See my other post in this thread. The Preamble says that those people ordained and established the Constitution, and more importantly it says why. It doesn't imply the limitation of scope that you seem to be inferring.
Please read the entire Preamble, not just the opening phrase. Heck, don't just stop with the Preamble, either.
The role of "We the People" was to ordain and establish the Constitution. The Constitution is binding on the government alone. Citizens, and foreigners present in the country, are bound by the laws passed by the government, but the Constitution does not dictate to those individuals.
Your assumption that the Constitution is binding on U.S. citizens, and U.S. citizens alone, would mean (by extension) that Americans traveling in other countries would not have to observe the local laws, because they were not part of the "People" who set up the governments that passed the laws of those countries.
The fact that the "Yea" side had supporters from both parties (as well as independent Sanders), whereas the "Nay" side was all Republicans (the "D" next to Lieberman is meaningless in his case, he's a traitor to his party) means one thing: The "Nay" position is the ideologically-driven extreme position, and the "Yea" side is the norm.
The Republicans who voted Yea -- people like Hagel, Specter, Snowe -- are all known for their moderation when it comes to social and civil rights issues. Even right-of-center Dems like Clinton and Feinstein voted Yea.
So why didn't the global temperature spiral out of control and turn Earth into a second Venus, the last time this vicious cycle got started?
One might as well ask why the voltage output of an oscillator doesn't grow tremendously large. Processes saturate. There's a finite amount of carbon on the planet, for instance, and only a fraction of that is readily released into the atmosphere, through natural processes, during a warming of several millennia. A higher fraction of the carbon might be released through unnatural processes.
An oscillator isn't a bad analogy for this discussion, by the way. It's a feedback circuit, much simpler than climate feedback, yet if you apply the same intuition that people are applying to the CO2 lag, you come up with an unexpected result. Look at the voltage and current across a capacitor in the oscillator's tank circuit. Current leads voltage. Does that mean that applying a voltage across an uncharged capacitor won't produce a current through the capacitor?
Far be it from me to boost AOL, but if you want to talk about percentages, maybe 99% were first exposed to the Internet via AOL, and 0.9% via Compuserve before that. That leaves what, 0.09% due to MS and 0.01% due to everything else?
Of course, any percentages whose significant digits are all nines should be viewed with great suspicion anyway.
"Atom" comes from Greek and literally means unsplittable. Of course, you can split electrons away from the atom (ionization), thereby making it a misnomer. And we get atomic energy by splitting the nucleus of a heavy atom. To be completely literal-minded about it, the electron and the positron are the true atoms in positronium.
Hmm, I wonder if all the odd versions of DOS are better? This would be the opposite of World Wars and Star Trek movies, where the even ones are better.
OK, first you say Carter pushed a communist program on the El Salvadoran people; now you say the program was to bolster the anti-communist government. Which is it?
OK, what the heck are you talking about? El Salvador has never been communist, though there was a leftist movement (FMLN) that engaged in civil war with the repressive right-wing government during the 1980s. The US government was in support of the government, not the rebels, during the years of Carter, Reagan, and Bush.
Re:Good binoculars, star charts, and a red flashli
on
Entry-Level Astronomy?
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· Score: 1
I agree. 15 years ago, I was doing astronomy with binoculars. With a good map and semi-dark suburban skies, you can find Neptune in a pair of 10x50s.
Now I have a Meade ETX-125 (can't remember the price, probably about $900 to $1K). Skies aren't as dark because the city I live in has grown a lot, and Neptune would elude my binoculars in these conditions (though I haven't tried in a long time). But with the more powerful scope, I can see objects down around magnitude 9 or 10, like the Ring Nebula, even under these skies. And of course, with the electronic guidance, finding those objects is even easier (feels like cheating, actually).
Liberalism isn't about having heart, at all. Liberalism is opposition to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism leaves the thinking to others, so liberalism really is more about brains than hearts.
The text of the patent says that Figure 7D (linked in the story post) is just part of an embodiment of the patent. Shutting off access to the account is just a policy; it's not what is being patented here.
That said, I have two real problems with the patent. One is that there seems to be a lot of prior art here; the other is that everything discussed in the patent is pretty obvious stuff. A patent like this should never have been granted.
Fair use is not actually a defined right. It is, instead, an"affirmative defense" against a charge of copyright violation. That's a difference, however subtle. That is to say, IF you are charged with violation, you may assert FU as a defense.
And yet that does nothing to change his assertion that copyright is not a right. Think about it: copyright is granted by the government. The government does not grant rights, it grants privileges. Rights are there already.
Saying fair use is an affirmative defense is perfectly consistent with the concept of "copyright as privilege".
So, even though I can't be assured that I observed something, because it could have been implanted in my memory, it's still a fact to me? I don't think you're being consistent.
