The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Hiibel vs. Humboldt County et. al. (2004) that it's legal for law enforcement officers to arrest people who don't show their papers. Before 2004, Mr. Righi would have had the law on his side. Today, not so much.
IANAL, I just remember when my Constitutional freedoms get yanked out from under me.
It seems to me for the executive branch to demand a lawsuit be dismissed is meddling in the independence of the judiciary and violating the Constitutional separation of powers.
Oh, wait, I forgot "activist judges" are supposed to be a bad thing. Never mind about that separation of powers rubbish, then.
People will always find fault with any plan, even a free education =)
Yes, because this is a bad plan. The student will be at the mercy of the government definition of an "acceptable" job that qualifies for the tuition waiver. That constrains his or her choice of jobs -- according to some arbitrary government criterion that is not defined in advance.
Perhaps an example will help my point get through. Suppose Suzie majors in biology and wants to finish school after her bachelor's degree. She finds a job testing blood samples at the local hospital. Then the government sends her a letter saying, "your job is medical, not scientific, so pay your back tuition." Worse yet, Suzie may not have the option of just switching to an approved "scientific" job because they're all taken by recent graduates who can't afford to repay their tuition either.
I'm not even sure it's true that Suzie would be in the same situation if she'd financed her education through loans. If the free education program locks her into a low-paying job at the start of her career (due to predatory employment practices in the field) her lifetime earnings may be less than if she'd had free choice of employment.
Come to that, Suzie will still have the sense to realize a job in biology pays less than one in (for example) finance, and free tuition again will not make up for the lifetime earnings difference. Certainly some students will prefer science over finance (I do) but I don't think free tuition do anything to change the market realities that science jobs are hard to get and underpaid.
So if you participate in this program and then lose your job, or become disabled, and are unable to work in the field for 4 years, not only do you have the regular problems of unemployment but you also have the sudden obligation to re-pay all that tuition?
From the student's point of view, it seems like quite a gamble that the job market will be favorable 4 years down the road.
The headline of TFA is polemical - "forced to" pick a major. However there is little detail about what the choice of major will actually mean. What opportunities will it open for students and what will it close? This may not amount to much from a student's point of view.
I went to high school in the mid-1980s and my school had majors. In order to take Advanced Placement English you had to major in English. In order to take AP calculus you had to major in math. In order to take sculpture you had to major in art. So I triple-majored in English, Math, and Art (actually, science also but that didn't affect my study options). It was perfectly feasible. I think I had less study hall than some other kids because I took art classes instead, and that was about it. So really majors do not need to "track" or constrain the students. (Now I admit if I had wanted to major in metalworking and home economics simultaneously, that might not have been possible because the classes were at the same time.)
Looking back, I think the reason for majors at my school was that there was limited funding for the advanced classes and they wanted some token commitment from the students in order to enroll them. It helps make planning easier - if you have 60 freshmen majoring in science, then you can predict that 4 years from now you'll need 60 or fewer seats in the senior-level physics class.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created from nothing. I believe that applies in Britain as well as the U.S., so the energy to power those plates came from somewhere. To wit, from the automobiles.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that any time energy is transferred, some will be lost to entropy.
Essentially such a device is A) using petrol in the cars to power the streetlights, and B) doing so less efficiently than would be putting petrol in the street lights and burning it there.
It's a waste of fuel; indeed, a waste of dirty-burning fuel that creates CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and NO2 (smog). A horrible idea.
The group wanted to make a point that Open Source software works on Windows machines, not just on computers running a version of GNU/Linux
So I don't think it's accurate to say this group is introducing "GNU/Linux." Quite the contrary, really: they're introducing users to free software that runs on Windows. There's no apparent direct connection between replacing MS Office with OpenOffice (for example) and replacing MS Windows with GNU/Linux.
On the other hand, introducing users to free applications does eliminate one of the barriers to switching. However the article itself does not say anything about that possible next step.
The good citizens of New York City must be delighted to know that their tax dollars and police manpower went to safeguarding the Republican Party from protesters instead of, for example, finding Al Quaeda operatives.
Vote for Guiliani for president, he really knows how to respond to terrorist threats. Not!
Actually, the Supreme Court addressed it in Missouri v. Holland, 252 US 416 (1920).
