Off the top of my head, how many people outside of France have you ever heard calling for the liberation of Corsica? Or the Basques in Spain? (by the way, both of which seem to me to be more apt comparisons to the situation between China and Tibet than the cases you mention, or at least the ones that I am familiar with.)
well, there are significant differences. i don't know much about Corsica, but can speak intelligently to the Basque issue. most importantly, neither spain nor france is oppressing the Basque, systematically trying to eliminate their language, culture, or religion, or diluting their ethnic identity by subsidized mass migration. in the spanish portion of Basque country, at least, the situation is quite the opposite: basque is a state-recognized official language in the region, and much is done by the state to support their cultural identity. it's also worth noting that there doesn't exist (to the best of my knowledge) an armed terrorist organization blowing crap up in China for the cause of Tibetan independence; the same is not true for the Basque.
that said, however: sure, the fundamentals - national identity, self-determination - are more or less the same, and i'd support something akin to a referendum on Basque independence (i don't really know how widespread the support is there; in my little time on the ground there, it seemed to be a minority opinion, but that's entirely anecdotal). closer to home (i'm an American), i'd suggest the same thing for Hawai'i (again, there's a significant independence movement, but i have no idea how widespread it actually is) and, say, Vermont (where about 7% of the population supports the idea). Tibet qualifies for the same reasons: there's an identifiable nation there which doesn't want to be controlled by what they see as outside forces.
i agree with your point overall - no organized religion has any historical claim at perfection - but your examples are poor.
the crusades are, collectively, certainly a low point for organized Christianity, but they're also monstrously complex socio-military-political events. there were genuine territorial encroachments into the byzantine empire by muslims empires that at least the first crusade was (on the surface) a direct response to, and most christians don't translate "forgive" into "let them get away with crimes" (making no arguments here as to the appropriateness of the "crimes" label or of making that translation).
you've got to really stretch to believe WWII was about religion, or that Nazi's were a particularly Christian organization. certainly the leadership wasn't, and wrote so quite explicitly. this isn't the same as the "they're not really christian" argument pseudo-apologists are likely to make, this is more about historical context.
the Spanish Inquisition was the most famous, and the most brutal, but it's worth noting that it reported to the King of Spain, not the Pope, unlike the rest of the contemporary Inquisition. note also that the Inquisition was much broader, both in scope and in time - it still exists, today called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. the Inquisition - especially during its darker periods a few hundred years ago - are probably the clearest examples of Christianity abandoning Christianity, but your example will be even more sound if you drop the "Spanish" (as it'll omit a whole bunch of odd political issues).
the most compelling example in my mind is the abortion clinic bombings. it's modern, explicitly "Christian", and entirely antithetical to both any honest reading of the New Testament and every major Christian denomination.
but, again, you're overall point is correct and your parent here is an ignorant fool. Muslims are taught the value of mercy the same way christians are. i think it's fair to say there's differences in the religion, and that those differences impact what we see from them in the world today, but teachings about forgiveness and mercy aren't them.
just to demonstrate that this sort of overlap isn't just CS undergrads doing homework assignments, take a look at Ken Thompson's Turing award lecture, particularly this section:
In the ten years that [Dennis Ritchie and I] have worked together, I can recall only one case of miscoordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character.
that would clearly fail this test, but it's simply the result of two guys working very closely together with similar styles for a very long time.
as far as nostalgia is concerned, i can relate. UnixWare really is the most direct descendent of AT&T unix (SVR4). i remember the first time uname showed said SVR5 in UnixWare 7. by that point UnixWare (and OpenServer) was already nearly irrelevant, but they still had some of the old AT&T people working for them doing kernel work in former AT&T facilities working on code that came directly from the USG. the old SCO was a pretty neat company, even if they failed in the market. the biggest shame here is that everyone's going to remember the colossal turds who tarnished the name when Caldera got it.
