System scans license plate --> misreads numbers --> finds car is owned by Osama bin Ladin --> you get arrested for being associated with terrorists.
Citizen spots you in a crowd ---> mistakes you for the one-armed man who murdered his wife --> phones police --> you get arrested for a murder you didn't commit. Therefore, the police should stop accepting information from citizens.
The question is not "are there any potential negatives?" but rather, "do the positive aspects outweigh the potential negatives?"
The costs of migration are a one-time cost. The costs of licensing are a continuing cost.
That doesn't mean anything without actual numbers attached to both cases, which will tend to vary from place to place and from time to time - specifically, does the amortized cost of that one-time payment really add up to less cost than licensing for the same period?
It has an American logo and a red star. Have the commies taken over?
If you go to the NASA page about the photo, it says " Following the two aircraft is an unmodified U.S. Navy F-5E used for baseline sonic boom measurements."
The Navy used to maintain several squadrons of F-5E's for use as aggressor aircraft in air combat training - think "Top Gun". Anyway, they've all been (IIRC) mothballed now, so when NASA called the Navy for a "stock" F-5E, for comparative purposes, the Navy probably just took that particular plane out of storage, got it flight-ready, and sent it on over - Warsaw Pact-paintjob and all...
You don't know how much energy it takes to wind this thing back a few meters. It could easily be tend times the energy required to move it forward a few meters.
For a minute there, I was worried that I only imagined those spring-powered cars from my childhood, the ones that shot across the room after being pulled back a foot or two;)
It's one thing to hold a minority view -- particularly one that can be accused of being unpatriotic -- it's quite another thing to express that view publicly.
I dunno. I may think he's a tool, but I doubt he's in any particular danger, personal or professional, as a result, and therefore I don't see any looming possibilities for martyrdom here. Certainly he's entitled to speak his mind, but the mere act of speaking one's mind is not, in and of itself, a heroic act of some sort - especially given that, for the most part, it's basically a risk-free enterprise to say such things these days. Having the target of your nasty comments make nasty comments about you ("You're a war criminal!" "Oh, yeah? You're un-American!") barely deserves the term "punishment", or even "retaliation".
In the grand scheme of things, if that's being "punished" for your views, then we've watered down the word to where it's essentially meaningless - dissenting from the dissenters is a fairly limp-wristed way of "punishing" someone. Publicly saying nasty things about George Bush is rather safer than was publicly saying nasty things about Josef Stalin, for example. Those guys knew how to deal with dissenters, in a way that you just don't see much of in this country;)
I think it takes a lot more bravery than it does to just go along with the herd -- even if he does happen to be wrong.
It may be a minority, but considering how many thousands of people his views are apparently in accord with, everyone from MoveOn.org to Michael Moore, it's hardly accurate to say he's not going "along with the herd" - he's merely found a somewhat smaller, louder herd to join.
Groupthink is not the exclusive domain of the majority.
Still, it'll be a talking piece in 20 years' time when you're watching ANH for the nth time and your grandkids ask you what an XBox was.
No it won't, because in that intervening 20 years, Lucas will have replaced that box set at least three times over with newer, ever more "deluxe" versions. By 2024, the original trilogy will come on 15 discs, and include six hours worth of footage featuring the set carpenters as they eat donuts and drink coffee. You know how every so often, Yoko Ono "discovers" some previously unknown John Lennon track? It'll be like that.
If the GPL is invalid, you're in violation of copyright law.
I don't think anyone would dispute that. If I (hypothetically) violate the GPL with your GPL'ed software, but manage to get the GPL invalidated, I am then using copyrighted software without a license. Of course, at that point, so is everyone else in the world who uses your code. You can offer everyone (including me) an alternate license, or you can sue them for not licensing from you (assuming they decline), but you can't really afford to ignore any other people who ignore your copyright, lest your copyright go "poof" due to failure to enforce, thus putting your code in the public domain, which means I get to keep it anyway. IOW, invalidating the GPL looks to be a big fucking mess for those copyright holders, as they'd suddenly have to decide whether to keep control of their code by negotiating alternate licenses with everyone who is currently using it under the auspices of the GPL, or abandon control and let it lapse into the public domain.