Thanks for the correction. I had no idea there was such a
broad precedent.
So it's clear the federal government has the authority to impose treaty compliance on the states. However, the treaty still can't be ratified without the approval of Congress, so the question of whether the states should accept the treaty's terms and requirements still heavily affects the ratification process in my opinion.
In the midst of all the outrage over the RIAA's choice to drag a 10-year-old girl onto the witness stand, I think we're overlooking the extent to which the legal system is working to the benefit of the defense (the girl's mother, Ms. Andersen).
The defense is entitled to a trial by jury. The defendant is also counter-suing claiming (among other things) that the RIAA's case is based on evidence that was obtained through unlawful computer intrusion.
It gets better: in the U.S. we have a concept called "punitive damages," which means the court can award additional damages (money) if the party who was in the wrong behaved "outrageously." When I sat on a jury and the subject of punitive damages came up (in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts), the judge said to consider punitive damages separately, and that the amount should be chosen large enough to deter future outrageous behavior. That is, when it comes to punitive damages, the amount of award is set by how much of a financial penalty would really, really hurt.:-)
So the RIAA is insisting on hauling a 10-year-old girl onto the witness stand to testify against her own disabled mother. How stupid can they get? I doubt that will play well with a jury. Also, if the RIAA loses their case, they're subject to punitive damages for committing computer crimes in order to obtain their evidence.
Yes, it's rotten that the RIAA is abusing its right to force the 10-year-old to take the stand, but the defense is making full use of its own rights in this case. If you read the list of complaints Ms. Andersen is making in retaliation, it sure looks as if the RIAA has a lot more to lose in this case than it stands to gain.
IANAL but I can't imagine why the RIAA's attorneys would take the dire risk of bullying a ten-year-old in a jury trial.
Don't get me wrong; I don't support the state-sovereignty argument myself. I'm just trying to make the point that there are conflicting legal principles involved, and that U.S. voters are somewhat divided on whether local or international standards should take priority. That is, the reason the U.S. hesitates to commit to international treaties such as the convention on human rights cannot be entirely attributed to simple hypocrisy. Because of the conflicting interests of state and federal governments, there's a lack of political will to see the treaties ratified.
Now, what's really inexcusable in my opinion is that on one hand my government can't commit to signing and ratifying the treaty, and on the other hand it seldom hesitates to condemn other countries' human-right records. They should put up or shut up.
Of course USA is the only western country that hasn't signed the human rights convention.
At the risk of drifting off-topic, there is a reason for the United States' lack of participation in international agreements of this sort, and the reason is not (usually) a casual indifference to human rights. It has to do with the autonomous legal systems of the individual states, which are protected under the U.S. Constitution. So even if the U.S. were to sign a (perfectly reasonable) treaty restricting how its courts could operate, one could argue that the federal government lacks the authority to tell the state courts how to operate.
The counter-argument is that the Constitution does grant Congress the power to sign treaties and that should trump the state courts' sovereignty in certain situations. However neither argument is rock-solid; both sides have a point. So the way things usually pan out is that Congress doesn't ratify the treaties because the Congresspersons (who nominally represent the interests of their states, remember) don't want to sign anything that imposes a burden of treaty compliance on the state courts.
As far as I know this issue has never been put to test in the U.S. Supreme Court, so the status quo is that no one really knows how far the federal government can go in telling state courts how to operate.
This case (Atlantic vs. Andersen) is a civil case, not a criminal one. So strictly speaking, the child isn't being prosecuted; she's being called to testify.
IANAL but I do know that children under a certain age (which I believe varies from state to state) can't be sued in the U.S.. However their parents can be held liable for their actions, which is what appears to be the case here.
The U.S. does have a system whereby children can be prosecuted for crimes but it's done in special juvenile courts.
INAL but really I regard this as a ruling against RIAA's bullying tactics.
It appears to me they are trying to draw out the costs of the case through two years of pre-trial discovery. The idea appears to be simply to bankrupt the defense and/or intimidate potential future defendants (i.e. the public) by showing that they don't have to go to trial in order to financially ruin their victim. Seems to occur commonly enough whenever one party in a case has especially deep pockets and the other doesn't.
What the judge is saying is, the RIAA can't just run up a huge legal bill and walk away. Score one for the little guy.
