I'm not sure why you want to add anything as specific as file sharing or platform neutrality to a document like a constitution, as it will just turn into an absolute nightmare of trying to enumerate the rights and privileges of your citizens.
A constitution should be a general statement of principles and (just as importantly) an outline of how your citizens elect to be governed. I think what you're trying to do is a good thing, but you might be better off trying to stick to general concepts. If you MUST enumerate the most basic and important liberties that your people retain, be as broad as possible. When you get specific, even with the important ones, people (politicians, certain groups, etc) are always gnashing their teeth to try to find "loopholes," in a violation of the very spirit of the document. Just look at the line "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" from the American constitution. It's hard to get more blatant than that, but it has still brought us a lot of headaches from people who feel the need to interpret.
I would suggest looking to America's constitution, at the very least, for examples of broad general principles. Some of the very best (IMO) parts of our constitution are the very broadest (Amendment I, IV, VI, IX, X). We may have fallen on hard times recently, but it's still a hallowed document and there are some excellent ideas to be found there. The current state of affairs isn't a fault of the constitution, but rather as a direct result of fear / war mongering.
At least in science there is a built-in way of self-correction. Publish all the made up crap you want, but when no one can duplicate the feat don't be surprised when the community calls you out on it. Tell me where you go to find the guy double checking the work of the corrupt police officer or judge when they perjure themselves to ruin your life and your ability to defend yourself. Find me the people replicating every aspect of your grafty mayor's work to make sure he's not full of shit...
I can't think of anywhere else in life that there are as many checks and double checks and accountability as in the field of scientific research. Just because no one catches it immediately means nothing. If it was fake no one will be able to replicate it. A single study proves very little and likewise does very little damage, so if no one cares enough to replicate it chances are slim that it will cause harm.
How about disabling the wi-fi during peak times when serving food becomes priority #1? You could even post a nice little sign saying something like: "In order to better service you, free Wi-Fi is available from XX:XX to YY:YY."
Or, you know, making the access available with purchases only, for a set period of time according to dollar amount spent. How about 15 minutes for every 5 dollars, with access codes printed right on the receipt? That seems to solve the problems of everyone worth mentioning. Hell they might even make money off the deal (but that's evil and wrong, amirite?)
How about recognizing the fact that there will soon be a serious incident occurring between an armed non-employee contractor and a potentially armed paying customer? How about de-escalating the situation before the government authorities come to do your job for you (however poorly)?
How about anything at all? From what the blogger says they essentially sat on their hands. Of ALL the things they could have done to ensure the safety of their customers, contractors, and staff, doing nothing is never the right answer.
The RIAA refuses to comment on the possibility that they will no long engage in legal proceedings whilst "in" 8-year-old August Jennings of San Antonio, Texas in the hopes that they won't be mistaken for litigious, boy loving pederasts.
All other names, likenesses, locations, and periods of time associated with the term "August" are completely and wholeheartedly reserved, however.
You just have to get more familiar with the lingo, Ray. They have discontinued the practice of bringing "new" lawsuits, but will indeed continue in the finely honed craft of suing the living shit out of John Doe.
Or it could be that they will no longer initiate lawsuits in August. Company vacation time and whatnot.
Besides, does anyone REALLY want to argue that the definition of those words are really all that concrete? Those are GOOD words. Good words are like good whores--just don't think they won't put on a completely different show for the next customer at the same price.
Tears and Letters only work when there is no risk to the politician. None of the buzzed-impaired-intoxicated driving crowd are sympathetic figures, so SCOTUS (and grandstanding politicians) was happy to curtail our rights to combat it.
It's the same with CP and those who trade in it; they induce no sympathy so lawmakers happily stop at nothing to combat it, too. Hence the current witch-hunt.
Politicians are only careful about their policy decisions when there is an equitable division between registered republicans and democrats. Everything else is meaningless to them, and if they can use some extreme act to justify themselves to their voters, they'll happily undermine the foundation of our country to do it. The population as a whole is kept slow, stupid, and fearful to promote this activity.
It is in no politician's interest to really stand up for something as nebulous and all-encompassing as free speech when it is much easier to appeal to fear. Tears and letters from a small group who do care about things like that are meaningless to them.
Drug war laws have ruined MILLIONS of lives and protected almost none.
I know you're being tongue-in-cheek but CP laws amount to the same thing. The government doesn't learn from the suffering of the people, the government learns when the people start killing them. And that's the ONLY time any government learns or changes for the better.
With, you know, blood and bullets and bombs. Not with tears and letters.