So much for SCO saying the GPL has no weight in court:-)
Well, not to piss in everyone's cornflakes, but it still doesn't, unless you're German. Although it is an encouraging sign for GPL proponents here in the US - even though it has no legal weight in the US per se, US judges will often take notice of such things when considering the issue in their own courts.
Now, let's say that CAPPS will determine that 5% of the passengers must be (100% chance) searched, and the rest of the searches are random. That means that the other 95% of the passengers now each have a 5% chance of getting searched.
With a probable system, you can determine who in your cell has that 5%, and who has the 100% chance. Who would you send?
That's not an argument for eliminating the system, merely an argument for making it smarter - the parent post I responded to is simply wrong in claiming that there's no trade-off. In such a case, the easiest solution is to more narrowly target the system by reducing the number of people it flags - why assume that it will be responsible for half of all searches? Suppose that CAPPS only flags 1 out of every 1000 passengers for heightened scrutiny, where we want an overall rate of 1 in 10 passengers being searched. In that case, passengers will still have a 9.9% chance of being randomly selected for heightened scrutiny, which is hardly a significant reduction from the 10% chance they would have if CAPPS were non-existent, and if CAPPS is smart about who it flags - remember, we're talking about adaptive systems that improve over time - it may very well make an excellent supplement to the broader sieve of random searches. Suppose 100 of every 1000 people CAPPS flags really are terrorists - does it then make sense to deploy it, or not?
And in any case, the point in the paper I cited remains unchallenged - implementing CAPPS raises the bar for terrorists no matter what, by forcing them to expend resources that they otherwise would not have had to expend, in the form of trial runs to "test" the system. The very act of raising the bar will, by itself, deter some number of potential terrorists, even if it doesn't deter all of them - the more expensive it is to try, the fewer people out there who will be able to afford to try.
The problem, however, is that not only does it not work, it actively decreases security.
Another argument put forward against passenger screening in particular is that terrorists will adapt to the screening methods
in order to slip through the system. See Samidh Chakrabarti & Aaron Strauss, Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-assisted Passenger Screening System, at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/sp ring02-
papers/caps.htm. Again, this concern should be taken into account when developing applications but does not argue against research and development, or deployment, with adequate accounting for the problem. First, there are
obviously ways to defeat any system. Nevertheless, they are worthwhile because they raise the cost of engaging in the terrorist act by requiring avoidance strategies. Not only do such avoidance strategies increase 'costs' to the terrorist but they also provide additional points of potential error on the part of the terrorist that may lead to discovery. Obviously, if we were to take this
critique too seriously on its face it would support the conclusion that locks should not be used because locksmiths (or burglars with locksmithing knowledge) can defeat them. Second, to the extent that we are talking about researching adaptive machine learning based algorithms, an important research objective
would be to try to anticipate these avoidance methods in application, algorithm and system design, including by building in both variability and random outcomes (for example, by combining random searches with CAPPS II).
There would have been no media coverage on this issue had O'Malley's Pub been the location of this resolution.
Even if that's true, surely the correctness of their actions - legal, moral, or otherwise - cannot be a function of whether or not anyone's paying attention, can it?
By doing the deed on government letterhead and during government working hours, they are publically declaring their votes as representing those of the people of South Carolina.
Well, since you brought it up, this is South Carolina we're talking about. I'd bet good money that those legislators had their thumbs jammed firmly on the pulses of their constituents for the most part, and that this resolution did in fact reflect the opinion of the people of South Carolina, or a majority thereof anyway. But if that's the case, where do we go from there? Do the people of South Carolina not have the right to express a collective opinion? And if it's not the case that it reflects majority opinion, don't the people of South Carolina have the ultimate recourse at the ballot box?
