You, and likely the parent poster, will like this site: Assault Weapon Watch. Sooner or later, there is going to be visible proof that people don't kill people, guns (and video games, and plastic sporks, and so on) do.
Oops. You are correct. I know the history but got the word wrong, and yes - what I was saying is that the switch made involved backing down from FDR; and the Court didn't step forward on the issue again for 58 years.
Interesting? Hardly. Of you want big government and interference with commerce, the period you want is 1937-1995. The Supreme Court let FDR cut its balls off in 1937 ("A stitch in time to save nine." comes from that event) and it took until 1995 for Rehnquist to give the dosage of testosterone into the Court that pushed it back to telling Congress that the "interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution doesn't involve frickin' everything. (During the cited period, a federal law was applied to a subsistence farmer, because somehow he was "affecting interstate commerce.") Before 1937, the Court struck down half of the New Deal. From 1937 until 1995, not one law was declared unconstitutional for going beyond the commerce clause.
The 70's were nothing for government having its hands in business.
They were interfering with the business of the court. If you go into Congress and start making political jokes out loud, or into the Supreme Court and start yelling out "O'Connor's a homophobe!" at the top of your lungs, you're going to get in trouble. That's what happened here; these guys had been going to courthouses all over the place and being dumbasses specifically to interfere with the business of the court.
That's the case in the US, as well, but consider this...
When you die, the computer you are using for this will be part of your estate and will itself be bequeathable in your will or covered by intestacy laws in your state. The new owner will be liable for the continued copyright infringement that computer is performing.
Not all torts have the same statute of limitations, nor do all jurisdictions have even remotely close to teh same statutes of limitations. For example, medical malpractice generally has its own statute of limitations in each state. I suspect that copyright infringement has its own statute of limitations and that it is not 2 years, but I am not going to spend the time finding out (regardless of when the last time I downloaded an mp3 was;).
Bad bad bad bad bad idea. This civil lawsuit was dropped by the RIAA of their own free will, and could have proceeded against the estate of the deceased regardless of her livelihood. They dropped it as a PR matter and because an 83-year-old obviously almost certainly didn't share 700 mp3s on the Internet. Had they wanted to and had they the proof to do it, the RIAA could have pursued the matter against old Gerdy's estate. What you are suggesting would make your heirs one very poor lot of people.
I agree. However, I think that the plaintiff here realized from the fact that the named defendant was 83 years old and dead that she probably had not swapped enough mp3s around for the case to even have jurisdiction in anything but small claims court (most general-purpose trial courts have a minimum dollar amount which must be in controversy, and although you can inflate your numbers in the complaint, if they were way off and you knew they were off and lied about it to get into that court, you're going to be in big trouble as a lawyer).
I don't think anyone's been convicted of anything yet--people have only settled out of court, right?
You're confusing civil and criminal law. This was a civil case. Criminal cases have convictions and acquittals. Civil cases have judgments for either the plaintiff or defendant.
In reality, this has done nothing to militate against the RIAA's potential success in future lawsuits. This is actually the equivalent of settling out of court, albeit very early on in the process and with no money paid by the defendant.
Lutefisk isn't bad, it's just prima facie disgusting. I had it as a kid, but haven't for some time. Lefse and krumkake are my favorite Norwegian foods. You probably have not tried this, but instead of butter, spread a very thin layer of peanut butter on a sheet of lefse and roll it with sugar. It's a fantastic variation. I doubt that peanut butter would work as well on lutefisk, though.;)
I agree with you entirely. I'm just trying to make sure people know that the Patriot Act is not 100% about arresting people for thought crime. Maybe 85%, but not 100%.
And yeah, the money laundering thing isn't going to catch any terrorists with an IQ over about 37. Anyone can see that.
I'm thankful that the Supreme Court is currently more formalist than it was through most of the 20th century, because they're finally starting to understand that things like subsistence farming and never leaving your land do not constitute "interstate commerce," the constitutional clause from which Congress purports to derive most of its power to pass laws. Congress was not held in check from 1937 until 1995, and it's coming around gradually. This is why it's not so bad that Bush will get to appoint a justice or two - he's likely to select people like Scalia who may be conservative and may be religious, but who are formalist in reading the Constitution. Scalia will go against his personal principles when the overriding principle of Constitutional formalism tells him to. I hope that Bush picks someone like that, with a spine to stand up to Bush and even to himself when in conflict with the Constitution.
