...but I don't think he has the legal understanding and I don't think he understands why the content industry is pushing DRM (hint: it's not because of piracy).
That is why I take Torvald's world on any programming issue related to the kernel and support RMS's position when it comes to freedom, content industry issues. While RMS may not be legally trained, he realises that and has a team that is competent in legal matters. Of course Linus is entitled to his opinion on these issues, but I believe that his take on it is harmful because it's the "famous people slightly connected to the issue seeming to be expert on the issue to the public" syndrome. He is no more competent in this case than the celebrities ridiculed by the bbc in a previous article.
Most nem fogom megmagyarázni hogy mi a francot jelent amit írtam, legyen elég annyi hogy 4 évvel tovább élek mint ti, haha.
I kind of like the idea of living 4 years longer. Does the effect stack with more than 2 languages? If that's the case then it ist Zeit für ein neu schprache gelearnen.
Sometimes the idea that my english/american is most likely better (barring accent, but could be trained) than half of the people speaking it as a native language scares me.
Apparently, a lot of feed readers and services (e.g. Firefox and Google) don't bother following links to dtd files, or may have their own cached versions available. But others -- Microsoft's Live.com RSS feed gadget is one example -- do check for the files, and refuse to load feeds if the referenced dtd file can't be located.
Microsoft software at it's best again. Don't look suprised
Please note, that I used the word metaphore. In this, the clock is similar to a work of art, it has meaning. It calls attention to an important issue by using a metaphore and you're asking where is the mathematical fact or measured reality in it?
The problem it points to does have mathematical facts and is consistent with reality aka it exists. It is a mathematical facts that governments around the world have enough nukes that it can display all civilisation on earth and potentially wipe out the human race. It is a mathematical fact that more and more governments are capable of using nuclear weapons. It is part of reality that those who aquired nukes recently are not the sanest people around, like Kim Il - if we can believe the reports about the test they carried out which I'm not sure I do.
It's a metaphore to illustrate the danger posed by nuclear weapons. It is not supposed to be a "threat level"-o-meter, but basically an indicator of what changes are worth, that we're never gotten further than 17 minutes on the scale of 12 hours of shades of nuclear weapon danger since the clock was built.
It's kind of like illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours and the appearence of humanity and civilization as the last minute/second whatever...
So let's assume two reasonable worst case scenarios about this case.
1. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer, but she intended it for her own eyes only, messed up and the kids has seen that she viewed porn. She lied to the kids covering up the situation...
reasonable reaction:...and laughter/ridiculing of the teacher ensues, the story is told behind the teacher's back for a few weeks and then everyone forgets about it.
2. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer and was showing it to kids because of pedophile intent or as an inappropriate sex-ed.
reasonable reaction: teacher fired, putting her on a list that she can't work with kids anymore. I find the sexual offenders list an overkill though. Disclosing the location of people like this teacher, not letting her go near schools or some such restrictions are an overkill, she is just not fit to be a teacher. She's 40 years old, must have been teaching for a long while now, so you just have to dig in her past to check whether something associated with paedophilia turns up. If yeah, hell sentence her criminally, but if not then there isn't a cause for stronger measures than firing her and not allowing her to work as a teacher anymore.
Criminal prosecution should only come if there is actual harm to children, and viewing a couple of porn pictures is not harm, it's just bad conduct on the part of the teacher, so it should mean loss of job.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke, even more so the 40 year sentence. What's next, execution for giving "the finger"? When I was 12 I was looking for serial keys on astalavista if my memory serves me correct when a porn popup popped up and it displayed a monster cock. The IT teacher walked up behind me and just told me to turn that off and walked away again. Other kids were directly looking at porn when the teacher wasn't looking and noone made a big deal about it. If the teacher's screen would have flooded with porn popups we would have been laughing at it. I'm not from the USA so I don't get the whole obsession with trying to hide sex. I also received proper sexual education from the school, so I can't complain.
Your post only displays ignorance about proportions, scientific consensus and about what a fact is.
Proportions: something is imminent: 100 thousand years.
Scientific consensus: not what you read in mainstream press.