...I do think that resolutions like this tend to waste "valuable legislative time" time and create animosity towards others for other reason than to grandstand for the voting public.
Of course. I find these sorts of things to be silly, pointless wastes of time myself. But I'm a small-government guy at heart, so I take comfort in the fact that, for every hour they waste arguing about such pointless nothings, that's one hour they didn't spend passing actual laws that tend to actually fuck things up for someone somewhere, as opposed to the largely hypothetical offenses of this thing.
It's a completely pointless gesture, except for the political theater of it. I wouldn't have said what Maines said, myself, but if I were in her position upon hearing about the SC legislature, my basic response would be a big, fat middle finger extended in their direction. No matter what you come up with under the guise of making things right, you're not going to get it, so if you're going to waste time like this, why not at least try to shoot the moon in your requests? Might as well ask Natalie Maines for a million dollars and a blowjob as an apology, for all the good it'll do you - your chances of getting what you want are about the same in either case;)
If I read this correctly for these awards, TJC is not interested in censorship that may or may not be "unonstitutional," but just point out extreme censorship in whatever form, wherever it may occur. Dixie Chicks/SC certainly qualifies as attempted censorship or at least a punishment against future censorship.
But my point is that it doesn't even qualify as censorship, let alone "extreme" censorship, unless we water down "censorship" to the point where it's virtually meaningless. "Censorship", as an offense, cannot be taken to mean "whenever someone says something I don't like, that's censorship", even if that someone is the SC legislature. After all, the logical extension of that is that it's "censorship" every time any government official expresses any opinion whatsoever. Whether you agree with him or not, is it really reasonable to say that George Bush is "censoring" people if he says that someone who opposes the war in Iraq is "unpatriotic"? Will it be "censorship" if John "Frog" Kerry says that people who oppose his tax plans are "unpatriotic"?
The answer, I think, pretty clearly has to be "no". George Bush could issue a statement strongly condemning puppy-stomping as un-American, and someone somewhere would take offense. "How can I speak out in favor of puppy-stomping now, with the vast machinery of the state arrayed against me?" comes the cry. President John "Frog" Kerry could issue a statement opposing wife-beating as inconsistent with fundamental American values, but can we reasonably say that the wife-beaters of America have been "censored" by such a move? There's not even an
True enough, but it's not just that no one could enforce such a resolution, but that the resolution was designed not to be enforced by anyone, right from the start. That's why this bit...
...such criticism must be made in their capacity as private citizens and not with the power of government office behind it...
...is so fundamentally misguided and wrong - there is no "power of government office behind it" in this case. There is no governmental power being exercised or otherwise on display here. Essentially, what TJC would have you believe is that if all the same legislators gathered together down at O'Malley's Pub and had the same exact vote, recording the same exact resolution on a sheet of loose-leaf, it would be okay. But if they do it on legislative letterhead during working hours, there's something wrong with that, even though the substantive effect on the Dixie Chicks (and everyone else inside and outside of South Carolina) is exactly the same in both cases - there is no effect, either way.
Now, it's certainly within the rights of TJC to hold that opinion, but the distinction they want to draw is not one drawn by the First Amendment, which is a rather odd position to be in if you're a self-anointed defender of same. Although the fact that they put "officially" in quotes like that ("an imprimatur that 'officially' declares what speech is patriotic and what speech is anti-American") suggests to me that they're aware that they've wandered off into Bullshitland - I rather doubt that anyone in South Carolina who was predisposed to defend the DC's was seriously hindered by the resolution of the state legislature. TJC is basically reduced to arguing that such things are wrong because some imaginary person might hypothetically find such non-binding expressions of an opinion to be somehow scary.
BTW, on a 1-0 vote, I have declared next Tuesday as "Let's All Go To The Zoo" day.
Excellent. Let's put some teeth in it and round up anyone found outside of zoo grounds on Tuesday;)
They did not deserve a law enacted to specifically force them to apologize and give a free concert.
