lacking in progressiveness (usually considered a liberal trait) as it is now. When "liberal" politicians try to move taxation to a more progressive level, like it was under Reagan or even Nixon, our society labels that as "liberal" and the opposite of conservative, even though it's actually moving things to be more like they used to be an always have been. Of course that's because the labels "liberal" and conservative" aren't about values, but about dividing society into two competing groups because it's the easiest way to get votes.
According to TFS, Android is the most like the desktop PC. Now I was under the impression from my Mac fanboi friends that the iPhone runs OS X with only a different GUI -- either they're wrong, or the proposed justification for why Android is less secure than iOS is wrong...
First, iOS is a variant of OS X, but with all the software signed, vetted(weakly), and in sandboxes as a requirement. Those are all optional and used for a small subset of software on the desktop version of OS X. By analogy, both the NSA document portal (running SELinux and strictly maintained) and my former company's remote development wiki are running Linux. That doesn't mean the OS is the important factor as to whether they are both secure or not.
The way Android handsets are most similar to security plagued desktop computers is that in both cases commercial companies are using an OS from another vendor and installing it on their commercial offerings without any pre-established method for end users to freely and easily keep their own OS up to date without help. The average person will buy a phone, install software, and if their hardware vendor does not push security updates upon them (some will for a period of time, some won't ever) their system will become out of date and vulnerable to many know exploits, just as Windows XP is today.
...Makes the whole argument fall to bits on inspection...
I don't think so. You've predicated your argument upon how close in lineage and application compatibility the OS is to existing desktop OS's. If you don't make said assumption the argument makes a lot of sense. Also the potential solutions begin to make more sense, ranging from finding hardware vendors that vet and maintain their users systems for the life of the handset to placing OS and security updates into the hands of either Google or an independent body that is concerned about end users more than short term cost cutting.
If a badly-written program can circumvent ASLR and DEP for itself, then aren't DEP and ASLR a bit useless?
In terms of preventing malware from running, no, they're an extra roadblock, but they are certainly not the hardest to overcome.
How does a badly-written, ancient program "bypass" such measures?
By linking the exploit to MS provided software included with Windows that does not use ASLR. From the article, "The gadgets come from Windows Live messenger dlls that are loaded by default on IE and have no ASLR flag,"
The Quicktime problem is that someone can get arbitrary code to try to execute on your box in the first place. That only happens because of the Quicktime flaw.
Are DEP and ASLR really that worthless that "old programs" compiled before they came along are allowed to do anything?
This isn't about old programs. This is the current version of Quicktime. This is about old code in the current version. Code that should never have shipped in the first place. But, until DEP and ASLR are applied to everything that is on a huge number of boxes and/or application level sandboxing or access control becomes robust DEP and ASLR are not very effective.
What's Quicktime doing differently to every other old, insecure program out there that makes it more of a risk?
The Quicktime part of this exploit isn't all that unusual. It's just run of the mill except for being the result of programmers' backdoor shortcut code that should never have gone out in the production release. The bypassing of ASLR in this case, was more interesting to me.
Say no more. This strawman argument means we don't need to explore this any further.
Do you even know what a strawman argument is? What argument did I make on behalf of Tea Partier's?
...anyone who tries from the starting gate to bust the two party oligopoly is destined to failure.
In the US no one has successfully challenged it on a wide scale since it became entrenched. In other countries similar situations have been resolved by grassroots movements. And on the local level Libertarians have certainly taken over some areas, if only in a few states. But how does it hurt people who oppose the two party system to actually oppose it politically as well?
Also, I don't see a reason for the democrats to enjoy support from the tea party people in this election cycle. They're just on the other side.
Um, yeah, all democrats are opposed to smaller government and don't fit with the supposed ideals of the Tea Party as well as Republicans? If the Tea Party wasn't just an extremist splinter of the Republican party and was actually working towards something novel it might be worthwhile, but it isn't. It's just the worst losers of the last election cycle, not anything else... as you seem to be demonstrating.
And "sane", "cohesive"? What do you expect here from a just born political movement?
Generally movements form around concrete ideals. That is, when they aren't dreamed up by PR firms and used to rally disparate people with disparate views around vague and unfocused goals. You don't see that it's aberrant for a people to join a political movement first, then for the movement to try to define what it is they're all coming out to support second?
Either it's a movement engineered by Madison Avenue, in which it's sane and cohesive even if it doesn't look it.
It's "sane" in that it is a useful tool for manipulating people via propaganda. That doesn't mean it actually has any substance or useful ideals or goals that make it a real movement.
Or it's an impromptu movement in which case it shouldn't be sane and cohesive until there's been some time for the people to deal with real world politics and well, reality, picking up some experience and pragmatism in the process.
I don't know of any other movement that gains momentum and followers without having a clear message and goal first. People generally join movements because they agree with the goal, then it builds. In this case, people have built a movement without defined goals, now it is being used to push politics in all sorts of ways... most of which don't seem to be benefiting the people very much at all.