Fact: not your opinion. For example, when you included the sentence about concern as a "fact", you clearly didn't bother to adjust this "fact", with the next two sentences which read as: "Although there was a cooling trend then, it should be realised that climate scientists were perfectly well aware that predictions based on this trend was not possible - because the trend was poorly studied and not understood. However in the popular press the possibility of cooling was reported generally without the caveats present in the scientific reports.". Your next quotation is from glacial-epoch experts. Do you know the timeframe they operate in? You conveniently also omit the explanation of the quotation included in the wikipedia article, in which it details that "Unless there were impacts from future human activity, they thought that serious cooling "must be expected within the next few millennia or even centuries"; but many other scientists doubted these conclusions", which demonstrates that a. scientist pretty much had the correct position in the 70s AND they were aware of the fact that their information was limited, so no strong conclusions can be drawn, but only educated guessing can be done.
This theory gained temporary popular attention due to press reporting following a better understanding of ice age cycles and a temporary downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The theory never had strong scientific support. At present, the dominant theory amongst scientists is that Earth as a whole is not cooling, but rather is in a period of global warming attributed to human activity
Bold tags were added by me. Otherwise, I'm quite tired of the global cooling anecdote. It's just not true.
To be honest, the verdict is out only on ignorance. The results and facts can be found, it's just that the press and most people don't bother, or worse, display their ignorance about the current scientific knowledge and declare the issue undecided.
On the other hand, apart from your post I also agree with Richard Dawkins' line of thought that moderate christians are those that allow fundamentalist to exist by supplying the ideological background.
which would remain stable were it not for our interference.
But of course, it would! On a human scale. The entire point with global warming is, that while naturally occuring changes do happen, they don't treaten us because we can adapt over the long periods of time the change is happening, but with global warming the paradox is that 40-50 years is FAST even compared to human standards, because 40-50 years mean reorganizing the economy on large scale, which can't be done if the issue of GW is ignored in the sense of doing nothing about it.
Personally, I never subscribe to the "we can't possibly understand it" argument. That also explains my deeply atheistic beliefs.
And what do these laws do? They only affect law abiding citizens. The criminals, by definition, do NOT follow the law, and they are the ones that do the killing with guns....against largely un-protected law abiding citizens.
I didn't elaborate on this in GP, but this is also a cultural issue. The idea is to pull out most of the guns from general circulation. The mafia and like will always have the heavy weaponry, but that is not the segment responsible for most crimes. There are degrees of criminality. For example, in Europe I can make the reasonable assumption that a burglar won't have a gun with him and that assumption will most likely be true in the vast majority of cases. In the vast majority of homes, there are no guns in the EU. Now, even if you set aside the fact that even by the american statistics that people trying to defend their homes with guns are more likely to have their guns used against them than the other way around, so even if you ignore that, the point is that getting rid of the gun culture does make ordinary criminals much less likely to have guns. Once again, not talking about mafia and high profile cases, but those of the most common kind.
As for the police not being there for protection, that is a cultural issue aswell, the police is what you (taxpayers) expect them to be. You just need to expect had enough. I'd also note that the right of killing someone who enters your house is very out of the line too. The burglar might be a criminal, but you can't be a judge and executioner in one person. If much less guns were in circulation, the burglar would just run away at the first sight of trouble like they do around here.
(Btw, statistics is a nice game to play with - as far as I know, neither lax gun laws nor the death penalty had a positive effect on crime reduction.)
First of all, if you thought the OP was the only thing he will post, then you're wrong.
5 people will point out where exactly is the original paper mistaken, then
4 people will write a post about how dare those 5 people challenge a peer reviewed journal,
the original 5 plus 15 new people will point out the flaws in that argument,
10 people will post "in soviet russia you suck vacuum" jokes, of which the first 6 will be modded redundant and the last 4 modded up to anything between +2 and +5 funny,
2 people will play grammar nazi and correct mistakes while making much bigger errors in their post and subsequently 7 others will invoke Godwin,
6 people will be actually people with physics jobs commenting with informative posts, but they'll be reduced to oblivion by 34 people in well written but totally clueless posts that will get modded up to +5,
24 other people will post only loosely connected nonsense to the topic,
1 person (me) admits that he only included the previous item to taunt grammar nazis with a proper use for loosely,
and finally 2 trolls will post the best posts, in a tie, in the entire discussion by complete accident
What doesn't set well with us, no matter how statistically insignificant overall, is people dying in large numbers. What we don't tolerate, no matter how statistically miniscule, is people intentionally killing other Americans, even still feeling so strongly after having lived in our own society and culture for months or years.