Contrast with Surstromming, which is fish allowed to ferment in the can to preserve itself. Thank you, Sweden, for one-upping Norway. Lutefisk wasn't disgusting enough.
All that could be done in CL, although the object forest would take slightly more work than one provided by the language directly. I'm not sure about an individual object being an instance of two classes without an intervening class, but the distinction probably makes no real difference.
CL has CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, which takes care of all the OO stuff. The MOP, meta-object protocol, allows you to really get in and mess with its behavior. MOP isn't 100% portable between Lisp implementations, and I haven't learned how to use it, but I know that you can do wacky things like say "This class should have a metaclass not of 'class, but of 'my-special-mega-class." and probably completely interfere with method calls, etc.
Do you know what the Patriot Act covers? It has provisions that are clearly unconstitutional, and some of which have been ruled as such by the Courts of Appeals already.
But it also has provisions which are designed to catch money launderers, and do a reasonably good job of it. I know you haven't considered actually reading the law to find out what it actually does, because that would interfere with your fantasy of America being the most intrusive government in the world, but you really should take a look sometime.
You're thinking of M-expressions, which the linked-to site explains as being the initially intended external representation of Lisp (as in the language in which you would write code), but which never came to fruition, in large part because S-expressions (whence comes the backronym "Lots of Irritating, Superfluous Parentheses") are easy to throw around as data and that's a Good Thing, because it gives rise to macros, one of Lisp's most powerful features.
As an Emacser, you should definitely get into Common Lisp. I don't know Inform, so I can't compare the object-oriented parts of the two languages, but I have yet to come up with an object-oriented feature that I really wanted and Common Lisp didn't provide. (Incidentally, that includes multiple inheritance, which is only present in one of the more popular programming languages.)
One of the niftiest things in Common Lisp's object system is multi-methods (I can't remember if that's the right term for them...I am back in school and programming has taken the back seat.) Essentially, the polymorphic methods in Common Lisp can specialize on any of their parameters, and you can specialize not only at the type level but also at the instance level.
And you get all the great features of Lisp right along with it.
Since you use Emacs, what you want is called SLIME - Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs. It interfaces to your choice of Lisp environments (I use, and recommend, SBCL; but have used Clisp and CMUCL with it, as well.) and provides an REPL, an interactive debugger, a Lisp editing mode with HyperSpec lookup (meaning you can type a command while over a symbol and a web browser will come up with the HyperSpec page for that symbol, the HyperSpec being a really helpful Lisp resource), and really easy incremental development features like "Compile and load this file" from which you can then go to the REPL and test out your functions.
But, needless to say, it blows C++, Java, Python, Perl, C#, and even Ruby right out of the water. And it's older than many Slashdotters' parents.
Common Lisp is strongly, dynamically typed. It has been for a long time. There are, of course, other language attributes than strength and time of datatyping, but those are what you're talking about.
Common Lisp is also object-oriented and beats every other language I know in that arena.
On top of that, with a good Lisp compiler (such as SBCL, CMUCL, or even GNU Clisp, just to name a few free compilers), it is as fast as any other language, even statically typed languages such as C; but particularly faster than other dynamically typed languages.
We can only hope that MSN Search was built with a beta version of Frontpage that will produce as nearly-compliant XHTML as MSN Search evidently is. Good idea on this comparison.:)
I didn't know about search.msn.com. The article only had one link, which was to www.msn.com, which had an input box to search from. Don't blame me for the incompetence of the submitter and editor. (Although you can blame me, as some moderators evidently have, for my utter disinterest in MSN Search to the extent that I didn't know the URL for it.:P)
And that's just the HTML. Google has no waste and does not inundate me with ads until after I've searched, and then only with brief text blurbs that are clearly delineated from the search results. I haven't bothered to check, but I doubt MSN search is any more polite after you search than it is before.
Slashdot Mirror
You, and likely the parent poster, will like this site: Assault Weapon Watch. Sooner or later, there is going to be visible proof that people don't kill people, guns (and video games, and plastic sporks, and so on) do.