Psh, he developed FORTRAN. I'm surprised he even lived to 82 without being killed by a rabid programmer.;) You disparage Mr. Backus's accomplishments for some cheap laughs, but could accomplish anything better?
Do you even know how to code in FORTRAN?
So we have government employees storing classified data on machines that are connected to the Internet, and then the authors of this report blame file-sharing software software?
I've worked in a classified lab before. If I, say, decided to store my work in an unsecured office instead of the safes provided for me, whose fault would it be if there were a security breach? (Answer: my boss's, for not firing me)
The only way to keep data safe is to keep it off the net. Period. (Even that is not really enough but it's a necessary condition).
Where are these 100,000 jobs that Mr. Gates claims appear annually? In what branch(es) of "computer science?" Application development? Database administration? Desktop support? R&D? All of these could fall under the umbrella of "computer science," but they require totally different skills and training.
Here's something to consider: if a company eliminates 100 engineers from application development and adds 100 network admin jobs (for example), that's 100 unemployed engineers and 100 admin openings competing for qualified applicants.
The amount of training required in a "computer science" sub-field makes jumping from one field to another prohibitive for the employee. Especially given that no one wants to go from a senior job in one branch to an entry-level job in another. This creates a lot of inefficiency in the employment market.
So it may be not that our schools are inferior; it may be instead the labor market is changing so fast that the labor pool can't keep up.
I seriously doubt this will turn into anything useful because it relies on a collective definition of "merit." When you and I search for information on the same topic, your needs and my needs may be totally differnt (I may be looking for a little bit of general background and you may be looking to compare and contrast the opinions of two recognized experts in the field). Even if all the hurdles against manipulation can be overcome, I don't see how "merit" rankings will amount to anything more than a popularity contest.
Wikipedia's job is to let people look something up quickly.
Surely there is a second part to that - to let people look something up quickly and get accurate information. Wikipedia itself says that
high quality is one of its goals, so your assessment of Wikipedia's function does not match what the Wikipedia community itself claims to be attempting. It is the quality, not the quickness of access, that is coming under question.
I don't think the question should be, "Is Wikipedia failing?" Rather, "is there a credible argument that Wikipedia is not failing?" The linked article is pretty damning.
And people want to use webmail on a regular basis?
I'm not saying encrypt everything you send. I'm saying, if someone wants private communication, he can do something about it instead of just whining. The tools are out there.
Slashdot Mirror
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Hiibel vs. Humboldt County et. al. (2004) that it's legal for law enforcement officers to arrest people who don't show their papers. Before 2004, Mr. Righi would have had the law on his side. Today, not so much.
IANAL, I just remember when my Constitutional freedoms get yanked out from under me.
Link to the ruling: http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/search/display. html?terms=%22driver's%20license%22%20arrested&url =/supct/html/03-5554.ZO.html
It seems to me for the executive branch to demand a lawsuit be dismissed is meddling in the independence of the judiciary and violating the Constitutional separation of powers.
Oh, wait, I forgot "activist judges" are supposed to be a bad thing. Never mind about that separation of powers rubbish, then.
Yes, because this is a bad plan. The student will be at the mercy of the government definition of an "acceptable" job that qualifies for the tuition waiver. That constrains his or her choice of jobs -- according to some arbitrary government criterion that is not defined in advance.
Perhaps an example will help my point get through. Suppose Suzie majors in biology and wants to finish school after her bachelor's degree. She finds a job testing blood samples at the local hospital. Then the government sends her a letter saying, "your job is medical, not scientific, so pay your back tuition." Worse yet, Suzie may not have the option of just switching to an approved "scientific" job because they're all taken by recent graduates who can't afford to repay their tuition either.
I'm not even sure it's true that Suzie would be in the same situation if she'd financed her education through loans. If the free education program locks her into a low-paying job at the start of her career (due to predatory employment practices in the field) her lifetime earnings may be less than if she'd had free choice of employment.
Come to that, Suzie will still have the sense to realize a job in biology pays less than one in (for example) finance, and free tuition again will not make up for the lifetime earnings difference. Certainly some students will prefer science over finance (I do) but I don't think free tuition do anything to change the market realities that science jobs are hard to get and underpaid.