I remember reading the statistics about the homicide rate comparing the USA to the UK. In a year the USA produced 10k bodies while the UK around 100 gun related deaths as far as I remember. Even if you adjust for population, it is still a magnitude difference between the two countries.
If you'd care about people dying in large numbers you would have introduced sensible gun control laws and stopped going along with the fantasy that some people with guns would form a militia in case of a bad government, and instead awakened to the reality that people are dieing en masse due to negligent circulation of lethal weaponry and that deconstructing the gun culture would go a long way in reducing crime, while wouldn't matter a bit in deposing an opressive government.
There is another issue which I assume will be hot buttons for a lot of you here, so I'll try to tread carefully. The military is overly glorified in the USA. A soldier is a person, who using advanced weaponry and training, under the command of the military, kills people, in defense of the interests of the given military, goverment or country. Let me give you an example of this. The news that the 3000th american soldier has been killed, and everytime an american soldier gets killed, the news receives great attention. While the death of any person is cause for sorrow, why is that a small (in comparison) number of deaths of people who voluntarily signed up for potentially life-threatening jobs is particularly interesting, while an astonishingly huge number (in comparison - 655k according to the most credible source we have) of Iraqi people dead doesn't even make it into the news? The Iraqi didn't sign up for this and the overwhelming majority of them weren't soldiers or military trained men, but children, women and old people. If a soldier gets killed, I have respect for him, but it is an occupational hazard. I feel immensely more sorrow for the dead civilians and as far as I'm concerned, the common iraqi man who is probably fucking tired of the whole shooting war that makes up his life deserves a good deal more respect than an american soldier dieing in Iraq ever will.
I know that/. is the place to turn to for legal advice, so I'll shoot.
Can someone sign a contract which says that the signatory party forfeits the right of knowing the terms which under some terms of another contract applies to him? Even if the government wants you to sign?
Because, as far as I see, this is the Gilmore case about. I know that traveling by air is generally not thought of as a contract, but it is one, called providing a service. Normally, when you want to use a private company's service, you get to know the terms. "You get this phone now for free, but only if you sign up for 2 years with our company" or "buy two and save 30%!". The fact is, Gilmore only wanted to know the terms: "so I'm only allowed to fly if I show my id? Then point me to the AUP" - paraphrased. Then the private company sends Gilmore to hell and throws him out of the building.
They are entirely within their rights to do that, they are a private business after all under no obligation to serve a customer or tell him anything, but as every private company knows, they make money from customers, so they don't generally do this.
The problem is that the private company didn't say this, but that they were following secret rules issued by the Transportation Security Administration, which is a government entity. The problem with this is, that when a private company makes rules, its called terms of employment, company policy or such, but when the goverment makes rules, it's called law or regulation. There is a tricky thing with laws, that ignorance of them does not nullify their force. It works the other way around though too: it is not a law which you can't know. A regulation is basically the same, it doesn't apply to you when you can't know about it. A job at a company works the same way, you get to know the terms of employment and for example they can't fire you for arbitary made up reasons, because that would be a breach of contract if the terms of employment doesn't include that. As far as I know, no private company or government has the power to add arbritary sections to a contract.
So, if a private company does things, you can just never use them again. When the government makes rules, you cannot escape them, you are bound by them - only if you know about them.
I'd add that it doesn't matter what the given regulation is. The regulation could have been that you have to look into a camera or raise your left arm or anything. It doesn't matter because it has nothing to do with the case. The case is about whether you need to comply with rules, regulations, laws, call them whatever to wish, whose existence is only indicated by taking someone's word for it and reading the actually law/regulation is forbidden. I believe that is in violation of your country's constitution.