Again, I agree with you, except I would call them assumptions or beliefs, not facts.
It sounds like we agree on everything except definitions. But I think my definition of "fact" is useful; I don't find yours particularly useful.
Total Recall is about how your past observations may have been implanted, and thus, your memory may be an illusion.
I know. But that doesn't affect the point I'm trying to make, the difference between "fact" and "faith". Of course, in real life as in movies, memory can be unreliable, but I don't have to have "faith" in memory to regard key things in my memory as facts -- be they the names of friends, my login password, my bank PIN, where I parked my car if I manage to remember that. These are factual matters.
Your examples aren't entirely consistent with that definition, then. There are people you could loan money to and have a very high level of confidence that you'd get it back.
I wasn't attempting a precise definition, just a partial one. And "confidence" is synonymous with faith, so I stand by the example, rather than the definition.
What you seem to be implying by "fact" is something that you not only have a good reason for believing is true, but you also have a good reason for believing it will always be true, under any circumstances, and that's mainly grounded in that you've never seen a contradictory observation, and neither has anyone else that you know -- well, anyone credible. (And of course, you define who's credible by who has observations that mostly match up with your own.)
Yes, that's correct but not quite complete. If I were to amend my previous weak definition, it would be that a fact is something that is known to a sufficient certainty, that it is unnecessary and possibly counterproductive to take into account the possibility that it is wrong.
It's not a fact that the person I loaned money to three times, and who repaid me every time, will do so the next time. He or she may turn out to be a con artist. Same thing with the stock market. Over the past century plus, the US stock market has had good annual returns, on average. So I have faith that it will continue to deliver good returns, on average, probably for the rest of my life. Enough to invest substantial part of my assets in it, even though it may have some short term episodes of significant loss. But it isn't fact, because the entire basis of our economy could be upset at some future point, for any number of reasons, and those long term prospects could be erased for the foreseeable future. Knowing the result of lending money or investing is uncertain, I might hedge my bets in one way or another. Not hedging, or in the case of philosophical questions, not tempering faith with skepticism, leads from religion to dogma, or from investing to gambling. Hedging one's bets with the stock market improves the chances that your portfolio will survive the next depression. But what possible basis might I have for hedging my bets with gravity? If I did, it would more than likely interfere with my chances for success, not enhance them ("The bullet might not drop this time, so perhaps I shouldn't aim above the target"). And I think that's what differentiates fact from faith.
Funny, in my earlier post I considered the same sort of amendments as you suggested for my arrow example, but I decided against it because I figured you'd get the point without them.
I appreciate your devil's advocacy here; I enjoy the same thing from time to time.
In this case, the only true fact here is that you observed something.
I disagree, but only because I don't have such a uselessly rigid definition of "fact". With your rigid definition, how can it be a fact that I observed something, if you don't have absolute certainty that I did?
You can count me as a skeptic, but I'm also a utilitarian. Our facts may not be perfectly accurate or completely verifiable, but if we want to survive, they're all we have to act on. We just need some means for separating useful facts (useful because they are accurate enough to help us) from myth, speculation, or wishful thinking. That means is what we call science.
The whole Total Recall thing -- good movie, by the way -- is equally useless from a practical standpoint. The only value in picking apart every single observation and concluding that, well, it might just be an illusion, is the entertainment value. No scientific value, and no practical value in surviving another day in our lives.
Outside the realm of mathematics, there are plenty of useful facts that are purely observational, purely products of inductive reasoning. We know, for example, that corn is edible and can be planted and harvested. We know that a mixture of gasoline and air, when ignited in the combustion chamber of a properly designed engine, will produce useful kinetic energy. And we know that if we shoot an arrow into the air, it will fall to earth, even if we know not where. We expect these things never to change, but that expectation isn't what I call faith.
If I loan money to somebody, my expectation of being repaid is faith. If I invest in the stock market, my expectation of a good return is faith. When people pray or worship, and expect it to make a difference in the world, that is faith. When Shrub invaded Iraq, and many people expected a cakewalk and flower greetings for the invading army, that was faith. The thing about faith is that it is so easily misplaced, and that's what distinguishes faith from fact (whether the fact is obtained deductively or inductively). If we have reasonable grounds for accepting something as true, and not just our natural tendency to trust that our belief will be validated someday, then I count it as fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Support for civil liberties is not an ideology. It's an obligation.
See my other post in this thread. The Preamble says that those people ordained and established the Constitution, and more importantly it says why. It doesn't imply the limitation of scope that you seem to be inferring.
Please read the entire Preamble, not just the opening phrase. Heck, don't just stop with the Preamble, either.