Oops. You are correct. I know the history but got the word wrong, and yes - what I was saying is that the switch made involved backing down from FDR; and the Court didn't step forward on the issue again for 58 years.
Interesting? Hardly. Of you want big government and interference with commerce, the period you want is 1937-1995. The Supreme Court let FDR cut its balls off in 1937 ("A stitch in time to save nine." comes from that event) and it took until 1995 for Rehnquist to give the dosage of testosterone into the Court that pushed it back to telling Congress that the "interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution doesn't involve frickin' everything. (During the cited period, a federal law was applied to a subsistence farmer, because somehow he was "affecting interstate commerce.") Before 1937, the Court struck down half of the New Deal. From 1937 until 1995, not one law was declared unconstitutional for going beyond the commerce clause.
The 70's were nothing for government having its hands in business.
They were interfering with the business of the court. If you go into Congress and start making political jokes out loud, or into the Supreme Court and start yelling out "O'Connor's a homophobe!" at the top of your lungs, you're going to get in trouble. That's what happened here; these guys had been going to courthouses all over the place and being dumbasses specifically to interfere with the business of the court.
You're probably more correct than the parent was.
That's the case in the US, as well, but consider this ...
When you die, the computer you are using for this will be part of your estate and will itself be bequeathable in your will or covered by intestacy laws in your state. The new owner will be liable for the continued copyright infringement that computer is performing.
Not all torts have the same statute of limitations, nor do all jurisdictions have even remotely close to teh same statutes of limitations. For example, medical malpractice generally has its own statute of limitations in each state. I suspect that copyright infringement has its own statute of limitations and that it is not 2 years, but I am not going to spend the time finding out (regardless of when the last time I downloaded an mp3 was ;).
Bad bad bad bad bad idea. This civil lawsuit was dropped by the RIAA of their own free will, and could have proceeded against the estate of the deceased regardless of her livelihood. They dropped it as a PR matter and because an 83-year-old obviously almost certainly didn't share 700 mp3s on the Internet. Had they wanted to and had they the proof to do it, the RIAA could have pursued the matter against old Gerdy's estate. What you are suggesting would make your heirs one very poor lot of people.
I agree. However, I think that the plaintiff here realized from the fact that the named defendant was 83 years old and dead that she probably had not swapped enough mp3s around for the case to even have jurisdiction in anything but small claims court (most general-purpose trial courts have a minimum dollar amount which must be in controversy, and although you can inflate your numbers in the complaint, if they were way off and you knew they were off and lied about it to get into that court, you're going to be in big trouble as a lawyer).
I don't think anyone's been convicted of anything yet--people have only settled out of court, right?
You're confusing civil and criminal law. This was a civil case. Criminal cases have convictions and acquittals. Civil cases have judgments for either the plaintiff or defendant.
In reality, this has done nothing to militate against the RIAA's potential success in future lawsuits. This is actually the equivalent of settling out of court, albeit very early on in the process and with no money paid by the defendant.
I have to disagree - EZ Cheeze is nowhere near Rocky Mountain Oysters in terms of how disgusting American cuisine can get.
Lutefisk isn't bad, it's just prima facie disgusting. I had it as a kid, but haven't for some time. Lefse and krumkake are my favorite Norwegian foods. You probably have not tried this, but instead of butter, spread a very thin layer of peanut butter on a sheet of lefse and roll it with sugar. It's a fantastic variation. I doubt that peanut butter would work as well on lutefisk, though. ;)
I agree with you entirely. I'm just trying to make sure people know that the Patriot Act is not 100% about arresting people for thought crime. Maybe 85%, but not 100%.
And yeah, the money laundering thing isn't going to catch any terrorists with an IQ over about 37. Anyone can see that.
I'm thankful that the Supreme Court is currently more formalist than it was through most of the 20th century, because they're finally starting to understand that things like subsistence farming and never leaving your land do not constitute "interstate commerce," the constitutional clause from which Congress purports to derive most of its power to pass laws. Congress was not held in check from 1937 until 1995, and it's coming around gradually. This is why it's not so bad that Bush will get to appoint a justice or two - he's likely to select people like Scalia who may be conservative and may be religious, but who are formalist in reading the Constitution. Scalia will go against his personal principles when the overriding principle of Constitutional formalism tells him to. I hope that Bush picks someone like that, with a spine to stand up to Bush and even to himself when in conflict with the Constitution.