Walls (really CTIA corporately) doesn't particularly care whether they're Bells (baby or Ma) or not, as long as they're CTIA members. they're a membership organization explicitly aimed at getting legislation and regulations put in place to favor their members (which are heavily dominated by folks with a CDMA and AMPS legacy). the CTIA's a dominant force in north america; in europe, you get the GSMA playing the same role. i've been at events where GSMA reps told their members about all the wonderful legislation and regulations they were getting passed around the world to ensure GSM stayed globally dominant; by the end of his pitch i'd been totally freed from any remaining dilusions about GSMA (or CTIA) having any consideration for the public good.
this is especially amusing since we're talking about CTIA here. the organization only exists to get legislation and regulation custom-tailored to the business interests of their members. they're like the GSMA in that regard, but without any technical work.
Be that as it may, 3 years of not earning pay during the early part of your life is a sacrifice.
but they are earning pay, simply not as much as they otherwise could. residents work an insane number of hours, leading to near-minimum-wage hourly rates, but the yearly pay is still well more than enough to support yourself on: more than $40,000 pretty uniformly. it goes up year after year. also, i've checked with my resident resident, and she reports that folks in "advanced" residencies or fellowships do indeed get a good pay bump (still well below what they'd be making as an independent practicing physician from a shorter residency). the details vary too much from program to program (even within a specialty) to make further generalizations.
the primary point here is that at no time are we asking people to make "living in poverty" levels of sacrifice to be a neurosurgeon, just to defer their full earnings potential for a few years. yes, i agree it seems "off" that the original formulation (all doctors make the same) would artificially depress some wages, i just think it'd be a safe starting point from which we can observe the effects. there are lots of ways to correct changes in the number of doctors becoming certified as neurosurgeons once we observe that.
that's just not true. i live with a doctor in her family practice residency at a large teaching hospital. her schedule and workload is more intense than all the other programs i've been exposed to there. getting the breadth to be an effective generalist is just damn hard, and the fact that they're underpaid (compared to other specialties after completion of the residency) leads to under-population of good generalists; evening the pay out would likely result in a better balance. neurosurgeons are a very small population. all the 10-year-residency doctors combined are an astoundingly small population. trying to tweak the system for them before we know what the actual effects are is just premature optimization - poor engineering.
I suppose that one could compensate for the financial loss by paying the neurosurgery RESIDENTS what a working GP would make. Is that what they do?
good question; i don't know for sure. the residents are all paid, and i know that for the "normal" residency your salary goes up year over year (although stays quite low throughout; my friend makes assume this continues as you progress into advanced residencies or fellowships, but am not certain. specifically, it'd be silly to pay them the same as a fully-qualified GP, as they're not yet qualified to work independently in any way (thus have significantly lower value). there's nothing economically evil with recognizing (and forcing perspective job seekers to recognize) that some jobs will simply have lower lifetime earnings potential; other motivations will still play.
also, if you're going into a job with an expectation that 10-12 years is half your working career, i have very little sympathy.
it takes a couple extra years personal investment in the medical education system to become the least of specialists
false, at least in the vast majority of cases.
this is perhaps a terminology thing more than anything, but your "generalist" doctor is also a specialist, they just selected a "specialty" that equates to "generalist" in the outside world. a medical residency (the thing doctors do just out of med school in the US system) is the same length (on average; it varies by institution) for "family practice" (perhaps the most general of generalists) as it is for gynecologist or surgery. you are correct, of course, that there are specialties that require more time in residency or equivalent, and yes, the formulation as stated by the grandparent would result in these people having a lower lifetime earnings, but it's a much smaller problem than you think, and (as a percentage of the medical establishment) likely small enough to be filled by the fact that people make decisions for more than just dollars (both "ephemeral" thinks like interest in a specific field and more concrete things like lower competition and better job security). i'd wait until we actually observe this being a problem (a marked decline in the number of "high cost" specialists should be easy to see) before imposing an external fix.
from personal experience, both programming and managing programmers, this is exactly right.
i had the odd fortune to be working at Bell Labs in the Inferno Business Unit at pretty much the start of my career. i'd taken a few programming courses, but the first time i had to do anything non-trivial, i was working in Limbo, a beautiful language based strongly on the CSP model (Hoare's revision of it, with channels as first class types). we never really thought much about parallel programming in particular, but concurrent programming was simply the easiest way to solve very many problems. when you apply more processors to the problem, you get the parallelism pretty much for free.
anyway, i picked this up without much difficulty. i'm a bright guy, but certainly no genius, and at the time was way down on the experience chain. i've since had the "opportunity" to work with parallels programming in C/C++ using the conventional models there, and find myself very lost very quickly. i keep asking myself "wait, you have to do what?" and "why would anyone do this?" whenever looking at this stuff. people spend months trying to wrap their heads around this, when it should be very simple. thankfully, there are now even CSP libraries for C when stuck there. i've seen lots of programmers make the switch in the other direction and very quickly become much more productive.
for those not familiar with the model, there's an excellent lecture by Rob Pike on the model and a language he wrote called Newsqueak that implements it (Newsqueak was a significant influence on Limbo). highly recommended for anyone who cares about this problem domain.