I think there is a loophole which might be an argument to get around my chain of reasoning. "But this regulation is only a routing order, it only tells the airline employee, who clearly can know about the regulation, what to do with the guy. If he doesn't have an ID, the employee directs the passenger towards the longer security check". The problem with that argument is that then the passenger shouldn't even know about this internal requirement, instead of a public notice that the government mandates the ID check and that you can't fly without it. Secondly, which is more serious, if the passanger asks about the different treatment and the rationale behind it, the answer that it is an internal governmental regulation that forces the employee to perform a more thorough security check is only grounds for just that, the employee performing a more thorough check, not grounds for denying the passenger a chance to fly altogether, because that would be the government making a secret regulation which a passenger would need to adhere to in order to fly. If the government wants ID checks, fine. Make a law or public regulation about it. Until then, the government restricts their citizens illegally from performing the legal activity of flight by air, which public usage conditions they satisfied.
So I'll ask once again. Do you think that the government is free to break the rules layed down by the constitution or law?
Slashdot Mirror
...but I don't think he has the legal understanding and I don't think he understands why the content industry is pushing DRM (hint: it's not because of piracy).
That is why I take Torvald's world on any programming issue related to the kernel and support RMS's position when it comes to freedom, content industry issues. While RMS may not be legally trained, he realises that and has a team that is competent in legal matters. Of course Linus is entitled to his opinion on these issues, but I believe that his take on it is harmful because it's the "famous people slightly connected to the issue seeming to be expert on the issue to the public" syndrome. He is no more competent in this case than the celebrities ridiculed by the bbc in a previous article.
Most nem fogom megmagyarázni hogy mi a francot jelent amit írtam, legyen elég annyi hogy 4 évvel tovább élek mint ti, haha.
I kind of like the idea of living 4 years longer. Does the effect stack with more than 2 languages? If that's the case then it ist Zeit für ein neu schprache gelearnen.
Sometimes the idea that my english/american is most likely better (barring accent, but could be trained) than half of the people speaking it as a native language scares me.
But is it plausible to convict a 16y old for child pornography?
Next they'll be prosecuting young mothers breastfeeding their kids on sexual molestation charges...
While browsing this new firehose stuff, I've seen this story submitted around ten times...
Just make sure to hit the right spot on the flamethrower suit.
A picture can be found here of this revolutionary new technology.
Oh btw, I looked in my email archive and this post is what I'm talking about, in reply to another user's post in this story.
I sent Taco a bugreport once when one of my posts went missing here.
I hit the back button in FF and took a screenshot to prove my point, this guy could have done the same.
Users are stupid!
[Foot icon here]
Please note, that I used the word metaphore. In this, the clock is similar to a work of art, it has meaning. It calls attention to an important issue by using a metaphore and you're asking where is the mathematical fact or measured reality in it?
The problem it points to does have mathematical facts and is consistent with reality aka it exists. It is a mathematical facts that governments around the world have enough nukes that it can display all civilisation on earth and potentially wipe out the human race. It is a mathematical fact that more and more governments are capable of using nuclear weapons. It is part of reality that those who aquired nukes recently are not the sanest people around, like Kim Il - if we can believe the reports about the test they carried out which I'm not sure I do.
It's a metaphore to illustrate the danger posed by nuclear weapons. It is not supposed to be a "threat level"-o-meter, but basically an indicator of what changes are worth, that we're never gotten further than 17 minutes on the scale of 12 hours of shades of nuclear weapon danger since the clock was built.
It's kind of like illustrating the age of the planet as 12 hours and the appearence of humanity and civilization as the last minute/second whatever...
Jack Bauer will disarm the russian ICBM 10^-23 second before it detonates, so we haven't got anything to worry about!
Oh wait, you mean Firemen, not Fremen. I was kinda wondering how do laws apply to fictional nomadic people living on a desert planet.
So let's assume two reasonable worst case scenarios about this case.
...and laughter/ridiculing of the teacher ensues, the story is told behind the teacher's back for a few weeks and then everyone forgets about it.
1. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer, but she intended it for her own eyes only, messed up and the kids has seen that she viewed porn. She lied to the kids covering up the situation...
reasonable reaction:
2. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer and was showing it to kids because of pedophile intent or as an inappropriate sex-ed.
reasonable reaction: teacher fired, putting her on a list that she can't work with kids anymore. I find the sexual offenders list an overkill though. Disclosing the location of people like this teacher, not letting her go near schools or some such restrictions are an overkill, she is just not fit to be a teacher. She's 40 years old, must have been teaching for a long while now, so you just have to dig in her past to check whether something associated with paedophilia turns up. If yeah, hell sentence her criminally, but if not then there isn't a cause for stronger measures than firing her and not allowing her to work as a teacher anymore.