Contrast with Surstromming, which is fish allowed to ferment in the can to preserve itself. Thank you, Sweden, for one-upping Norway. Lutefisk wasn't disgusting enough.
All that could be done in CL, although the object forest would take slightly more work than one provided by the language directly. I'm not sure about an individual object being an instance of two classes without an intervening class, but the distinction probably makes no real difference.
CL has CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, which takes care of all the OO stuff. The MOP, meta-object protocol, allows you to really get in and mess with its behavior. MOP isn't 100% portable between Lisp implementations, and I haven't learned how to use it, but I know that you can do wacky things like say "This class should have a metaclass not of 'class, but of 'my-special-mega-class." and probably completely interfere with method calls, etc.
Do you know what the Patriot Act covers? It has provisions that are clearly unconstitutional, and some of which have been ruled as such by the Courts of Appeals already.
But it also has provisions which are designed to catch money launderers, and do a reasonably good job of it. I know you haven't considered actually reading the law to find out what it actually does, because that would interfere with your fantasy of America being the most intrusive government in the world, but you really should take a look sometime.
You're thinking of M-expressions, which the linked-to site explains as being the initially intended external representation of Lisp (as in the language in which you would write code), but which never came to fruition, in large part because S-expressions (whence comes the backronym "Lots of Irritating, Superfluous Parentheses") are easy to throw around as data and that's a Good Thing, because it gives rise to macros, one of Lisp's most powerful features.
As an Emacser, you should definitely get into Common Lisp. I don't know Inform, so I can't compare the object-oriented parts of the two languages, but I have yet to come up with an object-oriented feature that I really wanted and Common Lisp didn't provide. (Incidentally, that includes multiple inheritance, which is only present in one of the more popular programming languages.)
One of the niftiest things in Common Lisp's object system is multi-methods (I can't remember if that's the right term for them...I am back in school and programming has taken the back seat.) Essentially, the polymorphic methods in Common Lisp can specialize on any of their parameters, and you can specialize not only at the type level but also at the instance level.
And you get all the great features of Lisp right along with it.
Since you use Emacs, what you want is called SLIME - Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs. It interfaces to your choice of Lisp environments (I use, and recommend, SBCL; but have used Clisp and CMUCL with it, as well.) and provides an REPL, an interactive debugger, a Lisp editing mode with HyperSpec lookup (meaning you can type a command while over a symbol and a web browser will come up with the HyperSpec page for that symbol, the HyperSpec being a really helpful Lisp resource), and really easy incremental development features like "Compile and load this file" from which you can then go to the REPL and test out your functions.
But, needless to say, it blows C++, Java, Python, Perl, C#, and even Ruby right out of the water. And it's older than many Slashdotters' parents.
Common Lisp is strongly, dynamically typed. It has been for a long time. There are, of course, other language attributes than strength and time of datatyping, but those are what you're talking about.
Common Lisp is also object-oriented and beats every other language I know in that arena.
On top of that, with a good Lisp compiler (such as SBCL, CMUCL, or even GNU Clisp, just to name a few free compilers), it is as fast as any other language, even statically typed languages such as C; but particularly faster than other dynamically typed languages.
We can only hope that MSN Search was built with a beta version of Frontpage that will produce as nearly-compliant XHTML as MSN Search evidently is. Good idea on this comparison. :)
I think you've vastly overestimated the diamond content.
I didn't know about search.msn.com. The article only had one link, which was to www.msn.com, which had an input box to search from. Don't blame me for the incompetence of the submitter and editor. (Although you can blame me, as some moderators evidently have, for my utter disinterest in MSN Search to the extent that I didn't know the URL for it. :P)
$ lynx -source http://www.msn.com/ | wc -c
37928
$ lynx -source http://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2058
And that's just the HTML. Google has no waste and does not inundate me with ads until after I've searched, and then only with brief text blurbs that are clearly delineated from the search results. I haven't bothered to check, but I doubt MSN search is any more polite after you search than it is before.
For writing LaTeX, I use Emacs. I'd really rather not have an 8-meg LaTeX template generated by AbiWord if I can help it. :P