However, this is still a bad thing for roommates.com.
clearly. and i think i agree that it's a bad thing overall if they're prohibited from doing this. but note that the appeals court didn't say they were violating the FHA, just that they weren't covered by CDA immunity. it's now up to the lower court to determine whether they're violating the FHA. i suspect it'll find they were, since my reading of the exemptions in the FHA means it only applies to the owners themselves (protecting the owners from whatever they post), not their agents, but the language around agents is unclear, so it's entirely possible the court will decide that the exemptions afforded the owners extends to their agents.
Furthermore, if he owns 3 or less separate rental units, he can also disciminate on any basis he wants.
note that there are restrictions on this exemption; specifically, you don't seem to be able to do things like even advertise, let alone use an agent or broker.
the court (at least the majority opinion) explicitly upheld protection for roommates.com passing along the contents of free form text boxes, even if they contain "no blacks". what the court found excluded the site from CDA protection was that it provided explicit options, in the form of pull-down menus, thus having an active role in forming the content. it is left up to the lower court to decide if, lacking this protection, roommates.com violated the FHA. the question there is likely to be whether roommates.com is covered by the exemptions afforded their users (who are clearly exempt) or not. since the site itself is not the owner in question, it doesn't seem to be covered by the same exemptions. i think the court will have to decide whether the agent of one covered by the exemption thus protected (the language around "agents" is weak, IMHO).
you're missing the point of what's really going on with those "exemptions", or at least the ones in the FHA. this isn't a question of the law granting you a new right; you're correct that these rights are pre-existing. as others have noted, the right to free association probably allows you to room with whoever you like. the purpose of stating it in the FHA is so that the act is not construed to be in conflict with that right. otherwise, you risk having the law thrown out and having to try again, creating a window in which (potentially) there is no fair housing protection.
As far as I'm concerned, people should be able to pick whomever they want as their roommate, using any criteria they want.
and the Fair Housing Act agrees with you. it contains several explicit exemptions, most relevantly exempting an owner renting out rooms in a house in which he lives (providing it's designed to house four or fewer independent families). the original suit did not claim that any individual user of roommates.com violated the FHA, but that the site itself did by providing explicit choices in violation of the code. the court (in the majority opinion) upheld CDA immunity for the free-form comment boxes, where the site itself had no role in forming the content (which i think is an important, and correct, distinction).
i lived in london for a year, during which time i never owned a television, TV tuner card, or other device capable of receiving television broadcasts. about a month into having my flat, i got my first "warning" about not having a license. there was no contact information other than a form to mail back (with payment) to obtain my license. the warning indicated that inspectors would be visiting my neighborhood "very soon". i got identical notices every month for about six months. i was hoping the inspectors would show up soon to get this resolved, but that never happened. around month seven or eight, i got a different form. this one was yellow, and included an option to respond with checkboxes of reasons why i don't require a license, one being that i don't own anything to receive broadcasts with (it also included a phone number and other contact information beyond a return address, which would've allowed me to clear this up months ago, but that's beside the point). i promptly filled out and returned this form about two months later, and for every month until i left, i got a note thanking me for my response... and warning me that fraudulent declarations were a crime and an inspector would be by "very soon" to verify my claim. after about the third one, i left the country (correlation does not indicate causation); i have no idea if an inspector ever made it around.
in logical terms, your argument is valid, but unsound; that is, at least one of the premises is untrue. specifically, you assert that "1-click requires said store of credit card information in said exploitable database", and your (mis-)linked example indicates that "said" database is a vendor's. that is not in any way required for 1-click to work. in common practice in online shopping sites generally, 1-click or no, the credit card number is sent one time to the CC processor, who responds with a unique key that the vendor uses in subsequent transactions. that key, not the CC number, is then stored in the database and used for subsequent transactions. the number is useless to anyone other than the initial vendor, thus eliminating the financial exposure to customers if the vendor's database is cracked.
it's tempting to point out that this practice, which is generally considered best practice in the payments inudstry, simply shifts the burden from the vendor to the processor. this is untrue; instead, it reduces the exposure. the CC processor has this anyway; we're simply reducing the burden on the vendor. if the fact that the processor stores the information bothers you, then your argument is against credit/debit cards in general, not 1-click (and it'd be a reasonable argument to make; the entire system is frighteningly fragile).