Criminal prosecution should only come if there is actual harm to children, and viewing a couple of porn pictures is not harm, it's just bad conduct on the part of the teacher, so it should mean loss of job.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke, even more so the 40 year sentence. What's next, execution for giving "the finger"? When I was 12 I was looking for serial keys on astalavista if my memory serves me correct when a porn popup popped up and it displayed a monster cock. The IT teacher walked up behind me and just told me to turn that off and walked away again. Other kids were directly looking at porn when the teacher wasn't looking and noone made a big deal about it. If the teacher's screen would have flooded with porn popups we would have been laughing at it. I'm not from the USA so I don't get the whole obsession with trying to hide sex. I also received proper sexual education from the school, so I can't complain.
Your post only displays ignorance about proportions, scientific consensus and about what a fact is.
Proportions: something is imminent: 100 thousand years.
Scientific consensus: not what you read in mainstream press.
Fact: not your opinion. For example, when you included the sentence about concern as a "fact", you clearly didn't bother to adjust this "fact", with the next two sentences which read as: "Although there was a cooling trend then, it should be realised that climate scientists were perfectly well aware that predictions based on this trend was not possible - because the trend was poorly studied and not understood. However in the popular press the possibility of cooling was reported generally without the caveats present in the scientific reports.". Your next quotation is from glacial-epoch experts. Do you know the timeframe they operate in? You conveniently also omit the explanation of the quotation included in the wikipedia article, in which it details that "Unless there were impacts from future human activity, they thought that serious cooling "must be expected within the next few millennia or even centuries"; but many other scientists doubted these conclusions", which demonstrates that a. scientist pretty much had the correct position in the 70s AND they were aware of the fact that their information was limited, so no strong conclusions can be drawn, but only educated guessing can be done.
Revisionist what?
To be honest, the verdict is out only on ignorance. The results and facts can be found, it's just that the press and most people don't bother, or worse, display their ignorance about the current scientific knowledge and declare the issue undecided.
On the other hand, apart from your post I also agree with Richard Dawkins' line of thought that moderate christians are those that allow fundamentalist to exist by supplying the ideological background.
Personally, I never subscribe to the "we can't possibly understand it" argument. That also explains my deeply atheistic beliefs.
methinks it is like a weasel
As for the police not being there for protection, that is a cultural issue aswell, the police is what you (taxpayers) expect them to be. You just need to expect had enough. I'd also note that the right of killing someone who enters your house is very out of the line too. The burglar might be a criminal, but you can't be a judge and executioner in one person. If much less guns were in circulation, the burglar would just run away at the first sight of trouble like they do around here. (Btw, statistics is a nice game to play with - as far as I know, neither lax gun laws nor the death penalty had a positive effect on crime reduction.)
You must be new here, right?
First of all, if you thought the OP was the only thing he will post, then you're wrong.
5 people will point out where exactly is the original paper mistaken, then
4 people will write a post about how dare those 5 people challenge a peer reviewed journal,
the original 5 plus 15 new people will point out the flaws in that argument,
10 people will post "in soviet russia you suck vacuum" jokes, of which the first 6 will be modded redundant and the last 4 modded up to anything between +2 and +5 funny,
2 people will play grammar nazi and correct mistakes while making much bigger errors in their post and subsequently 7 others will invoke Godwin,
6 people will be actually people with physics jobs commenting with informative posts, but they'll be reduced to oblivion by 34 people in well written but totally clueless posts that will get modded up to +5,
24 other people will post only loosely connected nonsense to the topic,
1 person (me) admits that he only included the previous item to taunt grammar nazis with a proper use for loosely,
and finally 2 trolls will post the best posts, in a tie, in the entire discussion by complete accident
If you'd care about people dying in large numbers you would have introduced sensible gun control laws and stopped going along with the fantasy that some people with guns would form a militia in case of a bad government, and instead awakened to the reality that people are dieing en masse due to negligent circulation of lethal weaponry and that deconstructing the gun culture would go a long way in reducing crime, while wouldn't matter a bit in deposing an opressive government.