The role of "We the People" was to ordain and establish the Constitution. The Constitution is binding on the government alone. Citizens, and foreigners present in the country, are bound by the laws passed by the government, but the Constitution does not dictate to those individuals.
Your assumption that the Constitution is binding on U.S. citizens, and U.S. citizens alone, would mean (by extension) that Americans traveling in other countries would not have to observe the local laws, because they were not part of the "People" who set up the governments that passed the laws of those countries.
The fact that the "Yea" side had supporters from both parties (as well as independent Sanders), whereas the "Nay" side was all Republicans (the "D" next to Lieberman is meaningless in his case, he's a traitor to his party) means one thing: The "Nay" position is the ideologically-driven extreme position, and the "Yea" side is the norm.
The Republicans who voted Yea -- people like Hagel, Specter, Snowe -- are all known for their moderation when it comes to social and civil rights issues. Even right-of-center Dems like Clinton and Feinstein voted Yea.
which may be the case since I didn't RTFA
You should be modded Funny.
So why didn't the global temperature spiral out of control and turn Earth into a second Venus, the last time this vicious cycle got started?
One might as well ask why the voltage output of an oscillator doesn't grow tremendously large. Processes saturate. There's a finite amount of carbon on the planet, for instance, and only a fraction of that is readily released into the atmosphere, through natural processes, during a warming of several millennia. A higher fraction of the carbon might be released through unnatural processes.
An oscillator isn't a bad analogy for this discussion, by the way. It's a feedback circuit, much simpler than climate feedback, yet if you apply the same intuition that people are applying to the CO2 lag, you come up with an unexpected result. Look at the voltage and current across a capacitor in the oscillator's tank circuit. Current leads voltage. Does that mean that applying a voltage across an uncharged capacitor won't produce a current through the capacitor?
Maybe here's your answer. Secure, yet auditable.
Far be it from me to boost AOL, but if you want to talk about percentages, maybe 99% were first exposed to the Internet via AOL, and 0.9% via Compuserve before that. That leaves what, 0.09% due to MS and 0.01% due to everything else?
Of course, any percentages whose significant digits are all nines should be viewed with great suspicion anyway.
"Atom" comes from Greek and literally means unsplittable. Of course, you can split electrons away from the atom (ionization), thereby making it a misnomer. And we get atomic energy by splitting the nucleus of a heavy atom. To be completely literal-minded about it, the electron and the positron are the true atoms in positronium.
Whaddaya expect, after WW Five there wasn't anyone left on the planet but mutants and zombies.
Hmm, I wonder if all the odd versions of DOS are better? This would be the opposite of World Wars and Star Trek movies, where the even ones are better.
OK, first you say Carter pushed a communist program on the El Salvadoran people; now you say the program was to bolster the anti-communist government. Which is it?
OK, what the heck are you talking about? El Salvador has never been communist, though there was a leftist movement (FMLN) that engaged in civil war with the repressive right-wing government during the 1980s. The US government was in support of the government, not the rebels, during the years of Carter, Reagan, and Bush.
I agree. 15 years ago, I was doing astronomy with binoculars. With a good map and semi-dark suburban skies, you can find Neptune in a pair of 10x50s.
Now I have a Meade ETX-125 (can't remember the price, probably about $900 to $1K). Skies aren't as dark because the city I live in has grown a lot, and Neptune would elude my binoculars in these conditions (though I haven't tried in a long time). But with the more powerful scope, I can see objects down around magnitude 9 or 10, like the Ring Nebula, even under these skies. And of course, with the electronic guidance, finding those objects is even easier (feels like cheating, actually).
Liberalism isn't about having heart, at all. Liberalism is opposition to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism leaves the thinking to others, so liberalism really is more about brains than hearts.
The text of the patent says that Figure 7D (linked in the story post) is just part of an embodiment of the patent. Shutting off access to the account is just a policy; it's not what is being patented here.
That said, I have two real problems with the patent. One is that there seems to be a lot of prior art here; the other is that everything discussed in the patent is pretty obvious stuff. A patent like this should never have been granted.
At first I read your post as part of a Steely Dan lyric: "Now you're going to do me everything / you dd baby!"
Fair use is not actually a defined right. It is, instead, an"affirmative defense" against a charge of copyright violation. That's a difference, however subtle. That is to say, IF you are charged with violation, you may assert FU as a defense.
And yet that does nothing to change his assertion that copyright is not a right. Think about it: copyright is granted by the government. The government does not grant rights, it grants privileges. Rights are there already.
Saying fair use is an affirmative defense is perfectly consistent with the concept of "copyright as privilege".
So, any sarcasm distinguishable from offtopic is not sufficiently advanced?
I'm not aware of Edison lobbying to extend the patent term every time his light bulb patent was set to expire, however.