Imagine a world where your senator voted for what your STATE really wanted, and not for what their party line said they should.
ensuring that the Senators represented the interests of the state was exactly why the Constitution's framers had them appointed by the states. the model was such that sovereignty came from the States, who gave some portion of it over to the Federal government. with the passage of the 17th amendment in 1913, we saw the most significant destruction of the redefinition of that balance of power that started with the conclusion of the Civil War. it's a stretch to say the current American Empire is a direct result, but that was certainly an important enabling factor.
i know you're aiming for +1 Funny (and i think you hit it), but that's not a copyright violation issue. the argument is that the key is a component of a circumvention device, and therefore distribution violates the DMCA. they're not arguing that the hex number is copyrighted. it's still stupid, but let's be clear about the nature of the stupidity.
CALEA is a US-only term; the more generic industry term is Lawful Intercept; while CALEA is reasonably representative and your comments hold true for every Lawful Intercept regulation i know anything about, the specifics vary by jurisdiction. this is a current issue for folks looking at deploying WiMAX services/networks, my current area of focus. it's a major hassle, and once you offer a plain data pipe as a service option, it's futile, since genuine "bad guys" can simply employ end-to-end encryption and bust the whole theory.
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that said, however: sure, the fundamentals - national identity, self-determination - are more or less the same, and i'd support something akin to a referendum on Basque independence (i don't really know how widespread the support is there; in my little time on the ground there, it seemed to be a minority opinion, but that's entirely anecdotal). closer to home (i'm an American), i'd suggest the same thing for Hawai'i (again, there's a significant independence movement, but i have no idea how widespread it actually is) and, say, Vermont (where about 7% of the population supports the idea). Tibet qualifies for the same reasons: there's an identifiable nation there which doesn't want to be controlled by what they see as outside forces.
- the crusades are, collectively, certainly a low point for organized Christianity, but they're also monstrously complex socio-military-political events. there were genuine territorial encroachments into the byzantine empire by muslims empires that at least the first crusade was (on the surface) a direct response to, and most christians don't translate "forgive" into "let them get away with crimes" (making no arguments here as to the appropriateness of the "crimes" label or of making that translation).
- you've got to really stretch to believe WWII was about religion, or that Nazi's were a particularly Christian organization. certainly the leadership wasn't, and wrote so quite explicitly. this isn't the same as the "they're not really christian" argument pseudo-apologists are likely to make, this is more about historical context.
- the Spanish Inquisition was the most famous, and the most brutal, but it's worth noting that it reported to the King of Spain, not the Pope, unlike the rest of the contemporary Inquisition. note also that the Inquisition was much broader, both in scope and in time - it still exists, today called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. the Inquisition - especially during its darker periods a few hundred years ago - are probably the clearest examples of Christianity abandoning Christianity, but your example will be even more sound if you drop the "Spanish" (as it'll omit a whole bunch of odd political issues).
- the most compelling example in my mind is the abortion clinic bombings. it's modern, explicitly "Christian", and entirely antithetical to both any honest reading of the New Testament and every major Christian denomination.
but, again, you're overall point is correct and your parent here is an ignorant fool. Muslims are taught the value of mercy the same way christians are. i think it's fair to say there's differences in the religion, and that those differences impact what we see from them in the world today, but teachings about forgiveness and mercy aren't them.as far as nostalgia is concerned, i can relate. UnixWare really is the most direct descendent of AT&T unix (SVR4). i remember the first time uname showed said SVR5 in UnixWare 7. by that point UnixWare (and OpenServer) was already nearly irrelevant, but they still had some of the old AT&T people working for them doing kernel work in former AT&T facilities working on code that came directly from the USG. the old SCO was a pretty neat company, even if they failed in the market. the biggest shame here is that everyone's going to remember the colossal turds who tarnished the name when Caldera got it.