There is another issue which I assume will be hot buttons for a lot of you here, so I'll try to tread carefully. The military is overly glorified in the USA. A soldier is a person, who using advanced weaponry and training, under the command of the military, kills people, in defense of the interests of the given military, goverment or country. Let me give you an example of this. The news that the 3000th american soldier has been killed, and everytime an american soldier gets killed, the news receives great attention. While the death of any person is cause for sorrow, why is that a small (in comparison) number of deaths of people who voluntarily signed up for potentially life-threatening jobs is particularly interesting, while an astonishingly huge number (in comparison - 655k according to the most credible source we have) of Iraqi people dead doesn't even make it into the news? The Iraqi didn't sign up for this and the overwhelming majority of them weren't soldiers or military trained men, but children, women and old people. If a soldier gets killed, I have respect for him, but it is an occupational hazard. I feel immensely more sorrow for the dead civilians and as far as I'm concerned, the common iraqi man who is probably fucking tired of the whole shooting war that makes up his life deserves a good deal more respect than an american soldier dieing in Iraq ever will.
I know that /. is the place to turn to for legal advice, so I'll shoot.
Can someone sign a contract which says that the signatory party forfeits the right of knowing the terms which under some terms of another contract applies to him? Even if the government wants you to sign?
Because, as far as I see, this is the Gilmore case about. I know that traveling by air is generally not thought of as a contract, but it is one, called providing a service. Normally, when you want to use a private company's service, you get to know the terms. "You get this phone now for free, but only if you sign up for 2 years with our company" or "buy two and save 30%!". The fact is, Gilmore only wanted to know the terms: "so I'm only allowed to fly if I show my id? Then point me to the AUP" - paraphrased. Then the private company sends Gilmore to hell and throws him out of the building.
They are entirely within their rights to do that, they are a private business after all under no obligation to serve a customer or tell him anything, but as every private company knows, they make money from customers, so they don't generally do this.
The problem is that the private company didn't say this, but that they were following secret rules issued by the Transportation Security Administration, which is a government entity. The problem with this is, that when a private company makes rules, its called terms of employment, company policy or such, but when the goverment makes rules, it's called law or regulation. There is a tricky thing with laws, that ignorance of them does not nullify their force. It works the other way around though too: it is not a law which you can't know. A regulation is basically the same, it doesn't apply to you when you can't know about it. A job at a company works the same way, you get to know the terms of employment and for example they can't fire you for arbitary made up reasons, because that would be a breach of contract if the terms of employment doesn't include that. As far as I know, no private company or government has the power to add arbritary sections to a contract.
So, if a private company does things, you can just never use them again. When the government makes rules, you cannot escape them, you are bound by them - only if you know about them.
I'd add that it doesn't matter what the given regulation is. The regulation could have been that you have to look into a camera or raise your left arm or anything. It doesn't matter because it has nothing to do with the case. The case is about whether you need to comply with rules, regulations, laws, call them whatever to wish, whose existence is only indicated by taking someone's word for it and reading the actually law/regulation is forbidden. I believe that is in violation of your country's constitution.
I think there is a loophole which might be an argument to get around my chain of reasoning. "But this regulation is only a routing order, it only tells the airline employee, who clearly can know about the regulation, what to do with the guy. If he doesn't have an ID, the employee directs the passenger towards the longer security check". The problem with that argument is that then the passenger shouldn't even know about this internal requirement, instead of a public notice that the government mandates the ID check and that you can't fly without it. Secondly, which is more serious, if the passanger asks about the different treatment and the rationale behind it, the answer that it is an internal governmental regulation that forces the employee to perform a more thorough security check is only grounds for just that, the employee performing a more thorough check, not grounds for denying the passenger a chance to fly altogether, because that would be the government making a secret regulation which a passenger would need to adhere to in order to fly. If the government wants ID checks, fine. Make a law or public regulation about it. Until then, the government restricts their citizens illegally from performing the legal activity of flight by air, which public usage conditions they satisfied.
So I'll ask once again. Do you think that the government is free to break the rules layed down by the constitution or law?