Actually it turns out soldiers are human and die like the rest of us when you put a bullet in their heads. Actually it turns out when you bring soldiers into an armed urban center where the populace hates them they die like flies.
Look at how many died invading Basra, and Basra is full of starving insurrectionist goatherds. Now try invading a city of 4 million heavily armed Americans and see how far you get. I doubt our military could successfully invade, capture, and hold _one_ of our larger cities, much less all of them at the same time... a situation pretty much impossible given the geography involved.
The difficult part is starting a revolution, not defending yourself against the all-powerful military. The difficult part is waiting for the situation to be bad enough to get the average guy off his ass and into the garage making pipe bombs.
If that's the case the shipping companies can coordinate some sort of bounty fund. If this is a multi-billion dollar industry like the news reports claim, there _is_ money to be made in killing these guys.
How about we reinstate the time honored tradition of privateering? Every privateer gets a representative from a multi-national body of privateer regulators. Kill pirates, take their shit, take their ships. No more pirates.
Great, glad to see we're exhausted our own solar system and are ready to explore the rest of the galaxy using disposable space drones. Yay for space trash.
I swear, if we ever do find intelligent life it will probably be because they've come to serve an eviction notice.
Why is that not a problem now? In most of those criminal cases you're worried about the information is already in the public record. It's just more difficult and time consuming for the average joe to lay hands on.
As it stands now, people with enough time, money, or some sort of vindictive grudge have easy access to that information you fear. This is just a more readily accessible format.
I'm not advocating the unfettered access to people's personal lives; the court already routinely blocks access to things like the identity of rape victims, or the names of parties in adoption cases or crimes involving children. I simply think that these so-called open and public court procedures should be made available to the public in the most convenient way possible, and not merely to those willing to attend in person (eliminating most of the working class) or spend time and effort tracking down and sometimes paying for printed documents (also eliminating most of the working class). So what are these judges worried about?
There really is no excuse for not streaming and electronically archiving every court proceeding in this country. It's certainly less expensive than the method of archival used now and has the added benefit of making the information available to the masses. This is an issue that, to me, goes to the very heart of transparency in government.
Is there even a coherent argument against making courtroom activity available to the public so it can be freely observed? When an appellate court can step in and forbid the dissemination of the proceedings at the behest of a wealthy and powerful lobby group, how far away are we from secret trials and off-the-books detention and punishment?
Yes, state cops as in highway patrol. If you go to the Boston College campus police page you will see that they are given authority directly from the commonwealth, and that even though their "jurisdiction" is the campus they also have authority anywhere else in the state (or in this case, commonwealth).
You'll find most medium and large schools are exactly like this, especially those receiving federal funding.
Been to a big state school, uh, ever? The "campus" police there are STATE COPS, who have more power and jurisdiction than the city police themselves. They're also better trained, and their hiring process is more rigorous.
Although I've never had any major run-ins with them myself, the campus police around here tend to be a lot more strict than the city cops. They also tend to be a lot meaner; playing pretend crime with a bunch of 20something children gives them an arrogance that the ghetto-patrolling city cops just can't match.
The reason we see soldiers acting "like 10 year olds" is because they have a lot in common with 10 year olds. The typical grunt in any branch of the service is in his late teens or early 20s. Their indoctrination program strips them down to nothing and rebuilds them as a new type of person, namely, a soldier. These are not college educated thinkers who are taught and encouraged to do a lot of abstract thinking and moral judgement. These are people who are created from the bottom up to follow orders. Their boot camps do not force them to do menial, mindless tasks perfectly because underwear folding is a matter of life and death, they do it because we want soldiers to carry out orders that they do not understand flawlessly and without question.
If you want someone to blame, point that finger at the next couple of officers up the command chain. Those people are college educated and are trained to carry out legitimate orders in such a way that is both legal and moral. The soldiers are little more than children in an unruly household. Problems like this happen because the people in positions of supervisory power created an environment that allowed them to happen, and should be (but rarely are) held accountable.
Erm, I should have said "objective tests". The projective ones are even worse.
(although the distinction is kind of blurry in personality tests, since even though the answers are quantifiable, the items themselves can be interpreted by the test taker in different ways. These are far different kinds of questions than those found on IQ tests.
For example: How are a hammer and screwdriver alike? (not an actual item, but similar items exist on the more popular IQ tests.
Answers will be scored something like this: They're tools / used to build things / used by construction workers, etc (2 points)
They're made out of metal / can use them in your hand / (not fully conceptualized as tools) (1 point)
A screwdriver uses screws, a hammer uses nails (0 points)
That's a very objective question with very specific answers. Not quite as specific as items on an achievement test (12 divided by 3 =) But much closer than a bunch of questions about what you're more like: A creative person or an analytical person. Bleh.