There is no such law. These sorts of things are non-binding resolutions whereby a legislative body simply expresses its opinion on some topic or issue. It has all the same legal force as a resolution declaring next Tuesday to be "Let's All Go To The Zoo" day - i.e., none whatsoever. It's just the legislators expressing their own opinions, which presumably the Thomas Jefferson Center would (grudgingly) allow that they are permitted to do.
An RPG in which the heroes are people like Jane Eyre?
GM: Okay, Rochester - the house is really burning now. What's your plan?
PLAYER: Well, I guess I better get in there and save Bertha...
GM: Sounds dangerous. Better make throws against strength and dexterity for that.
PLAYER: (rolls) Shit! Dammit!
GM: Ohhh, too bad. (rolls dice behind screen). Looks like Rochester is temporarily blind, and he lost a hand, and...he's permanently lost an eye. Bad luck, eh?
Just declare all copyrights from Microsoft alone unenforceable. It's all basicly a premature end to the life of copyright and patent from a specific company.
The term you're looking for is "bill of attainder", and it's specifically forbidden by Article I, Section 9 of the US constitution. Let's try not to knife the Constitution in our haste to do in Microsoft, hmmm?
Slashdot Mirror
A) by definition, you don't - that's why we call them "public streets", not "private streets". If you want privacy, build private roads.
B) that's the law as it currently stands.
Citizen spots you in a crowd ---> mistakes you for the one-armed man who murdered his wife --> phones police --> you get arrested for a murder you didn't commit. Therefore, the police should stop accepting information from citizens.
The question is not "are there any potential negatives?" but rather, "do the positive aspects outweigh the potential negatives?"
Not on a public street, you don't.
"Ergo! Viz-a-viz! Concordantly!"
That doesn't mean anything without actual numbers attached to both cases, which will tend to vary from place to place and from time to time - specifically, does the amortized cost of that one-time payment really add up to less cost than licensing for the same period?
For some reason, I thought that they'd retired the F-5E from Fallon, but a quick lookup says you're right. Do they still fly them out of NAS Key West?
If you go to the NASA page about the photo, it says " Following the two aircraft is an unmodified U.S. Navy F-5E used for baseline sonic boom measurements."
The Navy used to maintain several squadrons of F-5E's for use as aggressor aircraft in air combat training - think "Top Gun". Anyway, they've all been (IIRC) mothballed now, so when NASA called the Navy for a "stock" F-5E, for comparative purposes, the Navy probably just took that particular plane out of storage, got it flight-ready, and sent it on over - Warsaw Pact-paintjob and all...
For a minute there, I was worried that I only imagined those spring-powered cars from my childhood, the ones that shot across the room after being pulled back a foot or two ;)
I dunno. I may think he's a tool, but I doubt he's in any particular danger, personal or professional, as a result, and therefore I don't see any looming possibilities for martyrdom here. Certainly he's entitled to speak his mind, but the mere act of speaking one's mind is not, in and of itself, a heroic act of some sort - especially given that, for the most part, it's basically a risk-free enterprise to say such things these days. Having the target of your nasty comments make nasty comments about you ("You're a war criminal!" "Oh, yeah? You're un-American!") barely deserves the term "punishment", or even "retaliation".
In the grand scheme of things, if that's being "punished" for your views, then we've watered down the word to where it's essentially meaningless - dissenting from the dissenters is a fairly limp-wristed way of "punishing" someone. Publicly saying nasty things about George Bush is rather safer than was publicly saying nasty things about Josef Stalin, for example. Those guys knew how to deal with dissenters, in a way that you just don't see much of in this country ;)
It may be a minority, but considering how many thousands of people his views are apparently in accord with, everyone from MoveOn.org to Michael Moore, it's hardly accurate to say he's not going "along with the herd" - he's merely found a somewhat smaller, louder herd to join.
Groupthink is not the exclusive domain of the majority.