Walls (really CTIA corporately) doesn't particularly care whether they're Bells (baby or Ma) or not, as long as they're CTIA members. they're a membership organization explicitly aimed at getting legislation and regulations put in place to favor their members (which are heavily dominated by folks with a CDMA and AMPS legacy). the CTIA's a dominant force in north america; in europe, you get the GSMA playing the same role. i've been at events where GSMA reps told their members about all the wonderful legislation and regulations they were getting passed around the world to ensure GSM stayed globally dominant; by the end of his pitch i'd been totally freed from any remaining dilusions about GSMA (or CTIA) having any consideration for the public good.
this is especially amusing since we're talking about CTIA here. the organization only exists to get legislation and regulation custom-tailored to the business interests of their members. they're like the GSMA in that regard, but without any technical work.
the primary point here is that at no time are we asking people to make "living in poverty" levels of sacrifice to be a neurosurgeon, just to defer their full earnings potential for a few years. yes, i agree it seems "off" that the original formulation (all doctors make the same) would artificially depress some wages, i just think it'd be a safe starting point from which we can observe the effects. there are lots of ways to correct changes in the number of doctors becoming certified as neurosurgeons once we observe that.
neurosurgeons are a very small population. all the 10-year-residency doctors combined are an astoundingly small population. trying to tweak the system for them before we know what the actual effects are is just premature optimization - poor engineering.good question; i don't know for sure. the residents are all paid, and i know that for the "normal" residency your salary goes up year over year (although stays quite low throughout; my friend makes assume this continues as you progress into advanced residencies or fellowships, but am not certain. specifically, it'd be silly to pay them the same as a fully-qualified GP, as they're not yet qualified to work independently in any way (thus have significantly lower value). there's nothing economically evil with recognizing (and forcing perspective job seekers to recognize) that some jobs will simply have lower lifetime earnings potential; other motivations will still play.
also, if you're going into a job with an expectation that 10-12 years is half your working career, i have very little sympathy.
this is perhaps a terminology thing more than anything, but your "generalist" doctor is also a specialist, they just selected a "specialty" that equates to "generalist" in the outside world. a medical residency (the thing doctors do just out of med school in the US system) is the same length (on average; it varies by institution) for "family practice" (perhaps the most general of generalists) as it is for gynecologist or surgery.
you are correct, of course, that there are specialties that require more time in residency or equivalent, and yes, the formulation as stated by the grandparent would result in these people having a lower lifetime earnings, but it's a much smaller problem than you think, and (as a percentage of the medical establishment) likely small enough to be filled by the fact that people make decisions for more than just dollars (both "ephemeral" thinks like interest in a specific field and more concrete things like lower competition and better job security). i'd wait until we actually observe this being a problem (a marked decline in the number of "high cost" specialists should be easy to see) before imposing an external fix.
from personal experience, both programming and managing programmers, this is exactly right.
i had the odd fortune to be working at Bell Labs in the Inferno Business Unit at pretty much the start of my career. i'd taken a few programming courses, but the first time i had to do anything non-trivial, i was working in Limbo, a beautiful language based strongly on the CSP model (Hoare's revision of it, with channels as first class types). we never really thought much about parallel programming in particular, but concurrent programming was simply the easiest way to solve very many problems. when you apply more processors to the problem, you get the parallelism pretty much for free.
anyway, i picked this up without much difficulty. i'm a bright guy, but certainly no genius, and at the time was way down on the experience chain. i've since had the "opportunity" to work with parallels programming in C/C++ using the conventional models there, and find myself very lost very quickly. i keep asking myself "wait, you have to do what?" and "why would anyone do this?" whenever looking at this stuff. people spend months trying to wrap their heads around this, when it should be very simple. thankfully, there are now even CSP libraries for C when stuck there. i've seen lots of programmers make the switch in the other direction and very quickly become much more productive.
for those not familiar with the model, there's an excellent lecture by Rob Pike on the model and a language he wrote called Newsqueak that implements it (Newsqueak was a significant influence on Limbo). highly recommended for anyone who cares about this problem domain.