And copyright protection is not a producer right either then.
Agreed. I said essentially the same thing three weeks ago.
Well, it's not a fact, to me. It is to you.
So, even though I can't be assured that I observed something, because it could have been implanted in my memory, it's still a fact to me? I don't think you're being consistent.
Again, I agree with you, except I would call them assumptions or beliefs, not facts.
It sounds like we agree on everything except definitions. But I think my definition of "fact" is useful; I don't find yours particularly useful.
Total Recall is about how your past observations may have been implanted, and thus, your memory may be an illusion.
I know. But that doesn't affect the point I'm trying to make, the difference between "fact" and "faith". Of course, in real life as in movies, memory can be unreliable, but I don't have to have "faith" in memory to regard key things in my memory as facts -- be they the names of friends, my login password, my bank PIN, where I parked my car if I manage to remember that. These are factual matters.
Your examples aren't entirely consistent with that definition, then. There are people you could loan money to and have a very high level of confidence that you'd get it back.
I wasn't attempting a precise definition, just a partial one. And "confidence" is synonymous with faith, so I stand by the example, rather than the definition.
What you seem to be implying by "fact" is something that you not only have a good reason for believing is true, but you also have a good reason for believing it will always be true, under any circumstances, and that's mainly grounded in that you've never seen a contradictory observation, and neither has anyone else that you know -- well, anyone credible. (And of course, you define who's credible by who has observations that mostly match up with your own.)
Yes, that's correct but not quite complete. If I were to amend my previous weak definition, it would be that a fact is something that is known to a sufficient certainty, that it is unnecessary and possibly counterproductive to take into account the possibility that it is wrong.
It's not a fact that the person I loaned money to three times, and who repaid me every time, will do so the next time. He or she may turn out to be a con artist. Same thing with the stock market. Over the past century plus, the US stock market has had good annual returns, on average. So I have faith that it will continue to deliver good returns, on average, probably for the rest of my life. Enough to invest substantial part of my assets in it, even though it may have some short term episodes of significant loss. But it isn't fact, because the entire basis of our economy could be upset at some future point, for any number of reasons, and those long term prospects could be erased for the foreseeable future. Knowing the result of lending money or investing is uncertain, I might hedge my bets in one way or another. Not hedging, or in the case of philosophical questions, not tempering faith with skepticism, leads from religion to dogma, or from investing to gambling. Hedging one's bets with the stock market improves the chances that your portfolio will survive the next depression. But what possible basis might I have for hedging my bets with gravity? If I did, it would more than likely interfere with my chances for success, not enhance them ("The bullet might not drop this time, so perhaps I shouldn't aim above the target"). And I think that's what differentiates fact from faith.
Funny, in my earlier post I considered the same sort of amendments as you suggested for my arrow example, but I decided against it because I figured you'd get the point without them.
I appreciate your devil's advocacy here; I enjoy the same thing from time to time.
What does the DOJ have to do with Internet regulation? I could see this as a Dept. of Commerce thing, but Justice?
I remember SNL had a spoof of part 2, called "Alienses".
In this case, the only true fact here is that you observed something.
I disagree, but only because I don't have such a uselessly rigid definition of "fact". With your rigid definition, how can it be a fact that I observed something, if you don't have absolute certainty that I did?
You can count me as a skeptic, but I'm also a utilitarian. Our facts may not be perfectly accurate or completely verifiable, but if we want to survive, they're all we have to act on. We just need some means for separating useful facts (useful because they are accurate enough to help us) from myth, speculation, or wishful thinking. That means is what we call science.
The whole Total Recall thing -- good movie, by the way -- is equally useless from a practical standpoint. The only value in picking apart every single observation and concluding that, well, it might just be an illusion, is the entertainment value. No scientific value, and no practical value in surviving another day in our lives.
Outside the realm of mathematics, there are plenty of useful facts that are purely observational, purely products of inductive reasoning. We know, for example, that corn is edible and can be planted and harvested. We know that a mixture of gasoline and air, when ignited in the combustion chamber of a properly designed engine, will produce useful kinetic energy. And we know that if we shoot an arrow into the air, it will fall to earth, even if we know not where. We expect these things never to change, but that expectation isn't what I call faith.
If I loan money to somebody, my expectation of being repaid is faith. If I invest in the stock market, my expectation of a good return is faith. When people pray or worship, and expect it to make a difference in the world, that is faith. When Shrub invaded Iraq, and many people expected a cakewalk and flower greetings for the invading army, that was faith. The thing about faith is that it is so easily misplaced, and that's what distinguishes faith from fact (whether the fact is obtained deductively or inductively). If we have reasonable grounds for accepting something as true, and not just our natural tendency to trust that our belief will be validated someday, then I count it as fact.