No it won't, because in that intervening 20 years, Lucas will have replaced that box set at least three times over with newer, ever more "deluxe" versions. By 2024, the original trilogy will come on 15 discs, and include six hours worth of footage featuring the set carpenters as they eat donuts and drink coffee. You know how every so often, Yoko Ono "discovers" some previously unknown John Lennon track? It'll be like that.
I know, I know. Dammit, why can't I edit my own posts? ;)
Awww, fuck. That's what I get for being so quick on the trigger. Brain fart - what can I say? ;)
I don't think anyone would dispute that. If I (hypothetically) violate the GPL with your GPL'ed software, but manage to get the GPL invalidated, I am then using copyrighted software without a license. Of course, at that point, so is everyone else in the world who uses your code. You can offer everyone (including me) an alternate license, or you can sue them for not licensing from you (assuming they decline), but you can't really afford to ignore any other people who ignore your copyright, lest your copyright go "poof" due to failure to enforce, thus putting your code in the public domain, which means I get to keep it anyway. IOW, invalidating the GPL looks to be a big fucking mess for those copyright holders, as they'd suddenly have to decide whether to keep control of their code by negotiating alternate licenses with everyone who is currently using it under the auspices of the GPL, or abandon control and let it lapse into the public domain.
No. Wrong country. German cases don't serve as precedents for American ones.
Well, not to piss in everyone's cornflakes, but it still doesn't, unless you're German. Although it is an encouraging sign for GPL proponents here in the US - even though it has no legal weight in the US per se, US judges will often take notice of such things when considering the issue in their own courts.
With a probable system, you can determine who in your cell has that 5%, and who has the 100% chance. Who would you send?
That's not an argument for eliminating the system, merely an argument for making it smarter - the parent post I responded to is simply wrong in claiming that there's no trade-off. In such a case, the easiest solution is to more narrowly target the system by reducing the number of people it flags - why assume that it will be responsible for half of all searches? Suppose that CAPPS only flags 1 out of every 1000 passengers for heightened scrutiny, where we want an overall rate of 1 in 10 passengers being searched. In that case, passengers will still have a 9.9% chance of being randomly selected for heightened scrutiny, which is hardly a significant reduction from the 10% chance they would have if CAPPS were non-existent, and if CAPPS is smart about who it flags - remember, we're talking about adaptive systems that improve over time - it may very well make an excellent supplement to the broader sieve of random searches. Suppose 100 of every 1000 people CAPPS flags really are terrorists - does it then make sense to deploy it, or not?
And in any case, the point in the paper I cited remains unchallenged - implementing CAPPS raises the bar for terrorists no matter what, by forcing them to expend resources that they otherwise would not have had to expend, in the form of trial runs to "test" the system. The very act of raising the bar will, by itself, deter some number of potential terrorists, even if it doesn't deter all of them - the more expensive it is to try, the fewer people out there who will be able to afford to try.
Even if that's true, surely the correctness of their actions - legal, moral, or otherwise - cannot be a function of whether or not anyone's paying attention, can it?
By doing the deed on government letterhead and during government working hours, they are publically declaring their votes as representing those of the people of South Carolina.
Well, since you brought it up, this is South Carolina we're talking about. I'd bet good money that those legislators had their thumbs jammed firmly on the pulses of their constituents for the most part, and that this resolution did in fact reflect the opinion of the people of South Carolina, or a majority thereof anyway. But if that's the case, where do we go from there? Do the people of South Carolina not have the right to express a collective opinion? And if it's not the case that it reflects majority opinion, don't the people of South Carolina have the ultimate recourse at the ballot box?
Of course. I find these sorts of things to be silly, pointless wastes of time myself. But I'm a small-government guy at heart, so I take comfort in the fact that, for every hour they waste arguing about such pointless nothings, that's one hour they didn't spend passing actual laws that tend to actually fuck things up for someone somewhere, as opposed to the largely hypothetical offenses of this thing.