Test makers are notoriously vicious in the defense of their property. Psychological tests especially, since it cost them a lot of money to create those items and test their reliability and validity, and they will have to replace those items if they are disclosed to enough people.
Granted, projective tests like the MMPI are generally garbage that don't tell you anything you can't figure out yourself with a little introspection, but publicly airing their items directly costs them money. Anyone that was awake in psych 101 knows how "useful" a person's MMPI personality type is, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most popular go-to personality assessments.
Pearson in particular is a very large test maker with very hungry lawyers. They WILL sue you for this. They'll sue you for selling any of their products on ebay, too... even if it's just a xeroxed BLANK assessment protocol (the paper that the taker writes answers on). They'll sue you for talking about their items in a way that reveals items. They'll sue you at the drop of a hat.
Disclaimer: As a School Psychology student myself, most of our texts don't even use actual items from tests as examples. Tests themselves (and the protocols that go with them) are kept under lock and key, and cost a fortune.
They already do. The Xbox Live Terms of Use, along with pretty much every other TOU / TOS agreement in online gaming forbids (in very broad terms) ANY kind of sexual content, hate speech and slurs, as well as references to drugs, etc. This whole article is a non-issue, and certainly not a free-speech issue.
This has NOTHING to do with discrimination against gays or any other group; it's simply their way of covering their asses. Yes some of the games have specific sexual content which has been rated, reviewed, and is static in nature. Player generated names, profiles, and the like are none of those things, and they like to have very broad terms forbidding anything that might offend anyone.
I've also noticed that they tend to be reactive with regards to these violations, so just because there are 4 million teenage boys that can't come up with anything better than "ButtHurtAssNinja" as a name doesn't make it right. It just means it hasn't been reported yet.
He said that the best way to know whether your position in a case was right or wrong was to present the facts of the case to a 15-year old; if the 15-year old votes for the other side, then settle the case, quick.
No offense to your profession, Ray, but I'd say this is a bigger slight against the typical judge and juror (especially the later) than it is any kind of evidence that kids are great analytical thinkers.;)
Slashdot Mirror
(Not a student of the law or constitution)
I'm not sure why you want to add anything as specific as file sharing or platform neutrality to a document like a constitution, as it will just turn into an absolute nightmare of trying to enumerate the rights and privileges of your citizens.
A constitution should be a general statement of principles and (just as importantly) an outline of how your citizens elect to be governed. I think what you're trying to do is a good thing, but you might be better off trying to stick to general concepts. If you MUST enumerate the most basic and important liberties that your people retain, be as broad as possible. When you get specific, even with the important ones, people (politicians, certain groups, etc) are always gnashing their teeth to try to find "loopholes," in a violation of the very spirit of the document. Just look at the line "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" from the American constitution. It's hard to get more blatant than that, but it has still brought us a lot of headaches from people who feel the need to interpret.
I would suggest looking to America's constitution, at the very least, for examples of broad general principles. Some of the very best (IMO) parts of our constitution are the very broadest (Amendment I, IV, VI, IX, X). We may have fallen on hard times recently, but it's still a hallowed document and there are some excellent ideas to be found there. The current state of affairs isn't a fault of the constitution, but rather as a direct result of fear / war mongering.
At least in science there is a built-in way of self-correction. Publish all the made up crap you want, but when no one can duplicate the feat don't be surprised when the community calls you out on it. Tell me where you go to find the guy double checking the work of the corrupt police officer or judge when they perjure themselves to ruin your life and your ability to defend yourself. Find me the people replicating every aspect of your grafty mayor's work to make sure he's not full of shit...
I can't think of anywhere else in life that there are as many checks and double checks and accountability as in the field of scientific research. Just because no one catches it immediately means nothing. If it was fake no one will be able to replicate it. A single study proves very little and likewise does very little damage, so if no one cares enough to replicate it chances are slim that it will cause harm.
How about disabling the wi-fi during peak times when serving food becomes priority #1? You could even post a nice little sign saying something like: "In order to better service you, free Wi-Fi is available from XX:XX to YY:YY."
Or, you know, making the access available with purchases only, for a set period of time according to dollar amount spent. How about 15 minutes for every 5 dollars, with access codes printed right on the receipt? That seems to solve the problems of everyone worth mentioning. Hell they might even make money off the deal (but that's evil and wrong, amirite?)
How about recognizing the fact that there will soon be a serious incident occurring between an armed non-employee contractor and a potentially armed paying customer? How about de-escalating the situation before the government authorities come to do your job for you (however poorly)?