So if you participate in this program and then lose your job, or become disabled, and are unable to work in the field for 4 years, not only do you have the regular problems of unemployment but you also have the sudden obligation to re-pay all that tuition? From the student's point of view, it seems like quite a gamble that the job market will be favorable 4 years down the road.
The headline of TFA is polemical - "forced to" pick a major. However there is little detail about what the choice of major will actually mean. What opportunities will it open for students and what will it close? This may not amount to much from a student's point of view. I went to high school in the mid-1980s and my school had majors. In order to take Advanced Placement English you had to major in English. In order to take AP calculus you had to major in math. In order to take sculpture you had to major in art. So I triple-majored in English, Math, and Art (actually, science also but that didn't affect my study options). It was perfectly feasible. I think I had less study hall than some other kids because I took art classes instead, and that was about it. So really majors do not need to "track" or constrain the students. (Now I admit if I had wanted to major in metalworking and home economics simultaneously, that might not have been possible because the classes were at the same time.) Looking back, I think the reason for majors at my school was that there was limited funding for the advanced classes and they wanted some token commitment from the students in order to enroll them. It helps make planning easier - if you have 60 freshmen majoring in science, then you can predict that 4 years from now you'll need 60 or fewer seats in the senior-level physics class.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created from nothing. I believe that applies in Britain as well as the U.S., so the energy to power those plates came from somewhere. To wit, from the automobiles. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that any time energy is transferred, some will be lost to entropy. Essentially such a device is A) using petrol in the cars to power the streetlights, and B) doing so less efficiently than would be putting petrol in the street lights and burning it there. It's a waste of fuel; indeed, a waste of dirty-burning fuel that creates CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and NO2 (smog). A horrible idea.
So I don't think it's accurate to say this group is introducing "GNU/Linux." Quite the contrary, really: they're introducing users to free software that runs on Windows. There's no apparent direct connection between replacing MS Office with OpenOffice (for example) and replacing MS Windows with GNU/Linux.
On the other hand, introducing users to free applications does eliminate one of the barriers to switching. However the article itself does not say anything about that possible next step.
The good citizens of New York City must be delighted to know that their tax dollars and police manpower went to safeguarding the Republican Party from protesters instead of, for example, finding Al Quaeda operatives.
Vote for Guiliani for president, he really knows how to respond to terrorist threats. Not!
Thanks for the correction. I had no idea there was such a broad precedent.
So it's clear the federal government has the authority to impose treaty compliance on the states. However, the treaty still can't be ratified without the approval of Congress, so the question of whether the states should accept the treaty's terms and requirements still heavily affects the ratification process in my opinion.
In the midst of all the outrage over the RIAA's choice to drag a 10-year-old girl onto the witness stand, I think we're overlooking the extent to which the legal system is working to the benefit of the defense (the girl's mother, Ms. Andersen).
The defense is entitled to a trial by jury. The defendant is also counter-suing claiming (among other things) that the RIAA's case is based on evidence that was obtained through unlawful computer intrusion.
It gets better: in the U.S. we have a concept called "punitive damages," which means the court can award additional damages (money) if the party who was in the wrong behaved "outrageously." When I sat on a jury and the subject of punitive damages came up (in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts), the judge said to consider punitive damages separately, and that the amount should be chosen large enough to deter future outrageous behavior. That is, when it comes to punitive damages, the amount of award is set by how much of a financial penalty would really, really hurt. :-)
So the RIAA is insisting on hauling a 10-year-old girl onto the witness stand to testify against her own disabled mother. How stupid can they get? I doubt that will play well with a jury. Also, if the RIAA loses their case, they're subject to punitive damages for committing computer crimes in order to obtain their evidence.
Yes, it's rotten that the RIAA is abusing its right to force the 10-year-old to take the stand, but the defense is making full use of its own rights in this case. If you read the list of complaints Ms. Andersen is making in retaliation, it sure looks as if the RIAA has a lot more to lose in this case than it stands to gain.
IANAL but I can't imagine why the RIAA's attorneys would take the dire risk of bullying a ten-year-old in a jury trial.
Don't get me wrong; I don't support the state-sovereignty argument myself. I'm just trying to make the point that there are conflicting legal principles involved, and that U.S. voters are somewhat divided on whether local or international standards should take priority. That is, the reason the U.S. hesitates to commit to international treaties such as the convention on human rights cannot be entirely attributed to simple hypocrisy. Because of the conflicting interests of state and federal governments, there's a lack of political will to see the treaties ratified.