It's a completely pointless gesture, except for the political theater of it. I wouldn't have said what Maines said, myself, but if I were in her position upon hearing about the SC legislature, my basic response would be a big, fat middle finger extended in their direction. No matter what you come up with under the guise of making things right, you're not going to get it, so if you're going to waste time like this, why not at least try to shoot the moon in your requests? Might as well ask Natalie Maines for a million dollars and a blowjob as an apology, for all the good it'll do you - your chances of getting what you want are about the same in either case ;)
If I read this correctly for these awards, TJC is not interested in censorship that may or may not be "unonstitutional," but just point out extreme censorship in whatever form, wherever it may occur. Dixie Chicks/SC certainly qualifies as attempted censorship or at least a punishment against future censorship.
But my point is that it doesn't even qualify as censorship, let alone "extreme" censorship, unless we water down "censorship" to the point where it's virtually meaningless. "Censorship", as an offense, cannot be taken to mean "whenever someone says something I don't like, that's censorship", even if that someone is the SC legislature. After all, the logical extension of that is that it's "censorship" every time any government official expresses any opinion whatsoever. Whether you agree with him or not, is it really reasonable to say that George Bush is "censoring" people if he says that someone who opposes the war in Iraq is "unpatriotic"? Will it be "censorship" if John "Frog" Kerry says that people who oppose his tax plans are "unpatriotic"?
The answer, I think, pretty clearly has to be "no". George Bush could issue a statement strongly condemning puppy-stomping as un-American, and someone somewhere would take offense. "How can I speak out in favor of puppy-stomping now, with the vast machinery of the state arrayed against me?" comes the cry. President John "Frog" Kerry could issue a statement opposing wife-beating as inconsistent with fundamental American values, but can we reasonably say that the wife-beaters of America have been "censored" by such a move? There's not even an
True enough, but it's not just that no one could enforce such a resolution, but that the resolution was designed not to be enforced by anyone, right from the start. That's why this bit...
Now, it's certainly within the rights of TJC to hold that opinion, but the distinction they want to draw is not one drawn by the First Amendment, which is a rather odd position to be in if you're a self-anointed defender of same. Although the fact that they put "officially" in quotes like that ("an imprimatur that 'officially' declares what speech is patriotic and what speech is anti-American") suggests to me that they're aware that they've wandered off into Bullshitland - I rather doubt that anyone in South Carolina who was predisposed to defend the DC's was seriously hindered by the resolution of the state legislature. TJC is basically reduced to arguing that such things are wrong because some imaginary person might hypothetically find such non-binding expressions of an opinion to be somehow scary.
BTW, on a 1-0 vote, I have declared next Tuesday as "Let's All Go To The Zoo" day.
Excellent. Let's put some teeth in it and round up anyone found outside of zoo grounds on Tuesday ;)
There is no such law. These sorts of things are non-binding resolutions whereby a legislative body simply expresses its opinion on some topic or issue. It has all the same legal force as a resolution declaring next Tuesday to be "Let's All Go To The Zoo" day - i.e., none whatsoever. It's just the legislators expressing their own opinions, which presumably the Thomas Jefferson Center would (grudgingly) allow that they are permitted to do.
2000 was also the Year Of The Penguin, but that turned out to be a bad thing...
GM: Okay, Rochester - the house is really burning now. What's your plan?
PLAYER: Well, I guess I better get in there and save Bertha...
GM: Sounds dangerous. Better make throws against strength and dexterity for that.
PLAYER: (rolls) Shit! Dammit!
GM: Ohhh, too bad. (rolls dice behind screen). Looks like Rochester is temporarily blind, and he lost a hand, and...he's permanently lost an eye. Bad luck, eh?
Phew - I was lamenting the state of the US education system. Again. But I guess that's a legitimate excuse ;)
The term you're looking for is "bill of attainder", and it's specifically forbidden by Article I, Section 9 of the US constitution. Let's try not to knife the Constitution in our haste to do in Microsoft, hmmm?