yes, that is your right, and the FHA explicitly protects it. you're free to continue being a racist jerk when looking for roommates.
the court (at least the majority opinion) explicitly upheld protection for roommates.com passing along the contents of free form text boxes, even if they contain "no blacks". what the court found excluded the site from CDA protection was that it provided explicit options, in the form of pull-down menus, thus having an active role in forming the content. it is left up to the lower court to decide if, lacking this protection, roommates.com violated the FHA. the question there is likely to be whether roommates.com is covered by the exemptions afforded their users (who are clearly exempt) or not. since the site itself is not the owner in question, it doesn't seem to be covered by the same exemptions. i think the court will have to decide whether the agent of one covered by the exemption thus protected (the language around "agents" is weak, IMHO).
you're missing the point of what's really going on with those "exemptions", or at least the ones in the FHA. this isn't a question of the law granting you a new right; you're correct that these rights are pre-existing. as others have noted, the right to free association probably allows you to room with whoever you like. the purpose of stating it in the FHA is so that the act is not construed to be in conflict with that right. otherwise, you risk having the law thrown out and having to try again, creating a window in which (potentially) there is no fair housing protection.
in short, you're getting worked up over nothing.
your experience does not match mine.
i lived in london for a year, during which time i never owned a television, TV tuner card, or other device capable of receiving television broadcasts. about a month into having my flat, i got my first "warning" about not having a license. there was no contact information other than a form to mail back (with payment) to obtain my license. the warning indicated that inspectors would be visiting my neighborhood "very soon".
i got identical notices every month for about six months. i was hoping the inspectors would show up soon to get this resolved, but that never happened. around month seven or eight, i got a different form. this one was yellow, and included an option to respond with checkboxes of reasons why i don't require a license, one being that i don't own anything to receive broadcasts with (it also included a phone number and other contact information beyond a return address, which would've allowed me to clear this up months ago, but that's beside the point). i promptly filled out and returned this form
about two months later, and for every month until i left, i got a note thanking me for my response... and warning me that fraudulent declarations were a crime and an inspector would be by "very soon" to verify my claim. after about the third one, i left the country (correlation does not indicate causation); i have no idea if an inspector ever made it around.
in logical terms, your argument is valid, but unsound; that is, at least one of the premises is untrue. specifically, you assert that "1-click requires said store of credit card information in said exploitable database", and your (mis-)linked example indicates that "said" database is a vendor's. that is not in any way required for 1-click to work. in common practice in online shopping sites generally, 1-click or no, the credit card number is sent one time to the CC processor, who responds with a unique key that the vendor uses in subsequent transactions. that key, not the CC number, is then stored in the database and used for subsequent transactions. the number is useless to anyone other than the initial vendor, thus eliminating the financial exposure to customers if the vendor's database is cracked.
it's tempting to point out that this practice, which is generally considered best practice in the payments inudstry, simply shifts the burden from the vendor to the processor. this is untrue; instead, it reduces the exposure. the CC processor has this anyway; we're simply reducing the burden on the vendor. if the fact that the processor stores the information bothers you, then your argument is against credit/debit cards in general, not 1-click (and it'd be a reasonable argument to make; the entire system is frighteningly fragile).
we should be so lucky. i'm expecting "Star Wars Episode 7: Jar Jar's Revenge" and "Star Wars Episode 8: Spawn of Jar Jar".
i know you're aiming for +1 Funny (and i think you hit it), but that's not a copyright violation issue. the argument is that the key is a component of a circumvention device, and therefore distribution violates the DMCA. they're not arguing that the hex number is copyrighted.
it's still stupid, but let's be clear about the nature of the stupidity.
CALEA is a US-only term; the more generic industry term is Lawful Intercept; while CALEA is reasonably representative and your comments hold true for every Lawful Intercept regulation i know anything about, the specifics vary by jurisdiction. this is a current issue for folks looking at deploying WiMAX services/networks, my current area of focus. it's a major hassle, and once you offer a plain data pipe as a service option, it's futile, since genuine "bad guys" can simply employ end-to-end encryption and bust the whole theory.
yeah, me too.
of course, i'd forgotten nearly all of that a year later. by now, it looks like greek to me.
oh, wait: there actually was greek in there...