How about anything at all? From what the blogger says they essentially sat on their hands. Of ALL the things they could have done to ensure the safety of their customers, contractors, and staff, doing nothing is never the right answer.
The RIAA refuses to comment on the possibility that they will no long engage in legal proceedings whilst "in" 8-year-old August Jennings of San Antonio, Texas in the hopes that they won't be mistaken for litigious, boy loving pederasts.
All other names, likenesses, locations, and periods of time associated with the term "August" are completely and wholeheartedly reserved, however.
You just have to get more familiar with the lingo, Ray. They have discontinued the practice of bringing "new" lawsuits, but will indeed continue in the finely honed craft of suing the living shit out of John Doe.
Or it could be that they will no longer initiate lawsuits in August. Company vacation time and whatnot.
Besides, does anyone REALLY want to argue that the definition of those words are really all that concrete? Those are GOOD words. Good words are like good whores--just don't think they won't put on a completely different show for the next customer at the same price.
Tears and Letters only work when there is no risk to the politician. None of the buzzed-impaired-intoxicated driving crowd are sympathetic figures, so SCOTUS (and grandstanding politicians) was happy to curtail our rights to combat it.
It's the same with CP and those who trade in it; they induce no sympathy so lawmakers happily stop at nothing to combat it, too. Hence the current witch-hunt.
Politicians are only careful about their policy decisions when there is an equitable division between registered republicans and democrats. Everything else is meaningless to them, and if they can use some extreme act to justify themselves to their voters, they'll happily undermine the foundation of our country to do it. The population as a whole is kept slow, stupid, and fearful to promote this activity.
It is in no politician's interest to really stand up for something as nebulous and all-encompassing as free speech when it is much easier to appeal to fear. Tears and letters from a small group who do care about things like that are meaningless to them.
Drug war laws have ruined MILLIONS of lives and protected almost none.
I know you're being tongue-in-cheek but CP laws amount to the same thing. The government doesn't learn from the suffering of the people, the government learns when the people start killing them. And that's the ONLY time any government learns or changes for the better.
With, you know, blood and bullets and bombs. Not with tears and letters.
Don't kid yourself, slashdot-netizen, chances are you don't get enough human interaction or even sunlight to risk infection. You're as good as immune.
Actually it turns out soldiers are human and die like the rest of us when you put a bullet in their heads. Actually it turns out when you bring soldiers into an armed urban center where the populace hates them they die like flies.
Look at how many died invading Basra, and Basra is full of starving insurrectionist goatherds. Now try invading a city of 4 million heavily armed Americans and see how far you get. I doubt our military could successfully invade, capture, and hold _one_ of our larger cities, much less all of them at the same time... a situation pretty much impossible given the geography involved.
The difficult part is starting a revolution, not defending yourself against the all-powerful military. The difficult part is waiting for the situation to be bad enough to get the average guy off his ass and into the garage making pipe bombs.
If that's the case the shipping companies can coordinate some sort of bounty fund. If this is a multi-billion dollar industry like the news reports claim, there _is_ money to be made in killing these guys.
How about we reinstate the time honored tradition of privateering? Every privateer gets a representative from a multi-national body of privateer regulators. Kill pirates, take their shit, take their ships. No more pirates.
Great, glad to see we're exhausted our own solar system and are ready to explore the rest of the galaxy using disposable space drones. Yay for space trash.
I swear, if we ever do find intelligent life it will probably be because they've come to serve an eviction notice.
We are the tubgirl of Sol system.
Why is that not a problem now? In most of those criminal cases you're worried about the information is already in the public record. It's just more difficult and time consuming for the average joe to lay hands on.
As it stands now, people with enough time, money, or some sort of vindictive grudge have easy access to that information you fear. This is just a more readily accessible format.
I'm not advocating the unfettered access to people's personal lives; the court already routinely blocks access to things like the identity of rape victims, or the names of parties in adoption cases or crimes involving children. I simply think that these so-called open and public court procedures should be made available to the public in the most convenient way possible, and not merely to those willing to attend in person (eliminating most of the working class) or spend time and effort tracking down and sometimes paying for printed documents (also eliminating most of the working class). So what are these judges worried about?
There really is no excuse for not streaming and electronically archiving every court proceeding in this country. It's certainly less expensive than the method of archival used now and has the added benefit of making the information available to the masses. This is an issue that, to me, goes to the very heart of transparency in government.
Is there even a coherent argument against making courtroom activity available to the public so it can be freely observed? When an appellate court can step in and forbid the dissemination of the proceedings at the behest of a wealthy and powerful lobby group, how far away are we from secret trials and off-the-books detention and punishment?