Now, what's really inexcusable in my opinion is that on one hand my government can't commit to signing and ratifying the treaty, and on the other hand it seldom hesitates to condemn other countries' human-right records. They should put up or shut up.
At the risk of drifting off-topic, there is a reason for the United States' lack of participation in international agreements of this sort, and the reason is not (usually) a casual indifference to human rights. It has to do with the autonomous legal systems of the individual states, which are protected under the U.S. Constitution. So even if the U.S. were to sign a (perfectly reasonable) treaty restricting how its courts could operate, one could argue that the federal government lacks the authority to tell the state courts how to operate.
The counter-argument is that the Constitution does grant Congress the power to sign treaties and that should trump the state courts' sovereignty in certain situations. However neither argument is rock-solid; both sides have a point. So the way things usually pan out is that Congress doesn't ratify the treaties because the Congresspersons (who nominally represent the interests of their states, remember) don't want to sign anything that imposes a burden of treaty compliance on the state courts.
As far as I know this issue has never been put to test in the U.S. Supreme Court, so the status quo is that no one really knows how far the federal government can go in telling state courts how to operate.
This case (Atlantic vs. Andersen) is a civil case, not a criminal one. So strictly speaking, the child isn't being prosecuted; she's being called to testify. IANAL but I do know that children under a certain age (which I believe varies from state to state) can't be sued in the U.S.. However their parents can be held liable for their actions, which is what appears to be the case here. The U.S. does have a system whereby children can be prosecuted for crimes but it's done in special juvenile courts.
INAL but really I regard this as a ruling against RIAA's bullying tactics.
It appears to me they are trying to draw out the costs of the case through two years of pre-trial discovery. The idea appears to be simply to bankrupt the defense and/or intimidate potential future defendants (i.e. the public) by showing that they don't have to go to trial in order to financially ruin their victim. Seems to occur commonly enough whenever one party in a case has especially deep pockets and the other doesn't.
What the judge is saying is, the RIAA can't just run up a huge legal bill and walk away. Score one for the little guy.
More bloat! Yay, team!
So we have government employees storing classified data on machines that are connected to the Internet, and then the authors of this report blame file-sharing software software? I've worked in a classified lab before. If I, say, decided to store my work in an unsecured office instead of the safes provided for me, whose fault would it be if there were a security breach? (Answer: my boss's, for not firing me) The only way to keep data safe is to keep it off the net. Period. (Even that is not really enough but it's a necessary condition).
You're absolutely right, age discrimination is rampant and a huge problem for the workers.
If there were really a huge labor shortage, employers wouldn't be able to afford to discriminate against people like you.
Where are these 100,000 jobs that Mr. Gates claims appear annually? In what branch(es) of "computer science?" Application development? Database administration? Desktop support? R&D? All of these could fall under the umbrella of "computer science," but they require totally different skills and training. Here's something to consider: if a company eliminates 100 engineers from application development and adds 100 network admin jobs (for example), that's 100 unemployed engineers and 100 admin openings competing for qualified applicants. The amount of training required in a "computer science" sub-field makes jumping from one field to another prohibitive for the employee. Especially given that no one wants to go from a senior job in one branch to an entry-level job in another. This creates a lot of inefficiency in the employment market. So it may be not that our schools are inferior; it may be instead the labor market is changing so fast that the labor pool can't keep up.
I seriously doubt this will turn into anything useful because it relies on a collective definition of "merit." When you and I search for information on the same topic, your needs and my needs may be totally differnt (I may be looking for a little bit of general background and you may be looking to compare and contrast the opinions of two recognized experts in the field). Even if all the hurdles against manipulation can be overcome, I don't see how "merit" rankings will amount to anything more than a popularity contest.
I don't think the question should be, "Is Wikipedia failing?" Rather, "is there a credible argument that Wikipedia is not failing?" The linked article is pretty damning.
And people want to use webmail on a regular basis? I'm not saying encrypt everything you send. I'm saying, if someone wants private communication, he can do something about it instead of just whining. The tools are out there.
You could encrypt plain-text files, zip/gzip them and send them as attachments.