Yes, state cops as in highway patrol. If you go to the Boston College campus police page you will see that they are given authority directly from the commonwealth, and that even though their "jurisdiction" is the campus they also have authority anywhere else in the state (or in this case, commonwealth).
You'll find most medium and large schools are exactly like this, especially those receiving federal funding.
Been to a big state school, uh, ever? The "campus" police there are STATE COPS, who have more power and jurisdiction than the city police themselves. They're also better trained, and their hiring process is more rigorous.
Although I've never had any major run-ins with them myself, the campus police around here tend to be a lot more strict than the city cops. They also tend to be a lot meaner; playing pretend crime with a bunch of 20something children gives them an arrogance that the ghetto-patrolling city cops just can't match.
The reason we see soldiers acting "like 10 year olds" is because they have a lot in common with 10 year olds. The typical grunt in any branch of the service is in his late teens or early 20s. Their indoctrination program strips them down to nothing and rebuilds them as a new type of person, namely, a soldier. These are not college educated thinkers who are taught and encouraged to do a lot of abstract thinking and moral judgement. These are people who are created from the bottom up to follow orders. Their boot camps do not force them to do menial, mindless tasks perfectly because underwear folding is a matter of life and death, they do it because we want soldiers to carry out orders that they do not understand flawlessly and without question.
If you want someone to blame, point that finger at the next couple of officers up the command chain. Those people are college educated and are trained to carry out legitimate orders in such a way that is both legal and moral. The soldiers are little more than children in an unruly household. Problems like this happen because the people in positions of supervisory power created an environment that allowed them to happen, and should be (but rarely are) held accountable.
Erm, I should have said "objective tests". The projective ones are even worse.
(although the distinction is kind of blurry in personality tests, since even though the answers are quantifiable, the items themselves can be interpreted by the test taker in different ways. These are far different kinds of questions than those found on IQ tests.
For example: How are a hammer and screwdriver alike? (not an actual item, but similar items exist on the more popular IQ tests.
Answers will be scored something like this: They're tools / used to build things / used by construction workers, etc (2 points)
They're made out of metal / can use them in your hand / (not fully conceptualized as tools) (1 point)
A screwdriver uses screws, a hammer uses nails (0 points)
That's a very objective question with very specific answers. Not quite as specific as items on an achievement test (12 divided by 3 =) But much closer than a bunch of questions about what you're more like: A creative person or an analytical person. Bleh.
Test makers are notoriously vicious in the defense of their property. Psychological tests especially, since it cost them a lot of money to create those items and test their reliability and validity, and they will have to replace those items if they are disclosed to enough people.
Granted, projective tests like the MMPI are generally garbage that don't tell you anything you can't figure out yourself with a little introspection, but publicly airing their items directly costs them money. Anyone that was awake in psych 101 knows how "useful" a person's MMPI personality type is, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most popular go-to personality assessments.
Pearson in particular is a very large test maker with very hungry lawyers. They WILL sue you for this. They'll sue you for selling any of their products on ebay, too... even if it's just a xeroxed BLANK assessment protocol (the paper that the taker writes answers on). They'll sue you for talking about their items in a way that reveals items. They'll sue you at the drop of a hat.
Disclaimer: As a School Psychology student myself, most of our texts don't even use actual items from tests as examples. Tests themselves (and the protocols that go with them) are kept under lock and key, and cost a fortune.
If anyone needs me I'll be in the Angry Dome!
That's what the transporter is for. Beam her up, Scotty. Leave the dress.
They already do. The Xbox Live Terms of Use, along with pretty much every other TOU / TOS agreement in online gaming forbids (in very broad terms) ANY kind of sexual content, hate speech and slurs, as well as references to drugs, etc. This whole article is a non-issue, and certainly not a free-speech issue.
This has NOTHING to do with discrimination against gays or any other group; it's simply their way of covering their asses. Yes some of the games have specific sexual content which has been rated, reviewed, and is static in nature. Player generated names, profiles, and the like are none of those things, and they like to have very broad terms forbidding anything that might offend anyone.
I've also noticed that they tend to be reactive with regards to these violations, so just because there are 4 million teenage boys that can't come up with anything better than "ButtHurtAssNinja" as a name doesn't make it right. It just means it hasn't been reported yet.
He said that the best way to know whether your position in a case was right or wrong was to present the facts of the case to a 15-year old; if the 15-year old votes for the other side, then settle the case, quick.
No offense to your profession, Ray, but I'd say this is a bigger slight against the typical judge and juror (especially the later) than it is any kind of evidence that kids are great analytical thinkers. ;)